note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustration. see 27569-h.htm or 27569-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/7/5/6/27569/27569-h/27569-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/7/5/6/27569/27569-h.zip) gilbert keith chesterton by the same author oddments suggestive fragments [illustration: _g. k. chesterton_ _photograph reproduced by kind permission of messrs. speaight ltd., london_] gilbert keith chesterton by patrick braybrooke with an introduction by arthur f. thorn london, mcmxxii the chelsea publishing company 16 royal hospital road, chelsea printed at the curwen press plaistow, e. 13 _preface_ it is certain that up to a point in the evolution of self most people find life quite exciting and thrilling. but when middle age arrives, often prematurely, they forget the thrill and excitements; they become obsessed by certain other lesser things that are deficient in any kind of cosmic vitality. the thrill goes out of life: a light dies down and flickers fitfully; existence goes on at a low ebb--something has been lost. from this numbed condition is born much of the blind anguish of life. it is one of the tragedies of human existence that the divine sense of wonder is eventually destroyed by inexcusable routine and more or less mechanical living. mental abandon, the exercise of fancy and imagination, the function of creative thought--all these things are squeezed out of the consciousness of man until his primitive enjoyment of the mystical part of life is affected in a very serious way. nothing could be more useful, therefore, than to write a book about a man who has done more than any other living writer to stimulate and preserve the primitive sense of wonder and joy in human life. gilbert keith chesterton has never lost mental contact with the cosmic simplicity of human existence. he knows, as well as anybody has ever known, that the life of man goes wrong simply because we are too lazy to be pleased with simple, fundamental things. we grow up in our feverish, artificial civilization, believing that the real, satisfying things are complex and difficult to obtain. our lives become unnaturally stressed and tormented by the pitiless and incessant struggle for social conditions which are, at best, second-rate and ultimately disappointing. g. k. chesterton would restore the primitive joys of wonder and childlike delight in simple things. his ideal is the _real_, not the merely impossible. unlike most would-be saviours of the race, he seeks not to merge a new humanity into a brand new glittering civilization. he would have us awaken once more to the ancient mysteries and eternal truths. he would have us turn back in order to progress. science makes us proud, but it does not make us happy. efficiency makes us slaves--we have forgotten the truth about freedom. success is our narcotic deity, and weans more men into despair than failure; for, as g.k.c. has said, 'nothing fails like success.' we have yet to rediscover the spiritual health that comes with a clear recognition of the part that life cannot be great until it is lived madly and wildly. we have to learn all over again that grass really is green, and the sky, at times, very blue indeed. arthur f. thorn (_author of 'richard jefferies'_), _assistant-director of studies, london school of journalism._ _author's note_ this book is the outcome of many and repeated requests to the author to write it. while realizing the difficulties involved, he feels that the opportunities he has enjoyed give him at least some qualifications for the task, for not only is he a kinsman of mr. chesterton, but also has spent much time in his company. the book aims to be a popular study of the writer and the man. it is dedicated to lovers of the works of g.k.c. and to the wider public who wish to know about one of the most brilliant minds of the day. patrick braybrooke. _46 russell square, w.c. 1_ 1922. _contents_ chapter page i the essayist 1 ii dickens 15 iii thackeray 29 iv browning 42 v chesterton as historian 57 vi the poet 67 vii the playwright 76 viii the novelist 79 ix chesterton on divorce 90 x 'the new jerusalem' 96 xi mr. chesterton at home 99 xii his place in literature 105 xiii g.k.c. and g.b.s. 113 xiv conclusion 119 _chapter one_ the essayist it is extremely difficult in the somewhat limited space of a chapter to give the full attention that should be given to such a brilliant and original essayist (which is not always an _ipso facto_ of brilliant essayists) as chesterton. essayists are of all men extremely elastic. occasionally they are dull and prosy, very often they are obscure, quite often they are wearisome. the only criticism which applies adversely to chesterton as an essayist is that he is very often--and i rather fear he likes being so--obscure. he is brilliant in an original manner, he is original in a brilliant way; scarcely any thought of his is not expressed in paradox. what is orthodox to him is heresy to other people; what is heresy to him is orthodox to other people; and the surprising fact is that he is usually right when he is orthodox, and equally right when he is heretical. an essayist naturally has points of view which he expresses in a different way to a novelist. a novelist, if he adheres to what a novel should be--that is, i think, a simple tale--does not necessarily have a particular point of view when he starts his book. an essayist, on the other hand, starts with an idea and clothes it. of course, chesterton is not an essayist in the really accepted manner of an essayist. he is really more a brilliant exponent of an original point of view. in other words, he essays to knock down opinions held by other essayists, whether writers or politicians. it would be manifestly absurd to praise chesterton as being equal to hazlitt, or condemn him as being inferior to j.s. mill. comparisons are usually odious, which is precisely the reason so much use is made of them. in this case any comparison is not only odious; it is worse, it is merely futile, for the very simple fact that there has been no essayist ever quite like chesterton, which is a compliment to him, because it proves what every one who knows is assured, that he is unique. there are, of course, as is to be expected, people who do not like his essays. the reason is not far to seek, as in everything else people set up for themselves standards which they do not like to see set aside. consequently people who had read lamb, hazlitt, hume, and e.v. lucas astutely thought that no essayist could be such who did not adhere to the style of one of these four. therefore they were a little alarmed and upset when there descended upon them a strange genius who not only upset all the rules of essay writing, but was at the same time acclaimed by all sections of the press as one of the finest essayists of the day. with the advent of chesterton the essay received a shock. it had to realize that it was a larger and wider thing than it had been before. as it had been almost insular, so it became international; as it had been almost theological in its orthodoxy, so it became in its catholicity well-nigh heretical. which is the best possible definition of a heresy? it is the expanding of orthodoxy or the lessening of it. thus chesterton was a pioneer. he gave to the essay a new impetus--almost, we might say, a 'sketch' form; it dealt with subjects not so much in a dissertation as in a dissection. having dissected one way so that we are quite sure no other method would do, he calmly dissects again in the opposite manner, leaving us gasping, and finding that there really are two ways of looking at every question--a thing we never realize till we think about it. i have in this chapter taken five of chesterton's most characteristic books of essays, displaying the enormous depth of his intellect, the vast range of subject, the unique use of paradox. of these five books i have again taken rather necessarily at random subjects depicting the above chestertonian attributes, with an attempt to give some idea of what it really means when we say that he is an essayist. that chesterton's book of essays, entitled 'heretics,' should have an introductory and a concluding chapter on the importance of orthodoxy is exactly what we should expect to find. there is a great deal of what is undeniably true in this book; there is also, i venture to think, a good deal that is undeniably untrue. i do not think it is unfair to say that in some respects chesterton allows his cleverness to lead him to certain errors of judgment, and a certain levity in dealing with matters that are to a number of people so sacred that to reinterpret them is almost to blaspheme. i am thinking of the chapter in this book that is a reply to mr. mccabe, an ex-roman catholic, who, being a keen logician, is now a rationalist. he accuses chesterton of joking with the things _de profundis_. certain clergymen have also taken exception to chesterton's writings on the ground of this supposed levity. it is merely that he sees that the bible has humour, because it has said that 'god laughed and winked.' i do not think he intends to offend, but for many people any idea of humour in the bible is repugnant, and this view is not confined to clergymen. in an absolutely charming chapter chesterton writes of the literature of the servant girl, which is really the literature of park lane. it is the literature of park lane, for the very obvious reason that it is probably never read there; but the literature is about park lane, and is read by those who may live as near it as balham or surbiton. what he contends, and rightly, is that the general reader likes to hear about an environment outside his own. it is inherent in us that we always really want to be somewhere else; which is fortunate, as it makes it certain that the world will never come to an end through a universal contentment. it has been said that contentment is the essence of perfection. it is equally true that the essence of perfection is discontent, a striving for something else. this, i think, chesterton feels when he says of the penny novelette that it is the literature to 'teach a man to govern empires or look over the map of mankind.' rudyard kipling finds a warm spot in chesterton's heart, but he is a little too militaristic, which is exactly what he is not. kipling loves soldiers, which is no real reason why he should be disliked as a militarist. many a servant girl loves a score of soldiers, she may even write odes to her pet sergeant, but she is not necessarily a militarist. rudyard kipling likes soldiers and writes of them. he does not, as chesterton lays to his charge, 'worship militarism.' he accuses kipling of a want of patriotism, which is about as absurd as accusing chesterton of a love of politics. but when he says that kipling only knows england as a place, he is on safe ground, because england is something that is not bound by the confines of space. not being exactly a champion of kipling, chesterton turns to a different kind of man, george moore, and has nothing to say for him beyond that he writes endless personal confessions, which most people do if there are those who will read them. but not only this, poor george moore 'doesn't understand the roman catholic church, he doesn't understand thackeray, he misunderstands stevenson, he has no understanding of christianity.' it is, in fact, a hopeless case, but it is also possible that chesterton has not troubled to understand george moore. mr. bernard shaw is, so chesterton contends, a really horrible eugenist, because he wants to get a super-man who, having more than two legs, will be a vastly superior person to a man. chesterton loves men. he tells us why st. peter was used to found the church upon. it was because he 'was a shuffler, a coward, and a snob--in a word, a man.' even the thirty-nine articles and the councils of trent have failed to find a better reason for the founding of the church. it is a defence of the fallibility of the church, the practical nature of that body, an organization founded by a man who had divine powers in a unique way and was god. presumably, then, the mistake of shaw is that instead of trying to improve man he wishes to invent a kind of demi-god. chesterton has a great deal to say for christmas; in fact, he has no sympathy for those superior beings who find christmas out of date. even swinburne and shelley have attacked christianity in the grounds of its melancholy, showing a lamentable forgetfulness that this religion was born at a time that had always been a season of joy. chesterton is annoyed with them, and is sure that swinburne did not hang up his socks on christmas eve, nor did shelley. i wonder whether chesterton hangs up his socks on the eve of christmas? 'heretics' is a book that deals with a great number of subjects universal in their scope. the writing is at times too paradoxical, leading to obscurity of thought. there are splendid passages in this book, which is, when all is said, brilliantly original, even if at times a little puzzling. * * * * * 'orthodoxy' is, i think, one of the most important of chesterton's books. the lasting importance of a book depends not so much on its literary qualities or on its popularity, but rather on the theme handled. there are really two central themes handled in this book. one is of fairyland, the other is of the defence of christianity; not that it is either true or false, but that it is rational, or the most shuffle-headed nonsense ever set to delude the human race. the method of apology that chesterton takes is one that would cause the average theological student to turn white with fear. the theological colleges, excellent as they are in endeavouring to train efficient laymen into equally efficient priests, usually assume that the best way to know about christianity is to study christian books. it is the worst way, because these books are naturally biased in favour of it. it is better to study any religion by seeing what the attackers have to say against it. then a personal judgment can be formed. this is, i feel, the method that chesterton adopts in his deep and original treatise, 'orthodoxy,' which is more than an essay and less than a theological work. the chestertonian contention is that philosophers like schopenhauer and nietzsche have embarked on the suicide of thought, and that a later disciple to this self-destruction is bernard shaw. in the same way these pseudo philosophers have attacked the christian religion, 'tearing the soul of christ into silly strips labelled altruism and egoism. they are alike puzzled by his insane magnificance and his insane meekness.' as i have said, the method to realize the worth of christianity is to read all the attacks on it. this is what chesterton does. in doing so he discovers that these attacks are the one thing that demonstrate the strength of christianity. because the attackers reject it upon reasons that are contradictory to each other. thus some complain that it is a gloomy religion; others go to the opposite extreme and accuse it of pointing to a state of perpetual chocolate cream; yet again it is attacked on grounds of effeminancy, it is upbraided as being fond of a sickly sentimentalism. thus it is attacked on opposite grounds at once. it is condemned for being pessimistic, it is blamed for being optimistic. from this position chesterton deduces that it is the only rational religion, because it steers between the scylla of pessimism and avoids the charybdis of a facile optimism. regarding presumably the early church she has also kept from extremes. she has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. she has avoided the arian materialism by dropping a greek iota; she has not succumbed to eastern influences, which would have made her forget she was the church on earth as well as in heaven. with tremendous commonsense she has remained rational and chosen the middle course, which was one of the cardinal virtues of the ancient greek philosophers. the christian religion is, then, rational because attacked along irrational grounds; the church is also reasonable because she has not been swayed by the attraction of heresy nor listened to the glib fallacies of those who always want to make her something more or something less. * * * * * the other and lesser contention of the book is the wisdom of the land of the fairies. this is, chesterton feels, the land where is found the philosophy of the nursery that is expressed in fairy tales--tales that every grown-up should read at christmas. fairyland is for chesterton the sunny land of commonsense. it is more, it is a place that has a very definite religion; it is, in fact, really the child's land of christ. take the lesson of cinderella, says chesterton; it is really the teaching of the prayer book that the humble shall be exalted, because humility is worthy of exaltation. or the sleeping beauty. is it not the significance of how love can bridge time? the prince would have been there to wake the princess had she slept a thousand instead of a hundred years. yet again the land of the fairies is the abode of reason. if jack is the son of a miller, then a miller is the father of jack. it is no good in fairyland trying to prove that two and two do not make four, but it is quite possible to imagine that the witch really did turn the unlucky prince into a pig. after all, such a procedure is not a monopoly of the fairies. lesser persons than princes have been turned into pigs, not by the wand of a witch, but by the wand of good or bad fortune. * * * * * 'orthodoxy' is probably the sanest book that chesterton has ever written. it is, i venture to think, the work that will gain for him immortality. it is a book on the greatest of themes, the reasonableness of the christian religion. there have been many books written to attack the christian religion, equally many to defend it, but chesterton has made his apology for the religion on original grounds--the contradictories of the detractors of it. 'orthodoxy' goes alone with christ into the mountain, and the eager multitudes receive the real philosophy of chesterton. * * * * * the child who has eaten too much jam and feels that too much of a good thing is a truism is rather like the philosopher who, having studied everything, comes to the sad conviction that there is something wrong with the world. the child finds that large quantities of jam are a delusion; the philosopher discovers that the world is even more wrong than he thought it was. sitting in his study, chesterton, looking out on the garden which is the world, discovers that there is something wrong with it, and it is caused by the machinations of the 1,500 odd millions of people who, like ants, crawl about its surface. 'what's wrong with the world?' is the result, and a very entertaining book it is. like many other sociological treatises it leaves us still convinced that the world is wrong, because we don't know what we really want. the pessimist is convinced that the world is a bad place, the optimist is sure that it can be good. that is the point of the book. chesterton has his own ideas of what is wrong, and he says so with astonishing paradox. when this book was written, feminism was demanding votes, and, not getting them at once, became naughty, and tied itself to the house of commons or pushed policemen over. chesterton devotes a large section of this book to demanding what is the mistake of feminism. 'the feminists probably agree that womanhood is under shameful tyranny in the shops and mills. i want to destroy this tyranny. they (the feminists) want to destroy womanhood.' they do this by attempting to drive women into the world and turn them away from the home. this is what is wrong with the woman's world: they have it that the home is narrow, that the world is wide. the converse is the truth: woman is the star of the home. it is a pity if she has to make chains--significant word--at cradley heath. education is not for chesterton an unqualified success; there is a mistake about it somewhere. in fact, there is 'no such thing as education.' education is not an object, it is a 'transmission' or an 'inheritance.' it means that a certain standard of conduct is passed on from generation to generation. the keynote of education for chesterton is undoubtedly dogma, and dogma is certainly the result of a narrowing tendency. at this present time there is a controversy about the use of our public schools. whenever a harassed editor in fleet street cannot think what to put in those two spare columns, he works up a 'stunt' on the use or otherwise of the public schools. this is always exciting, as the public schools hardly ever see the controversy, being blissfully immersed in the military strategy of hannibal or the political intrigues of the caesars. thus the controversy is conducted by those who generally think that commerce is superior to greek, money-grubbing to good manners. even chesterton must say something about these schools that are the backbone of england. unfortunately he thinks that they are weakening the country, that the headmasters 'are teaching only the narrowest of manners.' but the public schools 'manufacture gentlemen; they are factories for the making of aristocrats.' if he is right, the more of these schools there are the better it is for the country. it is well that he is not averse to greek. in these days the classics are looked upon as waste of time. political economy and profiteering are more useful. as he says, a man of the type of carnegie would die in a greek city. i am not sure whether this is not unfair. the real use of greek is that it teaches culture. there is use in plato's philosophy; it is quite as useful as the knowledge acquired that results in peers made, not born. i don't think chesterton understands the public schools at all well; they are both bad and good, but at least they are very english. he hasn't a great deal to say for imperialism. imperialism is a very difficult ethic; it is not easy to say whether it is a selfish or an unselfish policy. thus we may quite conceivably pat ourselves on the back and say that, as english rule is good for natives, it is only right that we should keep india; but we might find that an equally good and more popular reason for doing so would be to prevent any one else having her. thus our imperial policy is a little selfish and a little unselfish. for chesterton, imperialism is something that is both weak and perilous. it is really, he contends, a false idealism which tends to try and make people locally discontented, contented with pseudo visions of distant realms where the cities are of gold, where blue skies are never hidden by yellow fog. but is it a false idealism? if it is, it is that conception which has made men leave their homes in england to build up the imperial empire which is the daughter of the great imperial island. the vision may not be always useful, but imperialism has done much to make england and empire synonymous. business is, according to chesterton, a nasty thing that will not wait. it hates leisure, it has no use for brotherhood, it is one of the things that is wrong in the world--not, of course, that business is wrong in itself, but the method. thus he disagrees that if a soap factory cannot be run on brotherhood lines the brotherhood must be scrapped. he would have the converse to be better. he contends that it is better to be without soap than without society. as a matter of fact, society without soap would be an abomination. society without any brotherhood would soon cease to be a society at all. utopia is a little soap, a little society, with a flavouring of brotherhood in each. another and obviously good reason that the world is wrong is that it is only half finished. this is a matter for extreme optimism; it is the one great thing that makes it certain that the world will be found all right if it comes to an end. that is, if it delays long enough for the irish question to be settled. this is what chesterton contends in this fine book, that reforms are not reforms at all, rather the same things dressed up in other clothes. values are set up on false standards. women in trying to become emancipated are likely to become slaves; the fear of the past is given over to a too delicate introspection of the probable vices and virtues of generations not yet born. imperialism is liable to a false idealism, drawing men from seven dials to find utopia in brixton. the public schools are weakening the country in some respects. education is not education at all; in fact, we really must start the wrong world over again. i don't quite see where chesterton proposes we are to start, or exactly how, whether backwards or forwards. perhaps, as in 'orthodoxy,' the middle course is the happy and safe one. * * * * * 'tremendous trifles' is a chestertonian philosophy of the importance and interest of small things. it is a remarkable thing that we never see the things that we daily gaze upon. chesterton finds scope for all kinds of subjects in this book, from a 'piece of chalk' to 'a dragon's grandmother.' provided we believe in dragons, there is good reason to suppose that they have grandmothers. it is not so easy to write a good essay on the subject. chesterton does so with great skill, and it makes it quite certain to be so intellectual as to hate fairies is a piteous condition. what he brings out in this particular essay is that what modern intellectualism has done is to make 'the hero extraordinary, the tale ordinary,' whereas the fairy tale makes 'the hero ordinary, the tale extraordinary.' in this book of short essays it is only possible to take a few, but care has been taken to attempt to show the enormous versatility of chesterton's mind. it has been said quite wrongly that chesterton cannot describe pathos. this is certainly untrue. he can so admirably describe humour that he cannot help knowing the pathetic, which is often so akin to humour. i am not sure that this ability to describe the melancholy is not to be seen in one of these essays that narrates how he travelled in a train in which there was a dead man whose end he never knew. perhaps there is nothing more interesting than turning out one's pockets--all sorts of long forgotten mementoes cause a lump in the throat or a gleam in the eye; but it is very annoying, on arriving at a station where tickets are collected, to find everything that relates to your past twenty years of life and be unable to find the ticket that makes you a legitimate rider on the iron way. this is what chesterton describes in a delightful essay. one day, so chesterton tells us in the 'riddle of the ivy,' he happened to be leaving battersea, and being asked where he was going, calmly replied to 'battersea.' which is really to say that we find our way to brixton more eagerly by way of singapore than by way of kennington. in a few words, it is what we mean when we say, as every traveller says at times, 'home, sweet home.' i fancy this is what mr. chesterton means. it is a beautiful thought--a fine love of the home, a strange understanding of the wish of the traveller who once more wishes to see the old cottage before he journeys 'across the bar.' the sight of chained convicts being taken to a prison causes chesterton to essay on the 'filthy torture' of our prisons, the whole system of which is a 'relic of sin.' perhaps he is right! but is it that the prisons are wrong, or is it that society makes criminals? after all, convicts are chained that they shall not endure a worse penalty for attempted escape. at present prisons are as necessary to the state as milk is to a baby; the thing against them is that they turn criminal men into criminal devils. at his home in beaconsfield, chesterton has a wonderful toy theatre. he writes in this book a sketch about it. this toy theatre has a certain philosophy. 'it can produce large events in a small space; it could represent the earthquake in jamaica or the day of judgment.' we must take chesterton's word for it. i am not convinced that the toy theatre of chesterton has added to philosophy; i don't think it has made any remarkable contribution to thought, nor is it, as he claims, more interesting and better than a west-end theatre; but i do believe that in having amused a few hundred children it has a place in the book of life--perhaps near the name of santa claus. while it is true that 'tremendous trifles' is not nearly as important as some of the chesterton books, it is true to say that it is a remarkably pleasant book about small things that are really tremendous when we come to study them. * * * * * 'the defendant' is, as the title suggests, a defence of all kinds of things that are usually attacked by other people. it takes a brave man to defend 'penny dreadfuls.' chesterton assumes this rã´le. he defends them on their remarkable powers of imagination. one has only to study sexton blake to discover the intricate psychology of that wondrous personality who can solve the foulest murder or unravel stories that the divorce courts would quail before. there is something to be said for the skeleton so long as he doesn't come out of his cupboard. chesterton defends skeletons. 'the truth is that man's horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all; it is that the skeleton reminds him that his appearance is shamelessly grotesque.' but he sees no objection to this at all. after all, he says, the frog and the hippopotamus are happy. why, then, should man dislike it that his anatomy without flesh is inelegant? it is to be expected that chesterton would write a defence of baby worship, because they are so 'very serious and in consequence very happy.' 'the humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the cosmos together.' probably we are all agreed that the defence of baby worship is a desirable thing; possibly it is the only point upon which there is universal agreement with chesterton. 'the defendant' is a series of papers that are light, but conceal a depth of thought behind them. they demonstrate that there is something to be said for everything which may be a slight solution of the eternal problem that theological professors are paid to try and discover, the problem of evil. it may be that there is really no such thing, but it would be disastrous to these professors to discover this, so the dear old problem goes on from year to year. as an essayist, chesterton is never dull: the philosophy contained in his essays is not prosy. the only fault is that he is at times so clever that it is a little difficult to know what he means. but this really does not matter, as a shrewd critic of one of his books made it public through the press that chesterton did not know himself what he meant. but i wonder if he did really know? _chapter two_ dickens if there is fault to be found in chesterton's masterly study of charles dickens it lies in the fact that in parts of the book the meaning is not always clear, or, rather, it is not always so at a first reading. whether this may be justly termed a fault depends largely upon what the reader of a critical study demands. if he desires that he shall read chesterton superficially and yet understand, he will be doomed to disappointment. perhaps of all writers chesterton must be read with the head between the hands, with a fierce determination that the meaning veiled in brilliant paradox shall be sought out. he is not only a keen critic, he is also a deliberate commentator. the difference is fundamental. the commentator builds upon the foundation the critic has erected; he does not merely state what he thinks about a book or character, rather he explains the criticism already made. this is the method adopted with regard to dickens. chesterton has written a commentary on the soul of dickens, he has not in any strict sense written a biography; this was not necessary; the difficulty of dickens lies in the interpretation of his work; his life, though having a great influence on his writings, has been written so often that chesterton has refrained from building on 'another's foundation.' in a word, it is an intensely original work, far more than our critic's companion book on browning. as was browning born to a world in the throes of the aftermath of the french revolution, so was dickens. chesterton lays great stress on the youth of dickens; it is only right that he should do this; the early life of dickens was probably responsible for the wonderful genius of his art. the blacking factory that nearly killed the physical dickens gave birth to the literary dickens. dickens was, in fact, born at the psychological moment, which is not to say that we are born at the unpsychological moment, but that dickens was born at a time that allowed his natural powers to be used to the best advantage. chesterton feels this strongly. 'the background of the dickens era was just that background that was eminently suitable to him'; it was a background that needed a dickens as much as the pagan world, with all its greek philosophies, had needed a christ. he begins his study of dickens with a keen survey of the dickens period. 'it was,' he says, 'a world that encouraged anybody to anything. and in england and literature its living expression was dickens. it is useless for us to attempt to imagine dickens and his life unless we are able to imagine his confidence in common men.' it is this supreme confidence in common men that was the keynote to the wonderful power of dickens in making characters from those who were in a world sense undistinguished. on this position chesterton lays great stress. it was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. it was the same position that made browning an optimist. it is the disbelief in the divine image in man that makes the cynic and the pessimist. swift hated men because they were capable of better things but would not realize it. dickens knew men were kings, though ordinary men; the result was that he loved humanity. it is a queer point of psychology that with the same wish two such minds as swift and dickens came to the extremes of the emotions of love and hate. in some ways dickens was more than a maker of books, he was a maker of worlds; he tried to make 'not only a book but a cosmos.' this may be a curious and obscure kind of clericalism that popularly expresses itself as an effort to run with the hare and follow with the hounds, but is really an heroic attempt to see both sides of the question, and is not a cheap pandering after popularity. many critics have disliked dickens because of this tendency of universalism, a tendency liable to intrude on minds of a giant intellect and a ready sympathy. chesterton does not think that dickens was right in this attitude of universalism, and says so with, i think, a certain amount of cheap disdain. 'he was inclined to be a literary whiteley, a universal provider.' really dickens wanted to have a say about everything, in which he is strangely like chesterton. the result of this was a result that meant the greatest value: it meant and was 'david copperfield.' the book was for chesterton a classic, and it was so because it was an autobiography. it is in this work that dickens makes his defence of the rather exaggerated situations in some of his books, for in this book dickens proves that his greatest romance is based on the experiences of his own life. 'david copperfield is the great answer of a romancer to the realists. david says in effect, "what! you say that the dickens tales are too purple really to have happened. why, this is what happened to me, and it seemed the most purple of all. you say that the dickens heroes are too handsome and triumphant! why, no prince or paladin in ariosto was ever so handsome and triumphant as the head boy seemed to me walking before me in the sun. you say the dickens villains are too black. why, there was no ink in the devil's inkstand black enough for my own stepfather when i had to live in the same house with him."' this is the point that chesterton brings out so well. the dickens characters are not overdrawn because, though they move between book covers, their originals have moved on the face of the earth; they have moved with dickens and he has made them his own. his brilliant apology for this alleged 'overdrawing' is one of the most effective replies ever penned to superior dickens detractors. it is effective because it is true; it is true because it is obvious that dickens created that which lay hidden in his own mind, the misery of his factory days. it is, i think, with this view in mind that chesterton pays so much attention to that period of dickens' life which he spent in the blacking factory, with its crude noise, its blatant vulgarity, its vile language that left the small boy dickens' sick, but with a sickness that discovered his literary genius. the factory was the germ that made the great writer. chesterton is a true critic of dickens because he has this somewhat singular insight of seeing the importance of the early miseries of dickens' life with regard to their influence on his literary output and his queerly favoured delineation of common folks, the sort of people we always meet but hardly ever talk about because we are foolish enough to think them ordinary. * * * * * it is from the account of the early life of dickens that chesterton gently leads us to the birth of the immortal mr. pickwick, that supreme englishman who is a byword amongst even those who scarcely know dickens. the birth pangs of the advent of pickwick was a sharp quarrel 'that did no good to dickens, and was one of those which occurred far too frequently in his life.' without any hesitation for chesterton, 'pickwick papers' is dickens' finest achievement, which is a pleasant enough problem if we happen to remember that he also wrote 'david copperfield.' possibly it is really unfair to compare them. 'pickwick papers' is not in the strict sense a novel; 'david copperfield' is a novel even if it is an autobiography. at any rate pickwick was a fairy, and as fairies are pretty elastic he probably was in that category of beings, but he was even more a royal fairy, none other than the 'fairy prince.' in pickwick, dickens made a great discovery, which was that he could write ordinary stuff like the 'sketches by boz,' and also could produce mr. pickwick and write 'david copperfield,' which was to say that dickens discovered he had a good chance of being the shakespeare of literature. 'it is in "pickwick papers" that dickens became a mythologist rather than a novelist; he dealt with men who were gods.' that is, no doubt, that they became household gods; in other words, as familiar as the characters of shakespeare. there is one tremendous outstanding characteristic of dickens which chesterton brings out with considerable force. it is that above all things dickens created characters. it is almost as if the setting of his books were on a stage where the environment changes but the essentials of the characters remain unchanged. the story is almost subordinated to the drawing of the principal character; it is almost a modern idea of the psychoanalytical kind of novel that our young novelists love to draw. but still there is the great difference that the characters of dickens pursue there own way regardless of the trend of events round them. naturally the modern novel is inferior to some of dickens' works, but they do not deserve the hard things chesterton says about them. thus he remarks in passing that the modern novel is 'devoted to the bewilderment of a weak young clerk who cannot decide which woman he wants to marry or which new religion he believes in; we still give this knock-kneed cad the name of hero.' this is, i think, unfair. the modern novel is very often still a good healthy love tale; the hero is more often than not a gentleman who has not the brains to be a cad; his trouble about marriage is that he wants to marry the right woman to their mutual well being; he is neither a cad nor a hero, but an ordinary englishman whom we need not walk half a mile to see; he usually marries a girl who can be seen in any suburb or at any church bazaar. i have dwelt on this at some length, as chesterton has a tendency to despise modern novelists while being one himself. at this period, when 'pickwick' had once and for all brought fame to dickens, it will be interesting to see why dickens attained the enormous popularity he did. he was, our critic thinks, a 'great event not only in literature but also in history.' he considers that dickens was popular in a sense that we of the twentieth century cannot understand. in fact, he goes so far as to say that there are no really popular authors to-day. this is probably not entirely true. when we say an author is popular we do not mean that necessarily, as chesterton seems to suggest, he is a 'best seller'; rather we call him popular in the sense that a large number of people find pleasure in reading him, even if the subject is not a pleasant one. dickens was popular in a different way: he was read by a public who wished his story might never end. they not only loved his books, they loved his characters even more. no matter that there might be five sub-stories running alongside of the main one, the central character retained the public affection. his characters were known outside their particular stories, and not only that, this was by no means confined to the principal ones. they were known, as chesterton points out, as sherlock holmes is known to-day. but even so there is again a difference. people do not speak of the minor characters of conan doyle's tales as they do, for instance, of smike. * * * * * it is now convenient to turn to the christmas literature of dickens. i am convinced that chesterton has very badly misconstrued the character of scrooge, that delightful person whose one virtue was consistency. above everything, scrooge was consistent; he hated christmas as we hate anything that does not agree with our temperament. merry christmas was nonsense to him because he did not know how to be merry. he was a cold, cynical bachelor, and at that, so far, was perfectly within the law, moral and legal. but chesterton, by rather an unfortunate attempt to be too original, has turned him into a filthy hypocrite who needed no appearances of spirits whatever; for he says of scrooge, 'he is only a crusty old bachelor, and had, i strongly suspect, given away turkeys secretly all his life.' when chesterton says that scrooge gave away turkeys secretly all his life it is merely saying that the whole attitude of scrooge to life was a silly and unmeaning pose, which makes him ridiculous, and robs the 'christmas carol' of all its real worth, that of the miraculous conversion of scrooge. but, then, the actual story does not mean much for chesterton: 'the repentance of scrooge is highly improbable.' if it is true that scrooge really did give away turkeys secretly, then it is quite obvious that scrooge never did repent; he was past it. but i fancy that chesterton has erred badly here; he has attempted without success to put a secret meaning into a simple and beautiful story. 'chimes' is, for chesterton, an attack on cant. it was a story written by dickens to protest against all he hated in the nature of oppression. dickens hated the vulgar cant that only helps to bring self-advertisement: the ethic that the poor must listen to the rich, not because the rich are the best law-givers, but because society is at present so constituted that no other method can be adopted. dickens loved the attitude the poor always take to christmas; it is that attitude which is the proof that at its bedrock humanity is extremely lovable. chesterton is entirely in agreement with dickens on this matter. 'there is nothing,' he says, 'upon which the poor are more criticized than on the point of spending large sums on small feasts; there is nothing in which they are more right.' dickens did not in any way forget that the real spirit of christmas is to be found in the cheery group round the blazing fire. 'the cricket on the hearth' is a pleasant tale about all that we associate with christmas, that very thing that has made hearth and christmas synonymous; yet chesterton considers this one of the weakest of the dickens' stories, which is a surprising criticism for a writer who really loves christmas as he does. * * * * * in a later period of dickens, chesterton informs us of his brief entry into the complex and exciting world that has its headquarters in fleet street. for a short period dickens occupied the editorship of the _daily news_, but the environment was not a very congenial one. dickens was unsettled with that strange restlessness that seizes all literary men at some time or other. this was the time that saw the publication of 'dombey and son.' chesterton thinks that the essential genius found its most perfect expression in this work though the treatment is grotesque. this book is almost, so our critic thinks, 'a theological one: it attempts to distinguish between the rough pagan devotion of the father and the gentler christian affection of the mother.' the grotesque manner of treatment of this work was as natural as the employment of the grotesque by browning. dickens must work in his own way, in the manner that suited his inmost soul; he could not be made to write to order. in a brilliant paradox chesterton says of 'dombey and son': the 'story of florence dombey is incredible, although it is true,' which is what many people feel about christianity. 'dombey and son' was the outlet for that curious psychology of dickens which could get the best out of a pathetic incident by approaching it from a grotesque angle. it came, as chesterton points out in his own inimitable way, 'into the inner chamber by coming down the chimney.' which demonstrates the ever nearness of pathos to humour, of the absurd to the pathetic. it will not be out of place to refer at this time to some of the defects with which people have charged dickens. chesterton does not agree with the critics on these points, but admits that these charges have been levelled against dickens. it will be advisable to take one or two examples of these alleged flaws. there is that most popular thing of which dickens is accused, that of exaggeration. many people are quite incredulous that there could ever have existed such a character as little nell. chesterton, however, thinks that dickens did know a girl of this nature, and that little nell was based on her. little nell is not really more improbable than 'eric,' the famous hero of dean farrar, and he was certainly based on a living boy. people who live in these enlightened days are piously shocked at the amount of drinking described by dickens. well-bred and garrulous ladies have shuddered at the scenes described, and have declared that dickens was at least fond of the bacchanalian element. so he was, but the reason was not that he loved hard drinking, but that, as our critic brings out, drinking was the symbol of hospitality as roast beef is the symbol of a sunday in a thousand english rectories. as dickens described the social life of england he could not leave out its most characteristic feature and shudder in pious horror that the red wine dyed old england a merry crimson. * * * * * it would be no doubt an exaggeration to call dickens a socialist. what he saw was that there was a mass of beings that was called humanity, that the two ends of the political pole were indifferent to this mass. the party to which a man gave his allegiance did not matter as long as that party worked for man's ultimate good. chesterton is quite sure that dickens was not a socialist; he was not the kind that ranted at street corners and dined in secret at the ritz, nor was he of the kind who said all men are equal but i am a little better. he was a socialist in the sense that he hated oppression of any kind. 'hard times' strikes a note that is a little short of being harsh. the reason that dickens may have exaggerated bounderby is that he really disliked him. the dickensian characters undoubtedly suffered from their delineator's likes and dislikes. about this time dickens wrote a book that was unique for him; it was a book that dealt with the french revolution, and was called 'the tale of two cities.' chesterton does not think that dickens really understood this gigantic upheaval; in fact, he says his attitude to it was quite a mistaken one. even, thinks our critic, carlyle didn't know what it meant. both see it as a bloody riot, both are mistaken. the reason that carlyle and dickens didn't know all about it was that they had the good fortune to be englishmen; a very good supposition that chesterton has still something to learn of that revolution. after all, the main point of 'the tale of two cities' is the exquisite pathos of it. whether its attitude to the french revolution is absolutely accurate does not matter very much for the reader who is not a keen historical student. with 'hard times' and 'a tale of two cities' dickens has struck a graver note. this is peculiarly emphasized in 'great expectations.' this story is 'characterized by a consistency and quietude of individuality which is rare in dickens.' it is really a book with a moral--that life in the limelight is not always synonymous with getting the best out of it. really, the hero behaves in a sneakish manner. probably dickens doesn't like him, and the writer is still on the stern side. in 1864, so chesterton tells us, dickens was in a merrier mood, and published 'our mutual friend,' a book that has, as our critic says, 'a thoroughly human hero and a thoroughly human villain.' this work is 'a satire dealing with the whims and pleasures of the leisured class.' but this is by no means a monopoly of the so-called idle rich: the hardworking middle and poorer classes have whims and pleasures in a like manner, but have not so much opportunity in indulging in them. as i have indicated, the story is not the principal part of the dickens' literature; it is the drawing of characters to which he pays so much attention. it will not be out of place at this time to see what our critic has to say with regard to this tendency of dickens. it is an essential of dickens, and is therefore of vast import to any critique on him. the essence of dickens, for chesterton, is that he makes kings out of common men: those folks who are the ordinary people of this strange, fascinating world, those who have no special claim to a place in the stars, those who, when they die, do not have two lines in any but a local paper, those who are common but are never commonplace. there is a vast difference between the common and the commonplace, as chesterton points out. death is common to all, yet it is never commonplace; it is in its very essence a grand and noble thing, because it is a proof of our common humanity; it gives the lie that the pope is of more importance than the dustman; it makes the busy editor equal to the newsboy shouting the papers under his office windows. the common man is he who does not receive any special distinction: universities do not compete to do him honour, his name is but mentioned in a small circle. these are those of whom dickens wrote. 'it is,' says chesterton, 'in private life that we find the great characters. they are too great to get into the public world.' they are people who are natural--natural in a sense that the holders of high office never can be. dickens could only write of natural people, so he wrote of common men: 'you will find him adrift as an impecunious commercial traveller like micawber; you will find him but one of a batch of silly clerks like swiveller; you will find him as an unsuccessful actor like crumples; you will find him as an unsuccessful doctor like sawyer; you will always find the rich and reeking personality where dickens found it among the poor.' not only were the characters dickens chose common men, they were also 'great fools,' because chesterton will have us believe that a man can be entirely great while he is entirely foolish. it is no doubt in the spiritual sense so admirably expressed in the pauline epistles, where 'foolish in the eyes of the world but wise before god' is a condition that is of merit. 'mr. toots is great because he is foolish.' he is great because he has a soul that glorifies his weak and foolish body, not that he is great because, _ipso facto_, he is foolish. there is a great and permanent value in the writings of dickens. i cannot do better than quote our critic: 'if we are to look for lessons, here at least are the last and deepest lessons of dickens. it is in our own daily life that we are to look for the portents and the prodigies. this is the truth, not merely of the fixed figures of our life, the wife, the husband, the fool that fills the day. every day we neglect tootses and swivellers, guppys and joblings, simmerys and flashers. this is the real gospel of dickens, the inexhaustible opportunities offered by the liberty and variety of man. it is when we pass our own private gate and open our own secret door that we step into the land of the giants.' * * * * * it will now be convenient to consider the question of the attitude of our critic to the 'mystery of edwin drood,' that tale that has produced one of those literary mysteries that are so dear to a number of folks of the kind who would be disappointed were the problem to be finally solved. 'the mystery of edwin drood' was cut short by the sudden death that fell upon dickens on a warm june night some half century ago. for chesterton the book 'might have proved to be the most ambitious that dickens ever planned.' it is non-dickensian in the sense that its value depends entirely on a story. the workmanship is very fine. the book was purely and simply a detective story. 'bleak house' was the nearest approach to its style, but the mystery there was easy to unravel. it was as though dickens wished in 'edwin drood' to make one last 'splendid and staggering' appearance before the curtain rang down, not to be rung up again until the last easter morning. 'yes,' says chesterton, 'there were many other dickenses, 'an industrious dickens, a public spirited dickens, but the last one (that is edwin drood) was the great one. the wild epitaph of mrs. sapsea, "canst thou do likewise?" should be the serious epitaph of dickens.' * * * * * it is more than fifty years since dickens died. what is the future of dickens likely to be? at least, chesterton has no doubt of the permanent influence of dickens; he is as sure of immortality as is shakespeare. the kings of the earth die, yet their works remain; the princes pass on but are not entirely forgotten; writers write and in their turn sleep; but there is that to which in every age we inscribe the word immortal. it is enough to say that dickens is immortal because he is dickens. there is a further reason, that he proved what all the world had been saying, that common humanity is a holy thing. to quote chesterton: 'he did for the world what the world could not do for itself.' dickens' creation was poetry--it dealt with the elementals; it is therefore permanent. in final words he says, 'we shall not be further troubled with the little artists who found dickens too sane for their sorrows and too clear for their delights. but we have a long way to travel before we get back to what dickens meant; and the passage is a long, rambling english road, a twisting road such as mr. pickwick travelled.' 'but the road leads to eternity, because the inn is at the end of the road, and at that inn is a goodly company of common men who are immortal because dickens made them. here we shall meet dickens and all his characters, and when we shall drink again it shall be from great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.' * * * * * what, then, is the essential part of chesterton's study of charles dickens? it is certainly not a biography; it is for all practical purposes a keen study of what dickens was, what he wrote, why he wrote as he did, why he has a place in literature no one else has. there are faults in the book--it would be a poor book if it had none. at times i think chesterton allows his genius to overcome his critical judgment. particularly is this so in his strange misconstruction of the character of scrooge. but this merely demonstrates yet once more that dickens, like christ, is unique, because no one has ever completely understood him. the book is a tribute by a great writer to a greater writer, by a great man to a great man, by a complex personality to a complex personality; above all it is a tribute by a lover of the things of the 'doorstep' to a writer who has made the doorstep and the street the road to heaven, because the beings who pass along have been made immortal. when the critics of dickens meet at the inn there will be none more worthy of a place close to the master writer than chesterton. _chapter three_ thackeray there are no doubt thousands of people who would be annoyed to be thought the reverse of well read who nevertheless know thackeray only as a name. they know that he was a really great english novelist--they may even know that he lived as a contemporary of dickens--but they do not know a line of any of his works. in lesser manner dickens is unknown to very many people of the present day who could tell you intelligently of every modern book that is produced. the reason is, i think, one that is not so generally thought of as might be expected. it is often said that thackeray and dickens are out of date, that they have had their day, that this era of tube trains and other abominations cannot fall into the background of lumbering stage coaches. this is, i think, a profound and grave error. it is an error because it presupposes that human interest changes with the advent of different means of transport: that squeers is no longer of interest because he would now travel to yorkshire by the great northern railway and would have lunch in a luncheon car instead of inside a four-horse stage coach. the fundamental reason that modern people do not read these great authors is that they are not encouraged to do so. the very best way to instil a love of thackeray into the modern world is to make the modern world read just so much of him that its voracious appetite is sharpened to wish for more. in an altogether admirable series of the masters of literature thackeray finds a place, and treatment of him is left to chesterton, who writes a fine introductory 'biography' and then takes picked passages from his writings. this is, i think, the most useful means possible of popularizing an author. it requires a good deal of pluck in these days to sit down and steadily pursue a way through a long book of thackeray unless it has been proved, by the perusal of a selected passage, that riches in the book warrant the act of courage in beginning the work. in this chapter it will be convenient to pay special attention to the introduction that is so ably contributed by chesterton. it will only be possible to refer to the passages he has selected from thackeray, and the reader must judge of the merit of the choosing. it is one of the hardest things possible to choose representative passages from a great writer. shall he choose those that display the literary qualities of the writer, shall he choose those which depict his powers of drama, shall he select those which bring out the humour of the writer, shall he pick at random and let the passage stand or fall on its own merits? these are questions that must be faced in a work of the nature of chesterton's thackeray. what the method has been will, i hope, be clear at the end of this chapter. it was thackeray's expressed wish that there should be no biography written of him, a position that might indicate extreme modesty, colossal conceit, or distinct cowardice. whatever the reason, it has not been entirely obeyed, and rightly. a man of the power of thackeray cannot live without the world being in some way better; it is only good that those who never knew him in the flesh should at least know him in a book. it is not enough that, as chesterton points out, he 'was of all novelists the most autobiographical,' which is not to say that he wrote unending personal confessions with a very large i, but rather that his books were drawn from the experiences of his life, a field that is productive of the richest literary worth. thackeray was born, we are told, in the year 1811, so that he was a year old when the world received two babies who were like ten thousand other babies, except that they happened to be browning and dickens. it was the time when the world trembled, because that mighty soldier napoleon stood with arms folded, waiting to strike, it knew not where. it was the time when military genius reached its height, a height that could be only brought low by one thing, and that was an english general with a long nose and a cocked hat. although thackeray was born in calcutta, he was as english as he could possibly be. but he did not forget his eastern beginning. 'a certain vague cosmological quality was always mixed with his experience, and it was his favourite boast that he had seen men and cities like ulysses.' which is to say that he had not only seen the world, he had felt it; if he had not seen a one-eyed giant, he had at least seen a two-eyed hindu. his early life followed the ordinary life of a thousand other boys born of anglo-indian parents; that was, he went to school, where 'a girl broke his heart and a boy broke his nose,' and he discovered that the nose took longer to mend. at cambridge, chesterton tells us, thackeray found that it was a quite easy thing to sit down and play cards and lose â£1,500 in an evening, a fact that very probably was more useful to him than twenty degrees. trinity college was the thackeray college: it has had no more famous son. it was said that thackeray could order a dinner in every language in europe, which is to say he could have dined in comfort in any restaurant in soho. from cambridge, we learn, he made his way to the bar, and at the same time wrote articles in the hope that some editor might keep them from the waste-paper basket. chesterton tells us an interesting legend that about this time thackeray offered to illustrate the books of dickens. the offer was declined, which he thinks was 'a good thing for dickens' books and a good thing for thackeray's.' whether thackeray ever really did meet dickens does not matter much; it is at least picturesque; 'it affects the imagination as much as the meeting with napoleon.' there has always been what is for chesterton a silly discussion--a controversy as to whether thackeray was a cynic. this was because he happened to write first about villains, then about heroes; villains are always more interesting than heroes, and not infrequently are much better mannered. a cynic is a person who doesn't take the trouble to find the motives for things, or he takes it for granted that the motives are never disinterested ones. to say that thackeray was a cynic because he drew a large number of villains is as untrue as to say swift was a cynic because he wrote satire. thackeray wrote about villains because he wished to also write about heroes; swift was satirical because he had the intelligence to see that his contemporaries were fools when they might have been wise. the cynics are the people of to-day who write books which attribute low motives to every one, which turn love into lust, which care not what is written so long as it can be made certain that there is nothing in the world which has not a hidden meaning. the first appearance of thackeray in literature was in 'fraser's magazine,' under the pseudo name of michael angelo titmarsh. it is on these unimportant papers that chesterton thinks was based the attack on thackeray for being a cynic. in passing, it is not necessary to say more than that thackeray's marriage ended in a horrible manner: mrs. thackeray was sent to an asylum. 'i would do it over again,' said thackeray; which was a 'fine thing to say.' it was really carrying out 'for better or worse,' which often enough really means for better only. * * * * * it will now be well at once to plunge into the very heart of thackeray, that heart which beat beneath the huge, gaunt frame. the two books which have made his name famous, and what chesterton thinks of them, must be now gone into. 'the book of snobs' was one of those literary rarities that has genius in its very name. no one probably really thinks himself a snob; every one likes to read of one. thackeray brought snobbishness to a classic. there had been books of scoundrels, there had been books of heroes, there had been books of nincompoops, now there was a book of those people who abound in every community, and who are snobs. 'this work was much needed and very admirably done. the solemn philosophic framework, the idea of treating snobbishness as a science, was original and sound; for snobbishness is indeed a disease in our society.' unfortunately chesterton is not nearly hard enough on snobbishness. were it a disease, it might be excusable as being at times unavoidable; it is nothing of the sort, it is a deliberate thing that undermines society more than anything; it is entirely spontaneous, and flourishes in every community, from the church to the jockey club. 'aristocracy does not have snobs any more than democracy'; but this 'thackeray was too restrained and early victorian to see.' there are at the present day a great number of people who will not see that bolshevism is as snobbish as suburbia, that the poor man in the park lodge is as much a snob as his master, who only knows the county folks. snobbery is not the monopoly of any one set; even also is it, as thackeray says,'a mean admiration' that thinks it is better to be a 'made' peer than an honest gardener. 'the true source of snobs in england was the refusal to take one side or the other in the crisis of the french revolution.' the title of 'vanity fair' was an inspiration. it gives the ideas of the disharmonies that can be found in any market place in any english market town on any english market day. it brings out 'the irrelevancy of thackeray.' a good motto for the book is, for chesterton, that attributed to cardinal newman: 'evil always fails by overleaping its aim and good by falling short of it.' our critic feels that the critics have been unfair to thackeray with respect to their denouncement of the character of amelia sedley as being much too soft, whereas chesterton thinks she was really a fool, which is the logical outcome of being the reverse of hard. but amelia was soft in a very delightful way. she was 'open to all emotions as they came'--in fact, she was a fool who was wise because she has retained her power of happiness, while the hard rebecca has arrived at hell, 'the hell of having all outward forces open, but all receptive organs closed.' it is necessary again to refer to the charge of cynicism that is levelled against thackeray. the mistake is, as our critic points out, 'taking a vague word and applying it precisely.' it all depends upon what cynicism really means. 'if it means a war on comfort, then thackeray was, to his eternal credit, a cynic'; 'if it means a war on virtue, then thackeray, to his eternal honour, was the reverse of a cynic.' his object is to show that silly goodness is better than clever vice. as i have indicated, the long and the short of the matter is that thackeray created a lot of villains, and has therefore been called a cynic by those who don't even know what the word means, or that there is a literary blessedness in the making of villains to bring out the more excellent virtues of the heroes. * * * * * from these two monumental works that were original in every way and might almost be called propaganda, thackeray passed on to a novel which bore the name of 'pendennis.' it was 'a novel with nothing else but a hero, only that the hero is not very heroic,' which makes him all the more interesting, for it makes him all the more human. but pendennis is more than a man--he is a type or symbol. he is 'the old mystical tragedian of the middle ages, everyman.' it is an epic, because it celebrates the universal man with all his glorious failings and glorious virtues. the love of pendennis for miss fotheringay is a different thing to the ordinary love of man for woman; it is rather the love that is in every man for every woman. this is what i think chesterton means when he says 'it is the veritable divine disease, which seems a part of the very health of youth.' the everyman of the middle ages was a symbol of what man really was. chesterton feels that every outside force that came to everyman had to be abnormal--for instance, 'death had to be bony'--so he contends in 'pendennis' that the shapes that intrude on the life of arthur pendennis have aggressive and allegorical influences. 'pendennis' is an epic because it celebrates not the strength of man but his weakness. in the character of major pendennis, chesterton feels that thackeray did a great work, because he showed that the life of the so-called man of the world is not the gay and careless one that fiction depicts. it is the religious people who can afford to be careless. 'if you want carelessness you must go to the martyrs.' the reason is fairly obvious. the worldling has to be careful, as he wants to remain in the world; the religious man, of whom the martyr was the true prototype, can afford to be careless; he is not necessarily careless of life, but he can put things at their proper value. the martyr facing the lions in the roman arena knew what life really was; the worldly woman spending her life trying to be in the company of titled people has no real idea of the value of it. it is the religious people who know the world; it is the worldly people who know nothing of it. with the publication of 'pendennis' the reputation of thackeray reached that position which is sought by all authors, that of being able to write a book that should not, on publication, be put to the indignity of being asked who the writer was. thackeray was now in the delightful position of being well established, a position that very often results in careless and poor work. it has been said with some truth that once a writer is established he can write anything he likes. this is to an extent true, and such work may even be published and fairly popular, but he will find sooner or later that his influence is on the wane. in the 'newcomes' thackeray drew a character in colonel newcome, to whom was given the highest of literary honours, that of being spoken of apart from the book--i mean in the way that people speak of micawber or scrooge, almost unconsciously, without really having the actual work in which the character appears in mind. of this book chesterton says 'the public has largely forgotten all the newcomes except one, the colonel who has taken his place with don quixote, sir roger de coverley, uncle toby, and mr. pickwick.' chesterton feels that thackeray at times falls into the trick common to many writers, that of repeating himself, a trick that is natural, as it does seem in some ways that the human mind, like history, is apt to move in circles. the reason was that in some way thackeray became tired of barnes newcome; the result was that from being a convincing villain he develops into a stereotyped one, the type who fires pistols into the air and is the squire's runaway son, so often found at the lyceum. if thackeray 'sprawled' in the newcomes he atones for this in 'esmond,' if any atonement is needed for sprawling, which is probably only that thackeray felt that there is nothing so elastic and sprawling as a human person, whether he be a villain or the reverse. for chesterton, 'esmond' is in the modern sense a work of art, which is to say that it was a book that could be read anywhere. 'it had no word that might not have been used at the court of queen anne.' it is a highly romantic tale, but it is a sad story. it is a great queen anne romance; but, 'there broods a peculiar conviction that queen anne is dead.' the whole tale moves round a complicated situation in which a young man loves a mother and her daughter, and finally marries the mother. this work is, for chesterton, thackeray's 'most difficult task.' it is difficult for the reason that the situation of the tale is placed between possibilities of grace and possibilities even of indecency. it is not hard to write a graceful tale, it is easy to write a loose story; it is extremely difficult to write a story that may by a stroke of the pen be either beautiful or merely sordid. but thackeray manipulates the keys of the tale so that 'it moves like music,' an extremely apt metaphor, where harmonies can be made disharmonies by a single note. it is a strange fact that a sequel is seldom to be compared to its forerunner: 'tom brown's schooldays' is of a schoolboy who is an eternal type; 'tom brown at oxford' is a poor book that does not in the least understand oxford. the fact is, i think, that an author cannot be inspired twice on the same subject--the gods give but sparingly, their gifts do not fall as the rains. the sequel to 'esmond' that thackeray wrote, 'the virginians,' is an 'inadequate sequel,' which is not to say that it is a poor book, but rather that it is an unnecessary one. yet, as chesterton says, 'thackeray never struck a smarter note than when, in "the virginians," he created the terrible little yankee countess of castlewood.' in the same way as 'the virginians' was a sequel to 'esmond,' so 'philip' was a sequel (also an inadequate one) to the 'newcomes.' it is strange that in two things at least thackeray's life followed the same course as dickens. both occupied the editorial chair: dickens that of the _daily news_, thackeray that of the _cornhill magazine_. both left unfinished works: dickens that of 'the mystery of edwin drood,' thackeray that of 'denis duval.' thackeray's last work, 'lovell the widower,' is 'a very clever sketch, but as a novel is rather drawn out.' 'the roundabout papers' make very pleasant reading. in one 'he compares himself to a pagan conqueror driving in his chariot up the hill of coru, with a slave behind him to remind him that he is only mortal.' in 1863, suddenly, thackeray died, seven years before dickens also passed away. chesterton has in the space of a short introduction given a very clear account of the chief characteristics of thackeray's works; it is no easy matter to give in a few lines the essence of a great novel, and chesterton is not always the most concise of writers. it will now be convenient to take a few of the characteristics of thackeray and observe what he says of them. at once he is aware of the fact that there is no writer from whom it is more difficult to make extracts than from thackeray. the reason is that thackeray worked by 'diffuseness of style.' if he wished to be satirical about a character he was not so directly; rather he worked his way to the inside of the character, got to know all about it, and then began to be satirical. this is what chesterton feels about the matter; it is no doubt the fairest way of being satirical and the most effective. many people and writers are satirical without first of all demonstrating upon what grounds they have the right to be so. satire is a wholly laudable thing if it is directed in a fair minded manner, but if it is only an excuse for bitter cynicism it is altogether contemptible. thus he says of the thackerean treatment of 'vanity fair,' 'he was attacking "vanity fair" from the inside.' it comes to this: if you want to make an extract from thackeray you must dive about all over the place to make apparent irrelevancy become relevancy. if the use of the grotesque was a strength of browning (as chesterton contends against other critics), so in the case of thackeray that which some critics have held to be a weakness--i mean his 'irrelevancy'--is for our critic a strength. it was a strength, because it was 'a very delicate and even cunning literary approach.' it is the perfect art of thackeray to get the right situation, not by an assumption of it, but by so approaching it that there is no way out, which is arriving at the situation by the fairest means possible. 'no other novelist ever carried to such perfection as thackeray the art of saying a thing without saying it. thus he may say that a man drinks too much, yet it may be false to say that he drinks.' what he did was not to say that a man had arrived at such and such a state, but rather that things must change. if, as chesterton says, miss smith finds marriage the reverse of the honeymoon, thackeray does not say that the marriage is a failure, but that joy cannot last for ever; that if there are roses there are also thorns. it is an admirable method, far better than saying a thing straight out. it is better to tell a man who is a cad that there is such a thing as being a gentleman, than to tell him he is a cad. in his later life thackeray was inclined to imitate himself. it is, i think, that the human brain is prone to move in circles. in the case of thackeray, as our critic points out, in later days he used his rambling style, and, as was to be expected, he rather lost himself. 'he did not merely get into a parenthesis, he never got out of it,' which is to say that as thackeray got older he inherited the tendencies of old age. i have said earlier in this chapter that the charge against thackeray of cynicism was one that was founded on a false premise. the charge that his irrelevancy was a weakness is based on another false but popular premise, that the direct method is always the best. it is usually the worst. it is the worst in warfare, it is the worst in literature, but it is possibly the best in literary criticism. thackeray had another quality that has laid him open to adverse criticism; that is, his 'perpetual reference to the remote past.' this repeated reference to the past may be a matter of conceit, or it may be that the influence of the past is genuinely felt. the reason that, as chesterton points out, thackeray referred so much to the remote past, was that he wished it to be known that 'there was nothing new under the sun'; not even, as our critic says, 'the sunstroke.' chesterton admits that at times thackeray carried this tendency to an excess; also thackeray wanted to show that the oldest thing in the world was its youth. thus in writing of a fashionable drawing-room in mayfair, if he referred to some classic, it was to 'remind people how many _dã©butantes_ had come out since the age of horace.' it was quite a different thing to the pompous bishop quoting greek at the squire's house to show that his doctor's degree, though an honorary one, had some classical learning behind it, or the small boy translating horace to avoid the headmaster's cane. in the case of the bishop and the schoolboy, the use of the classics is, on the one hand, pomposity; on the other, discretion. in the case of thackeray it was a reverence for the past, that it was a very large part of the present. there are, then, roughly three main characteristics of thackeray: his irrelevancy, his rambling style, and his frequent reference to the past. all these, chesterton makes it clear, are matters in which the strength of thackeray lies. not that they are free always from exaggerations. sometimes thackeray became lost in his irrelevancy, sometimes he became almost unintelligible in his rambling style, now and then his use of ancient quotation became irritating. 'above all things, thackeray was receptive. the world imposed on thackeray, and dickens imposed on the world.' but it could not be put more truly than that thackeray represents, in that gigantic parody called genius, the spirit of the englishman in repose. 'this spirit is the idle embodiment of all of us; by his weakness we shall fail, and by his enormous sanities we shall endure.' this is the crux of the matter which chesterton brings out, that the weaknesses of thackeray are his strength. he loved liberty, not because it meant restraint from law, but because he 'was a novelist'; he was open to all the influences round him, not because he had no standpoint, but because he could see merit in selection; he had an open mind, but knew when to shut it. * * * * * the passages selected from the various works have been chosen with care. it was evidently by no means an easy task. the passage chosen to show colonel newcome in the 'cave of harmony' gives in one poignant incident his character; the selection from 'pendennis' does much the same. in the passage from 'esmond' the story of the duel is a fine selection; the chapter on 'some country snobs' is an apt choosing; the celebrated 'essay on george iv' demonstrates thackeray in a very different mood. the 'fall of becky sharp,' taken from 'vanity fair,' has not been included without forethought. of thackeray's poems, chesterton has included the most significant, and not without due 'the cane-bottomed chair' finds a prominent place. enough has been said to show that chesterton is not a critic of thackeray who has no discrimination in choosing from his works. he knows what thackeray was, wherein lay his strength and weakness. he has added a worthy companion to his fuller works on browning and dickens. _chapter four_ browning it will be convenient for our purpose to adhere as closely as possible to the order of chesterton's book. it is a hard task to do justice to browning even in a long book; the task is not simplified when, in a chapter, it is hoped to give a criticism of an intricate criticism of browning. there are two ways to approach such a task: the first is to take the book as a whole and write a review of it, which is a method liable to a superficiality; the second is to take such a work chapter by chapter, and to piece the various criticisms into an ordered whole. this i have attempted to do. i make no attempt to criticize the method of chesterton's approach to browning, or his combination of the effect of his life on his work; rather i wish to take what the critic says and comment on his remarks. there is undoubtedly a fundamental difference between browning and dickens which is at once clear to any critic of these two writers. dickens was, as i have said in an earlier chapter, born at the psychological moment. browning happened to be born early in the nineteenth century. i cannot see that it would have mattered had he been born at the beginning of the twentieth. his early life, unlike dickens, was normal, but it did not affect browning adversely. had dickens' life been uneventful, i think it not improbable that his literary output would have been commonplace instead of, as nearly as possible, divine. there is no particular account of browning's family, which was probably a typical middle-class family, which is to say that they were, like many thousands of their kind, lovers of the normal--a very good reason why later browning should have acquired a love for the grotesque, which many people quite wrongly define as the abnormal. the grotesque is a queer psychological state of mind; the abnormal is an extreme kind of individualism that is probably insane, provided the opposite is sane. what is important, as chesterton feels, is that we shall get some account of browning's home. it is in the home that we can usually detect the embryo of future activity. the germ, although sometimes hidden, is nevertheless there, which is exactly why the commonplace home life of a genius, before the public has discovered the fact, is interesting. to quote our critic: 'browning was a thoroughly typical englishman of the middle class,' and he remained so through his life. but this middle-class englishman walking through the streets of camberwell, as the boys played in the gutters, was browning, not then the master poet of the victorian era, but the young man who could 'pass a bookstall and find no thrill in beholding on a placard the name of shelley.' browning found his early life in an age 'of inspired office boys,' an age that emerged from the shadow of the french revolution, that extreme method of optimism which chesterton believes no englishman can understand, not even carlyle himself. it was an optimism that was so, because it held that man was worthy of liberty, which is to say that no man is by his nature ever meant to be a slave. while browning was living his daily life in camberwell, dickens was existing in the blacking factory; yet again it was an age of the beginning of intellectual giants. the chestertonian standpoint with regard to the early days of browning is interesting. it is a ready acknowledgment of the poetic instinct that was being slowly but surely nurtured in the heart of the unknown young man of camberwell. it is in this early period of his life that browning attempts what chesterton rightly describes as the most difficult of literary propositions, that of writing a good political play. this browning essayed to do, and wrote 'strafford,' a play that dealt with that most controversial part of history, the time when kings could be executed in whitehall under the shadow of their own parliament. for our critic, strafford was one of the greatest men ever born with the sacred name of england on his brow. the play was not a gigantic success, it was not a failure; it was, as was to be expected, popular with a limited public, which is very often one of the surest criterions of merit in a book or play. the success of the play was sufficient to assure the public that browning had brains and, what was more unusual, could put them to a good advantage. browning became then 'a detached and eccentric personality who had arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of him at this time.' in 1840 our critic tells us 'sordello' was published. it was a poem that caused people to wonder whether it was really deep, or merely pure nonsense, a distinction some people cannot ever discover in regard to browning. of this poem, its unique reception by the literary world lies in the fact 'that it was fashionable to boast of not understanding,' which, as i have said, was an indication that it might be termed extremely clever or extremely stupid. it was not a poem, as has been held by some critics, that was a piece of intellectual vanity. browning was far too great a man to stoop down to such mere banal conceit. the poem was a very different thing. it was a creature created by the obscurity of browning's mind, which, as chesterton thinks, was the natural reaction for a genius, born in a villa street in south london. what is the explanation of this poem? what is its meaning? wherein lies its soul? these are questions every lover of browning has constantly to ask. our critic supplies an answer, an answer that is original, and is, i think, true--the poem is an epic on 'the horror of great darkness,' that darkness that strangely enough seems to attack the young more frequently than the old. that which is levelled against browning, his obscurity, is a very bulwark protecting a subtle and clear mind. this is specially so with a poet who probably of all men so lives in his own poetic world that he forgets his ideas, though clear to himself, are vague to the world occupied with conventionalities. the real difficulty of 'sordello' lies in the fact that it is written about an obscure piece of italian history of which browning happened to have knowledge--the struggles of mediã¦val italy. this obscurity is not studied, as in the case of academic distinction; it is natural. the obscurity of many of the passages of st. john's gospel is natural because the mind of st. john dwelt on the 'depths,' as did browning's dwell on the grotesque. the result is the same. each needs an interpreter, each has an abundance of the richest philosophy, each has an imprint of the finger of god. with all the controversy it has caused, 'sordello' has had no great influence on browningites; its name has passed into almost contempt. chesterton has done much to give the true meaning of this strange work. with his next poem browning spoke with a voice that, as our critic says, proved that he had found that he was not robinson crusoe, which is to say that he had found that the world contained a great number of people. despite the 1,500 millions amongst whom we 'live and move and have our being' we are apt to think that we alone are important, which is not conceit but a mere proposition demonstrating that man is a universe in himself while being but an infinitesimal part of the universe. 'pippa passes' is a poem which expresses a love of humanity; it is an epic of unconscious influence which, no doubt, browning felt was the key to all that is best and noble in human activity. 'the whole idea of the poem lies in the fact that "pippa passes" is utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and transforms.' browning's poetry in the poetical sense was now nearing its zenith. the 'dramatic lyrics' were published in 1842, possibly about the time that dickens was returning from his triumphant american tour. these showed, chesterton thinks, the two qualities most often denied to browning, passion and beauty. they are the contradiction to critics, other than ours, who regard browning as wholly a philosophic poet, which is to say a poet who wrote poetry not for its own sake but for purely utilitarian purpose; not that poetry of the emotions is not useful--it is on a different plane. the poems were those that 'represent the arrival of the real browning of literary history'; for in these he discovered what was, for chesterton, browning's finest achievement, his dramatic lyrical poems. critics have said that browning's poetry lacks passion and the most poignant emotion of human nature, love. chesterton, on the other hand, considers that browning was the finest love poet of the world. it is real love poetry, because it talks about real people, not ideals; it does not muse of the prince charming meeting the fairy princess, and forget the devoted wife meeting her husband on the villa doorstep with open arms and a nice dinner in the parlour. sentiment must be based on reality if it is to have worth. this is the strong point, for our critic, of browning's love poetry. the next work of importance that came from browning's pen was the 'return of the druses,' which shows browning's interest in the strange religions of the east, that queer phantastic part of the world that gave birth to a western religion which has transformed the west, leaving the east to gaze afar off. this poem is, for chesterton, a psychological one. it is an attempt to give an account of a human being; perhaps the most difficult task in the world, because it can never hope to solve all sides of the question. the central character of this splendid poem is one 'djubal,' a queer mixture of the virtues of the deity with the vices of humanity. he is for browning the first of a series of characters on which he displays his wonderful powers of apologizing for apparently bad men. he attempted, to quote our critic, 'to seek out the sinners whom even sinners cast out,' which christ always did, and which his church does not always do. again browning turned his hand to writing plays, but he was always a 'neglected dramatist' in the sense that he had to push his plays; his plays did not push him. his next play, 'a blot on the "scutcheon,"' is chiefly interesting, as it was the occasion of a quarrel between its author and that most eccentric of theatrical personalities, macready. the quarrel was, our critic points out, a matter of money. but browning failed to see this; he was a man of the world in his poems, but not in his life. it is interesting here to see what our critic says of browning about this period before we consider the question of his marriage. 'there were people who called browning a snob. he was fond of wealth and fond of society; he admired them as the child who comes in from the desert. he bore the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the pharisee--something frightfully close and similar and yet an everlasting opposite.' it has been left for chesterton to give the truest definition of a pharisee that has yet been penned, because it is exactly what every man feels but has never expressed in so brilliant a paradox. * * * * * that browning had faults chesterton would be the last to deny. faults are as much a part of a great man as virtues. the more pronounced the fault, the more exquisite is the virtue, especially in a man of the character of browning, a character that had a certain 'uncontrollable brutality of speech,' together with a profound and unaffected respect for other people. chesterton's chapter on browning and his marriage is one of the most homely chapters of the book; it gives the lie to those critics who have glibly said that he has no way in which to reach our hearts or cause a lump in our throats. the very method of describing how a great man wooed a great woman, how the two loved, married, and disagreed upon certain matters, is one that has an essential appeal to the heart. the exquisite description of the effect of the death of his wife on browning is pathetic by its very simplicity. it is enough to say that browning's marriage was a successful one, which is not to say that it was entirely free from certain disagreements. the domestic relations of great writers and poets have not always been of the rosiest. swift did not make an ideal marriage--at least, not on conventional lines. milton had a wife who utterly misunderstood that her husband was a genius. dickens was not blessed with matrimonial bliss. shelley found faith in one woman hard. but browning and his wife had no disagreements on their life interests. they were both poets, though of a different calibre. what they really did not see eye to eye upon was something which the human race is still much divided about. this great point of difference was with regard to spiritualism. browning did not dislike spiritualism; he disliked spiritualists. the difference is tremendous. unfortunately many of the interpreters of spiritualism have degraded it into a kind of blatant necromancy which is in no way dignified or useful. it is entirely opposed to proper psychic research. miss barrett had been an invalid. therefore browning feared that spiritualism might have a really bad effect on his wife. 'he was sensible to put a stop to it.' the theory, on the other hand, held by other critics of browning than chesterton was that his dislike of spiritualism was fostered by a direct disbelief in immortality, which is as absurd a statement as is possible to make. spiritualism and immortality have no necessary connection whatever, though to a certain extent spiritualism is presumed on the belief in a future life. but this, as chesterton points out, was not the reason for browning's position; it was entirely that browning thought 'if he had not interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might have ended in a lunatic asylum.' as browning spent so much of his life in italy it will be well to see what our critic considers he thought of that country under the blue skies jutting on to the blue seas of the mediterranean. 'italy,' says chesterton, 'to browning and his wife, was not by any means merely that sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many of those cultured englishmen who live in italy and despise it. to them it was a living nation, the type and centre of the religion and politics of a continent, the ancient and flaming heart of western history, the very europe of europe.' browning's life in italy was more or less uneventful. it consisted of a conventional method--the meeting of famous englishmen visiting italy, the writing of numerous poems, the pleasant domestic life of a literary genius and his wife. there was only one thing that could break it, and it came in 1861. mrs. browning died. 'alone in the room with browning. he, closing the door of that room behind him, closed a door in himself, and none ever saw browning upon earth again but only a splendid surface.' * * * * * during his wife's life browning had planned his great work, that of the 'ring and the book.' in the meantime came the death of his wife, and browning moved on the earth alone. of this period of his life, shortly after the death of mrs. browning, chesterton gives us a clear picture. 'browning liked social life, he liked the excitement of the dinner, the exchange of opinions, the pleasant hospitality that is so much a part of our life. he was a good talker because he had something to say.' one of his chief faults, according to our critic, was prejudice. prejudice is probably an unconscious obeying of instinct; it may even be a warning. yet it can be and often is entirely unreasonable. browning's prejudice was, chesterton thinks, the type that hated a thing it knew nothing about, a state of mind that is comparatively harmless. what is dangerous is disliking a thing when we know what it is. the prejudice of browning was synonymous with his profound contempt for certain things of which he can only speak 'in pothouse words.' about this period browning produced 'prince hohenstiel-schwangu, saviour of society.' this is 'one of the most picturesque of browning's apologetic monologues.' it is browning's courageous attempt to allow napoleon iii to speak for himself. yet again browning 'took in those sinners whom even sinners cast out.' two years later, we are told, browning produced one of his most characteristic works, 'night-cap country.' it is an elegant poem of the sicklier side of the french revolution and the more sensual side of the french temperament. this is the period in browning's life when he produced his most characteristic work. it was that time when he was nearly middle aged, when the lamp of youth was just flickering, and when the lamp of old age was about to be lighted. chesterton treats the whole of this period with a calm straightforwardness that we are not accustomed to in his writings. there is no doubt, i think, of all our critic's books, that his work on browning is the least chestertonian, which is not in any way to disparage it, but rather to state that the book might have been written by any biographer who knew browning's works and had the sense to see that his characteristics were such that many of his critics were unfair to him. chesterton will never allow for an instant that browning suffered from anything but an evident 'naturalness,' which expressed itself in a rugged style, concealing charity in an original grotesqueness of manner. it is now convenient to turn to browning's greatest work, 'the ring and the book,' and see what chesterton has to say about it. rumour is really distorted truth, or rather very often originates from a different standpoint being taken of the same thing. thus a man may say that another man is a good fellow but borrows money too often; another may say of the same man he is a good fellow but talks too much; a third that he is a good fellow but would be better without a moustache. the essential man is the same, but his three critics make really a different person, or, at least, each sees him from a different angle. as chesterton so finely points out, the conception of 'the ring and the book' is the studying of a single matter from nine different standpoints. in successive monologues browning is endeavouring to depict the various strange ways a fact gets itself presented to the world. further, the work indicates the extraordinary lack of logic used by those who would be ashamed to be denied the name of dialectician. probably, thinks chesterton, very many people do harm in their cause, not by want of propaganda, but by the fallaciousness of their arguments for it. there have been critics who have denied to this work the right of immortality. chesterton is not one of these; rather he contends such a criticism is a gross misunderstanding of the work. for our critic the greatness of this poem is the very point upon which it is attacked, that of environment. for once and all browning has demonstrated that there are riches and depths in small things that are often denied to what we think is greater. 'it is an epic round a sordid police court case.' 'the essence of "the ring and the book" is that it is the great epic of the nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the importance of small things.' browning says, 'i will show you the relation of man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty italian book of criminal trials, from which i select one of the meanest and most completely forgotten.' it is then that chesterton sees that this poem is more than a mere poem; it is a natural acknowledgment of the monarchy of small things, the same idea that made dickens believe that common men could be kings--that is, in the same category as the divine care of the hairs of the head. it gives the lie to the rather popular fallacy that events are important by their size. it is once more a position that the stone on the hillside is as mighty as the mountain of which it is only a small part. again, 'the ring and the book' is an embodiment of the spiritual in the material, the good that can be contained in a sordid story; it is the typical epic of our age, 'because it expresses the richness of life by taking as a text a poor story. it pays to existence the highest of all possible compliments, the great compliment of selecting from it almost at random.' there is a second respect, he feels, which makes this poem the epic of the age. it is that every man has a point of view. and, what is more, every man probably has a different point of view at least in something. 'the ring and the book,' to sum up briefly why chesterton thinks so highly of it, is an epic; it is a national expression of a characteristic love of small things, the germination of great truths; it pays a compliment to humanity by asserting the value of every opinion, it demonstrates that even in so sordid a thing as a police court there is a spiritual spark; in a word, it is an attempt to see god, not on the hill-tops or in the valleys, but in the back streets teeming with common men. it is now time to turn to two qualities of browning that are full of the deepest interest, and which are dealt with by chesterton with the greatest skill and judgment. these two qualities may be described as browning as a literary artist and browning as a philosopher. for our purpose it will be useful to take browning as a literary artist first and see what was his position. philosophy is usually in the nature of a summing up. the philosophy of a poet is best looked at when the poet has been studied; therefore it is best to follow chesterton's order and take browning's philosophical position at the end of this chapter. he feels that in some ways the critics want browning to be poet and logician, and are rather cross when he is either. they want him to be a poet and are annoyed that he is a logician; they want him to be a logician and are annoyed that he is a poet. the fact of the matter is he was probably a poet! chesterton is convinced that browning was a literary artist--that is to say, he was a symbolist. the wealth of browning's poetry depends on arrangement of language. it is so with all great literature: it is not so much what is said as how it is said, in what way the sentences are formed so that the climax comes in the right place. for all practical purposes browning was, our critic thinks, a deliberate artist. the suggestion that browning cared nothing for form is for chesterton a monstrous assertion. it is as absurd as saying that napoleon cared nothing for feminine love or that nero hated mushrooms. what browning did was always to fall into a different kind of form, which is a totally different thing to saying he disregarded it. there is rather an assumption among a certain class of critics that the artistic form is a quality that is finite. as a matter of fact, it is infinite; it cannot be bound up with any particular mode of expression; it is elastic, and so elastic that certain critics cannot adjust their minds to such lucidity. there is, our critic feels, another suggestion--that if browning had a form, it was a bad one. this really does not matter very much. whether form in an artistic sense is good or bad can only be determined by setting up a criterion; this is not possible in the case of browning, because, though he has many forms, they are original ones, which render them impervious to values of good and bad. chesterton is naturally aware that browning wrote a great deal of bad poetry--every poet does. the way to take with browning's bad poetry is not to condemn him for it, but to say quite frankly this poem or that poem was a failure. it is by his masterpieces that browning must be judged. perhaps, as he points out, the peculiar characteristic of browning's art lay in his use of the grotesque, which, as i said at the beginning of this chapter, is a totally different thing from the abnormal. in other words, browning was rugged. it was as natural for him to be rugged as for ruskin to be polished, for swift to be cynical (in an optimistic sense), for chesterton to be paradoxical. ruggedness is a form of beauty, but it is a beauty that is quite different from the commonly accepted grounds. a mountain is rugged and it is beautiful, a woman is beautiful; but the two features of the aesthetic are quite different. it is the same with poetry. there is (and browning proved it) a 'beautifulness' in the rugged; it is a sense of being 'beautifully' rugged. enough has been said to make it quite clear that browning was a literary artist; but, as chesterton contends, an original one. he did not confine himself to any one form: his beauty lay in the placing of the 'rugged' before his readers, the method he used of employing the grotesque. * * * * * it is now an excellent time in which to look at browning's philosophy and chesterton's interpretation of it. as it is perfectly true to say that every man has a point of view, a position so admirably brought out by browning in his 'ring and the book,' so it is also, i think, a truism that every man has (not always consciously) a philosophy. a philosophy is, after all, a point of view; it is not necessarily an abstract academic position; nor is it always a well-defined attempt to discover the ultimate purpose of things. it can be, and very often is, a point of view really acquired by experience. naturally a man of the intellect of browning would have a philosophy, and he had, as our critic points out, a very definite one. in his quaint way chesterton tells us 'browning had opinions as he had a dress suit or a vote for parliament.' and he had no hesitation in expressing these opinions. there was no reason why he should; at least part of his philosophy, as i have indicated, lay in his knowledge of the value of men's opinions--yet again brought out in 'the ring and the book.' he had, so we are told, two great theories of the universe: the first, the hope that lies in man, imperfect as he is; the second, a bold position that has offended many people but is nevertheless at least a reasonable one, that god is in some way imperfect; that is, in some obscure way he could be made jealous. this is, no doubt, a highly unorthodox position. yet it is a position that thousands have felt does make it plainer (as it did to browning)--the necessity of the crucifixion; it was a pandering to divine jealousy. these are, as chesterton admits, great thoughts, and, as such, are liable to be disliked by those christians and others who will not think and dislike any one else doing so. this strange theological position of browning is, i think, indicated in 'saul.' chesterton usually does not agree with the other critics about most things, but he does at least agree in regard to the fact that browning was an optimist. his theory of the use of men, though imperfect, is as good an argument for optimism as could well be found. browning's optimism was, as our critic says, founded on experience, it was not a mere theory that had nothing practical behind it. as i have said, browning disliked spiritualists; but that is not, our critic thinks, the reason he wrote 'sludge the medium.' what this poem showed was that spiritualism could be of use in spite of insincere mediums. it was in no way an attack on the tenets of spiritualism. the understanding of this poem gives the key to other poems of browning's, as 'bishop blougram's apology,' and some of the monologues in 'the ring and the book'; which is, that 'a man cannot help telling some truth, even when he sets out to tell lies.' this may be the right interpretation of these poems, but i think browning really meant that there is an end somewhere to lying; in other words, lying is negative and temporary; truth is positive and eternal. the summing up of browning's knaves cannot be better expressed than by chesterton. 'they are real somewhere. we are talking to a garrulous and peevish sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, his evasive eyes and babbling lips. and suddenly the face begins to change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes forth is the voice of god uttering his everlasting soliloquy.' it is the essence of browning; it is the certainty that however far distant there is the face of god behind the human features. * * * * * if there is one characteristic about this study of browning it lies in the fact that it is a very clear exposition of a remarkable poet. a man might take up the book knowing browning only as a name; he might well lay it down knowing what browning was, what he achieved, what his essence was. the book is a masterly study--it lays claim to our sympathies; and never more so than when our critic describes that moment when browning, alone in the room, saw his wife die. _chapter five_ chesterton as historian the reason that chesterton has written a history of england is that he says no member of the public has ever done so before. this is a thing to be supremely thankful for if true; but it is entirely untrue, for the very obvious fact that history has never been written by any one who is not a member of the public. every historian is a member of the public. let him imagine he is not, let him carry this imagination out to a logical conclusion, and he will have a good chance of landing in a prison for failing to pay the king's taxes. the very best people to write histories are historians, but they will never deal with history in a popular way. this chesterton laments. he wants a history that shall be about the things that never ordinarily get into history. if he is told about the charters of the barons, he wishes to hear of the charters of the carpenters. this, he thinks, would make history popular, that word which is always used to denote something rather slight and superficial. he exclaims that the people are ignored, whereas the historian really would not be one at all if he was guilty of this charge. the fact of the matter is, that the whole of the history of england has been so misunderstood that chesterton has come to the rescue and has told us what really happened--in fact, all we learnt at school was waste of time; poor green really wrote an anti-history of this country. the romans are not of the remote past; the whole of present-day england is the remains of rome, which is merely to say that our civilization comes down from rome, a statement that quite able historians have hinted at now and again. no one for an instant is so foolish as to think that the chief remains of the romans consist of the few broken-up baths and villas up and down the country, when a splendid high road stares them in the face. * * * * * chesterton pays enormous attention to the middle ages. they have, he thinks, been rather badly dealt with by historians. too much attention is, he contends, paid to the time of the stuarts onwards. chesterton asks us to contemplate history as we should if we had never learnt it at school. it is, of course, true that we do not learn the essentials of our country in our schooldays. it is of no real importance that william conquered harold in 1066, but it is of vast importance to know how he behaved as a conqueror, a fact seldom taught. but if we forgot all the history we ever knew, we should not be able to appreciate chesterton's history, which aims to reconstruct all that we had believed while pouring over green in the fifth form. chesterton covers so much ground in this book, his treatment is so intricate, his method so full of various peculiar contentions, that the only possible method in a chapter is to take some of the more important points he touches upon and try and discover what he feels about them. it will be well to realize at once that however he may differ from recognized historians, his history loses all its meaning unless the standard historians are known fairly well. * * * * * there are probably two tremendous turning points in history--the one occurred at the moment that the fatal arrow entered the eye of harold at senlac, the other when henry viii set fire to the ecclesiastical faggots that ended in the reformation. that period which lay between them may roughly be called the middle ages, which part of history chesterton thinks has been badly treated. whether this is so is a question that opens up a broader one: has the history of england ever received the attention it deserves? has right proportion been given to the most important events? should history be made popular in the modern sense of this much misinterpreted word? these are questions to which no adequate answer can be given in the space of a chapter, nor is it within the scope of this book. chesterton is very annoyed to find that to possess norman blood is, to many people, a hall mark of aristocracy: 'this fashionable fancy misses what is best in the normans.' what he contends, and i think rightly, is that william was a conqueror until he had conquered. then england passed out of his hands. he had wished it to be an autocracy; instead, it developed into a monarchy--'william the conqueror became william the conquered.' this is a line that the ordinary historians do not appear to take, though i fancy they imply it when they say that feudalism didn't exist in the time of the georges. perhaps one of the most picturesque parts of history is that time when men looked across the sea and saw in the far distance a huge cross that seemed to beckon as the voices later called to joan of arc. the crusades were a time when wars were holy because they were waged for a holy thing. six hundred years, so chesterton tells us, had elapsed since christianity had arisen and covered the world like a dust-storm, when there arose 'a copy and a contrary: the creed of the moslems'; in a sense islam was 'like a christian heresy.' historians, so he thinks, have not understood the crusades. they have taken them to be aristocratic expeditions with a cross as the prey instead of a deer, whereas really they were 'unanimous risings.' 'the holy land was much nearer to a plain man's house than westminster, and immeasurably nearer than runnymede.' but i am not sure that chesterton has scored over the orthodox historians who made a good deal out of the fact that crusade had a close affinity to _crux_, which word meant a cross that was not necessarily bound up with calvary. in dealing with the middle ages, he propounds the proposition that the best way to understand history is to read it backwards--that is, if we are to understand the magna charta we must be on speaking terms with mary. 'if we really want to know what was strongest in the twelfth century, it is no bad way to ask what remained of it in the fourteenth.' this is a very excellent method, as it demonstrates what were the historical events and what were the mere local and temporary. becket was one of those queer people of history who was half a priest and half a statesman, and he had to deal with a king who was half a king and half a tyrant. every schoolboy knows about becket, and delights to read of the wild ride to canterbury, which began with the spilling of becket's brains and ended with the spilling of the king's blood by his tomb. for chesterton, becket 'may have been too idealistic: he wished to protect the church as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules might seem to him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to the king as capricious as those of fairyland.' the tremendously suggestive thing of the whole story of becket is that henry ii submitted to being thrashed at becket's tomb. it was like 'cecil rhodes submitting to be horsewhipped by a boer as an apology for some indefensible death incidental to the jameson raid.' undoubtedly chesterton has got at the kernel of the story that made an archbishop a saint (a rare occurrence) and an english king a sportsman (a rarer occurrence). but clever as chesterton is in regard to this particular story, the ordinary schoolboy would do better to stick to the common tale of becket that came on the hasty words spoken by a hasty king; he will better understand the significance of the whipping of the king when he can read history back to the days when kings could not only not be whipped, but could whip whom they chose, and put men's eyes out when they used them to shoot at the king's deer. a great part of the middle ages is concerned with the french wars, those wars that staggered the english exchequer and made the english kings leaders of armies. the reason of these wars was, chesterton tells us, the fact that christianity was a very local thing. it was more--it was a national thing that was bound up with england. 'men began to feel that foreigners did not eat or drink like christians,' which is to say that the englishman began his contempt for the foreigner which has resulted in nearly all our wars, and has made the englishman abroad a supercilious creature, and has made the english schoolboy put his tongue out at the french master. the french wars were something more than a national hatred, they were a national dislike of foreigners, a dislike that had its probable origin in the tower of babel. but this was not the only reason of the incessant french wars--there was a question of policy. france began to be a nation, and 'a true patriotic applause hailed the later victory of agincourt.' france had become something more than a nation; it had become a religion, because it had as its figure a simple girl who believed in voices, and took her part in the struggles of a defeated country. chesterton's chapter is a fine understanding of the french wars; it is an amplification of the mere skeletons of ordinary history, and as such is very valuable. from being a reasonable national dislike, the french wars 'gradually grew to be almost as much a scourge to england as they were to france.' 'england was despoiled by her own victories; luxury and poverty increased at the extremes of society, and the balance of the better mediã¦valism was lost.' it resulted in the revolt connected with wat tyler, a revolt that 'was not only dramatic but was domestic'; it ended in the death of tyler and the intervention of the boy king, who, in swaying the multitude that was a dangerous mob, 'gives us a fleeting and final glimpse of the crowned sacramental man of the middle ages.' from this period chesterton tells us that a rather strange thing happened--men began to fight for the crown. the wars of the roses was the result. the english rose was then the symbol of party, as ever since it has been the symbol of an english summer. chesterton makes no attempt to follow the difficult path that the wars of the roses travel, from the military standpoint, nor the adventures that followed the king-maker warwick and the warlike widow of henry v, one margaret. there was, so he says, a moral difference in this conflict that took the name of a rose to fight for a crown. 'lancaster stood, as a whole, for the new notion of a king propped by parliaments and powerful bishops; and york, on the whole, for the remains of the older idea of a king who permits nothing to come between him and his people. this is everything of permanent political interest that could be traced by counting all the bows of barnet or all the lances of tewkesbury.' the time when the middle ages was drawing near to the tudors is interesting, because of the riddle of richard iii. chesterton's description of this strange king is full of fascination if also it is full of truth: 'he was not an ogre shedding rivers of blood, yet a crimson cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory. whether or not he was a good man, he was apparently a good king, and even a popular one. he anticipated the renaissance in an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music, and he seems to have held to the old paths of religion and charity.' he was indeed, as chesterton says, the last of the mediã¦val kings, and he died hard; his blood flowed over an england that did not know what loyalty was, a country that had nobles who would fly from their king on the first sign of danger; the last post of the old kings was sounding, and richard answered its challenge. his description of this remarkable king is perhaps the best thing in the book, and is certainly far better than the ordinary history that attempts to give the character of a king in a couple of lines. with the end of the mediã¦val kings we pass to a period that is none other than the renaissance, one of the most important epochs in english history, 'that great dawn of a more rational daylight which for so many made mediã¦valism seem a mere darkness.' the character of henry viii is one that is a veritable battleground. he is attacked because he found a variety of wives pleasing; he is condoned as a young man who promised to be a great king. there are, as chesterton points out, two great things that intruded into his reign: the one was the difficulty of his marriages, the other was the question of the monasteries. if henry was a bluebeard, he was such because his wives were not a fortunate selection. 'he was almost as unlucky in his wives as they were in their husband.' but the one thing that chesterton feels broke henry's honour was the question of his divorce. in doing this he mistook the friendship of the pope for something that would make him go against the position of the church. 'henry sought to lean upon the cushions of leo and found he had struck his arm upon the rock of peter. the result was that henry finished with the papacy in the pious hope that it had done with him; henry became head of the church that was national, and soon wolsey fell, to die in a monastery at leicester. but this terrible king 'struck down the noblest of the humanists, thomas more, who died the death of a saint, gloriously jesting.' the question of the monasteries is one that is solved by the simple statement that the king wanted money and the monasteries supplied it. is there any justification for the crimes of henry? for chesterton 'it is unpractical to discuss whether froude finds any justification for henry's crimes in the desire to create a strong national monarchy. for whether or not it was desired, it was not created.' chesterton in an original way has given a very clear account of the difficulties of the reign of henry viii, a reign that had perhaps more influence on english history than any other, a reign that showed what the licence of an english monarchy could do and, what is of more importance, what it could not, a reign that showed that the fall of a great man could be so precipitate that the significance of it could not be felt at the time, a reign that showed that the pope was something more than the friend of the english throne--he was in matters of church discipline its checkmate. this was the time that england trembled at the devilry of a king and rejoiced at the sun of a new learning that was slowly dispelling the fog of the dark ages. * * * * * it is usually assumed that mary was a bad woman because she burned people who were so unwise as not to be at least officially catholics. historians have applied the word 'bloody' to her, whereas the better word would be fanatic. 'her enemies were wrong about her character,' says chesterton. 'she was in a limited sense a good woman.' if chesterton means she was a good catholic he is right, if the burning of heretics is a good thing for a christian church. but the fortunate part of the whole affair was that not even burning could restore the power of the papacy in england in mary's time any more than the arrogance of the roman catholics to-day can restore the pope to london and unfrock the archbishop of canterbury. mary was a sincere fanatic, and like most fanatics was an extremely ignorant woman; consequently she could not see that the fire that burnt cranmer also burnt the last hope of england bowing to the pope of rome. i cannot feel that chesterton has in the least vindicated the character of mary. historians are apt to think that the days of queen elizabeth were those in which england first realized that she was great. on the other hand, chesterton is convinced that it is in this period that 'she first realized that she was small.' the business of the armada was to her what bannockburn was to the scots, or majuba to the boers--a victory that astonished the victors. the fact of the matter was that spain realized after the battle that the victory does not always go to the big battalions, which the present kaiser is no doubt writing in his 'imperial' copybook to-day. the 'magnificance of the elizabethan times has traces in mediã¦val times and far fewer traces in modern times.' 'her critics indeed might reasonably say that in replacing the virgin mary by the virgin queen, the english reformers merely exchanged a true virgin for a false one.' if elizabeth was crafty it was because it was good she should be so. if she had not been so, the history of england might have found philip of spain on the english throne and mary queen of scots a worse menace in england, a menace that by the skill of elizabeth developed into a headless corpse. had elizabeth had a different historical background, she might have been a different queen; but, as it was, she dealt with it as only a genius could who had followed a maniacal queen who failed in everything she did. from the times of elizabeth, chesterton moves on to the age of the puritans, those rather dull people who have always been the byword for those who are more popularly known as prigs. 'the puritans were primarily enthusiastic for what they thought was pure religion. their great and fundamental idea was that the mind of man can alone directly deal with the mind of god. consequently they were anti-sacramental.' not only in ecclesiastical matters, they were in doctrine calvinistic--that is, they believed 'that men were created to be lost and saved,' a theological position that makes god a person who wastes a lot of valuable time. it was to a large extent this belief in calvin that made the puritans dislike a sacramental principle; it was, of course, quite unnecessary to have one. if a man was either lost or saved, the need of any human meditators was not felt. it is, of course, true, as chesterton says, that 'england was never puritan.' neither was it ever entirely catholic, neither has it ever been entirely protestant. it is one of the things to be thankful for that men have ever held different religious opinions. it would be the greatest mistake if ever the church was so misguided as to listen to the cries that come for unity, a unity that could only be founded on the subordinating of the opinions of the many to the opinion of the few. i have said at the beginning of this chapter that chesterton has said that the middle ages have not had the historical attention they deserve. whether this is so is a question that cannot be answered here. what we have to say is whether this book is a valuable one. there are, of course, many opinions expressed in it that do not take the usual historical standpoint, or they have a more original way of expression. i cannot feel that this book is the best of chesterton's works, not because it has not some very sound opinions expressed in it, but rather because to understand its import the ordinary histories must be well known. it is perhaps a matter of an unsuitable title, 'a short history of england.' it would have been better to have called it a 'history of the histories of england, and the mistakes therein.' it would be no use as an historical book in the school sense, but as an original book on some of the turning-points of english history it is valuable. mr. chesterton tells us to read history backwards to understand it. this we may well do if we have read it as fully forward as he evidently has. _chapter six_ the poet amongst the many outstanding qualities of chesterton there is one that is pre-eminent--his extraordinary versatility. it cannot be said that this quality is always an advantage; a too ready versatility is not always synonymous with valuable work; especially is this so in literary matters. there are quite a number of writers who, without success, attempt to be a little of everything. this is not the case with chesterton; if he is better as an essayist than as a historian, he is at least good as the latter; if he is better at paradox than at concise statements, he can be, if he chooses, quite free from paradox; if he excels in satire of a light nature, he can also be the most serious of critics if the subject needs such treatment. it has often been said that a good prose writer seldom makes a good poet. this may be to a certain extent a truism; the opposite is more often the case; that a good poet is quite often a poor producer of prose. there is a good reason for this: the mind of a poet is probably of a different calibre to that of a prose writer; a poet must have a poetical outlook on life and nature; the tree to him is something more than a tree, it is probably a symbol, but to a prose writer more often than not a tree is merely a mass of bark and leaves that adorns the landscape. chesterton has written a great many poems, all of which can claim to be poetical in the true sense, but he has only written one really important poetical work. it is a ballad that is important for two things; firstly, it is about a very english thing; secondly, the style of the writing is nothing short of delightful, a statement that is not true of all good poetry. it has been said that chesterton might well be the poet laureate; at least, it is a matter for extreme joy that he is not, not because he is not worth that honour, but because anything that tended to reduce his poetical output would be a serious thing in these days when good poets are as scarce as really good novelists. the poem that has established chesterton for all time as a poet is the one he has called with true poetical genius 'the ballad of the white horse.' there have been many white horses, but there is the white horse, and he lies alone on the side of a hill down wiltshire way, where he has watched with a mournful gaze the centuries pass away as the horizon passes away in a liquid blue. the white horse stands for something that year by year we are forgetting, those quaint old english feasts that have done so much to make england merry, and have made history into a beautiful legend that bears the name of alfred. yet the white horse is falling into neglect. the author of 'tom brown's schooldays' lamented the fact that people flew past the white horse in stuffy first class carriages; were he alive now he would lament still more that english men and english women can pass the white horse without a glance up from the novel they are reading bound in a flaring yellow cover. but there is one great englishman who will never do this, and that is chesterton; rather he writes of the white horse, the lonely horse that is worthy of this splendid poem. * * * * * in connection with the vale of white horse there are three traditions--one, that alfred fought a great battle there; another, that he played a harp in the camp of the danes; a third, that alfred proved himself a very bad cook who wasted a poor woman's cake, a poor woman who would willingly have sacrificed cakes every day to have the honour of the king under her roof. it is of these three traditions that chesterton writes his poem. whether they may be historically accurate does not much matter; there is no doubt that the vale had something to do with the king of wessex, and popular tradition has made the name of alfred a national legend. when chesterton writes of the vision of the king he is no doubt writing of his own vision of the events that led up to the gathering of the chiefs. the danes had descended on england like a cloud of locusts; it was the time that needed a national champion, as time and again in the past the israelites had needed one. it is one of the strange things of history that a champion has always appeared when he was most needed. the name of the danes inspired terror; wessex was shattered- 'for earthquake following earthquake uprent the wessex tree ...' the kings of wessex were weary and disheartened: fire and pillage had laid the countryside bare with that horrible bareness that only lies in the wake of conqueror: 'there was not english armour left, nor any english thing, when alfred came to athelney to be an english king.' this was the vision that alfred had, and he gathered the disheartened chiefs to his side till, in victory, he could bear the name of king. * * * * * in the wake of national champions there have ever appeared popular tales demonstrating the human qualities of these giants; if napoleon could conquer empires, tradition has never forgotten that he once pardoned a sentry he found asleep at his post. if wellington won the battle of waterloo by military genius, so popular hearsay has urged that he commanded the guards to charge 'la grande armã©e' in cockney terms. around the almost sacred name of alfred many and various are the old wives' tales, among which the story of his harp is not the least picturesque; it is one on which chesterton expends a good deal of poetic energy. from the gist of the poem it is evident that alfred, in the course of his wanderings, came near to the white horse, but as though for very sorrow- 'the great white horse was grey.' down the hill the danes came in headlong flight and carried alfred off to their camp; his fame as a harpist had pierced the ears of the invaders: 'and hearing of his harp and skill, they dragged him to their play.' the danes might well laugh at the song of the king, but it was a laugh that was soon to be turned to weeping when the king had finished his song: 'and the king with harp on shoulder stood up and ceased his song; and the owls moaned from the mighty trees, and the danes laughed loud and long.' there is in this poem a pleasant rhythm and a clearness of meaning that is absent from much good poetry. chesterton has caught the wild romantic background of the time when the king of england could play a harp in the camp of his enemies; when he could, by a note, bring back the disheartened warriors to renew the fight; when he could be left to look after the cakes and be scolded when, like the english villages, they were burnt. one of the most popular of the legends is the one connected with alfred and the woman of the forest. it has made chesterton write some of his most charming verse. and alfred came to the door of a woman's cottage and there rested, with the promise that in return he would watch the cakes that they did not burn. but- 'the good food fell upon the ash, and blackened instantly.' the woman was naturally annoyed that this unknown tramp should let her cooking spoil: 'screaming, the woman caught a cake yet burning from the bar, and struck him suddenly on the face, leaving a scarlet scar.' the scar was on the king's brow, a scar that tens of thousands should follow to victory: 'a terrible harvest, ten by ten, as the wrath of the last red autumn--then when christ reaps down the kings.' in a preface to this poem, with regard to that part which deals with the battle of enthandune, chesterton says: 'i fancy that in fact alfred's wessex was of very mixed bloods; i have given a fictitious roman, celt, and saxon a part in the glory of enthandune.' * * * * * the battle of enthandune is divided into three parts. the poetry is specially noticeable for the great harmony of the words with the subject of the lines; it is one of the great characteristics of chesterton's poetry that he uses language that intimately expresses what he wants to describe. he can, in a few lines, describe the discipline of an army: 'and when they came to the open land they wheeled, deployed, and stood.' it is perfect poetry concerning the machine-like movements of highly-trained troops. the death of an earl that occurs in a moment of battle: we can almost see the blow, the quick change on the face from life to death; we can almost hear the death gurgle: 'earl harold, as in pain, strove for a smile, put hand to head, stumbled and suddenly fell dead, and the small white daisies all waxed red with blood out of his brain.' of the tremendous power of a charge, chesterton can give us the meaning in two lines that might otherwise take a page of prose: 'spears at the charge!' yelled mark amain, 'death to the gods of death.' whether it be to victory or defeat, the last charge grips the imagination, just as the latest words of a great man are remembered long after he has turned to dust. the final charge of the old guard, the remnant of napoleon's ill-fated army at waterloo, the dying words of nelson, these are the things that produce great poetry. some of the verses describing the last charge at enthandune are the finest lines chesterton has so far written. it will not be out of place to quote one or two of the best--the challenge of alfred to his followers to make an effort against the dreaded danes, at whose very name strong men would pale: 'brothers-at-arms,' said alfred, 'on this side lies the foe; are slavery and starvation flowers, that you should pluck them so?' or the death of the danish leader, who would have pierced alfred through and through: 'short time had shaggy ogier to pull his lance in line- he knew king alfred's axe on high, he heard it rushing through the sky; he cowered beneath it with a cry- it split him to the spine; and alfred sprang over him dead, and blew the battle sign.' the last part of the poem is that which gives an account of the scouring of the white horse, in the years of peace: 'when the good king sat at home.' but through everything the white horse remained- 'untouched except by the hand of nature: the turf crawled and the fungus crept, and the little sorrel, while all men slept, unwrought the work of man.' 'the ballad of the white horse' is in its way one of the best things chesterton has done: it is a fine poem about a very picturesque piece of english legend, which may or may not be based on history. poetry can, and very often does, fulfil a great patriotic mission in arousing interest in those distant times when englishmen, with their backs to the wall, responded to the cry of alfred, as they did when, centuries later, the hordes of germans attempted to cut the knot of haig's army. for hundreds of years alfred has been turned to dust, but the white horse remains, a perpetual monument to the great days when england was invaded by the danes. 'the ballad of the white horse' is a ballad worthy of the immortal horse that will remain centuries after the author of the poem has passed out of mortal sight. * * * * * in an early volume of light verse chesterton wrote of the kind of games that old men with beards would delight in. 'greybeards at play' is a delightful set of satirical verses in which the ardent philosopher confers a favour on nature by being on intimate and patronising terms with her. this dear old philosopher, with grey beard and presumably long nose and large spectacles, is full of admiration for the heavenly beings: 'i love to see the little stars all dancing to one tune; i think quite highly of the sun, and kindly of the moon.' coming to earth, this same philosopher is full of friendly relations with america, for- 'the great niagara waterfall is never shy with me.' in the same volume chesterton writes of the spread of ã¦stheticism, and that the cult of the soul had a terrible effect on trade: 'the shopmen, when their souls were still, declined to open shops- and cooks recorded frames of mind in sad and subtle chops.' in a small volume of poems called 'wine, water, and song,' we have some of the poems that appear in chesterton's novels. they have a delightful air of brilliancy and satire, about dogs and grocers and that peculiar king of the jews, nebuchadnezzar, who, when he is spoken of by scholars, alters his name to nebuchadrezzar. we have but room for one quotation, and the place of honour must be given to the epic of the grocer who, like many of other trades, makes a fortune by giving short weights: 'the hell-instructed grocer has a temple made of tin, and the ruin of good innkeepers is loudly urged therein; but now the sands are running out from sugar of a sort, the grocer trembles, for his time, just like his weight, is short.' * * * * * the hymn that mr. chesterton has written, called 'o god of earth and altar,' is unfortunately so good and so entirely sensible that the clergy on the whole have not used it much; rather they prefer to sing of heaven with a golden floor and a gate of pearl, ignoring a really fine hymn that pictures god as a sensible being and not a lord chief justice either of sickly sentimentality or of the type of a judge jeffreys. it must be said that to many people who know chesterton he is first and foremost an essayist and lastly a poet. the reason is that he has written comparatively little serious poetry; this is, i think, rather a pity--not that quantity is always consistent with quality, but that in some way it may not be too much to say that chesterton is the best poet of the day; and i do not forget that he has as contemporaries alfred noyes and walter de la mare. the strong characteristic of his poetry, as i have said, is the wealth of language; to this must be added the exceedingly pleasant rhythm that runs as easily as a well-oiled bicycle. if mr. chesterton is not known to posterity as one of the leading poets of the twentieth century it will be because his prose is so well known that his poetry is rather crowded out. _chapter seven_ the playwright nearly eight years ago all literary and dramatic london focused its eyes on a theatre that was known as the little theatre. on the night of november 7th the critics might have been seen making their way along john street with just the faintest suspicion of mirth in their eyes. the reason was that the most eccentric genius of the day had written a play, and it was to be produced that night, and had the name of magic, a title that might indicate something that turned princes into wolves, or transported people on carpets to distant lands, or might be more simply a play that dealt with magic in the sense that there really was such a thing. the play was a success--i could see that it would be at the moment mr. bernard shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had not himself written. the press was charmed with the play and went so far as to say, with a gross burlesque of chesterton, that it was 'real phantasy and had soul.' chesterton by his one produced play had earned the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public shiver and think at the same time, an unusual combination. i rather fancy that magic is a theological argument, disguised in the form of a play, that relies for its effects on clever conversation, the moving of pictures, and a mysterious person who may have been a conjurer and may have also been a magician. when i say that the play is really a theological one, i do not mean to say that it has anything to do with the thirty-nine articles, the validity of the anglican orders, or even the truth of the virgin birth; rather it is about an indefinable 'something' that is so simple that it is misunderstood by every one. the play turns upon five people who are thrown together in a room that has a nasty habit of becoming ghostly at times. the five people are a doctor who is a scientist, who does not believe in anything not material being scientific; a vicar who is a typical clergyman, who thoroughly believes in supernatural things until they are proved, when he becomes an agnostic; a young american who is a cad and a fool; a girl who believes in fairies and goes to holy communion, which is the one thing that depicts she has a certain amount of sense; a duke who ends every sentence with a quotation from tennyson to bernard shaw. these five people are influenced by a pied piper kind of fellow who calls himself a conjurer, and is rather too clever for the company. apparently the conjurer has been strolling about the garden when he meets patricia, who thinks he can produce fairies. in due course the conjurer comes into the room, where he has encounters with the various occupants, who don't believe in his tricks; the conjurer is unlucky enough to meet the young american cad morris carleon, who is really quite rude to the conjurer and discovers (so he thinks) all the tricks except one in which the conjurer turns the red lamp at the doctor's gate blue. this so worries morris that he goes up to his room with a chance of going mad. the others beseech the conjurer to explain the trick; he does so, and says it is done by magic, which is the whole point of the play, that we are left to wonder whether it was by magic or by a natural phenomenon. the conjurer gets the better of the parson, the rev. cyril smith, who believes in a model public house and the old testament, and takes a good stipend for pretending to believe in the supernatural. the result of the whole matter is magic, by which we presume the trick may have been done. * * * * * the play is in some ways a difficult one: we are left wondering whether or not chesterton believes in magic; if he does, then the conjurer need not have been so upset that he had gained so much power of a psychic nature; if he does not, then the conjurer was a clever fraud or a brilliant hypnotist. one thing is quite certain, chesterton brings out the weaknesses of the dialectic of the parson and doctor in a remarkable way; he makes us realise that there are some things we really know nothing about; if lamps turn blue suddenly it may quite well be a 'something' that may be magic and might be god or satan; anyhow, it cannot be explained by an american young man; it is of the things that the clergy profess to believe in and very often do not. it is, i think, undoubtedly a problem play, and i doubt very much if chesterton knows what was the agency that did the trick, but i rather think that 'magic' is a great play, not because of the situations, but rather because the more the play is studied the more difficult is it to say exactly what is the lesson of it. magic is called a phantastic comedy; it might well be called a phantastic tragedy. _chapter eight_ the novelist there is perhaps no word in the english language which is more elastic than the word novel as applied to what is commonly known as fiction. the word novel is used to describe stories that are as far apart as the poles. thus it is used to describe a classic by thackeray or dickens, or a clever love tale by miss dell, or a brilliantly outspoken sex tale by miss elinor glyn, or a romance by miss corelli, or a tale of adventure by joseph conrad, or a very modern type of analytical novel by very modern writers who are a little bit young and a big bit old. i do not think that it is an exaggeration to say that chesterton as a novelist carries the art yet a step farther and has added elasticity to the word. it would, i think, be probably untrue to say that chesterton is a popular novelist; he is much too unlike one to be so. that he is read by a wide public is not the same thing; he has not the following of the millions that charles garvice had, for the millions who understood him might find chesterton difficult. really chesterton is read by a select number of people who would claim to be intellectual; very up-to-date clergymen rave about his catholicity, high-brow ladies of smart clubs delight in his knave whimsicalities, but the girl in the suburban train to wimbledon passes by on the other side. one of the characteristic features of chesterton's novels is his clever selection of titles that are by their very nature fit to designate his original works. if in journalism nine-tenths of the importance of an article depends upon its title, it is equally true that the title of a novel is of the same import. either a title should give some indication of the nature of the book, or it should be of the kind that makes us want to read it; this is the case with regard to the chesterton novels, their designations are so phantastic that our curiosity is aroused. thus 'the man who was thursday' gives no possible explanation of what it is about, but it does suggest that it is interesting to know about a man who was thursday; 'the flying inn' may be a forecast of prohibition or it may be a romance of the time when inns shall fly to the ends of the earth; 'the napoleon of notting hill' leads us to suppose that perhaps there was a hidden history of that part of london, that notting hill can boast of a past that makes it worthy of having been a station on the first london tube. it is unsafe to prophesy any limit to the versatility of chesterton, but it is improbable that he could write an ordinary novel; the reason is, i fancy, that he cannot write of the ordinary emotions with the ease that he can construct grotesque situations. this is why i have said that, as a novelist, chesterton is not popular in the sense that he is read by the masses (that word that the church always uses to indicate those who form the bulk of the community). as a novelist, chesterton stands apart, not because he is better than contemporary writers of fiction, but because his books are unlike those of any one else. i have taken chesterton's most famous novels and have written a short survey of their character. they are not always easy to understand--sometimes they seem to indicate alternative points of view; they teem with pungent wit and shrewd observations, they are without doubt phantastic, they are in the true sense clever. 'the napoleon of notting hill' at the time of the publication of this book the critics with astounding frankness admitted that, while this was a fine book, they had difficulty in deciphering what it meant. one, now a well-known fleet street editor, went farther, and said that possibly the author himself did not know what he meant--a situation in which quite a number of authors have found themselves, especially when they read the reviews of their books. 'the napoleon of notting hill' is not an easy book to understand: it may be a satire, it may be a serious book, it may be a prophecy, it may be a joke, it may even be a novel! i think that it is a little bit of a joke, in a degree serious--something of a satire, possibly a prophecy. the main thing about the book is that a king is so unwise as to make a joke, and an obscure poet is more unwise in taking this royal joke seriously. many who have laughed at monarchical wit have found that their heads had an alarming trick of falling on tower hill. in 'the napoleon of notting hill' we are living a hundred years on, and we are to believe that london hasn't much changed; a certain respectable gentleman has been made a king for no special reason--a very good way of having a versatile monarchy and a selection of kings. not far off in the kingdom of notting hill there resides a poet who has written poems that no one reads. he is a romantic youth, and loves notting hill with the love of a roman for rome or of a jew for whitechapel. the new king, by way of a joke, suggests that it would be quite a good idea to take the various parts of london and restore them to a mediã¦val dignity; thus 'clapham should have a city guard, wimbledon a city wall, surbiton tolling a bell to raise its citizens.' it so happens that the obscure poet, adam wayne, has always seen in notting hill a glory that her citizens cannot see; he determines to make the grocers and barbers of that neighbourhood realise their rich inheritance. the new king, for some reason, desires to possess pump street in notting hill, and this gives the poet's dream a chance to mature; and he gets together a huge army, with himself as lord high provost of notting hill. there are some frightful battles in the adjacent states of kensington and bayswater, and, after varying fortunes, the notting hill army is defeated, the napoleon becomes again the poet of notting hill, while his citizens have developed from grocers to romanticists, from barbers to fanatics. that there might be in the future a napoleon of notting hill is highly improbable, that london will ever return to the pomp and heraldry of the middle ages is not at all likely; but that in a hundred years notting hill will be different is quite possible. if it is not likely that there will be fights between bayswater and notting hill, there may at least be battles in the air unthought of; it may well be that its citizens in times of peace will take a half-day trip, not to kew gardens or to hampton court, but to bombay and cape town. 'manalive' one of the strangest complications that man has to face is the criminal mind. it is so complex that no society has ever understood it; very often it has not taken the trouble to try. no method of punishment has stamped out the criminal; no reformers, however ardent, have freed the world from those who live by violence, kill by violence, and are themselves killed by violence. if crime is a disease, then to treat criminals as wrongdoers is absurd. if every murderer is insane, then hanging is nonsense; if a murderer is sane, then sanity is capable of being more revolting than insanity. 'manalive' may, perhaps, be called a philosophy of the motive for crime; it may be a pseudo philosophy--at least it is an entertaining one--which cannot be said about all serious attempts at moulding the universe into a tiresome system, that is uprooted generally by the next thinker. the book opens with a very strong gale that ends with the arrival at a boarding house of a man who can stand on his head and has the name of innocent smith. he is somewhat like the person in the 'passing of the third floor back,' in that he revolutionizes the household, who cannot determine whether he is a lunatic or not; anyhow, he falls in love with the girl of the house. unfortunately, rumour--a nasty, ill-natured thing--has it that smith is a criminal. evidence is collected, and a grand jury inquire into the charges, which include bigamy, murder, polygamy, burglary. it looks as if smith is in for a very uncomfortable time, and the wedding bells are a long way from ringing. the second part of the book is concerned with these charges and the conduct and motives of smith. but chesterton is a clever barrister, and shows that the motives behind the 'crimes' are not only within the law, but are extremely useful and throw a new light on criminology. the crime of murder of which smith is accused is one that he is supposed to have perpetrated in his college days. it was nothing less than firing at the warden. the reason was not at all that smith wanted to murder the warden, but, rather, to discover if his theory of 'the elimination of life being desirable' was a sincere one. it was not. as soon as the professor thought he might attain the desired bliss of death, he desired more than anything that he might live. the fact, then, that smith pointed a pistol at his warden was perfectly justifiable; it had the eminently good principle of wishing to test a theory. if smith was a bigamist he was so with his own wife, only that he happened to like to live with her in various places; if he was a burglar, he was perfectly justified, because he merely robbed his own house--in fact, he does not wish to steal, because he can covet his own goods. chesterton, on these grounds, acquits the prisoner. at the end of the book another or the same great gale springs up, and smith, accompanied by mary of the boarding-house, disappears. clever as chesterton's explanations of the crimes are, we shall not probably shoot at the regius professor of divinity at cambridge in order to demonstrate to him how desirable life really is; we shall not burgle our own sitting-room for the mere excitement of it; we shall not flit with our wife from peckham to marylebone, from singapore to bagdad, to imagine that we are bigamists or polygamists; rather, we shall sit at home and sigh that all crimes cannot be as easily settled as those chesterton propounds and shows are not crimes at all. 'the ball and the cross' it is usually assumed that a theological argument is a dull and prosy affair that has as its perpetrators either professors of theology or professors of rationalism. it is, of course, true that many professors of theology are dull, but they do not usually argue about theology at all. professors of rationalism are equally dull and are seldom happy when not engaged on the hopeless task of trying to understand god when they know nothing about man and little about satan. 'the ball and the cross' is a theological novel. it is, without any doubt, the most brilliant of chesterton's novels; it is an argument between a christian ass and a very decent atheist. atheists, if they are sincere, are on the way to becoming good christians; christians, if they are insincere, are on the way to becoming atheists. the book opens with a theological argument in the air between a professor and a monk. this becomes to the professor so wearisome that, with great good sense, he leaves the monk clinging to the cross at the top of st. paul's cathedral while he disappears into the clouds in his silver airship. having successfully climbed into the gallery, the monk is arrested as a wandering lunatic and taken off to an asylum. meanwhile, a great deal of excitement is agitating ludgate hill, where an atheistic editor runs a paper that propounds (with all the usual insults at christ, which culminate in an attack on the method of the birth of christ) the creed of atheism. a particularly slanderous attack on the virgin mary results in an ardent roman catholic throwing a stone through the blasphemer's window. the result is that they are both brought up before the magistrate, and the two men decide to fight a duel. the whole book really, then, consists of a theological argument between the two, interspersed with attempts to settle their differences by a duel, which is always interrupted at the crucial moment. finally, after queer adventures, the two arrive in a lunatic asylum, in which they are kept until the place is burned down. it so happens that the chief doctor of the place turns out to be professor lucifer, who had left the monk clinging to the cross at the top of the cathedral. he is burnt to death in an airship disaster, and the atheist and the catholic end their adventures. 'the ball and the cross' is very full of fine passages. it presents the side of the atheist and the catholic in a brilliant manner. the chapter that describes the trial before the magistrate has got the atmosphere of the police-court to perfection. not less good is the chestertonian satire of the comments of the press on the case, in which chesterton makes some pungent remarks about fleet street 'stunts.' perhaps one of the best things in the book is the argument between the french catholic girl and turnbull the atheist on the doctrine of transubstantiation. this passage must be quoted; it is one of the best arguments for the sacrament that has been written for those people who can see that (even in these days) bread is a symbol for the presence of the life giver, and wine a symbol for the presence of the life force. 'i am sure,' cried turnbull, 'there is no god.' 'but there is,' said madeleine quietly; 'why, i touched his body this morning.' 'you touched a bit of bread,' said turnbull. 'you think it is only a bit of bread,' said the girl. 'i know it is only a bit of bread,' said turnbull, with violence. 'then why did you refuse to eat it?' she said. * * * * * if 'orthodoxy' is the finest of chesterton's essays, 'browning' the best of his critical studies, 'the ballad of the white horse' the best of his poems, there is, i think, little doubt that this strange theological exposition, 'the ball and the cross,' is the best of his novels. it should be read by all rationalists, by all self-satisfied christians, by all heretics, by those who are orthodox, and, above all, it should be read by those millions who pass st. paul's cathedral and seldom if ever give a thought to the 'ball and the cross' that has made the title of chesterton's best novel. 'the flying inn' chesterton is once more a laughing prophet in this book, and he has as sad a state of things to prophesy as had jeremiah to the israelites, those people who, if it were not that they find a place in the sacred writings, would be the most silly and futile race of ancient history. the scene of the story is england, and the last inn is there. we are to imagine that the non-drinking wine dogma of islam has permeated england. it is a sorry state of things when- 'the wicked old women who feel well-bred, have turned to a teashop the saracen's head.' the great charm of the book is the poetry that the irish captain recites to pump, the innkeeper, the gallant innkeeper who, against all opposition, keeps the flag flying and the flagon full. if the book is a little overdrawn it is, no doubt, because the subject is slightly farcical; the arguments of the oriental are well put, and, if the discussion of the merits of vegetarianism are a little wearisome, the poetry of a vegetarian is splendid: 'for i stuff away for life shoving peas in with a knife, because i am at heart a vegetarian.' thus, if we observe queer manners at eustace miles we shall know the reason. no doubt the adventures of the last innkeeper in england would be wonderful; there would be half-day trips to see him; bishops would flock to gaze upon the last relic of a pagan england; the poet laureate might so forget himself as to write an 'epic of the last innkeeper'; editors would be sending lady reporters to give the feminine view of the finish of drinking; publishers would fall over one another in their eagerness to secure the 'memoirs of the last publican'; the salvation army would put the last drunkard in the british museum as a prehistoric specimen; on the death of this national hero, the dean of westminster would politely offer the abbey for a memorial service, with no tickets for the best places. chesterton gives other adventures to this last innkeeper. he is, we hope, a false prophet for this once. were there to be no beer perhaps not even the pen of chesterton would be able to describe the scenes that would take place in england. 'the man who was thursday' anarchy is a very interesting subject and is used to denote very different things. it may be something that puts a bullet through a king with the insane hope of ending the monarchy; it may be an act of a god-fearing protestant clergyman when he attempts to harry the catholics by denying that the crucifix is the proper symbol of the christian religion; it may be the act of god when a village is destroyed by an earthquake or an island created by a seaquake. 'the man who was thursday' is about an anarchist, and we are not sure whether chesterton is not pulling our respectable legs and laughing that we really believed the party of desperadoes were real anarchists. the fact is, the book starts in a highly respectable suburb that might be anywhere near london and could not be far from it. there are two poets strolling about under the canopy of a lovely sky; one believes in anarchy, the other doesn't--the one who does invites the one who does not to come with him and see what anarchy is. this he does, and, after a good supper of lobster mayonnaise, the two get down to a subterranean cavern where are assembled half the anarchists of the world, precisely six; they call themselves by the names of the week, with a leader, who is met with later, sunday. syme, the visitor, is appointed as a member, and becomes, thursday; he has a great many adventures, including breakfast, overlooking leicester square, and gradually discovers that the said anarchists, unknown at first to each other, are really scotland yard detectives. the only real anarchist is the poet who believed in it, whose name is gregory. he has the pious wish to destroy the world; he may be satan, if that person could ever pretend to be a poet. what does chesterton mean by this strange weird tale that is almost like a romance of oppenheim and is yet like an old-world allegory? is he laughing at anarchists that they are but policemen in disguise? is he saying that policemen are really only anarchists? or does he mean that the devil masquerades as the spirit of the holy day of the week 'sunday,' or is 'sunday' really christ? chesterton calls this novel a nightmare; a nightmare is usually a muddled kind of thing with no connections at all; it is a dream turned into a blasphemy. the book may mean several things; it is quite possible that it may mean nothing; there is no need for a novel to mean anything so long as it is readable. 'the man who was thursday' certainly is that, but it leaves us with an uneasy suspicion that it is a very serious book and at the same time it may be merely a farce. * * * * * space does not permit us to more than mention chesterton's two detective books, 'the innocence of father brown' and 'the wisdom of father brown.' they are a highly original series of detective tales. 'the club of queer trades' is a volume of quaint short stories full of chesterton's genius. since chesterton wrote these books an event has occurred to him which may have a considerable effect on his writings. his novels have always shown a catholic tendency when they have touched at all on religion. they have not, of course, the propagandist setting of the works of father r.h. benson, nor do they have a contempt for other churches that so often blackens the writings of roman catholic apologists. the event is one that has occasioned the usual mistake in the press. they have said with loud emphasis, 'mr. chesterton has joined the catholic church.' he has not; there is, unfortunately, no catholic church that he could have joined; what he has done is to be received into the roman part of the catholic church. this is a matter of importance to chesterton; it is a matter of far greater importance to the roman catholics. if the roman church is wise she will not put her ban on chesterton's writings--his intellect is far beyond the ken of the pope; his utterances are of more import than all the papal bulls. she has secured, as her ally, one of the finest intellects of the day, one of the best christian apologists. if, then, we have further novels from the pen of chesterton we shall expect them to have a roman bias, but we shall hope that they will not bear any signs that rome has dictated the policy that has made many of her best priests mere puppets, afraid, not of the church, but of the pope, who often enough in history has been a very ignorant man. of present-day novelists it is in no way fair to compare them to chesterton; 'some contemporary novelists are better than he is, some are worse.' these are statements the writer of this book has often heard; they are entirely unfair. chesterton, as i have said, stands apart; his works are for the most part symbolic. this is their difficulty: any of his books may be the symbol for several points of view with the exception of his religious position, which is always on the side of christianity, and, i think, the roman catholic interpretation of it; his dialogue is worthy of anthony hope, his dramatic power is intense, his satire is never ill-natured, it is always cutting, his humour is gentle, pathos is rare in his novels, he has never described a woman, he is undoubtedly a philosopher, but he is not one who is academic, above all he is the genial writer of phantastic tales that are as wide as the universe. _chapter nine_ chesterton on divorce it may be somewhat arbitrary to proceed straight away to nearly the end of chesterton's 'superstition of divorce' to find an argument that shows that he doesn't quite understand what divorce aims at; but it is well, when taking note of a book on an alleged abuse of modern society, to also see that the writer has got hold of the right end of the stick. it is no doubt unfortunate that many marriages said to be made in heaven end in hell. divorce may be a sign that men have no reverence for marriage, it may equally be an argument that they reverence it very much; but there is no good reason for attributing to divorce only very low motives and one of the lowest that can be found; consequently i have started in the middle of this book. in a chapter on the tragedies of marriage, chesterton remarks that 'the broad-minded are extremely bitter because a christian, who wishes to have several wives when his own promise bound him to one, is not allowed to violate his vow at the same altar at which he made it.' what most people who wish for a divorce want is that they shall have, not several wives, but one, who shall prove that christian marriage is not a horrible farce, that the words of the priest were not a miserable blasphemy. chesterton has made a very big mistake if he thinks that the exponents of divorce wish the church to be a party to polygamy; what they want is that the church shall show a little common sense and not rely on the tradition of hotly disputed texts. i think it is perfectly clear that chesterton can see no good in divorce at all. i have said it may be a very good argument for those who wish to make marriage what it is said by the church to be--a divine institution. many people seek divorce, not that, as chesterton implies, they shall run away with the wife of the man across the square, but that, having been unlucky in a speculation, they wish quite naturally and quite rightly to try again, to the infinite satisfaction of all parties. if the church does not agree that divorce is ever right, so much the worse for that divine institution; if the church is right in holding that marriages are made by god, then civil marriages are not marriages at all, and there is no need to worry about divorce, because the most ardent reformer does not imagine that man can undo the divine decree; on the other hand, the church never will face the fact that, if all marriages in a church by a priest are divine, then it is rather strange that the result of them very often would be more consistent with a satanic origin. i am dwelling at some length on this theological argument because, though chesterton does not base his case on that argument, he undoubtedly considers that divorce is against the church's teaching, and the church to which he now belongs would not allow him to think otherwise. before i finally leave this side of the question there is one other consideration that must be faced. whatever the texts in the new testament relating to divorce may mean, it is rather unfortunate that they are attributed to a bachelor. whether christ had any good reason for knowing anything about divorce is not an irreverent one, but it is one that the church must face to-day. another thing that chesterton does not seem to realize is that many people do not want divorce to marry again, but to be free of a partner who is not one in the most superficial sense of the word; at the same time a separation does not meet the case, as it is always possible that a man or woman may wish to take the matrimonial plunge again. chesterton seems to think it is amusing to poke fun at those who are sensible enough to wish to make lunacy a sufficient ground for divorce. 'the process' he says, 'might begin by releasing somebody from a homicidal maniac and end by dealing with a rather dull conversationalist.' he might have added, to make the joke complete, or from some one who snores, or keeps cats, or reads bernard shaw. 'to put it roughly,' says chesterton, 'we are prepared in some cases to listen to a man who complains of having a wife. but we are not prepared to listen at such length to the same man when he comes back and complains that he has not got a wife. in a word, divorce is a controversy about remarriage; or, rather, about whether it is marriage at all.' to a certain extent chesterton is right when he says that the controversy about divorce is really about remarriage, but what he forgets is, that for the hundreds who want divorce to be remarried, there are thousands who want it to be unmarried. the reason a man complains of having a wife is, of course, often that he prefers a mistress; but it is equally true that another cause for complaint is that his wife has for him none of the recognized attributes of the normal state of wifehood. i have always understood that in some sense chesterton was a journalist of the kind who is rather hard on journalism, but i did not know until i read this book on divorce that he so little understood newspapers and their writers. commenting on the fact that the press is sensible enough to use divorce as a news item, he says: 'the newspapers are full of an astonishing hilarity about the rapidity with which hundreds of thousands of human families are being broken up by the lawyers; and about the undisguised haste of the "hustling" judges who carry on the work.' i wonder if mr. chesterton ever reads the leaders of certain papers, leaders which never fail to regret the enormous amount of divorce there is. if it be true that there is a great deal of news of divorce in the press, it is because the press does not give news of an imaginary world that is a utopia, but of the dear old muddle-headed world as it is. does chesterton fail to see that if the newspapers did not report the divorce courts, the numbers of cases would increase from thousands to millions. it is useless chesterton sighing that lawyers have become breakers of families; they have also become restrainers of suicide. if the judges hustle, it is because they are sensible enough to see that most of the divorces are justifiable; when they have not been, they have not been slow to say so. yet again chesterton repeats the somewhat superficial argument against divorce that its obvious effect would be frivolous marriage. the normal person on his or her wedding day luckily does not think about anything beyond the supreme happiness they have found at least at the time. it is lightly said that the modern adam and eve think of the chances of divorce before marriage whatever may be the cause of divorce afterwards; at least it will be agreed that it is a failure of a particular two people who thought that their lives together would be a mutual happiness. therefore, when chesterton says that divorce is likely to make frivolous marriages he is saying that couples about to marry do so expecting it to be a failure. if this be so, then the young men and women of to-day are more hopeless than they are commonly made to appear by correspondence about them in the papers. if, on the other hand, every couple on marriage knew for a certainty that it was 'till death us do part,' it is more than likely that marriage would be a thing that was abnormal, not normal. it might even be that the church would have to listen to reason, and be disturbed over worse things than divorce, and whether she should endeavour to take a christian attitude to those who had been unfortunate or indiscreet. chesterton is very concerned that the time will come when 'there will be a distinction between those who are married and those who are really married.' this is precisely to state what is utopia. at present many people who are really married are in the chains of slavery; the more who get out of it the better. as the number of those whose marriages are a farce will gradually diminish, thus will divorce be a godsend. divorce is, in certain cases, a godsend, but the priests refuse to listen to the divine revelation. chesterton sketches at some length the nature of a vow. he considers that henry the viii broke the civilization of vows when he wished to have done with his wife. it is quite possible that he did, but it is also possible that she did precisely the same thing. the question in regard to our inquiry is: is the marriage vow entirely binding even when the other party to the contract has broken it? the opponents of divorce, amongst whom are chesterton, will quite easily say that it is, yet they cheerfully ignore the fact that in a marriage two persons make a contract, and if one breaks it there is quite a good reason that the vow made is no longer one at all. it is a very interesting question whether a vow should ever be broken. should jephthah have broken the vow that sacrificed his daughter? should herod have broken his vow that laid the head of john the baptist on a charger? should two people remain together when (if they have not broken their actual vows) they have lost the spirit of them? the opponents of divorce, who are so eager over the keeping of the marriage vow, are they as eager that it shall be but a miserable skeleton? chesterton does not see any particular reason why the exponents should be anxious to secure easier divorce for the poor man. it is, he thinks, 'encouraging him to look for a new wife.' if he has a wife who isn't one at all, the best thing for him is to look for another who will prove to be so, otherwise he will search for the nearest public-house and a cheap prostitute. surely it is better that it be granted his first marriage was a failure and let him try decently for a better. of course, the most sensible plan would be to give divorce for all sorts of small things; people would soon then tire of it. chesterton tells us that already in america there is demand for less divorce consequent on the increased facilities over there. in england there is demand for more. let it be given freely and the demand will soon cease. why should our policy be dictated by a celibate priesthood? does chesterton think that people who hate one another are going to live together as though they were the most ardent lovers? does he consider that it would be better to have no divorce and no marriage as a consequence? does he consider that ill-assorted couples will make happy nations? does he really consider that divorce can destroy marriage? does he consider that the newspapers print the divorce cases because they have no other copy? chesterton's book is, i think, unfair on some points. he considers divorce is a superstition; he holds that it is pernicious from a social standpoint; he considers that it encourages adultery; he considers that it is the breaking of a vow; but has he ever seriously considered that if all divorce is wrong, that marriage very often is the most miserable caricature of divinity possible? has he thought what the state of the country would be if no marriage could ever be broken or a fresh matrimonial start made? if such a thing happened it might make him write a book on the 'superstition of non-divorce.' _chapter ten_ 'the new jerusalem' there are four ways of going to jerusalem--the one is to go as a pilgrim would go to mecca; another is to go as a tourist in much the way that an american staying in russell square might start for a trip round london. again, it is possible to go to jerusalem for yet a third reason, that of wishing quite humbly to be in some way a modern crusader. there is yet a fourth way, which is to be made to go for reasons that are called military and are really political. 'the new jerusalem' is, above all, a massive book. it is the record of a tour, and it is something more, it is an appreciation of the sacred city on a hill. it is, in a limited sense, a philosophy of the holy land; it deals in a masterly way with problems connected with the jews; it is so unscholarly as to insist that the scholars who refuse to call the mosque of omar that at all are pedantic; it has a fine chapter on zionism; it describes jerusalem, not so much as a city, but as an impression that fastened itself on the mind of mr. chesterton. there are some very fine passages in the book that deal with the curious question of demonology, that peculiar belief which finds a place in the new testament in the story of the gadarene swine, and who, chesterton felt, might still be found at the bottom of the dead sea--'sea swine or four-legged fishes swollen over with evil eyes, grown over with sea grass for bristles, the ghosts of gadara.' one of the most interesting chapters of this book is that which is entitled 'the philosophy of sightseeing.' there is, of course, a philosophy of everything, of boiling eggs, of race-horses, of the relations of space and time--in fact, philosophy is a sort of harrods, that sums up anything from a rolls royce to a packet of pins. to some people there must be almost something incongruous in the idea of sightseeing in the holy land, yet it is probable that of the crowds round the foot of the cross, on which was enacted the world's greatest blessing, a great part were idle sightseers who, twenty centuries later, might have been a bank holiday crowd on hampstead heath. chesterton found that there was a philosophy in sightseeing; he had been warned that he would find jerusalem disappointing, but he did not. he could be interested in the guide who 'made it very clear that jesus christ was crucified in case any one should suppose that he was beheaded.' he could see that the 'christianity of jerusalem, after a thousand years of turkish tyranny, survived even in the sense of dying daily'; fascinating as chesterton found jerusalem, much as he insists that the 'sights' of the city must be seen in their right perspective, yet he has sympathy with the man who only 'sees in the distance jerusalem sitting on the hill and keeping that vision' lest going further he might understand the city and weep over it. * * * * * chesterton devotes a long and careful chapter to the question of the jews, of whom christ was the chief; but, notwithstanding, thousands of his so-called followers quite forget this, and scarcely will admit that the jew has a right to live. the reason is, no doubt, that the fourth gospel uses the word [greek: ioudaios] in the sense of those who were hostile, consequently many entirely orthodox christians are anti-jewists, quite oblivious of the very reasonable request of st. paul that in christ are neither jew nor gentile. this is, in brief, the theological side of the vexed question of zionism. chesterton makes it quite clear that he thinks it desirable that 'jews should be represented by jews, should live in a society of jews, should be judged by jews and ruled by jews,' which is of course to say that the jews should be a nation. but the fact remains, do they wish to be so, and, if they do, is it necessary to them, or even congenial, that it shall be in palestine? it is no way the province of this book to go into this question; it has been enough to say that it is perfectly evident that chesterton desires for the jew the dignity of being a separate nation. * * * * * is there any particular characteristic in this record of chesterton's visit to jerusalem? is it anything more than an impression of a wonderful experience, when a great writer left his home in buckinghamshire and passed over the sea and the desert to the city that is older than history and is now new? i do not think that the book can be called more than a chestertonian impression of jerusalem, with an appreciation of the vexed history of that strange city which is holy. it does not forget the problems in connection with palestine, but it has no particular claim to having said very much that was new about the new jerusalem. yet it has avoided the obvious: it is not of the type of book that is read at drawing-room missionary meetings, which are more often than not written in a surprised style, that the places mentioned in the bible are really somewhere. i almost feel as if this book is something of a guide-book--in fact, it was inevitable that it should be so. i rather fancy that descriptive writing is for chesterton difficult; it is a little bit too descriptive, which is to say it is not always easy to imagine the scene he is trying to describe. i am not sure that the jews will be flattered to be told that chesterton thinks they are worthy of being a nation; it is slightly patronizing. yet the new jerusalem is a book to read, but it is not of the holy city that st. john saw in the revelation; it is of the new jerusalem of the twentieth century, which is very imperfect, yet is holy. it is a book of a city that was visited by god, who did not deem himself too important to walk in its streets; it is of a city teeming with difficulties; it is of a city that has felt the iron hand of the conqueror; it is finally jerusalem made into a symbol by the hand of mr. chesterton. _chapter eleven_ mr. chesterton at home there is a very remarkable fascination about the home life of a great man whatever branch of activity he may adorn. if he is an archbishop, it is interesting to know what he looks like when he has exchanged his leggings for a human dress; if he is a pork millionaire, we like to see whether he enjoys chopin; if he is a great writer, the interest of his home life is intensified. for the tens of thousands who know an author by his books, the number who know him at home may quite well be measured by the score. there is always an idea that a great man is not as others; that he may quite conceivably eat mustard with mutton, or peas with a spoon; that his conversation will be of things the ordinary man knows nothing about; that he is unapproachable; that he is, in short, on a glorified pedestal. this love of the personal is demonstrated in the absurd wish people have to know about the private doings of royalty, it is shown in the remarkable fact that thousands will hang about a church door to see the wedding of some one who is of no particular interest beyond the fact that they are in some way well known; it is again seen in the interest that people display in those parts of a biography that deal with the life of the public man in his private surroundings. when i first knew chesterton he was living in a flat in battersea, a charming place overlooking a green park in front and a mass of black roofs behind. here chesterton lived in the days when he was becoming famous, when the inhabitants of that part of london began to realize that they had a great man in their midst, and grew accustomed to seeing a romantic figure in a cloak and slouch hat hail a hansom and drive off to fleet street. later, chesterton moved to beaconsfield, a delightful country town, built in the shape of a cross, on the road from london to oxford. he has here a queer kind of house that is mostly doors and passages, and looks like a very elaborate dolls'-house; it is rather like one of the four beasts, who had eyes all round, except that instead of having eyes all round it has doors all round; and i have never yet discovered which is really the front door, for the very good reason that either of the sides may be the front. in a very charming essay, max beerhobm, one of the best essayists of the day, gives warning to very eminent men that if they wish to please their admirers a great deal depends on how they receive those who would pay them homage. he tells us of how coventry patmore paid a visit to leigh hunt and was so overcome by the poet's greeting--'this is a beautiful world, mr. patmore'--that he remembered nothing else of that interview. i remember one day it so happened that i had to pay a visit to anthony hope. i knocked tremblingly at his door in gower street and followed the trim housemaid into the dining-room. here i found an oldish man with his back to me. turning round at my entrance he said, without any asking who i was, 'have a cigarette?' and this is all that i remembered of this visit. the best way, according to max beerbohm, is for the visitor to be already seated, and for the very eminent man to enter, for 'let the hero remember that his coming will seem supernatural to the young man.' i cannot remember the first time i saw chesterton, whether he was seated or whether i was; whether his entrance was like a god or whether he was sitting on the floor drawing pirates of foreign climes or whether he was wandering up and down the passage. chesterton is so remarkable-looking that any one seeing him cannot fail to be impressed by his splendid head, his shapely forehead, his eyes that seem to look back over the forgotten centuries or forward to those yet to come. if there is one thing that is characteristic of chesterton, it is that he always seems genuinely pleased to see you. many people say they are pleased to see you, yet at the same time there is the uncomfortable feeling that they would be much more pleased to see you leaving. this is not the case with chesterton: he has the happy advantage of making you feel that he really is glad that you have come to his house. this is not so with all great writers. carlyle, if he liked to see a person, did not say so; tennyson did not always trouble to be polite; swift would receive his guests with a gloomy moroseness; dickens was a man of moods; conversation with browning was not always easy. great men do not always trouble to be polite to smaller ones. what a wonderful laugh chesterton has. it is like a clap of thunder that suddenly startles the echoes in the valley; it is the very soul of geniality. there is nothing that so lays bare a man's character as his laugh--it cannot pretend. we can pretend to like; we can pretend to be pleased; we can pretend to listen; we can't pretend to laugh. chesterton laughs because he is amused; he is amused at all the small things, but he seldom laughs at a thing. i have often and often sat at his table. he talks incessantly. there is no subject upon which he has not something worth while to say. his memory is remarkable; he can quote poet after poet, or compose a poem on anything that crops up at the table. i do not think it can be said that chesterton is a good listener. this is not in any way conceit or boredom, but is rather that he is always thinking out some new story or article or poem. yet he is a good host in the niceties of the table; he knows if you want salt; he does not forget that wine is the symbol of hospitality. it has been said that chesterton is one of the best conversationalists of the day. conversation is a queer thing; so many people talk without having anything to say; others have a great deal to say and never say it. chesterton can undoubtedly talk well; he has a knack of finding subjects suitable to the company; though he does not talk very much of things of the day; he is naturally mostly interested in books. given a kindred soul the two will talk and laugh by the hour. naturally, chesterton has to pay the price of greatness: he has visitors who will make any pretence to get into his presence. but many are the interesting people to be found at his home. i remember one day, some years ago, when sir herbert tree called to see him. i do not recollect what they talked about, but the time came for the famous actor to go. the last i saw of him was the sight of his motor-car disappearing and sir herbert waving a great hat, while chesterton waved a great stick. i never saw tree again. not long after, the world waved farewell to him for ever. one of the most frequent visitors to his home is mr. belloc, and it is said that he always demands beer and bacon. one day it so happened that mr. wells came in about tea-time. he seemed, it is said, gloomy during the meal, and finally the cause was discovered! mr. wells also wanted beer and bacon. it was forthcoming, and the great novelist was satisfied. it is at least interesting to know that on one point at least belloc and wells are agreed--that beer and bacon are very excellent things. no word of chesterton's home life would be complete without reference to his dog winkle. winkle was more than a dog, he was an institution; he had the most polished manners--the more you hurt him the more he wagged his tail; if you trod on his tail he would almost apologize for being in the way. he knew his master was a great man; he had a certain dignity, but was never a snob. but the day came that winkle died, and was, i am sure, translated into abraham's bosom. chesterton has now another dog, but he will never get another winkle. such dogs are not found twice. i am not sure, but i think one day winkle will greet chesterton in the land that lies the other side of the grave. * * * * * it is, i think, well known that chesterton has a great liking for children. he is often to be seen playing games with them or telling them fairy stories; he is an optimist, and no optimist can dislike children. he probably likes children for the very good reason that he is quite grown up; it is no uncommon thing to see him sitting on the floor drawing pictures to illustrate his stories. which reminds me that chesterton is a remarkably clever artist. i would solemnly warn any one who does not like his books defaced not to lend them to chesterton. he will not cut them, he will not leave them out in the sun, he will not scorch them in front of the fire, but he will draw pictures on them. i have looked through many books at his home--nearly all of them have sketches in them. i have not the qualifications to speak of his art; i do not know whether he can be considered a great artist; i do not know whether it is a pity that he does not do more drawing; i do not know whether he can really be called an artist in the modern sense at all--but i do know that at his home there are many indications that he likes drawing, especially sketches of a fantastic nature. chesterton does nearly all his work in his little study, a sanctum littered with innumerable manuscripts. he, like most authors of the day, dictates to a secretary, who types what he says. it is, i think, in many ways a pity that so many authors type their manuscripts; for not only are they machine-made, they have not the interest that they should have for posterity. what would the british museum have lost if all the manuscripts had been typewritten! chesterton's written hand is extremely elegant. at one time i believe he used to write his own manuscripts. the typewriter is, after all, but one more indication that we live in times when nothing is done except by some kind of machinery; all the same, i could wish that even if typewriters are used famous authors would keep one copy of their writings in their own hand. it is remarkable the amount of work that chesterton gets through. he has masses of correspondence, he has articles to write, books to get ready for press, and yet he finds time to help in local theatricals, to give lectures in places as wide apart as oxford and america (and what is wider in every way than those two places?), that mean all that is best in the ancient world and all that is best in the modern. he can also find time to take a long tour to palestine to find the new jerusalem, that city that christ wept over, not because it was to be razed to the ground, but because its inhabitants were fools. what are the general impressions that a stranger visiting chesterton would get? he would, i think, be impressed by his genial kindliness; he would be amazed by his extraordinary powers of memory and the depths of his reading; he would be gratified by the interest that chesterton displays in him; he would be charmed by the quaintness of his home. that chesterton has humour is abundant by his conversation; that he has pathos is not so apparent. i am not perfectly sure that he can appreciate the things that make ordinary men sad. it has been said that he is not concerned with the facts of everyday life; if he is not, it is because he can see beyond them--he can see that this is a good world, which makes him a good host; he can look forward across the ages to the glorious stars that shine in the night sky for those who are optimists, as chesterton is, and are great men in their own homes. _chapter twelve_ his place in literature in a very admirable discussion on the word 'great,' in his study of dickens, chesterton remarks that 'there are a certain number of people who always think dead men great and live men small.' the tendency is natural and is entirely worthy of blame. if a man is great when he is dead, then he was great when he was alive. it is but a re-echo of much of the folly talked during the war, when we were so credulous as to believe that every dead soldier was a saint and every live one a hero. then, when the war was over, these hero worshippers quietly forgot that the soldiers had been heroes, put up stone crosses to the dead, and did little to remove the crosses from the living. there are a number of quite well meaning people who will say, without much thought, that chesterton is a great man, and if you ask them why, they will answer, 'he is a great writer, he is a great lecturer, he must be great; look at the times he appears in the press, look at the wealth of caricature that is displayed on him.' no doubt these are good reasons in their way, but they rather indicate that chesterton is well known in a popular sense; they are not a true indication that he is great. the public of to-day is inclined to measure greatness by the number of times a person appears in the newspapers, it seldom realizes that greatness is, above all, a moral quality, not a quantity; the fact that a person is in front of the public eye (very often a blind eye) is no indication of true greatness. if it was, then of necessity every prime minister would be a great man, every revue actress would be a great woman, every ordinary person would be small. it is one of the most difficult things possible to determine what is the place a writer takes in literature. it does not make the task easier when the writer is not only alive but is still a comparatively young man in the height of his powers. a pure and simple biography cannot always determine with any satisfaction its subject's literary standing. critical studies of classic authors do not usually give any preciseness about the exact niche the subject fills. literature is one of the most elastic qualities of the day, of human activity; it cannot be bound by rules, yet has a more or less artificial standard, which is, perhaps, an imaginary line which has style on the one side and lack of style on the other. yet there is a further difficulty: it is in no way fair to award an author his place in literature entirely by his style, nor is it fair to literature to disregard it. i have anticipated in earlier chapters some of what must be said in this, but it is not, i think, out of place to attempt to write of the literary qualities of chesterton and of his place in contemporary literature. with regard to his position in respect of former writers i must say something, but it would not be wise to give any comment of what may be the permanent place of chesterton in the world of books. he has, i hope, many years of literary output in front of him. it cannot be ignored that his reception into the roman catholic church may greatly influence his future writings; it is too soon to make any effort to predict whether his writings will stand the test of time, whether he will be popular in a hundred years or whether he will have the neglect that has attended some of the greatest of authors. there is a question that must be faced. has chesterton a place in literature at all, if, as is the usual thing, we have to compare him with contemporary writers, or is it that he has such a unique place that it is impossible to compare him to any living writer? probably, although it is not necessary, it is best to compare chesterton with some of the greatest writers of the day, and see why it is that he is worthy of a place in the foremost rank. there are, at the present day, a great number of writers who would appear worthy of a foremost place in literature. those i have chosen have been selected because, in a sort of vague way, people couple them with the name of chesterton. they are, i think, h.g. wells, bernard shaw and hilaire belloc. i do think that all these writers have a unique place in contemporary literature. perhaps, of the three, wells is the greatest, because there is possibly no greater thing than a scientific prophet who is also a brilliant novelist. if belloc and shaw are smaller men it is because they deal with smaller matters. at the present day chesterton does occupy in contemporary literature a place that no one else does. he is, in a sense, a dickens of the twentieth century; he is something more, he may even be a prophet. of course chesterton has not the enormous following that dickens had at the height of his powers, but he has that kind of monumental feeling in the twentieth century that belonged to dickens in the nineteenth: he is typical of this century, being an optimist when ordinary men are pessimistic. as in the nineteenth century dickens made common men realise their greatness when they themselves felt immeasurably small, so chesterton makes great men feel small when they are really so. but in another sense he cannot really be compared to dickens. dickens undoubtedly was a delineator of supreme characters. i do not think it can be said that any of the characters of chesterton would ever be known with the knowledge with which mr. pickwick is known. dickens was not in any sense an essayist; chesterton is one in every sense. dickens was a man who really cared very much that all kinds of oppression should be put down; chesterton, no doubt, cares also, but he rather imagines that things ordinary people quite rightly call welfare work are but forms of slavery. if dickens hated factories it was because he had hateful experience of them; if chesterton hates factories it is because he thinks they destroy family life and the home. i have attempted to suggest that dickens and chesterton are alike as regards their being monuments of their respective centuries. i have also suggested that they are extremely unlike. yet i can think of no writer of the nineteenth century who, in ideal, is so near to chesterton as dickens; but that at the same time they are also so far apart is but another indication that to place chesterton in regard to the past is almost impossible. one thing that chesterton is not, is an eclectic; if he is an original thinker, it is because he can see that though black is not really white there is no particular reason why it should not be grey; if notting hill can boast of forty fried fish shops he does not see any reason why it could fail to produce a napoleon. if a party of dons are sitting round a table discussing how desirable is the elimination of life, he sees that it is a perfectly good ethic for one of the undergraduates to test the theory by brandishing a loaded pistol at the warden's head. if, as a novelist, he is different to all his contemporaries, it is because he has discovered that the word novel sometimes means something new, sometimes something original, very often something extremely old. yet another difficulty for finding an exact niche for chesterton lies in the fact that he is a bit of everything, and, what is more, these bits are very big and make a large kaleidoscope. he is a theological professor who is so entirely sensible that the public hardly discovers the fact; he does not wear a cap and gown, and quote quite easily from all the fathers of the ancient church. he does not apologize for christianity by reading christian books. rather to learn the christian standpoint he discovers the tenets of rationalism; he writes a theological philosophy that might be a discussion between satan and christ and puts it into a novel; he writes a dissertation on transubstantiation and puts it into a tale of anarchy that is so untheological that it mentions leicester square and lobster mayonnaise; he is a historian who not only writes history but understands it; he does not consider that william conquered england, but that england conquered william; he says the best way to read history is to read it backwards; he is a historian who does not consider the most important facts are the dates of kings who lived and died. it has been said that chesterton is the finest essayist of the day. it would be perhaps fairer to say he is like no living essayist; if he is not a finer essayist than dean inge, he is at least as good; he may not be so academic, but he is as learned; if he has not quite the charm of mr. lucas he is at least more versatile. his essays sparkle with epigrams, they are full of paradox. he has said that plato said silly things and yet was the wonder of the ancient world. he can lament that h.g. wells has come to the awful conclusion that two and two are four, and at the same time be thankful that not even in fairyland can two and two make five; he can state quite calmly that the weakness of feminism is that it drives the woman from the freedom of the home to the slavery of the world; he can make priggish clergymen, who accuse him of joking and taking the name of the lord in vain, bite their words by explaining that to make a joke of anything is not to take it in vain. as an essayist, chesterton stands apart from his contemporaries. of older essayists i can think of none who could in any way be said to have a similarity to chesterton. one of the most interesting things about chesterton is his position as a poet. i have said, in an earlier chapter, that he might have been the poet laureate. i have ventured to say that if posterity did not place him among great poets it would be because he had given more attention to prose. the particular question of chesterton as a poet opens up a more general one, which is something in the nature of a problem. would the great classic poets of the last century have been as great if they had not written so much poetry? had tennyson written but two long poems; had browning never written anything but short lyrics; had wordsworth been content to write few poems, provided these had been an indication of the best work of these particular poets, would posterity have granted them immortality? will chesterton go down to posterity as a poet on account of his fine achievement in his 'ballad of the white horse,' or will people forget him because he has not written more? i am rather afraid this may be so. posterity, it is true, likes quality, but it likes it better with quantity. but i feel that i am dealing with what i had said it would be well to avoid--anything to do with the future of chesterton. what is chesterton's position as a poet to-day? he is, i think, one of the finest of the day; he has a fine sense of humour in poetry; he has great powers of recasting scenes of long-forgotten centuries; he has a fine musical rhythm; but he has not, i think, pathos. i think it is a pity that he does not write epics on events of the day; he might easily find the poet laureate's silence an inspiration; he might write another great poem; it might be better than any more novels. it is difficult to say whether or not chesterton is a playwright. his one play was a fine one about a fine subject, but i do not think it had the qualities that would be popular in an ordinary theatre in london. there is a certain suggestion of a problem about it which is a little obscure. we are not sure whether chesterton is in earnest or joking: it has not probably sufficient action to suit this century, that wishes aeroplanes to dash through the house on the stage, or two or three people to meet with violent deaths in three acts. it is in the nature of a discussion and might be almost anti-shavian; it would be absurd to attempt to place chesterton among contemporary dramatic authors, but it is not too much to predict that he might quite easily soon be very near the front rank. by his critical studies of browning, dickens, and thackeray, chesterton has proved that there was a great deal more to be said about these classic authors than the critics had seemed to think. chesterton seldom agreed with those who had written before. what they had considered weaknesses he had considered strength; what he had considered weakness they had considered strength. possibly no author had been written about more than dickens, yet there remained for chesterton to add much that was vital. no poet had been more misunderstood than browning; no poet had been more attacked for his grotesque style; no critic has written with the understanding of browning as has chesterton. in taking extracts from thackeray, chesterton has shown a fine appreciation of that novelist's best work. it is a difficult thing for a great writer to be a great critic. he is liable to be either condescending or supercilious; he is liable unconsciously to judge all standards by his own; he is likely to be rather intolerant of any opinions but his own; it is easier for a great critic to be a great writer. in the case of chesterton, because he is a great and original writer he has a brilliant critical acumen that probes deep into the minds of other authors and sees what is stored there in a way that other critics have, perhaps, failed to see, not because they did not choose to look for it, but rather because, almost without knowing it, critics who set out to be critics exclusively are liable to work rather too much by a fixed rule. it is, i hope, now apparent how difficult it is to say where exactly chesterton finds a place in literature. is it as an essayist? is it as a novelist? is it as a historian? is it as a critic? if it is as a novelist, then it is as a writer of peculiar phantasy; if it is as an essayist, it is as a brilliant controversialist; if it is as a historian, it is as a unique critic of history; if it is as a critic, it is as a broad-minded one of not only past great authors but of current events. i do not know of any writer who is so difficult to place. wells can quite well be a fine novelist and prophet; bernard shaw can easily be called a playwright and a philosopher; galsworthy is a serious novelist and a playwright who takes the art with proper regard for its powers of social redress; sir james barrie is a mystical writer with a message. there are fifty novelists who are interpreters of manners and problems of the twentieth century. but chesterton is not like any of these. he is not in any sense a specialist; he is really a general practitioner with the hand of a specialist in everything he touches except divorce. in a word, he is that thing in literature that occurs once or twice in every century--an epic. he is the laughing, genial writer of the twentieth century who, in everything he does, earns the highest of all literary honours--to be unique. _chapter thirteen_ g.k.c. and g.b.s. it would be a very interesting problem to try and discover how it is that gilbert keith chesterton and george bernard shaw have come to be known so familiarly as g.k.c. and g.b.s. if any of my readers can suggest a solution of this, i hope they will let me know; because, if i calmly headed this chapter g.k.c. and j.m.b. i do not think that any one would guess that i was attempting to compare chesterton to james matthew barrie unless i told them. it would be really quite amusing to do all comparisons by this initial method; we might find in the _hibbert journal_ an article on the need of episcopacy headed h.h. dunelm and frank zanzibar, which would be quite simply the bishop of durham and the bishop of zanzibar on episcopacy; or, for a rest, we might turn to the _daily herald_ and find 'j.r.c. attacks l.g.,' which would be quite simply that mr. clynes did not see eye to eye with the premier that a coalition government was a national asset. if we refer to the past, it is not easy to suggest any one who might be known by initials. charles dickens was never known as c.d.; thackeray, when he wrote his 'essay on the four georges' was probably not known as w.m.t. on the four georges; but if chesterton writes a book on america, the press affirms that there is a new book on america by g.k.c., or we pick up a morning paper and find a large headline on 'g.b.s. on prisons,' and every one knows who it is. but put a headline, 'randall on divorce,' and it is not seen at once that the archbishop of canterbury has been addressing the upper house on a matter of grave ecclesiastical import. there is a saying about some people being born great, others having that state thrust upon them, others as having achieved it. there is no doubt that chesterton was born to be great, so no doubt was shaw, but they went about it in a different way. the public caught hold of the remarkable personality of chesterton and scarcely a day passed that the press did not either quote him or caricature him; on the other hand, shaw caught hold of the public, annoyed its susceptibilities, held it in supreme contempt, raved at it from the stage and platform, and the public, amazed at his cleverness, received him as the rude philosopher who looked a genius, talked like a whirlwind, said that he was greater than shakespeare, said he was the moliã¨re of the twentieth century, and posed until it was expected of him. but chesterton does not pose. if he comes to lecture on cobbett and talks for three-quarters of an hour on how his hat blew off, it is not a pose, it is the natural inconsequence of chesterton on the platform. if shaw is invited to a dinner and writes that he does not eat dinner and does not care to see others doing nothing else, he is posing; but, if so, it is because he is expected to do so. on almost every subject shaw and chesterton disagree; yet they are both men who, in some way, attempt to be reformers. shaw proceeds by satire and contempt; chesterton proceeds by originality and good nature, except on the question of divorce, which makes him very angry, and, as i have said, uncritical. shaw chastises the world and is angry; chesterton laughs, and, in a genial way, asks what is wrong; and, having found out, attempts to put things right. shaw would rather have a new sort of world with a super-man. shaw and chesterton approach reform from two different ways. chesterton suggests them by queer novels and paradoxical essays; shaw puts his ideas into the mouthpieces of those who are known as shavian characters; he interprets his theories by the stage, therefore his sermons reach tens of thousands who would not read him if he preached from a pulpit. thus, if he wants to show that there are no rules for getting married, he puts the problem into a play and wants an extension of divorce; chesterton, on the other hand, believes that marriage is divine and that divorce is but a superstition. if shaw believed that the home narrowed life, was a domestic monarchy, meant a loss of individuality between husband and wife, chesterton, far from agreeing to this proposition, takes the opposite view that it is the home which is large and the world which is small and narrowing. probably neither is quite right. for some people the home is narrowing, for others it is the place that affords the widest scope; for some the world is narrow, for others the world is extremely broad--in fact, so broad that they never are able to get free from its immensity. with regard to religion, whatever opinions chesterton may hold--as he is now a roman catholic--they are no longer of interest. shaw, on the other hand, is much too elastic a man to imagine for a moment that religion is a thing that is necessarily bound up with an organization which is mainly political; he is not so credulous as to believe that the spiritual can fall vertically to earth because a man kneels before a bishop and becomes a priest. rather he had a much better plan. he started by being an atheist, the best possible foundation for subsequent theism. from this he became an immanist, which is that god is in some way dispersed throughout the earth. if there is one thing upon which we may say that shaw and chesterton are identical, it is in the strange fact that neither of them has, i think, ever described an ordinary lover--the sort of person who is nothing of a biological surprise, the kind of person who woos on a suburban court in surbiton or wimbledon and marries in a hideous red brick church to the cheerful accompaniment of confetti and the wedding march. i do not think either of them can really enter into the ordinary emotions of life. they could neither of them write, i fancy, a really typical novel--that is, a tale about the folks who do the conventional things. chesterton always sees everything upside down. if the man on notting hill sees it as a bustling area, chesterton sees it as a place upon which a napoleon might fall. shaw, on the other hand, could not write of ordinary things because he is usually contemptuous of them. if chesterton thinks education is a failure it is because the conventional method irritates him; shaw considers that education does not educate a man, it 'merely moulds him.' i am not sure that mr. skimpole, in his brilliant study of bernard shaw, is quite correct when he says 'the whole case against chesterton, of course, is that he is a romantic.' why is it a something against him that he chooses to be an idealist? because, says mr. skimpole, 'he does not seem to have grasped the fact that the most important difference between the real and the ideal aspects of anything is that while the ideal is permanent and unchangeable as an angel, the real requires an everlasting circle of changes.' i am rather afraid mr. skimpole is talking through a certain covering that adorns his head. cannot he see that very often the ideal is nothing less than the real? it is no case against chesterton that he is a romantic so long as the fact is duly recognized. if he considers certain institutions are permanent which may be said to be ideal (for instance, that marriage is a sacrament), he is just as likely to be as right as is mr. shaw when he contends that marriage must be made to fit the times, even if it be granted it is a divine thing. if shaw is unable to see that most earthly things have a heavenly meaning, as chesterton does, it is so much the worse for shaw and so much the better for chesterton. if chesterton is a dangerous romantic who likes fairyland, at least shaw is a dangerous eugenist who wants a super-man, and i am not sure that the fairies of chesterton are not more useful than the ethics of shaw; there is no doubt that they are less grown up. if shaw is a philosopher, he is not one of this universe; he is of another that shall be entirely sub-shavian. if chesterton is a philosopher, it is because he can see this universe better upside down than shaw understands it the right way up. in fact, the difference between shaw and chesterton may, i think, be something like this. they are, as i have said, both reformers, but chesterton wishes to keep man as he is essentially, and gradually make him something better. shaw wants to have done with man and produce a super-man. in this way shaw admits the failure of man to rise above his environment. chesterton not only thinks he is able to, but tries to prove it in his writings. thus, if a man is an atheist he can show that he is in time capable of becoming a good theist, but shaw if he allows some of his characters to be in hell, gets them out of it by attempting to make them strive for the super-man. for chesterton, man is the super-man; for shaw, the super-man is not man at all. in fact, this no doubt is the reason that shaw is really a pessimist and chesterton an optimist. there is, i think, little doubt that chesterton is a far more important man than shaw. he has the facility for getting hold of the things that matter; he is never ill-natured; he does not make fun of other people. much as the writer admires the wit and brilliancy of shaw, he cannot help feeling that shaw is a rather cynical personality; shaw loves to laugh at people, he is inclined to make fun of the martyrs. they were possibly quite mistaken in their enthusiasm, but at least they were consistent. i do not feel convinced that shaw would stand in the middle of piccadilly circus and keep his ideals if he knew that it would involve being eaten by lions that came up regent street, as the martyrs faced them centuries ago in rome, but i have little doubt that chesterton would remain in piccadilly circus if he knew that he would be eaten unless he denied that marriage was a divine institution. in a word, shaw bases his philosophy and plays on a contempt for all existing institutions. chesterton bases his writings and philosophy on genial good nature and a respect for the things that are important. therefore i think that shaw has not made such a permanent contribution to thought as chesterton certainly has; even if it is only in showing that the christian religion is reasonable. _chapter fourteen_ conclusion there was a time in history when the ancient world searched in vain for the truth. it produced men of the type of aristotle, plato, and socrates; they were great philosophers who looked at the world in which they lived and asked what it meant. was it material? was it spiritual? was it temporary? was it eternal? men were dissatisfied. and about that time a greater philosopher came in the wake of a star, and men called him christ. it is the twentieth century, and the man the ancient world called christ founded the religion which his followers were to take to the ends of the earth. yet men are still dissatisfied; philosophers look out of their high-walled windows and watch the modern world, which goes on; men die and are forgotten; creeds spring up for a day and pass; writers produce books, and in their turn pass away. of this century chesterton is one of the great thinkers. it is, i think, a mistake not to take him seriously. if he is phantastic, there is a meaning behind his phantasy; if he laughs, the world need not think that he is frivolous. he is a prophet, and he has honour in his own country. chesterton is still a young man; he is young in soul and body. like peter pan he does not grow up, yet he is a famous man; he has written great books, he has written fine poems, he has written brilliant essays, but he has never written a book with an appeal to an unthinking public that reads to kill thought. i wonder whether chesterton would write a 'philosophy for the unthinking man'? i think he is the one man of the day who could do it, and i think it might be his greatest book. i have attempted in this book to draw a picture of the works of chesterton. they are not easy to deal with; they may mean many things. i have not attempted to forecast the future of chesterton, strong as the temptation has been, but i have endeavoured to place before those who know chesterton what it is they admire in him; and for those who only know him as a name, i hope that this book may induce them to read the most arresting writer of the day, who is known in every country as the master of paradox, which is to say that he is the master of the temple of understanding. * * * * * transcriber's note: the following typographical errors have been corrected: page 16: a period was added after "period." (keen survey of the dickens period.) page 25: "cricle" changed to "circle." (but mentioned in a small circle) page 36: ' added after "task." (thackeray's 'most difficult task.') page 42: "dicken's" changed to "dickens'." (had dickens' life been uneventful,) page 50: ' deleted after "temperament." (french temperament.) page 64: ' deleted after "victors." (astonished the victors.) page 69: " changed to ' after "king." (to be an english king.') page 72: !' added after "charge." ('spears at the charge!') page 111: "supercillious" changed to "supercilious" (be either condescending or supercilious;) all other language, spelling, and punctuation has been retained. a chesterton calendar _a chesterton calendar_ compiled from the writings of 'g.k.c.' both in verse and in prose. with a section apart for the moveable feasts. kegan paul, trench, trübner & co. ltd. dryden house, gerrard street, london, w. 1911 prefatory note it will be found that almost all mr. g. k. chesterton's books have been utilized in the making of this calendar. a word of acknowledgment is due to the various publishers for their courtesy in permitting this: to messrs. grant richards, arthur l. humphreys, j. w. arrowsmith, john lane, j. m. dent & co., macmillan & co., duckworth & co., harper & co., cassell & co., and methuen & co. recourse has been had also to the files of the 'daily news,' the 'illustrated london news,' and other journals to which mr. chesterton has been a contributor. the present publishers feel they are peculiarly indebted to mr. chesterton himself for his kindness in allowing them to include certain verses from poems which have not yet been printed _in extenso_ elsewhere. january mere light sophistry is the thing that i happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which i am generally accused. '_orthodoxy._' new year's day the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. it is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. unless a particular man made new year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the kingdom of heaven. '_daily news._' january 2nd there is no such thing as fighting on the winning side: one fights to find out which is the winning side. '_what's wrong with the world._' january 3rd courage is almost a contradiction in terms. it means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'he that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. it is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. it might be printed in an alpine guideor a drill-book. this paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. a man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. he can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. a soldier, surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. he must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. he must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. he must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. no philosopher, i fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and i certainly have not done so. but christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. and it has held up ever since above the european lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the christian courage which is a disdain of death; not the chinese courage which is a disdain of life. '_orthodoxy._' january 4th the fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. to let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunsets, requires a discipline in pleasure and an education in gratitude. '_twelve types._' january 5th we have people who represent that all great historic motives were economic, and then have to howl at the top of their voices in order to induce the modern democracy to act on economic motives. the extreme marxian politicians in england exhibit themselves as a small, heroic minority, trying vainly to induce the world to do what, according to their theory, the world always does. '_tremendous trifles._' january 6th _the feast of the epiphany_ the wise men step softly, under snow or rain, to find the place where men can pray; the way is all so very plain, that we may lose the way. oh, we have learnt to peer and pore on tortured puzzles from our youth. we know all labyrinthine lore, we are the three wise men of yore, and we know all things but the truth. go humbly ... it has hailed and snowed ... with voices low and lanterns lit, so very simple is the road, that we may stray from it. the world grows terrible and white, and blinding white the breaking day, we walk bewildered in the light, for something is too large for sight, and something much too plain to say. the child that was ere worlds begun (... we need but walk a little way ... we need but see a latch undone ...), the child that played with moon and sun is playing with a little hay. the house from which the heavens are fed, the old strange house that is our own, where tricks of words are never said, and mercy is as plain as bread, and honour is as hard as stone. go humbly; humble are the skies, and low and large and fierce the star, so very near the manger lies, that we may travel far. hark! laughter like a lion wakes to roar to the resounding plain, and the whole heaven shouts and shakes, for god himself is born again; and we are little children walking through the snow and rain. '_daily news._' january 7th the idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house--this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. the world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. but the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the world's desire. '_what's wrong with the world._' january 8th the dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. they both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink. '_george bernard shaw._' january 9th the thing from which england suffers just now more than from any other evil is not the assertion of falsehoods, but the endless and irrepressible repetition of half-truths. '_g. f watts._' january 10th it is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. when they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with its tail in its mouth. there is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. the eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating its tail--a degraded animal who destroys even himself. '_orthodoxy._' january 11th variability is one of the virtues of a woman. it obviates the crude requirements of polygamy. if you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem. '_daily news._' january 12th we must not have king midas represented as an example of success; he was a failure of an unusually painful kind. also, he had the ears of an ass. also (like most other prominent and wealthy persons), he endeavoured to conceal the fact. it was his barber (if i remember right) who had to be treated on a confidential footing with regard to this peculiarity; and his barber, instead of behaving like a go-ahead person of the succeed-at-all-costs school and trying to blackmail king midas, went away and whispered this splendid piece of society scandal to the reeds, who enjoyed it enormously. it is said that they also whispered it as the winds swayed them to and fro. i look reverently at the portrait of lord rothschild; i read reverently about the exploits of mr. vanderbilt. i know that i cannot turn everything i touch to gold; but then i also know that i have never tried, having a preference for other substances--such as grass and good wine. i know that these people have certainly succeeded in something; that they have certainly overcome somebody; i know that they are kings in a sense that no men were ever kings before; that they create markets and bestride continents. yet it always seems to me that there is some small domestic fact that they are hiding, and i have sometimes thought i heard upon the wind the laughter and whisper of the reeds. '_all things considered._' january 13th the christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. it has been found difficult; and left untried. '_what's wrong with the world._' january 14th the old masters of a healthy madness--aristophanes or rabelais or shakespeare--doubtless had many brushes with the precisians or ascetics of their day, but we cannot but feel that for honest severity and consistent self-maceration they would always have had respect. but what abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have reserved for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and did not even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain to exuberance, which contented itself with the fool's cap without the bells! '_the defendant._' january 15th the truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you like. the next age is blank, and i can paint it freshly with my favourite colour. it requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we, and of things done which we could not do. i know i cannot write a poem as good as 'lycidas.' but it is always easy to say that the particular sort of poetry i can write will be the poetry of the future. '_george bernard shaw._' january 16th 'i have only that which the poor have equally with the rich; which the lonely have equally with the man of many friends. to me this whole strange world is homely, because in the heart of it there is a home; to me this cruel world is kindly, because higher than the heavens there is something more human than humanity. if a man must not fight for this, may he fight for anything? i would fight for my friend, but if i lost my friend, i should still be there. i would fight for my country, but if i lost my country, i should still exist. but if what that devil dreams were true, i should not be--i should burst like a bubble and be gone; i could not live in that imbecile universe. shall i not fight for my own existence?' '_the ball and the cross._' january 17th there are vast prospects and splendid songs in the point of view of the typically unsuccessful man; if all the used-up actors and spoilt journalists and broken clerks could give a chorus it would be a wonderful chorus in praise of the world. _introduction to 'nicholas nickleby.'_ january 18th 'tommy was a good boy' is a purely philosophical statement, worthy of plato or aquinas. 'tommy lived the higher life' is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule. '_orthodoxy._' january 19th happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized. suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. i do not mean something connected with a piece of enamel, i mean something with a violent happiness in it--an almost painful happiness. a man may have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of victory in battle. the lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for the moment's sake. he enjoys it for the woman's sake, or his own sake. the warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag. the cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last for a week. but the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as something that cannot end. these moments are filled with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary. once look at them as moments after pater's manner, and they become as cold as pater and his style. man cannot love mortal things. he can only love immortal things for an instant. '_heretics._' january 20th it is remarkable that in so many great wars it is the defeated who have won. the people who were left worst at the end of the war were generally the people who were left best at the end of the whole business. for instance, the crusades ended in the defeat of the christians. but they did not end in the decline of the christians; they ended in the decline of the saracens. that huge prophetic wave of moslem power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns of christendom: that wave was broken, and never came on again. the crusades had saved paris in the act of losing jerusalem. the same applies to that epic of republican war in the eighteenth century to which we liberals owe our political creed. the french revolution ended in defeat; the kings came back across a carpet of dead at waterloo. the revolution had lost its last battle, but it had gained its first object. it had cut a chasm. the world has never been the same since. '_tremendous trifles._' january 21st from such books ... we can discover what a clever man can do with the idea of aristocracy. but from the 'family herald 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. '_heretics._' january 22nd darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot be used to back up a single sane one. the kinship and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. on the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly humane; but you cannot be human. that you and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger. or it may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger. it is one way to train the tiger to imitate you; it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. but in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably--that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his claws. if you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of eden. '_orthodoxy._' january 23rd some priggish little clerk will say, 'i have reason to congratulate myself that i am a civilized person, and not so bloodthirsty as the mad mullah.' somebody ought to say to him, 'a really good man would be less bloodthirsty than the mullah. but you are less bloodthirsty, not because you are more of a good man, but because you are a great deal less of a man. you are not bloodthirsty, not because you would spare your enemy, but because you would run away from him.' '_all things considered._' january 24th to the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a london street. upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the spirit of pantomime. of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. '_the defendant._' january 25th silence is the unbearable repartee. '_charles dickens._' january 26th 'i am staring,' said macian at last, 'at that which shall judge us both.' 'oh yes,' said turnbull in a tired way; 'i suppose you mean god.' 'no, i don't,' said macian, shaking his head, 'i mean him.' and he pointed to the half-tipsy yokel who was ploughing, down the road. 'i mean him. he goes out in the early dawn; he digs or he ploughs a field. then he comes back and drinks ale, and then he sings a song. all your philosophies and political systems are young compared to him. all your hoary cathedrals--yes, even the eternal church on earth is new compared to him. the most mouldering gods in the british museum are new facts beside him. it is he who in the end shall judge us all. i am going to ask him which of us is right.' 'ask that intoxicated turnip-eater----' 'yes--which of us is right. oh, you have long words and i have long words; and i talk of every man being the image of god; and you talk of every man being a citizen and enlightened enough to govern. but, if every man typifies god, there is god. if every man is an enlightened citizen, there is your enlightened citizen. the first man one meets is always man. let us catch him up.' '_the ball and the cross._' january 27th i gravely doubt whether women ever were married by capture. i think they pretended to be; as they do still. '_what's wrong with the world._' january 28th on bright blue days i do not want anything to happen; the world is complete and beautiful--a thing for contemplation. i no more ask for adventures under that turquoise dome than i ask for adventures in church. but when the background of man's life is a grey background, then, in the name of man's sacred supremacy, i desire to paint on it in fire and gore. when the heavens fail man refuses to fail; when the sky seems to have written on it, in letters of lead and pale silver, the decree that nothing shall happen, then the immortal soul, the prince of all creatures, rises up and decrees that something shall happen, if it be only the slaughter of a policeman. '_tremendous trifles._' january 29th it is the very difference between the artistic mind and the mathematical that the former sees things as they are in a picture, some nearer and larger, some smaller and farther away: while to the mathematical mind everything, every inch in a million, every fact in a cosmos, must be of equal value. that is why mathematicians go mad, and poets scarcely ever do. a man may have as wide a view of life as he likes, the wider the better: a distant view, a bird's-eye view, but still a view and not a map. the one thing he cannot attempt in his version of the universe is to draw things to scale. '_g. f. watts._' january 30th execution of charles i the face of the king's servants grew greater than the king. he tricked them and they trapped him and drew round him in a ring; the new grave lords closed round him that had eaten the abbey's fruits, and the men of the new religion with their bibles in their boots, we saw their shoulders moving to menace and discuss. and some were pure and some were vile, but none took heed of us; we saw the king when they killed him, and his face was proud and pale, and a few men talked of freedom while england talked of ale. '_the silent people._' january 31st the 'iliad' is only great because all life is a battle, the 'odyssey' because all life is a journey, the book of job because all life is a riddle. '_the defendant._' february february 1st 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. '_heretics._' february 2nd _candlemas. the feast of the purification_ but as i sat scrawling these silly figures on brown paper, it began to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that i had left one chalk, and that a most exquisite and essential one, behind. i searched all my pockets, but i could not find any white chalk. now, those who are acquainted with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. i cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. one of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is this: that white is a colour. it is not a mere absence of colour, it is a shining and affirmative thing: as fierce as red, as definite as black. when (so to speak) your pencil grows red hot, it draws roses; when it grows white hot, it draws stars. and one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality--of real christianity, for example--is exactly this same thing. the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment: it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming like joan of arc. in a word, god paints in many colours, but he never paints so gorgeously--i had almost said so gaudily--as when he paints in white. '_tremendous trifles._' february 3rd it is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. it is always easy to be a modernist, as it is easy to be a snob. to have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of christendom--that would indeed have been simple. it is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls: only one at which one stands. to have fallen into any one of the fads from gnosticism to christian science would indeed have been obvious and tame. but to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. '_orthodoxy._' february 4th the curse against god is 'exercise i' in the primer of minor poetry. '_the defendant._' february 5th whatever else the worst doctrine of depravity may have been, it was a product of spiritual conviction; it had nothing to do with remote physical origins. men thought mankind wicked because they felt wicked themselves. if a man feels wicked, i cannot see why he should suddenly feel good because somebody tells him that his ancestors once had tails. man's primary purity and innocence may have dropped off with his tail, for all anybody knows. the only thing we all know about that primary purity and innocence is that we have not got it. '_all things considered._' february 6th if you have composed a bad opera you may persuade yourself that it is a good one; if you have carved a bad statue you can think yourself better than michelangelo. but if you have lost a battle you cannot believe you have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have got him off. '_george bernard shaw._' february 7th _dickens born_ we are able to answer the question, 'why have we no great men?' we have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. we are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we are fastidious--that is, we are small. when diogenes went about with a lantern looking for an honest man, i am afraid he had very little time to be honest himself. and when anybody goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great. now the error of diogenes is evident. the error of diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man. diogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern, but he never thought of looking inside the thief. and that is where the founder of christianity found the honest man; he found him on a gibbet and promised him paradise. just as christianity looked for the honest man inside the thief, democracy looked for the wise man inside the fool. it encouraged the fool to be wise. we can call this thing sometimes optimism, sometimes equality; the nearest name for it is encouragement. it had its exaggerations--failure to understand original sin, notions that education would make all men good, the childlike yet pedantic philosophies of human perfectibility. but the whole was full of faith in the infinity of human souls, which is in itself not only christian but orthodox; and this we have lost amid the limitations of pessimistic science. christianity said that any man could be a saint if he chose; democracy, that every man could be a citizen if he chose. the note of the last few decades in art and ethics has been that a man is stamped with an irrevocable psychology and is cramped for perpetuity in the prison of his skull. it was a world that expects everything and everybody. it was a world that encouraged anybody to be anything. and in england and literature its living expression was dickens. '_charles dickens._' february 8th that which is large enough for the rich to covet is large enough for the poor to defend. '_the napoleon of notting hill._' february 9th 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 is a good institution because it is uncongenial. it is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. it is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. it is exactly 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 is excitable, like mankind. our younger brother is mischievous, like mankind. grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world. '_heretics._' february 10th he said: 'if these were silent the very stones would cry out.' with these words he called up all the wealth of artistic creation that has been founded on this creed. with those words he founded gothic architecture. for in a town like this, which seems to have grown gothic as a wood grows leaves--anywhere and anyhow--any odd brick or moulding may be carved off into a shouting face. the front of vast buildings is thronged with open mouths, angels praising god, or devils defying him. rock itself is racked and twisted, until it seems to scream. the miracle is accomplished; the very stones cry out. '_tremendous trifles._' february 11th the chaos of habits that always goes with males when left entirely to themselves has only one honourable cure; and that is the strict discipline of a monastery. anyone who has seen our unhappy young idealists in east end settlements losing their collars in the wash and living on tinned salmon, will fully understand why it was decided by the wisdom of st. bernard or st. benedict that if men were to live without women, they must not live without rules. '_what's wrong with the world._' february 12th the british empire may annex what it likes, it will never annex england. it has not even discovered the island, let alone conquered it. '_tremendous trifles._' february 13th let it never be forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who has devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight thrilling battles and win hair-breadth victories for which he cannot have a whisper of praise. a really accomplished impostor is the most wretched of geniuses: he is a napoleon on a desert island. '_browning._' february 14th _st. valentine's day_ the revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. it is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. they appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a joke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being as it is a yoke consistently imposed on all lovers by themselves. they have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black _v._ white contradiction in two words--'free love'--as if a lover ever had been or ever could be free. it is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. modern sages offer to the lover with an ill-favoured grin the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens as the record of his highest moment. they give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants. '_the defendant._' february 15th london is the largest of the bloated modern cities; london is the smokiest; london is the dirtiest; london is, if you will, the most sombre; london is, if you will, the most miserable. but london is certainly the most amusing and the most amused. you may prove that we have the most tragedy; the fact remains that we have the most comedy, that we have the most farce. '_all things considered._' february 16th our fathers had a plain sort of pity: if you will, a gross and coarse pity. they had their own sort of sentimentalism. they were quite willing to weep over smike. but it certainly never occurred to them to weep over squeers. no doubt they were often narrow and often visionary. no doubt they often looked at a political formula when they should have looked at an elemental fact. no doubt they were pedantic in some of their principles and clumsy in some of their solutions. no doubt, in short, they were all very wrong, and no doubt we are the people and wisdom shall die with us. but when they saw something that in their eyes, such as they were, really violated their morality, such as it was, then they did not cry 'investigate!' they did not cry 'educate!' they did not cry 'improve!' they did not cry 'evolve!' like nicholas nickleby, they cried 'stop!' and it did stop. _introduction to 'nicholas nickleby.'_ february 17th some people do not like the word 'dogma.' fortunately they are free, and there is an alternative for them. there are two things, and two things only, for the human mind--a dogma and a prejudice. the middle ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. our age is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. a doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction. that an ox may be eaten, while a man should not be eaten, is a doctrine. that as little as possible of anything should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called an ideal. '_what's wrong with the world._' february 18th there are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique of another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. there are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often they are made. '_the defendant._' february 19th there are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds of democratic conception or sentiment of human equality. there are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. they are not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. but this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. and this, again, is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. no special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having to die. and no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of having two legs. every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it. and the universal test everywhere of whether a thing is popular, of the people, is whether it employs vigorously these extremes of the tragic and the comic. '_charles dickens._' february 20th now the reason why our fathers did not make marriage, in the middle-aged and static sense, the subject of their plays was a very simple one; it was that a play is a very bad place for discussing that topic. you cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or failure of a marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of the growth of an oak-tree or the decay of an empire. as polonius very reasonably observed, it is too long. a happy love-affair will make a drama simply because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or no. but a happy marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less happy if it were. the essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks herself an intense question; but the essence of a sensible wife is that she is much too sensible to ask herself any questions at all. all the things that make monogamy a success are in their nature undramatic things, the silent growth of an instinctive confidence, the common wounds and victories, the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing of old jokes. sane marriage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore not surprising that most modern dramatists have devoted themselves to insane marriage. '_george bernard shaw._' february 21st if americans can be divorced for 'incompatibility of temper,' i cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. i have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. the whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. for a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible. '_what's wrong with the world._' february 22nd of a sane man there is only one safe definition: he is a man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head. '_tremendous trifles._' february 23rd the artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. '_heretics._' february 24th it is constantly assumed, especially in our tolstoian tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. but that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. that is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. the real problem is--can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? that is the problem the church attempted; _that_ is the miracle she achieved. '_orthodoxy._' february 25th nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or the things on the retina of the eye, or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclopædias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come. _introduction to 'the old curiosity shop.'_ february 26th it is neither blood nor rain that has made england, but hope--the thing all those dead men have desired. france was not france because she was made to be by the skulls of the celts or by the sun of gaul. france was france because she chose. '_george bernard shaw._' february 27th a man must be partly a one-idead man because he is a one-weaponed man--and he is flung naked into the fight. in short, he must (as the books on success say) give 'his best'; and what a small part of a man 'his best' is! his second and third best are often much better. if he is the first violin he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountain-pen, a hand at whist, a gun, and an image of god. '_what's wrong with the world._' february 28th the wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the heavens, but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will grow, till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or stable. not till we know the high things shall we know how lovely they are. '_william blake._' march march 1st _st. david's day_ my eyes are void with vision; i sing but i cannot speak; i hide in the vaporous caverns like a creature wild and weak; but for ever my harps are tuned and for ever my songs are sung, and i answer my tyrants ever in an unknown tongue. when the blue men broke in the battle with the roman or the dane, in the cracks of my ghastly uplands they gathered like ghosts again. some say i am still a druid, some say my spirit shows catholic, puritan, pagan; but no man knows. mother of god's good witches, of all white mystery, whatever else i am seeking, i seek for thee. for the old harp better fitted and swung on a stronger thong, we, that shall sing for ever; o hear our song! '_the seven swords._' march 2nd it may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a 'many-faced and fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than to be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from mr. d'annunzio's downwards. '_the defendant._' march 3rd a man may easily be forgiven for not doing this or that incidental act of charity, especially when the question is as genuinely difficult and dubious as is the case of mendicity. but there is something quite pestilently pecksniffian about shrinking from a hard task on the plea that it is not hard enough. if a man will really try talking to the ten beggars who come to his door he will soon find out whether it is really so much easier than the labour of writing a cheque for a hospital. '_what's wrong with the world._' march 4th but the man we see every day--the worker in mr. gradgrind's factory, the little clerk in mr. gradgrind's office--he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom. he is kept quiet with revolutionary literature. he is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of wild philosophies. he is a marxian one day, a nietzscheite the next day, a superman (probably) the next day, and a slave every day. the only thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory. the only man who gains by all the philosophies is gradgrind. it would be worth his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied with sceptical literature. and now i come to think of it, of course, gradgrind is famous for giving libraries. he shows his sense: all modern books are on his side. as long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. no ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. the modern young man will never change his environment, for he will always change his mind. '_orthodoxy._' march 5th progress should mean that we are always walking towards the new jerusalem. it does mean that the new jerusalem is always walking away from us. we are not altering the real to suit the ideal. we are altering the ideal: it is easier. '_orthodoxy._' march 6th in a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, it is stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are--of immeasurable stature. '_the defendant._' march 7th thus because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to find the sepulchre of christ. but being in a civilization which does believe in this dogma of fact for fact's sake, we do not see the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the north pole. i am not speaking of a tenable ultimate utility, which is true both of the crusades and the polar explorations. i mean merely that we do see the superficial and æsthetic singularity, the startling quality, about the idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place where a man died. but we do not see the æsthetic singularity and the startling quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man can live--a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the meeting-place of some lines that do not exist. '_heretics._' march 8th in one of his least convincing phrases, nietzsche had said that just as the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately produce something higher than the man. the immediate answer, of course, is sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the man, so why should we worry about the superman? if the superman will come by natural selection, may we not leave it to natural selection? if the superman will come by human selection, what sort of superman are we to select? if he is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then zarathustra sinks into a sunday-school teacher; the only way we can work for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merciful--sensible advice, but hardly startling. if he is to be anything else than this, why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? these questions have been many times asked of the nietzscheites, and none of the nietzscheites have even attempted to answer them. '_george bernard shaw._' march 9th a man can be a christian to the end of the world, for the simple reason that a man could have been an atheist from the beginning of it. the materialism of things is on the face of things: it does not require any science to find it out. a man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. that is materialism, if you like. that is atheism, if you like. if mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything. but why our human lot is made any more hopeless because we know the names of the worms who eat him, or the names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover. '_all things considered._' march 10th we should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations. a child has no difficulty in achieving the miracle of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as marvellous as his accuracy. if we only adopted the same attitude towards premiers and chancellors of the exchequer, if we genially encouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper. '_the defendant._' march 11th when the working women in the poor districts come to the doors of the public-houses and try to get their husbands home, simple-minded 'social workers' always imagine that every husband is a tragic drunkard and every wife a broken-hearted saint. it never occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under coarser conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does when she tries to get the men from arguing over the cigars to come and gossip over the teacups. '_what's wrong with the world._' march 12th what have we done, and where have we wandered, we that have produced sages who could have spoken with socrates and poets who could walk with dante, that we should talk as if we had never done anything more intelligent than found colonies and kick niggers? we are the children of light, and it is we that sit in darkness. if we are judged, it will not be for the merely intellectual transgression of failing to appreciate other nations, but for the supreme spiritual transgression of failing to appreciate ourselves. '_the defendant._' march 13th and for those who talk to us with interfering eloquence about jaeger and the pores of the skin, and about plasmon and the coats of the stomach, at them shall only be hurled the words that are hurled at fops and gluttons, 'take no thought what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. for after all these things do the gentiles seek. but seek ye first the kingdom of god, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.' '_heretics._' march 14th the christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. but the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. the materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. materialists and madmen never have doubts. '_orthodoxy._' march 15th the modern world (intent on anarchy in everything, even in government) refuses to perceive the permanent element of tragic constancy which inheres in all passion, and which is the origin of marriage. marriage rests upon the fact that you cannot have your cake and eat it; that you cannot lose your heart and have it. _introduction to 'david copperfield.'_ march 16th morality did not begin by one man saying to another, 'i will not hit you if you do not hit me'; there _is_ no trace of such a transaction. there _is_ a trace of both men having said, 'we must not hit each other in the holy place.' they gained their morality by guarding their religion. they did not cultivate courage. they fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous. they did not cultivate cleanliness. they purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean. the history of the jews is the only early document known to most englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from that. the ten commandments which have been found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands; a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert. anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity. and only when they made a holy day for god did they find they had made a holiday for men. '_orthodoxy._' march 17th _st. patrick's day_ the average autochthonous irishman is close to patriotism because he is close to the earth; he is close to domesticity because he is close to the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology and elaborate ritual because he is close to the earth. in short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. '_george bernard shaw._' march 18th we men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. we owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty. if we catch sharks for food, let them be killed most mercifully; let anyone who likes love the sharks, and pet the sharks, and tie ribbons round their necks and give them sugar and teach them to dance. but if once a man suggests that a shark is to be valued against a sailor, or that the poor shark might be permitted to bite off a nigger's leg occasionally, then i would court-martial the man--he is a traitor to the ship. '_all things considered._' march 19th every statute is a declaration of war, to be backed by arms. every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. in a republic all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching. '_what's wrong with the world._' march 20th i have no sympathy with international aggression when it is taken seriously, but i have a certain dark and wild sympathy with it when it is quite absurd. raids are all wrong as practical politics, but they are human and imaginable as practical jokes. in fact, almost any act of ragging or violence can be forgiven on this strict condition--that it is of no use at all to anybody. if the aggression gets anything out of it, then it is quite unpardonable. it is damned by the least hint of utility or profit. a man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does not steal. a gentleman knocks off his friend's hat, but he does not annex his friend's hat. '_all things considered._' march 21st modern and cultured persons, i believe, object to their children seeing kitchen company or being taught by a woman like peggotty. but surely it is more important to be educated in a sense of human dignity and equality than in anything else in the world. and a child who has once had to respect a kind and capable woman of the lower classes will respect the lower classes for ever. the true way to overcome the evil in class distinctions is not to denounce them as revolutionists denounce them, but to ignore them as children ignore them. '_charles dickens._' march 22nd there is no clearer sign of the absence of originality among modern poets than their disposition to find new topics. really original poets write poems about the spring. they are always fresh, just as the spring is always fresh. men wholly without originality write poems about torture, or new religions, or some perversion of obscenity, hoping that the mere sting of the subject may speak for them. but we do not sufficiently realize that what is true of the classic ode is also true of the classic joke. a true poet writes about the spring being beautiful because (after a thousand springs) the spring really is beautiful. in the same way the true humorist writes about a man sitting down on his hat because the act of sitting down on one's own hat (however often and admirably performed) really is extremely funny. we must not dismiss a new poet because his poem is called 'to a skylark'; nor must we dismiss a humorist because his new farce is called 'my mother-in-law.' he may really have splendid and inspiring things to say upon an eternal problem. the whole question is whether he has. _introduction to 'sketches by boz.'_ march 23rd man is an exception, whatever else he is. if he is not the image of god, then he is a disease of the dust. if it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head. '_all things considered._' march 24th social reformers have fired a hundred shots against the public-house, but never one against its really shameful character. the sign of decay is not in the public-house, but in the private bar; or rather the row of five or six private bars, into each of which a respectable dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by indulging his own half-witted sin violates his own half-witted morality. nearly all these places are equipped with an atrocious apparatus of ground-glass windows which can be so closed that they practically conceal the face of the buyer from the seller. words cannot express the abysses of human infamy and hateful shame expressed by that elaborate piece of furniture. whenever i go into a public-house, which happens fairly often, i always carefully open all these apertures and then leave the place in every way refreshed. '_george bernard shaw._' march 25th _lady day_ fearfully plain the flowers grew, like a child's book to read, or like a friend's face seen in a glass. he looked, and there our lady was; she stood and stroked the tall live grass as a man strokes his steed. her face was like a spoken word when brave men speak and choose, the very colours of her coat were better than good news.... 'the gates of heaven are tightly locked, we do not guard our gain, the heaviest hind may easily come silently and suddenly upon me in a lane. 'and any little maid that walks in good thoughts apart, may break the guard of the three kings, and see the dear and dreadful things i hid within my heart.' '_ballad of alfred._' march 26th it is one of the mean and morbid modern lies that physical courage is connected with cruelty. the tolstoian and kiplingite are nowhere more at one than in maintaining this. they have, i believe, some small sectarian quarrel with each other: the one saying that courage must be abandoned because it is connected with cruelty, and the other maintaining that cruelty is charming because it is a part of courage. but it is all, thank god, a lie. an energy and boldness of body may make a man stupid or reckless or dull or drunk or hungry, but it does not make him spiteful. '_what's wrong with the world._' march 27th for human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. and they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. '_the napoleon of notting hill._' march 28th cruelty to animals is cruelty and a vile thing; but cruelty to a man is not cruelty; it is treason. tyranny over a man is not tyranny: it is rebellion, for man is royal. now, the practical weakness of the vast mass of modern pity for the poor and the oppressed is precisely that it is merely pity; the pity is pitiful, but not respectful. men feel that the cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. they never feel that it is injustice to equals; nay, it is treachery to comrades. this dark, scientific pity, this brutal pity, has an elemental sincerity of its own, but it is entirely useless for all ends of social reform. democracy swept europe with the sabre when it was founded upon the rights of man. it has done literally nothing at all since it has been founded only upon the wrongs of man. or, more strictly speaking, its recent failure has been due to its not admitting the existence of any rights or wrongs, or indeed of any humanity. evolution (the sinister enemy of revolution) does not especially deny the existence of god: what it does deny is the existence of man. and all the despair about the poor, and the cold and repugnant pity for them, has been largely due to the vague sense that they have literally relapsed into the state of the lower animals. '_charles dickens._' march 29th the modern humanitarian can love all opinions, but he cannot love all men; he seems sometimes, in the ecstasy of his humanitarianism, even to hate them all. he can love all opinions, including the opinion that men are unlovable. _introduction to 'hard times.'_ march 30th every man is dangerous who only cares for one thing. '_the napoleon of notting hill._' march 31st as mr. blatchford says, 'the world does not want piety, but soap--and socialism.' piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas soap and socialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class. '_what's wrong with the world._' april april 1st _all fools' day_ we shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of ourselves. for if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite certain that the effort is superfluous. '_the defendant._' april 2nd modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction--where it was never meant to be. a man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert--himself. the part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the divine reason. huxley preached a humility content to learn from nature. but the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. the truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. the old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping: not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. for the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. but the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether. '_orthodoxy._' april 3rd it is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments. i know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the reader to look at the modern man, as i have just looked at the modern man--in the looking-glass. is it really true that you and i are two starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past? have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth with a stone knife, through the greek citizen and the christian saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been sabred by the manchester yeomany or shot in the '48? are we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared? when we decline (in a marked manner) to fly the red flag and fire across a barricade like our grandfathers, are we really declining in deference to sociologists--or to soldiers? have we indeed outstripped the warrior and passed the ascetical saint? i fear we only outstrip the warrior in the sense that we should probably run away from him. and if we have passed the saint, i fear we have passed him without bowing. '_what's wrong with the world._' april 4th the prophet who is stoned is not a brawler or a marplot. he is simply a rejected lover. he suffers from an unrequited attachment to things in general. '_the defendant._' april 5th laughter and love are everywhere. the cathedrals, built in the ages that loved god, are full of blasphemous grotesques. the mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend. '_the napoleon of notting hill._' april 6th fairy-tales do not give a child his first idea of bogy. what fairy-tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogy. the baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. what the fairy-tale provides for him is a st. george to kill the dragon. exactly what the fairy-tale does is this: it accustoms him by a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors have a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these infinite enemies of man have enemies in the knights of god, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. when i was a child i have stared at the darkness until the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller than heaven. if there was one star in the sky it only made him a cyclops. but fairy-tales restored my mental health. for next day i read an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite equal dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similar inexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, some bad riddles, and a brave heart. '_tremendous trifles._' april 7th the full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. and if we have accepted everything we have missed something--war. this life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce. '_charles dickens._' april 8th the old religionists tortured men physically for a moral truth. the new realists torture men morally for a physical truth. '_tremendous trifles._' april 9th 'i sincerely maintain that nature-worship is more morally dangerous than the most vulgar man-worship of the cities; since it can easily be perverted into the worship of an impersonal mystery, carelessness, or cruelty. thoreau would have been a jollier fellow if he had devoted himself to a green-grocer instead of to greens.' '_alarms and discursions._' april 10th suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something--let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. a grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the middle ages, is approached on the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the schoolmen, 'let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of light. if light be in itself good----' at this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. all the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmedieval practicality. but as things go on they do not work out so easily. some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. and there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. so, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of light. only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp we must now discuss in the dark. '_heretics._' april 11th his soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of. he will make himself happy in the traps that have been laid for him; he will roll in their nets and sleep. all doors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere courage. the whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase--he will be always 'taken in.' to be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. it is the hospitality of circumstance. with torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by life. and the sceptic is cast out by it. '_charles dickens._' april 12th you cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular. a brilliant anarchist like mr. john davidson felt an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will--will to anything. he only wants humanity to want something. but humanity does want something. it wants ordinary morality. he rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything. but we _have_ willed something. we have willed the law against which he rebels. '_orthodoxy._' april 13th i have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. wine might stand for genuine catholicism, and ale for genuine protestantism; for these at least are real religions with comfort and strength in them. clean cold agnosticism would be clean cold water--an excellent thing if you can get it. most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water--which is a fuss about nothing. mr. bernard shaw's philosophy is exactly like black coffee--it awakens, but it does not really inspire. modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one's contempt for it in stronger terms than that. sometimes one may come across something that may honestly be compared to milk, an ancient and heathen mildness, an earthly yet sustaining mercy--the milk of human kindness. you can find it in a few pagan poets and a few old fables; but it is everywhere dying out. '_william blake._' april 14th as it is in politics with the specially potent man, so it is in history with the specially learned. we do not need the learned man to teach us the important things. we all know the important things, though we all violate and neglect them. gigantic industry, abysmal knowledge are needed for the discovery of the tiny things--the things that seem hardly worth the trouble. generally speaking, the ordinary man should be content with the terrible secret that men are men--which is another way of saying that they are brothers. '_illustrated london news._' april 15th the women were of the kind vaguely called emancipated, and professed some protest against male supremacy. yet these new women would always pay to a man the extraordinary compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him--that of listening while he is talking. '_the man who was thursday._' april 16th whatever the merits or demerits of the pantheistic sentiment of melting into nature of 'oneness' (i think they call it) with seas and skies, it is not and it never has been a popular sentiment. it has been the feeling of a few learned aesthetes or secluded naturalists. popular poetry is all against pantheism and quite removed from immanence. it is all about the beautiful earth as an edge or fringe of something much better and quite distinct. ballads and carols do not go to the tune of 'one with the essence of the boundless world.' ballads and carols go to the tune of 'over the hills and far away;' the sense that life leads by a strange and special path to something sacred and separate. '_daily news._' april 17th how high the sea of human happiness rose in the middle ages, we now only know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. how low human happiness sank in the twentieth century, our children will only know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. humanity never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. it is strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men to a banquet with spears. '_george bernard shaw._' april 18th if a god does come upon the earth, he will descend at the sight of the brave. our prostrations and litanies are of no avail; our new moons and sabbaths are an abomination. the great man will come when all of us are feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. he will ride in at some splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without him. '_charles dickens._' april 19th _primrose day_ if the great jew who led the english tories understood patriotism (as i do not doubt that he did) it must have been a decidedly special and peculiar kind of patriotism, and it necessarily laid him open to the mistake about the relative positions of the terms emperor and king. to him no doubt emperor seemed obviously a higher title; just as brother of the sun and moon would have seemed to him a higher title than second cousin of the evening star. among orientals all such titles are towering and hyperbolical. but of kingship as it has been felt among christian men he had no notion, and small blame to him. he did not understand the domestic, popular, and priestly quality in the thing; the idea expressed in the odd old phrase of being the breath of his people's nostrils; the mystical life pumped through the lungs and framework of a state. '_illustrated london news._' april 20th 'i know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that only one or two may rightly use, and only seldom. it is a fairy wand of great fear, stronger than those who use it--often frightful, often wicked to use. but whatever is touched with it is never again wholly common; whatever is touched with it takes a magic from outside the world. it has made mean landscapes magnificent and hovels outlast cathedrals. the touch of it is the finger of a strange perfection. 'there it is!'--he pointed to the floor where his sword lay flat and shining. '_the napoleon of notting hill._' april 21st there are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make men rich; the only 'instinct' i know of which does it is that instinct which theological christianity crudely describes as 'the sin of avarice.' '_all things considered_.' april 22nd it is a common saying that anything may happen behind our backs: transcendentally considered, the thing has an eerie truth about it. eden may be behind our backs, or fairyland. but this mystery of the human back has, again, its other side in the strange impression produced on those behind: to walk behind anyone along a lane is a thing that, properly speaking, touches the oldest nerve of awe. watts has realized this as no one in art or letters has realized it in the whole history of the world; it has made him great. there is one possible exception to his monopoly of this magnificent craze. two thousand years before, in the dark scriptures of a nomad people, it had been said that their prophet saw the immense creator of all things, but only saw him from behind. '_g. f. watts._' april 23rd _st. george's day_ i see you how you smile in state straight from the peak to plymouth bar; you need not tell me you are great, i know how more than great you are. i know what spirit chaucer was; i have seen gainsborough and the grass. '_tremendous trifles._' april 24th there is no fear that a modern king will attempt to override the constitution: it is more likely that he will ignore the constitution and work behind its back. he will take no advantage of his kingly power: it is more likely that he will take advantage of his kingly powerlessness--of the fact that he is free from criticism and publicity. for the king is the most private person of our time. it will not be necessary for anyone to fight against the proposal of a censorship of the press. we do not need a censorship of the press. we have a censorship by the press. '_orthodoxy._' april 25th _st mark's day_ the only thing still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the new theology. '_orthodoxy._' april 26th the modern man thought becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor. but then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. the modern man found the church too simple exactly where life is too complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy. the man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entrées. the man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers. and surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. if there was any insanity at all, it was in the extravagant entrées, not in the bread and wine. '_orthodoxy._' april 27th the two things that a healthy person hates most between heaven and hell are a woman who is not dignified and a man who is. '_all things considered._' april 28th for those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added. even for those who cannot do their work in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional. but that is not the caution i mean. the caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all. i do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. but if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. if he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac. '_tremendous trifles._' april 29th the creed of our cruel cities is not so sane and just as the creed of the old country-side; but the people are just as clever in giving names to their sins in the city as in giving names to their joys in the wilderness. one could not better sum up christianity than by calling a small white insignificant flower 'the star of bethlehem.' but then again one could not better sum up the philosophy deduced from darwinism than in the one verbal picture of 'having your monkey up.' '_daily news._' april 30th _st. catherine of siena's day_ historic christianity rose into a high and strange _coup de théâtre_ of morality--things that are to virtue what the crimes of nero are to vice. the spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible and attractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the plantagenets, to the sublime pity of st. catherine, who, in the official shambles, kissed the bloody head of the criminal. our ethical teachers write reasonably for prison reform; but we are not likely to see mr. cadbury, or any eminent philanthropist, go into reading jail to embrace the strangled corpse before it is cast into the quicklime. our ethical teachers write wildly against the power of millionaires, but we are not likely to see mr. rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly whipped in westminster abbey. '_orthodoxy._' may may 1st _labour day_ it may be we shall rise the last as frenchmen rose the first; our wrath come after russia's, and our wrath be the worst. it may be we are set to mark by our riot and our rest god's scorn of all man's governance: it may be beer is best. but we are the people of england, and we never have spoken yet. mock at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget. '_the silent people._' may 2nd if drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, i admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the cathedral of amiens or drudge behind a gun at trafalgar. but if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colourless, and of small import to the soul, then, as i say, i give it up: i do not know what the word means. to be queen elizabeth within a definite area--deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be whiteley within a certain area--providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes, and books; to be aristotle within a certain area--teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene: i can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but i cannot imagine how it could narrow it. '_what's wrong with the world._' may 3rd since it is lawful to pray for the coming of the kingdom, it is lawful also to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restore the kingdom. it is lawful to hope to hear the wind of heaven in the trees. it is lawful to pray, 'thine anger come on earth as it is in heaven.' '_tremendous trifles._' may 4th happy is he and more than wise who sees with wondering eyes and clean this world through all the grey disguise of sleep and custom in between. yes; we may pass the heavenly screen, but shall we know when we are there? who know not what these dead stones mean, the lovely city of lierre. '_tremendous trifles._' may 5th anomalies do matter very much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract illogicalities do matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm: and this for a reason that anyone at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself. all injustice begins in the mind: and anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. suppose i had by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in battersea to nod his head three times before he got out of bed: the practical politicians might say that this power was a harmless anomaly, that it was not a grievance. it could do my subjects no harm; it could do me no good. the people of battersea, they would say, might safely submit to it; but the people of battersea could not safely submit to it, for all that. if i had nodded their heads for them for fifty years, i could cut off their heads for them at the end of it with immeasurably greater ease; for there would have permanently sunk into every man's mind the notion that it was a natural thing for me to have a fantastic and irrational power. they would have grown accustomed to insanity. '_all things considered._' may 6th ireland is a country in which the political conflicts are at least genuine: they are about something. they are about patriotism, about religion, or about money: the three great realities. in other words, they are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives in, or with what universe a man lives in, or how he is to manage to live in either. but they are not concerned with which of two wealthy cousins in the same governing class shall be allowed to bring in the same parish councils bill. '_george bernard shaw._' may 7th maeterlinck is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual tremors as messrs. crosse & blackwell are in filling a man with jam. but it all depends on what you want to be filled with. lord rosebery, being a modern sceptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. i, being an orthodox christian, prefer the jam. '_what's wrong with the world._' may 8th the world is not a lodging-house at brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. it is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. the point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more. all optimistic thoughts about england and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the english patriot. similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot. '_orthodoxy._' may 9th it is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. it is not natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half a town with typhoid fever. the theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. it is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but once admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but philosophy, ethics, and finally, poetry. '_browning._' may 10th whatever makes men feel old is mean--an empire or a skin-flint shop. whatever makes men feel young is great--a great war or a love-story. and in the darkest of the books of god there is written a truth that is also a riddle. it is of the new things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. it is the old things that startle and intoxicate. it is the old things that are young. there is no sceptic who does not feel that men have doubted before. there is no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are ancient. there is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. but we who do the old things are fed by nature with a perpetual infancy. no man who is in love thinks that anyone has been in love before. no woman who has a child thinks there have been such things as children. no people that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires. '_the napoleon of notting hill._' may 11th most of us have suffered from a certain sort of lady who, by her perverse unselfishness, gives more trouble than the selfish; who almost clamours for the unpopular dish and scrambles for the worst seat. most of us have known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss of self-effacement. '_what's wrong with the world._' may 12th it is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the metropolis to cheap novelettes. if some grimy urchin runs away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's knowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary researches. the boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from young people possessed of no little native humour. if i had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence of mr. george moore's novels, i should find the greatest entertainment in the diversion. at any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books. '_the defendant._' may 13th soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit: they are never worshippers of force. soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. the fact is obvious: the might is in the hundred men who obey. the right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them. they learn to obey symbols, arbitrary things, stripes on an arm, buttons on a coat, a title, a flag. these may be artificial things; they may be unreasonable things; they may, if you will, be wicked things; but they are not weak things. they are not force, and they do not look like force. they are parts of an idea, of the idea of discipline; if you will, of the idea of tyranny; but still an idea. no soldier could possibly say that his own bayonets were his authority. no soldier could possibly say that he came in the name of his own bayonets. it would be as absurd as if a postman said that he came inside his bag. i do not, as i have said, underrate the evils that really do arise from militarism and the military ethic. it tends to give people wooden faces and sometimes wooden heads. it tends, moreover (both through its specialization and through its constant obedience), to a certain loss of real independence and strength of character. this has almost always been found when people made the mistake of turning the soldier into a statesman, under the mistaken impression that he was a strong man. the duke of wellington, for instance, was a strong soldier and therefore a weak statesman. but the soldier is always, by the nature of things, loyal to something. and as long as one is loyal to something one can never be a worshipper of mere force. for mere force, violence in the abstract, is the enemy of anything we love. to love anything is to see it at once under lowering skies of danger. loyalty implies loyalty in misfortune; and when a soldier has accepted any nation's uniform he has already accepted its defeat. '_all things considered._' may 14th now, i have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. what i have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. i am still as much concerned as ever about the battle of armageddon; but i am not so much concerned about the general election. as a babe i leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere mention of it. no; the vision is always solid and reliable. the vision is always a fact. it is the reality that is often a fraud. as much as i ever did, i believe in liberalism. but there was a rosy time of innocence when i believed in liberals. '_orthodoxy._' may 15th distribute the dignified people and the capable people and the highly business-like people among all the situations which their ambition or their innate corruption may demand, but keep close to your heart, keep deep in your inner councils the absurd people; let the clever people pretend to govern you, let the unimpeachable people pretend to advise you, but let the fools alone influence you; let the laughable people whose faults you see and understand be the only people who are really inside your life, who really come near you or accompany you on your lonely march towards the last impossibility. _introduction to 'david copperfield.'_ may 16th philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through divinity and greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. nearly all the more awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable, from 'a child is born' to 'a soul is damned.' if the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it? '_george bernard shaw._' may 17th keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. '_orthodoxy._' may 18th _george meredith died_ the trees thinned and fell away from each other, and i came out into deep grass and a road. i remember being surprised that the evening was so far advanced; i had a fancy that this valley had a sunset all to itself. i went along that road according to directions that had been given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling, beyond which the wood changed only faintly to a garden. it was as if the curious courtesy and fineness of that character i was to meet went out from him upon the valley; for i felt on all these things the finger of that quality which the old english called 'faerie'; it is the quality which those can never understand who think of the past as merely brutal; it is an ancient elegance such as there is in trees. i went through the garden and saw an old man sitting by a table, looking smallish in his big chair. he was already an invalid, and his hair and beard were both white; not like snow, for snow is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even fierce; rather they were white like white thistledown. i came up quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand, and i saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young. he was the one great man of the old world whom i have met who was not a mere statue over his own grave. he was deaf and he talked like a torrent. he did not talk about the books he had written; he was far too much alive for that. he talked about the books he had not written. he unrolled a purple bundle of romances which he had never had time to sell. he asked me to write one of the stories for him, as he would have asked the milkman, if he had been talking to the milkman. it was a splendid and frantic story, a sort of astronomical farce. it was all about a man who was rushing up to the royal society with the only possible way of avoiding an earth-destroying comet; and it showed how, even on this huge errand, the man was tripped up at every other minute by his own weaknesses and vanities; how he lost a train by trifling or was put in gaol for brawling. that is only one of them; there were ten or twenty more. another, i dimly remember, was a version of the fall of parnell; the idea that a quite honest man might be secret from a pure love of secrecy, of solitary self-control. i went out of that garden with a blurred sensation of the million possibilities of creative literature. the feeling increased as my way fell back into the wood; for a wood is a palace with a million corridors that cross each other everywhere. i really had the feeling that i had seen the creative quality; which is supernatural. i had seen what virgil calls the old man of the forest: i had seen an elf. the trees thronged behind my path; i have never seen him again; and now i shall not see him, because he died last tuesday. '_tremendous trifles._' may 19th _gladstone died_ lift up your heads: in life, in death, god knoweth his head was high; quit we the coward's broken breath who watched a strong man die. oh, young ones of a darker day, in art's wan colours clad, whose very love and hate are grey- whose very sin is sad, pass on; one agony long drawn was merrier than your mirth, when hand-in-hand came death and dawn and spring was on the earth. '_to them that mourn._' may 20th if the authors and publishers of 'dick deadshot,' and such remarkable works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught at a university extension lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. it is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. if the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstall in whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. these things are our luxuries. and with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal german professors) whether morality is valid at all. at the very instant that we curse the penny dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft.... at the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving. '_the defendant._' may 21st the english nation will still be going the way of all european nations when the anglo-saxon race has gone the way of all fads. '_heretics._' may 22nd the public does not like bad literature. the public likes a certain kind of literature, and likes that kind even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good. nor is this unreasonable; for the line between different types of literature is as real as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people who can only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is as irrational as to offer a man who is shivering over weak, warm coffee a really superior sort of ice. '_charles dickens._' may 23rd to-morrow is the gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored in the shining shield of yesterday. if he sees it directly he is turned to stone. this has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. the calvinists, with their perfect creed of predestination, were turned to stone; the modern sociological scientists (with their excruciating eugenics) are turned to stone. the only difference is that the puritans make dignified, and the eugenists somewhat amusing, statues. '_what's wrong with the world._' may 24th _empire day_ i for one should be sincerely glad if we could have a national celebration, remembering our real achievements and reminding ourselves of our real work in the world. only for any such national celebration i should suggest two conditions: first, that our national celebration should be invented by our nation and not by another nation. and secondly, that it should be forced by the people on the newspaper proprietors, and not by the newspaper proprietors on the people. '_illustrated london news._' may 25th there is no hope for men who do not boast that their wives bully them. '_alarms and discursions._' may 26th _st. augustine of england's day_ if our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. but the christian church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. she took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch, and she taught them to invent the gothic arch. in a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the church is the thing we have all heard said of it. how can we say that the church wishes to bring us back into the dark ages? the church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them. '_orthodoxy._' may 27th one sun is splendid: six suns would be only vulgar. one tower of giotto is sublime: a row of towers of giotto would be only like a row of white posts. the poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature, in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love, in following the single woman; the poetry of religion, in worshipping the single star. '_tremendous trifles._' may 28th boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales--because they find them romantic. in fact, a baby is about the only person, i should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. '_orthodoxy._' may 29th _the restoration_ it is a commonplace that the restoration movement can only be understood when considered as a reaction against puritanism. but it is insufficiently realized that the tyranny which half frustrated all the good work of puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. it was not the fire of puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of restraint, which passed away: that still burns in the heart of england, only to be quenched by the final overwhelming sea. but it is seldom remembered that the puritans were in their day emphatically intellectual bullies, that they relied swaggeringly on the logical necessity of calvinism, that they bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism. the puritans fell, through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life, through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never satisfy. '_twelve types._' may 30th _blessed joan of arc_ joan of arc was not stuck at the cross roads either by rejecting all the paths like tolstoy or by accepting them all like nietzsche. she chose a path and went down it like a thunderbolt. yet joan, when i come to think of her, had in her all that was true either in tolstoy or nietzsche--all that was even tolerable in either of them. i thought of all that is noble in tolstoy: the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. joan of arc had all that, and with this great addition: that she endured poverty while she admired it, whereas tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. and then i thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor nietzsche and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. i thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. well, joan of arc had all that; and, again, with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. we _know_ that she was not afraid of an army, while nietzsche for all we know was afraid of a cow. tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. she beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing. '_orthodoxy._' may 31st our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. if it wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than i know, but who can feel the things that i felt in the jury-box. when it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. but when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. the same thing was done, if i remember right, by the founder of christianity. '_tremendous trifles._' june june 1st the great lords will refuse the english peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, if they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary grounds. they will deny him the three acres on grounds of state ownership. they will forbid him the cow on grounds of humanitarianism. '_what's wrong with the world._' june 2nd life is a thing too glorious to be enjoyed. '_george bernard shaw._' june 3rd i remember an artistic and eager lady asking me, in her grand green drawing-room, whether i believed in comradeship between the sexes, and why not. i was driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer: 'because if i were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade, you would turn me out of the house.' '_what's wrong with the world._' june 4th every man of us to-day is three men. there is in every modern european three powers so distinct as to be almost personal--the trinity of our earthly destiny. the three may be rudely summarized thus: first and nearest to us is the christian, the man of the historic church, of the creed that must have coloured our minds incurably whether we regard it as the crown and combination of the other two, or whether we regard it as an accidental superstition which has remained for two thousand years. first, then, comes the christian; behind him comes the roman--the citizen of that great cosmopolitan realm of reason and order, in the level and equality of which christianity arose. he is the stoic who is so much sterner than the ancorites. he is the republican who is so much prouder than kings. it is he that makes straight roads and clear laws, and for whom good sense is good enough. and the third man: he has no name, and all true tales of him are blotted out; yet he walks behind us in every forest path and wakes within us when the wind wakes at night. he is the origins--he is the man in the forest. '_william blake._' june 5th the right and proper thing, of course, is that every good patriot should stop at home and curse his own country. so long as that is being done everywhere, we may be sure that things are fairly happy, and being kept up to a reasonably high standard. so long as we are discontented separately we may be well content as a whole. '_illustrated london news._' june 6th i have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. it is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. it is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. the man who quotes some german historian against the tradition of the catholic church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. he is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. it is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. the legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. the book is generally written by the one man in the village, who is mad. those who urge against tradition--that men in the past were ignorant--may go and urge it at the carlton club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. it will not do for us. if we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes--our ancestors. it is the democracy of the dead. tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. all democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth: tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom: tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. _'orthodoxy.'_ june 7th you hold that your heretics and sceptics have helped the world forward and handed on a lamp of progress. i deny it. nothing is plainer from real history than that each of your heretics invented a complete cosmos of his own which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces. who knows now exactly what nestorius taught? who cares? there are only two things that we know for certain about it. the first is that nestorius, as a heretic, taught something quite opposite to the teaching of arius, the heretic who came before him, and something quite useless to james turnbull, the heretic who comes after. i defy you to go back to the freethinkers of the past and find any habitation for yourself at all. i defy you to read godwin or shelley, or the deists of the eighteenth century, or the nature-worshipping humanists of the renaissance, without discovering that you differ from them twice as much as you differ from the pope. you are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are always telling me that i ignore the cruelty of nature. if you had been an eighteenth-century sceptic you would have told me that i ignore the kindness and benevolence of nature. you are an atheist, and you praise the deists of the eighteenth century. read them instead of praising them, and you will find that their whole universe stands or falls with the deity. you are a materialist, and you think bruno a scientific hero. see what he said, and you will think him an insane mystic. no; the great freethinker, with his genuine ability and honesty, does not in practice destroy christianity. what he does destroy is the freethinker who went before. _'the ball and the cross.'_ june 8th when the old liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be made. their view was that cosmic truth was so important that everyone ought to bear independent testimony. the modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what anyone says. the former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating. never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now, when, for the first time, anyone can discuss it. _'heretics.'_ june 9th _dickens died_ the hour of absinthe is over. we shall not be much further troubled with the little artists who found dickens too sane for their sorrows and too clean for their delights. but we have a long way to travel before we get back to what dickens meant; and the passage is along an english rambling road--a twisting road such as mr. pickwick travelled. but this at least is part of what he meant: that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel, but that rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which, through god, shall endure for ever. the inn does not point to the road: the road points to the inn. and all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet dickens and all his characters. and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world. _'charles dickens.'_ june 10th i have always been inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people rather than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which i belong. i prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside. i would always trust the old wives' fables against the old maids' facts. as long as wit is mother-wit it can be as wild as it pleases. _'orthodoxy.'_ june 11th however far aloft a man may go he is still looking up, not only at god (which is obvious), but in a manner at men also: seeing more and more all that is towering and mysterious in the dignity and destiny of the lonely house of adam.... so it may be hoped, until we die, you and i will always look up rather than down at the labours and habitations of our race; we will lift up our eyes to the valleys from whence cometh our help. for from every special eminence 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. _'alarms and discursions.'_ june 12th there is more of the song and music of mankind in a clerk putting on his sunday clothes than in a fanatic running naked down cheapside. _'william blake.'_ june 13th if we are to save the oppressed, we must have two apparently antagonistic emotions in us at the same time. we must think the oppressed man intensely miserable, and at the same time intensely attractive and important. we must insist with violence upon his degradation; we must insist with the same violence upon his dignity. for if we relax by one inch the one assertion, men will say he does not need saving. and if we relax by one inch the other assertion men will say he is not worth saving. the optimists will say that reform is needless. the pessimists will say that reform is hopeless. we must apply both simultaneously to the same oppressed man; we must say that he is a worm and a god; and we must thus lay ourselves open to the accusation (or the compliment) of transcendentalism. _'charles dickens.'_ june 14th you say your civilization will include all talents. will it? do you really mean to say that at the moment when the esquimaux has learnt to vote for a county council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus? _'the napoleon of notting hill.'_ june 15th 'certainly, it is untrue that three is no company. three is splendid company. three is the ideal number for pure comradeship: as in the 'three musketeers.' but if you reject the proverb altogether; if you say that two and three are the same sort of company; if you cannot see that there is a wider abyss between two and three than between three and three million--then i regret to inform you that you shall have no company either of two or three, but shall be alone in a howling desert till you die.' _'alarms and discursions.'_ june 16th blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends on a philosophical conviction. blasphemy depends upon belief, and is fading with it. if anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about thor. i think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion. _'heretics.'_ june 17th just as the rivalry of armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties is only a sort of sulky inheritance. men have votes, so women must soon have votes; poor children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed by force; the police shut public-houses by twelve o'clock, so soon they must shut them by eleven o'clock; children stop at school till they are fourteen, so soon they will stop till they are forty. no gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ june 18th _waterloo day_ the time of big theories was the time of big results. in the era of sentiment and fine words, at the end of the eighteenth century, men were really robust and effective. the sentimentalists conquered napoleon. the cynics could not catch de wet. a hundred years ago our affairs for good or evil were wielded triumphantly by rhetoricians. now our affairs are hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men. _'heretics.'_ june 19th herein lies the peculiar significance, the peculiar sacredness even, of penny dreadfuls and the common printed matter made for our errand-boys. here in dim and desperate forms, under the ban of our base culture, stormed at by silly magistrates, sneered at by silly schoolmasters--here is the old popular literature still popular; here is the unmistakable voluminousness, the thousand-and-one tales of dick deadshot, like the thousand-and-one tales of robin hood. here is the splendid and static boy, the boy who remains a boy through a thousand volumes and a thousand years. here in mean alleys and dim shops, shadowed and shamed by the police, mankind is still driving its dark trade in heroes. and elsewhere, and in all ages, in braver fashion, under cleaner skies, the same eternal tale-telling still goes on, and the whole mortal world is a factory of immortals. _'charles dickens.'_ june 20th there are two very curious things which the critic of life may observe. the first is the fact that there is one real difference between men and women: that women prefer to talk in two's, while men prefer to talk in three's. the second is that when you find (as you often do) three young cads and idiots going about together and getting drunk together every day, you generally find that one of the three cads and idiots is (for some extraordinary reason) not a cad and not an idiot. in those small groups devoted to a drivelling dissipation there is almost always one man who seems to have condescended to his company: one man who, while he can talk a foul triviality with his fellows, can also talk politics with a socialist, or philosophy with a catholic. _'tremendous trifles.'_ june 21st mankind has in nearly all places and periods seen that there is a soul and a body as plainly as that there is a sun and moon. but because a narrow protestant sect called materialists declared for a short time that there was no soul, another narrow protestant sect called christian scientist is now maintaining that there is no body. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ june 22nd those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it. _'tremendous trifles.'_ june 23rd only the christian church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. for she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man. further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous of all is the commodious environment. i know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. i know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. but if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest: if, in short, we assume the words of christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, his words must at the very least mean this--that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. _'orthodoxy.'_ june 24th _midsummer day_ o well for him that loves the sun, that sees the heaven-race ridden or run, the splashing seas of sunset won, and shouts for victory. god made the sun to crown his head, and when death's dart at last is sped, at least it will not find him dead, and pass the carrion by. o ill for him that loves the sun; shall the sun stoop for anyone? shall the sun weep for hearts undone or heavy souls that pray? not less for us and everyone was that white web of splendour spun; o well for him who loves the sun although the sun should slay. _'ballad of the sun.'_ june 25th a man's good work is effected by doing what he does: a woman's by being what she is. _'robert browning.'_ june 26th if the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid. it has been left for the modern mobs of anglicans and nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it. _'heretics.'_ june 27th from the time of the first fairy tales men had always believed ideally in equality; they had always thought that something ought to be done, if anything could be done, to redress the balance between cinderella and the ugly sisters. the irritating thing about the french was not that they said this ought to be done: everybody said that. the irritating thing about the french was that they did it. _introduction to 'hard times.'_ june 28th my lady clad herself in grey, that caught and clung about her throat; then all the long grey winter-day on me a living splendour smote; and why grey palmers holy are, and why grey minsters great in story, and grey skies ring the morning star, and grey hairs are a crown of glory. my lady clad herself in green, like meadows where the wind-waves pass; then round my spirit spread, i ween, a splendour of forgotten grass. then all that dropped of stem or sod, hoarded as emeralds might be, i bowed to every bush, and trod amid the live grass fearfully. my lady clad herself in blue, then on me, like the seer long gone, the likeness of a sapphire grew, the throne of him that sat thereon. then knew i why the fashioner splashed reckless blue on sky and sea; and ere 'twas good enough for her, he tried it on eternity. beneath the gnarled old knowledge-tree sat, like an owl, the evil sage: 'the world's a bubble,' solemnly he read, and turned a second page. 'a bubble, then, old crow,' i cried, 'god keep you in your weary wit! a bubble--have you ever spied the colours i have seen on it?' _'a chord of colour.'_ june 29th _st. peter's day_ when christ at a symbolic moment was establishing his great society, he chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant paul nor the mystic john, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward--in a word, a man. and upon this rock he has built his church, and the gates of hell have not prevailed against it. all the empires and the kingdoms have failed because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. but this one thing--the historic christian church--was founded upon a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. for no chain is stronger than its weakest link. _'heretics.'_ june 30th there are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the æsthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. and it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. it must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the alps among the silences of stars and snows. all around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats; but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships. _'the defendant.'_ july july 1st the average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. a man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. a man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. if he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into his vote. if he has ever heard splendid songs, they should be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross. but as it is, the difficulty with english democracy at all elections is that it is something less than itself. the question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. the point is that only a minority of the voter votes. _'tremendous trifles.'_ july 2nd modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. the ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. they began with the fact of sin--a fact as practical as potatoes. whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. but certain religious leaders in london, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of christian theology which can really be proved. some followers of the reverend r. j. campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. but they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. the strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. if it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions: he must either deny the existence of god, as all atheists do, or he must deny the present union between god and man, as all christians do. the new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat. _'orthodoxy.'_ july 3rd the love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as the love of those whom we do know. in our friends the richness of life is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the richness of life is proved to us by a hint of what we have lost. _'robert browning.'_ july 4th _independence day_ the old anglo-american quarrel was much more fundamentally friendly than most anglo-american alliances. each nation understood the other enough to quarrel. in our time, neither nation understands itself even enough to quarrel. _introduction to 'american notes.'_ july 5th it is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. we announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. we do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that the moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. that the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. but journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters 'mr. wilkinson still safe,' or 'mr. jones of worthing, not dead yet.' they cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. they cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not dissolved. hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious: they can only represent what is unusual. however democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority. _'the ball and the cross.'_ july 6th happy, who like ulysses or that lord that raped the fleece, returning full and sage, with usage and the world's wide reason stored, with his own kin can wait the end of age. when shall i see, when shall i see, god knows! my little village smoke; or pass the door, the old dear door of that unhappy house that is to me a kingdom and much more? mightier to me the house my fathers made than your audacious heads, o halls of rome! more than immortal marbles undecayed, the thin sad slates that cover up my home; more than your tiber is my loire to me, than palatine my little lyré there; and more than all the winds of all the sea the quiet kindness of the angevin air. _translation from 'du bellay.'_ july 7th it is a great mistake to suppose that love unites and unifies men. love diversifies them, because love is directed towards individuality. the thing that really unites men and makes them like to each other is hatred. thus, for instance, the more we love germany the more pleased we shall be that germany should be something different from ourselves, should keep her own ritual and conviviality and we ours. but the more we hate germany the more we shall copy german guns and german fortifications in order to be armed against germany. the more modern nations detest each other the more meekly they follow each other; for all competition is in its nature only a furious plagiarism. _'charles dickens.'_ july 8th the temporary decline of theology had involved the neglect of philosophy and all fine thinking, and bernard shaw had to find shaky justifications in schopenhauer for the sons of god shouting for joy. he called it the will to live--a phrase invented by prussian professors who would like to exist but can't. _'george bernard shaw.'_ july 9th there are only two kinds of social structure conceivable--personal government and impersonal government. if my anarchic friends will not have rules, they will have rulers. preferring personal government, with its tact and flexibility, is called royalism. preferring impersonal government, with its dogmas and definitions, is called republicanism. objecting broad-mindedly both to kings and creeds is called bosh--at least, i know no more philosophic word for it. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ july 10th now, i have no particular objection to people who take the gilt off the gingerbread: if only for this excellent reason--that i am much fonder of gingerbread than i am of gilt. but there are some objections to this task when it becomes a crusade or an obsession. one of them is this: that people who have really scraped the gilt off the gingerbread generally waste the rest of their lives in attempting to scrape the gilt off gigantic lumps of gold. such has too often been the case with shaw. he can, if he likes, scrape the romance off the armaments of europe or the party system of great britain; but he cannot scrape the romance off love or military valour, because it is all romance, and three thousand miles thick. _'george bernard shaw.'_ july 11th 'the church is not a thing like the athenæum club,' he cried. 'if the athenæum club lost all its members, the athenæum club would dissolve and cease to exist. but when we belong to the church we belong to something which is outside all of us: which is outside everything you talk about, outside the cardinals and the pope. they belong to it, but it does not belong to them. if we all fell dead suddenly, the church would still somehow exist in god.' _'the ball and the cross.'_ july 12th of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the inner light. of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. anyone who knows anybody knows how it would work; anyone who knows anyone from the higher thought centre knows how it does work. that jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that jones shall worship jones. let jones worship the sun or moon--anything rather than the inner light; let jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. christianity came into the world, firstly, in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. the only fun of being a christian was that a man was not left alone with the inner light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. _'orthodoxy.'_ july 13th the slum novelist gains his effects by describing the same grey mist as draping the dingy factory and the dingy tavern. but to the man he is supposed to be studying there must be exactly the same difference between the factory and the tavern that there is to a middle-class man between a late night at the office and a supper at pagani's. _'heretics.'_ july 14th _the fall of the bastille_ the destruction of the bastille was not a reform: it was something more important than a reform. it was an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image. the people saw the building like a giant looking at them with a score of eyes, and they struck at it as at a carved face. for of all the shapes in which that immense illusion called materialism can terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive is that of the big building. man feels like a fly, an accident in the thing he has himself made. it requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man could unmake it. therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual, and a ritual, meaning far beyond its immediate political results. it is a religious service. if, for instance, the socialists were numerous or courageous enough to capture and smash up the bank of england you might argue for ever about the inutility of the act, and how it really did not touch the root of the economic problem in the correct manner. but mankind would never forget it. it would change the world. _'tremendous trifles.'_ july 15th _st. swithin's day_ only in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called weather--beautiful and changeable as a woman. the great english landscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is english) have this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures: it is the subject of their pictures. they paint portraits of the weather. the weather sat to constable; the weather posed for turner--and the deuce of a pose it was. in the english painters the climate is the hero; in the case of turner a swaggering and fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent. the tall and terrible protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight, fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground. rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a dark background, and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. against a dim sky all flowers look like fireworks. there is something strange about them at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the grim garden of a witch. a bright blue sky is necessarily the high light in the picture, and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. but on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the lost-red eyes of day, and the sun-flower is the vice-regent of the sun. lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless: that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue, or blanching into white or breaking into green or gold. so we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather on our hills or grey hair on our heads perhaps they may still remind us of the morning. _'daily news.'_ july 16th it is true that all sensible women think all studious men mad. it is true, for the matter of that, all women of any kind think all men of any kind mad. but they do not put it in telegrams any more than they wire to you that grass is green or god all-merciful. these things are truisms and often private ones at that. _'the club of queer trades.'_ july 17th you may come to think a blow bad because it humiliates. you may come to think murder wrong because it is violent, and not because it is unjust. _'the ball and the cross.'_ july 18th _thackeray born_ in all things his great spirit had the grandeur and the weakness which belonged to the england of his time--an england splendidly secure and free, and yet (perhaps for that reason) provincial and innocent. he had nothing of the doctrinal quality of the french and germans. he was not one who made up his mind, but one who let his mind make him up. he lay naturally open to all noble influences flowing around him; but he never bestirred himself to seek those that were not flowing or that flowed in opposite directions. thus, for instance, he really loved liberty, as only a novelist can love it, a man mainly occupied with the variety and vivacity of men. but he could not see the cause of liberty except where the victorian english saw it; he could not see it in the cause of irish liberty (which was exactly like the cause of polish or italian liberty, except that it was led by much more religious and responsible men), and he made the irish characters the object of much innocent and rather lumbering satire. but this was not his mistake, but the mistake of the atmosphere, and he was a sublime emotional englishman, who lived by atmosphere. he was a great sensitive. the comparison between him and dickens is commonly as clumsy and unreasonable as a comparison between wilkie collins and charles reade or bulwer lytton and anthony trollope. but the comparison really has this element of actuality: that dickens was above all things creative; thackeray was above all things receptive. there is no sense in talking about truth in the matter: both are modes of truth. if you like to put it so: the world imposed on thackeray, and dickens imposed on the world. but it could be put more truly by saying that thackeray represents, in that gigantic parody called genius, the spirit of the englishman in repose. this spirit is the idle embodiment of all of us; by his weaknesses we shall fail and by his enormous sanities we shall endure. _introduction to 'thackeray.'_ july 19th the marchioness really has all the characteristics, the entirely heroic characteristics, which make a woman respected by a man. she is female--that is, she is at once incurably candid and incurably loyal, she is full of terrible common sense, she expects little pleasure for herself and yet she can enjoy bursts of it; above all, she is physically timid and yet she can face anything. _introduction to 'the old curiosity shop.'_ july 20th democracy in its human sense is not arbitrament by the majority; it is not even arbitrament by everybody. it can be more nearly defined as arbitrament by anybody: i mean that it rests on that club-habit of taking a total stranger for granted, of assuming certain things to be inevitably common to yourself and him. only the things that anybody may be presumed to hold have the full authority of democracy. look out of the window and notice the first man who walks by. the liberals may have swept england with an overwhelming majority; but you would not stake a button that the man is a liberal. the bible may be read in all schools and respected in all law courts; but you would not bet a straw that he believes in the bible. but you would bet your week's wages, let us say, that he believes in wearing clothes. you would bet that he believes that physical courage is a fine thing, or that parents have authority over children. of course, he might be the millioneth man who does not believe these things; if it comes to that, he might be the bearded lady dressed up as a man. but these prodigies are quite a different thing from any mere calculation of numbers. people who hold these views are not a minority, but a monstrosity. but of these universal dogmas that have full democratic authority the only test is this test of anybody: what you would observe before any new-comer in a tavern--that is the real english law. the first man you see from the window, he is the king of england. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ july 21st many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. many clever babylonians, many clever egyptians, many clever men at the end of rome. can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours? _'the napoleon of notting hill.'_ july 22nd it is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. if we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. with us the governing class is always saying to itself, 'what laws shall we make?' in a purely democratic state it would be always saying, 'what laws can we obey?' _'heretics.'_ july 23rd no two ideals could be more opposite than a christian saint in a gothic cathedral and a buddhist saint in a chinese temple. the opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the christian saint always has them very wide open. the buddhist saint always has a very sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. the medieval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. there cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. the buddhist is looking with peculiar intentness inwards. the christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. _'orthodoxy.'_ july 24th novels and newspapers still talk of the english aristocracy that came over with william the conqueror. little of our effective oligarchy is as old as the reformation; and none of it came over with william the conqueror. some of the older english landlords came over with william of orange; the rest have come over by ordinary alien immigration. _'george bernard shaw.'_ july 25th it is the negation of property that the duke of sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ july 26th christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities. when italy is mad on art the church seems too puritanical; when england is mad on puritanism the church seems too artistic. when you quarrel with us now you class us with kingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it was because we would not accept the divine despotism of henry viii. the church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer. it keeps the key of a permanent virtue. _'the ball and the cross.'_ july 27th the best men of the revolution were simply common men at their best. this is why our age can never understand napoleon. because he was something great and triumphant, we suppose that he must have been something extraordinary, something inhuman. some say he was the devil; some say he was the superman. was he a very, very bad man? was he a good man with some greater moral code? we strive in vain to invent the mysteries behind that immortal mask of brass. the modern world with all its subtleness will never guess his strange secret; for his strange secret was that he was very like other people. '_charles dickens._' july 28th the greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this: that men began to use the word 'spiritual' as the same as the word 'good.' they thought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was to grow in virtue. when scientific evolution was announced, some feared that it would encourage mere animality. it did worse: it encouraged mere spirituality. it taught men to think that so long as they were passing from the ape they were going. but you can pass from the ape and go to the devil. _'orthodoxy.'_ july 29th one of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. there is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. there is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance. _'robert browning.'_ july 30th the authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define, the authority even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all the authority of a man to think. we know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. for we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. _'orthodoxy.'_ july 31st the party system in england is an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing political conflicts. _'george bernard shaw.'_ august august 1st a man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy. _'george bernard shaw.'_ august 2nd just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. it is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. reason is itself a matter of faith. it is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. if you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, 'why should anything go right; even observation or deduction? why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? they are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?' the young sceptic says, 'i have a right to think for myself.' but the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, 'i have no right to think for myself. i have no right to think at all.' _'orthodoxy.'_ august 3rd even among liars there are two classes, one immeasurably better than another. the honest liar is the man who tells the truth about his old lies; who says on wednesday, 'i told a magnificent lie on monday.' he keeps the truth in circulation; no one version of things stagnates in him and becomes an evil secret. he does not have to live with old lies; a horrible domesticity. _introduction to 'the old curiosity shop.'_ august 4th the only way to remember a place for ever is to live in the place for an hour; and the only way to live in the place for an hour is to forget the place for an hour. the undying scenes we can all see, if we shut our eyes, are not the scenes we have stared at under the direction of guide-books; the scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not look at all--the scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about something else--about a sin, or a love affair, or some childish sorrow. we can see the background now because we did not see it then. _'charles dickens.'_ august 5th the keeper of a restaurant would much prefer that each customer should give his order smartly, though it were for stewed ibis or boiled elephant, rather than that each customer should sit holding his head in his hands, plunged in arithmetical calculations about how much food there can be on the premises. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ august 6th _transfiguration_ joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the christian. the tremendous figure which fills the gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. his pathos was natural, almost casual. the stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. he never concealed his tears; he showed them plainly on his open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of his native city. yet he concealed something. solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. he never restrained his anger. he flung furniture down the front steps of the temple and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. yet he restrained something. i say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. there was something that he hid from all men when he went up a mountain to pray. there was something that he covered by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. there was some one thing that was too great for god to show us when he walked upon our earth, and i have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth. _'orthodoxy.'_ august 7th imperialism is foreign, socialism is foreign, militarism is foreign, education is foreign, strictly even liberalism is foreign. but radicalism was our own; as english as the hedge-rows. _'charles dickens.'_ august 8th a cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather, yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together. science announced nonentity and art admired decay; the world was old and ended: but you and i were gay. round us in antic order their crippled vices came- lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame. like the white lock of whistler, that lit our aimless gloom, men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume. life was a flower that faded, and death a drone that stung; the world was very old indeed when you and i were young! they twisted even decent sins to shapes not to be named: men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed. weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus; when that black baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us. children we were--our forts of sand were even as weak as we, high as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea. fools as we were in motley, all jangled and absurd, when all church bells were silent, our cap and bells were heard. _'the man who was thursday.'_ august 9th in practice no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physical inheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely used except for special modern purposes--such as the endowment of research or the oppression of the poor. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ august 10th _the fall of the french monarchy_ we, the modern english, cannot easily understand the french revolution, because we cannot easily understand the idea of a bloody battle for pure common sense; we cannot understand common sense in arms and conquering. the french feeling--the feeling at the back of the revolution--was that the more sensible a man was, the more you must look out for slaughter. _'charles dickens.'_ august 11th tom jones is still alive, with all his good and all his evil; he is walking about the streets; we meet him every day. we meet with him, we drink with him, we smoke with him, we talk with him, we talk about him. the only difference is that we have no longer the intellectual courage to write about him. we split up the supreme and central human being, tom jones, into a number of separate aspects. we let mr. j. m. barrie write about him in his good moments, and make him out better than he is. we let zola write about him in his bad moments, and make him out much worse than he is. we let maeterlinck celebrate those moments of spiritual panic which he knows to be cowardly; we let mr. rudyard kipling celebrate those moments of brutality which he knows to be far more cowardly. we let obscene writers write about the obscenities of this ordinary man. we let puritan writers write about the purities of this ordinary man. we look through one peephole that makes men out as devils, and we call it the new art. we look through another peephole that makes men out as angels, and we call it the new theology. but if we pull down some dusty old books from the bookshelf, if we turn over some old mildewed leaves, and if in that obscurity and decay we find some faint traces of a tale about a complete man--such a man as is walking on the pavement outside--we suddenly pull a long face, and we call it the coarse morals of a bygone age. _'all things considered.'_ august 12th self is the gorgon. vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and lives. pride studies it for itself and is turned to stone. _'heretics.'_ august 13th you complain of catholicism for setting up an ideal of virginity; it did nothing of the kind. the whole human race set up an ideal of virginity; the greeks in athene, the romans in the vestal fire, set up an ideal of virginity. what then is your real quarrel with catholicism? your quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that catholicism has achieved an ideal of virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece of floating poetry. but if you, and a few feverish men, in top hats, running about in a street in london, choose to differ as to the ideal itself, not only from the church, but from the parthenon whose name means virginity, from the roman empire which went outwards from the virgin flame, from the whole legend and tradition of europe, from the lion who will not touch virgins, from the unicorn who respects them, and who make up together the bearers of your own national shield, from the most living and lawless of your own poets, from massinger, who wrote the 'virgin martyr,' from shakespeare, who wrote 'measure for measure'--if you in fleet street differ from all this human experience, does it never strike you that it may be fleet street that is wrong? _'the ball and the cross.'_ august 14th it cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt (like that of a jolly hostess) to bring shy people out. for every practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of a tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. at a tea-party it is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if possible without bodily violence. _'tremendous trifles.'_ august 15th _the assumption_ one instant in a still light he saw our lady, then her dress was soft as western sky, and she was a queen most womanly, but she was a queen of men. and over the iron forest he saw our lady stand, her eyes were sad withouten art and seven swords were in her heart, but one was in her hand. _'ballad of alfred.'_ august 16th i am not prepared to admit that there is, or can be, properly speaking, in the world anything that is too sacred to be known. that spiritual beauty and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable and that they should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every conceivable religion. christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a cavern, and the word gospel itself involves the same idea as the ordinary name of a daily paper. whenever, therefore, a poet or any similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, i can imagine nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. _'robert browning.'_ august 17th once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. if scientific civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest. _'heretics.'_ august 18th all i have to urge is that i dislike the big whiteley shop, and that i dislike socialism because it will (according to socialists) be so like that shop. it is its fulfilment, not its reversal. i do not object to socialism, because it will revolutionize our commerce, but because it will leave it so horribly the same. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ august 19th in a hollow of the grey-green hills of rainy ireland lived an old, old woman, whose uncle was always cambridge at the boat race. but in her grey-green hollows, she knew nothing of this; she didn't know that there was a boat race. also she did not know that she had an uncle. she had heard of nobody at all, except of george the first, of whom she had heard (i know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her simple trust. and by and by, in god's good time, it was discovered that this uncle of hers was really not her uncle, and they came and told her so. she smiled through her tears, and said only, 'virtue is its own reward.' _'the napoleon of notting hill.'_ august 20th surely the vilest point of human vanity is exactly that; to ask to be admired for admiring what your admirers do not admire. _introduction to 'bleak house.'_ august 21st there is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle. _'heretics.'_ august 22nd there was until lately a law forbidding a man to marry his deceased wife's sister; yet the thing happened constantly. there was no law forbidding a man to marry his deceased wife's scullery-maid; yet it did not happen nearly so often. it did not happen because the marriage market is managed in the spirit and by the authority of women. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ august 23rd this world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than we ever know until some accident reminds us. if you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment. if you wish to realize how fearfully and wonderfully god's image is made, stand upon one leg. if you want to realize the splendid vision of all visible things--wink the other eye. _'tremendous trifles.'_ august 24th _st. bartholomew's day_ the secularist says that christianity produced tumult and cruelty. he seems to suppose that this proves it to be bad. but it might prove it to be very good. for men commit crimes not only for bad things, far more often for good things. for no bad things can be desired quite so passionately and persistently as good things can be desired, and only very exceptional men desire very bad and unnatural things. most crime is committed because, owing to some peculiar complication, very beautiful and necessary things are in some danger. for instance, if we wanted to abolish thieving and swindling at one blow, the best thing to do would be to abolish babies. babies, the most beautiful things on earth, have been the excuse and origin of almost all the business brutality and financial infamy on earth. if we could abolish monogamic or romantic love, the country would be dotted with maiden assizes. _'religious doubts of democracy.'_ august 25th there are only three things in the world that women do not understand; and they are liberty, equality, and fraternity. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ august 26th modern nonconformist newspapers distinguish themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns and adjectives which the founders of nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at kings and queens. _'heretics.'_ august 27th many of us live publicly with featureless public puppets, images of the small public abstractions. it is when we pass our own private gate, and open our own secret door, that we step into the land of the giants. _'charles dickens.'_ august 28th with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. there comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first, a perpetuation of satanic pride; secondly, tears; and third, laughter. _'the man who was thursday.'_ august 29th did herbert spencer ever convince you--did he ever convince anybody--did he ever for one mad moment convince himself--that it must be to the interest of the individual to feel a public spirit? do you believe that, if you rule your department badly, you stand any more chance, or one half of the chance, of being guillotined that an angler stands of being pulled into the river by a strong pike? herbert spencer refrained from theft for the same reason he refrained from wearing feathers in his hair, because he was an english gentleman with different tastes. _'the napoleon of notting hill.'_ august 30th war is a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and unanswerably--numbers and an unnatural valour. one does discover the two urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are ready to be dead. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ august 31st carlyle said that men were mostly fools. christianity, with a surer 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. _'heretics.'_ september september 1st if a modern philanthropist came to dotheboys hall i fear he would not employ the simple, sacred and truly christian solution of beating mr. squeers with a stick. i fancy he would petition the government to appoint a royal commission to inquire into mr. squeers. i think he would every now and then write letters to the newspapers reminding people that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, there was a royal commission to inquire into mr. squeers. i agree that he might even go the length of calling a crowded meeting in st. james's hall on the subject of the best policy with regard to mr. squeers. at this meeting some very heated and daring speakers might even go the length of alluding sternly to mr. squeers. occasionally even hoarse voices from the back of the hall might ask (in vain) what was going to be done with mr. squeers. the royal commission would report about three years afterwards and would say that many things had happened which were certainly most regrettable, that mr. squeers was the victim of a bad system; that mrs. squeers was also the victim of a bad system; but that the man who sold squeers' cane had really acted with great indiscretion and ought to be spoken to kindly. something like this would be what, after four years, the royal commission would have said; but it would not matter in the least what the royal commission had said, for by that time the philanthropists would be off on a new tack and the world would have forgotten all about dotheboys hall and everything connected with it. by that time the philanthropists would be petitioning parliament for another royal commission; perhaps a royal commission to inquire into whether mr. mantalini was extravagant with his wife's money; perhaps a commission to inquire into whether mr. vincent crummies kept the infant phenomenon short by means of gin. _introduction to 'nicholas nickleby.'_ september 2nd _battle of sedan_ the germans have not conquered very much in history as a whole. about fifty years ago they beat the french and fifty years before that the french very soundly beat them. if we see history as a whole there is no more doubt that the french people is the more military than there is that the german people is the more musical. germany is a great and splendid nation; and there are millions of sensible german patriots grappling with the sins and follies which are part of her problem. _'illustrated london news.'_ september 3rd if votes for women do not mean mobs for women they do not mean what they were meant to mean. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ september 4th there is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. facts and history utterly contradict this view. most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. imagination does not breed insanity. exactly what does breed insanity is reason. poets do not go mad, but chess-players do. mathematicians go mad, and cashiers, but creative artists very seldom. _'orthodoxy.'_ september 5th our modern mystics make a mistake when they wear long hair or loose ties to attract the spirits. the elves and the old gods when they revisit the earth really go straight for a dull top-hat. for it means simplicity, which the gods love. _'charles dickens.'_ september 6th women have been set free to be bacchantes. they have been set free to be virgin martyrs; they have been set free to be witches. do not ask them now to sink so low as the higher culture. _'all things considered.'_ september 7th the sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too little. _'robert browning.'_ september 8th a philosopher cannot talk about any single thing, down to a pumpkin, without showing whether he is wise or foolish; but he can easily talk about everything without anyone having any views about him, beyond gloomy suspicions. _'g. f. watts.'_ september 9th chattering finch and water-fly are not merrier than i; here among the flowers i lie laughing everlastingly. no: i may not tell the best; surely, friends, i might have guessed death was but the good king's jest, it was hid so carefully. _'the skeleton.'_ september 10th england is still ruled by the great barnacle family. parliament is still ruled by the great barnacle trinity--the solemn old barnacle, who knew that the circumlocution office was a protection; the sprightly young barnacle, who knew that it was a fraud; and the bewildered young barnacle who knew nothing about it. from these three types our cabinets are still exclusively recruited. people talk of the tyrannies and anomalies which dickens denounced as things of the past like the star chamber. they believe that the days of the old brutal optimism and the old brutal indifference are gone for ever. in truth, this very belief is only the continuance of the old stupid optimism and the old brutal indifference. we believe in a free england and a pure england, because we still believe in the circumlocution office account of this matter. undoubtedly our serenity is widespread. we believe that england is really reformed, we believe that england is really democratic, we believe that english politics are free from corruption. but this general satisfaction of ours does not show that dickens has beaten the barnacles. it only shows that the barnacles have beaten dickens. _'charles dickens.'_ september 11th when a man begins to think that the grass will not grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends either in an asylum or on the throne of an emperor. _'robert browning.'_ september 12th thieves respect property. they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. but philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. but philosophers despise marriage as marriage. murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. but philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's. _'the man who was thursday.'_ september 13th the lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is a man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it is the whole. the madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision. hence the more clearly we see the world divided into saxons and non-saxons, into our splendid selves and the rest, the more certain we may be that we are slowly and quietly going mad. the more plain and satisfying our state appears, the more we may know that we are living in an unreal world. for the real world is not satisfying. the more clear become the colours and facts of anglo-saxon superiority, the more surely we may know we are in a dream. for the real world is not clear or plain. the real world is full of bracing bewilderments and brutal surprises. comfort is the blessing and the curse of the english, and of americans of the pogram type also. with them it is a loud comfort, a wild comfort, a screaming and capering comfort; but comfort at bottom still. for there is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell. _'charles dickens.'_ september 14th i never said a word against eminent men of science. what i complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. when people talked about the fall of man, they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. now they talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean. _'the club of queer trades.'_ september 15th the only way of catching a train i have ever discovered is to miss the train before. _'tremendous trifles.'_ september 16th many people have wondered why it is that children's stories are so full of moralizing. the reason is perfectly simple: it is that children like moralizing more than anything else, and eat it up as if it were so much jam. the reason why we, who are grown up, dislike moralizing is equally clear: it is that we have discovered how much perversion and hypocrisy can be mixed with it; we have grown to dislike morality not because morality is moral, but because morality is so often immoral. but the child has never seen the virtues twisted into vices; the child does not know that men are not only bad from good motives, but also often good from bad motives. the child does not know that whereas the jesuit may do evil that good may come, the man of the world often does good that evil may come. therefore, the child has a hearty, healthy, unspoiled, and insatiable appetite for mere morality; for the mere difference between a good little girl and a bad little girl. and it can be proved by innumerable examples that when we are quite young we do like the moralizing story. grown-up people like the "comic sandford and merton," but children like the real "sandford and merton." _'daily news.'_ september 17th one of the few gifts that can really increase with old age is a sense of humour. that is the whole fun of belonging to an ancient civilization like our own great civilization of europe. in my vision i see europe still sitting on her mighty bull, the enormous and mystic mother from whom we come, who has given us everything from the 'iliad' to the french revolution. and from her awful lips i seem to hear the words:- 'think of me, old mother scrubbs, a-joining these 'ere totty clubs: fancy me deserting the pubs at my time of life!' _'illustrated london news.'_ september 18th _dr. johnson born_ if anyone wishes to see the real rowdy egalitarianism which is necessary (to males at least) he can find it as well as anywhere in the great old tavern disputes which come down to us in such books as boswell's 'johnson.' it is worth while to mention that one name especially, because the modern world in its morbidity has done it a grave injustice. the demeanour of johnson, it is said, was 'harsh and despotic.' it was occasionally harsh, but it was never despotic. johnson was not in the least a despot. johnson was a demagogue, he shouted against a shouting crowd. the very fact that he wrangled with other people is a proof that other people were allowed to wrangle with him. his very brutality was based on the idea of an equal scrimmage like that of football. it is strictly true that he bawled and banged the table because he was a modest man. he was honestly afraid of being overwhelmed or even overlooked. addison had exquisite manners and was the king of his company. he was polite to everybody, but superior to everybody; therefore he has been handed down for ever in the immortal insult of pope:- like cato give his little senate laws and sit attention to his own applause. johnson, so far from being king of his company, was a sort of irish member in his own parliament. addison was a courteous superior and was hated. johnson was an insolent equal, and therefore was loved by all who knew him and handed down in a marvellous book which is one of the mere miracles of love. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ september 19th brave men are all vertebrates: they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle. _'tremendous trifles.'_ september 20th the teetotaller has chosen a most unfortunate phrase for the drunkard when he says that the drunkard is making a beast of himself. the man who drinks ordinarily makes nothing but an ordinary man of himself. the man who drinks excessively makes a devil of himself. but nothing connected with a human and artistic thing like wine can bring one nearer to the brute life of nature. the only man who is, in the exact and literal sense of the words, making a beast of himself is the teetotaller. _'charles dickens.'_ september 21st _st. matthew's day_ the abyss between christ and all his modern interpreters is that we have no record that he ever wrote a word, except with his finger in the sand. the whole is the history of one continuous and sublime conversation. it was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for any elaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and idle words that the cross was set up on calvary and the earth gaped, and the sun was darkened at noonday. _'twelve types.'_ september 22nd so with the wan waste grasses on my spear, i ride for ever seeking after god. my hair grows whiter than my thistle plume and all my limbs are loose; but in my eyes the star of an unconquerable praise: for in my soul one hope for ever sings, that at the next white corner of a road my eyes may look on him. _'the wild knight.'_ september 23rd an error is more menacing than a crime, for an error begets crimes.... a free lover is worse than a profligate. for a profligate is serious and reckless even in his shortest love; while a free lover is cautious and irresponsible even in his longest devotion. _'tremendous trifles.'_ september 24th if the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters, i think the priests would escape, i fear the gentlemen would; but i believe the gutters would be simply running with the blood of philanthropists. _'charles dickens.'_ september 25th pessimism says that life is so short that it gives nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives everybody his final chance. _introduction to 'nicholas nickleby.'_ september 26th in short, one pankhurst is an exception, but a thousand pankhursts are a nightmare, a bacchic orgy, a witch's sabbath. for in all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately, but horrible in a crowd. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ september 27th individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. but humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. men are men, but man is a woman. _'the napoleon of notting hill.'_ september 28th i should not be at all surprised if i turned one corner in fleet street and saw a queer looking window, turned another corner and saw a yet queerer looking lamp; i should not be surprised if i turned a third corner and found myself in elfland. _'tremendous trifles.'_ september 29th _st. michael and all angels_ historic christianity has always believed in the valour of st. michael riding in front of the church militant, and in an ultimate and absolute pleasure, not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of the spirit, the wine of the blood of god. _'george bernard shaw.'_ september 30th when a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ october october 1st of all the tests by which the good citizen and strong reformer can be distinguished from the vague faddist or the inhuman sceptic, i know no better test than this--that the unreal reformer sees in front of him one certain future, the future of his fad; while the real reformer sees before him ten or twenty futures among which his country must choose, and may in some dreadful hour choose the wrong one. the true patriot is always doubtful of victory; because he knows that he is dealing with a living thing; a thing with free will. to be certain of free will is to be uncertain of success. _introduction to 'american notes.'_ october 2nd nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in tibet. he sits down beside tolstoy in the land of nothing and nirvana. they are both helpless--one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. the tolstoian's will is frozen by a buddhistic instinct that all special actions are evil. but the nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. they stand at the cross roads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. the result is--well, some things are not hard to calculate. they stand at the cross roads. _'orthodoxy.'_ october 3rd modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. they fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. that is why they do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ october 4th _st. francis of assisi_ for most people there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of st. francis. he expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. he called his monks the mountebanks of god. he never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger; he was perhaps the happiest of the sons of men. yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think of the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience he denied to himself, and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? why did he who loved where all men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? why was he a monk and not a troubadour? we have a suspicion that if these questions were answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also. _'twelve types.'_ october 5th it is awful to think that this world which so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a mantrap into which we may just have the manhood to jump. think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live. _'george bernard shaw.'_ october 6th we will eat and drink later. let us remain together a little, we who have loved each other so sadly, and have fought so long. i seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were always heroes--epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and you always brothers in arms. whether it was but recently (for time is nothing) or at the beginning of the world, i sent you out to war. i sat in the darkness where there is not any created thing, and to you i was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. you heard the voice in the dark and you never heard it again. the sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. and when i met you in the daylight i denied it myself. but you were men. you did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. _'the man who was thursday.'_ october 7th the truest kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done, accepting with a sportsman-like relish the estate to which we are called, the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth. _'twelve types.'_ october 8th when your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smell sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. when the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence; when the rose smelt sweet you did not say, 'my father is a rude, barbaric symbol enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truth that flowers smell.' no, you believed your father because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you the truth to-morrow, as well as to-day. _'orthodoxy.'_ october 9th there is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism. _'g. f. watts.'_ october 10th red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond burns through. it glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire which destroys us, in the roses of our romance and in the awful cup of our religion. it stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in first love. _'daily news.'_ october 11th commonness means the quality common to the saint and the sinner, to the philosopher and the fool; and it was this that dickens grasped and developed. in everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies, that fears death, that likes sunlight: that thing enjoys dickens. and everybody does not mean uneducated crowds, everybody means everybody: everybody means mrs. meynell. _'charles dickens.'_ october 12th some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them. _'charles dickens.'_ october 13th in a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. and how perfect an exception! how can these people strike dignified attitudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is supported? a man strikes the lyre, and says, 'life is real, life is earnest,' and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head. _'the napoleon of notting hill.'_ october 14th _battle of hastings_ gored on the norman gonfalon the golden dragon died, we shall not wake with ballad strings the good time of the smaller things, we shall not see the holy kings ride down the severn side. _'ballad of alfred.'_ october 15th i am grown up, and i do not worry myself much about zola's immorality. the thing i cannot stand is his morality. if ever a man on this earth lived to embody the tremendous text, 'but if the light in your body be darkness, how great is the darkness!' it was certainly he. great men like ariosto, rabelais, and shakespeare fall in foul places, flounder in violent but venial sin, sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic weakness, are dirty, are indefensible; and then they struggle up again and can still speak with a convincing kindness and an unbroken honour of the best things in the world: rabelais, of the instruction of ardent and austere youth; ariosto, of holy chivalry; shakespeare, of the splendid stillness of mercy. but in zola even the ideals are undesirable; zola's mercy is colder than justice--nay, zola's mercy is more bitter in the mouth than injustice. when zola shows us an ideal training he does not take us, like rabelais, into the happy fields of humanist learning. he takes us into the schools of inhumanist learning, where there are neither books nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but only deformities in glass bottles, and where the rule is taught from the exceptions. zola's truth answers the exact description of the skeleton in the cupboard; that is, it is something of which a domestic custom forbids the discovery, but which is quite dead, even when it is discovered. _'all things considered.'_ october 16th we talk in a cant phrase of the man in the street, but the frenchman is the man in the street. as the frenchman drinks in the street and dines in the street, so he fights in the street and dies in the street; so that the street can never be commonplace to him. _'tremendous trifles.'_ october 17th if we wish to preserve the family we must revolutionize the nation. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ october 18th _st. luke's day_ in these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to be scientific. surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor in saying that he is our doctor, not our priest or our wife or ourself. it is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health will follow if we do go to a watering-place. after that, obviously, it is for us to judge. physical science is like simple addition; it is either infallible or it is false. to mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. i want my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. it is for my private philosopher to tell me whether i ought to be killed. _'all things considered.'_ october 19th it was absurd to say that waterloo was won on eton cricket-fields. but it might have been fairly said that waterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket. in a word, it was the average of the nation that was strong, and athletic glories do not indicate much about the average of a nation. waterloo was not won by good cricket-players. but waterloo was won by bad cricket-players, by a mass of men who had some minimum of athletic instincts and habits. it is a good sign in a nation, when such things are done badly. it shows that all the people are doing them. and it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on. _'all things considered.'_ october 20th i sometimes think it is a pity that people travel in foreign countries; it narrows their minds so much. _'daily news.'_ october 21st _trafalgar day_ the heroic is a fact, even when it is a fact of coincidence or of miracle; and a fact is a thing which can be admitted without being explained. but i would merely hint that there is a very natural explanation of this frightful felicity, either of phrase or action, which so many men have exhibited on so many scaffolds or battlefields. it is merely that when a man has found something which he prefers to life, he then for the first time begins to live. a promptitude of poetry opens in his soul of which our paltry experiences do not possess the key. when once he has despised this world as a mere instrument, it becomes a musical instrument, it falls into certain artistic harmonies around him. if nelson had not worn his stars he would not have been hit. but if he had not worn his stars he would not have been nelson; and if he had not been nelson he might have lost the battle. _'daily news.'_ october 22nd watts proved no doubt that he was not wholly without humour by this admirable picture ("the first oyster"). gladstone proved that he was not wholly without humour by his reply to mr. chaplin, by his singing of "doo-dah," and by his support of a grant to the duke of coburg. but both men were singularly little possessed by the mood or the idea of humour. to them had been in peculiar fullness revealed the one great truth which our modern thought does not know, and which it may possibly perish through not knowing. they knew that to enjoy life means to take it seriously. there is an eternal kinship between solemnity and high spirits, and almost the very name of it is gladstone. its other name is watts. they knew that not only life, but every detail of life, is most a pleasure when it is studied with the gloomiest intensity.... the startling cheerfulness of the old age of gladstone, the startling cheerfulness of the old age of watts, are both redolent of this exuberant seriousness, this uproarious gravity. they were as happy as the birds because, like the birds, they were untainted by the disease of laughter. they are as awful and philosophical as children at play: indeed, they remind us of a truth true for all of us, though capable of misunderstanding, that the great aim of a man's life is to get into his second childhood. _'watts.'_ october 23rd the foil may curve in the lunge; but there is nothing beautiful about beginning the battle with a crooked foil. so the strict aim, the strong doctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts; but that is no reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. do not be an opportunist; try to be theoretic at all the opportunities; fate can be trusted to do all the opportunist part of it. do not try to bend; any more than the trees try to bend. try to grow straight; and life will bend you. _'daily news.'_ october 24th truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it. _'the club of queer trades.'_ october 25th if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ october 26th it is currently said that hope goes with youth and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but i fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. the end of every episode is the end of the world. but the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged. god has kept that good wine until now. _'charles dickens.'_ october 27th we have made an empire out of our refuse; but we cannot make a nation even out of our best material. such is the vague and half-conscious contradiction that undoubtedly possesses the minds of great masses of the not unkindly rich. touching the remote empire they feel a vague but vast humanitarian hope; touching the chances of small holdings or rural reconstruction in the heart of the empire they feel a doubt and a disinclination that is not untouched with despair. their creed contains two great articles: first, that the common englishman can get on anywhere; and second, that the common englishman cannot get on in england. _introduction to 'cottage homes of england.'_ october 28th there is only one very timid sort of man that is not afraid of women. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ october 29th i do not see ghosts; i only see their inherent probability. _'tremendous trifles.'_ october 30th do you see this lantern? do you see the cross carved on it and the flame inside? you did not make it. you did not light it. better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron, and preserved the legend of fire. there is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. you can make nothing. you can only destroy. you will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world. let that suffice you. yet this one old christian lantern you shall now destroy. it shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it. _'the man who was thursday.'_ october 31st _hallow e'en_ if we ever get the english back on to the english land they will become again a religious people, if all goes well, a superstitious people. the absence from modern life of both the higher and the lower forms of faith is largely due to a divorce from nature and the trees and clouds. if we have no more turnip ghosts it is chiefly from the lack of turnips. _'heretics.'_ november november 1st _all saints' day_ you cannot deny that it is perfectly possible that to-morrow morning in ireland or in italy there might appear a man not only as good but good in exactly the same way as st. francis of assisi. very well; now take the other types of human virtue: many of them splendid. the english gentleman of elizabeth was chivalrous and idealistic. but can you stand still in this meadow and _be_ an english gentleman of elizabeth? the austere republican of the eighteenth century, with his stern patriotism and his simple life, was a fine fellow. but have you ever seen him? have you ever seen an austere republican? only a hundred years have passed and that volcano of revolutionary truth and valour is as cold as the mountains of the moon. and so it will be with the ethics which are buzzing down fleet street at this instant as i speak. what phrase would inspire a london clerk or workman just now? perhaps that he is a son of the british empire on which the sun never sets; perhaps that he is a prop of his trades union, or a class-conscious proletarian something or other; perhaps merely that he is a gentleman, when he obviously is not. those names and notions are all honourable, but how long will they last? empires break; industrial conditions change; the suburbs will not last for ever. what will remain? i will tell you: the catholic saint will remain. _'the ball and the cross.'_ november 2nd _all souls' day_ there are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. they are not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. but this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. and this again is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. _'charles dickens.'_ november 3rd you cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it. _introduction to 'nicholas nickleby.'_ november 4th the modern philosopher had told me again and again that i was in the right place, and i had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. but i had heard that i was in the _wrong_ place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. the knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. i knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why i could feel homesick at home. _'orthodoxy.'_ november 5th _guy fawkes' day_ guy fawkes' day is not only in some rude sense a festival, and in some rude sense a religious festival; it is also, what is supremely symbolic and important, a winter religious festival. here the 5th of november, which celebrates a paltry christian quarrel, has a touch of the splendour of the 25th of december, which celebrates christianity itself. dickens and all the jolly english giants who write of the red firelight are grossly misunderstood in this matter. prigs call them coarse and materialistic because they write about the punch and plum pudding of winter festivals. the prigs do not see that if these writers were really coarse and materialistic they would not write about winter feasts at all. mere materialists would write about summer and the sun. the whole point of winter pleasure is that it is a defiant pleasure, a pleasure armed and at bay. the whole point is in the fierce contrast between the fire and wine within and the roaring rains outside. and some part of the sacredness of firelight we may allow to fireworks. _article in 'the observer.'_ november 6th what we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought: it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. it is vain for bishops and pious big wigs to discuss what things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course. it has run its course. it is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. we have seen it end. it has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. you cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves. you cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world. _'orthodoxy.'_ november 7th a man ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy, and emphatically not because he has a large frame to sustain. a man ought to take exercise not because he is too fat, but because he loves foils or horses or high mountains, and loves them for their own sake. and a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love, and emphatically not because the world requires to be populated. the food will really renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking about his tissues. the exercise will really get him into training so long as he is thinking about something else. and the marriage will really stand some chance of producing a generous-blooded generation if it had its origin in its own natural and generous excitement. it is the first law of health that our necessities should not be accepted as necessities; they should be accepted as luxuries. let us, then, be careful about the small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness, or anything that can be managed with care. but in the name of all sanity, let us be careless about the important things, such as marriage, or the fountain of our very life will fail. _'heretics.'_ november 8th if there be any value in scaling the mountains, it is only that from them one can behold the plains. _'daily news.'_ november 9th _lord mayor's day_ i pressed some little way farther through the throng of people, and caught a glimpse of some things that are never seen in fleet street. i mean real green which is like the grass in the glaring sun, and real blue that is like the burning sky in another quarter of the world, and real gold that is like fire that cannot be quenched, and real red that is like savage roses and the wine that is the blood of god. nor was it a contemptible system of ideas that was supposed to be depicted by these colours of flags and shields and shining horsemen. it was at least supposed to be england, which made us all; it was at least supposed to be london, which made me and better men. i at least am not so made that i can make sport of such symbols. there in whatever ungainly procession, there on whatever ugly shields, there was the cross of st. george and the sword of st. paul. even if all men should go utterly away from everything that is symbolized, the last symbol will impress them. if no one should be left in the world except a million open malefactors and one hypocrite, that hypocrite will still remind them of holiness. _'daily news.'_ november 10th old happiness is grey as we and we may still outstrip her; if we be slippered pantaloons o let us hunt the slipper! the old world glows with colours clear, and if, as saith the saint, the world is but a painted show, o let us lick the paint! far, far behind are morbid hours and lonely hearts that bleed; far, far behind us are the days when we were old indeed. behold the simple sum of things where, in one splendour spun, the stars go round the mulberry bush, the burning bush, the sun. _'grey beards at play.'_ november 11th a man (of a certain age) may look into the eyes of his lady-love to see that they are beautiful. but no normal lady will allow that young man to look into her eyes to see whether they are beautiful. the same variety and idiosyncrasy has been generally observed in gods. praise them; or leave them alone; but do not look for them unless you know they are there. do not look for them unless you want them. _'all things considered.'_ november 12th likelier across these flats afar, these sulky levels smooth and free, the drums shall crash a waltz of war and death shall dance with liberty; likelier the barricades shall blare slaughter below and smoke above, and death and hate and hell declare that men have found a thing to love. _'the napoleon of notting hill.'_ november 13th everything is military in the sense that everything depends upon obedience. there is no perfectly epicurean corner; there is no perfectly irresponsible place. everywhere men have made the way for us with sweat and submission. we may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness. but we are glad that the net-maker did not make the net in a fit of divine carelessness. we may jump upon a child's rocking-horse for a joke. but we are glad that the carpenter did not leave the legs of it unglued for a joke. _'heretics.'_ november 14th i will ride upon the nightmare; but she shall not ride on me. _'daily news.'_ november 15th a great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing it. the things he describes are types because they are truths. shakespeare may or may not have ever put it to himself that richard the second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must necessarily see him so. it may be a reasonable question whether an artist should be allegorical. there can be no doubt among sane men that a critic should be allegorical. _introduction to 'great expectations.'_ november 16th when society is in rather a futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education becomes futile? for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. the real thing has been done already, and thank god it is nearly always done by women. every man is womanized, merely by being born. they talk of the masculine woman; but every man is a feminized man. and if ever men walk to westminster to protest against this female privilege, i shall not join their procession. _'orthodoxy.'_ november 17th seriousness is not a virtue. it would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. it is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. it is much easier to write a good _times_ leading article than a good joke in _punch_. for solemnity flows out of men naturally, but laughter is a leap. it is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. satan fell by the force of gravity. _'orthodoxy.'_ november 18th yes, you are right. i am afraid of him. therefore i swear by god that i will seek out this man whom i fear until i find him and strike him on the mouth. if heaven were his throne and the earth his footstool i swear that i would pull him down.... because i am afraid of him; and no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid. _'the man who was thursday.'_ november 19th under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. and it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars suburban. _'heretics.'_ november 20th every detail points to something, certainly, but generally to the wrong thing. facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree. it is only the life of the tree that has unity and goes up--only the green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars. _'the club of queer trades.'_ november 21st shallow romanticists go away in trains and stop in places called hugmy-in-the-hole, or bumps-on-the-puddle. and all the time they could, if they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name of st. john's wood. i have never been to st. john's wood. i dare not. i should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir-trees, afraid to come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the eagle. but all these things can be imagined by remaining reverently in the harrow train. _'the napoleon of notting hill.'_ november 22nd giants, as in the wise old fairy-tales, are vermin. supermen, if not good men, are vermin. _'heretics.'_ november 23rd it is part of that large and placid lie that the rationalists tell when they say that christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism. christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling cosmopolitan civilization. long sea voyages were not so quick, but were quite as incessant as to-day; and though in the nature of things christ had not many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that he had some. and a joseph of arimathea may easily have been a roman citizen with a yacht that could visit britain. the same fallacy is employed with the same partisan motive in the case of the gospel of st. john; which critics say could not have been written by one of the first few christians because of its greek transcendentalism and its platonic tone. i am no judge of the philology, but every human being is a divinely appointed judge of the philosophy: and the platonic tone seems to me to prove nothing at all. _'daily news.'_ november 24th sometimes the best business of an age is to resist some alien invasion; sometimes to preach practical self-control in a world too self-indulgent and diffuse; sometimes to prevent the growth in the state of great new private enterprises that would poison or oppress it. above all, it may happen that the highest task of a thinking citizen may be to do the exact opposite of the work the radicals had to do. it may be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he can find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and sinking into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture. _introduction to 'a child's history of england.'_ november 25th science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich. _'heretics.'_ november 26th we talk of art as something artificial in comparison with life. but i sometimes fancy that the very highest art is more real than life itself. at least this is true: that in proportion as passions become real they become poetical; the lover is always trying to be the poet. all real energy is an attempt at harmony and a high swing of rhythm; and if we were only real enough we should all talk in rhyme. however this may be, it is unquestionable in the case of great public affairs. whenever you have real practical politics you have poetical politics. whenever men have succeeded in wars they have sung war-songs; whenever you have the useful triumph you have also the useless trophy. but the thing is more strongly apparent exactly where the great fabian falls foul of it--in the open scenes of history and the actual operation of events. the things that actually did happen all over the world are precisely the things which he thinks could not have happened in galilee, the artistic isolations, the dreadful dialogues in which each speaker was dramatic, the prophecies flung down like gauntlets, the high invocations of history, the marching and mounting excitement of the story, the pulverizing and appropriate repartees. these things do happen; they have happened; they are attested, in all the cases where the soul of man had become poetic in its very peril. at every one of its important moments the most certain and solid history reads like an historical novel. _'daily news.'_ november 27th anyone could easily excuse the ill-humour of the poor. but great masses of the poor have not even any ill-humour to be excused. their cheeriness is startling enough to be the foundation of a miracle play; and certainly is startling enough to be the foundation of a romance. _introduction to 'christmas stories.'_ november 28th lo! i am come to autumn, when all the leaves are gold; grey hairs and golden leaves cry out the year and i are old. in youth i sought the prince of men captain in cosmic wars. our titan even the weeds would show defiant, to the stars. but now a great thing in the street seems any human nod, where shift in strange democracy the million masks of god. in youth i sought the golden flower hidden in wood or wold, but i am come to autumn, when all the leaves are gold. _'the wild knight.'_ november 29th there is a noble instinct for giving the right touch of beauty to common and necessary things, but the things that are so touched are the ancient things, the things that always, to some extent, commended themselves to the lover of beauty. the spirit of william morris has not seized hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful. and this was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not the supreme courage to face the ugliness of things; beauty shrank from the beast and the fairy tale had a different ending. _'twelve types.'_ november 30th _st. andrew's day_ i am quite certain that scotland is a nation; i am quite certain that nationality is the key of scotland; i am quite certain that all our success with scotland has been due to the fact that we have in spirit treated it as a nation. i am quite certain that ireland is a nation. i am quite certain that nationality is the key of ireland; i am quite certain that all our failure in ireland arose from the fact that we would not in spirit treat it as a nation. it would be difficult to find, even among the innumerable examples that exist, a stronger example of the immensely superior importance of sentiment, to what is called practicality, than this case of the two sister nations. it is not that we have encouraged a scotchman to be rich; it is not that we have encouraged a scotchman to be active; it is not that we have encouraged a scotchman to be free. it is that we have quite definitely encouraged a scotchman to be scotch. _'all things considered.'_ december december 1st in this world of ours we do not so much go on and discover small things: rather we go on and discover big things. it is the detail that we see first; it is the design that we only see very slowly, and some men die never having seen it at all. we see certain squadrons in certain uniforms gallop past; we take an arbitrary fancy to this or that colour, to this or that plume. but it often takes us a long time to realize what the fight is about or even who is fighting whom. so in the modern intellectual world we can see flags of many colours, deeds of manifold interest; the one thing we cannot see is the map. we cannot see the simplified statement which tells us what is the origin of all the trouble. _'william blake.'_ december 2nd our wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to those we love. _'browning.'_ december 3rd our fathers were large and healthy enough to make a thing humane, and not worry about whether it was hygienic. they were big enough to get into small rooms. _'charles dickens.'_ december 4th a cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. a man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon. _introduction to 'book of job.'_ december 5th that christianity is identical with democracy, is the hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as the saying that they are all the sons of god. _'twelve types.'_ december 6th _st. nicholas's day_ all the old wholesome customs in connexion with christmas were to the effect that one should not touch or see or know or speak of something before the actual coming of christmas day. thus, for instance, children were never given their presents until the actual coming of the appointed hour. the presents were kept tied up in brown-paper parcels, out of which an arm of a doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes accidentally stuck. i wish this principle were adopted in respect of modern christmas ceremonies and publications. the editors of the magazines bring out their christmas numbers so long before the time that the reader is more likely to be lamenting for the turkey of last year than to have seriously settled down to a solid anticipation of the turkey which is to come. christmas numbers of magazines ought to be tied up in brown paper and kept for christmas day. on consideration, i should favour the editors being tied up in brown paper. whether the leg or arm of an editor should ever be allowed to protrude i leave to individual choice. _'all things considered.'_ december 7th we had talked for about half an hour about politics and god; for men always talk about the most important things to total strangers. it is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of god is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache. _'the club of queer trades.'_ december 8th he had found the thing which the modern people call impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe. _'the man who was thursday.'_ december 9th there was a time when you and i and all of us were all very close to god; so that even now the colour of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a flower (or a firework) comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features of a forgotten face. to pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes the woman--she understands. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ december 10th a man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it. _'browning.'_ december 11th among all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that they are living on a star. _'defendant.'_ december 12th _browning died_ the poem, 'old pictures in florence,' suggests admirably that a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon a sense of completeness: that the part may easily and obviously be greater than the whole. and from this browning draws, as he is fully justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger scale of life. for nothing is more certain than that though this world is the only world that we have known, or of which we could ever dream, the fact does remain that we have named it 'a strange world.' in other words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. and browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness implies completeness, life implies immortality. the second of the great browning doctrines requires some audacity to express. it can only be properly stated as the hope that lies in the imperfection of god--that is to say, that browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of man, were also his privileges. he held that these stubborn sorrows and obscure valours might--to use a yet more strange expression--have provoked the envy of the almighty. if man has self-sacrifice and god has none, then man has in the universe a secret and blasphemous superiority. and this tremendous story of a divine jealousy browning reads into the story of the crucifixion. these are emphatically the two main doctrines or opinions of browning, which i have ventured to characterize roughly as the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in the imperfection of god. they are great thoughts, thoughts written by a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of faith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. _'robert browning.'_ december 13th elder father, though thine eyes shine with hoary mysteries, canst thou tell what in the heart of a cowslip blossom lies? smaller than all lives that be, secret as the deepest sea, stands a little house of seeds like an elfin's granary. speller of the stones and weeds, skilled in nature's crafts and creeds, tell me what is in the heart of the smallest of the seeds. god almighty, and with him cherubim and seraphim filling all eternity- adonai elohim. _'the wild knight.'_ december 14th the rare strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross obvious thing is to miss it. chaos is dull; because in chaos a train might go anywhere--to baker street or bagdad. but man is a magician and his whole magic is in this that he does say 'victoria,' and lo! it is victoria. _'the man who was thursday.'_ december 15th men talk of philosophy and theology as if they were something specialistic and arid and academic. but philosophy and theology are not only the only democratic things, they are democratic to the point of being vulgar, to the point, i was going to say, of being rowdy. they alone admit all matters: they alone lie open to all attacks.... there is no detail from buttons to kangaroos that does not enter into the gay confusion of philosophy. there is no fact of life, from the death of a donkey to the general post office, which has not its place to dance and sing in, in the glorious carnival of theology. _'g. f. watts.'_ december 16th the duke of chester, the vice-president, was a young and rising politician--that is to say, he was a pleasant youth with flat fair hair and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and enormous estates. in public his appearances were always successful and his principle was simple enough. when he thought of a joke he made it and was called brilliant. when he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able. in private, in a club of his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly like a schoolboy. _'the innocence of father brown.'_ december 17th the personal is not a mere figure for the impersonal: rather the impersonal is a clumsy term for something more personal than common personality. god is not a symbol of goodness. goodness is a symbol of god. _'william blake.'_ december 18th the world is not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical optimists; it is not to be justified as the best of all possible worlds.... its merit is precisely that none of us could have conceived such a thing; that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as miracle and unreason. it is the best of all impossible worlds. _'charles dickens.'_ december 19th the educated classes have adopted a hideous and heathen custom of considering death as too dreadful to talk about, and letting it remain a secret for each person, like some private malformation. the poor, on the contrary, make a great gossip and display about bereavement; and they are right. they have hold of a truth of psychology which is at the back of all the funeral customs of the children of men. the way to lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it. the way to endure a painful crisis is to insist very much that it is a crisis; to permit people who must feel sad at least to feel important. in this the poor are simply the priests of the universal civilization; and in their stuffy feasts and solemn chattering there is the smell of the baked meats of hamlet and the dust and echo of the funeral games of patroclus. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ december 20th a crime is like any other work of art. don't look surprised; crimes are by no means the only works of art that come from an infernal workshop. but every work of art, divine or diabolic, has one indispensable mark--i mean that the centre of it is simple, however the entourage may be complicated. _'the innocence of father brown.'_ december 21st _st. thomas's day_ it was huxley and herbert spencer and bradlaugh who brought me back to orthodox theology. they sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt. our grandmothers were quite right when they said that tom paine and the freethinkers unsettled the mind. they do. they unsettled mine horribly. the rationalists made me question whether reason was of any use whatever; and when i had finished herbert spencer i had got as far as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all. as i laid down the last of colonel ingersoll's atheistic lectures, the dreadful thought broke into my mind, 'almost thou persuadest me to be a christian.' _'orthodoxy.'_ december 22nd pure and exalted atheists talk themselves into believing that the working classes are turning with indignant scorn from the churches. the working classes are not indignant against the churches in the least. the things the working classes really are indignant against are the hospitals. the people has no definite disbelief in the temples of theology. the people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the temples of physical science. _'charles dickens.'_ december 23rd a turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. in so far as god has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. but god has never told us what a turkey means. and if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished. _'all things considered.'_ december 24th _christmas eve_ the truce of christmas passionate peace is in the sky- and in the snow in silver sealed the beasts are perfect in the field, and men seem men so suddenly- (but take ten swords and ten times ten and blow the bugle in praising men; for we are for all men under the sun, and they are against us every one; and misers haggle and madmen clutch and there is peril in praising much, and we have the terrible tongues uncurled that praise the world to the sons of the world). the idle humble hill and wood are bowed about the sacred birth, and for one little hour the earth is lazy with the love of good- (but ready are you, and ready am i, if the battle blow and the guns go by; for we are for all men under the sun, and they are against us every one; and the men that hate herd all together, to pride and gold, and the great white feather, and the thing is graven in star and stone that the men who love are all alone). hunger is hard and time is tough, but bless the beggars and kiss the kings, for hope has broken the heart of things, and nothing was ever praised enough. (but hold the shield for a sudden swing and point the sword when you praise a thing, for we are for all men under the sun, and they are against us every one, and mime and merchant, thane and thrall hate us because we love them all, only till christmastide go by passionate peace is in the sky). _'the commonwealth.'_ december 25th _christmas day_ there fared a mother driven forth out of an inn to roam; in the place where she was homeless all men are at home. the crazy stable close at hand, with shaking timber and shifting sand, grew a stronger thing to abide and stand than the square stones of rome. for men are homesick in their homes, and strangers under the sun, and they lay their heads in a foreign land whenever the day is done. here we have battle and blazing eyes, and chance and honour and high surprise, but our homes are under miraculous skies where the yule tale was begun. a child in a foul stable, where the beasts feed and foam, only where he was homeless are you and i at home: we have hands that fashion and heads that know, but our hearts we lost--how long ago! in a place no chart nor ship can show under the sky's dome. this world is wild as an old wives' tale, and strange the plain things are, the earth is enough and the air is enough for our wonder and our war; but our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings and our peace is put in impossible things where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings round an incredible star. to an open house in the evening home shall all men come, to an older place than eden and a taller town than rome. to the end of the way of the wandering star, to the things that cannot be and that are, to the place where god was homeless and all men are at home. _the house of christmas: 'daily news.'_ december 26th _boxing day_ there are innumerable persons with eyeglasses and green garments who pray for the return of the maypole or the olympian games. but there is about these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests that it is just possible that they do not keep christmas. if so, where is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions? here is a solid and ancient festive tradition still plying a roaring trade in the streets, and they think it vulgar. if this is so, let them be very certain of this: that they are the kind of people who in the time of the maypole would have thought the maypole vulgar; who in the time of the canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the canterbury pilgrimage vulgar; who in the time of the olympian games would have thought the olympian games vulgar. nor can there be any reasonable doubt that they were vulgar. let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean coarseness of speech, rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and some heavy drinking: vulgarity there always was, wherever there was joy, wherever there was faith in the gods. _'heretics.'_ december 27th _st. john's day_ christ did not love humanity, he never said he loved humanity; he loved men. neither he nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a gigantic centipede. and the reason that the tolstoians can even endure to think of an equally distributed love is that their love of humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat. _'twelve types.'_ december 28th _holy innocents' day_ that little urchin with the gold-red hair (whom i have just watched toddling past my house), she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict's. no; all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. the winds of the world shall be tempered to that lamb unshorn. all crowns that cannot fit her head shall be broken; all raiment and building that does not harmonize with her glory shall waste away. her mother may bid her bind her hair, for that is natural authority; but the emperor of the planet shall not bid her cut it off. she is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken and the roofs of ages come rushing down; and not one hair of her head shall be harmed. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ december 29th _st. thomas à becket_ when four knights scattered the blood and brains of st. thomas of canterbury it was not only a sign of anger but a sort of black admiration. they wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his brains. such a blow will remain for ever unintelligible unless we realize what the brains of st. thomas were thinking about just before they were distributed over the floor. they were thinking about the great medieval conception that the church is the judge of the world. becket objected to a priest being tried even by the lord chief justice. and his reason was simple: because the lord chief justice was being tried by the priest. the judiciary was itself _sub judice_. the kings were themselves in the dock. the idea was to create an invisible kingdom without armies or prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms of the earth. _'what's wrong with the world.'_ december 30th progress is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically evident that it is illegitimate for us. it is a sacred word, a word that could only rightly be used by rigid believers and in the ages of faith. _'heretics.'_ december 31st with all the multiplicity of knowledge there is one thing happily that no man knows: whether the world is old or young. _'the defendant.'_ the moveable feasts advent sunday people, if you have any prayers, say prayers for me; and lay me under a christian stone in this lost land i thought my own, to wait till the holy horn be blown and all poor men are free. _'ballad of alfred.'_ shrove tuesday why should i care for the ages because they are old and grey? to me like sudden laughter the stars are fresh and gay; the world is a daring fancy and finished yesterday. why should i bow to the ages because they are drear and dry? slow trees and ripening meadows for me go roaring by, a living charge, a struggle to escalade the sky. the eternal suns and systems, solid and silent all, to me are stars of an instant, only the fires that fall from god's good rocket rising on this night of carnival. _'a novelty' ('the wild knight')._ ash wednesday nor shall all iron doors make dumb men wondering ceaselessly, if it be not better to fast for joy than feast for misery? _'ballad of alfred.'_ palm sunday when fishes flew and forests walked and figs grew upon thorn, some moment when the moon was blood then surely i was born. with monstrous head and sickening cry and ears like errant wings, the devil's walking parody on all four-footed things. the tattered outlaw of the earth, of ancient crooked will, starve, scourge, deride me: i am dumb, i keep my secret still. fools, for i also had my hour, one far fierce hour and sweet, there was a shout about my ears and palms before my feet. _'the donkey' ('the wild knight')._ maunday thursday jesus christ made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. but omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. he feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad. 'drink,' he says, 'for you know not whence you come nor why. drink, for you know not when you go nor where. drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace.' so he stands offering us the cup in his hands. and in the high altar of christianity stands another figure in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. 'drink,' he says, 'for the whole world is as red as this wine with the crimson of the love and wrath of god. drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle, and this is the stirrup cup. drink, for this is my blood of the new testament that is shed for you. drink, for i know whence you come and why. drink, for i know when you go and where.' _'heretics.'_ good friday and well may god with the serving folk cast in his dreadful lot. is not he too a servant, and is not he forgot? wherefore was god in golgotha slain as a serf is slain; and hate he had of prince and peer, and love he had and made good cheer, of them that, like this woman here, go powerfully in pain. _'ballad of alfred.'_ holy saturday the cross cannot be defeated for it is defeat. _'the ball and the cross.'_ easter day i said to my companion the dickensian, 'do you see that angel over there? i think it must be meant for the angel at the sepulchre.' he saw that i was somewhat singularly moved, and he raised his eyebrows. 'i daresay,' he said. 'what is there odd about that?' after a pause i answered, 'do you remember what the angel at the sepulchre said?' 'not particularly,' ha replied; 'but where are you off to in such a hurry?' 'i am going,' i said, 'to put pennies into automatic machines on the beach. i am going to listen to the niggers. i am going to have my photograph taken. i will buy some picture postcards. i do want a boat. i am ready to listen to a concertina, and but for the defects of my education should be ready to play it. i am willing to ride on a donkey; that is, if the donkey is willing. for all this was commanded me by the angel in the stained glass window.' 'i really think,' said the dickensian, 'that i had better put you in charge of your relations.' 'sir,' i answered, 'there are certain writers to whom humanity owes much, whose talent is yet of so shy and delicate or retrospective a type that we do well to link it with certain quaint places or certain perishing associations. it would not be unnatural to look for the spirit of horace walpole at strawberry hill, or even for the shade of thackeray in old kensington. but let us have no antiquarianism about dickens for dickens is not an antiquity. dickens looks not backward but forward; he might look at our modern mobs with satire, or with fury, but he would love to look at them. he might lash our democracy, but it would be because, like a democrat, he asked much from it. we will not have all his books bound up under the title 'the old curiosity shop.' rather we will have them all bound up under the title of 'great expectations.' wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make something of it, swallow it with a holy cannibalism and assimilate it with the digestion of a giant. we must take these trippers as he would have taken them and tear out of them their tragedy and their farce. do you remember now what the angel said at the sepulchre? 'why seek ye the living among the dead? he is not here; he is risen.' _'tremendous trifles.'_ ascension day what is the difference between christ and satan? it is quite simple. christ descended into hell; satan fell into it. one of them wanted to go up and went down; the other wanted to go down and went up. _'the ball and the cross.'_ whitsunday i have a far more solid and central ground for submitting to christianity as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. and that is this; that the christian church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. it not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. once i saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day i may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. one fine morning i saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning i may see why priests were shaven. plato has told you a truth; but plato is dead. shakespeare has startled you with an image; but shakespeare will not startle you with any more. but imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. to know that plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. the man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living church is a man always expecting to meet plato and shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. he is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. _'orthodoxy.'_ trinity sunday the meanest man in grey fields gone behind the set of sun, heareth between star and other star, through the door of the darkness fallen ajar, the council eldest of things that are, the talk of the three in one. _'ballad of alfred.'_ corpus christi all great spiritual scriptures are full of the invitation not to test but to taste; not to examine but to eat. their phrases are full of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna and dreadful wine. worldliness and the polite society of the world has despised this instinct of eating, but religion has never despised it. _'daily news.'_ printed by spottiswoode and co. ltd., colchester london and eton g. k. chesterton _uniform with this volume:_ w. b. yeats by forrest reid j. m. synge by p. p. howe henry james by ford madox hueffer henrik ibsen by r. ellis roberts thomas hardy by lascelles abercrombie bernard shaw by p. p. howe walter pater by edward thomas walt whitman by basil de selincourt samuel butler by gilbert cannan a. c. swinburne by edward thomas george gissing by frank swinnerton r. l. stevenson by frank swinnerton rudyard kipling by cyril falls william morris by john drinkwater robert bridges by f. e. brett young fyodor dostoievsky by j. middleton murry maurice maeterlinck by una taylor [illustration: g. k. chesterton. from a photograph by hector murchison] g. k. chesterton a critical study by julius west london martin secker number five john street adelphi mcmxv i have to express my gratitude to messrs. burns and oates, messrs. methuen and co., and mr. martin seeker for their kind permission to quote from works by mr. g. k. chesterton published by them. i have also to express my qualified thanks to mr. john lane for his conditional permission to quote from books by the same author published by him. my thanks are further due, for a similar reason, to mr. chesterton himself. to j. c. squire contents chapter page i. introductory 11 ii. the romancer 23 iii. the maker of magic 59 iv. the critic of large things 76 v. the humorist and the poet 91 vi. the religion of a debater 109 vii. the politician who could not tell the time 136 viii. a decadent of sorts 163 bibliography 185 i introductory the habit, to which we are so much addicted, of writing books about other people who have written books, will probably be a source of intense discomfort to its practitioners in the twenty-first century. like the rest of their kind, they will pin their ambition to the possibility of indulging in epigram at the expense of their contemporaries. in order to lead up to the achievement of this desire they will have to work in the nineteenth century and the twentieth. between the two they will find an obstacle of some terror. the eighteen nineties will lie in their path, blocking the way like an unhealthy moat, which some myopes might almost mistake for an aquarium. all manner of queer fish may be discerned in these unclear waters. to drop the metaphor, our historians will find themselves confronted by a startling change. the great victorians write no longer, but are succeeded by eccentrics. there is kipling, undoubtedly the most gifted of them all, but not everybody's darling for all that. there is that prolific trio of best-sellers, mrs. humphry ward, miss marie corelli, and mr. hall caine. there is oscar wilde, who has a vast reputation on the continent, but never succeeded in convincing the british that he was much more than a compromise between a joke and a smell. there is the whole yellow book team, who never succeeded in convincing anybody. the economic basis of authorship had been shaken by the abolition of the three-volume novel. the intellectual basis had been lulled to sleep by that hotchpotch of convention and largeness that we call the victorian era. literature began to be an effort to express the inexpressible, resulting in outraged grammar and many dots. . . . english literature at the end of the last century stood in sore need of some of the elementary virtues. if obviousness and simplicity are liable to be overdone, they are not so deadly in their after-effects as the bizarre and the extravagant. the literary movement of the eighteen nineties was like a strong stimulant given to a patient dying of old age. its results were energetic, but the energy was convulsive. we should laugh if we saw a man apparently dancing in mid-air--until we noticed the rope about his neck. it is impossible to account for the success of the yellow book school and its congeners save on the assumption that the rope was, generally speaking, invisible. in this year of grace, 1915, we are still too close to the eighteen nineties, still too liable to be influenced by their ways, to be able to speak for posterity and to pronounce the final judgment upon those evil years. it is possible that the critics of the twenty-first century, as they turn over the musty pages of the yellow book, will ejaculate with feeling: "good god, what a dull time these people must have had!" on the whole it is probable that this will be their verdict. they will detect the dullness behind the mechanical brilliancy of oscar wilde, and recognize the strange hues of the whole æsthetic movement as the garments of men who could not, or would not see. there is really no rational alternative before our critics of the next century; if the men of the eighteen nineties, and the queer things they gave us, were not the products of an intense boredom, if, in strict point of fact, wilde, beardsley, davidson, hankin, dowson, and lionel johnson were men who rollicked in the warm sunshine of the late victorian period, then the suicide, drunkenness and vice with which they were afflicted is surely the strangest phenomenon in the history of human nature. to many people, those years actually were dull. the years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of afternoon in a rich house with large rooms; the hours before teatime. they believed in nothing except good manners; and the essence of good manners is to conceal a yawn. a yawn may be defined as a silent yell. so says chesterton, yawning prodigiously. one may even go farther, and declare that in those dark days a yawn was the true sign of intelligence. it is no mere coincidence that the two cleverest literary debutants of that last decade, mr. max beerbohm and the subject of this essay, both stepped on the stage making a pretty exhibition of boredom. when the first of these published, in 1896, being then twenty-four years old, his works of max beerbohm he murmured in the preface, "i shall write no more. already i begin to feel myself a trifle outmoded. . . . younger men, with months of activity before them . . . have pressed forward. . . . _cedo junioribus._" so too, when chesterton produced his first book, four years later, he called it _greybeards at play: literature and art for old gentlemen_, and the dedication contained this verse: now we are old and wise and grey, and shaky at the knees; now is the true time to delight in picture books like these. the joke would have been pointless in any other age. in 1900, directed against the crapulous exoticism of contemporary literature, it was an antidote, childhood was being used as a medicine against an assumed attack of second childhood. the attack began with nonsense rhymes and pictures. it was a complete success from the very first. there is this important difference between the writer of nonsense verses and their illustrator; the former must let himself go as much as he can, the latter must hold himself in. in _greybeards at play_, chesterton took the bit between his teeth, and bolted faster than edward lear had ever done. the antitheses of such verses as the following are irresistible: for me, as mr. wordsworth says, the duties shine like stars; i formed my uncle's character, decreasing his cigars. or the shopmen, when their souls were still, declined to open shops- and cooks recorded frames of mind, in sad and subtle chops. the drawings which accompanied these gems, it may be added, were such as the verses deserved. they exhibit a joyous inconsistency, the disproportion which is the essence of parody combined with the accuracy which is the _sine qua non_ of satire. about a month after chesterton had produced his statement of his extreme senility (the actual words of the affidavit are i am, i think i have remarked, [he had not], terrifically old.) he published another little book, _the wild knight and other poems_, as evidence of his youth. for some years past he had occasionally written more or less topical verses which appeared in the outlook and the defunct speaker. _greybeards at play_ was, after all, merely an elaborate sneer at the boredom of a decade; the second book was a more definite attack upon some points of its creeds and an assertion of the principles which mattered most. there is one sin: to call a green leaf grey, whereat the sun in heaven shuddereth. there is one blasphemy: for death to pray, for god alone knoweth the praise of death. or again (_the world's lover_) i stood and spoke a blasphemy- "behold the summer leaves are green." it was a defence of reality, crying for vengeance upon the realists. the word realism had come to be the trade-mark of zola and his followers, especially of mr. george moore, who made a sacrifice of nine obvious, clean and unsinkable aspects of life so as to concentrate upon the submersible tenth. chesterton came out with his defence of the common man, of the streets where shift in strange democracy the million masks of god, the grass, and all the little things of life, "things" in general, for our subject, alone among modern poets, is not afraid to use the word. if on one occasion he can merely . . . feel vaguely thankful to the vast stupidity of things, on another he will speak of the whole divine democracy of things, a line which is a challenge to the unbeliever, a statement of a political creed which is the outgrowth of a religious faith. the same year chesterton formally stepped into the ranks of journalism and joined the staff of the daily news. he had scribbled poems since he had been a boy at st. paul's school. in the years following he had watched other people working at the slade, while he had gone on scribbling. then he had begun to do little odd jobs of art criticism and reviewing for the bookman and put in occasional appearances in the statelier columns of the speaker. then came the boer war, which made g. k. chesterton lose his temper but find his soul. in 1900 the daily news passed into new hands--the hands of g.k.c.'s friends. and until 1913, when the causes he had come to uphold were just diametrically opposed to the causes the victorious liberal party had adopted, every saturday morning's issue of that paper contained an article by him, while often enough there appeared signed reviews and poems. the situation was absurd enough. the daily news was the organ of nonconformists, and g.k.c. preached orthodoxy to them. it advocated temperance, and g.k.c. advocated beer. at first this was sufficiently amusing, and nobody minded much. but before chesterton severed his connection with the paper, its readers had come to expect a weekly article that almost invariably contained an attack upon one of their pet beliefs, and often enough had to be corrected by a leader on the same page. but the chesterton of 1900 was a spokesman of the liberalism of his day, independent, not the intractable monster who scoffed, a few years later, at all the parties in the state. at this point one is reminded of watts-dunton's definition of the two kinds of humour in the renascence of wonder: "while in the case of relative humour that which amuses the humorist is the incongruity of some departure from the laws of convention, in the case of absolute humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the normal as fixed by nature herself." we have our doubts as to the general application of this definition: but it applies so well to chesterton that it might almost have come off his study walls. what made a series of more than six hundred articles by him acceptable to the daily news was just the skilful handling of "the laws of convention," and "the normal as fixed by nature herself." on the theory enunciated by watts-dunton, everything except the perfect average is absolutely funny, and the perfect average, of course, is generally an incommensurable quantity. chesterton carefully made it his business to present the eccentricity--i use the word in its literal sense--of most things, and the humour followed in accordance with the above definition. the method was simple. chesterton invented some grotesque situation, some hypothesis which was glaringly absurd. he then placed it in an abrupt juxtaposition with the normal, instead of working from the normal to the actual, in the usual manner. just as the reader was beginning to protest against the reversal of his accustomed values, g.k.c. would strip the grotesque of a few inessentials, and, lo! a parable. a few strokes of irony and wit, an epigram or two infallibly placed where it would distract attention from a weak point in the argument, and the thing was complete. by such means chesterton developed the use of a veritable excalibur of controversy, a tool of great might in political journalism. these methods, pursued a few years longer, taught him a craftsmanship he could employ for purely romantic ends. how he employed it, and the opinions which he sought to uphold by its means will be the subjects of the following chapters. chesterton sallied forth like a crusader against the political and literary turks who had unjustly come into possession of a part of the heritage of a christian people. we must not forget that the leading characteristic of a crusader is his power of invigorating, which he applies impartially to virtues and to vices. there is a great difference between a crusader and a christian, which is not commonly realized. the latter attempts to show his love for his enemy by abolishing his unchristianness, the former by abolishing him altogether. although the two methods are apt to give curiously similar results, the distinction between a crusader and a christian is radical and will be considered in greater detail in the course of this study. this study does not profess to be biographical, and only the essential facts of chesterton's life need be given here. these are, that he was born in london in 1873, is the son of a west london estate agent who is also an artist and a children's poet in a small but charming way, is married and has children. perhaps it is more necessary to record the fact that he is greatly read by the youth of his day, that he comes in for much amused tolerance, that, generally speaking, he is not recognized as a great or courageous thinker, even by those people who understand his views well enough to dissent from them entirely, and that he is regarded less as a stylist, than as the owner of a trick of style. these are the false beliefs that i seek to combat. the last may be disposed of summarily. when an author's style is completely sincere, and completely part of him, it has this characteristic; it is almost impossible to imitate. nobody has ever successfully parodied shakespeare, for example; there are not even any good parodies of mr. shaw. and chesterton remains unparodied; even mr. max beerbohm's effort in a christmas garland rings false. his style is individual. he has not "played the sedulous ape." but, on the other hand, it is not proposed to acquit chesterton of all the charges brought against him. the average human being is partly a prig and partly a saint; and sometimes men are so glad to get rid of a prig that they are ready to call him a saint--simon stylites, for example. and it is not suggested that the author of the remark, "there are only three things that women do not understand. they are liberty, equality, fraternity," is not a prig, for a demonstration that he is a complete gentleman would obviously leave other matters of importance inconveniently crowded out. we are confronted with a figure of some significance in these times. he represents what has been called in other spheres than his "the anti-intellectualist reaction." we must answer the questions; to what extent does he represent mere unqualified reaction? what are his qualifications as a craftsman? what, after all, has he done? and we begin with his romances. ii the romancer in spite of chesterton's liberal production of books, it is not altogether simple to classify them into "periods," in the manner beloved of the critic, nor even to sort them out according to subjects. g.k.c. can (and generally does) inscribe an essay on the nature of religion into his novels, together with other confusing ingredients to such an extent that most readers would consider it pure pedantry on the part of anybody to insist that a chestertonian romance need differ appreciably from a chestertonian essay, poem, or criticism. that a book by g.k.c. should describe itself as a novel means little more than that its original purchasing price was four shillings and sixpence. it might also contain passages of love, hate, and other human emotions, but then again, it might not. but one thing it would contain, and that is war. g.k.c. would be pugnacious, even when there was nothing to fight. his characters would wage their wars, even when the bone of contention mattered as little as the handle of an old toothbrush. that, we should say, is the first factor in the formula of the chestertonian romance--and all the rest are the inventor's secret. imprimis, a body of men and an idea, and the rest must follow, if only the idea be big enough for a man to fight about, or if need be, even to make himself ridiculous about. in _the napoleon of notting hill_ we have this view of romance stated in a manner entirely typical of its author. king auberon and the provost of notting hill, adam wayne, are speaking. the latter says: "i know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that only one or two may rightly use, and only seldom. it is a fairy wand of great fear, stronger than those who use it--often frightful, often wicked to use. but whatever is touched with it is never again wholly common; whatever is touched with it takes a magic from outside the world. if i touch, with this fairy wand, the railways and the roads of notting hill, men will love them, and be afraid of them for ever." "what the devil are you talking about?" asked the king. "it has made mean landscapes magnificent, and hovels outlast cathedrals," went on the madman. "why should it not make lamp-posts fairer than greek lamps, and an omnibus-ride like a painted ship? the touch of it is the finger of a strange perfection." "what is your wand?" cried the king, impatiently. "there it is," said wayne; and pointed to the floor, where his sword lay flat and shining. if all the dragons of old romance were loosed upon the fiction of our day, the result, one would imagine, would be something like that of a chestertonian novel. but the dragons are dead and converted into poor fossil ichthyosauruses, incapable of biting the timidest damsel or the most corpulent knight that ever came out of the stock exchange. that is the tragedy of g.k.c.'s ideas, but it is also his opportunity. "man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catch-words," says stevenson. "give me my dragons," says g.k.c. in effect, "and i will give you your catch-words. you may have them in any one of a hundred different ways. i will drop them on you when you least expect them, and their disguises will outrange all those known to scotland yard and to drury lane combined. you may have catastrophes and comets and camels, if you will, but you will certainly have your catch-words." the first of chesterton's novels, in order of their publication, is _the napoleon of notting hill_ (1904). this is extravagance itself; fiction in the sense only that the events never happened and never could have happened. the scene is placed in london, the time, about a.d. 1984. "this 'ere progress, it keeps on goin' on," somebody remarks in one of the novels of mr. h. g. wells. but it never goes on as the prophets said it would, and consequently england in those days does not greatly differ from the england of to-day. there have been changes, of course. kings are now chosen in alphabetical rotation, and the choice falls upon a civil servant, auberon quin by name. now quin has a sense of humour, of absolute humour, as the watts-dunton definition already cited would have it called. he has two bosom friends who are also civil servants and whose humour is of the official variety, and whose outlook upon life is that of a times leader. quin's first official act is the publication of a proclamation ordering every london borough to build itself city walls, with gates to be closed at sunset, and to become possessed of provosts in mediæval attire, with guards of halberdiers. from his throne he attends to some of the picturesque details of the scheme, and enjoys the joke in silence. but after a few years of this a young man named adam wayne becomes provost of notting hill, and to him his borough, and more especially the little street in which he has spent his life, are things of immense importance. rather than allow that street to make way for a new thoroughfare, wayne rallies his halberdiers to the defence of their borough. the provosts of north kensington and south kensington, of west kensington and bayswater, rally their guards too, and attack notting hill, purposing to clear wayne out of the way and to break down the offending street. wayne is surrounded at night but converts defeat into victory by seizing the offices of a gas company and turning off the street lights. the next day he is besieged in his own street. by a sudden sortie he and his army escape to campden hill. here a great battle rages for many hours, while one of the opposing provosts gathers a large army for a final attack. at last wayne and the remnants of his men are hopelessly outnumbered, but once more he turns defeat into victory. he threatens, unless the opposing forces instantly surrender, to open the great reservoir and flood the whole of notting hill. the allied generals surrender, and the empire of notting hill comes into being. twenty years later the spirit of adam wayne has gone beyond his own city walls. london is a wild romance, a mass of cities filled with citizens of great pride. but the empire, which has been the nazareth of the new idea, has waxed fat and kicked. in righteous anger the other boroughs attack it, and win, because their cause is just. king auberon, a recruit in wayne's army, falls with his leader in the great battle of kensington gardens. but they recover in the morning. "it was all a joke," says the king in apology. "no," says wayne; "we are two lobes of the same brain . . . you, the humorist . . . i, the fanatic. . . . you have a halberd and i have a sword, let us start our wanderings over the world. for we are its two essentials." so ends the story. consider the preposterous elements of the book. a london with blue horse-'buses. bloodthirsty battles chiefly fought with halberds. a king who acts as a war correspondent and parodies g. w. stevens. it is preposterous because it is romantic and we are not used to romance. but to chaucer let us say it would have appeared preposterous because he could not have realized the initial premises. before such a book the average reader is helpless. his scale of values is knocked out of working order by the very first page, almost by the very first sentence. ("the human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.") the absence of a love affair will deprive him of the only "human interest" he can be really sure of. the chestertonian idiom, above all, will soon lead him to expect nothing, because he can never get any idea of what he is to receive, and will bring him to a proper submissiveness. the later stages are simple. the reader will wonder why it never before occurred to him that area-railings are very like spears, and that a distant tramcar may at night distinctly resemble a dragon. he may travel far, once his imagination has been started on these lines. when romantic possibilities have once shed a glow on the offices of the gas light and coke company and on the erections of the metropolitan water board, the rest of life may well seem filled with wonder and wild desires. chesterton may be held to have invented a new species of detective story--the sort that has no crime, no criminal, and a detective whose processes are transcendental. _the club of queer trades_ is the first batch of such stories. _the man who was thursday_ is another specimen of some length. more recently, chesterton has repeated the type in some of the _father brown_ stories. in _the club of queer trades_, the transcendental detective is basil grant, to describe whom with accuracy is difficult, because of his author's inconsistencies. basil grant, for instance, is "a man who scarcely stirred out of his attic," yet it would appear elsewhere that he walked abroad often enough. the essentials of this unprecedented detective are, however, sufficiently tangible. he had been a k.c. and a judge. he had left the bench because it annoyed him, and because he held the very human but not legitimate belief that some criminals would be better off with a trip to the seaside than with a sentence of imprisonment. after his retirement from public life he stuck to his old trade as the judge of a voluntary criminal court. "my criminals were tried for the faults which really make social life impossible. they were tried before me for selfishness, or for an impossible vanity, or for scandal-mongering, or for stinginess to guests or dependents." it is regrettable that chesterton does not grant us a glimpse of this fascinating tribunal at work. however, it is grant's job, on the strength of which he becomes the president and founder of the c.q.t.--club of queer trades. among the members of this club are a gentleman who runs an adventure and romance agency for supplying thrills to the bourgeois, two professional detainers, and an agent for arboreal villas, who lets off a variety of birds' nest. the way in which these people go about their curious tasks invariably suggests a crime to rupert grant, basil's amateur detective brother, whereupon basil has to intervene to put matters right. the author does not appear to have been struck by the inconsistency of setting basil to work to ferret out the doings of his fellow club-members. the book is, in fact, full of joyous inconsistencies. the agent for arboreal villas is clearly unqualified for the membership of the club. professor chadd has no business there either. he is elected on the strength of having invented a language expressed by dancing, but it appears that he is really an employee in the asiatic mss. department of the british museum. things are extremely absurd in _the eccentric seclusion of the old lady_. at the instigation of rupert, who has heard sighs of pain coming out of a south kensington basement, basil, rupert, and the man who tells the story, break into the house and violently assault those whom they meet. basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three blows like battering-rams knocked the footman into a cocked hat. then he sprang on top of burrows, with one antimacassar in his hand and another in his teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost before he knew clearly that his head had struck the floor. then basil sprang at greenwood . . . etc. etc. there is a good deal more like this. having taken the citadel and captured the defenders (as cæsar might say), basil and company reach the sighing lady of the basement. but she refuses to be released. whereupon basil explains his own queer trade, and that the lady is voluntarily undergoing a sentence for backbiting. no explanation is vouchsafed of the strange behaviour of basil grant in attacking men who, as he knew, were doing nothing they should not. presumably it was due to a chestertonian theory that there should be at least one good physical fight in each book. it will be seen that _the club of queer trades_ tends to curl up somewhat (quite literally, in the sense that the end comes almost where the beginning ought to be) when it receives heavy and serious treatment. i should therefore explain that this serious treatment has been given under protest, and that its primary intention has been to deal with those well-meaning critics who believe that chesterton can write fiction, in the ordinary sense of the word. his own excellent definition of fictitious narrative (in _the victorian age in literature_) is that essentially "the story is told . . . for the sake of some study of the difference between human beings." this alone is enough to exculpate him of the charge of writing novels. the chestertonian short story is also in its way unique. if we applied the methods of the higher criticism to the story just described, we might base all manner of odd theories upon the defeat (_inter alios_) of burrows, a big and burly youth, by basil grant, aged sixty at the very least, and armed with antimacassars. but there is no necessity. if chesterton invents a fantastic world, full of fantastic people who speak chestertonese, then he is quite entitled to waive any trifling conventions which hinder the liberty of his subjects. as already pointed out, such is his humour. the only disadvantage, as somebody once complained of the arabian nights, is that one is apt to lose one's interest in a hero who is liable at any moment to turn into a camel. none of chesterton's heroes do, as a matter of fact, become camels, but i would nevertheless strongly advise any young woman about to marry one of them to take out an insurance policy against unforeseen transformations. although it appears that a few reviewers went to the length of reading the whole of _the man who was thursday_ (1908), it is obvious by their subsequent guesswork that they did not notice the second part of the title, which is, very simply, _a nightmare_. the story takes its name from the supreme council of anarchists, which has seven members, named after the days of the week. sunday is the chairman. the others, one after the other, turn out to be detectives. syme, the nearest approach to the what might be called the hero, is a poet whom mysterious hands thrust into an anarchists' meeting, at which he is elected to fill the vacancy caused by the death of last thursday. a little earlier other mysterious hands had taken him into a dark room in scotland yard where the voice of an unseen man had told him that henceforth he was a member of the anti-anarchist corps, a new body which was to deal with the new anarchists--not the comparatively harmless people who threw bombs, but the intellectual anarchist. "we say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher," somebody explains to him. the bewildered syme walks straight into further bewilderments, as, one after the other, the week-days of the committee are revealed. but who is sunday? chesterton makes no reply. it was he who in a darkened room of scotland yard had enrolled the detectives. he is the nightmare of the story. the first few chapters are perfectly straightforward, and lifelike to the extent of describing personal details in a somewhat exceptional manner for chesterton. but, gradually, wilder and wilder things begin to happen--until, at last, syme wakes up. the trouble about _the man who was thursday_ is not its incomprehensibility, but its author's gradual decline of interest in the book as it lengthened out. it begins excellently. there is real humour and a good deal of it in the earlier stages of syme. and there are passages like this one on the "lawless modern philosopher": compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. . . . thieves respect property. they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. but philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. but philosophers despise marriage as marriage. but his amiable flow of paradox soon runs out. the end of the book is just a wild whirl, a nightmare with a touch of the cinematograph. people chase one another, in one instance they quite literally chase themselves. and the ending has all the effect of a damaged film that cannot be stopped, on the large blank spaces of which some idiot has been drawing absurd pictures which appear on the screen, to the confusion of the story. one remembers the immense and dominating figure of sunday, only because the description of him reads very much like a description of chesterton himself. but if the person is recognizable, the personality remains deliberately incomprehensible. he is just an outline in space, who rode down albany street on an elephant abducted from the zoological gardens, and who spoke sadly to his guests when they had run their last race against him. until recent years the word mysticism was sufficiently true to its derivation to imply mystery, the relation of god to man. but since the cheaper sort of journalist seized hold of the unhappy word, its demoralization has been complete. it now indicates, generally speaking, an intellectual defect which expresses itself in a literary quality one can only call woolliness. there is a genuine mysticism, expressed in blake's lines: to see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. and there is a spurious mysticism, meaningless rubbish of which rossetti's sister helen is a specimen. what could be more idiotic than the verse: "he has made a sign and called halloo! sister helen, and he says that he would speak with you." "oh tell him i fear the frozen dew, little brother." (_o mother, mary mother,_ _why laughs she thus between hell and heaven?_) the trouble about the latter variety is its extreme simplicity. anybody with the gift of being able to make lines scan and rhyme can produce similar effects in a similar way. hence the enormous temptation exercised by this form of mysticism gone wrong. there is a naughty little story of a little girl, relating to her mother the mishaps of the family coal merchant, as seen from the dining-room window. he slipped on a piece of orange-peel, the child had explained. "and what happened then?" "why, mummy, he sat down on the pavement and talked about god." chesterton (and he is not alone in this respect) behaves exactly like this coal-heaver. when he is at a loss, he talks about god. in each case one is given to suspect that the invocation is due to a temporarily overworked imagination. this leads us to _the ball and the cross_ (1906). in _the man who was thursday_, when the author had tired of his story, he brought in the universe at large. but its successor is dominated by god, and discussions on him by beings celestial, terrestrial, and merely infernal. and yet _the ball and the cross_ is in many respects chesterton's greatest novel. the first few chapters are things of joy. there is much said in them about religion, but it is all sincere and bracing. the first chapter consists, in the main, of a dialogue on religion, between professor lucifer, the inventor and the driver of an eccentric airship, and father michael, a theologian acquired by the professor in western bulgaria. as the airship dives into the ball and the cross of saint paul's cathedral, its passengers naturally find themselves taking a deep interest in the cross, considered as symbol and anchor. lucifer plumps for the ball, the symbol of all that is rational and united. the cross "is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable direction. . . . the very shape of it is a contradiction in terms." michael replies, "but we like contradictions in terms. man is a contradiction in terms; he is a beast whose superiority to other beasts consists in having fallen." defeated on points, lucifer leaves the father clinging literally to the cross and flies away. michael meets a policeman on the upper gallery and is conducted downwards. the scene changes to ludgate circus, but michael is no longer in the centre of it. a scot named turnbull keeps a shop here, apparently in the endeavour to counterbalance the influence of st. paul's across the way. he is an atheist, selling atheist literature, editing an atheist paper. another scot arrives, young evan macian, straight from the highlands. unlike the habitual londoner, macian takes the little shop seriously. in its window he sees a copy of the atheist, the leading article of which contains an insult to the virgin mary. macian thereupon puts his stick through the window. turnbull comes out, there is a scuffle, and both are arrested and taken before a dickensian magistrate. the sketch of mr. cumberland vane is very pleasing: it is clear that the author knew what he was copying. lord melbourne is alleged to have said, "no one has more respect for the christian religion than i have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into private life. . . ." mr. vane felt much the same way when he heard macian's simple explanation: "he is my enemy. he is the enemy of god." he said, "it is most undesirable that things of that sort should be spoken about--a--in public, and in an ordinary court of justice. religion is--a--too personal a matter to be mentioned in such a place." however, macian is fined. after which he and turnbull, as men of honour, buy themselves swords and proceed to fight the matter out. with interruptions due to argument and the police, the fight lasts several weeks. turnbull and macian fight in the back garden of the man from whom they bought the swords,[1] until the police intervene. they escape the police and gain the northern heights of london, and fight once more, with a madness renewed and stimulated by the peace-making efforts of a stray and silly tolstoyan. then the police come again, and are once more outdistanced. this time mortal combat is postponed on account of the sanguinolence of a casual lunatic who worshipped blood to such a nauseating extent that the duellists deferred operations in order to chase him into a pond. then follows an interminable dialogue, paradoxical, thoroughly shavian, while the only two men in england to whom god literally is a matter of life and death find that they begin to regard the slaughter of one by the other as an unpleasant duty. again they fight and are separated. they are motored by a lady to the hampshire coast, and there they fight on the sands until the rising tide cuts them off. an empty boat turns up to rescue them from drowning; in it they reach one of the channel islands. again they fight, and again the police come. they escape from them, but remain on the island in disguise, and make themselves an opportunity to pick a quarrel and so fight a duel upon a matter in keeping with local prejudice. but turnbull has fallen in love. his irritatingly calm and beautiful devotee argues with him on religion until he is driven to cast off his disguise. then the police are on his tracks again. a lunatic lends turnbull and macian his yacht and so the chase continues. but by this time chesterton is getting just a trifle bored. he realizes that no matter how many adventures his heroes get into, or how many paradoxes they fling down each other's throats, the end of the story, the final inevitable end which alone makes a series of rapid adventures worth while, is not even on the horizon. an element of that spurious mysticism already described invades the book. it begins to be clear that chesterton is trying to drag in a moral somehow, if need be, by the hair of its head. the two yachters spend two weeks of geographical perplexity and come to a desert island. they land, but think it wiser, on the whole, to postpone fighting until they have finished the champagne and cigars with which their vessel is liberally stored. this takes a week. just as they are about to begin the definitive duel they discover that they are not upon a desert island at all, they are near margate. and the police are there, too. so once more they are chased. they land in a large garden in front of an old gentleman who assures them that he is god. he turns out to be a lunatic, and the place an asylum. there follows a characteristic piece of that abuse of science for which chesterton has never attempted to suggest a substitute. macian and turnbull find themselves prisoners, unable to get out. then they dream dreams. each sees himself in an aeroplane flying over fleet street and ludgate hill, where a battle is raging. but the woolly element is very pronounced by this time, and we can make neither head nor tail of these dreams and the conversations which accompany them. the duellists are imprisoned for a month in horrible cells. they find their way into the garden, and are told that all england is now in the hands of the alienists, by a new act of parliament: this has been the only possible manner of putting a stop to the revolution started by macian and turnbull. these two find all the persons they had met with during their odyssey, packed away in the asylum, which is a wonderful place worked by petroleum machinery. but the matter-of-fact grocer from the channel island, regarding the whole affair as an infringement of the rights of man, sets the petroleum alight. michael, the celestial being who had appeared in the first chapter and disappeared at the end of it, is dragged out of a cell in an imbecile condition. lucifer comes down in his airship to collect the doctors, whose bodies he drops out, a little later on. the buildings vanish in the flames, the keepers bolt, the inmates talk about their souls. macian is reunited to the lady of the channel island, and the story ends. when a stone has been tossed into a pond, the ripples gradually and symmetrically grow smaller. a chesterton novel is like an adventurous voyage of discovery, which begins on smooth water and is made with the object of finding the causes of the ripples. as ripple succeeds ripple--or chapter follows chapter--so we have to keep a tighter hold on such tangible things as are within our reach. finally we reach the centre of the excitement and are either sucked into a whirlpool, or hit on the head with a stone. when we recover consciousness we feebly remember we have had a thrilling journey and that we had started out with a misapprehension of the quality of chestertonian fiction. a man whose memory is normal should be able to give an accurate synopsis of a novel six months after he has read it. but i should be greatly surprised if any reader of _the ball and the cross_ could tell exactly what it was all about, within a month or two of reading it. the discontinuity of it makes one difficulty; the substitution of paradox for incident makes another. yet it is difficult to avoid the conviction that this novel will survive its day and the generation that begot it. if it was chesterton's endeavour (as one is bound to suspect) to show that the triumph of atheism would lead to the triumph of a callous and inhuman body of scientists, then he has failed miserably. but if he was attempting to prove that the uncertainties of religion were trivial things when compared with the uncertainties of atheism, then the verdict must be reversed. the dialogues on religion contained in _the ball and the cross_ are alone enough and more than enough to place it among the few books on religion which could be safely placed in the hands of an atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence. if we consider _manalive_ (1912) now we shall be departing from strict chronological order, as it was preceded by _the innocence of father brown_. it will, however, be more satisfactory to take the two father brown books together. in the first of these and _manalive_, a change can be distinctly felt. it is not a simple weakening of the power of employing instruments, such as befell ibsen when, after writing the lady from the sea, he could no longer keep his symbols and his characters apart. it is a more subtle change, a combination of several small changes, which cannot be studied fairly in relation only to one side of chesterton's work. in the last chapter an attempt will be made to analyze these, for the present i can only indicate some of the fallings-off noticeable in _manalive_, and leave it at that. chesterton's previous romances were not constructed, the reader may have gathered, with that minute attention to detail which makes some modern novels read like the report of a newly promoted detective. but a man may do such things and yet be considered spotless. shakespeare, after all, went astray on several points of history and geography. the authors of the old testament talked about "the hare that cheweth the cud." and, if any reader should fail to see the application of these instances to modern fiction, i can only recommend him to read vanity fair and find out how many children had the rev. bute crawley, and what were their names. no, the trouble with _manalive_ is not in its casual, happy-go-lucky construction. it is rather in a certain lack of ease, a tendency to exaggerate effects, a continual stirring up of inconsiderable points. but let us come to the story. there is a boarding-house situated on one of the summits of the northern heights. a great wind happens, and a large man, quite literally, blows in. his name is innocent smith and he is naturally considered insane. but he is really almost excessively sane. his presence makes life at the house a sort of holiday for the inmates, male and female. smith is about to run for a special licence in order to marry one of the women in the house, and the other boarders have just paired off when a telegram posted by one of the ladies in a misapprehension brings two lunacy experts around in a cab. smith adds to the excitement of the moment by putting a couple of bullets through a doctor's hat. now smith is what somebody calls "an allegorical practical joker." but chesterton gives a better description of him than that. he's comic just because he's so startlingly commonplace. don't you know what it is to be in all one family circle, with aunts and uncles, when a schoolboy comes home for the holidays? that bag there on the cab is only a schoolboy's hamper. this tree here in the garden is only the sort of tree that any schoolboy would have climbed. yes, that's the sort of thing that has haunted us all about him, the thing we could never fit a word to. whether he is my old schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my old schoolfellows. he is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwing animal that we have all been. innocent has an idea about every few minutes, but so far as the book is concerned we need mention only one of them. that one is--local autonomy for beacon house. this may be recommended as a game to be played _en famille_. establish a high court, call in a legal member, and get a constitution. the rest will be very hilarious. the legal member of the beacon house _ménage_ is an irish ex-barrister, one michael moon, who plans as follows: the high court of beacon, he declared, was a splendid example of our free and sensible constitution. it had been founded by king john in defiance of magna carta, and now held absolute power over windmills, wine and spirit licences, ladies travelling in turkey, revision of sentences for dog-stealing and parricide, as well as anything whatever that happened in the town of market bosworth. the whole hundred and nine seneschals of the high court of beacon met about once in every four centuries; but in the intervals (as mr. moon explained) the whole powers of the institution were vested in mrs. duke [the landlady]. tossed about among the rest of the company, however, the high court did not retain its historical and legal seriousness, but was used somewhat unscrupulously in a riot of domestic detail. if somebody spilt the worcester sauce on the tablecloth, he was quite sure it was a rite without which the sittings and findings of the court would be invalid; and if somebody wanted a window to remain shut, he would suddenly remember that none but the third son of the lord of the manor of penge had the right to open it. they even went the length of making arrests and conducting criminal inquiries. before this tribunal innocent smith is brought. one alienist is an american, who is quite prepared to acknowledge its jurisdiction, being by reason of his nationality not easily daunted by mere constitutional queerness. the other doctor, being the prosecutor and a boarder, has no choice in the matter. the doctors, it should be added, have brought with them a mass of documentary evidence, incriminating smith. how the defence has time to collect this evidence is not explained, but this is just one of the all-important details which do not matter in the chestertonian plane. smith is tried for attempted murder. the prosecution fails because the evidence shows smith to be a first-class shot, who has on occasion fired life into people by frightening them. then he is tried for burglary on the basis of a clergyman's letter from which it is gathered that smith tried one night to induce him and another cleric to enter a house burglariously in the dark. this charge breaks down because a letter is produced from the other clergyman who did actually accompany smith over housetops and down through trap-doors--into his own house! smith, it is explained, is in the habit of keeping himself awake to the romance and wonder of everyday existence by such courses. from the second letter, however, it appears that there is a mrs. smith, so the next charge is one of desertion and attempted bigamy. a series of documents is produced, from persons in france, russia, china, and california recounting conversations with smith, a man with a garden-rake, who left his house so that he might find it, and at the end leapt over the hedge into the garden where mrs. smith was having tea. in the words of the servant "he looked round at the garden and said, very loud and strong: 'oh, what a lovely place you've got,' just as if he'd never seen it before." after which the court proceeds to try smith on a polygamy charge. documentary evidence shows that smith has at one time or another married a miss green, a miss brown, a miss black, just as he is now about to marry a miss gray, moon points out that these are all the same lady. innocent smith has merely broken the conventions, he has religiously kept the commandments. he has burgled his own house, and married his own wife. he has been perfectly innocent, and therefore he has been perfectly merry. innocent is acquitted, and the book ends. in the course of _manalive_, somebody says, "going right round the world is the shortest way to where you are already." these are the words of an overworked epigrammatist, and upon them hangs the whole story. if _manalive_ is amusing, it is because chesterton has a style which could make even a debilitated paradox of great length seem amusing. the book has a few gorgeous passages. among the documents read at the trial of innocent smith, for example, is a statement made by a trans-siberian station-master, which is a perfectly exquisite burlesque at the expense of the russian _intelligenzia_. the whole series of documents, in fact, are delightful bits of self-expression on the part of a very varied team of selves. while chesterton is able to turn out such things we must be content to take the page, and not the story, as his unit of work. _manalive_, by the way, is the first of the author's stories in which women are represented as talking to one another. chesterton seems extraordinarily shy with his feminine characters. he is a little afraid of woman. "the average woman is a despot, the average man is a serf."[2] mrs. innocent smith's view of men is in keeping with this peculiar notion. "at certain curious times they're just fit to take care of us, and they're never fit to take care of themselves." smith is the chestertonian parsifal, just as prince muishkin is dostoievsky's. the transcendental type of detective, first sketched out in _the club of queer trades_, is developed more fully in the two father brown books. in the little roman priest who has such a wonderful instinct for placing the diseased spots in people's souls, we have chesterton's completest and most human creation. yet, with all their cleverness, and in spite of the fact that from internal evidence it is almost blatantly obvious that the author enjoyed writing these stories, they bear marks which put the books on a lower plane than either _the napoleon of notting hill_ or _the ball and the cross_. in the latter book chesterton spoke of "the mere healthy and heathen horror of the unclean; the mere inhuman hatred of the inhuman state of madness." his own critical work had been a long protest against the introduction of artificial horrors, a plea for sanity and the exercise of sanity. but in _the innocence of father brown_ these principles, almost the fundamental ones of literary decency, were put on the shelf. chesterton's criminals are lunatics, perhaps it is his belief that crime and insanity are inseparable. but even if this last supposition is correct, its approval would not necessarily license the introduction of some of the characters. there is israel gow, who suffers from a peculiar mania which drives him to collect gold from places seemly and unseemly, even to the point of digging up a corpse in order to extract the gold filling from its teeth. there is the insane french chief of police, who commits a murder and attempts to disguise the body, and the nature of the crime, by substituting the head of a guillotined criminal for that of the victim. in another story we have the picture of a cheerful teetotaller who suffers from drink and suicidal mania. there is also a doctor who kills a mad poet, and a mad priest who drops a hammer from the top of his church-tower upon his brother. another story is about the loathsome treachery of an english general. it is, of course, difficult to write about crime without touching on features which revolt the squeamish reader, but it can be done, and it has been done, as in the sherlock holmes stories. there are subjects about which one instinctively feels it is not good to know too much. sex, for example, is one of them. strindberg, weininger, maupassant, jules de goncourt, knew too much about sex, and they all went mad, although it is usual to disguise the fact in the less familiar terms of medical science. madness itself is another such subject. there are writers who dwell on madness because they cannot help themselves--strindberg, edgar allan poe, gogol, and many others--but they scarcely produce the same nauseating sensation as the sudden introduction of the note of insanity into a hitherto normal setting. the harnessing of the horror into which the discovery of insanity reacts is a favourite device of the feeble craftsman, but it is illegitimate. it is absolutely opposed to those elementary canons of good taste which decree that we may not jest at the expense of certain things, either because they are too sacred or not sacred enough. the opposite of a decadent author is not necessarily a writer who attacks decadents. many decadents have attacked themselves, by committing suicide, for example. the opposite of a decadent author is one to whom decadent ideas and imagery are alien, which is a very different thing. for example, the whole story _the wrong shape_ is filled with decadent ideas; one is sure that baudelaire would have entirely approved of it. it includes a decadent poet, living in wildly oriental surroundings, attended by a hindoo servant. even the air of the place is decadent; father brown on entering the house learns instinctively from it that a crime is to be committed. considered purely as detective stories, these cannot be granted a very good mark. there is scarcely a story that has not a serious flaw in it. a man--flambeau, of whom more later--gains admittance to a small and select dinner party and almost succeeds in stealing the silver, by the device of turning up and pretending to be a guest when among the waiters, and a waiter when among the guests. but it is not explained what he did during the first two courses of that dinner, when he obviously had to be either a waiter or a guest, and could not keep up both parts, as when the guests were arriving. another man, a "priest of apollo," is worshipping the sun on the top of a "sky-scraping" block of offices in westminster, while a woman falls down a lift-shaft and is killed. father brown immediately concludes that the priest is guilty of the murder because, had he been unprepared, he would have started and looked round at the scream and the crash of the victim falling. but a man absorbed in prayer on, let us say, a tenth floor, is, in point of fact, quite unlikely to hear a crash in the basement, or a scream even nearer to him. but the most astonishing thing about _the eye of apollo_ is the staging. in order to provide the essentials, mr. chesterton has to place "the heiress of a crest and half a county, as well as great wealth," who is blind, in a typist's office! the collocation is somewhat too singular. one might go right through the father brown stories in this manner. but, if the reader wishes to draw the maximum of enjoyment out of them, he will do nothing of the sort. he will believe, as fervently as alfred de vigny, that l'idée c'est tout, and lay down all petty regard for detail at the feet of father brown. this little roman cleric has listened to so many confessions (he calls himself "a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins," but this seems to be excessive, even for a roman catholic) that he is really well acquainted with the human soul. he is also extremely observant. and his greatest friend is flambeau, whom he once brings to judgment, twice hinders in crime, and thenceforward accompanies on detective expeditions. _the innocence of father brown_ had a _sequel_, _the wisdom of father brown_, distinctly less effective, as sequels always are, than the predecessor. but the underlying ideas are the same. in the first place there is a deep detestation of "science" (whatever that is) and the maintenance of the theory incarnate in father brown, that he who can read the human soul knows all things. the detestation of science (of which, one gathers, chesterton knows nothing) is carried to the same absurd length as in _the ball and the cross_. in the very first story, father brown calls on a criminologist ostensibly in order to consult him, actually in order to show the unfortunate man, who had retired from business fourteen years ago, what an extraordinary fool he was. the father brown of these stories--moon-faced little man--is a peculiar creation. no other author would have taken the trouble to excogitate him, and then treat him so badly. as a detective he never gets a fair chance. he is always on the spot when a murder is due to be committed, generally speaking he is there before time. when an absconding banker commits suicide under peculiar circumstances in italian mountains, when a french publicist advertises himself by fighting duels with himself (very nearly), when a murder is committed in the dressing-room corridor of a theatre, when a miser and blackmailer kills himself, when a lunatic admiral attempts murder and then commits suicide, when amid much incoherence a voodoo murder takes place, when somebody tries to kill a colonel by playing on his superstitions (and by other methods), and when a gentleman commits suicide from envy, father brown is always there. one might almost interpret the father brown stories by suggesting that their author had written them in order to illustrate the sudden impetus given to murder and suicide by the appearance of a roman priest. here we may suspend our reviews of chestertonian romance. there remains yet _the flying inn_, which shall be duly considered along with the other débris of its author. in summing up, it may be said of chesterton that at his best he invented new possibilities of romance and a new and hearty laugh. it may be said of the decadents of the eighteen nineties, that if their motto wasn't "let's all go bad," it should have been. so one may say of chesterton that if he has not selected "let's all go mad" as a text, he should have done. madness, in the chestertonian, whatever it is in the pathological sense, is a defiance of convention, a loosening of visible bonds in order to show the strength of the invisible ones; perhaps, as savages are said to regard lunatics with great respect, holding them to be nearer the deity than most, so chesterton believes of his own madmen. innocent smith, of course, the simple fool, the blithering idiot, is a truly wise man. footnotes: [1] chesterton jeers at this man's "scottish" ancestry because his surname was gordon and he was obviously a jew. the author is probably unaware that there are large numbers of jews bearing that name in russia. if he had made his jew call himself macpherson, the case would have been different. [2] _all things considered_, p. 106. iii the maker of magic chesterton's only play, _magic_, was written at the suggestion of mr. kenelm foss and produced by him in november, 1913, at the little theatre, where it enjoyed a run of more than one hundred performances. this charming thing does not make one wish that chesterton was an habitual playwright, for one feels that _magic_ was a sort of tank into which its author's dramatic talents had been draining for many years--although, in actual fact, chesterton allowed newspaper interviewers to learn that the play had been written in a very short space of time. his religious ideas were expressed in _magic_ with great neatness. most perhaps of all his works this is a quotable production. patricia carleon, a niece of the duke, her guardian, is in the habit of wandering about his grounds seeing fairies. on the night when her brother morris is expected to return from america she is having a solitary moonlight stroll when she sees a stranger, "a cloaked figure with a pointed hood," which last almost covers his face. she naturally asks him what he is doing there. he replies, mapping out the ground with his staff: i have a hat, but not to wear; i have a sword, but not to slay; and ever in my bag i bear a pack of cards, but not to play. this, he tells her, is the language of fairies. he tells her that fairies are not small things, but quite the reverse. after a few sentences have been spoken the prologue comes to an end, and the curtain rises upon the scene of the play, the drawing-room of the duke. here is seated the rev. cyril smith, a young clergyman, "an honest man and not an ass." to him enters the duke's secretary, to tell him the duke is engaged at the moment, but will be down shortly. he is followed by dr. grimthorpe, an elderly agnostic, the red lamp of whose house can be seen through the open french windows. smith is erecting a model public-house in the village, and has come to ask the duke for a contribution towards the cost. grimthorpe is getting up a league for opposing the erection of the new public-house, and has also come to the duke for help. they discover the nature of each other's errand. smith's case is, "how can the church have a right to make men fast if she does not allow them to feast?"; grimthorpe's, that alcohol is not a food. the duke's secretary enters and gives smith a cheque for £50, then he gives the doctor another--also for £50. this is the first glimpse we have of the duke's eccentricity, an excessive impartiality based on the theory that everybody "does a great deal of good in his own way," and on sheer absence of mind--an absence which sometimes is absolutely literal. the doctor explains in confidence to the clergyman that there is something wrong about the family of patricia and morris, who are of irish origin. . . . "they saw fairies and things of that sort." smith. and i suppose, to the medical mind, seeing fairies means much the same as seeing snakes? doctor. [_with a sour smile._] well, they saw them in ireland. i suppose it's quite correct to see fairies in ireland. it's like gambling at monte carlo. it's quite respectable. but i do draw the line at their seeing fairies in england. i do object to their bringing their ghosts and goblins and witches into the poor duke's own back garden and within a yard of my own red lamp. it shows a lack of tact. patricia, moreover, wanders about the park and the woods in the evenings. "damp evenings for choice. she calls it the celtic twilight. i've no use for the celtic twilight myself. it has a tendency to get on the chest." the duke, annoyed by this love of fairies, has blundered, in his usual way, on an absurd compromise between the real and the ideal. a conjuror is to come that very night. when explanations have gone so far, the duke at last makes his entry. the stage directions tell us that "in the present state of the peerage it is necessary to explain that the duke, though an ass, is a gentleman." his thoughts are the most casual on earth. he is always being reminded of something or somebody which has nothing to do with the case. as for instance, "i saw the place you're putting up . . . mr. smith. very good work. very good work, indeed. art for the people, eh? i particularly liked that woodwork over the west door--i'm glad to see you're using the new sort of graining . . . why, it all reminds one of the french revolution." after one or two dissociations of this sort, the expected morris carleon enters through the french window; he is rather young and excitable, and america has overlaid the original irishman. morris immediately asks for patricia and is told that she is wandering in the garden. the duke lets out that she sees fairies; morris raves a bit about his sister being allowed out alone with anything in the nature of a man, when patricia herself enters. she is in a slightly exalted state; she has just seen her fairy, him of the pointed hood. morris, of course, is furious, not to say suspicious. doctor. [_putting his hand on_ morris's _shoulder._] come, you must allow a little more for poetry. we can't all feed on nothing but petrol. duke. quite right, quite right. and being irish, don't you know, celtic, as old buffle used to say, charming songs, you know, about the irish girl who has a plaid shawl--and a banshee. [_sighs profoundly._] poor old gladstone! [_silence._] smith. [_speaking to_ doctor.] i thought you yourself considered the family superstition bad for the health? doctor. i consider a family superstition is better for the health than a family quarrel. a figure is seen to stand in front of the red lamp, blotting it out for a moment. patricia calls to it, and the cloaked stranger with the pointed hood enters. morris at once calls him a fraud. smith. [_quickly._] pardon me, i do not fancy that we know that. . . . morris. i didn't know you parsons stuck up for any fables but your own. smith. i stick up for the thing every man has a right to. perhaps the only thing every man has a right to. morris. and what is that? smith. the benefit of the doubt. morris returns to the attack. the stranger throws off his hood and reveals himself to the duke. he is the conjuror, ready for the evening's performance. all laugh at this _dénouement_, except patricia, between whom and the conjuror this bit of dialogue ensues: stranger. [_very sadly._] i am very sorry i am not a wizard. patricia. i wish you were a thief instead. stranger. have i committed a worse crime than thieving? patricia. you have committed the cruellest crime, i think, that there is. stranger. and what is the cruellest crime? patricia. stealing a child's toy. stranger. and what have i stolen? patricia. a fairy tale. and the curtain falls upon the first act. an hour later the room is being prepared for the performance. the conjuror is setting out his tricks, and the duke is entangling him and the secretary in his peculiar conversation. the following is characteristic: the secretary. . . . the only other thing at all urgent is the militant vegetarians. duke. ah! the militant vegetarians! you've heard of them, i'm sure. won't obey the law [_to the_ conjuror] so long as the government serves out meat. conjuror. let them be comforted. there are a good many people who don't get much meat. duke. well, well, i'm bound to say they're very enthusiastic. advanced, too--oh, certainly advanced. like joan of arc. [_short silence, in which the_ conjuror _stares at him._] conjuror. _was_ joan of arc a vegetarian? duke. oh, well, it's a very high ideal, after all. the sacredness of life, you know--the sacredness of life. [_shakes his head._] but they carry it too far. they killed a policeman down in kent. this conversation goes on for some time, while nothing in particular happens, except that the audience feels very happy. the duke asks the conjuror several questions, receiving thoroughly chestertonian answers. ["are you interested in modern progress?" "yes. we are interested in all tricks done by illusion."] at last the conjuror is left alone. patricia enters. he attempts to excuse himself for the theft of the fairy tale. he has had a troublesome life, and has never enjoyed "a holiday in fairyland." so, when he, with his hood up, because of the slight rain, was surprised by patricia, as he was rehearsing his patter, and taken for a fairy, he played up to her. patricia is inclined to forgive him, but the conversation is interrupted by the entrance of morris, in a mood to be offensive. he examines the apparatus, proclaims the way it is worked, and after a while breaks out into a frenzy of free thought, asking the universe in general and the conjuror in particular for "that old apparatus that turned rods into snakes." the clergyman and the doctor enter, and the conversation turns on religion, and then goes back to the tricks. morris is still extremely quarrelsome, and for the second time has to be quieted down. the conjuror is dignified, but cutting. the whole scene has been, so far, a discussion on do miracles happen? smith makes out a case in the affirmative, arguing from the false to the true. suppose, as morris claims, the "modern conjuring tricks are simply the old miracles when they have once been found out. . . . when we speak of things being sham, we generally mean that they are imitations of things that are genuine." morris gets more and more excited, and continues to insult the conjuror. at last he shouts . . . "you'll no more raise your saints and prophets from the dead than you'll raise the duke's great-grandfather to dance on that wall." at which the reynolds portrait in question sways slightly from side to side. morris turns furiously to the conjuror, accusing him of trickery. a chair falls over, for no apparent cause, still further exciting the youth. at last he blurts out a challenge. the doctor's red lamp is the lamp of science. no power on earth could change its colour. and the red light turns blue, for a minute. morris, absolutely puzzled, comes literally to his wits' end, and rushes out, followed shortly afterwards by his sister and the doctor. the youth is put to bed, and left in the care of patricia, while the doctor and the clergyman return to their argument. smith makes out a strong case for belief, for simple faith, a case which sounds strangely, coming from the lips of a clergyman of the church of england. doctor. weren't there as many who believed passionately in apollo? smith. and what harm came of believing in apollo? and what a mass of harm may have come of not believing in apollo? does it never strike you that doubt can be a madness, as well be faith? that asking questions may be a disease, as well as proclaiming doctrines? you talk of religious mania! is there no such thing as irreligious mania? is there no such thing in the house at this moment? doctor. then you think no one should question at all? smith. [_with passion, pointing to the next room._] i think that is what comes of questioning! why can't you leave the universe alone and let it mean what it likes? why shouldn't the thunder be jupiter? more men have made themselves silly by wondering what the devil it was if it wasn't jupiter. doctor. [_looking at him._] do you believe in your own religion? smith. [_returning the look equally steadily._] suppose i don't: i should still be a fool to question it. the child who doubts about santa claus has insomnia. the child who believes has a good night's rest. doctor. you are a pragmatist. smith. that is what the lawyers call vulgar abuse. but i do appeal to practice. here is a family over which you tell me a mental calamity hovers. here is the boy who questions everything and a girl who can believe anything. upon whom has the curse fallen? at this point the curtain was made to fall on the second act. the third and last act takes place in the same room a few hours later. the conjuror has packed his bag, and is going. the doctor has been sitting up with the patient. morris is in a more or less delirious state, and is continually asking how the trick was done. the doctor believes that the explanation would satisfy the patient and would probably help him to turn the corner. but the conjuror will not provide an explanation. he has many reasons, the most practical of which is that he would not be believed. the duke comes in and tries to make a business matter of the secret, even to the extent of paying £2000 for it. suddenly the conjuror changes his mind. he will tell them how the trick was done, it was all very simple. "it is the simplest thing in the world. that is why you will not laugh. . . . i did it by magic." the doctor and the duke are dumbfounded. smith intervenes; he cannot accept the explanation. the conjuror lets himself go, now he is voicing chesterton's views. the clergyman who merely believes in belief, as smith does, will not do. he must believe in a fact, which is far more difficult. conjuror. i say these things are supernatural. i say this is done by a spirit. the doctor does not believe me. he is an agnostic; and he knows everything. the duke does not believe me; he cannot believe anything so plain as a miracle. but what the devil are you for, if you don't believe in a miracle? what does your coat mean if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as the supernatural? what does your cursed collar mean if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as a spirit? [_exasperated._] why the devil do you dress up like that if you don't believe in it? [_with violence._] or perhaps you don't believe in devils? smith. i believe . . . [_after a pause._] i wish i could believe. conjuror. yes. i wish i could disbelieve. here patricia enters. she wants to speak to the conjuror, with whom she is left alone. a little love scene takes place: rather the result of two slightly sentimental and rather tired persons of different sexes being left alone than anything else. but they return to realities, with an effort. patricia, too, wants to know how the trick was done, in order to tell her brother. he tells her, but she is of the world which cannot believe in devils, even although it may manage to accept fairies as an inevitable adjunct to landscape scenery by moonlight. in order to convince her the conjuror tells her how he fell, how after dabbling in spiritualism he found he had lost control over himself. but he had resisted the temptation to make the devils his servants, until the impudence of morris had made him lose his temper. then he goes out into the garden to see if he can find some explanation to give morris. the duke, smith, the doctor, and the secretary drift into the room, which is now tenanted by something impalpable but horrible. the conjuror returns and clears the air with an exorcism. he has invented an explanation, which he goes out to give to morris. patricia announces that her brother immediately took a turn for the better. the conjuror refuses to repeat the explanation he gave morris, because if he did, "half an hour after i have left this house you will all be saying how it was done." he turns to go. patricia. our fairy tale has come to an end in the only way a fairy tale can come to an end. the only way a fairy tale can leave off being a fairy tale. conjuror. i don't understand you. patricia. it has come true. and the curtain falls for the last time. no doubt _magic_ owed a great deal of its success to the admirable production of mr. kenelm foss and the excellence of the cast. miss grace croft was surely the true patricia. of the duke of mr. fred lewis it is difficult to speak in terms other than superlative. those of my readers who have suffered the misfortune of not having seen him, may gain some idea of his execution of the part from the illustrations to mr. belloc's novels. the duke was an extraordinarily good likeness of the duke of battersea, as portrayed by chesterton, with rather more than a touch of mr. asquith superadded. mr. fred lewis, it may be stated, gagged freely, introducing topical lines until the play became a revue in little--but without injustice to the original. several of those who saw _magic_ came for a third, a fourth, even a tenth time. the editor of the dublin review had the happy idea of asking chesterton to review _magic_. the result is too long to quote in full, but it makes two important points which may be extracted. i will glide mercifully over the more glaring errors, which the critics have overlooked--as that no irishman could become so complete a cad merely by going to america--that no young lady would walk about in the rain so soon before it was necessary to dress for dinner--that no young man, however american, could run round a duke's grounds in the time between one bad epigram and another--that dukes never allow the middle classes to encroach on their gardens so as to permit a doctor's lamp to be seen there--that no sister, however eccentric, could conduct a slightly frivolous love-scene with a brother going mad in the next room--that the secretary disappears half-way through the play without explaining himself; and the conjuror disappears at the end, with almost equal dignity. . . . by the exercise of that knowledge of all human hearts which descends on any man (however unworthy) the moment he is a dramatic critic, i perceive that the author of _magic_ originally wrote it as a short story. it is a bad play, because it was a good short story. in a short story of mystery, as in a sherlock holmes story, the author and the hero (or villain) keep the reader out of the secret. . . . but the drama is built on that grander secrecy which was called the greek irony. in the drama, the audience must know the truth when the actors do not know it. that is where the drama is truly democratic: not because the audience shouts, but because it knows--and is silent. now i do quite seriously think it is a weakness in a play like _magic_ that the audience is not in the central secret from the start. mr. g. s. street put the point with his usual unerring simplicity by saying that he could not help feeling disappointed with the conjuror because he had hoped he would turn into the devil. a few additions may easily be made to the first batch of criticisms. patricia's welcome to her brother is not what a long-lost brother might expect. there is really no satisfactory reason for the doctor's continued presence. patricia and morris can only be half irish by blood, unless it is possible to become irish by residence. why should the conjuror rehearse his patter out in the wet? surely the duke's house would contain a spare room? where did the conjuror go, at the end of the third act, in the small hours of the morning? and so on. but these are little things that do not matter in an allegory. for in _magic_ "things are not what they seem." the duke is a modern man. he is also the world, the flesh, and the devil. he has no opinions, no positive religion, no brain. he believes in his own tolerance, which is merely his fatuousness. he follows the line of least resistance, and makes a virtue of it. he sits on the fence, but he will never come off. the clergyman is the church of to-day, preaching the supernatural, but unwilling to recognize its existence at close quarters. as somebody says somewhere in _the wisdom of father brown_, "if a miracle happened in your office, you'd have to hush it up, now so many bishops are atheists." the doctor is a less typical figure. he is the inconsistencies of science, kindly but with little joy of life, and extremely chestertonian, which is to say unscientific. morris is the younger generation, obsessed with business and getting on, and intellectually incapable of facing a religious fact. patricia is the chestertonian good woman, too essentially domestic to be ever fundamentally disturbed. the conjuror, if not the devil, is at any rate that inexplicable element in all life which most people do not see. nevertheless there is a flaw in _magic_ which really is serious. if i were to see, let us say, a sheet of newspaper flying down the road against the wind, and a friend of mine, who happened to be a gifted liar, told me that he was directing the paper by means of spirits, i should still be justified in believing that another explanation could be possible. i should say, "my dear friend, your explanation is romantic; i believe in spirits but i do not believe in you. i prefer to think that there is an air-current going the wrong way." that is the matter with the conjuror's explanation. why should the clergyman or the doctor--professional sceptics, both of them, which is to say seekers after truth--take the word of a professional deceiver as necessarily true? there are two works which the critic of chesterton must take into special consideration. they are _magic_ and _orthodoxy_; and it may be said that the former is a dramatized version of the latter. the two together are a great work, striking at the very roots of disbelief. in a sense chesterton pays the atheist a very high compliment. he does what the atheist is generally too lazy to do for himself; he takes his substitute for religion and systematizes it into something like a philosophy. then he examines it as a whole. and he finds that atheism is dogma in its extremist form, that it embodies a multitude of superstitions, and that it is actually continually adding to their number. such are the reasons of the greatness of _magic_. the play, one feels, must remain unique, for the prolegomenon cannot be rewritten while the philosophy is unchanged. and chesterton has deliberately chosen the word orthodox to apply to himself, and he has not limited its meaning. iv the critic of large things the heroes of chesterton's romances have an adipose diathesis, as a reviewer has been heard to remark. in plain english they tend towards largeness. flambeau, sunday, and innocent smith are big men. chesterton, as we have seen, pays little attention to his women characters, but whenever it comes to pass that he must introduce a heroine, he colours her as emphatically as the nature of things will admit. which is to say that the chestertonian heroine always has red hair. these things are symptomatic of their author. he loves robustness. if he cannot produce it, he can at any rate affect it, or attack its enemies. this worship of the robust is the fundamental fact of all chesterton's work. for example, as a critic of letters he confines himself almost exclusively to the big men. when mr. bernard shaw a few years ago committed what chesterton imagined was an attack upon shakespeare, he almost instinctively rushed to the defence in the columns of the daily news. when chesterton wrote a little book on _the victorian age in literature_ he showed no interest in the smaller people. the book, it may be urged in his excuse, was a little one, but we feel that even if it was not, chesterton would have done much the same thing. among the writers he omitted to mention, even by name, are sir edwin arnold, harrison ainsworth, walter bagehot, r. blackmore, a. h. clough, e. a. freeman, s. r. gardiner, george gissing, j. r. green, t. h. green, henry hallam, jean ingelow, benjamin jowett, w. e. h. lecky, thomas love peacock, w. m. praed, and mrs. humphry ward. the criticism which feeds upon research and comparison, which considers a new date or the emendation of a mispunctuated line of verse, worthy of effort, knows not chesterton. he is the student of the big men. he has written books about dickens, browning, and shaw, of whom only one common quality can be noted, which is that they are each the subjects of at least twenty other books. to write about the things which have already yielded such a huge crop of criticism savours at first of a lack of imagination. the truth is quite otherwise. anybody, so to speak, can produce a book about alexander pope because the ore is at the disposal of every miner. but that larger mine called dickens has been diligently worked by two generations of authors, and it would appear that a new one must either plagiarize or labour extremely in order to come upon fresh seams. but chesterton's taste for bigness has come to his service in criticism. it has given him a power of seeing the large, obvious things which the critic of small things misses. he has the "thinking in millions" trick of the statistician transposed to literary ends. or as a poet. the robustness is omnipresent, and takes several forms. a grandiloquence that sways uneasily between rodomontade and mere verbiage, a rotundity of diction, a choice of subjects which can only be described as sanguinolent, the use of the bludgeon where others would prefer a rapier. or as a simple user of words. chesterton has a preference for the big words: awful, enormous, tremendous, and so on. a word which occurs very often indeed is mystic: it suggests that the noun it qualifies is laden with undisclosable attributes, and that romance is hidden here. now all these things add up, as it were, to a tendency to say a thing as emphatically as possible. emphasis of statement from a humorist gifted with the use of words results sometimes in epigram, sometimes in fun, in all things except the dull things (except when the dullness is due to an unhappy succession of scintillations which have misfired). for these reasons chesterton is regarded as entirely frivolous--by persons without a sense of humour. he is, in point of fact, extremely serious, on those frequent occasions when he is making out a case. as he himself points out, to be serious is not the opposite of to be funny. the opposite of to be funny is not to be funny. a man may be perfectly serious in a funny way. now it has befallen chesterton on more than one occasion to have to cross swords with one of the few true atheists, mr. joseph maccabe, the author of a huge number of books, mostly attacking christianity, and as devoid of humour as an egg-shell is of hair. the differences and the resemblances between chesterton and mr. maccabe might well be the occasion of a parable. chesterton has written some of the liveliest books about christianity, mr. maccabe has written some of the dullest. chesterton has written the most amusing book about mr. bernard shaw; mr. maccabe has written the dullest. chesterton and mr. maccabe have a habit of sparring at one another, but up to the present i have not noticed either make any palpable hits. it is all rather like the party system, as mr. hilaire belloc depicts it. the two antagonists do not understand each other in the least. but, to a certain degree, mr. maccabe's confusion is the fault of chesterton and not of his own lack of humour. when chesterton says, "i also mean every word i say," he is saying something he does not mean. he is sometimes funny, but not serious, like mr. george robey. he is sometimes irritating, but not serious, like a circus clown. and he sometimes appears to be critical, but is not serious, like the young lady from walworth in front of a bond street shop-window, regretting that she could not possibly buy the crockery and glass displayed because the monogram isn't on right. chesterton's readers have perhaps spoiled him. he has pleaded, so to speak, for the inalienable and mystic right of every man to be a blithering idiot in all seriousness. so seriously, in fact, that when he exercised this inalienable and mystic right, the only man not in the secret was g. k. chesterton. there are few tasks so ungrateful as the criticism of a critic's criticisms, unless it be the job of criticizing the criticisms of a critic's critics. the first is part of the task of him who would write a book in which all chesterton's works are duly and fitly considered; and the second will not be wholly escaped by him. concerned as we are, however, with the ideas of one who was far more interested in putting the world to rights than with guiding men and women around literary edifices, there is no need for us to give any very detailed study to chesterton's critical work. bacon said "distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things." a second distillation, perhaps even a third, suggests a euclidean flatness. the sheer management of a point of view, however, is always instructive. we have seen an author use his exceptional powers of criticism upon society in general, and ideas at large. how is he able to deal with ideas and inventions stated in a more definite and particular manner? the latter task is the more difficult of the two. we all know perfectly well, to take an analogous illustration, how to deal with the prussian militarist class, the "junker caste," and so on. but we differ hopelessly on the treatment to be meted out to the national service league. the outstanding feature of chesterton's critical work is that it has no outstanding features which differentiate it from his other writings. he is always the journalist, writing for the day only. this leads him to treat all his subjects with special reference to his own day. sometimes, as in the essay on byron in _twelve types_, his own day is so much under discussion that poor byron is left out in the cold to warm himself before a feebly flickering epigram. in writing of dickens, chesterton says that he "can be criticized as a contemporary of bernard shaw or anatole france or c. f. g. masterman . . . his name comes to the tongue when we are talking of christian socialists or mr. roosevelt or county council steamboats or guilds of play." and chesterton does criticize dickens as the contemporary of all these phenomena. in point of fact, to g.k.c. everybody is either a contemporary or a victorian, and "i also was born a victorian." little dorrit sets him talking about gissing, hard times suggests herbert spencer, american notes leads to the mention of maxim gorky, and elsewhere mr. george moore and mr. william le queux are brought in. if chesterton happened to be writing about dickens at a time when there was a certain amount of feeling about on the subject of rich jews on the rand, then the rich jews on the rand would appear in print forthwith, whether or not dickens had ever depicted a rich jew or the rand, or the two in conjunction. chesterton's first critical work of importance was _robert browning_ in the "english men of letters series." it might be imagined that the austere editorship of lord morley might have a dejournalizing effect upon the style of the author. far otherwise. the t's are crossed and the i's are dotted, so to speak, more carefully in _robert browning_ than in works less fastidiously edited, but that is all. the book contains references to gladstone and home rule, parnell, pigott, and rudyard kipling, cyrano de bergerac, w. e. henley, and the tivoli. but of browning's literary ancestors and predecessors there is little mention. it is conventional to shed tears of ink over the journalistic touch, on the ground that it must inevitably shorten the life of whatever book bears its marks. if there is anything in this condemnation, then chesterton is doomed to forgetfulness, and his critical works will be the first to slip into oblivion, such being the nature of critical works in general. but if this condemnation holds true, it includes also macaulay, r. l. stevenson, matthew arnold, and how many others! the journalistic touch, when it is good, means the preservation of a work. and chesterton has that most essential part of a critic's mental equipment--what we call in an inadequately descriptive manner, insight. he was no mean critic, whatever the tricks he played, who could pen these judgments: the dominant passion of the artistic celt, such as mr. w. b. yeats or sir edward burne-jones, lies in the word "escape"; escape into a land where oranges grow on plum trees and men can sow what they like and reap what they enjoy. (_g. f. watts._) the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions arise from a condition of mind. (_robert browning._) this essential comedy of johnson's character is one which has never, oddly enough, been put upon the stage. there was in his nature one of the unconscious and even agreeable contradictions loved by the true comedian. . . . i mean a strenuous and sincere belief in convention, combined with a huge natural inaptitude for observing it. (_samuel johnson_.) rossetti could, for once in a way, write poetry about a real woman and call her "jenny." one has a disturbed suspicion that morris would have called her "jehanne." (_the victorian age in literature_.) these are a few samples collected at random, but they alone are almost sufficient to enthrone chesterton among the critics. he has a wonderful intuitive gift of feeling for the right metaphor, for the material object that best symbolizes an impression. but one thing he lacks. put him among authors whose view of the universe is opposed to his own, and chesterton instantly adopts an insecticide attitude. the wit of wilde moves him not, but his morals stir him profoundly; mr. thomas hardy is "a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot." only occasionally has he a good word to say for the technique of an author whose views he dislikes. his critical work very largely consists of an attempt to describe his subjects' views of the universe, and bring them into relation with his own. his two books on charles dickens are little more than such an attempt. when, a few years ago, mr. edwin pugh, who had also been studying the "aspects" of dickens, came to the conclusion that the novelist was a socialist, chesterton waxed exceeding wrath and gave the offending book a severe wigging in the daily news. he loves a good fighter, however, and to such he is always just. there are few philosophies so radically opposed to the whole spirit of chesterton's beliefs as that of john stuart mill. on religion, economic doctrine, and woman suffrage, mill held views that are offensive to g.k.c. but mill is nevertheless invariably treated by him with a respect which approximates to reverence. the principal case in point, however, is mr. bernard shaw, who holds all mill's beliefs, and waves them about even more defiantly. g.k.c.'s admiration in this case led him to write a whole book about g.b.s. in addition to innumerable articles and references. the book has the following characteristic introduction: most people either say that they agree with bernard shaw or that they do not understand him. i am the only person who understands him, and i do not agree with him. chesterton, of course, could not possibly agree with such an avowed and utter puritan as mr. shaw. the puritan has to be a revolutionary, which means a man who pushes forward the hand of the clock. chesterton, as near as may be, is a catholic tory, who is a man who pushes back the hand of the clock. superficially, the two make the clock show the same hour, but actually, one puts it on to a.m., the other back to p.m. between the two is all the difference that is between darkness and day. chesterton's point of view is distinctly like samuel johnson's in more respects than one. both critics made great play with dogmatic assertions based on the literature that was before their time, at the expense of the literature that was to come after. in the book on shaw, chesterton strikes a blow at all innovators, although he aims only at the obvious failures. the truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you like. the next age is blank, and i can paint it freely with my favourite colour. it requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we and of things done which we cannot do. i know i cannot write a poem as good as _lycidas_. but it is always easy to say that the particular sort of poetry i can write will be the poetry of the future. sentiments such as these have made many young experimentalists feel that chesterton is a traitor to his youth and generation. nobody will ever have the detachment necessary to appreciate "futurist" poetry until it is very much a thing of the past, because the near past is so much with us, and it is part of us, which the future is not. but fidelity to the good things of the past does not exonerate us from the task of looking for the germs of the good things of the future. the young poet of to-day sits at the feet of sir henry newbolt, whose critical appreciation is undaunted by mere dread of new things, while to the same youth and to his friends it has simply never occurred, often enough, to think of chesterton as a critic. it cannot be too strongly urged that an undue admiration of the distant past has sat like an incubus upon the chest of european literature, and shakespeare's greatness is not in spite of his "small latin and less greek," which probably contributed to it indirectly. had shakespeare been a classical scholar, he would almost certainly have modelled his plays on seneca or aeschylus, and the results would have been devastating. addison's cato, johnson's irene, and the dramas of racine and corneille are among the abysmal dullnesses mankind owes to its excessive estimation of the past. men have always been too ready to forget that we inherit our ancestors' bad points as well as their good ones. ancestor-worship has deprived the chinese of the capacity to create, it has seriously affected chesterton's power to criticize. chesterton's own generation has seen both the victory and the downfall of form in the novels of mr. galsworthy and mr. h. g. wells. it has witnessed fascinating experiments in stagecraft, some of which have assuredly succeeded. it has listened to new poets and wandered in enchanted worlds where no victorians trod. a critic in sympathy with these efforts at reform would have written the last-quoted passage something like this: "the truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the past, because it has no boundaries; it is a soft job; you can find in it what you like. the past ages are rank, and i can daub myself freely with whatever colours i extract. it requires no courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which neutralize one another; of men certainly no wiser than we, and of things done which we could not want to do. i know i cannot write a poem as good as lycidas. but i also know that milton could not write a poem as good as the hound of heaven or m'andrew's hymn. and it is always easy to say that the particular kind of poetry i can write has been the poetry of some period of the past." but chesterton didn't; quite the reverse. so that one comes to the sorrowful conclusion that chesterton is at his best, as a critic, when he is writing introductions, because then he has to leave the past alone. when he is writing an introduction to one of the works of a great victorian (dickens always excepted) he makes his subject stand out like a solitary giant, not necessarily because he is one, but on account of the largeness of the contours, the rough shaping, and the deliberate contrasts. he has written prefaces without number, and the british museum has not a complete set of the books introduced by him. the fables of æsop, the book of job, matthew arnold's critical essays, a book of children's poems by margaret arndt, boswell's johnson, a novel by gorky, selections from thackeray, a life of mr. will crooks, and an anthology by young poets are but a few of the books he has explained. the last thing to be said on chesterton as a critic is by way of illustration. for a series of books on artists, he wrote two, on william blake and g. f. watts. the first is all about mysticism, and so is the second. they are for the layman, not for the artist. they could be read with interest and joy by the colourblind. and, incidentally, they are extremely good criticism. therein is the triumph of chesterton. give him a subject which he can relate with his own view of the universe, and space wherein to accomplish this feat, and he will succeed in presenting his readers with a vividly outlined portrait, tinted, of course, with his own personality, but indisputably true to life, and ornamented with fascinating little gargoyles. but put him among the bourgeoisie of literature and he will sulk like an angry child. v the humorist and the poet there are innumerable books--or let us say twenty--on mr. bernard shaw. they deal with him as a sociologist, a dramatist, or what not, but never as a humorist. there is a mass of books on oscar wilde, and they deal with everything concerned with him, except his humour. the great humorists--as such--go unsung to their graves. that is because there is nothing so obvious as a joke, and nothing so difficult to explain. it requires a psychologist, like william james, or a philosopher, like bergson, to explain what a joke is, and then most of us cannot understand the explanation. a joke--especially another man's joke--is a thing to be handled delicately and reverently, for once the bloom is off, the joke mysteriously shrivels and vanishes. translators are the sworn enemies of jokes; the exigencies of their deplorable trade cause them to maul the poor little things about while they are putting them into new clothes, and the result is death, or at the least an appearance of vacuous senescence. but jokes are only the crystallization of humour; it exists also in less tangible forms, such as style and all that collection of effects vaguely lumped together and called "atmosphere." chesterton's peculiar "atmosphere" rises like a sweet exhalation from the very ink he sheds. and it is frankly indefinable, as all genuine style is. the insincere stylists can be reduced to a formula, because they work from a formula; pater may be brought down to an arrangement of adjectives and commas, doctor johnson to a succession of rhythms, carefully pruned of excrescences, and so on, but the stylist who writes as god made him defies such analysis. meredith and shaw and chesterton will remain mysteries even unto the latest research student of the universities of jena and chicago. patient students (something of the sort is already being done) will count up the number of nouns and verbs and commas in _the napoleon of notting hill_ and will express the result in such a form as this--[a] _ _ / / nouns³ _________ sin a chesterton (g. k.) = | | -----+ / ·2log bn ---- _/_/ verbs² \/ c e 47 but they will fail to touch the essential chesterton, because one of the beauties of this form of analysis is that when the formula has been obtained, nobody is any the wiser as to the manner of its use. we know that james smith is composed of beef and beer and bread, because all evidence goes to show that these are the only things he ever absorbs, but nobody has ever suggested that a synthesis of foodstuffs will ever give us james smith. now the difficulty of dealing with the humour of chesterton is that, in doing so, one is compelled to handle it, to its detriment. if in the chapter on his romances any reader thought he detected the voice and the style of chesterton, he is grievously mistaken. he only saw the scaffolding, which bears the same relation to the finished product as the skeleton bears to the human body. consider these things: if you throw one bomb you are only a murderer; but if you keep on persistently throwing bombs, you are in awful danger of at last becoming a prig. if we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. if the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to be inscribed, "for the fathers of gentlemen only." in two generations they can do the trick. now these propositions are not merely snippets from a system of philosophy, presented after the manner of the admirers of schopenhauer and nietzsche. these are quotations which display a quite exceptional power of surprising people. the anticlimaxes of the first two passages, the bold dip into the future at the expense of the past in the third are more than instances of mere verbal felicity. they indicate a writer capable of the humour which feeds upon daily life, and is therefore thoroughly democratic and healthy. for there are two sorts of humour; that which feeds upon its possessor, oscar wilde is the supreme example of this type of humorist, and that which draws its inspiration from its surroundings, of which the great exemplar is dickens, and chesterton is his follower. the first exhausts itself sooner or later, because it feeds on its own blood, the second is inexhaustible. this theory may be opposed on the ground that humour is both internal and external in its origin. the supporters of this claim are invited to take a holiday in bed, or elsewhere away from the madding crowd, and then see how humorous they can be. humour has an unfortunate tendency to stale. the joke of yesteryear already shows frays upon its sleeves. the wit of the early volumes of punch is in the last stages of decrepitude. watch an actor struggling to conceal from his audience the fact that he is repeating one of shakespeare's puns. we tolerate the humour of congreve, not because it is thoroughly amusing, but because it has survived better than most. humorous verse stands a slightly better chance of evoking smiles in its old age. there is always its unalterable verbal neatness; tradition, too, lingers more lovingly around fair shapes, and a poem is a better instance of form than a paragraph. mankind may grow blasé, if it will, but as a poet of the comic, chesterton will live long years. take for example that last and worst of his novels _the flying inn_. into this he has pitched with a fascinating recklessness a quantity of poems, garnered from the new witness and worthy of the immortality which is granted the few really good comic poems. there is the poem of noah, with that stimulating line with which each stanza ends. the last one goes: but noah he sinned, and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod, till a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod, and you can't get wine at a p.s.a., or chapel, or eisteddfod; for the curse of water has come again because of the wrath of god. and water is on the bishop's board, and the higher thinker's shrine, but i don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine. there is a lunatic song against grocers, who are accused of nonconformity, and an equally lunatic song in several instalments on being a vegetarian: i am silent in the club, i am silent in the pub, i am silent on a bally peak in darien; for i stuff away for life shoving peas in with a knife, because i am at heart a vegetarian. there is a joyous thing about a millionaire who lived the simple life, and a new version of "st. george for merry england." tea, cocoa, and soda-water are the subjects of another poem. the verses about roundabout are very happy: some say that when sir lancelot went forth to find the grail, grey merlin wrinkled up the roads, for hope that he should fail; all roads led back to lyonnesse and camelot in the vale, i cannot yield assent to this extravagant hypothesis, the plain shrewd briton will dismiss such rumours (_daily mail_). but in the streets of roundabout are no such factions found, or theories to expound about or roll upon the ground about, in the happy town of roundabout, that makes the world go round. and there are lots more like this. then there are the _ballades urbane_ which appeared in the early volumes of the eye-witness. they have refrains with the true human note. such as "but will you lend me two-and-six?" envoi prince, i will not be knighted! no! put up your sword and stow your tricks! offering the garter is no go- but will you lend me two-and-six? in prose chesterton is seldom the mere jester; he will always have a moral or two, at the very least, at his fingers' ends, or to be quite exact, at the end of his article. he is never quite irresponsible. he seldom laughs at a man who is not a reformer. or let us take another set of illustrations, this time in prose. (once more i protest that i shall not take the reader through all the works of chesterton.) i mean the articles "our note book" which he contributed to the illustrated london news. they are of a familiar type; a series of paragraphs on some topical subject, with little spaces between them in order to encourage the weary reader. chesterton wrote this class of article supremely well. he would seize on something apparently trivial, and exalt it into a symptom. when he had given the disease a name, he went for the quack doctors who professed to remedy it. he goes to letchworth, in which abode of middle-class faddery he finds a teetotal public-house, pretending to look like the real thing, and calling itself "the skittles inn." he immediately raises the question, can we dissociate beer from skittles? then he widens out his thesis. our life to-day is marked by perpetual attempts to revive old-fashioned things while omitting the human soul in them that made them more than fashions. and he concludes: i welcome a return to the rudeness of old times; when luther attacked henry viii for being fat; and when milton and his dutch opponent devoted pages of their controversy to the discussion of which of them was the uglier. . . . the new controversialists . . . call a man a physical degenerate, instead of calling him an ugly fellow. they say that red hair is the mark of the celtic stock, instead of calling him "carrots." of this class of fun chesterton is an easy master. it makes him a fearsome controversialist on the platform or in his favourite lists, the columns of a newspaper. but he uses his strength a little tyrannously. he is an adept at begging the question. the lost art called ignoratio elenchi has been privately rediscovered by him, to the surprise of many excellent and honest debaters, who have never succeeded in scoring the most obvious points in the face of chesterton's power of emitting a string of epigrams and pretending it is a chain of argument. the case, in whatever form it is put, is always fresh and vigorous. another epigrammatist, oscar wilde, in comparison with him may be said to have used the midnight oil so liberally in the preparation of his witticisms, that one might almost detect the fishy odour. but as with his prose so with his verses; chesterton's productions are so fresh that they seem to spring from his vitality rather than his intellect. they are generally a trifle ragged and unpolished as if, like all their author's productions, they were strangers to revision. and vitality demands boisterous movement, more even than coherence. sometimes the boisterousness is apparently unsupported by the sense of the words. so you have gained the golden crowns and grasped the golden weather, the kingdoms and the hemispheres that all men buy and sell, but i will lash the leaping drum and swing the flaring feather, for the light of seven heavens that are lost to me like hell. here the stanza actually goes with such a swing that the reader will in all probability not notice that the lines have no particular meaning. on the other hand, chesterton's poetry has exuberant moments of sheer delight. in one of his essays he is lamenting the songlessness of modern life and suggests one or two chanties. here they are: chorus of bank clerks: up, my lads, and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o'er. hear the stars of morning shouting: "two and two are four." though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the sophists roar, though we weep and pawn our watches, two and two are four. chorus of bank clerks when there is a run on the bank: there's a run upon the bank- stand away! for the manager's a crank and the secretary drank, and the upper tooting bank turns to bay! stand close: there is a run on the bank. of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing legend run, that she fired with every gun ere she sank. the post office hymn would begin as follows: o'er london our letters are shaken like snow, our wires o'er the world like the thunderbolts go. the news that may marry a maiden in sark, or kill an old lady in finsbury park. chorus (with a swing of joy and energy): or kill an old lady in finsbury park. the joke becomes simply immense when we picture the actual singing of the songs. but that is not the only class of humour of which chesterton is capable. he can cut as well as hack. it is to be doubted whether any politician was ever addressed in lines more sarcastic than those of _antichrist_, an ode to mr. f. e. smith. this gentleman, speaking on the welsh disestablishment bill, remarked that it "has shocked the conscience of every christian community in europe." it begins: are they clinging to their crosses, f. e. smith. where the breton boat-fleet tosses, are they, smith? do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding, wait the news from this our city? groaning "that's the second reading!" hissing "there is still committee!" if the voice of cecil falters, if mckenna's point has pith, do they tremble for their altars? do they, smith? then in russia, among the peasants, where establishment means nothing and they never heard of wales, do they read it all in hansard with a crib to read it with- "welsh tithes: dr. clifford answered." really, smith? the final verse is: it would greatly, i must own, soothe me, smith, if you left this theme alone, holy smith! for your legal cause or civil you fight well and get your fee; for your god or dream or devil you will answer, not to me. talk about the pews and steeples and the cash that goes therewith! but the souls of christian peoples . . . --chuck it, smith! the wilting sarcasm of this poem is a feature which puts it with a few others apart from the bulk of chesterton's poems. even as bellicosity and orthodoxy are two of the brightest threads which run through the whole texture of his work, so poems of pugnacity (as ella wheeler wilcox would say) and religious verses constitute the largest part of the poetic works of g.k.c. his first book of verses--after _greybeards at play_--_the wild knight_ contained a bloodthirsty poem about the battle of gibeon, written with strict adhesion to the spirit of the old testament. it might have been penned by a survivor, glutted with blood and duly grateful to the god of his race for the solar and lunar eccentricities which made possible the extermination of the five kings of the amorites. in 1911 came _the ballad of the white horse_, which is all about alfred, according to the popular traditions embodied in the elementary history books, and, in particular, the battle of ethandune. how chesterton revels in that homeric slaughter! the words blood and bloody punctuate the largest poem of g.k.c. to the virtual obliteration in our memory of the fine imagery, the occasional tendernesses, and the blustering aggressiveness of some of the metaphors and similes. not many men would have the nerve, let alone the skill, to write: and in the last eclipse the sea shall stand up like a tower, above all moons made dark and riven, hold up its foaming head in heaven, and laugh, knowing its hour. but, at the same time, this poem contains very touching and beautiful lines. _the ballad of the white horse_ is an epic of the struggle between christian and pagan. one of the essentials of an epic is that its men should be decent men, if they cannot be heroes. the iliad would have been impossible if it had occurred to homer to introduce the government contractors to the belligerent powers. all the point would have gone out of orlando furioso if it had been the case that the madness of orlando was the delirium tremens of an habitual drunkard. chesterton recognizing this truth makes the pagans of the _white horse_ behave like gentlemen. there is a beautiful little song put into the mouth of one of them, which is in its way a perfect expression of the inadequacy of false gods. there is always a thing forgotten when all the world goes well; a thing forgotten, as long ago when the gods forgot the mistletoe, and soundless as an arrow of snow the arrow of anguish fell. the thing on the blind side of the heart, on the wrong side of the door, the green plant groweth, menacing almighty lovers in the spring; there is always a forgotten thing, and love is not secure. the sorrow behind these lines is more moving, because more sincere, than the lines of that over-quoted verse of swinburne's: from too much love of living, from hope and fear set free, we thank with brief thanksgiving whatever gods there be- that no life lives for ever, that dead men rise up never, that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea. this is insincere, because a pagan (as swinburne was) could have committed suicide had he really felt these things. swinburne, like most modern pagans, really hated priestcraft when he thought he was hating god. chesterton's note is truer. he knows that the pagan has all the good things of life but one, and that only an exceptionally nice pagan knows he lacks that much. and so one might go on mining the _white horse_, for it contains most things, as a good epic should. two short stanzas, however, should be quoted, whatever else is omitted, for the sake of their essential christianity, their claim that a man may make a fool of himself for christ's sake, whatever the bishops have to say about it. the men of the east may spell the stars, and times and triumphs mark, but the men signed of the cross of christ go gaily in the dark. the men of the east may search the scrolls for sure fates and fame, but the men that drink the blood of god go singing to their shame. in his last volume of _poems_ (1915) chesterton presents us with a varied collection of works, written at any time during the last twelve or so years. the pugnacious element is present in _lepanto_, through the staccato syllables of which we hear drum-taps and men cheering. there is a temptation to treat _lepanto_, and indeed most of chesterton's poems, with special reference to their technique, but we must resist this temptation, with tears if need be, and with prayer, for to give way to it would be to commit a form of vivisection. g.k.c. is not a text, praise be, and whether he lives or dies, long may he be spared the hands of an editor or interpreter who is also an irrepressible authority on anapaests and suchlike things. he is a poet, and a considerable poet, not because of his strict attention to the rules of prosody, but because he cannot help himself, and the rules in question are for the persons who can, the poets by deliberate intention, the writers who polish unceasingly. chesterton has more impulse than finish, but he has natural gifts of rhythm and the effective use of words which more or less (according to the reader's taste) compensate for his refusal or his incapacity to take pains. finally there are the religious poems. from these we can best judge the reality of chesterton's poetic impulse, for here, knowing that affectation would be almost indecent, he has expressed what he had to express with a care denied to most of his other works. in one of his essays, g.k.c. exults in that matchless phrase of vaughan, "high humility." he has both adopted and adapted this quality, and the results are wonderful. in _the wise men_ occurs this stanza: the child that was ere worlds begun (. . . we need but walk a little way, we need but see a latch undone . . .) the child that played with moon and sun is playing with a little hay. the superb antithesis leaves one struggling against that involuntary little gasp which is a reader's first tribute to a fine thought. he could be a great hymn writer, if he would. one of his poems, in fact, has found its way into the english hymnal, where it competes (if one may use the word of a sacred song) with recessional for the favour of congregations. if we take a glance at a few of the finest hymns, we shall find that they share certain obvious qualities: bold imagery, the vocabulary of conflict, an attitude of humility that is very nearly also one of great pride, and certain tricks of style. and when we look through chesterton's poems generally, we shall find that these are exactly the qualities they possess. footnote: [a] transcriber's note: the original equation was represented as clearly as possible. an image of the original equation can be found in the html version of this text. vi the religion of a debater in his book on william blake, chesterton says that he is "personally quite convinced that if every human being lived a thousand years, every human being would end up either in utter pessimistic scepticism or in the catholic creed." in course of time, in fact, everybody would have to decide whether they preferred to be an intellectualist or a mystic. a debauch of intellectualism, lasting perhaps nine hundred and fifty years, is a truly terrible thing to contemplate. perhaps it is safest to assert that if our lives were considerably lengthened, there would be more mystics and more madmen. to chesterton modern thought is merely the polite description of a noisy crowd of persons proclaiming that something or other is wrong. mr. bernard shaw denounces meat and has been understood to denounce marriage. ibsen is said to have anathematized almost everything (by those who have not read his works). mr. maccabe and mr. blatchford think that, on the whole, there is no god, and tolstoy told us that nearly everything we did, and quite all we wanted to do, was opposed to the spirit of christ's teaching. auberon herbert disapproved of law, and john davidson disapproved of life. herbert spencer objected to government, passive resisters to state education, and various educational reformers to education of any description. there are people who would abolish our spelling, our clothing, our food and, most emphatically, our drink. mr. h. g. wells adds the finishing touch to this volume of denials, by blandly suggesting in an appendix to his modern utopia, headed "scepticism of the instrument," that our senses are so liable to err, that we can never be really sure of anything at all. this spirit of denial is extraordinarily infectious. a man begins to suspect what he calls the "supernatural." he joins an ethical society, and before he knows where he is, he is a vegetarian. the rebellious moderns have a curious tendency to flock together in self-defence, even when they have nothing in common. the mere aggregation of denials rather attracts the slovenly and the unattached. the lack of positive dogma expressed by such a coalition encourages the sceptic and the uneducated, who do not realize that the deliberate suppression of dogma is itself a dogma of extreme arrogance. we trust too much to the label, nowadays, and the brief descriptions we attach to ourselves have a gradually increasing connotation. in politics for example, the conservative creed, which originally contained the single article that aristocracy, wealth and government should be in the same few hands, now also implies adhesion to the economic doctrine of protection, and the political doctrine that unitary government is preferable to federal. the liberal creed, based principally upon opposition to the conservative, and to a lesser degree upon disrespect for the established church, has been enlarged concurrently with the latter. the average liberal or conservative now feels himself in honour bound to assert or to deny political dogmas out of sheer loyalty to his party. this does not make for sanity. the only political creed in which a man may reasonably expect to remain sane is socialism, which is catholic and not the least dependent upon other beliefs. apart from the inconsiderable number of socialists, the average politician follows in the footsteps of those gentlemen already mentioned. he is not allowed to believe, so he contents himself with a denial of the other side's promises. assertion is infinitely more brain-wearing than denial. side by side with the increase in those who deny is a growth in the numbers of those who come to regard apathy, suspended judgment, or a lack of interest in a religious matter as a state of positive belief. there are agnostics quite literally all over the place. belief peters down into acceptance, acceptance becomes a probability, a probability declines into a reasonable doubt, and a reasonable doubt drifts into "it is highly conjectural and indeed extremely unlikely," or something of that sort. tolerance was once an instrument for ensuring that truth should not be suppressed; it is now an excuse for refusing to bother. there is, in fact, a growing disrespect for truth. a great many men went to the stake years ago rather than admit the possibility that they were wrong; they protested, so far as human endurance allowed them to protest, that they were orthodox and that their persecutors, and not they, were the heretics. to-day a bunch of cambridge men calls itself "the heretics" and imagines it has found a clever title. at the same time there is an apparent decline in the power to believe. the average politician (the principal type of twentieth-century propagandist) hardly ever makes a speech which does not contain one at least of the following phrases: "i may be mistaken, but it seems to me that . . ." "we are all subject to correction, but as far as we know . . ." "in this necessarily imperfect world . . ." "so far as one is able to judge . . ." "appearances are notoriously deceptive, but . . ." "human experience is necessarily limited to . . ." "we can never be really sure . . ." "pilate asked, 'what is truth?' ah, my brethren, what indeed?" "the best minds of the country have failed to come to an agreement on this question; one can only surmise . . ." "art is long and life is short. art to-day is even longer than it used to be." now the politician, to do him justice, has retained the courage of his convictions to a greater extent than the orthodox believer in god. men are still prepared to make home rule the occasion of bloodshed, or to spend the midnight hours denouncing apparent political heresies. but whereas the politician, like the orthodox believer once pronounced apologetics, they now merely utter apologies. to-day, equipped as never before with the heavy artillery of argument in the shape of higher criticism, research, blue-books, statistics, cheap publications, free libraries, accessible information, public lectures, and goodness only knows what else, the fighting forces of the spiritual and temporal decencies lie drowsing as in a club-room, placarded "religion and politics must not be discussed here." all this, with the exception of the political references, is a summary of chesterton's claim that a return to orthodoxy is desirable and necessary. it will be found at length in _heretics_ and in the first chapters of _orthodoxy_, and sprinkled throughout all his writings of a later date than 1906 or so. he protests on more than one occasion against mr. shaw's epigram, which seems to him to contain the essence of all that is wrong to-day, "the golden rule is that there is no golden rule." chesterton insists that there is a golden rule, that it is a very old one, and that it is known to a great many people, most of whom belong to the working classes. in his argument that, on the whole, the masses are (or were) right about religion, and that the intellectuals are wrong, chesterton is undoubtedly at his most bellicose and his sincerest. his is the pugnacity that prefers to pull down another's banner rather than to raise his own. his "defences" in _the defendant_, and the six hundred odd cases made out by him in the columns of the daily news are largely and obviously inspired by the wish, metaphorically speaking, to punch somebody's head. the fact that he is not a mere bully appears in the appeal to common decency which chesterton would be incapable of omitting from an article. nevertheless he prefers attack to defence. in war, the offensive is infinitely more costly than the defensive. but in controversy this is reversed. the opener of a debate is in a much more difficult position than his opponent. the latter need only criticize the former's case; he is not compelled to disclose his own defences. chesterton used to have a grand time hoisting people on their own petards, and letting forth strings of epigrams at the expense of those from whom he differed, and only incidentally revealing his own position. then, as he tells us in the preface to _orthodoxy_, when he had published the saltatory series of indictments entitled _heretics_, a number of his critics said, in effect, "please, mr. chesterton, what are we to believe?" mr. g. s. street, in particular, begged for enlightenment. g.k.c. joyously accepted the invitation, and wrote _orthodoxy_, his most brilliant book. there are few works in the english language the brilliancy of which is so sustained. _orthodoxy_ is a rapid torrent of epigrammatically expressed arguments. chesterton's method in writing it is that of the digger wasp. this intelligent creature carries on the survival of the fittest controversy by paralyzing its opponent first, and then proceeding to lay the eggs from which future fitness will proceed in the unresisting but still living body. chesterton begins by paralyzing his reader, by savagely attacking all the beliefs which the latter, if he be a modern and a sceptic, probably regards as first principles. tolerance is dismissed, as we have just seen, as a mere excuse for not caring. reason, that awful french goddess, is shown to be another apology. nietzsche and various other authors to whom some of us have bent the knee are slaughtered without misery. then chesterton proceeds to the argument, the reader being by this time receptive enough to swallow a camel, on the sole condition that g.k.c. has previously slightly treacled the animal. perhaps it would be more accurate to assert that at this point chesterton pretends to begin his argument. as a matter of strict fact he only describes his adventures in fairyland, which is all the earth. he tells us of his profound astonishment at the consistent recurrence of apples on apple trees, and at the general jolliness of the earth. he describes, very beautifully, some of the sensations of childhood making the all-embracing discovery that things are what they seem, and the even more joyful feeling of pretending that they are not, or that they will cease to be at any moment. a young kitten will watch a large cushion, which to it is a very considerable portion of the universe, flying at it without indicating any very appreciable surprise. a child, in the same way, would not be surprised if his house suddenly developed wings and flew away. chesterton cultivated this attitude of always expecting to be surprised by the most natural things in the world, until it became an obsession, and a part of his journalistic equipment. in a sense chesterton is the everlasting boy, the undergraduate who would not grow up. there must be few normally imaginative town-bred children to whom the pointed upright area-railings do not appear an unsearchable armoury of spears or as walls of protective flames, temporarily frozen black so that people should be able to enter and leave their house. every child knows that the old norse story of a sleeping brunnhilde encircled by flames is true; to him or her, there is a brunnhilde in every street, and the child knows that there it always has a chance of being the chosen siegfried. but because this view of life is so much cosier than that of the grown-ups, chesterton clings to his childhood's neat little universe and weeps pathetically when anybody mentions herbert spencer, and makes faces when he hears the word newton. he insists on a fair dole of surprises. "children are grateful when santa claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys and sweets. could i not be grateful to santa claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs?" now this fairyland business is frankly overdone. chesterton conceives of god, having carried the creation as far as this world, sitting down to look at the new universe in a sort of ecstasy. "and god saw every thing that he had made, and, behold it was very good." he enjoyed his new toy immensely, and as he sent the earth spinning round the sun, his pleasure increased. so he said "do it again" every time the sun had completed its course, and laughed prodigiously, and behaved like a happy child. and so he has gone on to this day saying "do it again" to the sun and the moon and the stars, to the animal creation, and the trees, and every living thing. so chesterton pictures god, giving his name to what others, including christians, call natural law, or the laws of god, or the laws of gravitation, conservation of energy, and so on, but always laws. for which reason, one is compelled to assume that in his opinion god is now [1915] saying to himself, "there's another bloody war, do it again, sun," and gurgling with delight. it is dangerous to wander in fairyland, as chesterton has himself demonstrated, "one might meet a fairy." it is not safe to try to look god in the face. a prophet in israel saw the glory of jehovah, and though he was but the god of a small nation, the prophet's face shone, and, so great was the vitality he absorbed from the great source that he "was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated." that is the reverent hebrew manner of conveying the glory of god. but chesterton, cheerfully playing toss halfpenny among the fairies, sees an idiot child, and calls it god. fortunately for the argument, chesterton has no more to say about his excursion in fairyland after his return. he goes on to talk about the substitutes which people have invented for christianity. the inner light theory has vitriol sprayed upon it. marcus aurelius, it is explained, acted according to the inner light. "he gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats leading the simple life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games in the amphitheatre or giving the english people back their land." the present writer does not profess any ability to handle philosophic problems philosophically; it seems to him, however, that if chesterton had been writing a few years later, he would have attempted to extinguish the latest form of the inner light, that "intuition" which has been so much associated with m. bergson's teachings. the inner light is finally polished off as follows: of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the inner light. of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. any one who knows anybody knows how it would work; anybody who knows any one from the higher thought centre knows how it does work. that jones should worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that jones shall worship jones. . . . christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man has not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. continuing his spiritual autobiography, chesterton describes his gradual emergence from the wonted agnosticism of sixteen through the mediumship of agnostic literature. once again that remark of bacon's showed itself to be true, "a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." a man may read huxley and bradlaugh, who knew their minds, and call himself an agnostic. but when it comes to reading their followers, there's another story to tell. what especially struck chesterton was the wholesale self-contradictoriness of the literature of agnosticism. one man would say that christianity was so harmful that extermination was the least that could be desired for it, and another would insist that it had reached a harmless and doddering old age. a writer would assert that christianity was a religion of wrath and blood, and would point to the inquisition, and to the religious wars which have at one time or another swept over the civilized world. but by the time the reader's blood was up, he would come across some virile atheist's proclamation of the feeble, mattoid character of the religion in question, as illustrated by its quietist saints, the quakers, the tolstoyans, and non-resisters in general. when he had cooled down, he would run into a denunciation of the asceticism of christianity, the monastic system, hair-shirts, and so on. then he would come across a sweeping condemnation of its sensual luxuriousness, its bejewelled chalices, its pompous rituals, the extravagance of its archbishops, and the like. christianity "was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured." and then the sudden obvious truth burst upon chesterton, what if christianity was the happy mean? perhaps, after all, it is christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad--in various ways. i tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. i was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. for instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. but then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. the modern man thought becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor. but then the modern man was really exceptional in history. no man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. the modern man found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy. the man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on _entrées_. the man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers. and surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. if there was any insanity at all, it was in the extravagant _entrées_, not in the bread and wine. nevertheless, christianity was centrifugal rather than centripetal; it was not a mere average, but a centre of gravity; not a compromise, but a conflict. christ was not half-god and half-man, like hercules, but "perfect god and perfect man." man was not only the highest, but also the lowest. "the church was positive on both points. one can hardly think too little of one's self. one can hardly think too much of one's soul." at this point agreement with mr. chesterton becomes difficult. christianity, he tells us, comes in with a flaming sword and performs neat acts of bisection. it separates the sinner from the sin, and tells us to love the former and hate the latter. he also tells us that no pagan would have thought of this. leaving aside the question whether or not plato was a christian, it may be pointed out that whereas chesterton condemns tolstoyanism whenever he recognizes it, he here proclaims tolstoy's doctrine. on the whole, however, the mild perverseness of the chapter on _the paradoxes of christianity_ leaves its major implications safe. it does not matter greatly whether we prefer to regard christianity as a centre of gravity, or a point of balance. we need only pause to note chesterton personifies this dualism. _the napoleon of notting hill_ is the arrangement of little bits of iron--the inhabitants of london, in this case--around the two poles of a fantastic magnet, of which one is adam wayne, the fanatic, and the other, auberon quin, the humorist. in _the ball and the cross_ the diagram is repeated. james turnbull, the atheist, and evan macian, the believer, are the two poles. we speak in a loose sort of way of opposite poles when we wish to express separation. but, in point of fact, they symbolize connection far more exactly. they are absolutely interdependent. the whole essence of a north and a south pole is that we, knowing where one is, should be able to say where the other is. nobody has ever suggested a universe in which the north pole wandered about at large. this is the idea which chesterton seems to have captured and introduced into his definition of christianity. democracy, to chesterton, is the theory that one man is as good as another; christianity, he finds, is the virtual sanctification by supernatural authority of democracy. he points out the incompatibility of political democracy, for example, with the determinism to which mr. blatchford's logical atheism has brought him. if man is the creature of his heredity and his environment, as mr. blatchford asserts, and if a slum-bred heredity and a slum environment do not make for high intelligence, then obviously it is against the best interests of the state to allow the slum inhabitant to vote. on the other hand, it is entirely to the best interests of the state to entrust its affairs to the aristocracy, whose breeding and environment gives it an enormous amount of intelligence. christianity, by proclaiming that every man's body is the temple of the holy ghost, insists both upon the necessity of abolishing the slums and of honouring the slum-dwellers as sharers with the rest of humanity in a common sonship. this is the case for socialism, it may be pointed out parenthetically, and chesterton has let it slip past him. he insists that orthodoxy is the best conceivable guardian of liberty, for the somewhat far-fetched reason that no believer in miracles would have such "a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos" as to cling to the theory that men should not have the liberty to work changes. if a man believed in the freedom of god, in fact, he would have to believe in the freedom of man. the obvious answer to which is that he generally doesn't. christianity made for eternal vigilance, chesterton maintains, whereas buddhism kept its eye on the inner light--which means, in fact, kept it shut. in proof, or at least in confirmation of this, he points to the statues of christian saints and of the buddha. the former keep their eyes open wide, the latter keep their eyes firmly closed. vigilance, however, does not always make for liberty--the vigilance of the inquisition, for example. leaving out of account this and other monstrous exceptions, we might say spiritual liberty, perhaps, but not political liberty, not, at any rate, since the days of macchiavelli, and the divorce of church and state. by insisting specially on the immanence of god we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference--tibet. by insisting specially on the transcendence of god we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, religious indignation--christendom. insisting that god is inside man, man is always inside himself. by insisting that god transcends man, man has transcended himself. in concluding the book, chesterton joyously refutes a few anti-christian arguments by means of his extraordinary knack of seeing the large and obvious, and therefore generally overlooked things. he believes in christianity because he is a rationalist, and the evidence in its favour has convinced him. the arguments with which he deals are these. that men are much like beasts, and probably related to them. answer: yes, but men are also quite wonderfully unlike them in many important respects. that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear. answer: we know nothing about prehistoric man, because he was prehistoric, therefore we cannot say where he got his religion from. but "the whole human race has a tradition of the fall." and so on: the argument that christ was a poor sheepish and ineffectual professor of a quiet life is answered by the flaming energy of his earthly mission; the suggestion that christianity belongs to the dark ages is countered by the historical fact that it "was the one path across the dark ages that was not dark." it was the path that led from roman to modern civilization, and we are here because of it. and the book ends with a peroration that might be likened to a torrent, were it not for the fact that torrents are generally narrow and shallow. it is a most remarkable exhibition of energy, a case from which flippancies and irrelevancies have been removed, and where the central conviction advances irresistibly. elsewhere in the book chesterton had been inconsequent, darting from point to point, lunging at an opponent one moment, formulating a theory in the next, and producing an effect which, if judged by sample, would be considered bizarre and undirected. the book contains a few perversities, of course. the author attempts to rebut the idea "that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom," by pointing out that in one or two priest-ridden countries wine and song and dance abound. yes, but if people are jollier in france and spain and italy than in savage africa, it is due not to the priests so much as to the climate which makes wine cheap and an open-air life possible. no amount of priests would be able to set the inhabitants of the belgian congo dancing around a maypole singing the while glad songs handed down by their fathers. no amount of priests would be able to make the festive eskimo bask in the sun and sing in chorus when there wasn't any sun and it was altogether too cold to open their mouths wide in the open air. in fact the priests are not the cause of the blight where it exists, just as they are not the cause of the jolliness, when there is any. but _orthodoxy_ is chesterton's sincerest book. it is perhaps the only one of the whole lot in the course of which he would not be justified in repeating a remark which begins one of the _tremendous trifles_, "every now and then i have introduced into my essays an element of truth." twice upon a time there was a samuel butler who wrote exhilaratingly and died and left the paradoxical contents of his notebooks to be published by posterity. the first (i.e. of hudibras, not of erewhon) had many lively things to say on the question of orthodoxy, being the forerunner of g.k.c. and i am greatly tempted to treat samuel butler as an ancestor to be described at length. chesterton might well have said, "it is a dangerous thing to be too inquisitive, and search too narrowly into a true religion, for 50,000 bethshemites were destroyed only for looking into the ark of the covenant, and ten times as many have been ruined for looking too curiously into that booke in which that story is recorded"--in fact in _magic_ he very nearly did say the same thing. he would have liked (as who would not?) to have been the author of the saying that "repentant teares are the waters upon which the spirit of god moves," or that "there is no better argument to prove that the scriptures were written by divine inspiration, than that excellent saying of our savior, if any man will go to law with thee for thy cloke, give him thy coate also." he might well have written dozens of those puns and aphorisms of butler which an unkind fate has omitted from the things we read, and even from the things we quote. but butler provides an answer to chesterton, for he was an intelligent anticipator who foresaw exactly what would happen when orthodoxy, which is to say the injunction to shout with the larger crowd, should be proclaimed as the easiest way out of religious difficulties. before a reader has finally made up his mind on _orthodoxy_ (and it is highly desirable that he should do so), let him consider two little texts: "they that profess religion and believe it consists in frequenting of sermons, do, as if they should say they have a great desire to serve god, but would faine be perswaded to it. why should any man suppose that he pleases god by patiently hearing an ignorant fellow render religion ridiculous?" "he [a catholic] prefers his church merely for the antiquity of it, and cares not how sound or rotten it be, so it be but old. he takes a liking to it as some do to old cheese, only for the blue rottenness of it. if he had lived in the primitive times he had never been a _christian_; for the antiquity of the _pagan_ and _jewish_ religion would have had the same power over him against the _christian_, as the old _roman_ has against the modern reformation." here we leave samuel butler. the majority stands the largest chance of being right through the sheer operation of the law of averages. but somehow one does not easily imagine a mob passing through the gate that is narrow and the way that is narrow. one prefers to think of men going up in ones and twos, perhaps even in loneliness, and rejoicing at the strange miracle of judgment that all their friends should be assembled at the journey's end. but the final criticism of chesterton's _orthodoxy_ is that it is not orthodox. he claims that he is "concerned only to discuss . . . the central christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the apostles' creed)" and, "when the word 'orthodoxy' is used here it means the apostles' creed, as understood by everybody calling himself christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed." in other words he counts as orthodox anglicans, roman catholics, orthodox russians, nonconformists, lutherans, calvinists, and all manner of queer fish, possibly joanna southcott, mrs. annie besant, and mrs. mary baker eddy. he might even, by stretching a point or two (which is surely permissible by the rules of their game), rope in the new theologians. now this may be evidence of extraordinary catholicity, but not of orthodoxy. chesterton stands by and applauds the homoousians scalping the homoiousians, but he is apparently willing to leave the anglican and the roman catholic on the same plane of orthodoxy, which is absurd. we cannot all be right, even the duke in _magic_ would not be mad enough to assert that. and the average christian would absolutely refuse his adherence to a statement of orthodoxy that left the matter of supreme spiritual authority an open question. in the fifteenth century practically every englishman would have declared with some emphasis that it lay in the pope of rome. in the twentieth century practically every englishman would declare with equal emphasis that it did not. this change of opinion was accompanied by considerable ill-feeling on both sides, and was, as it were, illuminated by burning martyrs. the men of both parties burned in both an active and a passive sense. those charming tudor sisters, bloody mary (as the anglicans call her) and bloody bess (as the roman catholics affectionately name her) left a large smudge upon accepted ideas of orthodoxy; charred human flesh was a principal constituent of it. the mark remains, the differences are far greater, but, to chesterton, both anglican and roman catholic are "orthodox." of such is the illimitable orthodoxy of an ethical society, or of a body of theosophists who "recognize the essential unity of all creeds and religions"--the liars! chesterton tells us that messrs. shaw, kipling, wells, ibsen and others are heretics, because of their doctrines. but he gives us no idea whether the pope of rome, who sells indulgences, is a heretic. and as the pope is likely to outlive messrs. shaw, etc., by perhaps a thousand years, it is possible that chesterton has been attacking the ephemeral heresies, while leaving the major ones untouched. in effect, chesterton tells us no more than that we should shout with the largest crowd. but the largest crowd prefers, just now, not to do anything so clamorous. the most curious feature about the present position of christianity is the energy with which its opponents combine to keep it going. while mr. robert blatchford continues to argue that man's will is not free, and sir oliver lodge continues to maintain that it is, the doctrine of the resurrection is safe; it is not even attacked. but the net result of all those peculiar modern things called "movements" is a state of immobility like a nicely balanced tug-of-war. perhaps a rugby scrum would make a better comparison. the great and grave changes in our political civilization all belong to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. they belong to the black-and-white epoch, when men believed fixedly in toryism, in protestantism, in calvinism, in reform, and not infrequently in revolution. and whatever each man believed in, he hammered at steadily, without scepticism: and there was a time when the established church might have fallen, and the house of lords nearly fell. it was because radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was because radicals were wise enough to be conservative. . . . let beliefs fade fast and frequently if you wish institutions to remain the same. the more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. the net result of all our political suggestions, collectivism, tolstoyanism, neo-feudalism, communism, anarchy, scientific bureaucracy--the plain fruit of them all is that monarchy and the house of lords will remain. the net result of all the new religions will be that the church of england will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. it was karl marx, nietzsche, tolstoy, cunninghame graham, bernard shaw, and auberon herbert, who between them, with bowed, gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the archbishop of canterbury. it is on these grounds that we must believe that, even as the church survives, and prevails, in order to get a hearing when the atheist and the new theologian have finished shouting themselves hoarse at each other, so must political creeds be in conformity with the doctrines of the church. such is the foundation of democracy, according to chesterton. will anybody revise his political views on this basis? probably not. every christian believes that his political opinions are thoroughly christian, and so entire is the disrepute into which atheism has fallen as a philosophy of life, that a great many atheists likewise protest the entire christianity of their politics. we are all democrats to-day, in one sense or another; each of us more loosely than his neighbour. it is strange that by the criterion of almost every living man who springs to the mind as a representative democrat, chesterton is the most undemocratic of us all. this, however, needs a separate chapter of explanation. vii the politician who could not tell the time somewhere at the back of all chesterton's political and religious ideas lies an ideal country, a utopia which actually existed. its name is the middle ages. if some unemployed higher critic chose to undertake the appalling task of reading steadily through all the works of g.k.c., copying out those passages in which there was any reference to the middle ages, the result would be a description of a land flowing with milk and honey. the inhabitants would be large, strong christian men, and red-haired, womanly women. their children would be unschooled, save by the church. they would all live in houses of their own, on lands belonging to them. their faith would be one. they would speak latin as a sort of esperanto, and drink enormous quantities of good beer. the church--but i have found the passage relating to the church: religion, the immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant of mankind. she provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an unalterable cosmos; and also with the practical rules of the rapid and thrilling game of morality. she taught logic to the student and taught fairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront the nameless gods whose fear is on all flesh, and also to see that the streets were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for ringing bells. the inhabitants of this happy realm would be instinctively democratic, and no woman would demand a vote there. they would have that exalted notion of patriotism that works outwards from the village pump to the universe at large. they would understand all humanity because they understood themselves. they would understand themselves because they would have no newspapers to widen their interests and so make them shallower. in _magic_, as we have seen, chesterton's mouthpiece, the conjuror, gave us to understand that it was better to believe in apollo than merely to disbelieve in god. the chestertonian middle ages are like apollo; they did not exist, but they make an admirable myth. for chesterton, in common with the rest of us, flourishes on myths like the green bay; we, however, happen not to know, in most cases, when our myths have a foundation. mankind demands myths--and it has them. some day a history of the world's myths will be compiled. it will show humanity climbing perilous peaks in pursuit of somebody's misinterpretations of somebody else's books, or fighting bloodily because somebody asserted or denied that a nation was the chosen one, or invading new continents, physical or metaphysical, because of legendary gold to be found therein, or in fact committing all its follies under the inspiration of myths--as in fact it has done. the middle ages are to chesterton what king alfred was to the chartists and early radicals. they believed that in his days england was actually governed on chartist principles. so it happens that two radical papers of the early part of last century actually called themselves the alfred, and that major cartwright spent a considerable amount of energy in inducing the greeks to substitute pikes for bayonets in their struggles against the turks, on the grounds that the pike was used in alfred's england. so there we have chesterton believing devoutly that that servile state, stricken with plague, and afflicted with death in all its forms, is the dreamland of the saints. his political principles, roughly speaking, are england was decent once--let us apply the same recipe to the england of to-day. his suggestions, therefore, are rather negative than positive. he would dam the flood of modern legislative tendencies because it is taking england farther away from his middle ages. but he will not say "do this" about anything, because in the middle ages they made few laws, not having, in point of fact, the power to enforce those offences against moral and economic law which then took the place of legislation. it is impossible to say to what extent chesterton has surrendered himself to this myth; whether he has come to accept it because he liked it, or in order to please his friend, mr. hilaire belloc, from whom g.k.c. never differs politically. once they stood side by side and debated against mr. shaw and mr. wells, arguing from socialism to beer, and thence to religion. in january, 1908, chesterton accepted the invitation of the editor of the new age to explain why he did not call himself a socialist, in spite of his claim to possess "not only a faith in democracy, but a great tenderness for revolution." the explanation is complicated, to say the least. in the first place chesterton does not want people to share, they should give and take. in the second place, as a democrat (which nobody else is) he has a vast respect (which nobody else has) for the working classes. and one thing i should affirm as certain, the whole smell and sentiment and general ideal of socialism they detest and disdain. no part of the community is so specially fixed in those forms and feelings which are opposite to the tone of most socialists; the privacy of homes, the control of one's own children, the minding of one's own business. i look out of my back windows over the black stretch of battersea, and i believe i could make up a sort of creed, a catalogue of maxims, which i am certain are believed, and believed strongly, by the overwhelming mass of men and women as far as the eye can reach. for instance, that an englishman's house is his castle, and that awful proprieties ought to regulate admission to it; that marriage is a real bond, making jealousy and marital revenge at the least highly pardonable; that vegetarianism and all pitting of animal against human rights is a silly fad; that on the other hand to save money to give yourself a fine funeral is not a silly fad, but a symbol of ancestral self-respect; that when giving treats to friends or children, one should give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them; that there is nothing illogical in being furious because tommy has been coldly caned by a schoolmistress and then throwing saucepans at him yourself. all these things they believe; they are the only people who do believe them; and they are absolutely and eternally right. they are the ancient sanities of humanity; the ten commandments of man. a week later, mr. h. g. wells, who at that time had not yet broken away from organized socialism, but was actually a member of the executive committee of the fabian society, wrote a reply to the case against socialism which had been stated by chesterton, and, a week earlier, by mr. hilaire belloc. he attempted to get chesterton to look facts in the face. he pointed out that as things are "i do not see how belloc and chesterton can stand for anything but a strong state as against those wild monsters of property, the strong, big, private owners." suppose that chesterton isn't a socialist, is he more on the side of the socialists or on that of the free trade liberal capitalists and landlords? "it isn't an adequate reply to say [of socialism] that nobody stood treat there, and that the simple, generous people like to beat their own wives and children on occasion in a loving and intimate manner, and that they won't endure the spirit of sidney webb." a fortnight later, chesterton replied. but, though many have engaged with him in controversy, i doubt if anybody has ever pinned him down to a fact or an argument. on this occasion, g.k.c. politely refused even to refer to the vital point of the case of mr. h. g. wells. on the other hand he wrote a very jolly article about beer and "tavern hospitality." the argument marked time for two weeks more, when mr. belloc once again entered the lists. the essence of his contribution is "i premise that man, in order to be normally happy, tolerably happy, must own." collectivism will not let him own. the trouble about the present state of society is that people do not own enough. the remedy proposed will be worse than the disease. then mr. bernard shaw had a look in. in the course of his lengthy article he gave "the chesterbelloc"--"a very amusing pantomime elephant"--several shrewd digs in the ribs. it claimed, according to g.b.s., to be the zeitgeist. "to which we reply, bluntly, but conclusively, 'gammon!'" the rest was mostly amiable personalities. mr. shaw owned up to musical cravings, compared with which the chesterbelloc tendency to consume alcohol was as nothing. he also jeered very pleasantly at mr. belloc's power to cause a stampede of chesterton's political and religious ideas. "for belloc's sake chesterton says he believes literally in the bible story of the resurrection. for belloc's sake he says he is not a socialist. on a recent occasion i tried to drive him to swallow the miracle of st. januarius for belloc's sake; but at that he stuck. he pleaded his belief in the resurrection story. he pointed out very justly that i believe in lots of things just as miraculous as the miracle of st. januarius; but when i remorselessly pressed the fact that he did not believe that the blood of st. januarius reliquefies miraculously every year, the credo stuck in his throat like amen in macbeth's. he had got down at last to his irreducible minimum of dogmatic incredulity, and could not, even with the mouth of the bottomless pit yawning before belloc, utter the saving lie." by this time the discussion was definitely off socialism. chesterton produced another article, _the last of the rationalists_, in reply to mr. shaw, from which one gathered what one had been previously suspected that "you [namely mr. shaw, but in practice both the opposition controversialists] have confined yourselves to charming essays on our two charming personalities." and there they stopped. the year following this bout of personalities saw the publication of a remarkably brilliant book by chesterton, _george bernard shaw_, in which, one might have expected, the case against the political creed represented by g.b.s. might have been carried a trifle farther. instead of which it was not carried anything like so far. chesterton jeered at mr. shaw's vegetarianism, denied his democracy, but decided that on the whole he was a good republican, "in the literal and latin sense; he cares more for the public thing than for any private thing." he ends the chapter entitled "the progressive" by saying the kindest things he ever said about any body of socialists. i have in my time had my fling at the fabian society, at the pedantry of schemes, the arrogance of experts; nor do i regret it now. but when i remember that other world against which it reared its bourgeois banner of cleanliness and common sense, i will not end this chapter without doing it decent honour. give me the drain pipes of the fabians rather than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain pipes have a nicer smell. the reader may have grasped by this time the fact that chesterton's objections to socialism were based rather on his dislike of what the working man calls "mucking people about" than on any economic grounds. he made himself the sworn enemy of any bill before parliament which contained any proposals to appoint inspectors. he took the line that the sacredness of the home diminishes visibly with the entrance of the gas collector, and disappears down the kitchen sink with the arrival of the school attendance officer. in those of his writings which i have not seen i have no doubt there are pleadings for the retention of the cesspool, because it is the last moat left to the englishman's house, which is his castle. it is difficult to believe in the complete sincerity of such an attitude. the inspector is the chief enemy of the bad landlord and employer, he is a fruit of democracy. in the early days of the factory system, when mercilessly long hours were worked by children and women, when legislation had failed to ameliorate the conditions of employment, because the employers were also the magistrates, and would not enforce laws against themselves, the great reform bill agitation, which so nearly caused a revolution in this country, came to an end, having in 1832 achieved a partial success. but the new house of commons did not at once realize how partial it was, and at first it regarded the interests of working men with something of the intensity of the liberal government of 1906, which had not yet come to appreciate the new and portentous labour party at its true worth. so in 1833 inspectors were appointed for the first time. this very brief excursion into history is sufficient justification for refusing to take seriously those who would have us believe that inspectors are necessarily the enemies of the human race. chesterton's theory that middle-class socialists are people who want to do things to the poor in the direction of regimenting them finds an easy refutation. when, in 1910, the whole of england fell down before the eloquence of mr. lloyd george, and consented to the insurance bill, the one body of people who stood out and fought that bill was that middle-class socialist body, the fabian society. it is sometimes desirable, for purposes of controversy, to incarnate a theory or objection. chesterton lumped together all his views on the alleged intentions of the socialists to interfere in the natural and legitimate happinesses of the working class, and called this curious composite mr. sidney webb. so through many volumes mr. webb's name is continually bobbing up, like an irrepressible aunt sally, and having to be thwacked into a temporary disappearance. but this is only done for literary effect. to heave a brick at a man is both simpler and more amusing than to arraign a system or a creed. a reader enjoys the feeling that his author is a clever dog who is making it devilishly uncomfortable for his opponents. his appreciation would be considerably less if the opponent in question was a mere theory. in point of fact, chesterton is probably a warm admirer of mr. and mrs. sidney webb. when they founded (in 1909) their national committee for the prevention of destitution, designed to educate the british public in the ideas of what has been called webbism, especially those contained in the minority report of the poor law commission, one of the first to join was g. k. chesterton. the word socialism covers a multitude of socialists, some of whom are not. the political faith of a man, therefore, must not be judged upon his attitude towards socialism, if we have anything more definite to go upon. chesterton overflows, so to speak, with predilections, such as beer (in a political sense, of course), opposition to the jingo, on the one hand, and to middle-class faddery, such as vegetarianism, on the other, and so on. anybody might indulge in most of his views, in fact, without incurring severe moral reprobation. but there is an exception which, unfortunately, links chesterton pretty firmly with the sweater, and other undesirable lords of creation. he is an anti-suffragist. in a little essay chesterton once wrote on tolstoy, he argued that the thing that has driven men mad was logic, from the beginning of time, whereas the thing that has kept them sane was mysticism. tolstoy, lacking mysticism, was at the mercy of his pitiless logic, which led him to condemn things which are entirely natural and human. this attitude, one feels (and it is only to be arrived at by feeling), is absolutely right. we all start off with certain scarce expressible feelings that certain things are fundamentally decent and permissible, and that others are the reverse, just as we do not take our idea of blackness and whiteness from a text-book. if anybody proposed that all scotsmen should be compelled to eat sago with every meal, the idea, although novel to most of us, would be instantly dismissed, even, it is probable, by those with sago interests, because it would be contrary to our instinct of what is decent. in fact, we all believe in natural rights, or at any rate we claim the enjoyment of some. now natural rights have no logical basis. the late professor d. g. ritchie very brilliantly examined the theory of natural rights, and by means of much subtle dissection and argument found that there were no natural rights; law was the only basis of privilege. it is quite easy to be convinced by the author's delightful dialectic, but the conviction is apt to vanish suddenly in the presence of a dog being ill-treated. now on a basis of common decency--the basis of all democratic political thought--the case for woman suffrage is irresistible. it is not decent that the sweated woman worker should be denied what, in the opinion of many competent judges, might be the instrument of her salvation. it is not decent that women should share a disqualification with lunatics, criminals, children, and no others of their own race. it is not decent that the sex which knows most about babies should have no opportunity to influence directly legislation dealing with babies. it is not decent that a large, important and necessary section of humanity, with highly gregarious instincts, should not be allowed to exercise the only gregarious function which concerns the whole nation at once. these propositions are fundamental; if a man or woman cannot accept them, then he is at heart an "anti," even if he has constructed for himself a quantity of reasons, religious, ethical, economic, political or what not, why women should be allowed to vote. every suffrage argument is, or can be, based on decencies, not on emotion or statistics. chesterton bases his case on decencies, but they are not the decencies that matter. in _what's wrong with the world_ he insists on the indecency of allowing women to cease to be amateurs within the home, or of allowing them to earn a living in a factory or office, or of allowing them to share in the responsibility for taking the lives of condemned murderers, or of allowing them to exercise the coercion which is government, which is a sort of pyramid, with a gallows on top, the ultimate resort of coercive power. and in these alleged indecencies (the word is not altogether my own) lies chesterton's whole case against allowing any woman to vote. into these propositions his whole case, as expressed in _what's wrong with the world_, is faithfully condensed. well now, are these indecencies sincere or simulated? first, as regards the amateur, chesterton's case is that the amateur is necessary, in order to counteract the influences of the specialist. man is nowadays the specialist. he is confined to making such things as the thousandth part of a motor-car or producing the ten-thousandth part of a daily newspaper. by being a specialist he is made narrow. woman, with the whole home on her hands, has a multiplicity of tasks. she is the amateur, and as such she is free. if she is put into politics or industry she becomes a specialist, and as such becomes a slave. this is a pretty piece of reasoning, but it is absolutely hollow. there are few women who do not gladly resign part at least of their sovereignty, if they have the chance, to a maid-servant (who may be, and, in fact, usually is an amateur, but is not free to try daring experiments) or to such blatant specialists as cooks and nursemaids. nobody is the least bit shocked by the existence of specialist women. indeed, it is a solemn fact, that were it not for them chesterton would be unable to procure a single article of clothing. he would be driven to the fig-leaf, and would stand a good chance of not getting even so much, now that so many gardeners are women. we are terribly dependent upon the specialist woman. that is why the amateur within the home is beginning to wonder whether, on the whole, man _is_ so very much dependent upon her. she comes to rely more and more upon the specialist women to help her feed, clothe, and nurse her husband. she has so much done for her that she comes to understand the remainder left to her far better. she becomes a specialist herself, and feels kindly towards other specialists. then she demands a vote and meets chesterton, who tells her to go and mind the baby and be as free as she likes with the domestic apparatus for making pastry, when her baby is in point of fact being brought up by other women at a montessori school to be much more intelligent and much more of a specialist than she herself is ever likely to be, and when she knows that her dyspeptic husband has an absolute loathing for the amateurishness that expresses itself in dough. then there is the alleged wrongness of permitting women to work in factories and offices. we are all probably prepared to admit that we have been shocked at the commercial employment of women. but it has probably occurred to few of us that the shock was due simply to their commercial employment. it was due to their low wages and to the beastliness of their employers. when they drew decent wages and their employers were decent men we were not the least bit hurt. but when an employer made use of the amateurishness of young girls to underpay them, and then make deductions from their wages on various trivial pretexts, and put them to work in overcrowded factories and offices, then we all felt acutely that an indecency was being committed. the obvious democratic remedy is the duckpond, but in our great cities none remain. so one is sorrowfully brought round to the slower but surer expedient of attacking and destroying the amateurishness of women at the point where it is dangerous to them. amateurishness has encircled women in the past like the seven rivers of hades. every now and again a daring excursion was made in order that the wisdom of those imprisoned within should be added to our store. a good deal of aboriginal amateurishness has been evaporating as the woman doctor has been taking the place of the time-honoured amateur dispenser of brimstone and treacle, and even horrider things. and will chesterton maintain that it were better for us all if certain women had remained amateurs and had not studied and specialized so that, in time of need, they were enabled to tend the sick and wounded at home, in flanders and in france, and wherever the powers of evil had been at work? lastly, is it decent that women should share the awful responsibility which is attached to the ultimate control of the state, when the state is compelled to use the gallows? if women vote, they are responsible for whatever blood is shed by the state. yes, but, mr. chesterton, aren't they just as responsible for it in any case? don't women help to pay the hangman's wages with every ounce of tea or of sweets they buy? if capital punishment is obscene, then we can do without it, and a woman's vote will not make her a sharer in the evil. if capital punishment is morally stimulating to the nation at large, there is no reason why women should not be allowed to share in the stimulation. now what has become of chesterton's decencies? it is indeed saddening that a man who never misses an opportunity to proclaim himself a democrat should take his stand on this matter beside lord curzon, and in opposition to the instinctively and essentially democratic views proclaimed by such men as messrs. h. w. nevinson and philip snowden. in an article in the illustrated london news on june 1st, 1912, chesterton showed whose side he was on with unusual distinctness. the subject of the article was earnestness; the moral, that it was a bad quality, the property of socialists and anti-socialists, and suffragists, and that apathy was best of all. it concluded: neither socialists nor suffragists will smash our politics, i fear. the worst they can do is to put a little more of the poison of earnestness into the strong, unconscious sanity of our race, and disturb that deep and just indifference on which all things rest; the quiet of the mother or the carelessness of the child. in remarkably similar words, the late procurator of the holy synod of the russian church, c. p. pobedonostsev, condemned democracy in his book, the reflexions of a russian statesman, and praised _vis inertiæ_ for its preservative effects. but the russian had more consistency; he did not merely condemn votes for women, but also votes for men; and not only votes, but education, the jury system, the freedom of the press, religious freedom, and many other things. putting aside the question of woman suffrage, chesterton's views on democracy may be further illustrated by reference to the proceedings of the joint select committee of the house of lords and the house of commons, 1909, on stage plays (censorship). he may speak for himself here. mr. g. k. chesterton is called in, and examined. question 6141 (_chairman_). i understand that you appear here to give evidence on behalf of the average man? g.k.c. yes, that is so. i represent the audience, in fact. i am neither a dramatist nor a dramatic critic. i do not quite know why i am here, but if anybody wants to know my views on the subject they are these: i am for the censorship, but i am against the present censor. i am very strongly for the censorship, and i am very strongly against the present censor. the whole question i think turns on the old democratic objection to despotism. i am an old-fashioned person and i retain the old democratic objection to despotism. i would trust 12 ordinary men, but i cannot trust one ordinary man. 6142. you prefer the jury to the judge?--yes, exactly; that is the very point. it seems to me that if you have one ordinary man judging, it is not his ordinariness that appears, but it is his extraordinariness that appears. take anybody you like--george iii for instance. i suppose that george iii was a pretty ordinary man in one sense. people called him farmer george. he was very like a large number of other people, but when he was alone in his position things appeared in him that were not ordinary--that he was a german, and that he was mad, and various other facts. therefore, my primary principle--- 6143. he gloried in the name of briton?--i know he did. that is what showed him to be so thoroughly german. lord newton. he spelt it wrongly. witness. therefore, speaking broadly, i would not take george iii's opinion, but i would take the opinion of 12 george iii's on any question. the taking of the "evidence" took several hours, but it never yielded anything more than this: the local jury is a better judge of what is right and proper than a single censor. juries may differ in their judgments; but why not? is it not desirable that hampstead and highgate should each have an opportunity of finding out independently what they like? may they not compete in taste one against the other? this introduction of the question of dramatic censorship invites a slight digression. chesterton has a decided regard for a dramatic censorship. a book need not be censored, because it need not be finished by its reader, but it may be difficult to get out of a theatre in the course of a performance. and there are performances of plays, written by "irresponsible modern philosophers," which, to chesterton, seem to deserve suppression. a suggestive french farce may be a dirty joke, but it is at least a joke; but a play which raises the question is marriage a failure? and answers it in the affirmative, is a pernicious philosophy. the answer to this last contention is that, in point of strict fact, modern philosophers do not regard happy marriages as failures, and opinion is divided on the others, which are generally the subjects of their plays. but there is no doubt that a jury is better qualified than a single censor. a french jury decided that madame bovary was not immoral. an english jury decided that a certain book by zola was immoral and sent the publisher to prison. another english jury, for all practical purposes, decided that dorian gray was not immoral, and so on. the verdicts may be accepted. twelve men, picked from an alphabetical list, may not be judges of art, but they will not debase morality. chesterton's personal contribution to the political thought of his day lies in his criticism of the humaneness of legislative proposals. a thing that is human is commonly a very different matter from a thing that is merely humanitarian. g.k.c. is hotly human and almost bitterly anti-humanitarian. the difference between the two is illustrated by the institution of the gallows, which is human, but not humanitarian. in its essentials it consists of a rope and a branch, which is precisely the apparatus that an angry man might employ in order to rid himself of his captured enemy. herbert spencer, seeking in his old age for means whereby to increase the happiness of mankind, invented a humanitarian apparatus for the infliction of capital punishment. it consisted of a glorified roundabout, on which the victim was laid for his last journey. as it revolved, the blood-pressure on his head gradually increased (or decreased, i forget which) until he fell asleep and died painlessly. this is humanitarianism. the process is safe and sure (so long as the machine did not stop suddenly), highly efficient, bloodless and painless. but just because it is so humanitarian it offends one a great deal more than the old-fashioned gallows. the only circumstance which can justify violence is anger. the only circumstance which can justify the taking of human life is anger. and anger may be expressed by a rope or a knife-edge, but not by a roundabout or any other morbid invention of a cold-blooded philosopher such as the electric chair, or the lethal chamber. in the same way, if flogging is to continue as a punishment, it must be inflicted by a man and not by a machine. now this distinction (made without prejudice as to chesterton's views on capital or corporal punishment) holds good through his whole criticism of modern legislation. he believes that it is better that a man and his family should starve in their own slum, than that they should be moulded, by a cumbersome apparatus of laws and officials and inspectors, into a tame, mildly prosperous and mildly healthy group of individuals, whose opinions, occupations and homes should be provided for them. on these lines he attacks whatever in his opinion will tend to put men into a position where their souls will be less their own. he believes that the man who has been costered by the government into a mediocre state of life will be less of a man than one who has been left unbothered by officials, and has had to shift for himself. very largely, therefore, chesterton's political faith is an up-to-date variety of the tenets of the self-help school, which was own brother to the manchester school. and here we come to a curious contradiction, the first of a series. for chesterton loathes the manchester school. the contradiction comes of an inveterate nominalism. to g.k.c. all good politics are summed up in the words liberty, equality, fraternity. but nobody, not even a frenchman, can explain what they mean. chesterton used to believe that they mean liberalism, being led astray by the sound of the first word, but he soon realized his error. let a man say "i believe in liberty" and only the vagueness of the statement preserves it from the funniness of a higher thinker's affirmation, "i believe in beauty." a man has to _feel_ liberty, equality, fraternity, for they are not in the nature of facts. and one suspects horribly that what chesterton really feels is merely the masculine liberty, equality and fraternity of the public-house, where men meet together but never do anything. for chesterton has not yet asked us to do anything, he only requests parliament to refrain. he supports no political programme. he is opposed to party government, which is government by the government. he is in favour of home rule, it may be inferred; and of making things nasty for the jews, it may be supposed. but he does not poach on the leader-writers' preserves, and his political programme is left hazy. his opposition to liberal proposals brings him near the tories. if the liberals continue in power for a few years longer, and home rule drops out of the things opposed by tories, the latter may well find chesterton among their doubtful assets. he will probably continue to call himself a liberal and a "child of the french revolution," but that will be only his fun. for the interesting abortions to which the french revolution gave birth--well, they are quite another story. chesterton is a warm supporter of the queerly mixed proposals that are known as the "rights of small nationalities," and the smaller the nationality, the more warmly he supports (so he would have us believe) its demand for self-government. big fleas have little fleas, alas, and that is the difficulty he does not confront. for home rule carried to its final sub-division is simply home rule; the independence of homes. political home rule is only assented to on general principles; apparently on the ground that on the day when an englishman's home really does become his castle he will not, so to speak, mind much whether he is an englishman or an irishman. and here we may bid farewell to the politician who is chesterton. his politics are like his perverse definitions of the meaning of such words as progress and reform. he is like a child who plays about with the hands of a clock, and makes the surprising discovery that some clocks may be made to tell a time that does not exist--with the small hand at twelve and the large at six, for example. also that if a clock goes fast, it comes to register an hour behind the true time, and the other way round. and so chesterton goes on playing with the times, until at last a horrid suspicion grips us. what if he cannot tell the time himself? viii a decadent of sorts an idea, if treated gently, may be brought up to perform many useful tasks. it is, however, apt to pine in solitude, and should be allowed to enjoy the company of others of its own kind. it is much easier to overwork an idea than a man, and of the two, the wearied idea presents an infinitely more pathetic appearance. those of us who, for our sins, have to review the novels of other people, are accustomed to the saddening spectacle of a poor little idea, beautiful and fresh in its youth, come wearily to its tombstone on page 300 (where or whereabouts novels end), trailing after it an immense load of stiff and heavy puppets, taken down from the common property-cupboards of the nation's fiction, and not even dusted for the occasion. _manalive_, as we have seen, suffered from its devotion to one single idea, but the poor little thing was kept going to the bitter end by the flow of humorous encouragement given it by the author. the later works of chesterton, however, are symbolized by a performing flea, dragging behind it a little cartload of passengers. but it sometimes happens that the humour of _manalive_ is not there, that one weary idea has to support an intolerable deal of prose. in _an essay on two cities_[3] there is a long passage illustrating the adventures of a man who tried to find people in london by the names of the places. he might go into buckingham palace in search of the duke of buckingham, into marlborough house in quest of the duke of marlborough. he might even look for the duke of wellington at waterloo. i wonder that no one has written a wild romance about the adventures of such an alien, seeking the great english aristocrats, and only guided by the names; looking for the duke of bedford in the town of that name, seeking for some trace of the duke of norfolk in norfolk. he might sail for wellington in new zealand to find the ancient seat of the wellingtons. the last scene might show him trying to learn welsh in order to converse with the prince of wales. here is an idea that is distinctly amusing when made to fill one short paragraph, and might be deadly tedious if extended into a wild romance. perhaps the best way of summarizing the peculiar decadence into which chesterton seemed at one time to be falling is by the statement that up to the present he has not found time to write the book, but has done others like it. and yet the decadence has never showed signs of that _fin de siècle_ rustiness that marked the decadent movement (if it was really a movement and not just an obsession) of the generation that preceded chesterton. he cursed it in the dedication to mr. e. c. bentley of _the man who was thursday_, and he remained true to the point of view expressed in that curse for ever afterwards. a cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather, yea, a sick cloud upon the soul, when we were boys together. science announced nonentity, and art admired decay; the world was old and ended: but you and i were gay. round us in antic order their crippled vices came- lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame. like the white lock of whistler, that lit our aimless gloom, men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume. life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung; the world was very old indeed when you and i were young. they twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named: men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed. the chestertonian decadence was not even an all-round falling-off. if anybody were to make the statement that in the year nineteen-hundred-and-something chesterton produced his worst work it would be open to anybody else to declare, with equal truth, that in the same year chesterton produced his best work. and the year in which these extremes met would be either 1913 or 1914, the years of _father brown_ and _the flying inn_ on one hand, and of _father brown_ and some of the songs of _the flying inn_ on the other. it was not a technical decline, but the period of certain intellectual wearinesses, when chesterton's mental resilience failed him for a time, and he welcomed with too much enthusiasm the nasty ideas from which no man is wholly free. the main feature indeed of this period of decadence is the brandishing about of a whole mass of antipathies. a man is perfectly entitled to hate what he will, but it is generally assumed that the hater has some ideas on the subject of the reform of the hatee. but chesterton is as devoid of suggestions as a goat is of modesty. a man may have a violent objection against women earning their own livings, and yet be regarded as a reasonable being if he has any alternative proposals for the well-being of the unendowed and temporarily or permanently unmarriageable woman, with no relatives able to support her--and there are two or three millions of such women in the united kingdom. but a mere "you shouldn't" is neither here nor there. take this verse. it was written two or three years ago and is from a poem entitled _to a turk_. with us too rage against the rood your devils and your swine; a colder scorn of womanhood, a baser fear of wine, and lust without the harem, and doom without the god, go. it is not this rabble sayeth to you "ichabod." a previous stanza talks about "the creedless chapel." here is a whole mass of prejudices collected into a large splutter at the expense of england. if the verse means anything at all, it means that the english are nearer the beasts than the turks. another of chesterton's intellectual aberrations is his anti-semitism. he continually denied in the columns of the daily herald that he was an anti-semite, but his references to the jews are innumerable and always on the same side. if one admits what appears to be chesterton's contention that judaism is largely just an exclusive form of contemporary atheism, then one is entitled to ask, why is a wicked gentile atheist merely an atheist, while a jewish atheist remains a jew? surely the morals of both are on the same level, and the atheism, and not the race, is the offensive feature. the jews have their sinners and their saints, including the greatest saint of all. they and they only, amongst all mankind, received the transcript of the eternal mind; were trusted with his own engraven laws, and constituted guardians of his cause: their's were the prophets, their's the priestly call, and their's, by birth, the saviour of us all. even if chesterton cannot work himself up to cowper's enthusiasm (and few of us can), he cannot deny that the race he is continually blackguarding was preparing his religion, and discovering the way to health at a time when his own gentile ancestors were probably performing human sacrifices and eating worms. unquestionably what is the matter with the modern jew, especially of the educated classes, is that he refuses to be impressed by the christian church. but the christian church cannot fairly be said to have made herself attractive in the past; her methods of inquisition, for example. . . . it is difficult to write apathetically on this extreme instance of a great writer's intolerance. one single example will suffice. a year or two ago, a jew called beilis was put on his trial (after an imprisonment of nearly three years) for the murder of a small christian boy named yushinsky, in order that his blood might be used for ritual purposes. yushinsky, who was found dead under peculiar circumstances, was probably a jew himself, but that does not affect the point at issue. mr. arthur henderson, m.p., tried to arouse an agitation in order to secure the freedom of beilis, because it was perfectly evident from the behaviour of certain parties that the prisoner's conviction would be the signal for the outbreak of a series of massacres of the jews, and because a case which had taken nearly three years to prepare was obviously a very thin case. chesterton wrote a ribald article in the daily herald on mr. henderson's attempt at intervention, saying in effect, how do you know that beilis isn't guilty? now it is impossible to hold the belief that beilis might be guilty and at the same time disbelieve that the jews are capable of committing human sacrifice. when a leading russian critic named rosanov, also an anti-semite, issued a pamphlet proclaiming that the jews did, in fact, commit this loathsome crime, he was ignominiously ejected from a prominent russian literary society. the comparison should appeal to chesterton. the nadir of these antipathies is reached in _the flying inn_, a novel published a few months before the great war broke out, and before we all made the discovery that, hold what prejudices we will, we are all immensely dependent on one another. in this book we are given a picture of england of the future, conquered by the turk. as a concession to islam, all intoxicating drink is prohibited in england. it is amusing to note that a few months after the publication of this silly prognostication, the greatest empire in christendom prohibited drink within its frontiers in order to conquer the turk--and his allies. a patrick dalroy, an irishman (with red hair), and of course a giant, has been performing homeric feats against the conquering turks. a lord ivywood, an abstraction bloodless to the point of albinism, is at the head of affairs in england. the jews dominate everything. dalroy and humphrey pump, an evicted innkeeper, discovering that drinks may still be sold where an inn-sign may be found, start journeying around england loaded only with the sign-board of "the green man," a large cheese, and a keg of rum. they are, in fact, a peripatetic public-house, and the only democratic institution of its kind left in england. every other chapter the new innkeepers run into ivywood and his hangers-on. as the story wriggles its inconsequent length, the author curses through the mouths of his heroes. he anathematizes teetotallers, brewers, vegetarians, temperance drinks, model villages, æsthetic poets, oriental art, parliament, politicians, jews, turks, and infidels in general, futurist painting, and other things. in the end, dalroy and pump lead a vast insurrection, and thousands of dumb, long-suffering englishmen attack ivywood in his hall, and so free their country from the turk. only the songs already described in chapter v preserve this book from extreme dullness. technically it is poor. the action is as scattered as the parts of a futurist picture. a whole chapter is devoted to a picture of a newspaper editor at work, inventing the phraseology of indefiniteness. epigrams are few and are very much overworked. once a catchword is sprung, it is run to death. the turk who by means of silly puns attempts to prove that islamic civilization is better than european, never ceases in his efforts. the heartlessness of ivywood is continuous, and ends in insanity. parts of _the flying inn_ convey the impression that chesterton was tired of his own style and his own manner of controversy, and had taken to parodying himself. the arguments of the already-mentioned turk, for example, might well pass for a really good parody of the theological dispute in the first chapter of _the ball and the cross_. there, it may be remembered, two men (more or less) discussed the symbolism of balls and crosses. in _the flying inn_ people discuss the symbolism of crescents and crosses, and the turk, misysra ammon, explains, "when the english see an english youth, they cry out 'he is crescent!' but when they see an english aged man, they cry out 'he is cross!'" on these lines a great deal of _the flying inn_ is written. we now come to chesterton's political decadence, traceable, like many features in his history, to mr. hilaire belloc. the friendship between g.k.c. and the ex-liberal m.p. for rochdale bore a number of interesting fruits. there were the amusing illustrations to the great enquiry, an amusing skit on the tariff reform league, to emmanuel burden and the green overcoat. but curious artificialities sprang into existence, like so many funguses, under the lengthening shadow of mr. belloc. to him is due the far-fetchedness of some of chesterton's pleading in support of the miraculous element in religion. to him also is due the growing antipathy against the liberal party and the party system in general. up to the end of january, 1913, chesterton had continued his connection with the daily news. on january 28th there took place, at the queen's hall, london, a debate between mr. bernard shaw and mr. hilaire belloc. the latter moved "that if we do not re-establish the institution of property, we shall re-establish the institution of slavery; there is no third course." the debate was an extremely poor affair, as neither combatant dealt, except parenthetically, with his opponent's points. in the course of it mr. shaw, to illustrate an argument, referred to chesterton as "a flourishing property of mr. cadbury," a remark which g.k.c. appears to have taken to heart. his quarrel with official liberalism was at the moment more bitter than ever before. mr. belloc had taken a very decided stand on the marconi affair, and mr. cecil chesterton, g.k.c.'s brother, was sturdily supporting him. the daily news, on the other hand, was of course vigorously defending the government. chesterton suddenly severed his long connection with the daily news and came over to the daily herald. this paper, which is now defunct, except in a weekly edition, was the organ of syndicalism and rebellion in general. in a letter to the editor of the herald, chesterton explained with pathetic irony that the daily news "had come to stand for almost everything i disagree with; and i thought i had better resign before the next great measure of social reform made it illegal to go on strike." a week or so later, chesterton started his series of saturday articles in the daily herald. his first few efforts show that he made a determined attempt to get down to the intellectual level of the syndicalist. but anybody who sits down to read through these articles will notice that before many weeks had passed chesterton was beginning to feel a certain discomfort in the company he was keeping. he writes to say that he likes writing for the daily herald because it is the most revolutionary paper he knows, "even though i do not agree with all the revolutions it advocates," and goes on to state that, personally, he likes most of the people he meets. having thus, as it were, cleared his conscience in advance, chesterton let himself go. he attacked the government for its alleged nepotism, dishonesty, and corruption. he ended one such article with, "there is nothing but a trumpet at midnight, calling for volunteers." the new statesman then published an article, "trumpets and how to blow them," suggesting, among other things, that there was little use in being merely destructive. it is typical of what i have called the decadence of chesterton that he borrowed another writer's most offensive description of a lady prominently connected with the new statesman in order to quote it with glee by way of answer to this article. the syndicalist hates the socialist for his catholicity. the socialist wishes to see the world a comfortable place, the syndicalist merely wishes to work in a comfortable factory. chesterton seized the opportunity, being mildly rebuked by a socialist paper, to declare that the fabians "are constructing a man-trap." a little later on he writes, with reference to a controversialist's request, that he should explain why, after all, he was not a socialist: if he wants to know what the marconi scandal has saved us from, i can tell him. it has saved us from socialism. my god! what socialism, and run by what sort of socialists! my god! what an escape! if we had transferred the simplest national systems to the state (as we wanted to do in our youth) it is to these men that we should have transferred them. there never was an example of more muddled thinking. let us apply it to something definite, to that harmless, necessary article of diet, milk, to be precise, cow's milk. to-day milk is made expensive by a multiplicity of men who have interests in keeping milk expensive. there are too many milkmen's wages to be paid, too many milk-carts to be built, too many shop-rents paid, and too much apparatus bought, simply because we have not yet had the intelligence to let any municipality or county run its own milk-service and so avoid all manner of duplication. chesterton's answer to this is: "i used to think so, but what about lord murray, mr. lloyd george, and mr. godfrey isaacs?" it would be as relevant to say, "what about dr. crippen, jack sheppard, and ananias," or, "but what about mr. bernard shaw, the grand duke nicolas, and my brother?" the week later chesterton addresses the labour party in these words: comrades (i mean gentlemen), there is only one real result of anything you have done. you have justified the vulgar slander of the suburban conservatives that men from below are men who merely want to rise. it is a lie. no one knows so well as you that it was a lie: you who drove out grayson and deserted lansbury. before you went into parliament to represent the working classes, the working classes were feared. since you have represented the working classes, they are not even respected. just when there was a hope of democracy, you have revived the notion that the demagogue was only the sycophant. just when there had begun to be an english people to represent, you have been paid to misrepresent them. get out of our path. take your money; go. regarding which passage there is only to be said that it is grossly unjust both to the labour party and to the working classes. it was followed up in subsequent numbers by violent attacks on woman suffrage and the economic independence of women; a proceeding quite commendably amusing in a paper with a patron saint surnamed pankhurst. a promise to say no more about votes for women was followed by several more spirited references to it, from the same point of view. after which chesterton cooled off and wrote about detective stories, telephones, and worked himself down into an all-round fizzle of disgust at things as they are, to illustrate which "i will not run into a paroxysm of citations again," as milton said in the course of his epistle in two books on reformation in england. the most unpleasant feature of the daily herald articles is the assumption of superiority over the british working man, expressing itself in the patronizing tone. the british working man, as chesterton sees him, is a very different person from what he is. if the middle ages had been the peculiar period chesterton appears to believe it was, then his working man would be merely a trifling anachronism of five centuries or so. but he is not even that. five centuries would be but a trifle compared with the difference between him and his real self. chesterton's attitude towards the working man must resemble that of a certain chivalrous knight towards the distressed damsel he thought he had rescued. he observed, "well, little one, aren't you going to show me any gratitude?" and the lady replied, "i wasn't playing andromeda, fathead, i was looking for blackberries. run away and play." the attitude of the middle-class suburbanite towards the working man and his wife is not exactly graceful, but the former at any rate does not pretend to love the latter, and to find all decency of feeling and righteousness of behaviour in them. chesterton both pretends to reverence the working classes, and exhibits a profound contempt for them. he is never happier than when he is telling the working classes that they are wrong. he delights in attacking the labour party in order to have the supreme satisfaction of demonstrating that working men are their own worst enemies. at the beginning of august, 1914, the great war broke out, and everything seemed changed. no man now living will be able to say definitely what effects the war will have upon literature, but one thing is certain: nothing will remain the same. we have already learned to view each other with different eyes. for better or for worse, old animosities and party cleavages have given way to unforeseen combinations. to assert that we have all grown better would be untrue. but it might reasonably be argued that the innate generousness of the british people has been vitiated by its childlike trust in its journalists, and the men who own them. when mr. bernard shaw wrote a brilliant defence of the british case for intervention in the war, his mild denigration of some of the defects of the english nation, a few trivial inaccuracies, and his perverse bellicosity of style made him the object of the attentions of a horde of panic-stricken heresy-hunters. those of us who had not the fortune to escape the press by service abroad, especially those of us who derived our living from it, came to loathe its misrepresentation of the english people. there seemed no end to the nauseous vomits of undigested facts and dishonourable prejudices that came pouring out in daily streams. then we came to realize, as never before, the value of such men as chesterton. christianity and the common decencies fare badly at the hands of the bishops of to-day, and the journalists threw them over as soon as the war began. but, unfortunately for us all, g.k.c. fell seriously ill in the early period of the war, and was in a critical state for many months. but not before he had published a magnificent recantation--for it is no less--of all those bitternesses which, in their sum, had very nearly caused him to hate the british. it is a poem, _blessed are the peacemakers_. of old with a divided heart i saw my people's pride expand, since a man's soul is born apart by mother earth and fatherland. i knew, through many a tangled tale, glory and truth not one but two: king, constable and amirail took me like trumpets: but i knew a blacker thing than blood's own dye weighed down great hawkins on the sea; and nelson turned his blindest eye on naples and on liberty. therefore to you my thanks, o throne, o thousandfold and frozen folk, for whose cold frenzies all your own the battle of the rivers broke; who have no faith a man could mourn, nor freedom any man desires; but in a new clean light of scorn close up my quarrel with my sires; who bring my english heart to me, who mend me like a broken toy; till i can see you fight and flee, and laugh as if i were a boy. when we read this poem, with its proclamation of a faith restored, chesterton's temporary absence from the field of letters appears even more lamentable. for even before his breakdown he had given other signs of a resurrection. between the overworked descriptions of _the flying inn_ and the little book _the barbarism of berlin_ which closely followed it, there is a fine difference of style, as if in the interval chesterton had taken a tonic. thus there is a jolly passage in which, describing german barbarism, he refers to the different ways of treating women. the two extremes of the treatment of women might be represented by what are called the respectable classes in america and in france. in america they choose the risk of comradeship; in france the compensation of courtesy. in america it is practically possible for any young gentleman to take any young lady for what he calls (i deeply regret to say) a joy-ride; but at least the man goes with the woman as much as the woman with the man. in france the young woman is protected like a nun while she is unmarried; but when she is a mother she is really a holy woman; and when she is a grandmother she is a holy terror. by both extremes the woman gets something back out of life. france and america aim alike at equality--america by similarity; france by dissimilarity. but north germany does actually aim at inequality. the woman stands up, with no more irritation than a butler; the man sits down, with no more embarrassment than a guest. and so on. it runs very easily; we recognize the old touch; the epigrams are not worked to death; and the chains of argument are not mere strings of damped brilliancies. and before 1914 had come to its end, in another pamphlet, _letters to an old garibaldian_, the same style, the same freshness of thought, and the same resurgent strength were once again in evidence. then illness overcame. * * * * * of all futures, the future of literature and its professors is the least predictable. we have all, so to speak, turned a corner since august, 1914, but we have not all turned the same way. chesterton would seem to have felt the great change early in the war. soon he will break his silence, and we shall know whether we have amongst us a giant with strength renewed or a querulous nonconformist crusader, agreeing with no man, while claiming to speak for every man. early in the course of this study a distinction was drawn between christians and crusaders. chesterton has been throughout his career essentially a crusader. he set out to put wrongs to rights in the same spirit; in much the same spirit, too, he incidentally chivvied about the jews he met in his path, just as the crusaders had done. he fought for the holy sepulchre, and gained it. like the crusaders, he professed orthodoxy, and, like them, fell between several "orthodoxies." he shared their visions and their faith, so far as they had any. but one thing is true of all crusaders, they are not necessarily christians. and there is that about chesterton which sometimes makes me wonder whether, after all, he is not "a child of the french revolution" in a sense he himself does not suspect. he has cursed the barren fig-tree of modern religious movements. but there comes a suspicion that he denies too much; that from between those supple sentences and those too plausible arguments one may catch a glimpse of the features of a mocking spirit. chesterton has given us the keenest enjoyment, and he has provoked thought, even in the silly atheist. we all owe him gratitude, but no two readers of his works are likely to agree as to the causes of their gratitude. that, in itself, is a tribute. wherefore let it be understood that in writing this study i have been speaking entirely for myself, and if any man think me misguided, inappreciative, hypercritical, frivolous, or anything else, why, he is welcome. footnote: [3] _all things considered._ bibliography (to july, 1915) works 1900. _greybeards at play._ brimley johnson. cheaper edition, 1902. _the wild knight._ grant richards. second edition, brimley johnson, 1905. enlarged edition, dent, 1914. 1901. _the defendant._ brimley johnson. second enlarged edition, 1902. cheap edition, in dent's wayfarer's library, 1914. 1902. _twelve types._ a. l. humphreys. partly reprinted as _five types_, 1910, same publisher. cheap edition, 1911. _g. f. watts._ duckworth. in popular library of art. reissued at higher price, 1914. 1903. _robert browning._ in english men of letters series. macmillan. 1904. _the patriotic idea._ in _england a nation_. edited by lucien oldershaw. brimley johnson. _the napoleon of notting hill._ john lane. with 7 full-page illustrations by w. graham robertson and a map of the seat of war. 1905. _the club of queer trades._ harper. cheap edition, hodder and stoughton, 1912. _heretics._ john lane. 1906. _charles dickens._ methuen. cheaper edition, 1907. popular edition, 1913. 1908. _the man who was thursday._ arrowsmith. _all things considered._ methuen. _orthodoxy._ john lane. 1909. _tremendous trifles._ methuen. 1910. _alarms and discursions._ methuen. _five types._ a. l. humphreys. reprinted from _twelve types_, 1905. _what's wrong with the world?_ cassell. cheap edition, 1912. _william blake._ duckworth. in popular library of art. _george bernard shaw._ john lane. cheap edition, 1914. _the ball and the cross._ wells gardner, darton. 1911. _the ballad of the white horse._ methuen. _appreciations of dickens._ dent. reprinted prefaces from everyman series edition of dickens. _the innocence of father brown._ cassell. 1912. _simplicity and tolstoy._ a. l. humphreys. another edition, h. siegle. in watteau series, 1913. _a miscellany of men._ methuen. _manalive._ nelson. 1913. _magic._ martin seeker. _the victorian age in literature._ williams and norgate. in home university library. 1914. _the wisdom of father brown._ cassell. _the flying inn._ methuen. (_the songs of the simple life_ appeared originally in _the new witness_.) _the wild knight._ dent. enlarged edition, first published 1900. _the barbarism of berlin._ cassell. _letters to an old garibaldian._ methuen. 1915. _poems._ burns and oates. and articles on tolstoy, stevenson, tennyson, and dickens in a series of booklets published by _the bookman_, 1902-1904. prefaces to the following books 1902. _past and present._ by thomas carlyle. in world's classics. grant richards. 1903. _life of johnson._ extracts from boswell. isbister. 1904. _the autocrat of the breakfast table._ by o. w. holmes. red letter library. blackie. _sartor resartus._ by thomas carlyle. cassell's national library. _the pilgrim's progress._ by john bunyan. cassell's national library. 1905. _creatures that once were men._ by maxim gorky. rivers. 1906 etc. _works of dickens._ in everyman library. dent. 1906. _essays._ by matthew arnold. in the everyman library. dent. _literary london._ by elsie m. lang. werner laurie. 1907. _the book of job._ (wellwood books.) _from workhouse to westminster; the life story of will crooks, m.p._ by george haw. cassell. cheaper edition, 1908. 1908. _poems._ by john ruskin. muses library. routledge. _the cottage homes of england._ by w. w. crotch. industrial publishing co. 1909. _a vision of life._ by darrell figgis. lane. _meadows of play._ by margaret arndt. elkin mathews. 1910. _selections from thackeray._ bell. _eyes of youth._ an anthology. herbert and daniel. 1911. _samuel johnson._ extracts from, selected by alice meynell. herbert and daniel. _the book of snobs._ by w. m. thackeray. red letter library. blackie. 1912. _famous paintings reproduced in colour._ cassell. _the english agricultural labourer._ by a. h. baverstock. the vineyard press. _fables._ by æsop. translated by v. s. vernon jones. illustrated by arthur rackham. heinemann. 1913. _the christmas carol._ in the waverley dickens. 1915. _bohemia's claim for freedom._ the london czech committee. illustrations to the following books by other writers 1901. _nonsense rhymes._ by w. c. monkhouse. brimley johnson. cheaper edition, 1902. 1903. _the great enquiry._ by h. b. (hilaire belloc). duckworth. 1904. _emmanuel burden._ by hilaire belloc. methuen. 1905. _biography for beginners._ by e. clerihew. cheaper edition, werner laurie, 1908. cheap edition, 1910. 1912. _the green overcoat._ by hilaire belloc. arrowsmith. contributions to periodicals _bookman._ from 1898 onwards, _passim_. _the speaker_ (afterwards _the nation_). from 1898 onwards. _the daily news._ weekly article, 1900-1913. also occasional poems and reviews. _the daily herald._ weekly article, 1913-1914. _the illustrated london news._ 1905-1914; 1915 _the eye-witness_ (afterwards _the new witness_). poems and articles, 1911 onwards. also correspondence columns of _the tribune_ (1906-1908), _the clarion_, and the london press in general. _the oxford and cambridge review_ (afterwards _the british review_). articles 1911, etc. _the dublin review._ occasional articles. contributions to official publications evidence before the joint select committee of the house of lords and the house of commons on stage plays (censorship), included in the minutes of evidence, 1909. speeches 1908. _the press._ speech at pan-anglican congress. proceedings published by _the times_. 1910. _what to do with the backward races._ speech at the nationalities and subject races conference, london. proceedings published by p. s. king. 1914. _do miracles happen?_ report of a discussion at the little theatre in january, 1914. published as a pamphlet by the christian commonwealth co. printed by william brendon and son, ltd. plymouth, england _martin secker_ _his complete catalogue mcmxv_ _the books in this list should be obtainable from all booksellers and libraries, and if any difficulty is experienced the publisher will be glad to be informed of the fact. he will also be glad if those interested in receiving from time to time announcement lists, prospectuses, &c., of new and forthcoming books from number five john street will send their names and addresses to him for this purpose. any book in this list may be obtained on approval through the booksellers, or direct from the publisher, on remitting him the published price, plus the postage._ _martin secker_ _publisher_ _number five john street_ _adelphi london_ _telephone gerrard 4779_ _telegraphic address: psophidian london_ part one index of authors abercrombie, lascelles speculative dialogues. _cr. 8vo. 5s. net._ thomas hardy: a critical study. _demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._ the epic (_the art and craft of letters_). _f'cap 8vo. 1s. net._ aflalo, f. g. behind the ranges. _wide demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._ regilding the crescent. _demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._ birds in the calendar. _crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net._ allshorn, lionel stupor mundi. _medium octavo. 16s. net._ apperson, g. l. the social history of smoking. _post 8vo. 6s. net._ armstrong, donald the marriage of quixote. _crown 8vo. 6s._ artzibashef, michael sanine. _preface by gilbert cannan. crown 8vo. 6s._ breaking-point. _crown 8vo. 6s._ the millionaire. _intro. by the author. cr. 8vo. 6s._ the revolution. _crown 8vo. 6s._ barrington, michael grahame of claverhouse. _imperial 8vo. 30s. net. edition de luxe 63s. net._ bennett, arnold those united states. _post 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._ black, clementina the linleys of bath. _medium 8vo. 16s. net._ the cumberland letters. _med. 8vo. 16s. net._ boulger, d. c. the battle of the boyne. _med. 8vo. 21s. net._ bottome, phyllis the common chord. _crown 8vo. 6s._ brown, ivor years of plenty. _crown 8vo. 6s._ security. _crown 8vo. 6s._ burrow, c. kennett carmina varia. _f'cap 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._ calderon, george (with st. john hankin) thompson: a comedy. _sq. cr. 8vo. 2s. net._ cannan, gilbert round the corner. _crown 8vo. 6s._ old mole. _crown 8vo. 6s._ young earnest. _crown 8vo. 6s._ samuel butler: a critical study. _demy 8vo. 7s 6d. net._ windmills: a book of fables. _cr. 8vo. 5s. net._ satire (_the art and craft of letters_). _f'cap 8vo. 1s. net._ chesterton, g. k. magic: a fantastic comedy. _sq. cr. 8vo. 2s. net._ clayton, joseph the underman. _crown 8vo. 6s._ leaders of the people. _demy 8vo. 12s. 6d. net._ robert kett. _demy 8vo. 8s. 6d. net._ coke, desmond the art of silhouette. _demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net._ craven, a. scott the fool's tragedy. _crown 8vo. 6s._ dawson, warrington the true dimension. _crown 8vo. 6s._ de selincourt, basil walt whitman: a critical study. _demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._ rhyme (_the art and craft of letters_). _f'cap 8vo. 1s. net._ douglas, lord alfred the wilde myth. _demy 8vo. 12s. 6d. net._ douglas, norman fountains in the sand. _wide demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._ old calabria. _demy 8vo. 15s. net._ draycott, g. m. mahomet: founder of islam. _demy 8vo. 12s. 6d. net._ drinkwater, john william morris: a critical study. _demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._ d. g. rossetti: a critical study. _demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net._ the lyric. 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the. _by henry james._ round the corner. _by gilbert cannan._ salamander, the. _by owen johnson._ sanine. _by michael artzibashef._ sea hawk, the. _by rafael sabatini._ security. _by ivor brown._ sinister street. i. _by compton mackenzie._ sinister street. ii. _by compton mackenzie._ story of louie, the. _by oliver onions._ tales of the revolution. _by m. artzibashef._ telling the truth. _by william hewlett._ true dimension, the. _by warrington dawson._ turn of the screw, the. _by henry james._ uncle's advice. _by william hewlett._ undergrowth. _by f. & e. brett young._ underman, the. _by joseph clayton._ unofficial. _by bohun lynch._ widdershins. _by oliver onions._ years of plenty. _by ivor brown._ young earnest. _by gilbert cannan._ ballantyne press: london and edinburgh * * * * * transcriber's note: page 150, a period was changed to a comma. (as regards the amateur,) this etext was proofread by martin ward and compared against a separate copy scanned by mike perry. orthodoxy by gilbert k. chesterton preface this book is meant to be a companion to "heretics," and to put the positive side in addition to the negative. many critics complained of the book called "heretics" because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. this book is an attempt to answer the challenge. it is unavoidably affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical. the writer has been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset newman in writing his apologia; he has been forced to be egotistical only in order to be sincere. while everything else may be different the motive in both cases is the same. it is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the christian faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. the book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer. it deals first with all the writer's own solitary and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the christian theology. the writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed. but if it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence. gilbert k. chesterton. contents i. introduction in defence of everything else ii. the maniac iii. the suicide of thought iv. the ethics of elfland v. the flag of the world vi. the paradoxes of christianity vii. the eternal revolution viii. the romance of orthodoxy ix. authority and the adventurer orthodoxy i introduction in defence of everything else the only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel. when some time ago i published a series of hasty but sincere papers, under the name of "heretics," several critics for whose intellect i have a warm respect (i may mention specially mr. g.s.street) said that it was all very well for me to tell everybody to affirm his cosmic theory, but that i had carefully avoided supporting my precepts with example. "i will begin to worry about my philosophy," said mr. street, "when mr. chesterton has given us his." it was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation. but after all, though mr. street has inspired and created this book, he need not read it. if he does read it, he will find that in its pages i have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which i have come to believe. i will not call it my philosophy; for i did not make it. god and humanity made it; and it made me. i have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an english yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered england under the impression that it was a new island in the south seas. i always find, however, that i am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so i may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. there will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the british flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the pavilion at brighton, felt rather a fool. i am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. but if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. his mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man i take him for. what could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? what could be better than to have all the fun of discovering south africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? what could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover new south wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old south wales. this at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. how can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? how can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town? to show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger book than this; it is necessary to follow one path of argument; and this is the path that i here propose to follow. i wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which christendom has rightly named romance. for the very word "romance" has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of rome. any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute. beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove. the thing i do not propose to prove, the thing i propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired. if a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom i am talking. if a man prefers nothing i can give him nothing. but nearly all people i have ever met in this western society in which i live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. we need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. we need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. it is this achievement of my creed that i shall chiefly pursue in these pages. but i have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered england. for i am that man in a yacht. i discovered england. i do not see how this book can avoid being egotistical; and i do not quite see (to tell the truth) how it can avoid being dull. dulness will, however, free me from the charge which i most lament; the charge of being flippant. mere light sophistry is the thing that i happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which i am generally accused. i know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. if it were true (as has been said) that mr. bernard shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes. it is as easy as lying; because it is lying. the truth is, of course, that mr. shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth. i find myself under the same intolerable bondage. i never in my life said anything merely because i thought it funny; though of course, i have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because i had said it. it is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. it is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't. one searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths. and i offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what i write, and regard it (very justly, for all i know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke. for if this book is a joke it is a joke against me. i am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before. if there is an element of farce in what follows, the farce is at my own expense; for this book explains how i fancied i was the first to set foot in brighton and then found i was the last. it recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious. no one can think my case more ludicrous than i think it myself; no reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him: i am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne. i freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. i did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. like them i tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. and i found that i was eighteen hundred years behind it. i did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. and i was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for i have kept my truths: but i have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. when i fancied that i stood alone i was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all christendom. it may be, heaven forgive me, that i did try to be original; but i only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. the man from the yacht thought he was the first to find england; i thought i was the first to find europe. i did try to found a heresy of my own; and when i had put the last touches to it, i discovered that it was orthodoxy. it may be that somebody will be entertained by the account of this happy fiasco. it might amuse a friend or an enemy to read how i gradually learnt from the truth of some stray legend or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy, things that i might have learnt from my catechism--if i had ever learnt it. there may or may not be some entertainment in reading how i found at last in an anarchist club or a babylonian temple what i might have found in the nearest parish church. if any one is entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the phrases in an omnibus, the accidents of politics or the pains of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain conviction of christian orthodoxy, he may possibly read this book. but there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. i have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it. i add one purely pedantic note which comes, as a note naturally should, at the beginning of the book. these essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the apostles' creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics. they are not intended to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation of that creed. when the word "orthodoxy" is used here it means the apostles' creed, as understood by everybody calling himself christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed. i have been forced by mere space to confine myself to what i have got from this creed; i do not touch the matter much disputed among modern christians, of where we ourselves got it. this is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography. but if any one wants my opinions about the actual nature of the authority, mr. g.s.street has only to throw me another challenge, and i will write him another book. ii the maniac thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. once i remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which i had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. yet i had heard it once too often, and i saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. the publisher said of somebody, "that man will get on; he believes in himself." and i remember that as i lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written "hanwell." i said to him, "shall i tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? for i can tell you. i know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than napoleon or caesar. i know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. i can guide you to the thrones of the super-men. the men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." he said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "yes, there are," i retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. that drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. that elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. if you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. it would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in joanna southcote: the man who has it has `hanwell' written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus." and to all this my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply, "well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?" after a long pause i replied, "i will go home and write a book in answer to that question." this is the book that i have written in answer to it. but i think this book may well start where our argument started-in the neighbourhood of the mad-house. modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. the ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. they began with the fact of sin--a fact as practical as potatoes. whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. but certain religious leaders in london, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of christian theology which can really be proved. some followers of the reverend r.j.campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. but they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. the strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. if it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. he must either deny the existence of god, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between god and man, as all christians do. the new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat. in this remarkable situation it is plainly not now possible (with any hope of a universal appeal) to start, as our fathers did, with the fact of sin. this very fact which was to them (and is to me) as plain as a pikestaff, is the very fact that has been specially diluted or denied. but though moderns deny the existence of sin, i do not think that they have yet denied the existence of a lunatic asylum. we all agree still that there is a collapse of the intellect as unmistakable as a falling house. men deny hell, but not, as yet, hanwell. for the purpose of our primary argument the one may very well stand where the other stood. i mean that as all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits. it is true that some speak lightly and loosely of insanity as in itself attractive. but a moment's thought will show that if disease is beautiful, it is generally some one else's disease. a blind man may be picturesque; but it requires two eyes to see the picture. and similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can only be enjoyed by the sane. to the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite true. a man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken. a man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass. it is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which makes him mad. it is only because we see the irony of his idea that we think him even amusing; it is only because he does not see the irony of his idea that he is put in hanwell at all. in short, oddities only strike ordinary people. oddities do not strike odd people. this is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life. this is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure for ever. the old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. but in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. you can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. the fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. the sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world. let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey. now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. there is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. facts and history utterly contradict this view. most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. imagination does not breed insanity. exactly what does breed insanity is reason. poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. i am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: i only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. he avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great english poet went mad, cowper. and he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. he could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the ouse. he was damned by john calvin; he was almost saved by john gilpin. everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. critics are much madder than poets. homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. and though st. john the evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. the general fact is simple. poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. the result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of mr. holbein. to accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. the poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. the poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. it is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. and it is his head that splits. it is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this striking mistake is commonly supported by a striking misquotation. we have all heard people cite the celebrated line of dryden as "great genius is to madness near allied." but dryden did not say that great genius was to madness near allied. dryden was a great genius himself, and knew better. it would have been hard to find a man more romantic than he, or more sensible. what dryden said was this, "great wits are oft to madness near allied"; and that is true. it is the pure promptitude of the intellect that is in peril of a breakdown. also people might remember of what sort of man dryden was talking. he was not talking of any unworldly visionary like vaughan or george herbert. he was talking of a cynical man of the world, a sceptic, a diplomatist, a great practical politician. such men are indeed to madness near allied. their incessant calculation of their own brains and other people's brains is a dangerous trade. it is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind. a flippant person has asked why we say, "as mad as a hatter." a more flippant person might answer that a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head. and if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners. when i was engaged in a controversy with the clarion on the matter of free will, that able writer mr. r.b.suthers said that free will was lunacy, because it meant causeless actions, and the actions of a lunatic would be causeless. i do not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse in determinist logic. obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. if the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man. but my purpose is to point out something more practical. it was natural, perhaps, that a modern marxian socialist should not know anything about free will. but it was certainly remarkable that a modern marxian socialist should not know anything about lunatics. mr. suthers evidently did not know anything about lunatics. the last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. if any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. it is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. it is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. the madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. he would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. he would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice. if the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. if you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. he is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. he is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. the madman is not the man who has lost his reason. the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. the madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. if a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. his explanation covers the facts as much as yours. or if a man says that he is the rightful king of england, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were king of england that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. or if a man says that he is jesus christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied christ's. nevertheless he is wrong. but if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. a small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. in the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. a bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. there is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. the lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. i mean that if you or i were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument. suppose, for instance, it were the first case that i took as typical; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. if we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, i suppose we should say something like this: "oh, i admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. i admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already. but how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! how much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! you would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. you would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers." or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, "all right! perhaps you know that you are the king of england; but why do you care? make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth." or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself christ. if we said what we felt, we should say, "so you are the creator and redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! what a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! how sad it must be to be god; and an inadequate god! is there really no life fuller and no love more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? how much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher god could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!" and it must be remembered that the most purely practical science does take this view of mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell. neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought. theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous. science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid. for example, some religious societies discouraged men more or less from thinking about sex. the new scientific society definitely discourages men from thinking about death; it is a fact, but it is considered a morbid fact. and in dealing with those whose morbidity has a touch of mania, modern science cares far less for pure logic than a dancing dervish. in these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health. nothing can save him but a blind hunger for normality, like that of a beast. a man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. he can only be saved by will or faith. the moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the inner circle will go round and round the inner circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at gower street. decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever. every remedy is a desperate remedy. every cure is a miraculous cure. curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil. and however quietly doctors and psychologists may go to work in the matter, their attitude is profoundly intolerant-as intolerant as bloody mary. their attitude is really this: that the man must stop thinking, if he is to go on living. their counsel is one of intellectual amputation. if thy head offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter the kingdom of heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile, rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell-or into hanwell. such is the madman of experience; he is commonly a reasoner, frequently a successful reasoner. doubtless he could be vanquished in mere reason, and the case against him put logically. but it can be put much more precisely in more general and even aesthetic terms. he is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point. he is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity. now, as i explain in the introduction, i have determined in these early chapters to give not so much a diagram of a doctrine as some pictures of a point of view. and i have described at length my vision of the maniac for this reason: that just as i am affected by the maniac, so i am affected by most modern thinkers. that unmistakable mood or note that i hear from hanwell, i hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of learning to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more senses than one. they all have exactly that combination we have noted: the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense. they are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far. but a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern. they see a chess-board white on black, and if the universe is paved with it, it is still white on black. like the lunatic, they cannot alter their standpoint; they cannot make a mental effort and suddenly see it black on white. take first the more obvious case of materialism. as an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. it has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, mr. mccabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. he understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. his cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. the earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small. the cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in. it must be understood that i am not now discussing the relation of these creeds to truth; but, for the present, solely their relation to health. later in the argument i hope to attack the question of objective verity; here i speak only of a phenomenon of psychology. i do not for the present attempt to prove to haeckel that materialism is untrue, any more than i attempted to prove to the man who thought he was christ that he was labouring under an error. i merely remark here on the fact that both cases have the same kind of completeness and the same kind of incompleteness. you can explain a man's detention at hanwell by an indifferent public by saying that it is the crucifixion of a god of whom the world is not worthy. the explanation does explain. similarly you may explain the order in the universe by saying that all things, even the souls of men, are leaves inevitably unfolding on an utterly unconscious tree-the blind destiny of matter. the explanation does explain, though not, of course, so completely as the madman's. but the point here is that the normal human mind not only objects to both, but feels to both the same objection. its approximate statement is that if the man in hanwell is the real god, he is not much of a god. and, similarly, if the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. the thing has shrunk. the deity is less divine than many men; and (according to haeckel) the whole of life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it. the parts seem greater than the whole. for we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. in one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow. they cannot be broader than themselves. a christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted. he cannot think christianity false and continue to be a christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist. but as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. mr. mccabe thinks me a slave because i am not allowed to believe in determinism. i think mr. mccabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies. but if we examine the two vetoes we shall see that his is really much more of a pure veto than mine. the christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. but the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. poor mr. mccabe is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a pimpernel. the christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. the sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. but the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. the materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. materialists and madmen never have doubts. spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials. even if i believe in immortality i need not think about it. but if i disbelieve in immortality i must not think about it. in the first case the road is open and i can go as far as i like; in the second the road is shut. but the case is even stronger, and the parallel with madness is yet more strange. for it was our case against the exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic that, right or wrong, it gradually destroyed his humanity. now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; i do not mean only kindness, i mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. for instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. it is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. the determinists come to bind, not to loose. they may well call their law the "chain" of causation. it is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being. you may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up in a mad-house. you may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. but it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette. similarly you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. but it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make new year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say "thank you" for the mustard. in passing from this subject i may note that there is a queer fallacy to the effect that materialistic fatalism is in some way favourable to mercy, to the abolition of cruel punishments or punishments of any kind. this is startlingly the reverse of the truth. it is quite tenable that the doctrine of necessity makes no difference at all; that it leaves the flogger flogging and the kind friend exhorting as before. but obviously if it stops either of them it stops the kind exhortation. that the sins are inevitable does not prevent punishment; if it prevents anything it prevents persuasion. determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice. determinism is not inconsistent with the cruel treatment of criminals. what it is (perhaps) inconsistent with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle. the determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. he must not say to the sinner, "go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it. but he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment. considered as a figure, therefore, the materialist has the fantastic outline of the figure of the madman. both take up a position at once unanswerable and intolerable. of course it is not only of the materialist that all this is true. the same would apply to the other extreme of speculative logic. there is a sceptic far more terrible than he who believes that everything began in matter. it is possible to meet the sceptic who believes that everything began in himself. he doubts not the existence of angels or devils, but the existence of men and cows. for him his own friends are a mythology made up by himself. he created his own father and his own mother. this horrible fancy has in it something decidedly attractive to the somewhat mystical egoism of our day. that publisher who thought that men would get on if they believed in themselves, those seekers after the superman who are always looking for him in the looking-glass, those writers who talk about impressing their personalities instead of creating life for the world, all these people have really only an inch between them and this awful emptiness. then when this kindly world all round the man has been blackened out like a lie; when friends fade into ghosts, and the foundations of the world fail; then when the man, believing in nothing and in no man, is alone in his own nightmare, then the great individualistic motto shall be written over him in avenging irony. the stars will be only dots in the blackness of his own brain; his mother's face will be only a sketch from his own insane pencil on the walls of his cell. but over his cell shall be written, with dreadful truth, "he believes in himself." all that concerns us here, however, is to note that this panegoistic extreme of thought exhibits the same paradox as the other extreme of materialism. it is equally complete in theory and equally crippling in practice. for the sake of simplicity, it is easier to state the notion by saying that a man can believe that he is always in a dream. now, obviously there can be no positive proof given to him that he is not in a dream, for the simple reason that no proof can be offered that might not be offered in a dream. but if the man began to burn down london and say that his housekeeper would soon call him to breakfast, we should take him and put him with other logicians in a place which has often been alluded to in the course of this chapter. the man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. they have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth. their position is quite reasonable; nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny bit is infinitely circular. but there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. it is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. when they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. there is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. the eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself. this chapter is purely practical and is concerned with what actually is the chief mark and element of insanity; we may say in summary that it is reason used without root, reason in the void. the man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end. and for the rest of these pages we have to try and discover what is the right end. but we may ask in conclusion, if this be what drives men mad, what is it that keeps them sane? by the end of this book i hope to give a definite, some will think a far too definite, answer. but for the moment it is possible in the same solely practical manner to give a general answer touching what in actual human history keeps men sane. mysticism keeps men sane. as long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. the ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. he has permitted the twilight. he has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. he has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. he has always cared more for truth than for consistency. if he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. his spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. he admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. it is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. the whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. the morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. the mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. the determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say "if you please" to the housemaid. the christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. he puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health. as we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. buddhism is centripetal, but christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. for the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. but the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. the circle returns upon itself and is bound. the cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers. symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. the one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. but the greeks were right when they made apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. of necessary dogmas and a special creed i shall speak later. but that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. we are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. but the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of euclid on a blackboard. for the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name. iii the suicide of thought the phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition. phrases like "put out" or "off colour" might have been coined by mr. henry james in an agony of verbal precision. and there is no more subtle truth than that of the everyday phrase about a man having "his heart in the right place." it involves the idea of normal proportion; not only does a certain function exist, but it is rightly related to other functions. indeed, the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and perverse tenderness of the most representative moderns. if, for instance, i had to describe with fairness the character of mr. bernard shaw, i could not express myself more exactly than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous heart; but not a heart in the right place. and this is so of the typical society of our time. the modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. it is full of wild and wasted virtues. when a religious scheme is shattered (as christianity was shattered at the reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. the vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. but the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. the modern world is full of the old christian virtues gone mad. the virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (i am sorry to say) is often untruthful. for example, mr. blatchford attacks christianity because he is mad on one christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. he has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. mr. blatchford is not only an early christian, he is the only early christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions. for in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. he really is the enemy of the human race-because he is so human. as the other extreme, we may take the acrid realist, who has deliberately killed in himself all human pleasure in happy tales or in the healing of the heart. torquemada tortured people physically for the sake of moral truth. zola tortured people morally for the sake of physical truth. but in torquemada's time there was at least a system that could to some extent make righteousness and peace kiss each other. now they do not even bow. but a much stronger case than these two of truth and pity can be found in the remarkable case of the dislocation of humility. it is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned. humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. he was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. his very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. by asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small. even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility. giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility. towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility. for towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we. all this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble. it is impossible without humility to enjoy anything-even pride. but what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. a man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert--himself. the part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the divine reason. huxley preached a humility content to learn from nature. but the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. the truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. the old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. for the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. but the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether. at any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. we are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. we are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. the meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance. it is exactly this intellectual helplessness which is our second problem. the last chapter has been concerned only with a fact of observation: that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from his reason than his imagination. it was not meant to attack the authority of reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it. for it needs defence. the whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels. the sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion. but the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle. they are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door. the modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause. religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. it is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. but the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars. for there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. and against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin. that peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. it is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. reason is itself a matter of faith. it is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. if you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? they are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" the young sceptic says, "i have a right to think for myself." but the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "i have no right to think for myself. i have no right to think at all." there is a thought that stops thought. that is the only thought that ought to be stopped. that is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. it only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already mr. h.g.wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "doubts of the instrument." in this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. but it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. the creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. they were organized for the difficult defence of reason. man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. the authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all--the authority of a man to think. we know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. for we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. in so far as religion is gone, reason is going. for they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. they are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. and in the act of destroying the idea of divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. with a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it. lest this should be called loose assertion, it is perhaps desirable, though dull, to run rapidly through the chief modern fashions of thought which have this effect of stopping thought itself. materialism and the view of everything as a personal illusion have some such effect; for if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think about. but in these cases the effect is indirect and doubtful. in some cases it is direct and clear; notably in the case of what is generally called evolution. evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. if evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. if evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal god might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the christian god, he were outside time. but if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. it means that there is no such thing as a thing. at best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. this is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. you cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. descartes said, "i think; therefore i am." the philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. he says, "i am not; therefore i cannot think." then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by mr. h.g.wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there are no categories at all. this also is merely destructive. thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. it need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. thus when mr. wells says (as he did somewhere), "all chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. if all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs." akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. we often hear it said, for instance, "what is right in one age is wrong in another." this is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. if women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner. but you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong. if the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard? nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. how can you overtake jones if you walk in the other direction? you cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. it would be like discussing whether milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat. it is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. but as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. if the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. progress itself cannot progress. it is worth remark, in passing, that when tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. he wrote- "let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change." he thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is. change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into. the main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about the past or future simply impossible. the theory of a complete change of standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure of honouring our fathers; it deprives us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them. this bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our time would not be complete without some reference to pragmatism; for though i have here used and should everywhere defend the pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth, there is an extreme application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever. my meaning can be put shortly thus. i agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. but i say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth. the pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the absolute. but precisely one of the things that he must think is the absolute. this philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist. extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks. the determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be a human being) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice. the pragmatist, who professes to be specially human, makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact. to sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania. the mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it. this is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts of the advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought. what we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. it is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course. it has run its course. it is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. we have seen it end. it has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. you cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves. you cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world. it might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretence that modern england is christian. but it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow. militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority than because they are a new one. free thought has exhausted its own freedom. it is weary of its own success. if any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in mark twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set. if any frightened curate still says that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread, we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of mr. belloc, "do not, i beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. you have mistaken the hour of the night: it is already morning." we have no more questions left to ask. we have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. we have found all the questions that can be found. it is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers. but one more word must be added. at the beginning of this preliminary negative sketch i said that our mental ruin has been wrought by wild reason, not by wild imagination. a man does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out in square inches. now, one school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing the pagan health of the world. they see that reason destroys; but will, they say, creates. the ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not in reason. the supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it. i have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of will. it came, i suppose, through nietzsche, who preached something that is called egoism. that, indeed, was simpleminded enough; for nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. to preach anything is to give it away. first, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war. to preach egoism is to practise altruism. but however it began, the view is common enough in current literature. the main defence of these thinkers is that they are not thinkers; they are makers. they say that choice is itself the divine thing. thus mr. bernard shaw has attacked the old idea that men's acts are to be judged by the standard of the desire of happiness. he says that a man does not act for his happiness, but from his will. he does not say, "jam will make me happy," but "i want jam." and in all this others follow him with yet greater enthusiasm. mr. john davidson, a remarkable poet, is so passionately excited about it that he is obliged to write prose. he publishes a short play with several long prefaces. this is natural enough in mr. shaw, for all his plays are prefaces: mr. shaw is (i suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry. but that mr. davidson (who can write excellent poetry) should write instead laborious metaphysics in defence of this doctrine of will, does show that the doctrine of will has taken hold of men. even mr. h.g.wells has half spoken in its language; saying that one should test acts not like a thinker, but like an artist, saying, "i feel this curve is right," or "that line shall go thus." they are all excited; and well they may be. for by this doctrine of the divine authority of will, they think they can break out of the doomed fortress of rationalism. they think they can escape. but they cannot escape. this pure praise of volition ends in the same break up and blank as the mere pursuit of logic. exactly as complete free thought involves the doubting of thought itself, so the acceptation of mere "willing" really paralyzes the will. mr. bernard shaw has not perceived the real difference between the old utilitarian test of pleasure (clumsy, of course, and easily misstated) and that which he propounds. the real difference between the test of happiness and the test of will is simply that the test of happiness is a test and the other isn't. you can discuss whether a man's act in jumping over a cliff was directed towards happiness; you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will. of course it was. you can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul. but you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action. by this praise of will you cannot really choose one course as better than another. and yet choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising. the worship of will is the negation of will. to admire mere choice is to refuse to choose. if mr. bernard shaw comes up to me and says, "will something," that is tantamount to saying, "i do not mind what you will," and that is tantamount to saying, "i have no will in the matter." you cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular. a brilliant anarchist like mr. john davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will--will to anything. he only wants humanity to want something. but humanity does want something. it wants ordinary morality. he rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything. but we have willed something. we have willed the law against which he rebels. all the will-worshippers, from nietzsche to mr. davidson, are really quite empty of volition. they cannot will, they can hardly wish. and if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. it can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. but it is quite the opposite. every act of will is an act of self-limitation. to desire action is to desire limitation. in that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. when you choose anything, you reject everything else. that objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act. every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses. if you become king of england, you give up the post of beadle in brompton. if you go to rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in wimbledon. it is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense. for instance, mr. john davidson tells us to have nothing to do with "thou shalt not"; but it is surely obvious that "thou shalt not" is only one of the necessary corollaries of "i will." "i will go to the lord mayor's show, and thou shalt not stop me." anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. but it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. if you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. if, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. the moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. you can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. you may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. if a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. somebody wrote a work called "the loves of the triangles"; i never read it, but i am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. this is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. the artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. the painter is glad that the canvas is flat. the sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless. in case the point is not clear, an historic example may illustrate it. the french revolution was really an heroic and decisive thing, because the jacobins willed something definite and limited. they desired the freedoms of democracy, but also all the vetoes of democracy. they wished to have votes and not to have titles. republicanism had an ascetic side in franklin or robespierre as well as an expansive side in danton or wilkes. therefore they have created something with a solid substance and shape, the square social equality and peasant wealth of france. but since then the revolutionary or speculative mind of europe has been weakened by shrinking from any proposal because of the limits of that proposal. liberalism has been degraded into liberality. men have tried to turn "revolutionise" from a transitive to an intransitive verb. the jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would not rebel against, the system he would trust. but the new rebel is a sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. he has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. and the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. for all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. he curses the sultan because christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses mrs. grundy because they keep it. as a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. a russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. a man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. he calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of poland or ireland because they take away that bauble. the man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. in short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. in his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. by rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything. it may be added that the same blank and bankruptcy can be observed in all fierce and terrible types of literature, especially in satire. satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard. when little boys in the street laugh at the fatness of some distinguished journalist, they are unconsciously assuming a standard of greek sculpture. they are appealing to the marble apollo. and the curious disappearance of satire from our literature is an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce about. nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of common morality behind it. he is himself more preposterous than anything he denounces. but, indeed, nietzsche will stand very well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence. the softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident. if nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, nietzscheism would end in imbecility. thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain. this last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism, and therefore in death. the sortie has failed. the wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in tibet. he sits down beside tolstoy in the land of nothing and nirvana. they are both helpless--one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. the tolstoyan's will is frozen by a buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. but the nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. they stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. the result is--well, some things are not hard to calculate. they stand at the cross-roads. here i end (thank god) the first and dullest business of this book--the rough review of recent thought. after this i begin to sketch a view of life which may not interest my reader, but which, at any rate, interests me. in front of me, as i close this page, is a pile of modern books that i have been turning over for the purpose--a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility. by the accident of my present detachment, i can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of schopenhauer and tolstoy, nietzsche and shaw, as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from a balloon. they are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum. for madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness; and they have nearly reached it. he who thinks he is made of glass, thinks to the destruction of thought; for glass cannot think. so he who wills to reject nothing, wills the destruction of will; for will is not only the choice of something, but the rejection of almost everything. and as i turn and tumble over the clever, wonderful, tiresome, and useless modern books, the title of one of them rivets my eye. it is called "jeanne d'arc," by anatole france. i have only glanced at it, but a glance was enough to remind me of renan's "vie de jesus." it has the same strange method of the reverent sceptic. it discredits supernatural stories that have some foundation, simply by telling natural stories that have no foundation. because we cannot believe in what a saint did, we are to pretend that we know exactly what he felt. but i do not mention either book in order to criticise it, but because the accidental combination of the names called up two startling images of sanity which blasted all the books before me. joan of arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like tolstoy, or by accepting them all like nietzsche. she chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. yet joan, when i came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in tolstoy or nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. i thought of all that is noble in tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. joan of arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. and then i thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. i thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. well, joan of arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. we know that she was not afraid of an army, while nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. she beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing. it was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility that has been lost. and with that thought came a larger one, and the colossal figure of her master had also crossed the theatre of my thoughts. the same modern difficulty which darkened the subject-matter of anatole france also darkened that of ernest renan. renan also divided his hero's pity from his hero's pugnacity. renan even represented the righteous anger at jerusalem as a mere nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations of galilee. as if there were any inconsistency between having a love for humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity! altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce christ as an egoist. egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices) denounce him as an altruist. in our present atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible enough. the love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant. the hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist. there is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments. there is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about. they have torn the soul of christ into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are equally puzzled by his insane magnificence and his insane meekness. they have parted his garments among them, and for his vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top throughout. iv the ethics of elfland when the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: "ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is." thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when i was a boy. but since then i have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. what has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. they said that i should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. now, i have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. what i have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. i am still as much concerned as ever about the battle of armageddon; but i am not so much concerned about the general election. as a babe i leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere mention of it. no; the vision is always solid and reliable. the vision is always a fact. it is the reality that is often a fraud. as much as i ever did, more than i ever did, i believe in liberalism. but there was a rosy time of innocence when i believed in liberals. i take this instance of one of the enduring faiths because, having now to trace the roots of my personal speculation, this may be counted, i think, as the only positive bias. i was brought up a liberal, and have always believed in democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity. if any one finds the phrase vague or threadbare, i can only pause for a moment to explain that the principle of democracy, as i mean it, can be stated in two propositions. the first is this: that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. man is something more awful than men; something more strange. the sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. the mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. death is more tragic even than death by starvation. having a nose is more comic even than having a norman nose. this is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. and the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. the democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. it is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the north pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being astronomer royal, and so on. for these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. it is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. these things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. i am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; i know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all i know, to have their noses blown by nurses. i merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. in short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves--the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. this is democracy; and in this i have always believed. but there is one thing that i have never from my youth up been able to understand. i have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. it is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. it is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. the man who quotes some german historian against the tradition of the catholic church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. he is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. it is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. the legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. the book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad. those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the carlton club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. it will not do for us. if we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. it is the democracy of the dead. tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. all democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. i, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. we will have the dead at our councils. the ancient greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. it is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross. i have first to say, therefore, that if i have had a bias, it was always a bias in favour of democracy, and therefore of tradition. before we come to any theoretic or logical beginnings i am content to allow for that personal equation; i have always been more inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which i belong. i prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside. i would always trust the old wives' fables against the old maids' facts. as long as wit is mother wit it can be as wild as it pleases. now, i have to put together a general position, and i pretend to no training in such things. i propose to do it, therefore, by writing down one after another the three or four fundamental ideas which i have found for myself, pretty much in the way that i found them. then i shall roughly synthesise them, summing up my personal philosophy or natural religion; then i shall describe my startling discovery that the whole thing had been discovered before. it had been discovered by christianity. but of these profound persuasions which i have to recount in order, the earliest was concerned with this element of popular tradition. and without the foregoing explanation touching tradition and democracy i could hardly make my mental experience clear. as it is, i do not know whether i can make it clear, but i now propose to try. my first and last philosophy, that which i believe in with unbroken certainty, i learnt in the nursery. i generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition. the things i believed most then, the things i believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. they seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. they are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. it is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. i knew the magic beanstalk before i had tasted beans; i was sure of the man in the moon before i was certain of the moon. this was at one with all popular tradition. modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush. that is what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not "appreciate nature," because they said that nature was divine. old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; and the old greeks could not see the trees for the dryads. but i deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on fairy tales. if i were describing them in detail i could note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them. there is the chivalrous lesson of "jack the giant killer"; that giants should be killed because they are gigantic. it is a manly mutiny against pride as such. for the rebel is older than all the kingdoms, and the jacobin has more tradition than the jacobite. there is the lesson of "cinderella," which is the same as that of the magnificat-exaltavit humiles. there is the great lesson of "beauty and the beast"; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable. there is the terrible allegory of the "sleeping beauty," which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep. but i am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but with the whole spirit of its law, which i learnt before i could speak, and shall retain when i cannot write. i am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts. it might be stated this way. there are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. they are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. we in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity. for instance, if the ugly sisters are older than cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) necessary that cinderella is younger than the ugly sisters. there is no getting out of it. haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases: it really must be. if jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the father of jack. cold reason decrees it from her awful throne: and we in fairyland submit. if the three brothers all ride horses, there are six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true rationalism, and fairyland is full of it. but as i put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, i observed an extraordinary thing. i observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened-dawn and death and so on--as if they were rational and inevitable. they talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as the fact that two and one trees make three. but it is not. there is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. you cannot imagine two and one not making three. but you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. these men in spectacles spoke much of a man named newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. but they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. if the apple hit newton's nose, newton's nose hit the apple. that is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. but we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike. we have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions. we believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities. we believe that a bean-stalk climbed up to heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans make five. here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery tales. the man of science says, "cut the stalk, and the apple will fall"; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. the witch in the fairy tale says, "blow the horn, and the ogre's castle will fall"; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause. doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her reason. she does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary mental connection between a horn and a falling tower. but the scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground. they do really talk as if they had found not only a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. they do talk as if the connection of two strange things physically connected them philosophically. they feel that because one incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. two black riddles make a white answer. in fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, grimm's law. but grimm's law is far less intellectual than grimm's fairy tales. the tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. a law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. if there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets. and we know what the idea is. we can say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. but we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince. as ideas, the egg and the chicken are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears. granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the "laws of nature." when we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o'clock. we must answer that it is magic. it is not a "law," for we do not understand its general formula. it is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen. it is no argument for unalterable law (as huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. we do not count on it; we bet on it. we risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. we leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception. all the terms used in the science books, "law," "necessity," "order," "tendency," and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. the only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell," "enchantment." they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. a tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. water runs downhill because it is bewitched. the sun shines because it is bewitched. i deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. we may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic. it is the only way i can express in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs. it is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the mystic. nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. he is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. he has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. a forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. in both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. a sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. so the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. but the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country. this elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this. just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. this is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. mere life is interesting enough. a child of seven is excited by being told that tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. but a child of three is excited by being told that tommy opened a door. boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales--because they find them romantic. in fact, a baby is about the only person, i should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. this proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. these tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. they make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. i have said that this is wholly reasonable and even agnostic. and, indeed, on this point i am all for the higher agnosticism; its better name is ignorance. we have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. this man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. well, every man is that man in the story. every man has forgotten who he is. one may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. thou shalt love the lord thy god; but thou shalt not know thyself. we are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. we have all forgotten what we really are. all that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. all that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget. but though (like the man without memory in the novel) we walk the streets with a sort of half-witted admiration, still it is admiration. it is admiration in english and not only admiration in latin. the wonder has a positive element of praise. this is the next milestone to be definitely marked on our road through fairyland. i shall speak in the next chapter about optimists and pessimists in their intellectual aspect, so far as they have one. here i am only trying to describe the enormous emotions which cannot be described. and the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. it was an ecstasy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity. the goodness of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there might be more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a fairy tale. the test of all happiness is gratitude; and i felt grateful, though i hardly knew to whom. children are grateful when santa claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. could i not be grateful to santa claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? we thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. can i thank no one for the birthday present of birth? there were, then, these two first feelings, indefensible and indisputable. the world was a shock, but it was not merely shocking; existence was a surprise, but it was a pleasant surprise. in fact, all my first views were exactly uttered in a riddle that stuck in my brain from boyhood. the question was, "what did the first frog say?" and the answer was, "lord, how you made me jump!" that says succinctly all that i am saying. god made the frog jump; but the frog prefers jumping. but when these things are settled there enters the second great principle of the fairy philosophy. any one can see it who will simply read "grimm's fairy tales" or the fine collections of mr. andrew lang. for the pleasure of pedantry i will call it the doctrine of conditional joy. touchstone talked of much virtue in an "if"; according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an "if." the note of the fairy utterance always is, "you may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word `cow'"; or "you may live happily with the king's daughter, if you do not show her an onion." the vision always hangs upon a veto. all the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. all the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden. mr. w.b.yeats, in his exquisite and piercing elfin poetry, describes the elves as lawless; they plunge in innocent anarchy on the unbridled horses of the air- "ride on the crest of the dishevelled tide, and dance upon the mountains like a flame." it is a dreadful thing to say that mr. w.b.yeats does not understand fairyland. but i do say it. he is an ironical irishman, full of intellectual reactions. he is not stupid enough to understand fairyland. fairies prefer people of the yokel type like myself; people who gape and grin and do as they are told. mr. yeats reads into elfland all the righteous insurrection of his own race. but the lawlessness of ireland is a christian lawlessness, founded on reason and justice. the fenian is rebelling against something he understands only too well; but the true citizen of fairyland is obeying something that he does not understand at all. in the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. a box is opened, and all evils fly out. a word is forgotten, and cities perish. a lamp is lit, and love flies away. a flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. an apple is eaten, and the hope of god is gone. this is the tone of fairy tales, and it is certainly not lawlessness or even liberty, though men under a mean modern tyranny may think it liberty by comparison. people out of portland gaol might think fleet street free; but closer study will prove that both fairies and journalists are the slaves of duty. fairy godmothers seem at least as strict as other godmothers. cinderella received a coach out of wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere, but she received a command--which might have come out of brixton--that she should be back by twelve. also, she had a glass slipper; and it cannot be a coincidence that glass is so common a substance in folk-lore. this princess lives in a glass castle, that princess on a glass hill; this one sees all things in a mirror; they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw stones. for this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance most easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat. and this fairy-tale sentiment also sank into me and became my sentiment towards the whole world. i felt and feel that life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as brittle as the window-pane; and when the heavens were compared to the terrible crystal i can remember a shudder. i was afraid that god would drop the cosmos with a crash. remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do. now, the point here is that to me this did not seem unjust. if the miller's third son said to the fairy, "explain why i must not stand on my head in the fairy palace," the other might fairly reply, "well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace." if cinderella says, "how is it that i must leave the ball at twelve?" her godmother might answer, "how is it that you are going there till twelve?" if i leave a man in my will ten talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. he must not look a winged horse in the mouth. and it seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that i could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when i did not understand the vision they limited. the frame was no stranger than the picture. the veto might well be as wild as the vision; it might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees. for this reason (we may call it the fairy godmother philosophy) i never could join the young men of my time in feeling what they called the general sentiment of revolt. i should have resisted, let us hope, any rules that were evil, and with these and their definition i shall deal in another chapter. but i did not feel disposed to resist any rule merely because it was mysterious. estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick or the payment of a peppercorn: i was willing to hold the huge estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal fantasy. it could not well be wilder than the fact that i was allowed to hold it at all. at this stage i give only one ethical instance to show my meaning. i could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. to be allowed, like endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like endymion's) a vulgar anti-climax. keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. to complain that i could only be married once was like complaining that i had only been born once. it was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. it showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. a man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter eden by five gates at once. polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. the aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. the thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. men (i felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. men might go through fire to find a cowslip. yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. they would not go through common christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip. surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. oscar wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. but oscar wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. we can pay for them by not being oscar wilde. well, i left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and i have not found any books so sensible since. i left the nurse guardian of tradition and democracy, and i have not found any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative. but the matter for important comment was here: that when i first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern world, i found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales. it has taken me a long time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right. the really curious thing was this: that modern thought contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines. i have explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. but i found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which i have had ever since and which, crude as they were, have since hardened into convictions. first, i found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. the leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. he feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. he is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black. every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. he feels that something has been done. but the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling that something had happened an instant before. in fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world. nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure. the modern world as i found it was solid for modern calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. but when i came to ask them i found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. it was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, i had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. i should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. so one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. i speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. but the repetition in nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. the grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. the sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. the recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and i began to see an idea. all the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. it is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. people feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. this is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. for the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. a man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. he gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. but if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to islington, he might go to islington as regularly as the thames goes to sheerness. the very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death. the sun rises every morning. i do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. his routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. the thing i mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. a child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. they always say, "do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. for grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. but perhaps god is strong enough to exult in monotony. it is possible that god says every morning, "do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "do it again" to the moon. it may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that god makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. it may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger than we. the repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. if the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. it may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance. this was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. i had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now i began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were wilful. i mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. in short, i had always believed that the world involved magic: now i thought that perhaps it involved a magician. and this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. i had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller. but modern thought also hit my second human tradition. it went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions. the one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. herbert spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. but he was an imperialist of the lowest type. he popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? if mere size proves that man is not the image of god, then a whale may be the image of god; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. it is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree. but herbert spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe. he spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent unionist talks about the irish and their ideals. he turned mankind into a small nationality. and his evil influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honourable of later scientific authors; notably in the early romances of mr. h.g.wells. many moralists have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as wicked. but mr. wells and his school made the heavens wicked. we should lift up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin. but the expansion of which i speak was much more evil than all this. i have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. these people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. the size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. the cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. the grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. it was like telling a prisoner in reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. the warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. so these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine. in fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken, for the definition of a law is something that can be broken. but the machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could not be broken; for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery. we were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them. the idea of the mystical condition quite disappeared; one can neither have the firmness of keeping laws nor the fun of breaking them. the largeness of this universe had nothing of that freshness and airy outbreak which we have praised in the universe of the poet. this modern universe is literally an empire; that is, it was vast, but it is not free. one went into larger and larger windowless rooms, rooms big with babylonian perspective; but one never found the smallest window or a whisper of outer air. their infernal parallels seemed to expand with distance; but for me all good things come to a point, swords for instance. so finding the boast of the big cosmos so unsatisfactory to my emotions i began to argue about it a little; and i soon found that the whole attitude was even shallower than could have been expected. according to these people the cosmos was one thing since it had one unbroken rule. only (they would say) while it is one thing, it is also the only thing there is. why, then, should one worry particularly to call it large? there is nothing to compare it with. it would be just as sensible to call it small. a man may say, "i like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its crowd of varied creatures." but if it comes to that why should not a man say, "i like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number of stars and as neat a provision of live stock as i wish to see"? one is as good as the other; they are both mere sentiments. it is mere sentiment to rejoice that the sun is larger than the earth; it is quite as sane a sentiment to rejoice that the sun is no larger than it is. a man chooses to have an emotion about the largeness of the world; why should he not choose to have an emotion about its smallness? it happened that i had that emotion. when one is fond of anything one addresses it by diminutives, even if it is an elephant or a life-guardsman. the reason is, that anything, however huge, that can be conceived of as complete, can be conceived of as small. if military moustaches did not suggest a sword or tusks a tail, then the object would be vast because it would be immeasurable. but the moment you can imagine a guardsman you can imagine a small guardsman. the moment you really see an elephant you can call it "tiny." if you can make a statue of a thing you can make a statuette of it. these people professed that the universe was one coherent thing; but they were not fond of the universe. but i was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. i often did so; and it never seemed to mind. actually and in truth i did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it large. for about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which i felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life. they showed only a dreary waste; but i felt a sort of sacred thrift. for economy is far more romantic than extravagance. to them stars were an unending income of halfpence; but i felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling. these subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour and tone of certain tales. thus i have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. i may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, "robinson crusoe," which i read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. the greatest of poems is an inventory. every kitchen tool becomes ideal because crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. it is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. but it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck. every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a great might-have-been. to me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a great might-not-have-been. but i really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of crusoe's ship. that there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe. it was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. the trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when i saw the matterhorn i was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion. i felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are called so in milton's eden): i hoarded the hills. for the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true. this cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another one. thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable things. these are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine. these in some dark way i thought before i could write, and felt before i could think: that we may proceed more easily afterwards, i will roughly recapitulate them now. i felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. it may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. but the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations i have heard. the thing is magic, true or false. second, i came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. there was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. third, i thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank god for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them. we owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. and last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. man had saved his good as crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. all this i felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. and all this time i had not even thought of christian theology. v the flag of the world when i was a boy there were two curious men running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist. i constantly used the words myself, but i cheerfully confess that i never had any very special idea of what they meant. the only thing which might be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said; for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought it as bad as it could be. both these statements being obviously raving nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations. an optimist could not mean a man who thought everything right and nothing wrong. for that is meaningless; it is like calling everything right and nothing left. upon the whole, i came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself. it would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl, "an optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist is a man who looks after your feet." i am not sure that this is not the best definition of all. there is even a sort of allegorical truth in it. for there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice of road. but this is a deep mistake in this alternative of the optimist and the pessimist. the assumption of it is that a man criticises this world as if he were house-hunting, as if he were being shown over a new suite of apartments. if a man came to this world from some other world in full possession of his powers he might discuss whether the advantage of midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just as a man looking for lodgings might balance the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea view. but no man is in that position. a man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. he has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted. to put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration. in the last chapter it has been said that the primary feeling that this world is strange and yet attractive is best expressed in fairy tales. the reader may, if he likes, put down the next stage to that bellicose and even jingo literature which commonly comes next in the history of a boy. we all owe much sound morality to the penny dreadfuls. whatever the reason, it seemed and still seems to me that our attitude towards life can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism and approval. my acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. it is a matter of primary loyalty. the world is not a lodging-house at brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. it is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. the point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more. all optimistic thoughts about england and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the english patriot. similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot. let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing--say pimlico. if we think what is really best for pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. it is not enough for a man to disapprove of pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to chelsea. nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of pimlico: for then it will remain pimlico, which would be awful. the only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. if there arose a man who loved pimlico, then pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. for decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. a mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. a lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. if men loved pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than florence. some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. i answer that this is the actual history of mankind. this, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. people first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. men did not love rome because she was great. she was great because they had loved her. the eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right. but they really were wrong, in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests. morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "i will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. there is a trace of both men having said, "we must not hit each other in the holy place." they gained their morality by guarding their religion. they did not cultivate courage. they fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous. they did not cultivate cleanliness. they purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean. the history of the jews is the only early document known to most englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from that. the ten commandments which have been found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands; a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert. anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity. and only when they made a holy day for god did they find they had made a holiday for men. if it be granted that this primary devotion to a place or thing is a source of creative energy, we can pass on to a very peculiar fact. let us reiterate for an instant that the only right optimism is a sort of universal patriotism. what is the matter with the pessimist? i think it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot. and what is the matter with the anti-patriot? i think it can be stated, without undue bitterness, by saying that he is the candid friend. and what is the matter with the candid friend? there we strike the rock of real life and immutable human nature. i venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. he is keeping something back-his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. he has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. this is certainly, i think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. i do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses; that is only patriotism speaking plainly. a man who says that no patriot should attack the boer war until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. but there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, i think, what i have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "i am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all. and he may be said, without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge which was allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it. because he is allowed to be pessimistic as a military adviser he is being pessimistic as a recruiting sergeant. just in the same way the pessimist (who is the cosmic anti-patriot) uses the freedom that life allows to her counsellors to lure away the people from her flag. granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. it may be that twelve hundred men in tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men. the evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises--he has not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things. what is the evil of the man commonly called an optimist? obviously, it is felt that the optimist, wishing to defend the honour of this world, will defend the indefensible. he is the jingo of the universe; he will say, "my cosmos, right or wrong." he will be less inclined to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of front-bench official answer to all attacks, soothing every one with assurances. he will not wash the world, but whitewash the world. all this (which is true of a type of optimist) leads us to the one really interesting point of psychology, which could not be explained without it. we say there must be a primal loyalty to life: the only question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty? if you like to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an unreasonable loyalty? now, the extraordinary thing is that the bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak defence of everything) comes in with the reasonable optimism. rational optimism leads to stagnation: it is irrational optimism that leads to reform. let me explain by using once more the parallel of patriotism. the man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a reason. the man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a reason. if a man loves some feature of pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may find himself defending that feature against pimlico itself. but if he simply loves pimlico itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the new jerusalem. i do not deny that reform may be excessive; i only say that it is the mystic patriot who reforms. mere jingo self-contentment is commonest among those who have some pedantic reason for their patriotism. the worst jingoes do not love england, but a theory of england. if we love england for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the hindoos. but if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the hindoos ruled us. thus also only those will permit their patriotism to falsify history whose patriotism depends on history. a man who loves england for being english will not mind how she arose. but a man who loves england for being anglo-saxon may go against all facts for his fancy. he may end (like carlyle and freeman) by maintaining that the norman conquest was a saxon conquest. he may end in utter unreason--because he has a reason. a man who loves france for being military will palliate the army of 1870. but a man who loves france for being france will improve the army of 1870. this is exactly what the french have done, and france is a good instance of the working paradox. nowhere else is patriotism more purely abstract and arbitrary; and nowhere else is reform more drastic and sweeping. the more transcendental is your patriotism, the more practical are your politics. perhaps the most everyday instance of this point is in the case of women; and their strange and strong loyalty. some stupid people started the idea that because women obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. they can hardly have known any women. the same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head. a man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. women who are utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their criticism. thackeray expressed this well when he made pendennis' mother, who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong as a man. she underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value. the devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind. this at least had come to be my position about all that was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement. before any cosmic act of reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance. a man must be interested in life, then he could be disinterested in his views of it. "my son give me thy heart"; the heart must be fixed on the right thing: the moment we have a fixed heart we have a free hand. i must pause to anticipate an obvious criticism. it will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent endurance. but this is exactly the attitude which i maintain to be defective. it is, i know, very common in this age; it was perfectly put in those quiet lines of matthew arnold which are more piercingly blasphemous than the shrieks of schopenhauer-"enough we live:--and if a life, with large results so little rife, though bearable, seem hardly worth this pomp of worlds, this pain of birth." i know this feeling fills our epoch, and i think it freezes our epoch. for our titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. we do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. we have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening. no one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a christian to die to it? in this combination, i maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. he is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself. i put these things not in their mature logical sequence, but as they came: and this view was cleared and sharpened by an accident of the time. under the lengthening shadow of ibsen, an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self. grave moderns told us that we must not even say "poor fellow," of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence. mr. william archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny. in all this i found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane. not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. it is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. the man who kills a man, kills a man. the man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. his act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. for it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. the thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. he cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the celestial city. the thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. but the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. he defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. there is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. when a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. there often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. but if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in mr. archer's suicidal automatic machines. there is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. the man's crime is different from other crimes--for it makes even crimes impossible. about the same time i read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. the open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. a martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. a suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. one wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. in other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. the suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. and then i remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. for christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr. historic christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. the early christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. they blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers. all this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. yet there is the stake at the crossroads to show what christianity thought of the pessimist. this was the first of the long train of enigmas with which christianity entered the discussion. and there went with it a peculiarity of which i shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one. the christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals. it was not a matter of degree. it was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it. the christian feeling evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far. the christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. one man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence. another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren's. i am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was it so fierce? here it was that i first found that my wandering feet were in some beaten track. christianity had also felt this opposition of the martyr to the suicide: had it perhaps felt it for the same reason? had christianity felt what i felt, but could not (and cannot) express--this need for a first loyalty to things, and then for a ruinous reform of things? then i remembered that it was actually the charge against christianity that it combined these two things which i was wildly trying to combine. christianity was accused, at one and the same time, of being too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic about the world. the coincidence made me suddenly stand still. an imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. you might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on mondays, but cannot be believed on tuesdays. you might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. what a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. if a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. if a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age. suppose, for the sake of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing. a materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more than a materialist of the twentieth century. but a christian scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a christian of the twelfth century. it is simply a matter of a man's theory of things. therefore in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question. and the more i thought about when and how christianity had come into the world, the more i felt that it had actually come to answer this question. it is commonly the loose and latitudinarian christians who pay quite indefensible compliments to christianity. they talk as if there had never been any piety or pity until christianity came, a point on which any mediaeval would have been eager to correct them. they represent that the remarkable thing about christianity was that it was the first to preach simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness and sincerity. they will think me very narrow (whatever that means) if i say that the remarkable thing about christianity was that it was the first to preach christianity. its peculiarity was that it was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not peculiar, but obvious ideals for all mankind. christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long talk. only the other day i saw in an excellent weekly paper of puritan tone this remark, that christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the quaker doctrine of the inner light. now, if i were to say that christianity came into the world specially to destroy the doctrine of the inner light, that would be an exaggeration. but it would be very much nearer to the truth. the last stoics, like marcus aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the inner light. their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the inner light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. notice that marcus aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. he gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the simple life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the english people back their land. marcus aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. he is an unselfish egoist. an unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the inner light. of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the higher thought centre knows how it does work. that jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that jones shall worship jones. let jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the inner light; let jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. the only fun of being a christian was that a man was not left alone with the inner light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. all the same, it will be as well if jones does not worship the sun and moon. if he does, there is a tendency for him to imitate them; to say, that because the sun burns insects alive, he may burn insects alive. he thinks that because the sun gives people sun-stroke, he may give his neighbour measles. he thinks that because the moon is said to drive men mad, he may drive his wife mad. this ugly side of mere external optimism had also shown itself in the ancient world. about the time when the stoic idealism had begun to show the weaknesses of pessimism, the old nature worship of the ancients had begun to show the enormous weaknesses of optimism. nature worship is natural enough while the society is young, or, in other words, pantheism is all right as long as it is the worship of pan. but nature has another side which experience and sin are not slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god pan that he soon showed the cloven hoof. the only objection to natural religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. a man loves nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. he washes at dawn in clear water as did the wise man of the stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull's blood, as did julian the apostate. the mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy. physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped. stars and mountains must not be taken seriously. if they are, we end where the pagan nature worship ended. because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties. because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality. mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination. the theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything that was bad. on the other side our idealist pessimists were represented by the old remnant of the stoics. marcus aurelius and his friends had really given up the idea of any god in the universe and looked only to the god within. they had no hope of any virtue in nature, and hardly any hope of any virtue in society. they had not enough interest in the outer world really to wreck or revolutionise it. they did not love the city enough to set fire to it. thus the ancient world was exactly in our own desolate dilemma. the only people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up; and the virtuous people did not care enough about them to knock them down. in this dilemma (the same as ours) christianity suddenly stepped in and offered a singular answer, which the world eventually accepted as the answer. it was the answer then, and i think it is the answer now. this answer was like the slash of a sword; it sundered; it did not in any sense sentimentally unite. briefly, it divided god from the cosmos. that transcendence and distinctness of the deity which some christians now want to remove from christianity, was really the only reason why any one wanted to be a christian. it was the whole point of the christian answer to the unhappy pessimist and the still more unhappy optimist. as i am here only concerned with their particular problem, i shall indicate only briefly this great metaphysical suggestion. all descriptions of the creating or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical, because they must be verbal. thus the pantheist is forced to speak of god in all things as if he were in a box. thus the evolutionist has, in his very name, the idea of being unrolled like a carpet. all terms, religious and irreligious, are open to this charge. the only question is whether all terms are useless, or whether one can, with such a phrase, cover a distinct idea about the origin of things. i think one can, and so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would not talk about evolution. and the root phrase for all christian theism was this, that god was a creator, as an artist is a creator. a poet is so separate from his poem that he himself speaks of it as a little thing he has "thrown off." even in giving it forth he has flung it away. this principle that all creation and procreation is a breaking off is at least as consistent through the cosmos as the evolutionary principle that all growth is a branching out. a woman loses a child even in having a child. all creation is separation. birth is as solemn a parting as death. it was the prime philosophic principle of christianity that this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world. according to most philosophers, god in making the world enslaved it. according to christianity, in making it, he set it free. god had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it. i will discuss the truth of this theorem later. here i have only to point out with what a startling smoothness it passed the dilemma we have discussed in this chapter. in this way at least one could be both happy and indignant without degrading one's self to be either a pessimist or an optimist. on this system one could fight all the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence. one could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with the world. st. george could still fight the dragon, however big the monster bulked in the cosmos, though he were bigger than the mighty cities or bigger than the everlasting hills. if he were as big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world. st. george had not to consider any obvious odds or proportions in the scale of things, but only the original secret of their design. he can shake his sword at the dragon, even if it is everything; even if the empty heavens over his head are only the huge arch of its open jaws. and then followed an experience impossible to describe. it was as if i had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection--the world and the christian tradition. i had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. i found this projecting feature of christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that god was personal, and had made a world separate from himself. the spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world--it had evidently been meant to go there-and then the strange thing began to happen. when once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. i could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. or, to vary the metaphor, i was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress. and when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me. the whole land was lit up, as it were, back to the first fields of my childhood. all those blind fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter i have tried in vain to trace on the darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane. i was right when i felt that roses were red by some sort of choice: it was the divine choice. i was right when i felt that i would almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour than say it must by necessity have been that colour: it might verily have been any other. my sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it meant the whole doctrine of the fall. even those dim and shapeless monsters of notions which i have not been able to describe, much less defend, stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatides of the creed. the fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void, but small and cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist; to god the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds. and my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from crusoe's ship-even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world. but the important matter was this, that it entirely reversed the reason for optimism. and the instant the reversal was made it felt like the abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket. i had often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessimism. but all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world. the christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world. i had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from god. but now i really was happy, for i had learnt that man is a monstrosity. i had been right in feeling all things as odd, for i myself was at once worse and better than all things. the optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. the modern philosopher had told me again and again that i was in the right place, and i had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. but i had heard that i was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. the knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. i knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why i could feel homesick at home. vi the paradoxes of christianity the real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. the commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. it looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. i give one coarse instance of what i mean. suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. a man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. at last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. and just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong. it is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything. it seems a sort of secret treason in the universe. an apple or an orange is round enough to get itself called round, and yet is not round after all. the earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some simple astronomer into calling it a globe. a blade of grass is called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point; but it doesn't. everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable. it escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment. from the grand curve of our earth it could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved. it would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides, he should have a heart on both sides. yet scientific men are still organizing expeditions to find the north pole, because they are so fond of flat country. scientific men are also still organizing expeditions to find a man's heart; and when they try to find it, they generally get on the wrong side of him. now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it guesses these hidden malformations or surprises. if our mathematician from the moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce the two shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain. but if he guessed that the man's heart was in the right place, then i should call him something more than a mathematician. now, this is exactly the claim which i have since come to propound for christianity. not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth. it not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the things go wrong. its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected. it is simple about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth. it will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit (though all the modernists wail to it) the obvious deduction that he has two hearts. it is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show that whenever we feel there is something odd in christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth. i have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to the effect that such and such a creed cannot be believed in our age. of course, anything can be believed in any age. but, oddly enough, there really is a sense in which a creed, if it is believed at all, can be believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one. if a man finds christianity true in birmingham, he has actually clearer reasons for faith than if he had found it true in mercia. for the more complicated seems the coincidence, the less it can be a coincidence. if snowflakes fell in the shape, say, of the heart of midlothian, it might be an accident. but if snowflakes fell in the exact shape of the maze at hampton court, i think one might call it a miracle. it is exactly as of such a miracle that i have since come to feel of the philosophy of christianity. the complication of our modern world proves the truth of the creed more perfectly than any of the plain problems of the ages of faith. it was in notting hill and battersea that i began to see that christianity was true. this is why the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and details which so much distresses those who admire christianity without believing in it. when once one believes in a creed, one is proud of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity of science. it shows how rich it is in discoveries. if it is right at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right. a stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. but a key and a lock are both complex. and if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key. but this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult to do what i now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth. it is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. it is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. he is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. but a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. he is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. and the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "why do you prefer civilization to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen." the whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. it has done so many things. but that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible. there is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness. the belief is so big that it takes a long time to get it into action. and this hesitation chiefly arises, oddly enough, from an indifference about where one should begin. all roads lead to rome; which is one reason why many people never get there. in the case of this defence of the christian conviction i confess that i would as soon begin the argument with one thing as another; i would begin it with a turnip or a taximeter cab. but if i am to be at all careful about making my meaning clear, it will, i think, be wiser to continue the current arguments of the last chapter, which was concerned to urge the first of these mystical coincidences, or rather ratifications. all i had hitherto heard of christian theology had alienated me from it. i was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen; and i cannot understand any one passing the age of seventeen without having asked himself so simple a question. i did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity and a great historical interest in the founder of christianity. but i certainly regarded him as a man; though perhaps i thought that, even in that point, he had an advantage over some of his modern critics. i read the scientific and sceptical literature of my time--all of it, at least, that i could find written in english and lying about; and i read nothing else; i mean i read nothing else on any other note of philosophy. the penny dreadfuls which i also read were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of christianity; but i did not know this at the time. i never read a line of christian apologetics. i read as little as i can of them now. it was huxley and herbert spencer and bradlaugh who brought me back to orthodox theology. they sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt. our grandmothers were quite right when they said that tom paine and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind. they do. they unsettled mine horribly. the rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use whatever; and when i had finished herbert spencer i had got as far as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all. as i laid down the last of colonel ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought broke across my mind, "almost thou persuadest me to be a christian." i was in a desperate way. this odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways. i take only one. as i read and re-read all the non-christian or anti-christian accounts of the faith, from huxley to bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind--the impression that christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. for not only (as i understood) had christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. it was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. no sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. no sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than i was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness. in case any reader has not come across the thing i mean, i will give such instances as i remember at random of this self-contradiction in the sceptical attack. i give four or five of them; there are fifty more. thus, for instance, i was much moved by the eloquent attack on christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom; for i thought (and still think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin. insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere. but if christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely pessimistic and opposed to life, then i was quite prepared to blow up st. paul's cathedral. but the extraordinary thing is this. they did prove to me in chapter i. (to my complete satisfaction) that christianity was too pessimistic; and then, in chapter ii., they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too optimistic. one accusation against christianity was that it prevented men, by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom of nature. but another accusation was that it comforted men with a fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery. one great agnostic asked why nature was not beautiful enough, and why it was hard to be free. another great agnostic objected that christian optimism, "the garment of make-believe woven by pious hands," hid from us the fact that nature was ugly, and that it was impossible to be free. one rationalist had hardly done calling christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool's paradise. this puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent. christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world. the state of the christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it. if it falsified human vision it must falsify it one way or another; it could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles. i rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men of that time, the taunts which swinburne hurled at the dreariness of the creed- "thou hast conquered, o pale galilaean, the world has grown gray with thy breath." but when i read the same poet's accounts of paganism (as in "atalanta"), i gathered that the world was, if possible, more gray before the galilean breathed on it than afterwards. the poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself was pitch dark. and yet, somehow, christianity had darkened it. the very man who denounced christianity for pessimism was himself a pessimist. i thought there must be something wrong. and it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other. it must be understood that i did not conclude hastily that the accusations were false or the accusers fools. i simply deduced that christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made out. a thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. a man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape. at this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the christian religion; i did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind. here is another case of the same kind. i felt that a strong case against christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called "christian," especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting. the great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile. bradlaugh in an expansive way, huxley, in a reticent way, were decidedly men. in comparison, it did seem tenable that there was something weak and over patient about christian counsels. the gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation that christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep. i read it and believed it, and if i had read nothing different, i should have gone on believing it. but i read something very different. i turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned up-side down. now i found that i was to hate christianity not for fighting too little, but for fighting too much. christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars. christianity had deluged the world with blood. i had got thoroughly angry with the christian, because he never was angry. and now i was told to be angry with him because his anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history; because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun. the very people who reproached christianity with the meekness and non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached it also with the violence and valour of the crusades. it was the fault of poor old christianity (somehow or other) both that edward the confessor did not fight and that richard coeur de leon did. the quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic christians; and yet the massacres of cromwell and alva were characteristic christian crimes. what could it all mean? what was this christianity which always forbade war and always produced wars? what could be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight, and second because it was always fighting? in what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness? the shape of christianity grew a queerer shape every instant. i take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves the one real objection to the faith. the one real objection to the christian religion is simply that it is one religion. the world is a big place, full of very different kinds of people. christianity (it may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people; it began in palestine, it has practically stopped with europe. i was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and i was much drawn towards the doctrine often preached in ethical societies-i mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of all humanity founded on the omnipresence of the human conscience. creeds, it was said, divided men; but at least morals united them. the soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common sense. it might find confucius under eastern trees, and he would be writing "thou shalt not steal." it might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would be "little boys should tell the truth." i believed this doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense, and i believe it still--with other things. and i was thoroughly annoyed with christianity for suggesting (as i supposed) that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason. but then i found an astonishing thing. i found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from plato to emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another. if i asked, say, for an altar, i was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. but if i mildly pointed out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages. i found it was their daily taunt against christianity that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark. but i also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark. their chief insult to christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative insistence on the two things. when considering some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd religions some men had. we could trust the ethics of epictetus, because ethics had never changed. we must not trust the ethics of bossuet, because ethics had changed. they changed in two hundred years, but not in two thousand. this began to be alarming. it looked not so much as if christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat christianity with. what again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves? i saw the same thing on every side. i can give no further space to this discussion of it in detail; but lest any one supposes that i have unfairly selected three accidental cases i will run briefly through a few others. thus, certain sceptics wrote that the great crime of christianity had been its attack on the family; it had dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation of the cloister, away from their homes and their children. but, then, other sceptics (slightly more advanced) said that the great crime of christianity was forcing the family and marriage upon us; that it doomed women to the drudgery of their homes and children, and forbade them loneliness and contemplation. the charge was actually reversed. or, again, certain phrases in the epistles or the marriage service, were said by the anti-christians to show contempt for woman's intellect. but i found that the anti-christians themselves had a contempt for woman's intellect; for it was their great sneer at the church on the continent that "only women" went to it. or again, christianity was reproached with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. but the next minute christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. it was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured. again christianity had always been accused of restraining sexuality too much, when bradlaugh the malthusian discovered that it restrained it too little. it is often accused in the same breath of prim respectability and of religious extravagance. between the covers of the same atheistic pamphlet i have found the faith rebuked for its disunion, "one thinks one thing, and one another," and rebuked also for its union, "it is difference of opinion that prevents the world from going to the dogs." in the same conversation a free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed christianity for despising jews, and then despised it himself for being jewish. i wished to be quite fair then, and i wish to be quite fair now; and i did not conclude that the attack on christianity was all wrong. i only concluded that if christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. there are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. there are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. but if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. for i found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. they gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. it was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the pope. an historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. the only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. really, if jesus of nazareth was not christ, he must have been antichrist. and then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. there had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. one explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. but there is another explanation. he might be the right shape. outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. very short men might feel him to be tall. old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. perhaps swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. perhaps, after all, it is christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad--in various ways. i tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. i was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. for instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. but then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. the modern man thought becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor. but then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. the modern man found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy. the man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entrees. the man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers. and surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. if there was any insanity at all, it was in the extravagant entrees, not in the bread and wine. i went over all the cases, and i found the key fitted so far. the fact that swinburne was irritated at the unhappiness of christians and yet more irritated at their happiness was easily explained. it was no longer a complication of diseases in christianity, but a complication of diseases in swinburne. the restraints of christians saddened him simply because he was more hedonist than a healthy man should be. the faith of christians angered him because he was more pessimist than a healthy man should be. in the same way the malthusians by instinct attacked christianity; not because there is anything especially anti-malthusian about christianity, but because there is something a little anti-human about malthusianism. nevertheless it could not, i felt, be quite true that christianity was merely sensible and stood in the middle. there was really an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified the secularists in their superficial criticism. it might be wise, i began more and more to think that it was wise, but it was not merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and respectable. its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other; still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek, meek beyond all decency. now, it was just at this point of the speculation that i remembered my thoughts about the martyr and the suicide. in that matter there had been this combination between two almost insane positions which yet somehow amounted to sanity. this was just such another contradiction; and this i had already found to be true. this was exactly one of the paradoxes in which sceptics found the creed wrong; and in this i had found it right. madly as christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide, they never felt these passions more madly than i had felt them long before i dreamed of christianity. then the most difficult and interesting part of the mental process opened, and i began to trace this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts of our theology. the idea was that which i had outlined touching the optimist and the pessimist; that we want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning. here i shall only trace it in relation to ethics. but i need not remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central in orthodox theology. for orthodox theology has specially insisted that christ was not a being apart from god and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very god. now let me trace this notion as i found it. all sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little. some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and evolution which seeks to destroy the meson or balance of aristotle. they seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively, or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever. but the great truism of the meson remains for all thinking men, and these people have not upset any balance except their own. but granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. that was the problem which paganism tried to solve: that was the problem which i think christianity solved and solved in a very strange way. paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. no quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. courage is almost a contradiction in terms. it means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "he that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. it is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. it might be printed in an alpine guide or a drill book. this paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. a man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. he can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. a soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. he must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. he must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. he must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. no philosopher, i fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and i certainly have not done so. but christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. and it has held up ever since above the european lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the chinese courage, which is a disdain of life. and now i began to find that this duplex passion was the christian key to ethics everywhere. everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions. take, for instance, the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere pride and mere prostration. the average pagan, like the average agnostic, would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them. in short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily with his nose in the air. this is a manly and rational position, but it is open to the objection we noted against the compromise between optimism and pessimism--the "resignation" of matthew arnold. being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour. this proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. on the other hand, this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass. it does not make him look up and see marvels; for alice must grow small if she is to be alice in wonderland. thus it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble. christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both of them. it separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. in one way man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. in so far as i am man i am the chief of creatures. in so far as i am a man i am the chief of sinners. all humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny--all that was to go. we were to hear no more the wail of ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over the brute, or the awful cry of homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. man was a statue of god walking about the garden. man had pre-eminence over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. the greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. now man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of st. dominic and the white snows of st. bernard. when one came to think of one's self, there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. there the realistic gentleman could let himself go--as long as he let himself go at himself. there was an open playground for the happy pessimist. let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. he must not say that a man, qua man, can be valueless. here, again in short, christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious. the church was positive on both points. one can hardly think too little of one's self. one can hardly think too much of one's soul. take another case: the complicated question of charity, which some highly uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy. charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things--pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. but if we ask ourselves (as we did in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan would feel about such a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it. a sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive, and some one couldn't: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. in so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. that again is rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. it leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent. and it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable. christianity came in here as before. it came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. it divided the crime from the criminal. the criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. the crime we must not forgive at all. it was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. we must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. there was room for wrath and love to run wild. and the more i considered christianity, the more i found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild. mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look. really they require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions as do social and political liberty. the ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. he breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. but in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the "odyssey." he is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism. but being outside patriotism he is outside "henry v." such a literary man is simply outside all literature: he is more of a prisoner than any bigot. for if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out. what we want is not the universality that is outside all normal sentiments; we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments. it is all the difference between being free from them, as a man is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of a city. i am free from windsor castle (that is, i am not forcibly detained there), but i am by no means free of that building. how can man be approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing them in a clear space without breakage or wrong? this was the achievement of this christian paradox of the parallel passions. granted the primary dogma of the war between divine and diabolic, the revolt and ruin of the world, their optimism and pessimism, as pure poetry, could be loosened like cataracts. st. francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than walt whitman. st. jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than schopenhauer. both passions were free because both were kept in their place. the optimist could pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march, the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle. but he must not call the fight needless. the pessimist might draw as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds. but he must not call the fight hopeless. so it was with all the other moral problems, with pride, with protest, and with compassion. by defining its main doctrine, the church not only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible only to anarchists. meekness grew more dramatic than madness. historic christianity rose into a high and strange coup de theatre of morality--things that are to virtue what the crimes of nero are to vice. the spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible and attractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the plantagenets, to the sublime pity of st. catherine, who, in the official shambles, kissed the bloody head of the criminal. poetry could be acted as well as composed. this heroic and monumental manner in ethics has entirely vanished with supernatural religion. they, being humble, could parade themselves: but we are too proud to be prominent. our ethical teachers write reasonably for prison reform; but we are not likely to see mr. cadbury, or any eminent philanthropist, go into reading gaol and embrace the strangled corpse before it is cast into the quicklime. our ethical teachers write mildly against the power of millionaires; but we are not likely to see mr. rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly whipped in westminster abbey. thus, the double charges of the secularists, though throwing nothing but darkness and confusion on themselves, throw a real light on the faith. it is true that the historic church has at once emphasised celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so) been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children. it has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of st. george. it has always had a healthy hatred of pink. it hates that combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers. it hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty gray. in fact, the whole theory of the church on virginity might be symbolized in the statement that white is a colour: not merely the absence of a colour. all that i am urging here can be expressed by saying that christianity sought in most of these cases to keep two colours coexistent but pure. it is not a mixture like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross. so it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges of the anti-christians about submission and slaughter. it is true that the church told some men to fight and others not to fight; and it is true that those who fought were like thunderbolts and those who did not fight were like statues. all this simply means that the church preferred to use its supermen and to use its tolstoyans. there must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers. there must be some good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem to enjoy being quakers. all that the church did (so far as that goes) was to prevent either of these good things from ousting the other. they existed side by side. the tolstoyans, having all the scruples of monks, simply became monks. the quakers became a club instead of becoming a sect. monks said all that tolstoy says; they poured out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the vanity of revenge. but the tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run the whole world; and in the ages of faith they were not allowed to run it. the world did not lose the last charge of sir james douglas or the banner of joan the maid. and sometimes this pure gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture; the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, in the soul of st. louis, the lion lay down with the lamb. but remember that this text is too lightly interpreted. it is constantly assured, especially in our tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. but that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. that is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. the real problem is--can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? that is the problem the church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved. this is what i have called guessing the hidden eccentricities of life. this is knowing that a man's heart is to the left and not in the middle. this is knowing not only that the earth is round, but knowing exactly where it is flat. christian doctrine detected the oddities of life. it not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions. those underrate christianity who say that it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. in fact every one did. but to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe-that was to anticipate a strange need of human nature. for no one wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one. any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy. but to find out how far one may be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy--that was a discovery in psychology. any one might say, "neither swagger nor grovel"; and it would have been a limit. but to say, "here you can swagger and there you can grovel"--that was an emancipation. this was the big fact about christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance. paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry. christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. in a gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress. so in christendom apparent accidents balanced. becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. it is at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. but the balance was not always in one man's body as in becket's; the balance was often distributed over the whole body of christendom. because a man prayed and fasted on the northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the southern cities; and because fanatics drank water on the sands of syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of england. this is what makes christendom at once so much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the pagan empire; just as amiens cathedral is not better but more interesting than the parthenon. if any one wants a modern proof of all this, let him consider the curious fact that, under christianity, europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations. patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing of one emphasis against another emphasis. the instinct of the pagan empire would have said, "you shall all be roman citizens, and grow alike; let the german grow less slow and reverent; the frenchmen less experimental and swift." but the instinct of christian europe says, "let the german remain slow and reverent, that the frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental. we will make an equipoise out of these excesses. the absurdity called germany shall correct the insanity called france." last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of christianity. i mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. it was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. the church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. it was no flock of sheep the christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. remember that the church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. the idea of birth through a holy spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. the smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. of these theological equalisations i have to speak afterwards. here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. a sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in europe. a slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the christmas trees or break all the easter eggs. doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. the church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless. this is the thrilling romance of orthodoxy. people have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. there never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. it was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. it was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. the church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. she swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. she left on one hand the huge bulk of arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make christianity too worldly. the next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. the orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox church was never respectable. it would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the arians. it would have been easy, in the calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. it is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. it is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. it is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. to have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of christendom--that would indeed have been simple. it is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. to have fallen into any one of the fads from gnosticism to christian science would indeed have been obvious and tame. but to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. vii the eternal revolution the following propositions have been urged: first, that some faith in our life is required even to improve it; second, that some dissatisfaction with things as they are is necessary even in order to be satisfied; third, that to have this necessary content and necessary discontent it is not sufficient to have the obvious equilibrium of the stoic. for mere resignation has neither the gigantic levity of pleasure nor the superb intolerance of pain. there is a vital objection to the advice merely to grin and bear it. the objection is that if you merely bear it, you do not grin. greek heroes do not grin: but gargoyles do--because they are christian. and when a christian is pleased, he is (in the most exact sense) frightfully pleased; his pleasure is frightful. christ prophesied the whole of gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and respectable people (such people as now object to barrel organs) objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of jerusalem. he said, "if these were silent, the very stones would cry out." under the impulse of his spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the facades of the mediaeval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces and open mouths. the prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out. if these things be conceded, though only for argument, we may take up where we left it the thread of the thought of the natural man, called by the scotch (with regrettable familiarity), "the old man." we can ask the next question so obviously in front of us. some satisfaction is needed even to make things better. but what do we mean by making things better? most modern talk on this matter is a mere argument in a circle--that circle which we have already made the symbol of madness and of mere rationalism. evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it helps evolution. the elephant stands on the tortoise, and the tortoise on the elephant. obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle in nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human or divine theory), there is no principle in nature. for instance, the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that there is no equality in nature. he is right, but he does not see the logical addendum. there is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature. inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value. to read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it. both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable. but nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. she does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. we think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. but if the mouse were a german pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. he might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive. just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence. it all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. you cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. you cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. you cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got. we cannot, then, get the ideal itself from nature, and as we follow here the first and natural speculation, we will leave out (for the present) the idea of getting it from god. we must have our own vision. but the attempts of most moderns to express it are highly vague. some fall back simply on the clock: they talk as if mere passage through time brought some superiority; so that even a man of the first mental calibre carelessly uses the phrase that human morality is never up to date. how can anything be up to date?-a date has no character. how can one say that christmas celebrations are not suitable to the twenty-fifth of a month? what the writer meant, of course, was that the majority is behind his favourite minority--or in front of it. other vague modern people take refuge in material metaphors; in fact, this is the chief mark of vague modern people. not daring to define their doctrine of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality. thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high." it is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase from a steeple or a weathercock. "tommy was a good boy" is a pure philosophical statement, worthy of plato or aquinas. "tommy lived the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule. this, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. no one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. he was not at all bold. he never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did aristotle and calvin, and even karl marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. he said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. so, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. he says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. he does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. and if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either. then again, some people fall back on sheer submission and sitting still. nature is going to do something some day; nobody knows what, and nobody knows when. we have no reason for acting, and no reason for not acting. if anything happens it is right: if anything is prevented it was wrong. again, some people try to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything. because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs. yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know. lastly, there is a fourth class of people who take whatever it is that they happen to want, and say that that is the ultimate aim of evolution. and these are the only sensible people. this is the only really healthy way with the word evolution, to work for what you want, and to call that evolution. the only intelligible sense that progress or advance can have among men, is that we have a definite vision, and that we wish to make the whole world like that vision. if you like to put it so, the essence of the doctrine is that what we have around us is the mere method and preparation for something that we have to create. this is not a world, but rather the material for a world. god has given us not so much the colours of a picture as the colours of a palette. but he has also given us a subject, a model, a fixed vision. we must be clear about what we want to paint. this adds a further principle to our previous list of principles. we have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it. we now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary) in order to have something to change it to. we need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress: personally i prefer to call it reform. for reform implies form. it implies that we are trying to shape the world in a particular image; to make it something that we see already in our minds. evolution is a metaphor from mere automatic unrolling. progress is a metaphor from merely walking along a road--very likely the wrong road. but reform is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men: it means that we see a certain thing out of shape and we mean to put it into shape. and we know what shape. now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. we have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. it should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any prussian sophist makes men doubt it. progress should mean that we are always walking towards the new jerusalem. it does mean that the new jerusalem is always walking away from us. we are not altering the real to suit the ideal. we are altering the ideal: it is easier. silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a man wanted a particular kind of world; say, a blue world. he would have no cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task; he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could work away (in every sense) until all was blue. he could have heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger. he could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. but if he worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it. if he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day, he would get on slowly. but if he altered his favourite colour every day, he would not get on at all. if, after reading a fresh philosopher, he started to paint everything red or yellow, his work would be thrown away: there would be nothing to show except a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of his early bad manner. this is exactly the position of the average modern thinker. it will be said that this is avowedly a preposterous example. but it is literally the fact of recent history. the great and grave changes in our political civilization all belonged to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. they belonged to the black and white epoch when men believed fixedly in toryism, in protestantism, in calvinism, in reform, and not unfrequently in revolution. and whatever each man believed in he hammered at steadily, without scepticism: and there was a time when the established church might have fallen, and the house of lords nearly fell. it was because radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was because radicals were wise enough to be conservative. but in the existing atmosphere there is not enough time and tradition in radicalism to pull anything down. there is a great deal of truth in lord hugh cecil's suggestion (made in a fine speech) that the era of change is over, and that ours is an era of conservation and repose. but probably it would pain lord hugh cecil if he realized (what is certainly the case) that ours is only an age of conservation because it is an age of complete unbelief. let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same. the more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. the net result of all our political suggestions, collectivism, tolstoyanism, neo-feudalism, communism, anarchy, scientific bureaucracy--the plain fruit of all of them is that the monarchy and the house of lords will remain. the net result of all the new religions will be that the church of england will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. it was karl marx, nietzsche, tolstoy, cunninghame grahame, bernard shaw and auberon herbert, who between them, with bowed gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the archbishop of canterbury. we may say broadly that free thought is the best of all the safeguards against freedom. managed in a modern style the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself. again, it may be said that this instance is remote or extreme. but, again, it is exactly true of the men in the streets around us. it is true that the negro slave, being a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection of loyalty, or a human affection for liberty. but the man we see every day--the worker in mr. gradgrind's factory, the little clerk in mr. gradgrind's office--he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom. he is kept quiet with revolutionary literature. he is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of wild philosophies. he is a marxian one day, a nietzscheite the next day, a superman (probably) the next day; and a slave every day. the only thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory. the only man who gains by all the philosophies is gradgrind. it would be worth his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied with sceptical literature. and now i come to think of it, of course, gradgrind is famous for giving libraries. he shows his sense. all modern books are on his side. as long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. no ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. the modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind. this, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards which progress is directed; it must be fixed. whistler used to make many rapid studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he tore up twenty portraits. but it would matter if he looked up twenty times, and each time saw a new person sitting placidly for his portrait. so it does not matter (comparatively speaking) how often humanity fails to imitate its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitful. but it does frightfully matter how often humanity changes its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitless. the question therefore becomes this: how can we keep the artist discontented with his pictures while preventing him from being vitally discontented with his art? how can we make a man always dissatisfied with his work, yet always satisfied with working? how can we make sure that the portrait painter will throw the portrait out of window instead of taking the natural and more human course of throwing the sitter out of window? a strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary for rebelling. this fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any sort of revolution. man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas; but he will only act swiftly upon old ideas. if i am merely to float or fade or evolve, it may be towards something anarchic; but if i am to riot, it must be for something respectable. this is the whole weakness of certain schools of progress and moral evolution. they suggest that there has been a slow movement towards morality, with an imperceptible ethical change in every year or at every instant. there is only one great disadvantage in this theory. it talks of a slow movement towards justice; but it does not permit a swift movement. a man is not allowed to leap up and declare a certain state of things to be intrinsically intolerable. to make the matter clear, it is better to take a specific example. certain of the idealistic vegetarians, such as mr. salt, say that the time has now come for eating no meat; by implication they assume that at one time it was right to eat meat, and they suggest (in words that could be quoted) that some day it may be wrong to eat milk and eggs. i do not discuss here the question of what is justice to animals. i only say that whatever is justice ought, under given conditions, to be prompt justice. if an animal is wronged, we ought to be able to rush to his rescue. but how can we rush if we are, perhaps, in advance of our time? how can we rush to catch a train which may not arrive for a few centuries? how can i denounce a man for skinning cats, if he is only now what i may possibly become in drinking a glass of milk? a splendid and insane russian sect ran about taking all the cattle out of all the carts. how can i pluck up courage to take the horse out of my hansom-cab, when i do not know whether my evolutionary watch is only a little fast or the cabman's a little slow? suppose i say to a sweater, "slavery suited one stage of evolution." and suppose he answers, "and sweating suits this stage of evolution." how can i answer if there is no eternal test? if sweaters can be behind the current morality, why should not philanthropists be in front of it? what on earth is the current morality, except in its literal sense--the morality that is always running away? thus we may say that a permanent ideal is as necessary to the innovator as to the conservative; it is necessary whether we wish the king's orders to be promptly executed or whether we only wish the king to be promptly executed. the guillotine has many sins, but to do it justice there is nothing evolutionary about it. the favourite evolutionary argument finds its best answer in the axe. the evolutionist says, "where do you draw the line?" the revolutionist answers, "i draw it here: exactly between your head and body." there must at any given moment be an abstract right and wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must be something eternal if there is to be anything sudden. therefore for all intelligible human purposes, for altering things or for keeping things as they are, for founding a system for ever, as in china, or for altering it every month as in the early french revolution, it is equally necessary that the vision should be a fixed vision. this is our first requirement. when i had written this down, i felt once again the presence of something else in the discussion: as a man hears a church bell above the sound of the street. something seemed to be saying, "my ideal at least is fixed; for it was fixed before the foundations of the world. my vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered; for it is called eden. you may alter the place to which you are going; but you cannot alter the place from which you have come. to the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men god has been put under the feet of satan. in the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. but in this world heaven is rebelling against hell. for the orthodox there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration. at any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which no man has seen since adam. no unchanging custom, no changing evolution can make the original good any thing but good. man may have had concubines as long as cows have had horns: still they are not a part of him if they are sinful. men may have been under oppression ever since fish were under water; still they ought not to be, if oppression is sinful. the chain may seem as natural to the slave, or the paint to the harlot, as does the plume to the bird or the burrow to the fox; still they are not, if they are sinful. i lift my prehistoric legend to defy all your history. your vision is not merely a fixture: it is a fact." i paused to note the new coincidence of christianity: but i passed on. i passed on to the next necessity of any ideal of progress. some people (as we have said) seem to believe in an automatic and impersonal progress in the nature of things. but it is clear that no political activity can be encouraged by saying that progress is natural and inevitable; that is not a reason for being active, but rather a reason for being lazy. if we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. the pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive. but it is to none of these obvious comments that i wish primarily to call attention. the only arresting point is this: that if we suppose improvement to be natural, it must be fairly simple. the world might conceivably be working towards one consummation, but hardly towards any particular arrangement of many qualities. to take our original simile: nature by herself may be growing more blue; that is, a process so simple that it might be impersonal. but nature cannot be making a careful picture made of many picked colours, unless nature is personal. if the end of the world were mere darkness or mere light it might come as slowly and inevitably as dusk or dawn. but if the end of the world is to be a piece of elaborate and artistic chiaroscuro, then there must be design in it, either human or divine. the world, through mere time, might grow black like an old picture, or white like an old coat; but if it is turned into a particular piece of black and white art-then there is an artist. if the distinction be not evident, i give an ordinary instance. we constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern humanitarians; i use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity. they suggest that through the ages we have been growing more and more humane, that is to say, that one after another, groups or sections of beings, slaves, children, women, cows, or what not, have been gradually admitted to mercy or to justice. they say that we once thought it right to eat men (we didn't); but i am not here concerned with their history, which is highly unhistorical. as a fact, anthropophagy is certainly a decadent thing, not a primitive one. it is much more likely that modern men will eat human flesh out of affectation than that primitive man ever ate it out of ignorance. i am here only following the outlines of their argument, which consists in maintaining that man has been progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves, then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants. i think it wrong to sit on a man. soon, i shall think it wrong to sit on a horse. eventually (i suppose) i shall think it wrong to sit on a chair. that is the drive of the argument. and for this argument it can be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or inevitable progress. a perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might--one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children. this drift may be really evolutionary, because it is stupid. darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot be used to back up a single sane one. the kinship and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. on the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly humane; but you cannot be human. that you and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger. or it may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger. it is one way to train the tiger to imitate you, it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. but in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his claws. if you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of eden. for the obstinate reminder continued to recur: only the supernatural has taken a sane view of nature. the essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that nature is our mother. unfortunately, if you regard nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. the main point of christianity was this: that nature is not our mother: nature is our sister. we can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. this gives to the typically christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of isis and cybele. nature was a solemn mother to wordsworth or to emerson. but nature is not solemn to francis of assisi or to george herbert. to st. francis, nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. this, however, is hardly our main point at present; i have admitted it only in order to show how constantly, and as it were accidentally, the key would fit the smallest doors. our main point is here, that if there be a mere trend of impersonal improvement in nature, it must presumably be a simple trend towards some simple triumph. one can imagine that some automatic tendency in biology might work for giving us longer and longer noses. but the question is, do we want to have longer and longer noses? i fancy not; i believe that we most of us want to say to our noses, "thus far, and no farther; and here shall thy proud point be stayed:" we require a nose of such length as may ensure an interesting face. but we cannot imagine a mere biological trend towards producing interesting faces; because an interesting face is one particular arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth, in a most complex relation to each other. proportion cannot be a drift: it is either an accident or a design. so with the ideal of human morality and its relation to the humanitarians and the anti-humanitarians. it is conceivable that we are going more and more to keep our hands off things: not to drive horses; not to pick flowers. we may eventually be bound not to disturb a man's mind even by argument; not to disturb the sleep of birds even by coughing. the ultimate apotheosis would appear to be that of a man sitting quite still, nor daring to stir for fear of disturbing a fly, nor to eat for fear of incommoding a microbe. to so crude a consummation as that we might perhaps unconsciously drift. but do we want so crude a consummation? similarly, we might unconsciously evolve along the opposite or nietzschian line of development--superman crushing superman in one tower of tyrants until the universe is smashed up for fun. but do we want the universe smashed up for fun? is it not quite clear that what we really hope for is one particular management and proposition of these two things; a certain amount of restraint and respect, a certain amount of energy and mastery? if our life is ever really as beautiful as a fairy-tale, we shall have to remember that all the beauty of a fairy-tale lies in this: that the prince has a wonder which just stops short of being fear. if he is afraid of the giant, there is an end of him; but also if he is not astonished at the giant, there is an end of the fairy-tale. the whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder, and haughty enough to defy. so our attitude to the giant of the world must not merely be increasing delicacy or increasing contempt: it must be one particular proportion of the two--which is exactly right. we must have in us enough reverence for all things outside us to make us tread fearfully on the grass. we must also have enough disdain for all things outside us, to make us, on due occasion, spit at the stars. yet these two things (if we are to be good or happy) must be combined, not in any combination, but in one particular combination. the perfect happiness of men on the earth (if it ever comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satisfaction of animals. it will be an exact and perilous balance; like that of a desperate romance. man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them. this, then, is our second requirement for the ideal of progress. first, it must be fixed; second, it must be composite. it must not (if it is to satisfy our souls) be the mere victory of some one thing swallowing up everything else, love or pride or peace or adventure; it must be a definite picture composed of these elements in their best proportion and relation. i am not concerned at this moment to deny that some such good culmination may be, by the constitution of things, reserved for the human race. i only point out that if this composite happiness is fixed for us it must be fixed by some mind; for only a mind can place the exact proportions of a composite happiness. if the beatification of the world is a mere work of nature, then it must be as simple as the freezing of the world, or the burning up of the world. but if the beatification of the world is not a work of nature but a work of art, then it involves an artist. and here again my contemplation was cloven by the ancient voice which said, "i could have told you all this a long time ago. if there is any certain progress it can only be my kind of progress, the progress towards a complete city of virtues and dominations where righteousness and peace contrive to kiss each other. an impersonal force might be leading you to a wilderness of perfect flatness or a peak of perfect height. but only a personal god can possibly be leading you (if, indeed, you are being led) to a city with just streets and architectural proportions, a city in which each of you can contribute exactly the right amount of your own colour to the many coloured coat of joseph." twice again, therefore, christianity had come in with the exact answer that i required. i had said, "the ideal must be fixed," and the church had answered, "mine is literally fixed, for it existed before anything else." i said secondly, "it must be artistically combined, like a picture"; and the church answered, "mine is quite literally a picture, for i know who painted it." then i went on to the third thing, which, as it seemed to me, was needed for an utopia or goal of progress. and of all the three it is infinitely the hardest to express. perhaps it might be put thus: that we need watchfulness even in utopia, lest we fall from utopia as we fell from eden. we have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. but the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. the corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. the conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. but all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. but you do not. if you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. if you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. if you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. but this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. an almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. it is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. but, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before. thus england went mad with joy over the patriotic monarchy of elizabeth; and then (almost immediately afterwards) went mad with rage in the trap of the tyranny of charles the first. so, again, in france the monarchy became intolerable, not just after it had been tolerated, but just after it had been adored. the son of louis the well-beloved was louis the guillotined. so in the same way in england in the nineteenth century the radical manufacturer was entirely trusted as a mere tribune of the people, until suddenly we heard the cry of the socialist that he was a tyrant eating the people like bread. so again, we have almost up to the last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion. just recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start) that they are obviously nothing of the kind. they are, by the nature of the case, the hobbies of a few rich men. we have not any need to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty. it is the new rulers, the capitalist or the editor, who really hold up the modern world. there is no fear that a modern king will attempt to override the constitution; it is more likely that he will ignore the constitution and work behind its back; he will take no advantage of his kingly power; it is more likely that he will take advantage of his kingly powerlessness, of the fact that he is free from criticism and publicity. for the king is the most private person of our time. it will not be necessary for any one to fight again against the proposal of a censorship of the press. we do not need a censorship of the press. we have a censorship by the press. this startling swiftness with which popular systems turn oppressive is the third fact for which we shall ask our perfect theory of progress to allow. it must always be on the look out for every privilege being abused, for every working right becoming a wrong. in this matter i am entirely on the side of the revolutionists. they are really right to be always suspecting human institutions; they are right not to put their trust in princes nor in any child of man. the chieftain chosen to be the friend of the people becomes the enemy of the people; the newspaper started to tell the truth now exists to prevent the truth being told. here, i say, i felt that i was really at last on the side of the revolutionary. and then i caught my breath again: for i remembered that i was once again on the side of the orthodox. christianity spoke again and said: "i have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature to rust or to rot; i have always said that human beings as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous human beings. this eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the doctrine of progress. if you were a philosopher you would call it, as i do, the doctrine of original sin. you may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; i call it what it is--the fall." i have spoken of orthodoxy coming in like a sword; here i confess it came in like a battle-axe. for really (when i came to think of it) christianity is the only thing left that has any real right to question the power of the well-nurtured or the well-bred. i have listened often enough to socialists, or even to democrats, saying that the physical conditions of the poor must of necessity make them mentally and morally degraded. i have listened to scientific men (and there are still scientific men not opposed to democracy) saying that if we give the poor healthier conditions vice and wrong will disappear. i have listened to them with a horrible attention, with a hideous fascination. for it was like watching a man energetically sawing from the tree the branch he is sitting on. if these happy democrats could prove their case, they would strike democracy dead. if the poor are thus utterly demoralized, it may or may not be practical to raise them. but it is certainly quite practical to disfranchise them. if the man with a bad bedroom cannot give a good vote, then the first and swiftest deduction is that he shall give no vote. the governing class may not unreasonably say: "it may take us some time to reform his bedroom. but if he is the brute you say, it will take him very little time to ruin our country. therefore we will take your hint and not give him the chance." it fills me with horrible amusement to observe the way in which the earnest socialist industriously lays the foundation of all aristocracy, expatiating blandly upon the evident unfitness of the poor to rule. it is like listening to somebody at an evening party apologising for entering without evening dress, and explaining that he had recently been intoxicated, had a personal habit of taking off his clothes in the street, and had, moreover, only just changed from prison uniform. at any moment, one feels, the host might say that really, if it was as bad as that, he need not come in at all. so it is when the ordinary socialist, with a beaming face, proves that the poor, after their smashing experiences, cannot be really trustworthy. at any moment the rich may say, "very well, then, we won't trust them," and bang the door in his face. on the basis of mr. blatchford's view of heredity and environment, the case for the aristocracy is quite overwhelming. if clean homes and clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the present at any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air? if better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should not better conditions already make the rich more fit to govern them? on the ordinary environment argument the matter is fairly manifest. the comfortable class must be merely our vanguard in utopia. is there any answer to the proposition that those who have had the best opportunities will probably be our best guides? is there any answer to the argument that those who have breathed clean air had better decide for those who have breathed foul? as far as i know, there is only one answer, and that answer is christianity. only the christian church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. for she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man. further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment. i know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. i know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. but if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest--if, in short, we assume the words of christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, his words must at the very least mean this-that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. the mere minimum of the church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. for the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a christian) is not tenable. you will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. the fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. that is why he is a rich man. the whole case for christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. there is one thing that christ and all the christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. they have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. it is not demonstrably un-christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. it is not demonstrably un-christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. it is not certainly un-christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. but it is quite certainly un-christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor. a christian may consistently say, "i respect that man's rank, although he takes bribes." but a christian cannot say, as all modern men are saying at lunch and breakfast, "a man of that rank would not take bribes." for it is a part of christian dogma that any man in any rank may take bribes. it is a part of christian dogma; it also happens by a curious coincidence that it is a part of obvious human history. when people say that a man "in that position" would be incorruptible, there is no need to bring christianity into the discussion. was lord bacon a bootblack? was the duke of marlborough a crossing sweeper? in the best utopia, i must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment. much vague and sentimental journalism has been poured out to the effect that christianity is akin to democracy, and most of it is scarcely strong or clear enough to refute the fact that the two things have often quarrelled. the real ground upon which christianity and democracy are one is very much deeper. the one specially and peculiarly un-christian idea is the idea of carlyle-the idea that the man should rule who feels that he can rule. whatever else is christian, this is heathen. if our faith comments on government at all, its comment must be this--that the man should rule who does not think that he can rule. carlyle's hero may say, "i will be king"; but the christian saint must say "nolo episcopari." if the great paradox of christianity means anything, it means this-that we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who feels himself unfit to wear it. carlyle was quite wrong; we have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule. rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can't. now, this is one of the two or three vital defences of working democracy. the mere machinery of voting is not democracy, though at present it is not easy to effect any simpler democratic method. but even the machinery of voting is profoundly christian in this practical sense--that it is an attempt to get at the opinion of those who would be too modest to offer it. it is a mystical adventure; it is specially trusting those who do not trust themselves. that enigma is strictly peculiar to christendom. there is nothing really humble about the abnegation of the buddhist; the mild hindoo is mild, but he is not meek. but there is something psychologically christian about the idea of seeking for the opinion of the obscure rather than taking the obvious course of accepting the opinion of the prominent. to say that voting is particularly christian may seem somewhat curious. to say that canvassing is christian may seem quite crazy. but canvassing is very christian in its primary idea. it is encouraging the humble; it is saying to the modest man, "friend, go up higher." or if there is some slight defect in canvassing, that is in its perfect and rounded piety, it is only because it may possibly neglect to encourage the modesty of the canvasser. aristocracy is not an institution: aristocracy is a sin; generally a very venial one. it is merely the drift or slide of men into a sort of natural pomposity and praise of the powerful, which is the most easy and obvious affair in the world. it is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern "force" that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile or full of sensibility. the swiftest things are the softest things. a bird is active, because a bird is soft. a stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. the stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. the bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. in perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of "levitation." they might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. this has been always the instinct of christendom, and especially the instinct of christian art. remember how fra angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. it was the one thing that the modern pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real pre-raphaelites. burne-jones could never recover the deep levity of the middle ages. in the old christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. the tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. but the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. one "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. a man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. seriousness is not a virtue. it would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. it is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. it is much easier to write a good times leading article than a good joke in punch. for solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. it is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. satan fell by the force of gravity. now, it is the peculiar honour of europe since it has been christian that while it has had aristocracy it has always at the back of its heart treated aristocracy as a weakness--generally as a weakness that must be allowed for. if any one wishes to appreciate this point, let him go outside christianity into some other philosophical atmosphere. let him, for instance, compare the classes of europe with the castes of india. there aristocracy is far more awful, because it is far more intellectual. it is seriously felt that the scale of classes is a scale of spiritual values; that the baker is better than the butcher in an invisible and sacred sense. but no christianity, not even the most ignorant or perverse, ever suggested that a baronet was better than a butcher in that sacred sense. no christianity, however ignorant or extravagant, ever suggested that a duke would not be damned. in pagan society there may have been (i do not know) some such serious division between the free man and the slave. but in christian society we have always thought the gentleman a sort of joke, though i admit that in some great crusades and councils he earned the right to be called a practical joke. but we in europe never really and at the root of our souls took aristocracy seriously. it is only an occasional non-european alien (such as dr. oscar levy, the only intelligent nietzscheite) who can even manage for a moment to take aristocracy seriously. it may be a mere patriotic bias, though i do not think so, but it seems to me that the english aristocracy is not only the type, but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects. it is casual, it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one great merit that overlaps even these. the great and very obvious merit of the english aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take it seriously. in short, i had spelled out slowly, as usual, the need for an equal law in utopia; and, as usual, i found that christianity had been there before me. the whole history of my utopia has the same amusing sadness. i was always rushing out of my architectural study with plans for a new turret only to find it sitting up there in the sunlight, shining, and a thousand years old. for me, in the ancient and partly in the modern sense, god answered the prayer, "prevent us, o lord, in all our doings." without vanity, i really think there was a moment when i could have invented the marriage vow (as an institution) out of my own head; but i discovered, with a sigh, that it had been invented already. but, since it would be too long a business to show how, fact by fact and inch by inch, my own conception of utopia was only answered in the new jerusalem, i will take this one case of the matter of marriage as indicating the converging drift, i may say the converging crash of all the rest. when the ordinary opponents of socialism talk about impossibilities and alterations in human nature they always miss an important distinction. in modern ideal conceptions of society there are some desires that are possibly not attainable: but there are some desires that are not desirable. that all men should live in equally beautiful houses is a dream that may or may not be attained. but that all men should live in the same beautiful house is not a dream at all; it is a nightmare. that a man should love all old women is an ideal that may not be attainable. but that a man should regard all old women exactly as he regards his mother is not only an unattainable ideal, but an ideal which ought not to be attained. i do not know if the reader agrees with me in these examples; but i will add the example which has always affected me most. i could never conceive or tolerate any utopia which did not leave to me the liberty for which i chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself. complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any fun. to take an obvious instance, it would not be worth while to bet if a bet were not binding. the dissolution of all contracts would not only ruin morality but spoil sport. now betting and such sports are only the stunted and twisted shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure and romance, of which much has been said in these pages. and the perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. if i bet i must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. if i challenge i must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. if i vow to be faithful i must be cursed when i am unfaithful, or there is no fun in vowing. you could not even make a fairy tale from the experiences of a man who, when he was swallowed by a whale, might find himself at the top of the eiffel tower, or when he was turned into a frog might begin to behave like a flamingo. for the purpose even of the wildest romance results must be real; results must be irrevocable. christian marriage is the great example of a real and irrevocable result; and that is why it is the chief subject and centre of all our romantic writing. and this is my last instance of the things that i should ask, and ask imperatively, of any social paradise; i should ask to be kept to my bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously; i should ask utopia to avenge my honour on myself. all my modern utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully, for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties. but again i seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world. "you will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you get to my utopia. but the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure is to get there." viii the romance of orthodoxy it is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. but in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. there would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about. our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous. and this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect. most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. we know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. it is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. if you say "the social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. but if you begin "i wish jones to go to gaol and brown to say when jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. the long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. there is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration." but these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil of reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially ruinous and confusing. this difficulty occurs when the same long word is used in different connections to mean quite different things. thus, to take a well-known instance, the word "idealist" has one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece of moral rhetoric. in the same way the scientific materialists have had just reason to complain of people mixing up "materialist" as a term of cosmology with "materialist" as a moral taunt. so, to take a cheaper instance, the man who hates "progressives" in london always calls himself a "progressive" in south africa. a confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection with the word "liberal" as applied to religion and as applied to politics and society. it is often suggested that all liberals ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that is free. you might just as well say that all idealists ought to be high churchmen, because they ought to love everything that is high. you might as well say that low churchmen ought to like low mass, or that broad churchmen ought to like broad jokes. the thing is a mere accident of words. in actual modern europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself. it means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on. and none of these ideas are particularly liberal. nay, indeed almost all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose of this chapter to show. in the few following pages i propose to point out as rapidly as possible that on every single one of the matters most strongly insisted on by liberalisers of theology their effect upon social practice would be definitely illiberal. almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. for freeing the church now does not even mean freeing it in all directions. it means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas loosely called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of arianism, or of necessity. and every one of these (and we will take them one by one) can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression. in fact, it is a remarkable circumstance (indeed not so very remarkable when one comes to think of it) that most things are the allies of oppression. there is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression--and that is orthodoxy. i may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. but i can easily make up a german philosophy to justify him entirely. now let us take in order the innovations that are the notes of the new theology or the modernist church. we concluded the last chapter with the discovery of one of them. the very doctrine which is called the most old-fashioned was found to be the only safeguard of the new democracies of the earth. the doctrine seemingly most unpopular was found to be the only strength of the people. in short, we found that the only logical negation of oligarchy was in the affirmation of original sin. so it is, i maintain, in all the other cases. i take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles. for some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them. why, i cannot imagine, nor can anybody tell me. for some inconceivable cause a "broad" or "liberal" clergyman always means a man who wishes at least to diminish the number of miracles; it never means a man who wishes to increase that number. it always means a man who is free to disbelieve that christ came out of his grave; it never means a man who is free to believe that his own aunt came out of her grave. it is common to find trouble in a parish because the parish priest cannot admit that st. peter walked on water; yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish because the clergyman says that his father walked on the serpentine? and this is not because (as the swift secularist debater would immediately retort) miracles cannot be believed in our experience. it is not because "miracles do not happen," as in the dogma which matthew arnold recited with simple faith. more supernatural things are alleged to have happened in our time than would have been possible eighty years ago. men of science believe in such marvels much more than they did: the most perplexing, and even horrible, prodigies of mind and spirit are always being unveiled in modern psychology. things that the old science at least would frankly have rejected as miracles are hourly being asserted by the new science. the only thing which is still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the new theology. but in truth this notion that it is "free" to deny miracles has nothing to do with the evidence for or against them. it is a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism. the man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the resurrection because his liberal christianity allowed him to doubt it. he disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it. tennyson, a very typical nineteenth century man, uttered one of the instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he said that there was faith in their honest doubt. there was indeed. those words have a profound and even a horrible truth. in their doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos. the doubts of the agnostic were only the dogmas of the monist. of the fact and evidence of the supernatural i will speak afterwards. here we are only concerned with this clear point; that in so far as the liberal idea of freedom can be said to be on either side in the discussion about miracles, it is obviously on the side of miracles. reform or (in the only tolerable sense) progress means simply the gradual control of matter by mind. a miracle simply means the swift control of matter by mind. if you wish to feed the people, you may think that feeding them miraculously in the wilderness is impossible--but you cannot think it illiberal. if you really want poor children to go to the seaside, you cannot think it illiberal that they should go there on flying dragons; you can only think it unlikely. a holiday, like liberalism, only means the liberty of man. a miracle only means the liberty of god. you may conscientiously deny either of them, but you cannot call your denial a triumph of the liberal idea. the catholic church believed that man and god both had a sort of spiritual freedom. calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left it to god. scientific materialism binds the creator himself; it chains up god as the apocalypse chained the devil. it leaves nothing free in the universe. and those who assist this process are called the "liberal theologians." this, as i say, is the lightest and most evident case. the assumption that there is something in the doubt of miracles akin to liberality or reform is literally the opposite of the truth. if a man cannot believe in miracles there is an end of the matter; he is not particularly liberal, but he is perfectly honourable and logical, which are much better things. but if he can believe in miracles, he is certainly the more liberal for doing so; because they mean first, the freedom of the soul, and secondly, its control over the tyranny of circumstance. sometimes this truth is ignored in a singularly naive way, even by the ablest men. for instance, mr. bernard shaw speaks with hearty old-fashioned contempt for the idea of miracles, as if they were a sort of breach of faith on the part of nature: he seems strangely unconscious that miracles are only the final flowers of his own favourite tree, the doctrine of the omnipotence of will. just in the same way he calls the desire for immortality a paltry selfishness, forgetting that he has just called the desire for life a healthy and heroic selfishness. how can it be noble to wish to make one's life infinite and yet mean to wish to make it immortal? no, if it is desirable that man should triumph over the cruelty of nature or custom, then miracles are certainly desirable; we will discuss afterwards whether they are possible. but i must pass on to the larger cases of this curious error; the notion that the "liberalising" of religion in some way helps the liberation of the world. the second example of it can be found in the question of pantheism--or rather of a certain modern attitude which is often called immanentism, and which often is buddhism. but this is so much more difficult a matter that i must approach it with rather more preparation. the things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue. here is a case. there is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: "the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach." it is false; it is the opposite of the fact. the religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach. it is as if a man were to say, "do not be misled by the fact that the church times and the freethinker look utterly different, that one is painted on vellum and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular and the other hectagonal; read them and you will see that they say the same thing." the truth is, of course, that they are alike in everything except in the fact that they don't say the same thing. an atheist stockbroker in surbiton looks exactly like a swedenborgian stockbroker in wimbledon. you may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly godless in the umbrella. it is exactly in their souls that they are divided. so the truth is that the difficulty of all the creeds of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim: that they agree in meaning, but differ in machinery. it is exactly the opposite. they agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts. they agree in the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught. pagan optimists and eastern pessimists would both have temples, just as liberals and tories would both have newspapers. creeds that exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have guns. the great example of this alleged identity of all human religions is the alleged spiritual identity of buddhism and christianity. those who adopt this theory generally avoid the ethics of most other creeds, except, indeed, confucianism, which they like because it is not a creed. but they are cautious in their praises of mahommedanism, generally confining themselves to imposing its morality only upon the refreshment of the lower classes. they seldom suggest the mahommedan view of marriage (for which there is a great deal to be said), and towards thugs and fetish worshippers their attitude may even be called cold. but in the case of the great religion of gautama they feel sincerely a similarity. students of popular science, like mr. blatchford, are always insisting that christianity and buddhism are very much alike, especially buddhism. this is generally believed, and i believed it myself until i read a book giving the reasons for it. the reasons were of two kinds: resemblances that meant nothing because they were common to all humanity, and resemblances which were not resemblances at all. the author solemnly explained that the two creeds were alike in things in which all creeds are alike, or else he described them as alike in some point in which they are quite obviously different. thus, as a case of the first class, he said that both christ and buddha were called by the divine voice coming out of the sky, as if you would expect the divine voice to come out of the coal-cellar. or, again, it was gravely urged that these two eastern teachers, by a singular coincidence, both had to do with the washing of feet. you might as well say that it was a remarkable coincidence that they both had feet to wash. and the other class of similarities were those which simply were not similar. thus this reconciler of the two religions draws earnest attention to the fact that at certain religious feasts the robe of the lama is rent in pieces out of respect, and the remnants highly valued. but this is the reverse of a resemblance, for the garments of christ were not rent in pieces out of respect, but out of derision; and the remnants were not highly valued except for what they would fetch in the rag shops. it is rather like alluding to the obvious connection between the two ceremonies of the sword: when it taps a man's shoulder, and when it cuts off his head. it is not at all similar for the man. these scraps of puerile pedantry would indeed matter little if it were not also true that the alleged philosophical resemblances are also of these two kinds, either proving too much or not proving anything. that buddhism approves of mercy or of self-restraint is not to say that it is specially like christianity; it is only to say that it is not utterly unlike all human existence. buddhists disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess because all sane human beings disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess. but to say that buddhism and christianity give the same philosophy of these things is simply false. all humanity does agree that we are in a net of sin. most of humanity agrees that there is some way out. but as to what is the way out, i do not think that there are two institutions in the universe which contradict each other so flatly as buddhism and christianity. even when i thought, with most other well-informed, though unscholarly, people, that buddhism and christianity were alike, there was one thing about them that always perplexed me; i mean the startling difference in their type of religious art. i do not mean in its technical style of representation, but in the things that it was manifestly meant to represent. no two ideals could be more opposite than a christian saint in a gothic cathedral and a buddhist saint in a chinese temple. the opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the christian saint always has them very wide open. the buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. the mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. there cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. the buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. the christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. if we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things. a short time ago mrs. besant, in an interesting essay, announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite prepared to say what it was. according to mrs. besant this universal church is simply the universal self. it is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man. if i may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours. that is mrs. besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement. and i never heard of any suggestion in my life with which i more violently disagree. i want to love my neighbour not because he is i, but precisely because he is not i. i want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. if souls are separate love is possible. if souls are united love is obviously impossible. a man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. if the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. but upon mrs. besant's principle the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person. it is just here that buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism and immanence. and it is just here that christianity is on the side of humanity and liberty and love. love desires personality; therefore love desires division. it is the instinct of christianity to be glad that god has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. it is her instinct to say "little children love one another" rather than to tell one large person to love himself. this is the intellectual abyss between buddhism and christianity; that for the buddhist or theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the christian it is the purpose of god, the whole point of his cosmic idea. the world-soul of the theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. but the divine centre of christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. the oriental deity is like a giant who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it; but the christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him. we come back to the same tireless note touching the nature of christianity; all modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. no other philosophy makes god actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls. but according to orthodox christianity this separation between god and man is sacred, because this is eternal. that a man may love god it is necessary that there should be not only a god to be loved, but a man to love him. all those vague theosophical minds for whom the universe is an immense melting-pot are exactly the minds which shrink instinctively from that earthquake saying of our gospels, which declare that the son of god came not with peace but with a sundering sword. the saying rings entirely true even considered as what it obviously is; the statement that any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate. it is as true of democratic fraternity as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed. yet there is another and yet more awful truth behind the obvious meaning of this utterance of our lord. according to himself the son was a sword separating brother and brother that they should for an aeon hate each other. but the father also was a sword, which in the black beginning separated brother and brother, so that they should love each other at last. this is the meaning of that almost insane happiness in the eyes of the mediaeval saint in the picture. this is the meaning of the sealed eyes of the superb buddhist image. the christian saint is happy because he has verily been cut off from the world; he is separate from things and is staring at them in astonishment. but why should the buddhist saint be astonished at things?-since there is really only one thing, and that being impersonal can hardly be astonished at itself. there have been many pantheist poems suggesting wonder, but no really successful ones. the pantheist cannot wonder, for he cannot praise god or praise anything as really distinct from himself. our immediate business here, however, is with the effect of this christian admiration (which strikes outwards, towards a deity distinct from the worshipper) upon the general need for ethical activity and social reform. and surely its effect is sufficiently obvious. there is no real possibility of getting out of pantheism, any special impulse to moral action. for pantheism implies in its nature that one thing is as good as another; whereas action implies in its nature that one thing is greatly preferable to another. swinburne in the high summer of his scepticism tried in vain to wrestle with this difficulty. in "songs before sunrise," written under the inspiration of garibaldi and the revolt of italy he proclaimed the newer religion and the purer god which should wither up all the priests of the world: "what doest thou now looking godward to cry i am i, thou art thou, i am low, thou art high, i am thou that thou seekest to find him, find thou but thyself, thou art i." of which the immediate and evident deduction is that tyrants are as much the sons of god as garibaldis; and that king bomba of naples having, with the utmost success, "found himself" is identical with the ultimate good in all things. the truth is that the western energy that dethrones tyrants has been directly due to the western theology that says "i am i, thou art thou." the same spiritual separation which looked up and saw a good king in the universe looked up and saw a bad king in naples. the worshippers of bomba's god dethroned bomba. the worshippers of swinburne's god have covered asia for centuries and have never dethroned a tyrant. the indian saint may reasonably shut his eyes because he is looking at that which is i and thou and we and they and it. it is a rational occupation: but it is not true in theory and not true in fact that it helps the indian to keep an eye on lord curzon. that external vigilance which has always been the mark of christianity (the command that we should watch and pray) has expressed itself both in typical western orthodoxy and in typical western politics: but both depend on the idea of a divinity transcendent, different from ourselves, a deity that disappears. certainly the most sagacious creeds may suggest that we should pursue god into deeper and deeper rings of the labyrinth of our own ego. but only we of christendom have said that we should hunt god like an eagle upon the mountains: and we have killed all monsters in the chase. here again, therefore, we find that in so far as we value democracy and the self-renewing energies of the west, we are much more likely to find them in the old theology than the new. if we want reform, we must adhere to orthodoxy: especially in this matter (so much disputed in the counsels of mr. r.j.campbell), the matter of insisting on the immanent or the transcendent deity. by insisting specially on the immanence of god we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference--tibet. by insisting specially on the transcendence of god we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation--christendom. insisting that god is inside man, man is always inside himself. by insisting that god transcends man, man has transcended himself. if we take any other doctrine that has been called old-fashioned we shall find the case the same. it is the same, for instance, in the deep matter of the trinity. unitarians (a sect never to be mentioned without a special respect for their distinguished intellectual dignity and high intellectual honour) are often reformers by the accident that throws so many small sects into such an attitude. but there is nothing in the least liberal or akin to reform in the substitution of pure monotheism for the trinity. the complex god of the athanasian creed may be an enigma for the intellect; but he is far less likely to gather the mystery and cruelty of a sultan than the lonely god of omar or mahomet. the god who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an eastern king. the heart of humanity, especially of european humanity, is certainly much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world. for western religion has always felt keenly the idea "it is not well for man to be alone." the social instinct asserted itself everywhere as when the eastern idea of hermits was practically expelled by the western idea of monks. so even asceticism became brotherly; and the trappists were sociable even when they were silent. if this love of a living complexity be our test, it is certainly healthier to have the trinitarian religion than the unitarian. for to us trinitarians (if i may say it with reverence)--to us god himself is a society. it is indeed a fathomless mystery of theology, and even if i were theologian enough to deal with it directly, it would not be relevant to do so here. suffice it to say here that this triple enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an english fireside; that this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart: but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely god; the real unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. for it is not well for god to be alone. again, the same is true of that difficult matter of the danger of the soul, which has unsettled so many just minds. to hope for all souls is imperative; and it is quite tenable that their salvation is inevitable. it is tenable, but it is not specially favourable to activity or progress. our fighting and creative society ought rather to insist on the danger of everybody, on the fact that every man is hanging by a thread or clinging to a precipice. to say that all will be well anyhow is a comprehensible remark: but it cannot be called the blast of a trumpet. europe ought rather to emphasize possible perdition; and europe always has emphasized it. here its highest religion is at one with all its cheapest romances. to the buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. but to a christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way. in a thrilling novel (that purely christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. the hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. so christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't. in christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man "damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable. all christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. the vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. the true philosophy is concerned with the instant. will a man take this road or that?--that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. the aeons are easy enough to think about, any one can think about them. the instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. it is full of danger, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis. there is a great deal of real similarity between popular fiction and the religion of the western people. if you say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the catholic churches. life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) "to be continued in our next." also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. for death is distinctly an exciting moment. but the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will. you cannot finish a sum how you like. but you can finish a story how you like. when somebody discovered the differential calculus there was only one differential calculus he could discover. but when shakespeare killed romeo he might have married him to juliet's old nurse if he had felt inclined. and christendom has excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted on the theological free-will. it is a large matter and too much to one side of the road to be discussed adequately here; but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. the fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not. if you say that you are going to cure a profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is, "produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want to be profligates." a man may lie still and be cured of a malady. but he must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin; on the contrary, he must get up and jump about violently. the whole point indeed is perfectly expressed in the very word which we use for a man in hospital; "patient" is in the passive mood; "sinner" is in the active. if a man is to be saved from influenza, he may be a patient. but if he is to be saved from forging, he must be not a patient but an impatient. he must be personally impatient with forgery. all moral reform must start in the active not the passive will. here again we reach the same substantial conclusion. in so far as we desire the definite reconstructions and the dangerous revolutions which have distinguished european civilization, we shall not discourage the thought of possible ruin; we shall rather encourage it. if we want, like the eastern saints, merely to contemplate how right things are, of course we shall only say that they must go right. but if we particularly want to make them go right, we must insist that they may go wrong. lastly, this truth is yet again true in the case of the common modern attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of christ. the thing may be true or not; that i shall deal with before i end. but if the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary. that a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that god could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made god incomplete. christianity alone has felt that god, to be wholly god, must have been a rebel as well as a king. alone of all creeds, christianity has added courage to the virtues of the creator. for the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point--and does not break. in this indeed i approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and i apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. but in that terrific tale of the passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. it is written, "thou shalt not tempt the lord thy god." no; but the lord thy god may tempt himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in gethsemane. in a garden satan tempted man: and in a garden god tempted god. he passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. when the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that god was forsaken of god. and now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. they will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. nay, (the matter grows too difficult for human speech,) but let the atheists themselves choose a god. they will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which god seemed for an instant to be an atheist. these can be called the essentials of the old orthodoxy, of which the chief merit is that it is the natural fountain of revolution and reform; and of which the chief defect is that it is obviously only an abstract assertion. its main advantage is that it is the most adventurous and manly of all theologies. its chief disadvantage is simply that it is a theology. it can always be urged against it that it is in its nature arbitrary and in the air. but it is not so high in the air but that great archers spend their whole lives in shooting arrows at it--yes, and their last arrows; there are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their civilization if they may ruin also this old fantastic tale. this is the last and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers, and the firebrands that burn their own homes. men who begin to fight the church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the church. this is no exaggeration; i could fill a book with the instances of it. mr. blatchford set out, as an ordinary bible-smasher, to prove that adam was guiltless of sin against god; in manoeuvring so as to maintain this he admitted, as a mere side issue, that all the tyrants, from nero to king leopold, were guiltless of any sin against humanity. i know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now. he invokes buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to hartlepool. i have known people who protested against religious education with arguments against any education, saying that the child's mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young. i have known people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing that there can be no human judgment, even for practical purposes. they burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with, though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture. we do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. but what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? he sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of god. he offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. he is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all. and yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. its opponents only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. they do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political and common courage sense. they do not prove that adam was not responsible to god; how could they prove it? they only prove (from their premises) that the czar is not responsible to russia. they do not prove that adam should not have been punished by god; they only prove that the nearest sweater should not be punished by men. with their oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete one here. with their paralysing hints of all conclusions coming out wrong they do not tear the book of the recording angel; they only make it a little harder to keep the books of marshall & snelgrove. not only is the faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes are the fathers of all worldly confusion. the secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. the titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world. ix authority and the adventurer the last chapter has been concerned with the contention that orthodoxy is not only (as is often urged) the only safe guardian of morality or order, but is also the only logical guardian of liberty, innovation and advance. if we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the old doctrine of original sin. if we want to uproot inherent cruelties or lift up lost populations we cannot do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes mind; we can do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter. if we wish specially to awaken people to social vigilance and tireless pursuit of practise, we cannot help it much by insisting on the immanent god and the inner light: for these are at best reasons for contentment; we can help it much by insisting on the transcendent god and the flying and escaping gleam; for that means divine discontent. if we wish particularly to assert the idea of a generous balance against that of a dreadful autocracy we shall instinctively be trinitarian rather than unitarian. if we desire european civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal. and if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall rather wish to think that a veritable god was crucified, rather than a mere sage or hero. above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas. the rules of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member. the drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one. and now we come to the crucial question which truly concludes the whole matter. a reasonable agnostic, if he has happened to agree with me so far, may justly turn round and say, "you have found a practical philosophy in the doctrine of the fall; very well. you have found a side of democracy now dangerously neglected wisely asserted in original sin; all right. you have found a truth in the doctrine of hell; i congratulate you. you are convinced that worshippers of a personal god look outwards and are progressive; i congratulate them. but even supposing that those doctrines do include those truths, why cannot you take the truths and leave the doctrines? granted that all modern society is trusting the rich too much because it does not allow for human weakness; granted that orthodox ages have had a great advantage because (believing in the fall) they did allow for human weakness, why cannot you simply allow for human weakness without believing in the fall? if you have discovered that the idea of damnation represents a healthy idea of danger, why can you not simply take the idea of danger and leave the idea of damnation? if you see clearly the kernel of common-sense in the nut of christian orthodoxy, why cannot you simply take the kernel and leave the nut? why cannot you (to use that cant phrase of the newspapers which i, as a highly scholarly agnostic, am a little ashamed of using) why cannot you simply take what is good in christianity, what you can define as valuable, what you can comprehend, and leave all the rest, all the absolute dogmas that are in their nature incomprehensible?" this is the real question; this is the last question; and it is a pleasure to try to answer it. the first answer is simply to say that i am a rationalist. i like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions. if i am treating man as a fallen being it is an intellectual convenience to me to believe that he fell; and i find, for some odd psychological reason, that i can deal better with a man's exercise of freewill if i believe that he has got it. but i am in this matter yet more definitely a rationalist. i do not propose to turn this book into one of ordinary christian apologetics; i should be glad to meet at any other time the enemies of christianity in that more obvious arena. here i am only giving an account of my own growth in spiritual certainty. but i may pause to remark that the more i saw of the merely abstract arguments against the christian cosmology the less i thought of them. i mean that having found the moral atmosphere of the incarnation to be common sense, i then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the incarnation and found them to be common nonsense. in case the argument should be thought to suffer from the absence of the ordinary apologetic i will here very briefly summarise my own arguments and conclusions on the purely objective or scientific truth of the matter. if i am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why i believe in christianity, i can only answer, "for the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in christianity." i believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. but the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts. the secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. i mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. the very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion. now, the non-christianity of the average educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up of these loose but living experiences. i can only say that my evidences for christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it. for when i look at these various anti-christian truths, i simply discover that none of them are true. i discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows the other way. let us take cases. many a sensible modern man must have abandoned christianity under the pressure of three such converging convictions as these: first, that men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom. those three anti-christian arguments are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate; and they all converge. the only objection to them (i discover) is that they are all untrue. if you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. it is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. that man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. that an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. people talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. but elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes. certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. they have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? no; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. we talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. it is man that has broken out. all other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. all other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk. so that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins. it would be the same if i examined the second of the three chance rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine began in some darkness and terror. when i did attempt to examine the foundations of this modern idea i simply found that there were none. science knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man; for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic. a few professors choose to conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once innocent and general and that they gradually dwindled; but there is no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of indirect evidence is very much the other way. in the earliest legends we have, such as the tales of isaac and of iphigenia, human sacrifice is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new; as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods. history says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder in its earliest time. there is no tradition of progress; but the whole human race has a tradition of the fall. amusingly enough, indeed, the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity. learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot be true because every race of mankind remembers it. i cannot keep pace with these paradoxes. and if we took the third chance instance, it would be the same; the view that priests darken and embitter the world. i look at the world and simply discover that they don't. those countries in europe which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open-air. catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of paganism. we might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. so long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. but the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. they did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased. thus these three facts of experience, such facts as go to make an agnostic, are, in this view, turned totally round. i am left saying, "give me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some ancient happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan joy in the countries of the catholic church." one explanation, at any rate, covers all three: the theory that twice was the natural order interrupted by some explosion or revelation such as people now call "psychic." once heaven came upon the earth with a power or seal called the image of god, whereby man took command of nature; and once again (when in empire after empire men had been found wanting) heaven came to save mankind in the awful shape of a man. this would explain why the mass of men always look backwards; and why the only corner where they in any sense look forwards is the little continent where christ has his church. i know it will be said that japan has become progressive. but how can this be an answer when even in saying "japan has become progressive," we really only mean, "japan has become european"? but i wish here not so much to insist on my own explanation as to insist on my original remark. i agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being guided by three or four odd facts all pointing to something; only when i came to look at the facts i always found they pointed to something else. i have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-christian arguments; if that be too narrow a basis i will give on the spur of the moment another. these are the kind of thoughts which in combination create the impression that christianity is something weak and diseased. first, for instance, that jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the church would drag us back; third, that the people still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious--such people as the irish--are weak, unpractical, and behind the times. i only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when i looked into them independently i found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts. instead of looking at books and pictures about the new testament i looked at the new testament. there i found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god-and always like a god. christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, i think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the a fortiori. his "how much more" is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds. the diction used about christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. but the diction used by christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. that he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence. we cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent channel. the maniac is generally a monomaniac. here we must remember the difficult definition of christianity already given; christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other. the one explanation of the gospel language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis. i take in order the next instance offered: the idea that christianity belongs to the dark ages. here i did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalisations; i read a little history. and in history i found that christianity, so far from belonging to the dark ages, was the one path across the dark ages that was not dark. it was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. if any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. it arose in the mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the roman empire. the world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when constantine nailed the cross to the mast. it is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. this is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. the ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered rome. if our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. but the christian church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. she took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the gothic arch. in a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the church is the thing we have all heard said of it. how can we say that the church wishes to bring us back into the dark ages? the church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them. i added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from those who feel such people as the irish to be weakened or made stagnant by superstition. i only added it because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood. it is constantly said of the irish that they are impractical. but if we refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at what is done about them, we shall see that the irish are not only practical, but quite painfully successful. the poverty of their country, the minority of their members are simply the conditions under which they were asked to work; but no other group in the british empire has done so much with such conditions. the nationalists were the only minority that ever succeeded in twisting the whole british parliament sharply out of its path. the irish peasants are the only poor men in these islands who have forced their masters to disgorge. these people, whom we call priest-ridden, are the only britons who will not be squire-ridden. and when i came to look at the actual irish character, the case was the same. irishmen are best at the specially hard professions--the trades of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier. in all these cases, therefore, i came back to the same conclusion: the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. the sceptic is too credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias. again the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. the average sceptic wanted to know how i explained the namby-pamby note in the gospel, the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political impracticability of the celtic christians. but i wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "what is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the empire can actually help itself?" there is an answer: it is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of a real psychical disturbance. the highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old egyptian or the existing chinese. nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that only modern europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume. all other societies die finally and with dignity. we die daily. we are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics. it is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic christendom a sort of unnatural life: it could be explained as a supernatural life. it could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse. for our civilization ought to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the ragnorak of the end of rome. that is the weird inspiration of our estate: you and i have no business to be here at all. we are all revenants; all living christians are dead pagans walking about. just as europe was about to be gathered in silence to assyria and babylon, something entered into its body. and europe has had a strange life--it is not too much to say that it has had the jumps-ever since. i have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt in order to convey the main contention--that my own case for christianity is rational; but it is not simple. it is an accumulation of varied facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. but the ordinary agnostic has got his facts all wrong. he is a non-believer for a multitude of reasons; but they are untrue reasons. he doubts because the middle ages were barbaric, but they weren't; because darwinism is demonstrated, but it isn't; because miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly bright colours and gay with gold; because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it isn't, it is moving towards the supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train. but among these million facts all flowing one way there is, of course, one question sufficiently solid and separate to be treated briefly, but by itself; i mean the objective occurrence of the supernatural. in another chapter i have indicated the fallacy of the ordinary supposition that the world must be impersonal because it is orderly. a person is just as likely to desire an orderly thing as a disorderly thing. but my own positive conviction that personal creation is more conceivable than material fate, is, i admit, in a sense, undiscussable. i will not call it a faith or an intuition, for those words are mixed up with mere emotion, it is strictly an intellectual conviction; but it is a primary intellectual conviction like the certainty of self of the good of living. any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in god merely mystical; the phrase is not worth fighting about. but my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; i believe in them upon human evidences as i do in the discovery of america. upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. the fact is quite the other way. the believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. the disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. the open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. the plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord. being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. still you could fill the british museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. if it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. if you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. you reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. that is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism-the abstract impossibility of miracle. you have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. it is we christians who accept all actual evidence--it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. but i am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, i have come to the conclusion that they occurred. all argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. if i say, "mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles," they answer, "but mediaevals were superstitious"; if i want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. if i say "a peasant saw a ghost," i am told, "but peasants are so credulous." if i ask, "why credulous?" the only answer is--that they see ghosts. iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen iceland. it is only fair to add that there is another argument that the unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself generally forgets to use it. he may say that there has been in many miraculous stories a notion of spiritual preparation and acceptance: in short, that the miracle could only come to him who believed in it. it may be so, and if it is so how are we to test it? if we are inquiring whether certain results follow faith, it is useless to repeat wearily that (if they happen) they do follow faith. if faith is one of the conditions, those without faith have a most healthy right to laugh. but they have no right to judge. being a believer may be, if you like, as bad as being drunk; still if we were extracting psychological facts from drunkards, it would be absurd to be always taunting them with having been drunk. suppose we were investigating whether angry men really saw a red mist before their eyes. suppose sixty excellent householders swore that when angry they had seen this crimson cloud: surely it would be absurd to answer "oh, but you admit you were angry at the time." they might reasonably rejoin (in a stentorian chorus), "how the blazes could we discover, without being angry, whether angry people see red?" so the saints and ascetics might rationally reply, "suppose that the question is whether believers can see visions--even then, if you are interested in visions it is no point to object to believers." you are still arguing in a circle--in that old mad circle with which this book began. the question of whether miracles ever occur is a question of common sense and of ordinary historical imagination: not of any final physical experiment. one may here surely dismiss that quite brainless piece of pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions" in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. if we are asking whether a dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous to insist that it shall be under conditions in which no two living souls in their senses would seriously communicate with each other. the fact that ghosts prefer darkness no more disproves the existence of ghosts than the fact that lovers prefer darkness disproves the existence of love. if you choose to say, "i will believe that miss brown called her fiance a periwinkle or, any other endearing term, if she will repeat the word before seventeen psychologists," then i shall reply, "very well, if those are your conditions, you will never get the truth, for she certainly will not say it." it is just as unscientific as it is unphilosophical to be surprised that in an unsympathetic atmosphere certain extraordinary sympathies do not arise. it is as if i said that i could not tell if there was a fog because the air was not clear enough; or as if i insisted on perfect sunlight in order to see a solar eclipse. as a common-sense conclusion, such as those to which we come about sex or about midnight (well knowing that many details must in their own nature be concealed) i conclude that miracles do happen. i am forced to it by a conspiracy of facts: the fact that the men who encounter elves or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers, but fishermen, farmers, and all men at once coarse and cautious; the fact that we all know men who testify to spiritualistic incidents but are not spiritualists, the fact that science itself admits such things more and more every day. science will even admit the ascension if you call it levitation, and will very likely admit the resurrection when it has thought of another word for it. i suggest the regalvanisation. but the strongest of all is the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural things are never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or of materialist dogmatism--i may say materialist mysticism. the sceptic always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need not be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed. for i hope we may dismiss the argument against wonders attempted in the mere recapitulation of frauds, of swindling mediums or trick miracles. that is not an argument at all, good or bad. a false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as much as a forged banknote disproves the existence of the bank of england-if anything, it proves its existence. given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena do occur (my evidence for which is complex but rational), we then collide with one of the worst mental evils of the age. the greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this: that men began to use the word "spiritual" as the same as the word "good." they thought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was to grow in virtue. when scientific evolution was announced, some feared that it would encourage mere animality. it did worse: it encouraged mere spirituality. it taught men to think that so long as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel. but you can pass from the ape and go to the devil. a man of genius, very typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly. benjamin disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of the angels. he was indeed; he was on the side of the fallen angels. he was not on the side of any mere appetite or animal brutality; but he was on the side of all the imperialism of the princes of the abyss; he was on the side of arrogance and mystery, and contempt of all obvious good. between this sunken pride and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must suppose, spirits of shapes and sizes. man, in encountering them, must make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering any other varied types in any other distant continent. it must be hard at first to know who is supreme and who is subordinate. if a shade arose from the under world, and stared at piccadilly, that shade would not quite understand the idea of an ordinary closed carriage. he would suppose that the coachman on the box was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind him a kicking and imprisoned captive. so, if we see spiritual facts for the first time, we may mistake who is uppermost. it is not enough to find the gods; they are obvious; we must find god, the real chief of the gods. we must have a long historic experience in supernatural phenomena-in order to discover which are really natural. in this light i find the history of christianity, and even of its hebrew origins, quite practical and clear. it does not trouble me to be told that the hebrew god was one among many. i know he was, without any research to tell me so. jehovah and baal looked equally important, just as the sun and the moon looked the same size. it is only slowly that we learn that the sun is immeasurably our master, and the small moon only our satellite. believing that there is a world of spirits, i shall walk in it as i do in the world of men, looking for the thing that i like and think good. just as i should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil at the north pole to make a comfortable fire, so i shall search the land of void and vision until i find something fresh like water, and comforting like fire; until i find some place in eternity, where i am literally at home. and there is only one such place to be found. i have now said enough to show (to any one to whom such an explanation is essential) that i have in the ordinary arena of apologetics, a ground of belief. in pure records of experiment (if these be taken democratically without contempt or favour) there is evidence first, that miracles happen, and second that the nobler miracles belong to our tradition. but i will not pretend that this curt discussion is my real reason for accepting christianity instead of taking the moral good of christianity as i should take it out of confucianism. i have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. and that is this: that the christian church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. it not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. once i saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day i may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. one fine morning i saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning i may see why priests were shaven. plato has told you a truth; but plato is dead. shakespeare has startled you with an image; but shakespeare will not startle you with any more. but imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. the man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living church is a man always expecting to meet plato and shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. he is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. there is one only other parallel to this position; and that is the parallel of the life in which we all began. when your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. when the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. when the rose smelt sweet you did not say "my father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truths that flowers smell." no: you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth to-morrow, as well as to-day. and if this was true of your father, it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine, to whom this book is dedicated. now, when society is in a rather futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education becomes futile: for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. the real thing has been done already, and thank god it is nearly always done by women. every man is womanised, merely by being born. they talk of the masculine woman; but every man is a feminised man. and if ever men walk to westminster to protest against this female privilege, i shall not join their procession. for i remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact; that the very time when i was most under a woman's authority, i was most full of flame and adventure. exactly because when my mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did come in winter (as she said); therefore the whole world was to me a fairyland of wonderful fulfilments, and it was like living in some hebraic age, when prophecy after prophecy came true. i went out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me, precisely because i had a clue to it: if i had held no clue it would not have been terrible, but tame. a mere unmeaning wilderness is not even impressive. but the garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found out in its turn. inch by inch i might discover what was the object of the ugly shape called a rake; or form some shadowy conjecture as to why my parents kept a cat. so, since i have accepted christendom as a mother and not merely as a chance example, i have found europe and the world once more like the little garden where i stared at the symbolic shapes of cat and rake; i look at everything with the old elvish ignorance and expectancy. this or that rite or doctrine may look as ugly and extraordinary as a rake; but i have found by experience that such things end somehow in grass and flowers. a clergyman may be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also as fascinating, for there must be some strange reason for his existence. i give one instance out of a hundred; i have not myself any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has certainly been a note of historic christianity. but when i look not at myself but at the world, i perceive that this enthusiasm is not only a note of christianity, but a note of paganism, a note of high human nature in many spheres. the greeks felt virginity when they carved artemis, the romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest of the great elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world. above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence-the great modern worship of children. for any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex. with all this human experience, allied with the christian authority, i simply conclude that i am wrong, and the church right; or rather that i am defective, while the church is universal. it takes all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. but the fact that i have no appreciation of the celibates, i accept like the fact that i have no ear for music. the best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of bach. celibacy is one flower in my father's garden, of which i have not been told the sweet or terrible name. but i may be told it any day. this, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. i do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. all other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true. alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive; it turns out to be right, like my father in the garden. theosophists for instance will preach an obviously attractive idea like re-incarnation; but if we wait for its logical results, they are spiritual superciliousness and the cruelty of caste. for if a man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins, people will tend to despise the beggar. but christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin; but when we wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity the beggar and distrust the king. men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium. orthodoxy makes us jump by the sudden brink of hell; it is only afterwards that we realise that jumping was an athletic exercise highly beneficial to our health. it is only afterwards that we realise that this danger is the root of all drama and romance. the strongest argument for the divine grace is simply its ungraciousness. the unpopular parts of christianity turn out when examined to be the very props of the people. the outer ring of christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. but in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within. and its despair is this, that it does not really believe that there is any meaning in the universe; therefore it cannot hope to find any romance; its romances will have no plots. a man cannot expect any adventures in the land of anarchy. but a man can expect any number of adventures if he goes travelling in the land of authority. one can find no meanings in a jungle of scepticism; but the man will find more and more meanings who walks through a forest of doctrine and design. here everything has a story tied to its tail, like the tools or pictures in my father's house; for it is my father's house. i end where i began--at the right end. i have entered at last the gate of all good philosophy. i have come into my second childhood. but this larger and more adventurous christian universe has one final mark difficult to express; yet as a conclusion of the whole matter i will attempt to express it. all the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up. the primary paradox of christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality. that is the inmost philosophy of the fall. in sir oliver lodge's interesting new catechism, the first two questions were: "what are you?" and "what, then, is the meaning of the fall of man?" i remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions; but i soon found that they were very broken and agnostic answers. to the question, "what are you?" i could only answer, "god knows." and to the question, "what is meant by the fall?" i could answer with complete sincerity, "that whatever i am, i am not myself." this is the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves, but even more natural to us than ourselves. and there is really no test of this except the merely experimental one with which these pages began, the test of the padded cell and the open door. it is only since i have known orthodoxy that i have known mental emancipation. but, in conclusion, it has one special application to the ultimate idea of joy. it is said that paganism is a religion of joy and christianity of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that paganism is pure sorrow and christianity pure joy. such conflicts mean nothing and lead nowhere. everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided. and the really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens. the gaiety of the best paganism, as in the playfulness of catullus or theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten by a grateful humanity. but it is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about its origin. to the pagan the small things are as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain; but the broad things are as bitter as the sea. when the pagan looks at the very core of the cosmos he is struck cold. behind the gods, who are merely despotic, sit the fates, who are deadly. nay, the fates are worse than deadly; they are dead. and when rationalists say that the ancient world was more enlightened than the christian, from their point of view they are right. for when they say "enlightened" they mean darkened with incurable despair. it is profoundly true that the ancient world was more modern than the christian. the common bond is in the fact that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence, about everything, while mediaevals were happy about that at least. i freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable about everything--they were quite jolly about everything else. i concede that the christians of the middle ages were only at peace about everything--they were at war about everything else. but if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of florence than in the theatre of athens or the open garden of epicurus. giotto lived in a gloomier town than euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe. the mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. nevertheless (i offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. this is what i call being born upside down. the sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstasies, while his brain is in the abyss. to the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. the explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. but when he has found his feet again he knows it. christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. the vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. we are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. we can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. so we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear. joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the christian. and as i close this chaotic volume i open again the strange small book from which all christianity came; and i am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. the tremendous figure which fills the gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. his pathos was natural, almost casual. the stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. he never concealed his tears; he showed them plainly on his open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of his native city. yet he concealed something. solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. he never restrained his anger. he flung furniture down the front steps of the temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. yet he restrained something. i say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. there was something that he hid from all men when he went up a mountain to pray. there was something that he covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. there was some one thing that was too great for god to show us when he walked upon our earth; and i have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth. heretics by gilbert k. chesterton "to my father" source heretics was copyrighted in 1905 by the john lane company. this electronic text is derived from the twelfth (1919) edition published by the john lane company of new york city and printed by the plimpton press of norwood, massachusetts. the text carefully follows that of the published edition (including british spelling). the author gilbert keith chesterton was born in london, england on the 29th of may, 1874. though he considered himself a mere "rollicking journalist," he was actually a prolific and gifted writer in virtually every area of literature. a man of strong opinions and enormously talented at defending them, his exuberant personality nevertheless allowed him to maintain warm friendships with people--such as george bernard shaw and h. g. wells--with whom he vehemently disagreed. chesterton had no difficulty standing up for what he believed. he was one of the few journalists to oppose the boer war. his 1922 "eugenics and other evils" attacked what was at that time the most progressive of all ideas, the idea that the human race could and should breed a superior version of itself. in the nazi experience, history demonstrated the wisdom of his once "reactionary" views. his poetry runs the gamut from the comic 1908 "on running after one's hat" to dark and serious ballads. during the dark days of 1940, when britain stood virtually alone against the armed might of nazi germany, these lines from his 1911 ballad of the white horse were often quoted: i tell you naught for your comfort, yea, naught for your desire, save that the sky grows darker yet and the sea rises higher. though not written for a scholarly audience, his biographies of authors and historical figures like charles dickens and st. francis of assisi often contain brilliant insights into their subjects. his father brown mystery stories, written between 1911 and 1936, are still being read and adapted for television. his politics fitted with his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and power of any sort. along with his friend hilaire belloc and in books like the 1910 "what's wrong with the world" he advocated a view called "distributionism" that was best summed up by his expression that every man ought to be allowed to own "three acres and a cow." though not known as a political thinker, his political influence has circled the world. some see in him the father of the "small is beautiful" movement and a newspaper article by him is credited with provoking gandhi to seek a "genuine" nationalism for india rather than one that imitated the british. heretics belongs to yet another area of literature at which chesterton excelled. a fun-loving and gregarious man, he was nevertheless troubled in his adolescence by thoughts of suicide. in christianity he found the answers to the dilemmas and paradoxes he saw in life. other books in that same series include his 1908 orthodoxy (written in response to attacks on this book) and his 1925 the everlasting man. orthodoxy is also available as electronic text. chesterton died on the 14th of june, 1936 in beaconsfield, buckinghamshire, england. during his life he published 69 books and at least another ten based on his writings have been published after his death. many of those books are still in print. ignatius press is systematically publishing his collected writings. table of contents 1. introductory remarks on the importance of othodoxy 2. on the negative spirit 3. on mr. rudyard kipling and making the world small 4. mr. bernard shaw 5. mr. h. g. wells and the giants 6. christmas and the esthetes 7. omar and the sacred vine 8. the mildness of the yellow press 9. the moods of mr. george moore 10. on sandals and simplicity 11. science and the savages 12. paganism and mr. lowes dickinson 13. celts and celtophiles 14. on certain modern writers and the institution of the family 15. on smart novelists and the smart set 16. on mr. mccabe and a divine frivolity 17. on the wit of whistler 18. the fallacy of the young nation 19. slum novelists and the slums 20. concluding remarks on the importance of orthodoxy i. introductory remarks on the importance of orthodoxy nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word "orthodox." in former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. it was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. he was orthodox. he had no pride in having rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him. the armies with their cruel security, the kings with their cold faces, the decorous processes of state, the reasonable processes of law--all these like sheep had gone astray. the man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right. if he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man; he was a church. he was the centre of the universe; it was round him that the stars swung. all the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. but a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. he says, with a conscious laugh, "i suppose i am very heretical," and looks round for applause. the word "heresy" not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. the word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. all this can mean one thing, and one thing only. it means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. for obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. the bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. the dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox. it is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in smithfield market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. that was done very frequently in the last decadence of the middle ages, and it failed altogether in its object. but there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. this is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. general theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of the rights of man is dismissed with the doctrine of the fall of man. atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. we will have no generalizations. mr. bernard shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: "the golden rule is that there is no golden rule." we are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. a man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. he may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. everything matters--except everything. examples are scarcely needed of this total levity on the subject of cosmic philosophy. examples are scarcely needed to show that, whatever else we think of as affecting practical affairs, we do not think it matters whether a man is a pessimist or an optimist, a cartesian or a hegelian, a materialist or a spiritualist. let me, however, take a random instance. at any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, "life is not worth living." we regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. and yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head. murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the royal humane society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. yet we never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist will strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced that theories do not matter. this was certainly not the idea of those who introduced our freedom. when the old liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be made. their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every one ought to bear independent testimony. the modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says. the former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating. never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now, when, for the first time, any one can discuss it. the old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed. sixty years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed atheist. then came the bradlaughites, the last religious men, the last men who cared about god; but they could not alter it. it is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. but their agony has achieved just this--that now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed christian. emancipation has only locked the saint in the same tower of silence as the heresiarch. then we talk about lord anglesey and the weather, and call it the complete liberty of all the creeds. but there are some people, nevertheless--and i am one of them--who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. we think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. we think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. we think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run, anything else affects them. in the fifteenth century men cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude; in the nineteenth century we feted and flattered oscar wilde because he preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out. it may be a question which of the two methods was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which was the more ludicrous. the age of the inquisition has not at least the disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a convict for practising. now, in our time, philosophy or religion, our theory, that is, about ultimate things, has been driven out, more or less simultaneously, from two fields which it used to occupy. general ideals used to dominate literature. they have been driven out by the cry of "art for art's sake." general ideals used to dominate politics. they have been driven out by the cry of "efficiency," which may roughly be translated as "politics for politics' sake." persistently for the last twenty years the ideals of order or liberty have dwindled in our books; the ambitions of wit and eloquence have dwindled in our parliaments. literature has purposely become less political; politics have purposely become less literary. general theories of the relation of things have thus been extruded from both; and we are in a position to ask, "what have we gained or lost by this extrusion? is literature better, is politics better, for having discarded the moralist and the philosopher?" when everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. so it is that when a man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health. vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims. there cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world. and there cannot be any better proof of the practical efficiency of a nation than that it talks constantly of a journey to the end of the world, a journey to the judgment day and the new jerusalem. there can be no stronger sign of a coarse material health than the tendency to run after high and wild ideals; it is in the first exuberance of infancy that we cry for the moon. none of the strong men in the strong ages would have understood what you meant by working for efficiency. hildebrand would have said that he was working not for efficiency, but for the catholic church. danton would have said that he was working not for efficiency, but for liberty, equality, and fraternity. even if the ideal of such men were simply the ideal of kicking a man downstairs, they thought of the end like men, not of the process like paralytics. they did not say, "efficiently elevating my right leg, using, you will notice, the muscles of the thigh and calf, which are in excellent order, i--" their feeling was quite different. they were so filled with the beautiful vision of the man lying flat at the foot of the staircase that in that ecstasy the rest followed in a flash. in practice, the habit of generalizing and idealizing did not by any means mean worldly weakness. the time of big theories was the time of big results. in the era of sentiment and fine words, at the end of the eighteenth century, men were really robust and effective. the sentimentalists conquered napoleon. the cynics could not catch de wet. a hundred years ago our affairs for good or evil were wielded triumphantly by rhetoricians. now our affairs are hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men. and just as this repudiation of big words and big visions has brought forth a race of small men in politics, so it has brought forth a race of small men in the arts. our modern politicians claim the colossal license of caesar and the superman, claim that they are too practical to be pure and too patriotic to be moral; but the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is chancellor of the exchequer. our new artistic philosophers call for the same moral license, for a freedom to wreck heaven and earth with their energy; but the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is poet laureate. i do not say that there are no stronger men than these; but will any one say that there are any men stronger than those men of old who were dominated by their philosophy and steeped in their religion? whether bondage be better than freedom may be discussed. but that their bondage came to more than our freedom it will be difficult for any one to deny. the theory of the unmorality of art has established itself firmly in the strictly artistic classes. they are free to produce anything they like. they are free to write a "paradise lost" in which satan shall conquer god. they are free to write a "divine comedy" in which heaven shall be under the floor of hell. and what have they done? have they produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than the things uttered by the fierce ghibbeline catholic, by the rigid puritan schoolmaster? we know that they have produced only a few roundels. milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats them at their own irreverence. in all their little books of verse you will not find a finer defiance of god than satan's. nor will you find the grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery christian felt it who described faranata lifting his head as in disdain of hell. and the reason is very obvious. blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. if any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about thor. i think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion. neither in the world of politics nor that of literature, then, has the rejection of general theories proved a success. it may be that there have been many moonstruck and misleading ideals that have from time to time perplexed mankind. but assuredly there has been no ideal in practice so moonstruck and misleading as the ideal of practicality. nothing has lost so many opportunities as the opportunism of lord rosebery. he is, indeed, a standing symbol of this epoch--the man who is theoretically a practical man, and practically more unpractical than any theorist. nothing in this universe is so unwise as that kind of worship of worldly wisdom. a man who is perpetually thinking of whether this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause or that cause is promising, is the man who will never believe in anything long enough to make it succeed. the opportunist politician is like a man who should abandon billiards because he was beaten at billiards, and abandon golf because he was beaten at golf. there is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. there is nothing that fails like success. and having discovered that opportunism does fail, i have been induced to look at it more largely, and in consequence to see that it must fail. i perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. i see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the homoousion were far more sensible than the people who are quarrelling about the education act. for the christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. but our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. if the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid. it has been left for the modern mobs of anglicans and nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it. for these reasons, and for many more, i for one have come to believe in going back to fundamentals. such is the general idea of this book. i wish to deal with my most distinguished contemporaries, not personally or in a merely literary manner, but in relation to the real body of doctrine which they teach. i am not concerned with mr. rudyard kipling as a vivid artist or a vigorous personality; i am concerned with him as a heretic--that is to say, a man whose view of things has the hardihood to differ from mine. i am not concerned with mr. bernard shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; i am concerned with him as a heretic--that is to say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong. i revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting something done. suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. a grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the middle ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the schoolmen, "let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of light. if light be in itself good--" at this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. all the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. but as things go on they do not work out so easily. some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. and there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. so, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of light. only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark. ii. on the negative spirit much has been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the hysteria which as often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. but let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense, necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality. it is more wholesome for this reason, that it can contemplate the idea of success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical ideal, in what stevenson called, with his usual startling felicity, "the lost fight of virtue." a modern morality, on the other hand, can only point with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow breaches of law; its only certainty is a certainty of ill. it can only point to imperfection. it has no perfection to point to. but the monk meditating upon christ or buddha has in his mind an image of perfect health, a thing of clear colours and clean air. he may contemplate this ideal wholeness and happiness far more than he ought; he may contemplate it to the neglect of exclusion of essential things; he may contemplate it until he has become a dreamer or a driveller; but still it is wholeness and happiness that he is contemplating. he may even go mad; but he is going mad for the love of sanity. but the modern student of ethics, even if he remains sane, remains sane from an insane dread of insanity. the anchorite rolling on the stones in a frenzy of submission is a healthier person fundamentally than many a sober man in a silk hat who is walking down cheapside. for many such are good only through a withering knowledge of evil. i am not at this moment claiming for the devotee anything more than this primary advantage, that though he may be making himself personally weak and miserable, he is still fixing his thoughts largely on gigantic strength and happiness, on a strength that has no limits, and a happiness that has no end. doubtless there are other objections which can be urged without unreason against the influence of gods and visions in morality, whether in the cell or street. but this advantage the mystic morality must always have--it is always jollier. a young man may keep himself from vice by continually thinking of disease. he may keep himself from it also by continually thinking of the virgin mary. there may be question about which method is the more reasonable, or even about which is the more efficient. but surely there can be no question about which is the more wholesome. i remember a pamphlet by that able and sincere secularist, mr. g. w. foote, which contained a phrase sharply symbolizing and dividing these two methods. the pamphlet was called beer and bible, those two very noble things, all the nobler for a conjunction which mr. foote, in his stern old puritan way, seemed to think sardonic, but which i confess to thinking appropriate and charming. i have not the work by me, but i remember that mr. foote dismissed very contemptuously any attempts to deal with the problem of strong drink by religious offices or intercessions, and said that a picture of a drunkard's liver would be more efficacious in the matter of temperance than any prayer or praise. in that picturesque expression, it seems to me, is perfectly embodied the incurable morbidity of modern ethics. in that temple the lights are low, the crowds kneel, the solemn anthems are uplifted. but that upon the altar to which all men kneel is no longer the perfect flesh, the body and substance of the perfect man; it is still flesh, but it is diseased. it is the drunkard's liver of the new testament that is marred for us, which we take in remembrance of him. now, it is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of the nineteenth century. if any ordinary man ever said that he was horrified by the subjects discussed in ibsen or maupassant, or by the plain language in which they are spoken of, that ordinary man was lying. the average conversation of average men throughout the whole of modern civilization in every class or trade is such as zola would never dream of printing. nor is the habit of writing thus of these things a new habit. on the contrary, it is the victorian prudery and silence which is new still, though it is already dying. the tradition of calling a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes down very late. but the truth is that the ordinary honest man, whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings, was not either disgusted or even annoyed at the candour of the moderns. what disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence of a clear realism, but the absence of a clear idealism. strong and genuine religious sentiment has never had any objection to realism; on the contrary, religion was the realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing that called names. this is the great difference between some recent developments of nonconformity and the great puritanism of the seventeenth century. it was the whole point of the puritans that they cared nothing for decency. modern nonconformist newspapers distinguish themselves by suppressing precisely those nouns and adjectives which the founders of nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at kings and queens. but if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke plainly about evil, it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly about good. the thing which is resented, and, as i think, rightly resented, in that great modern literature of which ibsen is typical, is that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment, till it goes almost blind with doubt. if we compare, let us say, the morality of the divine comedy with the morality of ibsen's ghosts, we shall see all that modern ethics have really done. no one, i imagine, will accuse the author of the inferno of an early victorian prudishness or a podsnapian optimism. but dante describes three moral instruments--heaven, purgatory, and hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of improvement, and the vision of failure. ibsen has only one--hell. it is often said, and with perfect truth, that no one could read a play like ghosts and remain indifferent to the necessity of an ethical self-command. that is quite true, and the same is to be said of the most monstrous and material descriptions of the eternal fire. it is quite certain the realists like zola do in one sense promote morality--they promote it in the sense in which the hangman promotes it, in the sense in which the devil promotes it. but they only affect that small minority which will accept any virtue of courage. most healthy people dismiss these moral dangers as they dismiss the possibility of bombs or microbes. modern realists are indeed terrorists, like the dynamiters; and they fail just as much in their effort to create a thrill. both realists and dynamiters are well-meaning people engaged in the task, so obviously ultimately hopeless, of using science to promote morality. i do not wish the reader to confuse me for a moment with those vague persons who imagine that ibsen is what they call a pessimist. there are plenty of wholesome people in ibsen, plenty of good people, plenty of happy people, plenty of examples of men acting wisely and things ending well. that is not my meaning. my meaning is that ibsen has throughout, and does not disguise, a certain vagueness and a changing attitude as well as a doubting attitude towards what is really wisdom and virtue in this life--a vagueness which contrasts very remarkably with the decisiveness with which he pounces on something which he perceives to be a root of evil, some convention, some deception, some ignorance. we know that the hero of ghosts is mad, and we know why he is mad. we do also know that dr. stockman is sane; but we do not know why he is sane. ibsen does not profess to know how virtue and happiness are brought about, in the sense that he professes to know how our modern sexual tragedies are brought about. falsehood works ruin in the pillars of society, but truth works equal ruin in the wild duck. there are no cardinal virtues of ibsenism. there is no ideal man of ibsen. all this is not only admitted, but vaunted in the most valuable and thoughtful of all the eulogies upon ibsen, mr. bernard shaw's quintessence of ibsenism. mr. shaw sums up ibsen's teaching in the phrase, "the golden rule is that there is no golden rule." in his eyes this absence of an enduring and positive ideal, this absence of a permanent key to virtue, is the one great ibsen merit. i am not discussing now with any fullness whether this is so or not. all i venture to point out, with an increased firmness, is that this omission, good or bad, does leave us face to face with the problem of a human consciousness filled with very definite images of evil, and with no definite image of good. to us light must be henceforward the dark thing--the thing of which we cannot speak. to us, as to milton's devils in pandemonium, it is darkness that is visible. the human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and of evil. now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us. a great silent collapse, an enormous unspoken disappointment, has in our time fallen on our northern civilization. all previous ages have sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the right life, what was really the good man. a definite part of the modern world has come beyond question to the conclusion that there is no answer to these questions, that the most that we can do is to set up a few notice-boards at places of obvious danger, to warn men, for instance, against drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the mere existence of their neighbours. ibsen is the first to return from the baffled hunt to bring us the tidings of great failure. every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. we are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. we are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. we are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. the modern man says, "let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." this is, logically rendered, "let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." he says, "away with your old moral formulae; i am for progress." this, logically stated, means, "let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it." he says, "neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education." this, clearly expressed, means, "we cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children." mr. h.g. wells, that exceedingly clear-sighted man, has pointed out in a recent work that this has happened in connection with economic questions. the old economists, he says, made generalizations, and they were (in mr. wells's view) mostly wrong. but the new economists, he says, seem to have lost the power of making any generalizations at all. and they cover this incapacity with a general claim to be, in specific cases, regarded as "experts", a claim "proper enough in a hairdresser or a fashionable physician, but indecent in a philosopher or a man of science." but in spite of the refreshing rationality with which mr. wells has indicated this, it must also be said that he himself has fallen into the same enormous modern error. in the opening pages of that excellent book mankind in the making, he dismisses the ideals of art, religion, abstract morality, and the rest, and says that he is going to consider men in their chief function, the function of parenthood. he is going to discuss life as a "tissue of births." he is not going to ask what will produce satisfactory saints or satisfactory heroes, but what will produce satisfactory fathers and mothers. the whole is set forward so sensibly that it is a few moments at least before the reader realises that it is another example of unconscious shirking. what is the good of begetting a man until we have settled what is the good of being a man? you are merely handing on to him a problem you dare not settle yourself. it is as if a man were asked, "what is the use of a hammer?" and answered, "to make hammers"; and when asked, "and of those hammers, what is the use?" answered, "to make hammers again". just as such a man would be perpetually putting off the question of the ultimate use of carpentry, so mr. wells and all the rest of us are by these phrases successfully putting off the question of the ultimate value of the human life. the case of the general talk of "progress" is, indeed, an extreme one. as enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. we meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress--that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what. progress, properly understood, has, indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning. but as used in opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous. so far from it being the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that of ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth. nobody has any business to use the word "progress" unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; i might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible--at any rate, without believing in some infallibility. for progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress. never perhaps since the beginning of the world has there been an age that had less right to use the word "progress" than we. in the catholic twelfth century, in the philosophic eighteenth century, the direction may have been a good or a bad one, men may have differed more or less about how far they went, and in what direction, but about the direction they did in the main agree, and consequently they had the genuine sensation of progress. but it is precisely about the direction that we disagree. whether the future excellence lies in more law or less law, in more liberty or less liberty; whether property will be finally concentrated or finally cut up; whether sexual passion will reach its sanest in an almost virgin intellectualism or in a full animal freedom; whether we should love everybody with tolstoy, or spare nobody with nietzsche;--these are the things about which we are actually fighting most. it is not merely true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this "progressive" age. it is, moreover, true that the people who have settled least what is progress are the most "progressive" people in it. the ordinary mass, the men who have never troubled about progress, might be trusted perhaps to progress. the particular individuals who talk about progress would certainly fly to the four winds of heaven when the pistol-shot started the race. i do not, therefore, say that the word "progress" is unmeaning; i say it is unmeaning without the previous definition of a moral doctrine, and that it can only be applied to groups of persons who hold that doctrine in common. progress is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically evident that it is illegitimate for us. it is a sacred word, a word which could only rightly be used by rigid believers and in the ages of faith. iii. on mr. rudyard kipling and making the world small there is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. when byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. the bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. the bored has certainly proved himself prosaic. we might, no doubt, find it a nuisance to count all the blades of grass or all the leaves of the trees; but this would not be because of our boldness or gaiety, but because of our lack of boldness and gaiety. the bore would go onward, bold and gay, and find the blades of grass as splendid as the swords of an army. the bore is stronger and more joyous than we are; he is a demigod--nay, he is a god. for it is the gods who do not tire of the iteration of things; to them the nightfall is always new, and the last rose as red as the first. the sense that everything is poetical is a thing solid and absolute; it is not a mere matter of phraseology or persuasion. it is not merely true, it is ascertainable. men may be challenged to deny it; men may be challenged to mention anything that is not a matter of poetry. i remember a long time ago a sensible sub-editor coming up to me with a book in his hand, called "mr. smith," or "the smith family," or some such thing. he said, "well, you won't get any of your damned mysticism out of this," or words to that effect. i am happy to say that i undeceived him; but the victory was too obvious and easy. in most cases the name is unpoetical, although the fact is poetical. in the case of smith, the name is so poetical that it must be an arduous and heroic matter for the man to live up to it. the name of smith is the name of the one trade that even kings respected, it could claim half the glory of that arma virumque which all epics acclaimed. the spirit of the smithy is so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed in a million poems, and every blacksmith is a harmonious blacksmith. even the village children feel that in some dim way the smith is poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic, when they feast on the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the cavern of that creative violence. the brute repose of nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the wierdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of mr. smith. yet our novelists call their hero "aylmer valence," which means nothing, or "vernon raymond," which means nothing, when it is in their power to give him this sacred name of smith--this name made of iron and flame. it would be very natural if a certain hauteur, a certain carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip, distinguished every one whose name is smith. perhaps it does; i trust so. whoever else are parvenus, the smiths are not parvenus. from the darkest dawn of history this clan has gone forth to battle; its trophies are on every hand; its name is everywhere; it is older than the nations, and its sign is the hammer of thor. but as i also remarked, it is not quite the usual case. it is common enough that common things should be poetical; it is not so common that common names should be poetical. in most cases it is the name that is the obstacle. a great many people talk as if this claim of ours, that all things are poetical, were a mere literary ingenuity, a play on words. precisely the contrary is true. it is the idea that some things are not poetical which is literary, which is a mere product of words. the word "signal-box" is unpoetical. but the thing signal-box is not unpoetical; it is a place where men, in an agony of vigilance, light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death. that is the plain, genuine description of what it is; the prose only comes in with what it is called. the word "pillar-box" is unpoetical. but the thing pillar-box is not unpoetical; it is the place to which friends and lovers commit their messages, conscious that when they have done so they are sacred, and not to be touched, not only by others, but even (religious touch!) by themselves. that red turret is one of the last of the temples. posting a letter and getting married are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic a thing must be irrevocable. we think a pillar-box prosaic, because there is no rhyme to it. we think a pillar-box unpoetical, because we have never seen it in a poem. but the bold fact is entirely on the side of poetry. a signal-box is only called a signal-box; it is a house of life and death. a pillar-box is only called a pillar-box; it is a sanctuary of human words. if you think the name of "smith" prosaic, it is not because you are practical and sensible; it is because you are too much affected with literary refinements. the name shouts poetry at you. if you think of it otherwise, it is because you are steeped and sodden with verbal reminiscences, because you remember everything in punch or comic cuts about mr. smith being drunk or mr. smith being henpecked. all these things were given to you poetical. it is only by a long and elaborate process of literary effort that you have made them prosaic. now, the first and fairest thing to say about rudyard kipling is that he has borne a brilliant part in thus recovering the lost provinces of poetry. he has not been frightened by that brutal materialistic air which clings only to words; he has pierced through to the romantic, imaginative matter of the things themselves. he has perceived the significance and philosophy of steam and of slang. steam may be, if you like, a dirty by-product of science. slang may be, if you like, a dirty by-product of language. but at least he has been among the few who saw the divine parentage of these things, and knew that where there is smoke there is fire--that is, that wherever there is the foulest of things, there also is the purest. above all, he has had something to say, a definite view of things to utter, and that always means that a man is fearless and faces everything. for the moment we have a view of the universe, we possess it. now, the message of rudyard kipling, that upon which he has really concentrated, is the only thing worth worrying about in him or in any other man. he has often written bad poetry, like wordsworth. he has often said silly things, like plato. he has often given way to mere political hysteria, like gladstone. but no one can reasonably doubt that he means steadily and sincerely to say something, and the only serious question is, what is that which he has tried to say? perhaps the best way of stating this fairly will be to begin with that element which has been most insisted by himself and by his opponents--i mean his interest in militarism. but when we are seeking for the real merits of a man it is unwise to go to his enemies, and much more foolish to go to himself. now, mr. kipling is certainly wrong in his worship of militarism, but his opponents are, generally speaking, quite as wrong as he. the evil of militarism is not that it shows certain men to be fierce and haughty and excessively warlike. the evil of militarism is that it shows most men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable. the professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines. thus the pretorian guard became more and more important in rome as rome became more and more luxurious and feeble. the military man gains the civil power in proportion as the civilian loses the military virtues. and as it was in ancient rome so it is in contemporary europe. there never was a time when nations were more militarist. there never was a time when men were less brave. all ages and all epics have sung of arms and the man; but we have effected simultaneously the deterioration of the man and the fantastic perfection of the arms. militarism demonstrated the decadence of rome, and it demonstrates the decadence of prussia. and unconsciously mr. kipling has proved this, and proved it admirably. for in so far as his work is earnestly understood the military trade does not by any means emerge as the most important or attractive. he has not written so well about soldiers as he has about railway men or bridge builders, or even journalists. the fact is that what attracts mr. kipling to militarism is not the idea of courage, but the idea of discipline. there was far more courage to the square mile in the middle ages, when no king had a standing army, but every man had a bow or sword. but the fascination of the standing army upon mr. kipling is not courage, which scarcely interests him, but discipline, which is, when all is said and done, his primary theme. the modern army is not a miracle of courage; it has not enough opportunities, owing to the cowardice of everybody else. but it is really a miracle of organization, and that is the truly kiplingite ideal. kipling's subject is not that valour which properly belongs to war, but that interdependence and efficiency which belongs quite as much to engineers, or sailors, or mules, or railway engines. and thus it is that when he writes of engineers, or sailors, or mules, or steam-engines, he writes at his best. the real poetry, the "true romance" which mr. kipling has taught, is the romance of the division of labour and the discipline of all the trades. he sings the arts of peace much more accurately than the arts of war. and his main contention is vital and valuable. every thing is military in the sense that everything depends upon obedience. there is no perfectly epicurean corner; there is no perfectly irresponsible place. everywhere men have made the way for us with sweat and submission. we may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness. but we are glad that the net-maker did not make the hammock in a fit of divine carelessness. we may jump upon a child's rocking-horse for a joke. but we are glad that the carpenter did not leave the legs of it unglued for a joke. so far from having merely preached that a soldier cleaning his side-arm is to be adored because he is military, kipling at his best and clearest has preached that the baker baking loaves and the tailor cutting coats is as military as anybody. being devoted to this multitudinous vision of duty, mr. kipling is naturally a cosmopolitan. he happens to find his examples in the british empire, but almost any other empire would do as well, or, indeed, any other highly civilized country. that which he admires in the british army he would find even more apparent in the german army; that which he desires in the british police he would find flourishing, in the french police. the ideal of discipline is not the whole of life, but it is spread over the whole of the world. and the worship of it tends to confirm in mr. kipling a certain note of worldly wisdom, of the experience of the wanderer, which is one of the genuine charms of his best work. the great gap in his mind is what may be roughly called the lack of patriotism--that is to say, he lacks altogether the faculty of attaching himself to any cause or community finally and tragically; for all finality must be tragic. he admires england, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. he admires england because she is strong, not because she is english. there is no harshness in saying this, for, to do him justice, he avows it with his usual picturesque candour. in a very interesting poem, he says that- "if england was what england seems" --that is, weak and inefficient; if england were not what (as he believes) she is--that is, powerful and practical- "how quick we'd chuck 'er! but she ain't!" he admits, that is, that his devotion is the result of a criticism, and this is quite enough to put it in another category altogether from the patriotism of the boers, whom he hounded down in south africa. in speaking of the really patriotic peoples, such as the irish, he has some difficulty in keeping a shrill irritation out of his language. the frame of mind which he really describes with beauty and nobility is the frame of mind of the cosmopolitan man who has seen men and cities. "for to admire and for to see, for to be'old this world so wide." he is a perfect master of that light melancholy with which a man looks back on having been the citizen of many communities, of that light melancholy with which a man looks back on having been the lover of many women. he is the philanderer of the nations. but a man may have learnt much about women in flirtations, and still be ignorant of first love; a man may have known as many lands as ulysses, and still be ignorant of patriotism. mr. rudyard kipling has asked in a celebrated epigram what they can know of england who know england only. it is a far deeper and sharper question to ask, "what can they know of england who know only the world?" for the world does not include england any more than it includes the church. the moment we care for anything deeply, the world--that is, all the other miscellaneous interests--becomes our enemy. christians showed it when they talked of keeping one's self "unspotted from the world;" but lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the "world well lost." astronomically speaking, i understand that england is situated on the world; similarly, i suppose that the church was a part of the world, and even the lovers inhabitants of that orb. but they all felt a certain truth--the truth that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe. thus mr. kipling does certainly know the world; he is a man of the world, with all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet. he knows england as an intelligent english gentleman knows venice. he has been to england a great many times; he has stopped there for long visits. but he does not belong to it, or to any place; and the proof of it is this, that he thinks of england as a place. the moment we are rooted in a place, the place vanishes. we live like a tree with the whole strength of the universe. the globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. he is always breathing, an air of locality. london is a place, to be compared to chicago; chicago is a place, to be compared to timbuctoo. but timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. the man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men--diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in africa, or in the ears as in europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern britons. the man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men--hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky. mr. kipling, with all his merits, is the globe-trotter; he has not the patience to become part of anything. so great and genuine a man is not to be accused of a merely cynical cosmopolitanism; still, his cosmopolitanism is his weakness. that weakness is splendidly expressed in one of his finest poems, "the sestina of the tramp royal," in which a man declares that he can endure anything in the way of hunger or horror, but not permanent presence in one place. in this there is certainly danger. the more dead and dry and dusty a thing is the more it travels about; dust is like this and the thistle-down and the high commissioner in south africa. fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy fruit trees on the pregnant mud of the nile. in the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. we were inclined to ask, "who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?" but for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. the rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. the moss is silent because the moss is alive. the truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. the telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. the telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. the first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. it is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel arabia as a whirl of sand or china as a flash of rice-fields. but arabia is not a whirl of sand and china is not a flash of rice-fields. they are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. if we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. to conquer these places is to lose them. the man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas. his mind creates distance; the motor-car stupidly destroys it. moderns think of the earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round, the spirit of a schoolmistress. this is shown in the odd mistake perpetually made about cecil rhodes. his enemies say that he may have had large ideas, but he was a bad man. his friends say that he may have been a bad man, but he certainly had large ideas. the truth is that he was not a man essentially bad, he was a man of much geniality and many good intentions, but a man with singularly small views. there is nothing large about painting the map red; it is an innocent game for children. it is just as easy to think in continents as to think in cobble-stones. the difficulty comes in when we seek to know the substance of either of them. rhodes' prophecies about the boer resistance are an admirable comment on how the "large ideas" prosper when it is not a question of thinking in continents but of understanding a few two-legged men. and under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. and it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars suburban. iv. mr. bernard shaw in the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities, when genial old ibsen filled the world with wholesome joy, and the kindly tales of the forgotten emile zola kept our firesides merry and pure, it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood. it may be doubted whether it is always or even generally a disadvantage. the man who is misunderstood has always this advantage over his enemies, that they do not know his weak point or his plan of campaign. they go out against a bird with nets and against a fish with arrows. there are several modern examples of this situation. mr. chamberlain, for instance, is a very good one. he constantly eludes or vanquishes his opponents because his real powers and deficiencies are quite different to those with which he is credited, both by friends and foes. his friends depict him as a strenuous man of action; his opponents depict him as a coarse man of business; when, as a fact, he is neither one nor the other, but an admirable romantic orator and romantic actor. he has one power which is the soul of melodrama--the power of pretending, even when backed by a huge majority, that he has his back to the wall. for all mobs are so far chivalrous that their heroes must make some show of misfortune--that sort of hypocrisy is the homage that strength pays to weakness. he talks foolishly and yet very finely about his own city that has never deserted him. he wears a flaming and fantastic flower, like a decadent minor poet. as for his bluffness and toughness and appeals to common sense, all that is, of course, simply the first trick of rhetoric. he fronts his audiences with the venerable affectation of mark antony- "i am no orator, as brutus is; but as you know me all, a plain blunt man." it is the whole difference between the aim of the orator and the aim of any other artist, such as the poet or the sculptor. the aim of the sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor; the aim of the orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator. once let mr. chamberlain be mistaken for a practical man, and his game is won. he has only to compose a theme on empire, and people will say that these plain men say great things on great occasions. he has only to drift in the large loose notions common to all artists of the second rank, and people will say that business men have the biggest ideals after all. all his schemes have ended in smoke; he has touched nothing that he did not confuse. about his figure there is a celtic pathos; like the gaels in matthew arnold's quotation, "he went forth to battle, but he always fell." he is a mountain of proposals, a mountain of failures; but still a mountain. and a mountain is always romantic. there is another man in the modern world who might be called the antithesis of mr. chamberlain in every point, who is also a standing monument of the advantage of being misunderstood. mr. bernard shaw is always represented by those who disagree with him, and, i fear, also (if such exist) by those who agree with him, as a capering humorist, a dazzling acrobat, a quick-change artist. it is said that he cannot be taken seriously, that he will defend anything or attack anything, that he will do anything to startle and amuse. all this is not only untrue, but it is, glaringly, the opposite of the truth; it is as wild as to say that dickens had not the boisterous masculinity of jane austen. the whole force and triumph of mr. bernard shaw lie in the fact that he is a thoroughly consistent man. so far from his power consisting in jumping through hoops or standing on his head, his power consists in holding his own fortress night and day. he puts the shaw test rapidly and rigorously to everything that happens in heaven or earth. his standard never varies. the thing which weak-minded revolutionists and weak-minded conservatives really hate (and fear) in him, is exactly this, that his scales, such as they are, are held even, and that his law, such as it is, is justly enforced. you may attack his principles, as i do; but i do not know of any instance in which you can attack their application. if he dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the lawlessness of socialists as much as that of individualists. if he dislikes the fever of patriotism, he dislikes it in boers and irishmen as well as in englishmen. if he dislikes the vows and bonds of marriage, he dislikes still more the fiercer bonds and wilder vows that are made by lawless love. if he laughs at the authority of priests, he laughs louder at the pomposity of men of science. if he condemns the irresponsibility of faith, he condemns with a sane consistency the equal irresponsibility of art. he has pleased all the bohemians by saying that women are equal to men; but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women. he is almost mechanically just; he has something of the terrible quality of a machine. the man who is really wild and whirling, the man who is really fantastic and incalculable, is not mr. shaw, but the average cabinet minister. it is sir michael hicks-beach who jumps through hoops. it is sir henry fowler who stands on his head. the solid and respectable statesman of that type does really leap from position to position; he is really ready to defend anything or nothing; he is really not to be taken seriously. i know perfectly well what mr. bernard shaw will be saying thirty years hence; he will be saying what he has always said. if thirty years hence i meet mr. shaw, a reverent being with a silver beard sweeping the earth, and say to him, "one can never, of course, make a verbal attack upon a lady," the patriarch will lift his aged hand and fell me to the earth. we know, i say, what mr. shaw will be, saying thirty years hence. but is there any one so darkly read in stars and oracles that he will dare to predict what mr. asquith will be saying thirty years hence? the truth is, that it is quite an error to suppose that absence of definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility. a man who believes something is ready and witty, because he has all his weapons about him. he can apply his test in an instant. the man engaged in conflict with a man like mr. bernard shaw may fancy he has ten faces; similarly a man engaged against a brilliant duellist may fancy that the sword of his foe has turned to ten swords in his hand. but this is not really because the man is playing with ten swords, it is because he is aiming very straight with one. moreover, a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world. people accuse mr. shaw and many much sillier persons of "proving that black is white." but they never ask whether the current colour-language is always correct. ordinary sensible phraseology sometimes calls black white, it certainly calls yellow white and green white and reddish-brown white. we call wine "white wine" which is as yellow as a blue-coat boy's legs. we call grapes "white grapes" which are manifestly pale green. we give to the european, whose complexion is a sort of pink drab, the horrible title of a "white man"--a picture more blood-curdling than any spectre in poe. now, it is undoubtedly true that if a man asked a waiter in a restaurant for a bottle of yellow wine and some greenish-yellow grapes, the waiter would think him mad. it is undoubtedly true that if a government official, reporting on the europeans in burmah, said, "there are only two thousand pinkish men here" he would be accused of cracking jokes, and kicked out of his post. but it is equally obvious that both men would have come to grief through telling the strict truth. that too truthful man in the restaurant; that too truthful man in burmah, is mr. bernard shaw. he appears eccentric and grotesque because he will not accept the general belief that white is yellow. he has based all his brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger than fiction. truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves. so much then a reasonable appreciation will find in mr. shaw to be bracing and excellent. he claims to see things as they are; and some things, at any rate, he does see as they are, which the whole of our civilization does not see at all. but in mr. shaw's realism there is something lacking, and that thing which is lacking is serious. mr. shaw's old and recognized philosophy was that powerfully presented in "the quintessence of ibsenism." it was, in brief, that conservative ideals were bad, not because they were conservative, but because they were ideals. every ideal prevented men from judging justly the particular case; every moral generalization oppressed the individual; the golden rule was there was no golden rule. and the objection to this is simply that it pretends to free men, but really restrains them from doing the only thing that men want to do. what is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? the liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people. and what is the good of telling a man (or a philosopher) that he has every liberty except the liberty to make generalizations. making generalizations is what makes him a man. in short, when mr. shaw forbids men to have strict moral ideals, he is acting like one who should forbid them to have children. the saying that "the golden rule is that there is no golden rule," can, indeed, be simply answered by being turned round. that there is no golden rule is itself a golden rule, or rather it is much worse than a golden rule. it is an iron rule; a fetter on the first movement of a man. but the sensation connected with mr. shaw in recent years has been his sudden development of the religion of the superman. he who had to all appearance mocked at the faiths in the forgotten past discovered a new god in the unimaginable future. he who had laid all the blame on ideals set up the most impossible of all ideals, the ideal of a new creature. but the truth, nevertheless, is that any one who knows mr. shaw's mind adequately, and admires it properly, must have guessed all this long ago. for the truth is that mr. shaw has never seen things as they really are. if he had he would have fallen on his knees before them. he has always had a secret ideal that has withered all the things of this world. he has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human, with a monster from mars, with the wise man of the stoics, with the economic man of the fabians, with julius caesar, with siegfried, with the superman. now, to have this inner and merciless standard may be a very good thing, or a very bad one, it may be excellent or unfortunate, but it is not seeing things as they are. it is not seeing things as they are to think first of a briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. it is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. and it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots. and this is what mr. shaw has always in some degree done. when we really see men as they are, we do not criticise, but worship; and very rightly. for a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this place or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter. it is only the quite arbitrary and priggish habit of comparison with something else which makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him. a sentiment of superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere facts would make our knees knock under as with religious fear. it is the fact that every instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy. it is the fact that every face in the street has the incredible unexpectedness of a fairy-tale. the thing which prevents a man from realizing this is not any clear-sightedness or experience, it is simply a habit of pedantic and fastidious comparisons between one thing and another. mr. shaw, on the practical side perhaps the most humane man alive, is in this sense inhumane. he has even been infected to some extent with the primary intellectual weakness of his new master, nietzsche, the strange notion that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other things. the greater and stronger a man is the more he would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle. that mr. shaw keeps a lifted head and a contemptuous face before the colossal panorama of empires and civilizations, this does not in itself convince one that he sees things as they are. i should be most effectively convinced that he did if i found him staring with religious astonishment at his own feet. "what are those two beautiful and industrious beings," i can imagine him murmuring to himself, "whom i see everywhere, serving me i know not why? what fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elfland when i was born? what god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs, must i propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me?" the truth is, that all genuine appreciation rests on a certain mystery of humility and almost of darkness. the man who said, "blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed," put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. the truth "blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised." the man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass, and a more startling sun. blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed is the meek, for he shall inherit the earth. until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are. until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. as soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of god, and can realize none of the trophies of his ancient war. it is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing until we know nothing. now this is, i say deliberately, the only defect in the greatness of mr. shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man, that he is not easily pleased. he is an almost solitary exception to the general and essential maxim, that little things please great minds. and from this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility, comes incidentally the peculiar insistence on the superman. after belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, mr. shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. mr. shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. if man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, mr. shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. it is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby. mr. shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man--the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. and the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have been founded on the fancy of the superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth. when christ at a symbolic moment was establishing his great society, he chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant paul nor the mystic john, but a shuffler, a snob a coward--in a word, a man. and upon this rock he has built his church, and the gates of hell have not prevailed against it. all the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. but this one thing, the historic christian church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. for no chain is stronger than its weakest link. v. mr. h. g. wells and the giants we ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity. we ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot. and the more we approach the problems of human history with this keen and piercing charity, the smaller and smaller space we shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind. the hypocrites shall not deceive us into thinking them saints; but neither shall they deceive us into thinking them hypocrites. and an increasing number of cases will crowd into our field of inquiry, cases in which there is really no question of hypocrisy at all, cases in which people were so ingenuous that they seemed absurd, and so absurd that they seemed disingenuous. there is one striking instance of an unfair charge of hypocrisy. it is always urged against the religious in the past, as a point of inconsistency and duplicity, that they combined a profession of almost crawling humility with a keen struggle for earthly success and considerable triumph in attaining it. it is felt as a piece of humbug, that a man should be very punctilious in calling himself a miserable sinner, and also very punctilious in calling himself king of france. but the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a christian and the rapacity of a christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. the truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy. there never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire. and there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to have it. the whole secret of the practical success of christendom lies in the christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled. for with the removal of all question of merit or payment, the soul is suddenly released for incredible voyages. if we ask a sane man how much he merits, his mind shrinks instinctively and instantaneously. it is doubtful whether he merits six feet of earth. but if you ask him what he can conquer--he can conquer the stars. thus comes the thing called romance, a purely christian product. a man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs. the mediaeval europe which asserted humility gained romance; the civilization which gained romance has gained the habitable globe. how different the pagan and stoical feeling was from this has been admirably expressed in a famous quotation. addison makes the great stoic say- "'tis not in mortals to command success; but we'll do more, sempronius, we'll deserve it." but the spirit of romance and christendom, the spirit which is in every lover, the spirit which has bestridden the earth with european adventure, is quite opposite. 'tis not in mortals to deserve success. but we'll do more, sempronius; we'll obtain it. and this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready for an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that every one has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and mysterious. humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be a vice. humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride. it is mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goes with a certain simple love of splendour which amounts to vanity. humility will always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold; pride is that which refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or please it too much. in a word, the failure of this virtue actually lies in its success; it is too successful as an investment to be believed in as a virtue. humility is not merely too good for this world; it is too practical for this world; i had almost said it is too worldly for this world. the instance most quoted in our day is the thing called the humility of the man of science; and certainly it is a good instance as well as a modern one. men find it extremely difficult to believe that a man who is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas, tearing down temples and stretching out hands to the stars, is really a quiet old gentleman who only asks to be allowed to indulge his harmless old hobby and follow his harmless old nose. when a man splits a grain of sand and the universe is turned upside down in consequence, it is difficult to realize that to the man who did it, the splitting of the grain is the great affair, and the capsizing of the cosmos quite a small one. it is hard to enter into the feelings of a man who regards a new heaven and a new earth in the light of a by-product. but undoubtedly it was to this almost eerie innocence of the intellect that the great men of the great scientific period, which now appears to be closing, owed their enormous power and triumph. if they had brought the heavens down like a house of cards their plea was not even that they had done it on principle; their quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident. whenever there was in them the least touch of pride in what they had done, there was a good ground for attacking them; but so long as they were wholly humble, they were wholly victorious. there were possible answers to huxley; there was no answer possible to darwin. he was convincing because of his unconsciousness; one might almost say because of his dulness. this childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the world of science. men of science are beginning to see themselves, as the fine phrase is, in the part; they are beginning to be proud of their humility. they are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of the world, beginning to spell truth with a capital t, beginning to talk of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed, of the discoveries that their forbears made. like the modern english, they are beginning to be soft about their own hardness. they are becoming conscious of their own strength--that is, they are growing weaker. but one purely modern man has emerged in the strictly modern decades who does carry into our world the clear personal simplicity of the old world of science. one man of genius we have who is an artist, but who was a man of science, and who seems to be marked above all things with this great scientific humility. i mean mr. h. g. wells. and in his case, as in the others above spoken of, there must be a great preliminary difficulty in convincing the ordinary person that such a virtue is predicable of such a man. mr. wells began his literary work with violent visions--visions of the last pangs of this planet; can it be that a man who begins with violent visions is humble? he went on to wilder and wilder stories about carving beasts into men and shooting angels like birds. is the man who shoots angels and carves beasts into men humble? since then he has done something bolder than either of these blasphemies; he has prophesied the political future of all men; prophesied it with aggressive authority and a ringing decision of detail. is the prophet of the future of all men humble? it will indeed be difficult, in the present condition of current thought about such things as pride and humility, to answer the query of how a man can be humble who does such big things and such bold things. for the only answer is the answer which i gave at the beginning of this essay. it is the humble man who does the big things. it is the humble man who does the bold things. it is the humble man who has the sensational sights vouchsafed to him, and this for three obvious reasons: first, that he strains his eyes more than any other men to see them; second, that he is more overwhelmed and uplifted with them when they come; third, that he records them more exactly and sincerely and with less adulteration from his more commonplace and more conceited everyday self. adventures are to those to whom they are most unexpected--that is, most romantic. adventures are to the shy: in this sense adventures are to the unadventurous. now, this arresting, mental humility in mr. h. g. wells may be, like a great many other things that are vital and vivid, difficult to illustrate by examples, but if i were asked for an example of it, i should have no difficulty about which example to begin with. the most interesting thing about mr. h. g. wells is that he is the only one of his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing. one can lie awake at night and hear him grow. of this growth the most evident manifestation is indeed a gradual change of opinions; but it is no mere change of opinions. it is not a perpetual leaping from one position to another like that of mr. george moore. it is a quite continuous advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction. but the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the fact that it has been upon the whole an advance from more startling opinions to more humdrum opinions. it has been even in some sense an advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. this fact fixes mr. wells's honesty and proves him to be no poseur. mr. wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classes would be so much differentiated in the future that one class would eat the other. certainly no paradoxical charlatan who had once found arguments for so startling a view would ever have deserted it except for something yet more startling. mr. wells has deserted it in favour of the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimately subordinated or assimilated to a sort of scientific middle class, a class of engineers. he has abandoned the sensational theory with the same honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. then he thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true. he has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. it is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four. mr. h. g. wells exists at present in a gay and exhilarating progress of conservativism. he is finding out more and more that conventions, though silent, are alive. as good an example as any of this humility and sanity of his may be found in his change of view on the subject of science and marriage. he once held, i believe, the opinion which some singular sociologists still hold, that human creatures could successfully be paired and bred after the manner of dogs or horses. he no longer holds that view. not only does he no longer hold that view, but he has written about it in "mankind in the making" with such smashing sense and humour, that i find it difficult to believe that anybody else can hold it either. it is true that his chief objection to the proposal is that it is physically impossible, which seems to me a very slight objection, and almost negligible compared with the others. the one objection to scientific marriage which is worthy of final attention is simply that such a thing could only be imposed on unthinkable slaves and cowards. i do not know whether the scientific marriage-mongers are right (as they say) or wrong (as mr. wells says) in saying that medical supervision would produce strong and healthy men. i am only certain that if it did, the first act of the strong and healthy men would be to smash the medical supervision. the mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it connects the idea of health with the idea of care. what has health to do with care? health has to do with carelessness. in special and abnormal cases it is necessary to have care. when we are peculiarly unhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy. but even then we are only trying to be healthy in order to be careless. if we are doctors we are speaking to exceptionally sick men, and they ought to be told to be careful. but when we are sociologists we are addressing the normal man, we are addressing humanity. and humanity ought to be told to be recklessness itself. for all the fundamental functions of a healthy man ought emphatically to be performed with pleasure and for pleasure; they emphatically ought not to be performed with precaution or for precaution. a man ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy, and emphatically not because he has a body to sustain. a man ought to take exercise not because he is too fat, but because he loves foils or horses or high mountains, and loves them for their own sake. and a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love, and emphatically not because the world requires to be populated. the food will really renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking about his tissues. the exercise will really get him into training so long as he is thinking about something else. and the marriage will really stand some chance of producing a generous-blooded generation if it had its origin in its own natural and generous excitement. it is the first law of health that our necessities should not be accepted as necessities; they should be accepted as luxuries. let us, then, be careful about the small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness, or anything that can be managed with care. but in the name of all sanity, let us be careless about the important things, such as marriage, or the fountain of our very life will fail. mr. wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrower scientific outlook to see that there are some things which actually ought not to be scientific. he is still slightly affected with the great scientific fallacy; i mean the habit of beginning not with the human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about, but with some such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last. the one defect in his splendid mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently allow for the stuff or material of men. in his new utopia he says, for instance, that a chief point of the utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. if he had begun with the human soul--that is, if he had begun on himself--he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in. he would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. and the weakness of all utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. they first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon. and an even stronger example of mr. wells's indifference to the human psychology can be found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his utopia of all patriotic boundaries. he says in his innocent way that utopia must be a world-state, or else people might make war on it. it does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a world-state we should still make war on it to the end of the world. for if we admit that there must be varieties in art or opinion what sense is there in thinking there will not be varieties in government? the fact is very simple. unless you are going deliberately to prevent a thing being good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for. it is impossible to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations, because it is impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals. if there were no longer our modern strife between nations, there would only be a strife between utopias. for the highest thing does not tend to union only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation. you can often get men to fight for the union; but you can never prevent them from fighting also for the differentiation. this variety in the highest thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism of the great european civilization. it is also, incidentally, the meaning of the doctrine of the trinity. but i think the main mistake of mr. wells's philosophy is a somewhat deeper one, one that he expresses in a very entertaining manner in the introductory part of the new utopia. his philosophy in some sense amounts to a denial of the possibility of philosophy itself. at least, he maintains that there are no secure and reliable ideas upon which we can rest with a final mental satisfaction. it will be both clearer, however, and more amusing to quote mr. wells himself. he says, "nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant).... being indeed!--there is no being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and plato turned his back on truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals." mr. wells says, again, "there is no abiding thing in what we know. we change from weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below." now, when mr. wells says things like this, i speak with all respect when i say that he does not observe an evident mental distinction. it cannot be true that there is nothing abiding in what we know. for if that were so we should not know it all and should not call it knowledge. our mental state may be very different from that of somebody else some thousands of years back; but it cannot be entirely different, or else we should not be conscious of a difference. mr. wells must surely realize the first and simplest of the paradoxes that sit by the springs of truth. he must surely see that the fact of two things being different implies that they are similar. the hare and the tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness, but they must agree in the quality of motion. the swiftest hare cannot be swifter than an isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness. when we say the hare moves faster, we say that the tortoise moves. and when we say of a thing that it moves, we say, without need of other words, that there are things that do not move. and even in the act of saying that things change, we say that there is something unchangeable. but certainly the best example of mr. wells's fallacy can be found in the example which he himself chooses. it is quite true that we see a dim light which, compared with a darker thing, is light, but which, compared with a stronger light, is darkness. but the quality of light remains the same thing, or else we should not call it a stronger light or recognize it as such. if the character of light were not fixed in the mind, we should be quite as likely to call a denser shadow a stronger light, or vice versa if the character of light became even for an instant unfixed, if it became even by a hair's-breadth doubtful, if, for example, there crept into our idea of light some vague idea of blueness, then in that flash we have become doubtful whether the new light has more light or less. in brief, the progress may be as varying as a cloud, but the direction must be as rigid as a french road. north and south are relative in the sense that i am north of bournemouth and south of spitzbergen. but if there be any doubt of the position of the north pole, there is in equal degree a doubt of whether i am south of spitzbergen at all. the absolute idea of light may be practically unattainable. we may not be able to procure pure light. we may not be able to get to the north pole. but because the north pole is unattainable, it does not follow that it is indefinable. and it is only because the north pole is not indefinable that we can make a satisfactory map of brighton and worthing. in other words, plato turned his face to truth but his back on mr. h. g. wells, when he turned to his museum of specified ideals. it is precisely here that plato shows his sense. it is not true that everything changes; the things that change are all the manifest and material things. there is something that does not change; and that is precisely the abstract quality, the invisible idea. mr. wells says truly enough, that a thing which we have seen in one connection as dark we may see in another connection as light. but the thing common to both incidents is the mere idea of light--which we have not seen at all. mr. wells might grow taller and taller for unending aeons till his head was higher than the loneliest star. i can imagine his writing a good novel about it. in that case he would see the trees first as tall things and then as short things; he would see the clouds first as high and then as low. but there would remain with him through the ages in that starry loneliness the idea of tallness; he would have in the awful spaces for companion and comfort the definite conception that he was growing taller and not (for instance) growing fatter. and now it comes to my mind that mr. h. g. wells actually has written a very delightful romance about men growing as tall as trees; and that here, again, he seems to me to have been a victim of this vague relativism. "the food of the gods" is, like mr. bernard shaw's play, in essence a study of the superman idea. and it lies, i think, even through the veil of a half-pantomimic allegory, open to the same intellectual attack. we cannot be expected to have any regard for a great creature if he does not in any manner conform to our standards. for unless he passes our standard of greatness we cannot even call him great. nietszche summed up all that is interesting in the superman idea when he said, "man is a thing which has to be surpassed." but the very word "surpass" implies the existence of a standard common to us and the thing surpassing us. if the superman is more manly than men are, of course they will ultimately deify him, even if they happen to kill him first. but if he is simply more supermanly, they may be quite indifferent to him as they would be to another seemingly aimless monstrosity. he must submit to our test even in order to overawe us. mere force or size even is a standard; but that alone will never make men think a man their superior. giants, as in the wise old fairy-tales, are vermin. supermen, if not good men, are vermin. "the food of the gods" is the tale of "jack the giant-killer" told from the point of view of the giant. this has not, i think, been done before in literature; but i have little doubt that the psychological substance of it existed in fact. i have little doubt that the giant whom jack killed did regard himself as the superman. it is likely enough that he considered jack a narrow and parochial person who wished to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force. if (as not unfrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than one. he would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment, enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to correct himself with promptitude. but jack was the champion of the enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head and one man one conscience, of the single head and the single heart and the single eye. jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the giant was a particularly gigantic giant. all he wished to know was whether he was a good giant--that is, a giant who was any good to us. what were the giant's religious views; what his views on politics and the duties of the citizen? was he fond of children--or fond of them only in a dark and sinister sense? to use a fine phrase for emotional sanity, was his heart in the right place? jack had sometimes to cut him up with a sword in order to find out. the old and correct story of jack the giant-killer is simply the whole story of man; if it were understood we should need no bibles or histories. but the modern world in particular does not seem to understand it at all. the modern world, like mr. wells is on the side of the giants; the safest place, and therefore the meanest and the most prosaic. the modern world, when it praises its little caesars, talks of being strong and brave: but it does not seem to see the eternal paradox involved in the conjunction of these ideas. the strong cannot be brave. only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong. the only way in which a giant could really keep himself in training against the inevitable jack would be by continually fighting other giants ten times as big as himself. that is by ceasing to be a giant and becoming a jack. thus that sympathy with the small or the defeated as such, with which we liberals and nationalists have been often reproached, is not a useless sentimentalism at all, as mr. wells and his friends fancy. it is the first law of practical courage. to be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school. nor can i imagine anything that would do humanity more good than the advent of a race of supermen, for them to fight like dragons. if the superman is better than we, of course we need not fight him; but in that case, why not call him the saint? but if he is merely stronger (whether physically, mentally, or morally stronger, i do not care a farthing), then he ought to have to reckon with us at least for all the strength we have. it we are weaker than he, that is no reason why we should be weaker than ourselves. if we are not tall enough to touch the giant's knees, that is no reason why we should become shorter by falling on our own. but that is at bottom the meaning of all modern hero-worship and celebration of the strong man, the caesar the superman. that he may be something more than man, we must be something less. doubtless there is an older and better hero-worship than this. but the old hero was a being who, like achilles, was more human than humanity itself. nietzsche's superman is cold and friendless. achilles is so foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughters armies in the agony of his bereavement. mr. shaw's sad caesar says in his desolate pride, "he who has never hoped can never despair." the man-god of old answers from his awful hill, "was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?" a great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more. and when nietszche says, "a new commandment i give to you, 'be hard,'" he is really saying, "a new commandment i give to you, 'be dead.'" sensibility is the definition of life. i recur for a last word to jack the giant-killer. i have dwelt on this matter of mr. wells and the giants, not because it is specially prominent in his mind; i know that the superman does not bulk so large in his cosmos as in that of mr. bernard shaw. i have dwelt on it for the opposite reason; because this heresy of immoral hero-worship has taken, i think, a slighter hold of him, and may perhaps still be prevented from perverting one of the best thinkers of the day. in the course of "the new utopia" mr. wells makes more than one admiring allusion to mr. w. e. henley. that clever and unhappy man lived in admiration of a vague violence, and was always going back to rude old tales and rude old ballads, to strong and primitive literatures, to find the praise of strength and the justification of tyranny. but he could not find it. it is not there. the primitive literature is shown in the tale of jack the giant-killer. the strong old literature is all in praise of the weak. the rude old tales are as tender to minorities as any modern political idealist. the rude old ballads are as sentimentally concerned for the under-dog as the aborigines protection society. when men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks and hard laws, when they knew what fighting really was, they had only two kinds of songs. the first was a rejoicing that the weak had conquered the strong, the second a lamentation that the strong had, for once in a way, conquered the weak. for this defiance of the statu quo, this constant effort to alter the existing balance, this premature challenge to the powerful, is the whole nature and inmost secret of the psychological adventure which is called man. it is his strength to disdain strength. the forlorn hope is not only a real hope, it is the only real hope of mankind. in the coarsest ballads of the greenwood men are admired most when they defy, not only the king, but what is more to the point, the hero. the moment robin hood becomes a sort of superman, that moment the chivalrous chronicler shows us robin thrashed by a poor tinker whom he thought to thrust aside. and the chivalrous chronicler makes robin hood receive the thrashing in a glow of admiration. this magnanimity is not a product of modern humanitarianism; it is not a product of anything to do with peace. this magnanimity is merely one of the lost arts of war. the henleyites call for a sturdy and fighting england, and they go back to the fierce old stories of the sturdy and fighting english. and the thing that they find written across that fierce old literature everywhere, is "the policy of majuba." vi. christmas and the aesthetes the world is round, so round that the schools of optimism and pessimism have been arguing from the beginning whether it is the right way up. the difficulty does not arise so much from the mere fact that good and evil are mingled in roughly equal proportions; it arises chiefly from the fact that men always differ about what parts are good and what evil. hence the difficulty which besets "undenominational religions." they profess to include what is beautiful in all creeds, but they appear to many to have collected all that is dull in them. all the colours mixed together in purity ought to make a perfect white. mixed together on any human paint-box, they make a thing like mud, and a thing very like many new religions. such a blend is often something much worse than any one creed taken separately, even the creed of the thugs. the error arises from the difficulty of detecting what is really the good part and what is really the bad part of any given religion. and this pathos falls rather heavily on those persons who have the misfortune to think of some religion or other, that the parts commonly counted good are bad, and the parts commonly counted bad are good. it is tragic to admire and honestly admire a human group, but to admire it in a photographic negative. it is difficult to congratulate all their whites on being black and all their blacks on their whiteness. this will often happen to us in connection with human religions. take two institutions which bear witness to the religious energy of the nineteenth century. take the salvation army and the philosophy of auguste comte. the usual verdict of educated people on the salvation army is expressed in some such words as these: "i have no doubt they do a great deal of good, but they do it in a vulgar and profane style; their aims are excellent, but their methods are wrong." to me, unfortunately, the precise reverse of this appears to be the truth. i do not know whether the aims of the salvation army are excellent, but i am quite sure their methods are admirable. their methods are the methods of all intense and hearty religions; they are popular like all religion, military like all religion, public and sensational like all religion. they are not reverent any more than roman catholics are reverent, for reverence in the sad and delicate meaning of the term reverence is a thing only possible to infidels. that beautiful twilight you will find in euripides, in renan, in matthew arnold; but in men who believe you will not find it--you will find only laughter and war. a man cannot pay that kind of reverence to truth solid as marble; they can only be reverent towards a beautiful lie. and the salvation army, though their voice has broken out in a mean environment and an ugly shape, are really the old voice of glad and angry faith, hot as the riots of dionysus, wild as the gargoyles of catholicism, not to be mistaken for a philosophy. professor huxley, in one of his clever phrases, called the salvation army "corybantic christianity." huxley was the last and noblest of those stoics who have never understood the cross. if he had understood christianity he would have known that there never has been, and never can be, any christianity that is not corybantic. and there is this difference between the matter of aims and the matter of methods, that to judge of the aims of a thing like the salvation army is very difficult, to judge of their ritual and atmosphere very easy. no one, perhaps, but a sociologist can see whether general booth's housing scheme is right. but any healthy person can see that banging brass cymbals together must be right. a page of statistics, a plan of model dwellings, anything which is rational, is always difficult for the lay mind. but the thing which is irrational any one can understand. that is why religion came so early into the world and spread so far, while science came so late into the world and has not spread at all. history unanimously attests the fact that it is only mysticism which stands the smallest chance of being understanded of the people. common sense has to be kept as an esoteric secret in the dark temple of culture. and so while the philanthropy of the salvationists and its genuineness may be a reasonable matter for the discussion of the doctors, there can be no doubt about the genuineness of their brass bands, for a brass band is purely spiritual, and seeks only to quicken the internal life. the object of philanthropy is to do good; the object of religion is to be good, if only for a moment, amid a crash of brass. and the same antithesis exists about another modern religion--i mean the religion of comte, generally known as positivism, or the worship of humanity. such men as mr. frederic harrison, that brilliant and chivalrous philosopher, who still, by his mere personality, speaks for the creed, would tell us that he offers us the philosophy of comte, but not all comte's fantastic proposals for pontiffs and ceremonials, the new calendar, the new holidays and saints' days. he does not mean that we should dress ourselves up as priests of humanity or let off fireworks because it is milton's birthday. to the solid english comtist all this appears, he confesses, to be a little absurd. to me it appears the only sensible part of comtism. as a philosophy it is unsatisfactory. it is evidently impossible to worship humanity, just as it is impossible to worship the savile club; both are excellent institutions to which we may happen to belong. but we perceive clearly that the savile club did not make the stars and does not fill the universe. and it is surely unreasonable to attack the doctrine of the trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism, and then to ask men to worship a being who is ninety million persons in one god, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. but if the wisdom of comte was insufficient, the folly of comte was wisdom. in an age of dusty modernity, when beauty was thought of as something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible, he alone saw that men must always have the sacredness of mummery. he saw that while the brutes have all the useful things, the things that are truly human are the useless ones. he saw the falsehood of that almost universal notion of to-day, the notion that rites and forms are something artificial, additional, and corrupt. ritual is really much older than thought; it is much simpler and much wilder than thought. a feeling touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say; it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do. the more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive. but everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn, and man was a ritualist before he could speak. if comtism had spread the world would have been converted, not by the comtist philosophy, but by the comtist calendar. by discouraging what they conceive to be the weakness of their master, the english positivists have broken the strength of their religion. a man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. it is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions when he is not even ready to wear a wreath round his head for them. i myself, to take a corpus vile, am very certain that i would not read the works of comte through for any consideration whatever. but i can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on darwin day. that splendid effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has succeeded. there has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy. men are still in black for the death of god. when christianity was heavily bombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy. shelley and swinburne and all their armies have passed again and again over the ground, but they have not altered it. they have not set up a single new trophy or ensign for the world's merriment to rally to. they have not given a name or a new occasion of gaiety. mr. swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthday of victor hugo. mr. william archer does not sing carols descriptive of the infancy of ibsen outside people's doors in the snow. in the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth. christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether pagan or christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it. in all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly. the strange truth about the matter is told in the very word "holiday." a bank holiday means presumably a day which bankers regard as holy. a half-holiday means, i suppose, a day on which a schoolboy is only partially holy. it is hard to see at first sight why so human a thing as leisure and larkiness should always have a religious origin. rationally there appears no reason why we should not sing and give each other presents in honour of anything--the birth of michael angelo or the opening of euston station. but it does not work. as a fact, men only become greedily and gloriously material about something spiritualistic. take away the nicene creed and similar things, and you do some strange wrong to the sellers of sausages. take away the strange beauty of the saints, and what has remained to us is the far stranger ugliness of wandsworth. take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural. and now i have to touch upon a very sad matter. there are in the modern world an admirable class of persons who really make protest on behalf of that antiqua pulchritudo of which augustine spoke, who do long for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world. william morris and his followers showed how much brighter were the dark ages than the age of manchester. mr. w. b. yeats frames his steps in prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voice to forgotten choruses that no one but he can hear. mr. george moore collects every fragment of irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the catholic church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved. there are innumerable persons with eye-glasses and green garments who pray for the return of the maypole or the olympian games. but there is about these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests that it is just possible that they do not keep christmas. it is painful to regard human nature in such a light, but it seems somehow possible that mr. george moore does not wave his spoon and shout when the pudding is set alight. it is even possible that mr. w. b. yeats never pulls crackers. if so, where is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions? here is a solid and ancient festive tradition still plying a roaring trade in the streets, and they think it vulgar. if this is so, let them be very certain of this, that they are the kind of people who in the time of the maypole would have thought the maypole vulgar; who in the time of the canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the canterbury pilgrimage vulgar; who in the time of the olympian games would have thought the olympian games vulgar. nor can there be any reasonable doubt that they were vulgar. let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean coarseness of speech, rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and some heavy drinking, vulgarity there always was wherever there was joy, wherever there was faith in the gods. wherever you have belief you will have hilarity, wherever you have hilarity you will have some dangers. and as creed and mythology produce this gross and vigorous life, so in its turn this gross and vigorous life will always produce creed and mythology. if we ever get the english back on to the english land they will become again a religious people, if all goes well, a superstitious people. the absence from modern life of both the higher and lower forms of faith is largely due to a divorce from nature and the trees and clouds. if we have no more turnip ghosts it is chiefly from the lack of turnips. vii. omar and the sacred vine a new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connection with the problem of strong drink; and enthusiasts in the matter range from the man who is violently thrown out at 12.30, to the lady who smashes american bars with an axe. in these discussions it is almost always felt that one very wise and moderate position is to say that wine or such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine. with this i should venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity. the one genuinely dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a medicine. and for this reason, if a man drinks wine in order to obtain pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional, something he does not expect every hour of the day, something which, unless he is a little insane, he will not try to get every hour of the day. but if a man drinks wine in order to obtain health, he is trying to get something natural; something, that is, that he ought not to be without; something that he may find it difficult to reconcile himself to being without. the man may not be seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being ecstatic; it is more dazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of being ordinary. if there were a magic ointment, and we took it to a strong man, and said, "this will enable you to jump off the monument," doubtless he would jump off the monument, but he would not jump off the monument all day long to the delight of the city. but if we took it to a blind man, saying, "this will enable you to see," he would be under a heavier temptation. it would be hard for him not to rub it on his eyes whenever he heard the hoof of a noble horse or the birds singing at daybreak. it is easy to deny one's self festivity; it is difficult to deny one's self normality. hence comes the fact which every doctor knows, that it is often perilous to give alcohol to the sick even when they need it. i need hardly say that i do not mean that i think the giving of alcohol to the sick for stimulus is necessarily unjustifiable. but i do mean that giving it to the healthy for fun is the proper use of it, and a great deal more consistent with health. the sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound rules--a paradox. drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of italy. never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. but drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world. for more than thirty years the shadow and glory of a great eastern figure has lain upon our english literature. fitzgerald's translation of omar khayyam concentrated into an immortal poignancy all the dark and drifting hedonism of our time. of the literary splendour of that work it would be merely banal to speak; in few other of the books of men has there been anything so combining the gay pugnacity of an epigram with the vague sadness of a song. but of its philosophical, ethical, and religious influence which has been almost as great as its brilliancy, i should like to say a word, and that word, i confess, one of uncompromising hostility. there are a great many things which might be said against the spirit of the rubaiyat, and against its prodigious influence. but one matter of indictment towers ominously above the rest--a genuine disgrace to it, a genuine calamity to us. this is the terrible blow that this great poem has struck against sociability and the joy of life. some one called omar "the sad, glad old persian." sad he is; glad he is not, in any sense of the word whatever. he has been a worse foe to gladness than the puritans. a pensive and graceful oriental lies under the rose-tree with his wine-pot and his scroll of poems. it may seem strange that any one's thoughts should, at the moment of regarding him, fly back to the dark bedside where the doctor doles out brandy. it may seem stranger still that they should go back to the grey wastrel shaking with gin in houndsditch. but a great philosophical unity links the three in an evil bond. omar khayyam's wine-bibbing is bad, not because it is wine-bibbing. it is bad, and very bad, because it is medical wine-bibbing. it is the drinking of a man who drinks because he is not happy. his is the wine that shuts out the universe, not the wine that reveals it. it is not poetical drinking, which is joyous and instinctive; it is rational drinking, which is as prosaic as an investment, as unsavoury as a dose of camomile. whole heavens above it, from the point of view of sentiment, though not of style, rises the splendour of some old english drinking-song- "then pass the bowl, my comrades all, and let the zider vlow." for this song was caught up by happy men to express the worth of truly worthy things, of brotherhood and garrulity, and the brief and kindly leisure of the poor. of course, the great part of the more stolid reproaches directed against the omarite morality are as false and babyish as such reproaches usually are. one critic, whose work i have read, had the incredible foolishness to call omar an atheist and a materialist. it is almost impossible for an oriental to be either; the east understands metaphysics too well for that. of course, the real objection which a philosophical christian would bring against the religion of omar, is not that he gives no place to god, it is that he gives too much place to god. his is that terrible theism which can imagine nothing else but deity, and which denies altogether the outlines of human personality and human will. "the ball no question makes of ayes or noes, but here or there as strikes the player goes; and he that tossed you down into the field, he knows about it all--he knows--he knows." a christian thinker such as augustine or dante would object to this because it ignores free-will, which is the valour and dignity of the soul. the quarrel of the highest christianity with this scepticism is not in the least that the scepticism denies the existence of god; it is that it denies the existence of man. in this cult of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker the rubaiyat stands first in our time; but it does not stand alone. many of the most brilliant intellects of our time have urged us to the same self-conscious snatching at a rare delight. walter pater said that we were all under sentence of death, and the only course was to enjoy exquisite moments simply for those moments' sake. the same lesson was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of oscar wilde. it is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. great joy does, not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which dante saw. great joy has in it the sense of immortality; the very splendour of youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch its legs in. in all great comic literature, in "tristram shandy" or "pickwick", there is this sense of space and incorruptibility; we feel the characters are deathless people in an endless tale. it is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think of them as passing, or enjoy them simply "for those moments' sake." to do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it. happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized. suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. i do not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, i mean something with a violent happiness in it--an almost painful happiness. a man may have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of victory in battle. the lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for the moment's sake. he enjoys it for the woman's sake, or his own sake. the warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag. the cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last a week. but the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as something that cannot end. these moments are filled with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary. once look at them as moments after pater's manner, and they become as cold as pater and his style. man cannot love mortal things. he can only love immortal things for an instant. pater's mistake is revealed in his most famous phrase. he asks us to burn with a hard, gem-like flame. flames are never hard and never gem-like--they cannot be handled or arranged. so human emotions are never hard and never gem-like; they are always dangerous, like flames, to touch or even to examine. there is only one way in which our passions can become hard and gem-like, and that is by becoming as cold as gems. no blow then has ever been struck at the natural loves and laughter of men so sterilizing as this carpe diem of the aesthetes. for any kind of pleasure a totally different spirit is required; a certain shyness, a certain indeterminate hope, a certain boyish expectation. purity and simplicity are essential to passions--yes even to evil passions. even vice demands a sort of virginity. omar's (or fitzgerald's) effect upon the other world we may let go, his hand upon this world has been heavy and paralyzing. the puritans, as i have said, are far jollier than he. the new ascetics who follow thoreau or tolstoy are much livelier company; for, though the surrender of strong drink and such luxuries may strike us as an idle negation, it may leave a man with innumerable natural pleasures, and, above all, with man's natural power of happiness. thoreau could enjoy the sunrise without a cup of coffee. if tolstoy cannot admire marriage, at least he is healthy enough to admire mud. nature can be enjoyed without even the most natural luxuries. a good bush needs no wine. but neither nature nor wine nor anything else can be enjoyed if we have the wrong attitude towards happiness, and omar (or fitzgerald) did have the wrong attitude towards happiness. he and those he has influenced do not see that if we are to be truly gay, we must believe that there is some eternal gaiety in the nature of things. we cannot enjoy thoroughly even a pas-de-quatre at a subscription dance unless we believe that the stars are dancing to the same tune. no one can be really hilarious but the serious man. "wine," says the scripture, "maketh glad the heart of man," but only of the man who has a heart. the thing called high spirits is possible only to the spiritual. ultimately a man cannot rejoice in anything except the nature of things. ultimately a man can enjoy nothing except religion. once in the world's history men did believe that the stars were dancing to the tune of their temples, and they danced as men have never danced since. with this old pagan eudaemonism the sage of the rubaiyat has quite as little to do as he has with any christian variety. he is no more a bacchanal than he is a saint. dionysus and his church was grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre like that of walt whitman. dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. jesus christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. but omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. he feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad. "drink," he says, "for you know not whence you come nor why. drink, for you know not when you go nor where. drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace." so he stands offering us the cup in his hand. and at the high altar of christianity stands another figure, in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. "drink" he says "for the whole world is as red as this wine, with the crimson of the love and wrath of god. drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-cup. drink, for this my blood of the new testament that is shed for you. drink, for i know of whence you come and why. drink, for i know of when you go and where." viii. the mildness of the yellow press there is a great deal of protest made from one quarter or another nowadays against the influence of that new journalism which is associated with the names of sir alfred harmsworth and mr. pearson. but almost everybody who attacks it attacks on the ground that it is very sensational, very violent and vulgar and startling. i am speaking in no affected contrariety, but in the simplicity of a genuine personal impression, when i say that this journalism offends as being not sensational or violent enough. the real vice is not that it is startling, but that it is quite insupportably tame. the whole object is to keep carefully along a certain level of the expected and the commonplace; it may be low, but it must take care also to be flat. never by any chance in it is there any of that real plebeian pungency which can be heard from the ordinary cabman in the ordinary street. we have heard of a certain standard of decorum which demands that things should be funny without being vulgar, but the standard of this decorum demands that if things are vulgar they shall be vulgar without being funny. this journalism does not merely fail to exaggerate life--it positively underrates it; and it has to do so because it is intended for the faint and languid recreation of men whom the fierceness of modern life has fatigued. this press is not the yellow press at all; it is the drab press. sir alfred harmsworth must not address to the tired clerk any observation more witty than the tired clerk might be able to address to sir alfred harmsworth. it must not expose anybody (anybody who is powerful, that is), it must not offend anybody, it must not even please anybody, too much. a general vague idea that in spite of all this, our yellow press is sensational, arises from such external accidents as large type or lurid headlines. it is quite true that these editors print everything they possibly can in large capital letters. but they do this, not because it is startling, but because it is soothing. to people wholly weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted train, it is a simplification and a comfort to have things presented in this vast and obvious manner. the editors use this gigantic alphabet in dealing with their readers, for exactly the same reason that parents and governesses use a similar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to spell. the nursery authorities do not use an a as big as a horseshoe in order to make the child jump; on the contrary, they use it to put the child at his ease, to make things smoother and more evident. of the same character is the dim and quiet dame school which sir alfred harmsworth and mr. pearson keep. all their sentiments are spelling-book sentiments--that is to say, they are sentiments with which the pupil is already respectfully familiar. all their wildest posters are leaves torn from a copy-book. of real sensational journalism, as it exists in france, in ireland, and in america, we have no trace in this country. when a journalist in ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill worth talking about. he denounces a leading irish member for corruption, or he charges the whole police system with a wicked and definite conspiracy. when a french journalist desires a frisson there is a frisson; he discovers, let us say, that the president of the republic has murdered three wives. our yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as this; their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the same. but it is their mental calibre which happens to be such that they can only invent calm and even reassuring things. the fictitious version of the massacre of the envoys of pekin was mendacious, but it was not interesting, except to those who had private reasons for terror or sorrow. it was not connected with any bold and suggestive view of the chinese situation. it revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be impressive except a great deal of blood. real sensationalism, of which i happen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral. but even when it is most immoral, it requires moral courage. for it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody. if you make any sentient creature jump, you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you. but the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage; their whole method consists in saying, with large and elaborate emphasis, the things which everybody else says casually, and without remembering what they have said. when they brace themselves up to attack anything, they never reach the point of attacking anything which is large and real, and would resound with the shock. they do not attack the army as men do in france, or the judges as men do in ireland, or the democracy itself as men did in england a hundred years ago. they attack something like the war office--something, that is, which everybody attacks and nobody bothers to defend, something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers. just as a man shows he has a weak voice by straining it to shout, so they show the hopelessly unsensational nature of their minds when they really try to be sensational. with the whole world full of big and dubious institutions, with the whole wickedness of civilization staring them in the face, their idea of being bold and bright is to attack the war office. they might as well start a campaign against the weather, or form a secret society in order to make jokes about mothers-in-law. nor is it only from the point of view of particular amateurs of the sensational such as myself, that it is permissible to say, in the words of cowper's alexander selkirk, that "their tameness is shocking to me." the whole modern world is pining for a genuinely sensational journalism. this has been discovered by that very able and honest journalist, mr. blatchford, who started his campaign against christianity, warned on all sides, i believe, that it would ruin his paper, but who continued from an honourable sense of intellectual responsibility. he discovered, however, that while he had undoubtedly shocked his readers, he had also greatly advanced his newspaper. it was bought--first, by all the people who agreed with him and wanted to read it; and secondly, by all the people who disagreed with him, and wanted to write him letters. those letters were voluminous (i helped, i am glad to say, to swell their volume), and they were generally inserted with a generous fulness. thus was accidentally discovered (like the steam-engine) the great journalistic maxim--that if an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing. some hold that such papers as these are scarcely the proper objects of so serious a consideration; but that can scarcely be maintained from a political or ethical point of view. in this problem of the mildness and tameness of the harmsworth mind there is mirrored the outlines of a much larger problem which is akin to it. the harmsworthian journalist begins with a worship of success and violence, and ends in sheer timidity and mediocrity. but he is not alone in this, nor does he come by this fate merely because he happens personally to be stupid. every man, however brave, who begins by worshipping violence, must end in mere timidity. every man, however wise, who begins by worshipping success, must end in mere mediocrity. this strange and paradoxical fate is involved, not in the individual, but in the philosophy, in the point of view. it is not the folly of the man which brings about this necessary fall; it is his wisdom. the worship of success is the only one out of all possible worships of which this is true, that its followers are foredoomed to become slaves and cowards. a man may be a hero for the sake of mrs. gallup's ciphers or for the sake of human sacrifice, but not for the sake of success. for obviously a man may choose to fail because he loves mrs. gallup or human sacrifice; but he cannot choose to fail because he loves success. when the test of triumph is men's test of everything, they never endure long enough to triumph at all. as long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. like all the christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable. it was through this fatal paradox in the nature of things that all these modern adventurers come at last to a sort of tedium and acquiescence. they desired strength; and to them to desire strength was to admire strength; to admire strength was simply to admire the statu quo. they thought that he who wished to be strong ought to respect the strong. they did not realize the obvious verity that he who wishes to be strong must despise the strong. they sought to be everything, to have the whole force of the cosmos behind them, to have an energy that would drive the stars. but they did not realize the two great facts--first, that in the attempt to be everything the first and most difficult step is to be something; second, that the moment a man is something, he is essentially defying everything. the lower animals, say the men of science, fought their way up with a blind selfishness. if this be so, the only real moral of it is that our unselfishness, if it is to triumph, must be equally blind. the mammoth did not put his head on one side and wonder whether mammoths were a little out of date. mammoths were at least as much up to date as that individual mammoth could make them. the great elk did not say, "cloven hoofs are very much worn now." he polished his own weapons for his own use. but in the reasoning animal there has arisen a more horrible danger, that he may fail through perceiving his own failure. when modern sociologists talk of the necessity of accommodating one's self to the trend of the time, they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of people who will not accommodate themselves to anything. at its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there. and that is becoming more and more the situation of modern england. every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion. every man makes his contribution negative under the erroneous impression that the next man's contribution is positive. every man surrenders his fancy to a general tone which is itself a surrender. and over all the heartless and fatuous unity spreads this new and wearisome and platitudinous press, incapable of invention, incapable of audacity, capable only of a servility all the more contemptible because it is not even a servility to the strong. but all who begin with force and conquest will end in this. the chief characteristic of the "new journalism" is simply that it is bad journalism. it is beyond all comparison the most shapeless, careless, and colourless work done in our day. i read yesterday a sentence which should be written in letters of gold and adamant; it is the very motto of the new philosophy of empire. i found it (as the reader has already eagerly guessed) in pearson's magazine, while i was communing (soul to soul) with mr. c. arthur pearson, whose first and suppressed name i am afraid is chilperic. it occurred in an article on the american presidential election. this is the sentence, and every one should read it carefully, and roll it on the tongue, till all the honey be tasted. "a little sound common sense often goes further with an audience of american working-men than much high-flown argument. a speaker who, as he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won hundreds of votes for his side at the last presidential election." i do not wish to soil this perfect thing with comment; the words of mercury are harsh after the songs of apollo. but just think for a moment of the mind, the strange inscrutable mind, of the man who wrote that, of the editor who approved it, of the people who are probably impressed by it, of the incredible american working-man, of whom, for all i know, it may be true. think what their notion of "common sense" must be! it is delightful to realize that you and i are now able to win thousands of votes should we ever be engaged in a presidential election, by doing something of this kind. for i suppose the nails and the board are not essential to the exhibition of "common sense;" there may be variations. we may read-"a little common sense impresses american working-men more than high-flown argument. a speaker who, as he made his points, pulled buttons off his waistcoat, won thousands of votes for his side." or, "sound common sense tells better in america than high-flown argument. thus senator budge, who threw his false teeth in the air every time he made an epigram, won the solid approval of american working-men." or again, "the sound common sense of a gentleman from earlswood, who stuck straws in his hair during the progress of his speech, assured the victory of mr. roosevelt." there are many other elements in this article on which i should love to linger. but the matter which i wish to point out is that in that sentence is perfectly revealed the whole truth of what our chamberlainites, hustlers, bustlers, empire-builders, and strong, silent men, really mean by "commonsense." they mean knocking, with deafening noise and dramatic effect, meaningless bits of iron into a useless bit of wood. a man goes on to an american platform and behaves like a mountebank fool with a board and a hammer; well, i do not blame him; i might even admire him. he may be a dashing and quite decent strategist. he may be a fine romantic actor, like burke flinging the dagger on the floor. he may even (for all i know) be a sublime mystic, profoundly impressed with the ancient meaning of the divine trade of the carpenter, and offering to the people a parable in the form of a ceremony. all i wish to indicate is the abyss of mental confusion in which such wild ritualism can be called "sound common sense." and it is in that abyss of mental confusion, and in that alone, that the new imperialism lives and moves and has its being. the whole glory and greatness of mr. chamberlain consists in this: that if a man hits the right nail on the head nobody cares where he hits it to or what it does. they care about the noise of the hammer, not about the silent drip of the nail. before and throughout the african war, mr. chamberlain was always knocking in nails, with ringing decisiveness. but when we ask, "but what have these nails held together? where is your carpentry? where are your contented outlanders? where is your free south africa? where is your british prestige? what have your nails done?" then what answer is there? we must go back (with an affectionate sigh) to our pearson for the answer to the question of what the nails have done: "the speaker who hammered nails into a board won thousands of votes." now the whole of this passage is admirably characteristic of the new journalism which mr. pearson represents, the new journalism which has just purchased the standard. to take one instance out of hundreds, the incomparable man with the board and nails is described in the pearson's article as calling out (as he smote the symbolic nail), "lie number one. nailed to the mast! nailed to the mast!" in the whole office there was apparently no compositor or office-boy to point out that we speak of lies being nailed to the counter, and not to the mast. nobody in the office knew that pearson's magazine was falling into a stale irish bull, which must be as old as st. patrick. this is the real and essential tragedy of the sale of the standard. it is not merely that journalism is victorious over literature. it is that bad journalism is victorious over good journalism. it is not that one article which we consider costly and beautiful is being ousted by another kind of article which we consider common or unclean. it is that of the same article a worse quality is preferred to a better. if you like popular journalism (as i do), you will know that pearson's magazine is poor and weak popular journalism. you will know it as certainly as you know bad butter. you will know as certainly that it is poor popular journalism as you know that the strand, in the great days of sherlock holmes, was good popular journalism. mr. pearson has been a monument of this enormous banality. about everything he says and does there is something infinitely weak-minded. he clamours for home trades and employs foreign ones to print his paper. when this glaring fact is pointed out, he does not say that the thing was an oversight, like a sane man. he cuts it off with scissors, like a child of three. his very cunning is infantile. and like a child of three, he does not cut it quite off. in all human records i doubt if there is such an example of a profound simplicity in deception. this is the sort of intelligence which now sits in the seat of the sane and honourable old tory journalism. if it were really the triumph of the tropical exuberance of the yankee press, it would be vulgar, but still tropical. but it is not. we are delivered over to the bramble, and from the meanest of the shrubs comes the fire upon the cedars of lebanon. the only question now is how much longer the fiction will endure that journalists of this order represent public opinion. it may be doubted whether any honest and serious tariff reformer would for a moment maintain that there was any majority for tariff reform in the country comparable to the ludicrous preponderance which money has given it among the great dailies. the only inference is that for purposes of real public opinion the press is now a mere plutocratic oligarchy. doubtless the public buys the wares of these men, for one reason or another. but there is no more reason to suppose that the public admires their politics than that the public admires the delicate philosophy of mr. crosse or the darker and sterner creed of mr. blackwell. if these men are merely tradesmen, there is nothing to say except that there are plenty like them in the battersea park road, and many much better. but if they make any sort of attempt to be politicians, we can only point out to them that they are not as yet even good journalists. ix. the moods of mr. george moore mr. george moore began his literary career by writing his personal confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them for the remainder of his life. he is a man of genuinely forcible mind and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction which excites and pleases. he is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty. he has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics until they could stand it no longer. everything he writes, it is to be fully admitted, has a genuine mental power. his account of his reason for leaving the roman catholic church is possibly the most admirable tribute to that communion which has been written of late years. for the fact of the matter is, that the weakness which has rendered barren the many brilliancies of mr. moore is actually that weakness which the roman catholic church is at its best in combating. mr. moore hates catholicism because it breaks up the house of looking-glasses in which he lives. mr. moore does not dislike so much being asked to believe in the spiritual existence of miracles or sacraments, but he does fundamentally dislike being asked to believe in the actual existence of other people. like his master pater and all the aesthetes, his real quarrel with life is that it is not a dream that can be moulded by the dreamer. it is not the dogma of the reality of the other world that troubles him, but the dogma of the reality of this world. the truth is that the tradition of christianity (which is still the only coherent ethic of europe) rests on two or three paradoxes or mysteries which can easily be impugned in argument and as easily justified in life. one of them, for instance, is the paradox of hope or faith--that the more hopeless is the situation the more hopeful must be the man. stevenson understood this, and consequently mr. moore cannot understand stevenson. another is the paradox of charity or chivalry that the weaker a thing is the more it should be respected, that the more indefensible a thing is the more it should appeal to us for a certain kind of defence. thackeray understood this, and therefore mr. moore does not understand thackeray. now, one of these very practical and working mysteries in the christian tradition, and one which the roman catholic church, as i say, has done her best work in singling out, is the conception of the sinfulness of pride. pride is a weakness in the character; it dries up laughter, it dries up wonder, it dries up chivalry and energy. the christian tradition understands this; therefore mr. moore does not understand the christian tradition. for the truth is much stranger even than it appears in the formal doctrine of the sin of pride. it is not only true that humility is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride. it is also true that vanity is a much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride. vanity is social--it is almost a kind of comradeship; pride is solitary and uncivilized. vanity is active; it desires the applause of infinite multitudes; pride is passive, desiring only the applause of one person, which it already has. vanity is humorous, and can enjoy the joke even of itself; pride is dull, and cannot even smile. and the whole of this difference is the difference between stevenson and mr. george moore, who, as he informs us, has "brushed stevenson aside." i do not know where he has been brushed to, but wherever it is i fancy he is having a good time, because he had the wisdom to be vain, and not proud. stevenson had a windy vanity; mr. moore has a dusty egoism. hence stevenson could amuse himself as well as us with his vanity; while the richest effects of mr. moore's absurdity are hidden from his eyes. if we compare this solemn folly with the happy folly with which stevenson belauds his own books and berates his own critics, we shall not find it difficult to guess why it is that stevenson at least found a final philosophy of some sort to live by, while mr. moore is always walking the world looking for a new one. stevenson had found that the secret of life lies in laughter and humility. self is the gorgon. vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and lives. pride studies it for itself and is turned to stone. it is necessary to dwell on this defect in mr. moore, because it is really the weakness of work which is not without its strength. mr. moore's egoism is not merely a moral weakness, it is a very constant and influential aesthetic weakness as well. we should really be much more interested in mr. moore if he were not quite so interested in himself. we feel as if we were being shown through a gallery of really fine pictures, into each of which, by some useless and discordant convention, the artist had represented the same figure in the same attitude. "the grand canal with a distant view of mr. moore," "effect of mr. moore through a scotch mist," "mr. moore by firelight," "ruins of mr. moore by moonlight," and so on, seems to be the endless series. he would no doubt reply that in such a book as this he intended to reveal himself. but the answer is that in such a book as this he does not succeed. one of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys self-revelation. a man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality will be lost in that false universalism. thinking about himself will lead to trying to be the universe; trying to be the universe will lead to ceasing to be anything. if, on the other hand, a man is sensible enough to think only about the universe; he will think about it in his own individual way. he will keep virgin the secret of god; he will see the grass as no other man can see it, and look at a sun that no man has ever known. this fact is very practically brought out in mr. moore's "confessions." in reading them we do not feel the presence of a clean-cut personality like that of thackeray and matthew arnold. we only read a number of quite clever and largely conflicting opinions which might be uttered by any clever person, but which we are called upon to admire specifically, because they are uttered by mr. moore. he is the only thread that connects catholicism and protestantism, realism and mysticism--he or rather his name. he is profoundly absorbed even in views he no longer holds, and he expects us to be. and he intrudes the capital "i" even where it need not be intruded--even where it weakens the force of a plain statement. where another man would say, "it is a fine day," mr. moore says, "seen through my temperament, the day appeared fine." where another man would say "milton has obviously a fine style," mr. moore would say, "as a stylist milton had always impressed me." the nemesis of this self-centred spirit is that of being totally ineffectual. mr. moore has started many interesting crusades, but he has abandoned them before his disciples could begin. even when he is on the side of the truth he is as fickle as the children of falsehood. even when he has found reality he cannot find rest. one irish quality he has which no irishman was ever without--pugnacity; and that is certainly a great virtue, especially in the present age. but he has not the tenacity of conviction which goes with the fighting spirit in a man like bernard shaw. his weakness of introspection and selfishness in all their glory cannot prevent him fighting; but they will always prevent him winning. x. on sandals and simplicity the great misfortune of the modern english is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them. a frenchman can be proud of being bold and logical, and still remain bold and logical. a german can be proud of being reflective and orderly, and still remain reflective and orderly. but an englishman cannot be proud of being simple and direct, and still remain simple and direct. in the matter of these strange virtues, to know them is to kill them. a man may be conscious of being heroic or conscious of being divine, but he cannot (in spite of all the anglo-saxon poets) be conscious of being unconscious. now, i do not think that it can be honestly denied that some portion of this impossibility attaches to a class very different in their own opinion, at least, to the school of anglo-saxonism. i mean that school of the simple life, commonly associated with tolstoy. if a perpetual talk about one's own robustness leads to being less robust, it is even more true that a perpetual talking about one's own simplicity leads to being less simple. one great complaint, i think, must stand against the modern upholders of the simple life--the simple life in all its varied forms, from vegetarianism to the honourable consistency of the doukhobors. this complaint against them stands, that they would make us simple in the unimportant things, but complex in the important things. they would make us simple in the things that do not matter--that is, in diet, in costume, in etiquette, in economic system. but they would make us complex in the things that do matter--in philosophy, in loyalty, in spiritual acceptance, and spiritual rejection. it does not so very much matter whether a man eats a grilled tomato or a plain tomato; it does very much matter whether he eats a plain tomato with a grilled mind. the only kind of simplicity worth preserving is the simplicity of the heart, the simplicity which accepts and enjoys. there may be a reasonable doubt as to what system preserves this; there can surely be no doubt that a system of simplicity destroys it. there is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle. the chief error of these people is to be found in the very phrase to which they are most attached--"plain living and high thinking." these people do not stand in need of, will not be improved by, plain living and high thinking. they stand in need of the contrary. they would be improved by high living and plain thinking. a little high living (i say, having a full sense of responsibility, a little high living) would teach them the force and meaning of the human festivities, of the banquet that has gone on from the beginning of the world. it would teach them the historic fact that the artificial is, if anything, older than the natural. it would teach them that the loving-cup is as old as any hunger. it would teach them that ritualism is older than any religion. and a little plain thinking would teach them how harsh and fanciful are the mass of their own ethics, how very civilized and very complicated must be the brain of the tolstoyan who really believes it to be evil to love one's country and wicked to strike a blow. a man approaches, wearing sandals and simple raiment, a raw tomato held firmly in his right hand, and says, "the affections of family and country alike are hindrances to the fuller development of human love;" but the plain thinker will only answer him, with a wonder not untinged with admiration, "what a great deal of trouble you must have taken in order to feel like that." high living will reject the tomato. plain thinking will equally decisively reject the idea of the invariable sinfulness of war. high living will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to despise a pleasure as purely material. and plain thinking will convince us that nothing is more materialistic than to reserve our horror chiefly for material wounds. the only simplicity that matters is the simplicity of the heart. if that be gone, it can be brought back by no turnips or cellular clothing; but only by tears and terror and the fires that are not quenched. if that remain, it matters very little if a few early victorian armchairs remain along with it. let us put a complex entree into a simple old gentleman; let us not put a simple entree into a complex old gentleman. so long as human society will leave my spiritual inside alone, i will allow it, with a comparative submission, to work its wild will with my physical interior. i will submit to cigars. i will meekly embrace a bottle of burgundy. i will humble myself to a hansom cab. if only by this means i may preserve to myself the virginity of the spirit, which enjoys with astonishment and fear. i do not say that these are the only methods of preserving it. i incline to the belief that there are others. but i will have nothing to do with simplicity which lacks the fear, the astonishment, and the joy alike. i will have nothing to do with the devilish vision of a child who is too simple to like toys. the child is, indeed, in these, and many other matters, the best guide. and in nothing is the child so righteously childlike, in nothing does he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of simplicity, than in the fact that he sees everything with a simple pleasure, even the complex things. the false type of naturalness harps always on the distinction between the natural and the artificial. the higher kind of naturalness ignores that distinction. to the child the tree and the lamp-post are as natural and as artificial as each other; or rather, neither of them are natural but both supernatural. for both are splendid and unexplained. the flower with which god crowns the one, and the flame with which sam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the gold of fairy-tales. in the middle of the wildest fields the most rustic child is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines. and the only spiritual or philosophical objection to steam-engines is not that men pay for them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that men are killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them. the evil is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain. the wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired enough. the sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are mechanical. in this matter, then, as in all the other matters treated in this book, our main conclusion is that it is a fundamental point of view, a philosophy or religion which is needed, and not any change in habit or social routine. the things we need most for immediate practical purposes are all abstractions. we need a right view of the human lot, a right view of the human society; and if we were living eagerly and angrily in the enthusiasm of those things, we should, ipso facto, be living simply in the genuine and spiritual sense. desire and danger make every one simple. and to those who talk to us with interfering eloquence about jaeger and the pores of the skin, and about plasmon and the coats of the stomach, at them shall only be hurled the words that are hurled at fops and gluttons, "take no thought what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. for after all these things do the gentiles seek. but seek first the kingdom of god and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." those amazing words are not only extraordinarily good, practical politics; they are also superlatively good hygiene. the one supreme way of making all those processes go right, the processes of health, and strength, and grace, and beauty, the one and only way of making certain of their accuracy, is to think about something else. if a man is bent on climbing into the seventh heaven, he may be quite easy about the pores of his skin. if he harnesses his waggon to a star, the process will have a most satisfactory effect upon the coats of his stomach. for the thing called "taking thought," the thing for which the best modern word is "rationalizing," is in its nature, inapplicable to all plain and urgent things. men take thought and ponder rationalistically, touching remote things--things that only theoretically matter, such as the transit of venus. but only at their peril can men rationalize about so practical a matter as health. xi science and the savages a permanent disadvantage of the study of folk-lore and kindred subjects is that the man of science can hardly be in the nature of things very frequently a man of the world. he is a student of nature; he is scarcely ever a student of human nature. and even where this difficulty is 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 folk-lore--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 away of intuitions or guess-work which make a man preternaturally clever in dealing with the stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing with the heart of 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 learnt, 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 travelling among those savages and taking down their answers in a note-book, 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 timbuctoo 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 islands; let him go to church. if a man wishes to know the origin of human society, to know what society, philosophically speaking, really is, let him not go into 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 mumbojumbo 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 rite is the object of the anger of the priests and the tribe." to any one acquainted with humanity this way of talking is topsy-turvy. it is like saying, "the english in the twentieth century believed 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 a dead man because they think that a dead man can eat, or weapons with a 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 for ever spoilt 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 analyse a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but science cannot analyse any man's wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful. the man's desire 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 folk-lore, 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 folk-lore, 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 the least affect the question of whether any one 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 folk-lore students remain at all, their nature will be unchanged; and their services to folk-lore 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 any more 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 happen everywhere. of the first class, for instance, we might take such an example 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 occur to any boastful archer. it might be one of the fantastic caprices of some story-teller. it might equally well be one of the fantastic caprices 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 afterwards 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 somebody 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 "je ne vois pas la necessite" we have all seen attributed to talleyrand, to voltaire, to henri quatre, 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 mot 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 to sigurd, to hercules, to rustem, to the cid, 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 a 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 delilah 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 ruin of samson by a woman, and the ruin of hercules by a woman, have a common legendary origin, it is gratifying to know that we can also explain, as a fable, the ruin of nelson by a woman and the ruin of parnell by a woman. and, indeed, i have no doubt whatever that, some centuries hence, the students of folk-lore 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 they have about the thing they call anthropomorphism. they believe that primitive men attributed phenomena to a 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. any one 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, but 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. xii paganism and mr. lowes 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 a thing which left behind it incomparable exercises in the english language. the new paganism is no longer new, and it never at any time bore 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, whereas 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 respectable. 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. lowes 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 error of the 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. lowes dickinson 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 ye?" 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 jacobinism, 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. simeon stylites 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. lowes 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 any one 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 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 the pagan virtues are the reasonable virtues, and that 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 a paradox in its own nature, and that this is not true of any of the typically pagan or rationalist 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 to-day; 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 earthquake and, eclipse. it is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving 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 nobly 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 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 conception 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 the misfortunes which baulk 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; 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 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 a 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 is of any 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. lowes dickinson will not question it. it has been the boast of hundreds of the champions of christianity. it has been the taunt of hundreds of the opponents of christianity. it is, in essence, the basis of mr. lowes 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, of strictly ascetic humility) mixed itself with the main stream 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. lowes 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 for ever renewing the earth and the stars. it is humility, and not duty, which preserves the stars from wrong, 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 expectation, 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 not 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 for 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 is, indeed, only a very paltry by-product 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 the honour 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 idealistic writers. it may be worth while, however, to point out the interesting disparity in the matter of humility between the modern notion of the strong man and the actual records of strong men. carlyle objected to the statement that no man could be a hero to his valet. every sympathy can be extended towards him in the matter if he merely or mainly meant that the phrase was a 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 both the proverb itself and carlyle's stricture 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 carlyle, was a strong man. according to cromwell, he was a weak one. the weak point in the whole of carlyle's case for aristocracy lies, indeed, in his most celebrated phrase. carlyle said that men were mostly fools. christianity, with a surer 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 carlyle's pathetic belief (or any one 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 religious armies--the moslem 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 this virtue of humility, while being practical enough to win battles, will always be paradoxical enough to puzzle pedants. it is at one with the virtue of charity in this respect. every generous person will admit that the one kind of sin which charity should cover is the sin which is inexcusable. and 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 a little more reason for pride. 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 reassertors 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 plough 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. xiii. celts and celtophiles 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 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. honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for 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 defences for the indefensible conduct of the powerful. as i have said above, these defences generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of appeals to physical science. and of all the forms in which science, or pseudo-science, has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of 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) there 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 diluted blood can possibly remain in that roaring whirlpool of america into which a cataract of swedes, jews, germans, irishmen, and italians is perpetually pouring, is a matter only interesting to lunatics. it would have been wiser for the english governing class 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 for ever; boasts of being unstable as water. and england and the english governing class 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 do 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 gentleman 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 smaller 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. every one knows it who has ever founded a club. it is a moment when five places become one place. every one 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, independent 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 cromwell 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 celticism. who were the celts? i defy anybody to say. who are the irish? i defy any one to be indifferent, or to pretend not to know. mr. w. b. yeats, 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 who are 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, wherever it happens that the germans are human. there is nothing celtic about loving poetry; the english loved 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. xiv on certain modern writers and the institution of the family the family may fairly be considered, one would think, an ultimate human institution. every one would admit that it has been the main cell and central unit of almost all societies hitherto, except, indeed, such societies as that of lacedaemon, 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. this 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 defence of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. but there is another defence of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defence 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 wilfully 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 shut 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 colours 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 a club. when london was smaller, and the parts of london more self-contained and parochial, the club was what it still is in villages, the opposite of what it is now in 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. its 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-indulgence of lucullus with the insane loneliness of st. simeon stylites. if we were to-morrow 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 timbuctoo. 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 too 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 put their shape or colour or custom into a decisive intellectual competition with his own. they do not seek to destroy his principles and assert their own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do seek to do this. the camel does not contort his features into a fine sneer because mr. robinson has not got a hump; the cultured gentleman at no. 5 does exhibit a sneer because robinson has not got a dado. the vulture will not roar with laughter because a man does not fly; but the major at no. 9 will roar with laughter because a man does not smoke. the complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbours 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 neighbours did not mind their own business they would be asked abruptly for their rent, and would rapidly cease to be our neighbours. 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 can be interested in us as well. what we dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it. and all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character. they are not aversions 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 in justice to be pointed out. fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a 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. nietzsche's aristocracy has about it 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 nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour 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 neighbour. 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 neighbour. 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 even 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 specially interested in leprosy. we may love negroes because they are black or german socialists because they are pedantic. but we have to love our neighbour because he is there--a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation. he is the sample of humanity which is 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 it, 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 neighbours 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 matter 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 a 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 a truly stimulating and fascinating life, is a 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 is a good institution because it is uncongenial. it is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. it is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. it is exactly 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 is excitable, like mankind our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. grandpapa 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 a 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; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even judge--in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, 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 dreamed before. our father and mother do lie in 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 colour 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" remain god-like to those who, like mr. micawber, can call on them and renew their strength. people wonder why the novel is the most 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 a 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 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 freewill in the thirteenth century, produced the thing called "fiction" in the eighteenth. 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 the adventures. the thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain 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 uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance. of all these great limitations and 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 that 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 that infinity. they say they wish to be, as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves. xv 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 manufacture. 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 men's basic assumptions and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and halfpenny 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 the 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 any one wishes to find a really effective and comprehensible and permanent case for aristocracy well and sincerely stated, let him read, not the modern philosophical conservatives, not even nietzsche, let him read the bow bells novelettes. of the case of nietzsche i am confessedly more doubtful. nietzsche and the bow bells novelettes have both obviously the same fundamental character; they both worship the tall man with curling moustaches 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 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. nietzsche, 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 bow bells novelettes, that it is my present affair to speak. the picture of aristocracy in the popular sentimental novelette seems to me 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 valour; and if the family herald supplement sometimes distorts or exaggerates these things, at least, it does not fall short in them. it never errs 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 pretensions, 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 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 aristocratic fiction must have caught the attention of everybody who has read the best fiction for the last fifteen years. it is that 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 in 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. hichens, in the "green carnation," reaffirmed the strange idea that young noblemen talk well; though his case had some vague biographical foundation, and in consequence an excuse. mrs. craigie is considerably guilty in the 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 blame in this matter be altogether removed from a man of much greater ability, and a man who has proved his possession of the highest of human instinct, the romantic instinct--i mean mr. anthony hope. 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. hope devotes so much serious and sympathetic study to the man called tristram of blent, a man who throughout burning boyhood thought of nothing but a silly old estate, we feel even in mr. hope 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. hope, 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 noblemen 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, immeasurably 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, but 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 noblemen. 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 air as if he had. and, upon the whole, the upper class 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 sycophantic about the popular literature which makes all its marquises seven feet high. it is snobbish, 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; 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 had behaved like a viscount. the oligarchic 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 halfpenny romance where the duchesses 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, has 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 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 favourite 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 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 impromptus fill 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 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 ideal, 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 or 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, i may be permitted to approach in a more circuitous way. the haunting element of ineffectualness which runs through so much of the witty and epigrammatic fiction fashionable during the last eight or ten years, which runs through such works of a real though varying 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 "precious nonsense." even when they become light-headed they do not become light-hearted. 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 humour has come from the men who were capable not merely of sentimentalism, but a very silly sentimentalism. there has been no humour so robust or uproarious as that of the sentimentalist steele or the sentimentalist sterne or the sentimentalist dickens. these creatures who wept like women were the creatures who laughed like men. it is true that the humour of micawber is good literature and that the pathos of little nell 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 gigantesque scale of action which brought the napoleon of comedy his jena 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 imbecilities 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 in 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 called a 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 honour and an abysmal tenderness. above all, it is necessary to be openly and indecently humane, to confess with fulness 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 any one 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 teutonism 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 hammered out, in the great eighteenth century when the british empire was being 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 palladins 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 sensible to answer the spanish guns only, as stevenson says, with a flourish of insulting trumpets? did sydney 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 carlyle 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 abounding" 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 tradition of english emotionalism immediately resumed and unbrokenly continuous. whatever may have been the moral beauty of the passions of etheridge and dorset, sedley and buckingham, they cannot be accused of the fault of fastidiously concealing them. charles the second 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 eighteenth 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 pass to the soldiers and the rulers, the patriots and the empire-builders of the eighteenth 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 commons all his weakness. wolfe 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 all the admirals and adventurers of that england are full of braggadocio, of sentimentality, of splendid affectation. but it is scarcely necessary to multiply examples of the essentially romantic englishman 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 the modern weakening of england. sydney would have thought nothing of kissing spenser. 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 for ever the great english sentiment, "kiss me, hardy." this ideal of self-repression, 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 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 (who may be called the decayed gentleman), it certainly has something to do with the unemotional quality in these society novels. from representing aristocrats as people who suppressed 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 sonneteer addressing his lady in the seventeenth century, he seems to use the word "cold" almost as a eulogium, and the word "heartless" as a kind of compliment. of course, in people so incurably kind-hearted and babyish as are the english gentry, 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 ideal 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. xvi on mr. mccabe and a divine frivolity a critic once remonstrated with me saying, with an air of indignant reasonableness, "if you must make jokes, at least you need not make them on such serious subjects." i replied with a natural simplicity and wonder, "about what other subjects can one make jokes except serious subjects?" it is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. all jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all. if a joke is not a joke about religion or morals, it is a joke about police-magistrates or scientific professors or undergraduates dressed up as queen victoria. and people joke about the police-magistrate more than they joke about the pope, not because the police-magistrate is a more frivolous subject, but, on the contrary, because the police-magistrate is a more serious subject than the pope. the bishop of rome has no jurisdiction in this realm of england; whereas the police-magistrate may bring his solemnity to bear quite suddenly upon us. men make jokes about old scientific professors, even more than they make them about bishops--not because science is lighter than religion, but because science is always by its nature more solemn and austere than religion. it is not i; it is not even a particular class of journalists or jesters who make jokes about the matters which are of most awful import; it is the whole human race. if there is one thing more than another which any one will admit who has the smallest knowledge of the world, it is that men are always speaking gravely and earnestly and with the utmost possible care about the things that are not important, but always talking frivolously about the things that are. men talk for hours with the faces of a college of cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party politics. but all the most grave and dreadful things in the world are the oldest jokes in the world--being married; being hanged. one gentleman, however, mr. mccabe, has in this matter made to me something that almost amounts to a personal appeal; and as he happens to be a man for whose sincerity and intellectual virtue i have a high respect, i do not feel inclined to let it pass without some attempt to satisfy my critic in the matter. mr. mccabe devotes a considerable part of the last essay in the collection called "christianity and rationalism on trial" to an objection, not to my thesis, but to my method, and a very friendly and dignified appeal to me to alter it. i am much inclined to defend myself in this matter out of mere respect for mr. mccabe, and still more so out of mere respect for the truth which is, i think, in danger by his error, not only in this question, but in others. in order that there may be no injustice done in the matter, i will quote mr. mccabe himself. "but before i follow mr. chesterton in some detail i would make a general observation on his method. he is as serious as i am in his ultimate purpose, and i respect him for that. he knows, as i do, that humanity stands at a solemn parting of the ways. towards some unknown goal it presses through the ages, impelled by an overmastering desire of happiness. to-day it hesitates, lightheartedly enough, but every serious thinker knows how momentous the decision may be. it is, apparently, deserting the path of religion and entering upon the path of secularism. will it lose itself in quagmires of sensuality down this new path, and pant and toil through years of civic and industrial anarchy, only to learn it had lost the road, and must return to religion? or will it find that at last it is leaving the mists and the quagmires behind it; that it is ascending the slope of the hill so long dimly discerned ahead, and making straight for the long-sought utopia? this is the drama of our time, and every man and every woman should understand it. "mr. chesterton understands it. further, he gives us credit for understanding it. he has nothing of that paltry meanness or strange density of so many of his colleagues, who put us down as aimless iconoclasts or moral anarchists. he admits that we are waging a thankless war for what we take to be truth and progress. he is doing the same. but why, in the name of all that is reasonable, should we, when we are agreed on the momentousness of the issue either way, forthwith desert serious methods of conducting the controversy? why, when the vital need of our time is to induce men and women to collect their thoughts occasionally, and be men and women--nay, to remember that they are really gods that hold the destinies of humanity on their knees--why should we think that this kaleidoscopic play of phrases is inopportune? the ballets of the alhambra, and the fireworks of the crystal palace, and mr. chesterton's daily news articles, have their place in life. but how a serious social student can think of curing the thoughtlessness of our generation by strained paradoxes; of giving people a sane grasp of social problems by literary sleight-of-hand; of settling important questions by a reckless shower of rocket-metaphors and inaccurate 'facts,' and the substitution of imagination for judgment, i cannot see." i quote this passage with a particular pleasure, because mr. mccabe certainly cannot put too strongly the degree to which i give him and his school credit for their complete sincerity and responsibility of philosophical attitude. i am quite certain that they mean every word they say. i also mean every word i say. but why is it that mr. mccabe has some sort of mysterious hesitation about admitting that i mean every word i say; why is it that he is not quite as certain of my mental responsibility as i am of his mental responsibility? if we attempt to answer the question directly and well, we shall, i think, have come to the root of the matter by the shortest cut. mr. mccabe thinks that i am not serious but only funny, because mr. mccabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. the question of whether a man expresses himself in a grotesque or laughable phraseology, or in a stately and restrained phraseology, is not a question of motive or of moral state, it is a question of instinctive language and self-expression. whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in french or german. whether a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he preaches it in prose or verse. the question of whether swift was funny in his irony is quite another sort of question to the question of whether swift was serious in his pessimism. surely even mr. mccabe would not maintain that the more funny "gulliver" is in its method the less it can be sincere in its object. the truth is, as i have said, that in this sense the two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other, they are no more comparable than black and triangular. mr. bernard shaw is funny and sincere. mr. george robey is funny and not sincere. mr. mccabe is sincere and not funny. the average cabinet minister is not sincere and not funny. in short, mr. mccabe is under the influence of a primary fallacy which i have found very common in men of the clerical type. numbers of clergymen have from time to time reproached me for making jokes about religion; and they have almost always invoked the authority of that very sensible commandment which says, "thou shalt not take the name of the lord thy god in vain." of course, i pointed out that i was not in any conceivable sense taking the name in vain. to take a thing and make a joke out of it is not to take it in vain. it is, on the contrary, to take it and use it for an uncommonly good object. to use a thing in vain means to use it without use. but a joke may be exceedingly useful; it may contain the whole earthly sense, not to mention the whole heavenly sense, of a situation. and those who find in the bible the commandment can find in the bible any number of the jokes. in the same book in which god's name is fenced from being taken in vain, god himself overwhelms job with a torrent of terrible levities. the same book which says that god's name must not be taken vainly, talks easily and carelessly about god laughing and god winking. evidently it is not here that we have to look for genuine examples of what is meant by a vain use of the name. and it is not very difficult to see where we have really to look for it. the people (as i tactfully pointed out to them) who really take the name of the lord in vain are the clergymen themselves. the thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is not a careless joke. the thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is a careless solemnity. if mr. mccabe really wishes to know what sort of guarantee of reality and solidity is afforded by the mere act of what is called talking seriously, let him spend a happy sunday in going the round of the pulpits. or, better still, let him drop in at the house of commons or the house of lords. even mr. mccabe would admit that these men are solemn--more solemn than i am. and even mr. mccabe, i think, would admit that these men are frivolous--more frivolous than i am. why should mr. mccabe be so eloquent about the danger arising from fantastic and paradoxical writers? why should he be so ardent in desiring grave and verbose writers? there are not so very many fantastic and paradoxical writers. but there are a gigantic number of grave and verbose writers; and it is by the efforts of the grave and verbose writers that everything that mr. mccabe detests (and everything that i detest, for that matter) is kept in existence and energy. how can it have come about that a man as intelligent as mr. mccabe can think that paradox and jesting stop the way? it is solemnity that is stopping the way in every department of modern effort. it is his own favourite "serious methods;" it is his own favourite "momentousness;" it is his own favourite "judgment" which stops the way everywhere. every man who has ever headed a deputation to a minister knows this. every man who has ever written a letter to the times knows it. every rich man who wishes to stop the mouths of the poor talks about "momentousness." every cabinet minister who has not got an answer suddenly develops a "judgment." every sweater who uses vile methods recommends "serious methods." i said a moment ago that sincerity had nothing to do with solemnity, but i confess that i am not so certain that i was right. in the modern world, at any rate, i am not so sure that i was right. in the modern world solemnity is the direct enemy of sincerity. in the modern world sincerity is almost always on one side, and solemnity almost always on the other. the only answer possible to the fierce and glad attack of sincerity is the miserable answer of solemnity. let mr. mccabe, or any one else who is much concerned that we should be grave in order to be sincere, simply imagine the scene in some government office in which mr. bernard shaw should head a socialist deputation to mr. austen chamberlain. on which side would be the solemnity? and on which the sincerity? i am, indeed, delighted to discover that mr. mccabe reckons mr. shaw along with me in his system of condemnation of frivolity. he said once, i believe, that he always wanted mr. shaw to label his paragraphs serious or comic. i do not know which paragraphs of mr. shaw are paragraphs to be labelled serious; but surely there can be no doubt that this paragraph of mr. mccabe's is one to be labelled comic. he also says, in the article i am now discussing, that mr. shaw has the reputation of deliberately saying everything which his hearers do not expect him to say. i need not labour the inconclusiveness and weakness of this, because it has already been dealt with in my remarks on mr. bernard shaw. suffice it to say here that the only serious reason which i can imagine inducing any one person to listen to any other is, that the first person looks to the second person with an ardent faith and a fixed attention, expecting him to say what he does not expect him to say. it may be a paradox, but that is because paradoxes are true. it may not be rational, but that is because rationalism is wrong. but clearly it is quite true that whenever we go to hear a prophet or teacher we may or may not expect wit, we may or may not expect eloquence, but we do expect what we do not expect. we may not expect the true, we may not even expect the wise, but we do expect the unexpected. if we do not expect the unexpected, why do we go there at all? if we expect the expected, why do we not sit at home and expect it by ourselves? if mr. mccabe means merely this about mr. shaw, that he always has some unexpected application of his doctrine to give to those who listen to him, what he says is quite true, and to say it is only to say that mr. shaw is an original man. but if he means that mr. shaw has ever professed or preached any doctrine but one, and that his own, then what he says is not true. it is not my business to defend mr. shaw; as has been seen already, i disagree with him altogether. but i do not mind, on his behalf offering in this matter a flat defiance to all his ordinary opponents, such as mr. mccabe. i defy mr. mccabe, or anybody else, to mention one single instance in which mr. shaw has, for the sake of wit or novelty, taken up any position which was not directly deducible from the body of his doctrine as elsewhere expressed. i have been, i am happy to say, a tolerably close student of mr. shaw's utterances, and i request mr. mccabe, if he will not believe that i mean anything else, to believe that i mean this challenge. all this, however, is a parenthesis. the thing with which i am here immediately concerned is mr. mccabe's appeal to me not to be so frivolous. let me return to the actual text of that appeal. there are, of course, a great many things that i might say about it in detail. but i may start with saying that mr. mccabe is in error in supposing that the danger which i anticipate from the disappearance of religion is the increase of sensuality. on the contrary, i should be inclined to anticipate a decrease in sensuality, because i anticipate a decrease in life. i do not think that under modern western materialism we should have anarchy. i doubt whether we should have enough individual valour and spirit even to have liberty. it is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. materialism itself is the great restraint. the mccabe school advocates a political liberty, but it denies spiritual liberty. that is, it abolishes the laws which could be broken, and substitutes laws that cannot. and that is the real slavery. the truth is that the scientific civilization in which mr. mccabe believes has one rather particular defect; it is perpetually tending to destroy that democracy or power of the ordinary man in which mr. mccabe also believes. science means specialism, and specialism means oligarchy. if you once establish the habit of trusting particular men to produce particular results in physics or astronomy, you leave the door open for the equally natural demand that you should trust particular men to do particular things in government and the coercing of men. if, you feel it to be reasonable that one beetle should be the only study of one man, and that one man the only student of that one beetle, it is surely a very harmless consequence to go on to say that politics should be the only study of one man, and that one man the only student of politics. as i have pointed out elsewhere in this book, the expert is more aristocratic than the aristocrat, because the aristocrat is only the man who lives well, while the expert is the man who knows better. but if we look at the progress of our scientific civilization we see a gradual increase everywhere of the specialist over the popular function. once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. if scientific civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest. i do not know that i can express this more shortly than by taking as a text the single sentence of mr. mccabe, which runs as follows: "the ballets of the alhambra and the fireworks of the crystal palace and mr. chesterton's daily news articles have their places in life." i wish that my articles had as noble a place as either of the other two things mentioned. but let us ask ourselves (in a spirit of love, as mr. chadband would say), what are the ballets of the alhambra? the ballets of the alhambra are institutions in which a particular selected row of persons in pink go through an operation known as dancing. now, in all commonwealths dominated by a religion--in the christian commonwealths of the middle ages and in many rude societies--this habit of dancing was a common habit with everybody, and was not necessarily confined to a professional class. a person could dance without being a dancer; a person could dance without being a specialist; a person could dance without being pink. and, in proportion as mr. mccabe's scientific civilization advances--that is, in proportion as religious civilization (or real civilization) decays--the more and more "well trained," the more and more pink, become the people who do dance, and the more and more numerous become the people who don't. mr. mccabe may recognize an example of what i mean in the gradual discrediting in society of the ancient european waltz or dance with partners, and the substitution of that horrible and degrading oriental interlude which is known as skirt-dancing. that is the whole essence of decadence, the effacement of five people who do a thing for fun by one person who does it for money. now it follows, therefore, that when mr. mccabe says that the ballets of the alhambra and my articles "have their place in life," it ought to be pointed out to him that he is doing his best to create a world in which dancing, properly speaking, will have no place in life at all. he is, indeed, trying to create a world in which there will be no life for dancing to have a place in. the very fact that mr. mccabe thinks of dancing as a thing belonging to some hired women at the alhambra is an illustration of the same principle by which he is able to think of religion as a thing belonging to some hired men in white neckties. both these things are things which should not be done for us, but by us. if mr. mccabe were really religious he would be happy. if he were really happy he would dance. briefly, we may put the matter in this way. the main point of modern life is not that the alhambra ballet has its place in life. the main point, the main enormous tragedy of modern life, is that mr. mccabe has not his place in the alhambra ballet. the joy of changing and graceful posture, the joy of suiting the swing of music to the swing of limbs, the joy of whirling drapery, the joy of standing on one leg,--all these should belong by rights to mr. mccabe and to me; in short, to the ordinary healthy citizen. probably we should not consent to go through these evolutions. but that is because we are miserable moderns and rationalists. we do not merely love ourselves more than we love duty; we actually love ourselves more than we love joy. when, therefore, mr. mccabe says that he gives the alhambra dances (and my articles) their place in life, i think we are justified in pointing out that by the very nature of the case of his philosophy and of his favourite civilization he gives them a very inadequate place. for (if i may pursue the too flattering parallel) mr. mccabe thinks of the alhambra and of my articles as two very odd and absurd things, which some special people do (probably for money) in order to amuse him. but if he had ever felt himself the ancient, sublime, elemental, human instinct to dance, he would have discovered that dancing is not a frivolous thing at all, but a very serious thing. he would have discovered that it is the one grave and chaste and decent method of expressing a certain class of emotions. and similarly, if he had ever had, as mr. shaw and i have had, the impulse to what he calls paradox, he would have discovered that paradox again is not a frivolous thing, but a very serious thing. he would have found that paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief. i should regard any civilization which was without a universal habit of uproarious dancing as being, from the full human point of view, a defective civilization. and i should regard any mind which had not got the habit in one form or another of uproarious thinking as being, from the full human point of view, a defective mind. it is vain for mr. mccabe to say that a ballet is a part of him. he should be part of a ballet, or else he is only part of a man. it is in vain for him to say that he is "not quarrelling with the importation of humour into the controversy." he ought himself to be importing humour into every controversy; for unless a man is in part a humorist, he is only in part a man. to sum up the whole matter very simply, if mr. mccabe asks me why i import frivolity into a discussion of the nature of man, i answer, because frivolity is a part of the nature of man. if he asks me why i introduce what he calls paradoxes into a philosophical problem, i answer, because all philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. if he objects to my treating of life riotously, i reply that life is a riot. and i say that the universe as i see it, at any rate, is very much more like the fireworks at the crystal palace than it is like his own philosophy. about the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity--like preparations for guy fawkes' day. eternity is the eve of something. i never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy's rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall. xvii on the wit of whistler that capable and ingenious writer, mr. arthur symons, has included in a book of essays recently published, i believe, an apologia for "london nights," in which he says that morality should be wholly subordinated to art in criticism, and he uses the somewhat singular argument that art or the worship of beauty is the same in all ages, while morality differs in every period and in every respect. he appears to defy his critics or his readers to mention any permanent feature or quality in ethics. this is surely a very curious example of that extravagant bias against morality which makes so many ultra-modern aesthetes as morbid and fanatical as any eastern hermit. unquestionably it is a very common phrase of modern intellectualism to say that the morality of one age can be entirely different to the morality of another. and like a great many other phrases of modern intellectualism, it means literally nothing at all. if the two moralities are entirely different, why do you call them both moralities? it is as if a man said, "camels in various places are totally diverse; some have six legs, some have none, some have scales, some have feathers, some have horns, some have wings, some are green, some are triangular. there is no point which they have in common." the ordinary man of sense would reply, "then what makes you call them all camels? what do you mean by a camel? how do you know a camel when you see one?" of course, there is a permanent substance of morality, as much as there is a permanent substance of art; to say that is only to say that morality is morality, and that art is art. an ideal art critic would, no doubt, see the enduring beauty under every school; equally an ideal moralist would see the enduring ethic under every code. but practically some of the best englishmen that ever lived could see nothing but filth and idolatry in the starry piety of the brahmin. and it is equally true that practically the greatest group of artists that the world has ever seen, the giants of the renaissance, could see nothing but barbarism in the ethereal energy of gothic. this bias against morality among the modern aesthetes is nothing very much paraded. and yet it is not really a bias against morality; it is a bias against other people's morality. it is generally founded on a very definite moral preference for a certain sort of life, pagan, plausible, humane. the modern aesthete, wishing us to believe that he values beauty more than conduct, reads mallarme, and drinks absinthe in a tavern. but this is not only his favourite kind of beauty; it is also his favourite kind of conduct. if he really wished us to believe that he cared for beauty only, he ought to go to nothing but wesleyan school treats, and paint the sunlight in the hair of the wesleyan babies. he ought to read nothing but very eloquent theological sermons by old-fashioned presbyterian divines. here the lack of all possible moral sympathy would prove that his interest was purely verbal or pictorial, as it is; in all the books he reads and writes he clings to the skirts of his own morality and his own immorality. the champion of l'art pour l'art is always denouncing ruskin for his moralizing. if he were really a champion of l'art pour l'art, he would be always insisting on ruskin for his style. the doctrine of the distinction between art and morality owes a great part of its success to art and morality being hopelessly mixed up in the persons and performances of its greatest exponents. of this lucky contradiction the very incarnation was whistler. no man ever preached the impersonality of art so well; no man ever preached the impersonality of art so personally. for him pictures had nothing to do with the problems of character; but for all his fiercest admirers his character was, as a matter of fact far more interesting than his pictures. he gloried in standing as an artist apart from right and wrong. but he succeeded by talking from morning till night about his rights and about his wrongs. his talents were many, his virtues, it must be confessed, not many, beyond that kindness to tried friends, on which many of his biographers insist, but which surely is a quality of all sane men, of pirates and pickpockets; beyond this, his outstanding virtues limit themselves chiefly to two admirable ones--courage and an abstract love of good work. yet i fancy he won at last more by those two virtues than by all his talents. a man must be something of a moralist if he is to preach, even if he is to preach unmorality. professor walter raleigh, in his "in memoriam: james mcneill whistler," insists, truly enough, on the strong streak of an eccentric honesty in matters strictly pictorial, which ran through his complex and slightly confused character. "he would destroy any of his works rather than leave a careless or inexpressive touch within the limits of the frame. he would begin again a hundred times over rather than attempt by patching to make his work seem better than it was." no one will blame professor raleigh, who had to read a sort of funeral oration over whistler at the opening of the memorial exhibition, if, finding himself in that position, he confined himself mostly to the merits and the stronger qualities of his subject. we should naturally go to some other type of composition for a proper consideration of the weaknesses of whistler. but these must never be omitted from our view of him. indeed, the truth is that it was not so much a question of the weaknesses of whistler as of the intrinsic and primary weakness of whistler. he was one of those people who live up to their emotional incomes, who are always taut and tingling with vanity. hence he had no strength to spare; hence he had no kindness, no geniality; for geniality is almost definable as strength to spare. he had no god-like carelessness; he never forgot himself; his whole life was, to use his own expression, an arrangement. he went in for "the art of living"--a miserable trick. in a word, he was a great artist; but emphatically not a great man. in this connection i must differ strongly with professor raleigh upon what is, from a superficial literary point of view, one of his most effective points. he compares whistler's laughter to the laughter of another man who was a great man as well as a great artist. "his attitude to the public was exactly the attitude taken up by robert browning, who suffered as long a period of neglect and mistake, in those lines of 'the ring and the book'- "'well, british public, ye who like me not, (god love you!) and will have your proper laugh at the dark question; laugh it! i'd laugh first.' "mr. whistler," adds professor raleigh, "always laughed first." the truth is, i believe, that whistler never laughed at all. there was no laughter in his nature; because there was no thoughtlessness and self-abandonment, no humility. i cannot understand anybody reading "the gentle art of making enemies" and thinking that there is any laughter in the wit. his wit is a torture to him. he twists himself into arabesques of verbal felicity; he is full of a fierce carefulness; he is inspired with the complete seriousness of sincere malice. he hurts himself to hurt his opponent. browning did laugh, because browning did not care; browning did not care, because browning was a great man. and when browning said in brackets to the simple, sensible people who did not like his books, "god love you!" he was not sneering in the least. he was laughing--that is to say, he meant exactly what he said. there are three distinct classes of great satirists who are also great men--that is to say, three classes of men who can laugh at something without losing their souls. the satirist of the first type is the man who, first of all enjoys himself, and then enjoys his enemies. in this sense he loves his enemy, and by a kind of exaggeration of christianity he loves his enemy the more the more he becomes an enemy. he has a sort of overwhelming and aggressive happiness in his assertion of anger; his curse is as human as a benediction. of this type of satire the great example is rabelais. this is the first typical example of satire, the satire which is voluble, which is violent, which is indecent, but which is not malicious. the satire of whistler was not this. he was never in any of his controversies simply happy; the proof of it is that he never talked absolute nonsense. there is a second type of mind which produces satire with the quality of greatness. that is embodied in the satirist whose passions are released and let go by some intolerable sense of wrong. he is maddened by the sense of men being maddened; his tongue becomes an unruly member, and testifies against all mankind. such a man was swift, in whom the saeva indignatio was a bitterness to others, because it was a bitterness to himself. such a satirist whistler was not. he did not laugh because he was happy, like rabelais. but neither did he laugh because he was unhappy, like swift. the third type of great satire is that in which he satirist is enabled to rise superior to his victim in the only serious sense which superiority can bear, in that of pitying the sinner and respecting the man even while he satirises both. such an achievement can be found in a thing like pope's "atticus" a poem in which the satirist feels that he is satirising the weaknesses which belong specially to literary genius. consequently he takes a pleasure in pointing out his enemy's strength before he points out his weakness. that is, perhaps, the highest and most honourable form of satire. that is not the satire of whistler. he is not full of a great sorrow for the wrong done to human nature; for him the wrong is altogether done to himself. he was not a great personality, because he thought so much about himself. and the case is stronger even than that. he was sometimes not even a great artist, because he thought so much about art. any man with a vital knowledge of the human psychology ought to have the most profound suspicion of anybody who claims to be an artist, and talks a great deal about art. art is a right and human thing, like walking or saying one's prayers; but the moment it begins to be talked about very solemnly, a man may be fairly certain that the thing has come into a congestion and a kind of difficulty. the artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. it is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. it is healthful to every sane man to utter the art within him; it is essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all costs. artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. but in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. thus, very great artists are able to be ordinary men--men like shakespeare or browning. there are many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or violence or fear. but the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is that it cannot produce any art. whistler could produce art; and in so far he was a great man. but he could not forget art; and in so far he was only a man with the artistic temperament. there can be no stronger manifestation of the man who is a really great artist than the fact that he can dismiss the subject of art; that he can, upon due occasion, wish art at the bottom of the sea. similarly, we should always be much more inclined to trust a solicitor who did not talk about conveyancing over the nuts and wine. what we really desire of any man conducting any business is that the full force of an ordinary man should be put into that particular study. we do not desire that the full force of that study should be put into an ordinary man. we do not in the least wish that our particular law-suit should pour its energy into our barrister's games with his children, or rides on his bicycle, or meditations on the morning star. but we do, as a matter of fact, desire that his games with his children, and his rides on his bicycle, and his meditations on the morning star should pour something of their energy into our law-suit. we do desire that if he has gained any especial lung development from the bicycle, or any bright and pleasing metaphors from the morning star, that the should be placed at our disposal in that particular forensic controversy. in a word, we are very glad that he is an ordinary man, since that may help him to be an exceptional lawyer. whistler never ceased to be an artist. as mr. max beerbohm pointed out in one of his extraordinarily sensible and sincere critiques, whistler really regarded whistler as his greatest work of art. the white lock, the single eyeglass, the remarkable hat--these were much dearer to him than any nocturnes or arrangements that he ever threw off. he could throw off the nocturnes; for some mysterious reason he could not throw off the hat. he never threw off from himself that disproportionate accumulation of aestheticism which is the burden of the amateur. it need hardly be said that this is the real explanation of the thing which has puzzled so many dilettante critics, the problem of the extreme ordinariness of the behaviour of so many great geniuses in history. their behaviour was so ordinary that it was not recorded; hence it was so ordinary that it seemed mysterious. hence people say that bacon wrote shakespeare. the modern artistic temperament cannot understand how a man who could write such lyrics as shakespeare wrote, could be as keen as shakespeare was on business transactions in a little town in warwickshire. the explanation is simple enough; it is that shakespeare had a real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so got rid of the impulse and went about his business. being an artist did not prevent him from being an ordinary man, any more than being a sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner prevented him from being an ordinary man. all very great teachers and leaders have had this habit of assuming their point of view to be one which was human and casual, one which would readily appeal to every passing man. if a man is genuinely superior to his fellows the first thing that he believes in is the equality of man. we can see this, for instance, in that strange and innocent rationality with which christ addressed any motley crowd that happened to stand about him. "what man of you having a hundred sheep, and losing one, would not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which was lost?" or, again, "what man of you if his son ask for bread will he give him a stone, or if he ask for a fish will he give him a serpent?" this plainness, this almost prosaic camaraderie, is the note of all very great minds. to very great minds the things on which men agree are so immeasurably more important than the things on which they differ, that the latter, for all practical purposes, disappear. they have too much in them of an ancient laughter even to endure to discuss the difference between the hats of two men who were both born of a woman, or between the subtly varied cultures of two men who have both to die. the first-rate great man is equal with other men, like shakespeare. the second-rate great man is on his knees to other men, like whitman. the third-rate great man is superior to other men, like whistler. xviii the fallacy of the young nation to say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man; but, nevertheless, it might be possible to effect some valid distinction between one kind of idealist and another. one possible distinction, for instance, could be effected by saying that humanity is divided into conscious idealists and unconscious idealists. in a similar way, humanity is divided into conscious ritualists and unconscious ritualists. the curious thing is, in that example as in others, that it is the conscious ritualism which is comparatively simple, the unconscious ritual which is really heavy and complicated. the ritual which is comparatively rude and straightforward is the ritual which people call "ritualistic." it consists of plain things like bread and wine and fire, and men falling on their faces. but the ritual which is really complex, and many coloured, and elaborate, and needlessly formal, is the ritual which people enact without knowing it. it consists not of plain things like wine and fire, but of really peculiar, and local, and exceptional, and ingenious things--things like door-mats, and door-knockers, and electric bells, and silk hats, and white ties, and shiny cards, and confetti. the truth is that the modern man scarcely ever gets back to very old and simple things except when he is performing some religious mummery. the modern man can hardly get away from ritual except by entering a ritualistic church. in the case of these old and mystical formalities we can at least say that the ritual is not mere ritual; that the symbols employed are in most cases symbols which belong to a primary human poetry. the most ferocious opponent of the christian ceremonials must admit that if catholicism had not instituted the bread and wine, somebody else would most probably have done so. any one with a poetical instinct will admit that to the ordinary human instinct bread symbolizes something which cannot very easily be symbolized otherwise; that wine, to the ordinary human instinct, symbolizes something which cannot very easily be symbolized otherwise. but white ties in the evening are ritual, and nothing else but ritual. no one would pretend that white ties in the evening are primary and poetical. nobody would maintain that the ordinary human instinct would in any age or country tend to symbolize the idea of evening by a white necktie. rather, the ordinary human instinct would, i imagine, tend to symbolize evening by cravats with some of the colours of the sunset, not white neckties, but tawny or crimson neckties--neckties of purple or olive, or some darkened gold. mr. j. a. kensit, for example, is under the impression that he is not a ritualist. but the daily life of mr. j. a. kensit, like that of any ordinary modern man, is, as a matter of fact, one continual and compressed catalogue of mystical mummery and flummery. to take one instance out of an inevitable hundred: i imagine that mr. kensit takes off his hat to a lady; and what can be more solemn and absurd, considered in the abstract, than, symbolizing the existence of the other sex by taking off a portion of your clothing and waving it in the air? this, i repeat, is not a natural and primitive symbol, like fire or food. a man might just as well have to take off his waistcoat to a lady; and if a man, by the social ritual of his civilization, had to take off his waistcoat to a lady, every chivalrous and sensible man would take off his waistcoat to a lady. in short, mr. kensit, and those who agree with him, may think, and quite sincerely think, that men give too much incense and ceremonial to their adoration of the other world. but nobody thinks that he can give too much incense and ceremonial to the adoration of this world. all men, then, are ritualists, but are either conscious or unconscious ritualists. the conscious ritualists are generally satisfied with a few very simple and elementary signs; the unconscious ritualists are not satisfied with anything short of the whole of human life, being almost insanely ritualistic. the first is called a ritualist because he invents and remembers one rite; the other is called an anti-ritualist because he obeys and forgets a thousand. and a somewhat similar distinction to this which i have drawn with some unavoidable length, between the conscious ritualist and the unconscious ritualist, exists between the conscious idealist and the unconscious idealist. it is idle to inveigh against cynics and materialists--there are no cynics, there are no materialists. every man is idealistic; only it so often happens that he has the wrong ideal. every man is incurably sentimental; but, unfortunately, it is so often a false sentiment. when we talk, for instance, of some unscrupulous commercial figure, and say that he would do anything for money, we use quite an inaccurate expression, and we slander him very much. he would not do anything for money. he would do some things for money; he would sell his soul for money, for instance; and, as mirabeau humorously said, he would be quite wise "to take money for muck." he would oppress humanity for money; but then it happens that humanity and the soul are not things that he believes in; they are not his ideals. but he has his own dim and delicate ideals; and he would not violate these for money. he would not drink out of the soup-tureen, for money. he would not wear his coat-tails in front, for money. he would not spread a report that he had softening of the brain, for money. in the actual practice of life we find, in the matter of ideals, exactly what we have already found in the matter of ritual. we find that while there is a perfectly genuine danger of fanaticism from the men who have unworldly ideals, the permanent and urgent danger of fanaticism is from the men who have worldly ideals. people who say that an ideal is a dangerous thing, that it deludes and intoxicates, are perfectly right. but the ideal which intoxicates most is the least idealistic kind of ideal. the ideal which intoxicates least is the very ideal ideal; that sobers us suddenly, as all heights and precipices and great distances do. granted that it is a great evil to mistake a cloud for a cape; still, the cloud, which can be most easily mistaken for a cape, is the cloud that is nearest the earth. similarly, we may grant that it may be dangerous to mistake an ideal for something practical. but we shall still point out that, in this respect, the most dangerous ideal of all is the ideal which looks a little practical. it is difficult to attain a high ideal; consequently, it is almost impossible to persuade ourselves that we have attained it. but it is easy to attain a low ideal; consequently, it is easier still to persuade ourselves that we have attained it when we have done nothing of the kind. to take a random example. it might be called a high ambition to wish to be an archangel; the man who entertained such an ideal would very possibly exhibit asceticism, or even frenzy, but not, i think, delusion. he would not think he was an archangel, and go about flapping his hands under the impression that they were wings. but suppose that a sane man had a low ideal; suppose he wished to be a gentleman. any one who knows the world knows that in nine weeks he would have persuaded himself that he was a gentleman; and this being manifestly not the case, the result will be very real and practical dislocations and calamities in social life. it is not the wild ideals which wreck the practical world; it is the tame ideals. the matter may, perhaps, be illustrated by a parallel from our modern politics. when men tell us that the old liberal politicians of the type of gladstone cared only for ideals, of course, they are talking nonsense--they cared for a great many other things, including votes. and when men tell us that modern politicians of the type of mr. chamberlain or, in another way, lord rosebery, care only for votes or for material interest, then again they are talking nonsense--these men care for ideals like all other men. but the real distinction which may be drawn is this, that to the older politician the ideal was an ideal, and nothing else. to the new politician his dream is not only a good dream, it is a reality. the old politician would have said, "it would be a good thing if there were a republican federation dominating the world." but the modern politician does not say, "it would be a good thing if there were a british imperialism dominating the world." he says, "it is a good thing that there is a british imperialism dominating the world;" whereas clearly there is nothing of the kind. the old liberal would say "there ought to be a good irish government in ireland." but the ordinary modern unionist does not say, "there ought to be a good english government in ireland." he says, "there is a good english government in ireland;" which is absurd. in short, the modern politicians seem to think that a man becomes practical merely by making assertions entirely about practical things. apparently, a delusion does not matter as long as it is a materialistic delusion. instinctively most of us feel that, as a practical matter, even the contrary is true. i certainly would much rather share my apartments with a gentleman who thought he was god than with a gentleman who thought he was a grasshopper. to be continually haunted by practical images and practical problems, to be constantly thinking of things as actual, as urgent, as in process of completion--these things do not prove a man to be practical; these things, indeed, are among the most ordinary signs of a lunatic. that our modern statesmen are materialistic is nothing against their being also morbid. seeing angels in a vision may make a man a supernaturalist to excess. but merely seeing snakes in delirium tremens does not make him a naturalist. and when we come actually to examine the main stock notions of our modern practical politicians, we find that those main stock notions are mainly delusions. a great many instances might be given of the fact. we might take, for example, the case of that strange class of notions which underlie the word "union," and all the eulogies heaped upon it. of course, union is no more a good thing in itself than separation is a good thing in itself. to have a party in favour of union and a party in favour of separation is as absurd as to have a party in favour of going upstairs and a party in favour of going downstairs. the question is not whether we go up or down stairs, but where we are going to, and what we are going, for? union is strength; union is also weakness. it is a good thing to harness two horses to a cart; but it is not a good thing to try and turn two hansom cabs into one four-wheeler. turning ten nations into one empire may happen to be as feasible as turning ten shillings into one half-sovereign. also it may happen to be as preposterous as turning ten terriers into one mastiff. the question in all cases is not a question of union or absence of union, but of identity or absence of identity. owing to certain historical and moral causes, two nations may be so united as upon the whole to help each other. thus england and scotland pass their time in paying each other compliments; but their energies and atmospheres run distinct and parallel, and consequently do not clash. scotland continues to be educated and calvinistic; england continues to be uneducated and happy. but owing to certain other moral and certain other political causes, two nations may be so united as only to hamper each other; their lines do clash and do not run parallel. thus, for instance, england and ireland are so united that the irish can sometimes rule england, but can never rule ireland. the educational systems, including the last education act, are here, as in the case of scotland, a very good test of the matter. the overwhelming majority of irishmen believe in a strict catholicism; the overwhelming majority of englishmen believe in a vague protestantism. the irish party in the parliament of union is just large enough to prevent the english education being indefinitely protestant, and just small enough to prevent the irish education being definitely catholic. here we have a state of things which no man in his senses would ever dream of wishing to continue if he had not been bewitched by the sentimentalism of the mere word "union." this example of union, however, is not the example which i propose to take of the ingrained futility and deception underlying all the assumptions of the modern practical politician. i wish to speak especially of another and much more general delusion. it pervades the minds and speeches of all the practical men of all parties; and it is a childish blunder built upon a single false metaphor. i refer to the universal modern talk about young nations and new nations; about america being young, about new zealand being new. the whole thing is a trick of words. america is not young, new zealand is not new. it is a very discussable question whether they are not both much older than england or ireland. of course we may use the metaphor of youth about america or the colonies, if we use it strictly as implying only a recent origin. but if we use it (as we do use it) as implying vigour, or vivacity, or crudity, or inexperience, or hope, or a long life before them or any of the romantic attributes of youth, then it is surely as clear as daylight that we are duped by a stale figure of speech. we can easily see the matter clearly by applying it to any other institution parallel to the institution of an independent nationality. if a club called "the milk and soda league" (let us say) was set up yesterday, as i have no doubt it was, then, of course, "the milk and soda league" is a young club in the sense that it was set up yesterday, but in no other sense. it may consist entirely of moribund old gentlemen. it may be moribund itself. we may call it a young club, in the light of the fact that it was founded yesterday. we may also call it a very old club in the light of the fact that it will most probably go bankrupt to-morrow. all this appears very obvious when we put it in this form. any one who adopted the young-community delusion with regard to a bank or a butcher's shop would be sent to an asylum. but the whole modern political notion that america and the colonies must be very vigorous because they are very new, rests upon no better foundation. that america was founded long after england does not make it even in the faintest degree more probable that america will not perish a long time before england. that england existed before her colonies does not make it any the less likely that she will exist after her colonies. and when we look at the actual history of the world, we find that great european nations almost invariably have survived the vitality of their colonies. when we look at the actual history of the world, we find, that if there is a thing that is born old and dies young, it is a colony. the greek colonies went to pieces long before the greek civilization. the spanish colonies have gone to pieces long before the nation of spain--nor does there seem to be any reason to doubt the possibility or even the probability of the conclusion that the colonial civilization, which owes its origin to england, will be much briefer and much less vigorous than the civilization of england itself. the english nation will still be going the way of all european nations when the anglo-saxon race has gone the way of all fads. now, of course, the interesting question is, have we, in the case of america and the colonies, any real evidence of a moral and intellectual youth as opposed to the indisputable triviality of a merely chronological youth? consciously or unconsciously, we know that we have no such evidence, and consciously or unconsciously, therefore, we proceed to make it up. of this pure and placid invention, a good example, for instance, can be found in a recent poem of mr. rudyard kipling's. speaking of the english people and the south african war mr. kipling says that "we fawned on the younger nations for the men that could shoot and ride." some people considered this sentence insulting. all that i am concerned with at present is the evident fact that it is not true. the colonies provided very useful volunteer troops, but they did not provide the best troops, nor achieve the most successful exploits. the best work in the war on the english side was done, as might have been expected, by the best english regiments. the men who could shoot and ride were not the enthusiastic corn merchants from melbourne, any more than they were the enthusiastic clerks from cheapside. the men who could shoot and ride were the men who had been taught to shoot and ride in the discipline of the standing army of a great european power. of course, the colonials are as brave and athletic as any other average white men. of course, they acquitted themselves with reasonable credit. all i have here to indicate is that, for the purposes of this theory of the new nation, it is necessary to maintain that the colonial forces were more useful or more heroic than the gunners at colenso or the fighting fifth. and of this contention there is not, and never has been, one stick or straw of evidence. a similar attempt is made, and with even less success, to represent the literature of the colonies as something fresh and vigorous and important. the imperialist magazines are constantly springing upon us some genius from queensland or canada, through whom we are expected to smell the odours of the bush or the prairie. as a matter of fact, any one who is even slightly interested in literature as such (and i, for one, confess that i am only slightly interested in literature as such), will freely admit that the stories of these geniuses smell of nothing but printer's ink, and that not of first-rate quality. by a great effort of imperial imagination the generous english people reads into these works a force and a novelty. but the force and the novelty are not in the new writers; the force and the novelty are in the ancient heart of the english. anybody who studies them impartially will know that the first-rate writers of the colonies are not even particularly novel in their note and atmosphere, are not only not producing a new kind of good literature, but are not even in any particular sense producing a new kind of bad literature. the first-rate writers of the new countries are really almost exactly like the second-rate writers of the old countries. of course they do feel the mystery of the wilderness, the mystery of the bush, for all simple and honest men feel this in melbourne, or margate, or south st. pancras. but when they write most sincerely and most successfully, it is not with a background of the mystery of the bush, but with a background, expressed or assumed, of our own romantic cockney civilization. what really moves their souls with a kindly terror is not the mystery of the wilderness, but the mystery of a hansom cab. of course there are some exceptions to this generalization. the one really arresting exception is olive schreiner, and she is quite as certainly an exception that proves the rule. olive schreiner is a fierce, brilliant, and realistic novelist; but she is all this precisely because she is not english at all. her tribal kinship is with the country of teniers and maarten maartens--that is, with a country of realists. her literary kinship is with the pessimistic fiction of the continent; with the novelists whose very pity is cruel. olive schreiner is the one english colonial who is not conventional, for the simple reason that south africa is the one english colony which is not english, and probably never will be. and, of course, there are individual exceptions in a minor way. i remember in particular some australian tales by mr. mcilwain which were really able and effective, and which, for that reason, i suppose, are not presented to the public with blasts of a trumpet. but my general contention if put before any one with a love of letters, will not be disputed if it is understood. it is not the truth that the colonial civilization as a whole is giving us, or shows any signs of giving us, a literature which will startle and renovate our own. it may be a very good thing for us to have an affectionate illusion in the matter; that is quite another affair. the colonies may have given england a new emotion; i only say that they have not given the world a new book. touching these english colonies, i do not wish to be misunderstood. i do not say of them or of america that they have not a future, or that they will not be great nations. i merely deny the whole established modern expression about them. i deny that they are "destined" to a future. i deny that they are "destined" to be great nations. i deny (of course) that any human thing is destined to be anything. all the absurd physical metaphors, such as youth and age, living and dying, are, when applied to nations, but pseudo-scientific attempts to conceal from men the awful liberty of their lonely souls. in the case of america, indeed, a warning to this effect is instant and essential. america, of course, like every other human thing, can in spiritual sense live or die as much as it chooses. but at the present moment the matter which america has very seriously to consider is not how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near it may be to its end. it is only a verbal question whether the american civilization is young; it may become a very practical and urgent question whether it is dying. when once we have cast aside, as we inevitably have after a moment's thought, the fanciful physical metaphor involved in the word "youth," what serious evidence have we that america is a fresh force and not a stale one? it has a great many people, like china; it has a great deal of money, like defeated carthage or dying venice. it is full of bustle and excitability, like athens after its ruin, and all the greek cities in their decline. it is fond of new things; but the old are always fond of new things. young men read chronicles, but old men read newspapers. it admires strength and good looks; it admires a big and barbaric beauty in its women, for instance; but so did rome when the goth was at the gates. all these are things quite compatible with fundamental tedium and decay. there are three main shapes or symbols in which a nation can show itself essentially glad and great--by the heroic in government, by the heroic in arms, and by the heroic in art. beyond government, which is, as it were, the very shape and body of a nation, the most significant thing about any citizen is his artistic attitude towards a holiday and his moral attitude towards a fight--that is, his way of accepting life and his way of accepting death. subjected to these eternal tests, america does not appear by any means as particularly fresh or untouched. she appears with all the weakness and weariness of modern england or of any other western power. in her politics she has broken up exactly as england has broken up, into a bewildering opportunism and insincerity. in the matter of war and the national attitude towards war, her resemblance to england is even more manifest and melancholy. it may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. first, it is a small power, and fights small powers. then it is a great power, and fights great powers. then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity. after that, the next step is to become a small power itself. england exhibited this symptom of decadence very badly in the war with the transvaal; but america exhibited it worse in the war with spain. there was exhibited more sharply and absurdly than anywhere else the ironic contrast between the very careless choice of a strong line and the very careful choice of a weak enemy. america added to all her other late roman or byzantine elements the element of the caracallan triumph, the triumph over nobody. but when we come to the last test of nationality, the test of art and letters, the case is almost terrible. the english colonies have produced no great artists; and that fact may prove that they are still full of silent possibilities and reserve force. but america has produced great artists. and that fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility and the end of all things. whatever the american men of genius are, they are not young gods making a young world. is the art of whistler a brave, barbaric art, happy and headlong? does mr. henry james infect us with the spirit of a schoolboy? no; the colonies have not spoken, and they are safe. their silence may be the silence of the unborn. but out of america has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man. xix slum novelists and the slums odd ideas are entertained in our time about the real nature of the doctrine of human fraternity. the real doctrine is something which we do not, with all our modern humanitarianism, very clearly understand, much less very closely practise. there is nothing, for instance, particularly undemocratic about kicking your butler downstairs. it may be wrong, but it is not unfraternal. in a certain sense, the blow or kick may be considered as a confession of equality: you are meeting your butler body to body; you are almost according him the privilege of the duel. there is nothing, undemocratic, though there may be something unreasonable, in expecting a great deal from the butler, and being filled with a kind of frenzy of surprise when he falls short of the divine stature. the thing which is really undemocratic and unfraternal is not to expect the butler to be more or less divine. the thing which is really undemocratic and unfraternal is to say, as so many modern humanitarians say, "of course one must make allowances for those on a lower plane." all things considered indeed, it may be said, without undue exaggeration, that the really undemocratic and unfraternal thing is the common practice of not kicking the butler downstairs. it is only because such a vast section of the modern world is out of sympathy with the serious democratic sentiment that this statement will seem to many to be lacking in seriousness. democracy is not philanthropy; it is not even altruism or social reform. democracy is not founded on pity for the common man; democracy is founded on reverence for the common man, or, if you will, even on fear of him. it does not champion man because man is so miserable, but because man is so sublime. it does not object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king, for its dream is always the dream of the first roman republic, a nation of kings. next to a genuine republic, the most democratic thing in the world is a hereditary despotism. i mean a despotism in which there is absolutely no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness for the post. rational despotism--that is, selective despotism--is always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all. but irrational despotism is always democratic, because it is the ordinary man enthroned. the worst form of slavery is that which is called caesarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man as despot because he is suitable. for that means that men choose a representative, not because he represents them, but because he does not. men trust an ordinary man like george iii or william iv. because they are themselves ordinary men and understand him. men trust an ordinary man because they trust themselves. but men trust a great man because they do not trust themselves. and hence the worship of great men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of great men until the time when all other men are small. hereditary despotism is, then, in essence and sentiment democratic because it chooses from mankind at random. if it does not declare that every man may rule, it declares the next most democratic thing; it declares that any man may rule. hereditary aristocracy is a far worse and more dangerous thing, because the numbers and multiplicity of an aristocracy make it sometimes possible for it to figure as an aristocracy of intellect. some of its members will presumably have brains, and thus they, at any rate, will be an intellectual aristocracy within the social one. they will rule the aristocracy by virtue of their intellect, and they will rule the country by virtue of their aristocracy. thus a double falsity will be set up, and millions of the images of god, who, fortunately for their wives and families, are neither gentlemen nor clever men, will be represented by a man like mr. balfour or mr. wyndham, because he is too gentlemanly to be called merely clever, and just too clever to be called merely a gentleman. but even an hereditary aristocracy may exhibit, by a sort of accident, from time to time some of the basically democratic quality which belongs to a hereditary despotism. it is amusing to think how much conservative ingenuity has been wasted in the defence of the house of lords by men who were desperately endeavouring to prove that the house of lords consisted of clever men. there is one really good defence of the house of lords, though admirers of the peerage are strangely coy about using it; and that is, that the house of lords, in its full and proper strength, consists of stupid men. it really would be a plausible defence of that otherwise indefensible body to point out that the clever men in the commons, who owed their power to cleverness, ought in the last resort to be checked by the average man in the lords, who owed their power to accident. of course, there would be many answers to such a contention, as, for instance, that the house of lords is largely no longer a house of lords, but a house of tradesmen and financiers, or that the bulk of the commonplace nobility do not vote, and so leave the chamber to the prigs and the specialists and the mad old gentlemen with hobbies. but on some occasions the house of lords, even under all these disadvantages, is in some sense representative. when all the peers flocked together to vote against mr. gladstone's second home rule bill, for instance, those who said that the peers represented the english people, were perfectly right. all those dear old men who happened to be born peers were at that moment, and upon that question, the precise counterpart of all the dear old men who happened to be born paupers or middle-class gentlemen. that mob of peers did really represent the english people--that is to say, it was honest, ignorant, vaguely excited, almost unanimous, and obviously wrong. of course, rational democracy is better as an expression of the public will than the haphazard hereditary method. while we are about having any kind of democracy, let it be rational democracy. but if we are to have any kind of oligarchy, let it be irrational oligarchy. then at least we shall be ruled by men. but the thing which is really required for the proper working of democracy is not merely the democratic system, or even the democratic philosophy, but the democratic emotion. the democratic emotion, like most elementary and indispensable things, is a thing difficult to describe at any time. but it is peculiarly difficult to describe it in our enlightened age, for the simple reason that it is peculiarly difficult to find it. it is a certain instinctive attitude which feels the things in which all men agree to be unspeakably important, and all the things in which they differ (such as mere brains) to be almost unspeakably unimportant. the nearest approach to it in our ordinary life would be the promptitude with which we should consider mere humanity in any circumstance of shock or death. we should say, after a somewhat disturbing discovery, "there is a dead man under the sofa." we should not be likely to say, "there is a dead man of considerable personal refinement under the sofa." we should say, "a woman has fallen into the water." we should not say, "a highly educated woman has fallen into the water." nobody would say, "there are the remains of a clear thinker in your back garden." nobody would say, "unless you hurry up and stop him, a man with a very fine ear for music will have jumped off that cliff." but this emotion, which all of us have in connection with such things as birth and death, is to some people native and constant at all ordinary times and in all ordinary places. it was native to st. francis of assisi. it was native to walt whitman. in this strange and splendid degree it cannot be expected, perhaps, to pervade a whole commonwealth or a whole civilization; but one commonwealth may have it much more than another commonwealth, one civilization much more than another civilization. no community, perhaps, ever had it so much as the early franciscans. no community, perhaps, ever had it so little as ours. everything in our age has, when carefully examined, this fundamentally undemocratic quality. in religion and morals we should admit, in the abstract, that the sins of the educated classes were as great as, or perhaps greater than, the sins of the poor and ignorant. but in practice the great difference between the mediaeval ethics and ours is that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the educated are sins at all. we are always talking about the sin of intemperate drinking, because it is quite obvious that the poor have it more than the rich. but we are always denying that there is any such thing as the sin of pride, because it would be quite obvious that the rich have it more than the poor. we are always ready to make a saint or prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little kindly advice to the uneducated. but the medieval idea of a saint or prophet was something quite different. the mediaeval saint or prophet was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a little kindly advice to the educated. the old tyrants had enough insolence to despoil the poor, but they had not enough insolence to preach to them. it was the gentleman who oppressed the slums; but it was the slums that admonished the gentleman. and just as we are undemocratic in faith and morals, so we are, by the very nature of our attitude in such matters, undemocratic in the tone of our practical politics. it is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. if we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. with us the governing class is always saying to itself, "what laws shall we make?" in a purely democratic state it would be always saying, "what laws can we obey?" a purely democratic state perhaps there has never been. but even the feudal ages were in practice thus far democratic, that every feudal potentate knew that any laws which he made would in all probability return upon himself. his feathers might be cut off for breaking a sumptuary law. his head might be cut off for high treason. but the modern laws are almost always laws made to affect the governed class, but not the governing. we have public-house licensing laws, but not sumptuary laws. that is to say, we have laws against the festivity and hospitality of the poor, but no laws against the festivity and hospitality of the rich. we have laws against blasphemy--that is, against a kind of coarse and offensive speaking in which nobody but a rough and obscure man would be likely to indulge. but we have no laws against heresy--that is, against the intellectual poisoning of the whole people, in which only a prosperous and prominent man would be likely to be successful. the evil of aristocracy is not that it necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of sad ones; the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never suffer. whether what they inflict is, in their intention, good or bad, they become equally frivolous. the case against the governing class of modern england is not in the least that it is selfish; if you like, you may call the english oligarchs too fantastically unselfish. the case against them simply is that when they legislate for all men, they always omit themselves. we are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts to "raise" the poor. we are undemocratic in our government, as is proved by our innocent attempt to govern them well. but above all we are undemocratic in our literature, as is proved by the torrent of novels about the poor and serious studies of the poor which pour from our publishers every month. and the more "modern" the book is the more certain it is to be devoid of democratic sentiment. a poor man is a man who has not got much money. this may seem a simple and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an alligator. there is no more need to study the psychology of poverty than to study the psychology of bad temper, or the psychology of vanity, or the psychology of animal spirits. a man ought to know something of the emotions of an insulted man, not by being insulted, but simply by being a man. and he ought to know something of the emotions of a poor man, not by being poor, but simply by being a man. therefore, in any writer who is describing poverty, my first objection to him will be that he has studied his subject. a democrat would have imagined it. a great many hard things have been said about religious slumming and political or social slumming, but surely the most despicable of all is artistic slumming. the religious teacher is at least supposed to be interested in the costermonger because he is a man; the politician is in some dim and perverted sense interested in the costermonger because he is a citizen; it is only the wretched writer who is interested in the costermonger merely because he is a costermonger. nevertheless, so long as he is merely seeking impressions, or in other words copy, his trade, though dull, is honest. but when he endeavours to represent that he is describing the spiritual core of a costermonger, his dim vices and his delicate virtues, then we must object that his claim is preposterous; we must remind him that he is a journalist and nothing else. he has far less psychological authority even than the foolish missionary. for he is in the literal and derivative sense a journalist, while the missionary is an eternalist. the missionary at least pretends to have a version of the man's lot for all time; the journalist only pretends to have a version of it from day to day. the missionary comes to tell the poor man that he is in the same condition with all men. the journalist comes to tell other people how different the poor man is from everybody else. if the modern novels about the slums, such as novels of mr. arthur morrison, or the exceedingly able novels of mr. somerset maugham, are intended to be sensational, i can only say that that is a noble and reasonable object, and that they attain it. a sensation, a shock to the imagination, like the contact with cold water, is always a good and exhilarating thing; and, undoubtedly, men will always seek this sensation (among other forms) in the form of the study of the strange antics of remote or alien peoples. in the twelfth century men obtained this sensation by reading about dog-headed men in africa. in the twentieth century they obtained it by reading about pig-headed boers in africa. the men of the twentieth century were certainly, it must be admitted, somewhat the more credulous of the two. for it is not recorded of the men in the twelfth century that they organized a sanguinary crusade solely for the purpose of altering the singular formation of the heads of the africans. but it may be, and it may even legitimately be, that since all these monsters have faded from the popular mythology, it is necessary to have in our fiction the image of the horrible and hairy east-ender, merely to keep alive in us a fearful and childlike wonder at external peculiarities. but the middle ages (with a great deal more common sense than it would now be fashionable to admit) regarded natural history at bottom rather as a kind of joke; they regarded the soul as very important. hence, while they had a natural history of dog-headed men, they did not profess to have a psychology of dog-headed men. they did not profess to mirror the mind of a dog-headed man, to share his tenderest secrets, or mount with his most celestial musings. they did not write novels about the semi-canine creature, attributing to him all the oldest morbidities and all the newest fads. it is permissible to present men as monsters if we wish to make the reader jump; and to make anybody jump is always a christian act. but it is not permissible to present men as regarding themselves as monsters, or as making themselves jump. to summarize, our slum fiction is quite defensible as aesthetic fiction; it is not defensible as spiritual fact. one enormous obstacle stands in the way of its actuality. the men who write it, and the men who read it, are men of the middle classes or the upper classes; at least, of those who are loosely termed the educated classes. hence, the fact that it is the life as the refined man sees it proves that it cannot be the life as the unrefined man lives it. rich men write stories about poor men, and describe them as speaking with a coarse, or heavy, or husky enunciation. but if poor men wrote novels about you or me they would describe us as speaking with some absurd shrill and affected voice, such as we only hear from a duchess in a three-act farce. the slum novelist gains his whole effect by the fact that some detail is strange to the reader; but that detail by the nature of the case cannot be strange in itself. it cannot be strange to the soul which he is professing to study. the slum novelist gains his effects by describing the same grey mist as draping the dingy factory and the dingy tavern. but to the man he is supposed to be studying there must be exactly the same difference between the factory and the tavern that there is to a middle-class man between a late night at the office and a supper at pagani's. the slum novelist is content with pointing out that to the eye of his particular class a pickaxe looks dirty and a pewter pot looks dirty. but the man he is supposed to be studying sees the difference between them exactly as a clerk sees the difference between a ledger and an edition de luxe. the chiaroscuro of the life is inevitably lost; for to us the high lights and the shadows are a light grey. but the high lights and the shadows are not a light grey in that life any more than in any other. the kind of man who could really express the pleasures of the poor would be also the kind of man who could share them. in short, these books are not a record of the psychology of poverty. they are a record of the psychology of wealth and culture when brought in contact with poverty. they are not a description of the state of the slums. they are only a very dark and dreadful description of the state of the slummers. one might give innumerable examples of the essentially unsympathetic and unpopular quality of these realistic writers. but perhaps the simplest and most obvious example with which we could conclude is the mere fact that these writers are realistic. the poor have many other vices, but, at least, they are never realistic. the poor are melodramatic and romantic in grain; the poor all believe in high moral platitudes and copy-book maxims; probably this is the ultimate meaning of the great saying, "blessed are the poor." blessed are the poor, for they are always making life, or trying to make life like an adelphi play. some innocent educationalists and philanthropists (for even philanthropists can be innocent) have expressed a grave astonishment that the masses prefer shilling shockers to scientific treatises and melodramas to problem plays. the reason is very simple. the realistic story is certainly more artistic than the melodramatic story. if what you desire is deft handling, delicate proportions, a unit of artistic atmosphere, the realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama. in everything that is light and bright and ornamental the realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama. but, at least, the melodrama has one indisputable advantage over the realistic story. the melodrama is much more like life. it is much more like man, and especially the poor man. it is very banal and very inartistic when a poor woman at the adelphi says, "do you think i will sell my own child?" but poor women in the battersea high road do say, "do you think i will sell my own child?" they say it on every available occasion; you can hear a sort of murmur or babble of it all the way down the street. it is very stale and weak dramatic art (if that is all) when the workman confronts his master and says, "i'm a man." but a workman does say "i'm a man" two or three times every day. in fact, it is tedious, possibly, to hear poor men being melodramatic behind the footlights; but that is because one can always hear them being melodramatic in the street outside. in short, melodrama, if it is dull, is dull because it is too accurate. somewhat the same problem exists in the case of stories about schoolboys. mr. kipling's "stalky and co." is much more amusing (if you are talking about amusement) than the late dean farrar's "eric; or, little by little." but "eric" is immeasurably more like real school-life. for real school-life, real boyhood, is full of the things of which eric is full--priggishness, a crude piety, a silly sin, a weak but continual attempt at the heroic, in a word, melodrama. and if we wish to lay a firm basis for any efforts to help the poor, we must not become realistic and see them from the outside. we must become melodramatic, and see them from the inside. the novelist must not take out his notebook and say, "i am an expert." no; he must imitate the workman in the adelphi play. he must slap himself on the chest and say, "i am a man." xx. concluding remarks on the importance of orthodoxy whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated. but if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to be raised against the modern version of that improvement. the vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. but if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. the human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. when we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. it is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. as he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. when he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as god, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. trees have no dogmas. turnips are singularly broad-minded. if then, i repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental advance in the construction of a definite philosophy of life. and that philosophy of life must be right and the other philosophies wrong. now of all, or nearly all, the able modern writers whom i have briefly studied in this book, this is especially and pleasingly true, that they do each of them have a constructive and affirmative view, and that they do take it seriously and ask us to take it seriously. there is nothing merely sceptically progressive about mr. rudyard kipling. there is nothing in the least broad minded about mr. bernard shaw. the paganism of mr. lowes dickinson is more grave than any christianity. even the opportunism of mr. h. g. wells is more dogmatic than the idealism of anybody else. somebody complained, i think, to matthew arnold that he was getting as dogmatic as carlyle. he replied, "that may be true; but you overlook an obvious difference. i am dogmatic and right, and carlyle is dogmatic and wrong." the strong humour of the remark ought not to disguise from us its everlasting seriousness and common sense; no man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks that he is in truth and the other man in error. in similar style, i hold that i am dogmatic and right, while mr. shaw is dogmatic and wrong. but my main point, at present, is to notice that the chief among these writers i have discussed do most sanely and courageously offer themselves as dogmatists, as founders of a system. it may be true that the thing in mr. shaw most interesting to me, is the fact that mr. shaw is wrong. but it is equally true that the thing in mr. shaw most interesting to himself, is the fact that mr. shaw is right. mr. shaw may have none with him but himself; but it is not for himself he cares. it is for the vast and universal church, of which he is the only member. the two typical men of genius whom i have mentioned here, and with whose names i have begun this book, are very symbolic, if only because they have shown that the fiercest dogmatists can make the best artists. in the fin de siecle atmosphere every one was crying out that literature should be free from all causes and all ethical creeds. art was to produce only exquisite workmanship, and it was especially the note of those days to demand brilliant plays and brilliant short stories. and when they got them, they got them from a couple of moralists. the best short stories were written by a man trying to preach imperialism. the best plays were written by a man trying to preach socialism. all the art of all the artists looked tiny and tedious beside the art which was a byproduct of propaganda. the reason, indeed, is very simple. a man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. a man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. a small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything. so we find that when real forces, good or bad, like kipling and g. b. s., enter our arena, they bring with them not only startling and arresting art, but very startling and arresting dogmas. and they care even more, and desire us to care even more, about their startling and arresting dogmas than about their startling and arresting art. mr. shaw is a good dramatist, but what he desires more than anything else to be is a good politician. mr. rudyard kipling is by divine caprice and natural genius an unconventional poet; but what he desires more than anything else to be is a conventional poet. he desires to be the poet of his people, bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh, understanding their origins, celebrating their destiny. he desires to be poet laureate, a most sensible and honourable and public-spirited desire. having been given by the gods originality--that is, disagreement with others--he desires divinely to agree with them. but the most striking instance of all, more striking, i think, even than either of these, is the instance of mr. h. g. wells. he began in a sort of insane infancy of pure art. he began by making a new heaven and a new earth, with the same irresponsible instinct by which men buy a new necktie or button-hole. he began by trifling with the stars and systems in order to make ephemeral anecdotes; he killed the universe for a joke. he has since become more and more serious, and has become, as men inevitably do when they become more and more serious, more and more parochial. he was frivolous about the twilight of the gods; but he is serious about the london omnibus. he was careless in "the time machine," for that dealt only with the destiny of all things; but he is careful, and even cautious, in "mankind in the making," for that deals with the day after to-morrow. he began with the end of the world, and that was easy. now he has gone on to the beginning of the world, and that is difficult. but the main result of all this is the same as in the other cases. the men who have really been the bold artists, the realistic artists, the uncompromising artists, are the men who have turned out, after all, to be writing "with a purpose." suppose that any cool and cynical art-critic, any art-critic fully impressed with the conviction that artists were greatest when they were most purely artistic, suppose that a man who professed ably a humane aestheticism, as did mr. max beerbohm, or a cruel aestheticism, as did mr. w. e. henley, had cast his eye over the whole fictional literature which was recent in the year 1895, and had been asked to select the three most vigorous and promising and original artists and artistic works, he would, i think, most certainly have said that for a fine artistic audacity, for a real artistic delicacy, or for a whiff of true novelty in art, the things that stood first were "soldiers three," by a mr. rudyard kipling; "arms and the man," by a mr. bernard shaw; and "the time machine," by a man called wells. and all these men have shown themselves ingrainedly didactic. you may express the matter if you will by saying that if we want doctrines we go to the great artists. but it is clear from the psychology of the matter that this is not the true statement; the true statement is that when we want any art tolerably brisk and bold we have to go to the doctrinaires. in concluding this book, therefore, i would ask, first and foremost, that men such as these of whom i have spoken should not be insulted by being taken for artists. no man has any right whatever merely to enjoy the work of mr. bernard shaw; he might as well enjoy the invasion of his country by the french. mr. shaw writes either to convince or to enrage us. no man has any business to be a kiplingite without being a politician, and an imperialist politician. if a man is first with us, it should be because of what is first with him. if a man convinces us at all, it should be by his convictions. if we hate a poem of kipling's from political passion, we are hating it for the same reason that the poet loved it; if we dislike him because of his opinions, we are disliking him for the best of all possible reasons. if a man comes into hyde park to preach it is permissible to hoot him; but it is discourteous to applaud him as a performing bear. and an artist is only a performing bear compared with the meanest man who fancies he has anything to say. there is, indeed, one class of modern writers and thinkers who cannot altogether be overlooked in this question, though there is no space here for a lengthy account of them, which, indeed, to confess the truth, would consist chiefly of abuse. i mean those who get over all these abysses and reconcile all these wars by talking about "aspects of truth," by saying that the art of kipling represents one aspect of the truth, and the art of william watson another; the art of mr. bernard shaw one aspect of the truth, and the art of mr. cunningham grahame another; the art of mr. h. g. wells one aspect, and the art of mr. coventry patmore (say) another. i will only say here that this seems to me an evasion which has not even had the sense to disguise itself ingeniously in words. if we talk of a certain thing being an aspect of truth, it is evident that we claim to know what is truth; just as, if we talk of the hind leg of a dog, we claim to know what is a dog. unfortunately, the philosopher who talks about aspects of truth generally also asks, "what is truth?" frequently even he denies the existence of truth, or says it is inconceivable by the human intelligence. how, then, can he recognize its aspects? i should not like to be an artist who brought an architectural sketch to a builder, saying, "this is the south aspect of sea-view cottage. sea-view cottage, of course, does not exist." i should not even like very much to have to explain, under such circumstances, that sea-view cottage might exist, but was unthinkable by the human mind. nor should i like any better to be the bungling and absurd metaphysician who professed to be able to see everywhere the aspects of a truth that is not there. of course, it is perfectly obvious that there are truths in kipling, that there are truths in shaw or wells. but the degree to which we can perceive them depends strictly upon how far we have a definite conception inside us of what is truth. it is ludicrous to suppose that the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything. it is clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything. i plead, then, that we should agree or disagree with these men. i plead that we should agree with them at least in having an abstract belief. but i know that there are current in the modern world many vague objections to having an abstract belief, and i feel that we shall not get any further until we have dealt with some of them. the first objection is easily stated. a common hesitation in our day touching the use of extreme convictions is a sort of notion that extreme convictions specially upon cosmic matters, have been responsible in the past for the thing which is called bigotry. but a very small amount of direct experience will dissipate this view. in real life the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all. the economists of the manchester school who disagree with socialism take socialism seriously. it is the young man in bond street, who does not know what socialism means much less whether he agrees with it, who is quite certain that these socialist fellows are making a fuss about nothing. the man who understands the calvinist philosophy enough to agree with it must understand the catholic philosophy in order to disagree with it. it is the vague modern who is not at all certain what is right who is most certain that dante was wrong. the serious opponent of the latin church in history, even in the act of showing that it produced great infamies, must know that it produced great saints. it is the hard-headed stockbroker, who knows no history and believes no religion, who is, nevertheless, perfectly convinced that all these priests are knaves. the salvationist at the marble arch may be bigoted, but he is not too bigoted to yearn from a common human kinship after the dandy on church parade. but the dandy on church parade is so bigoted that he does not in the least yearn after the salvationist at the marble arch. bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions. it is the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite to excess. bigotry may be called the appalling frenzy of the indifferent. this frenzy of the indifferent is in truth a terrible thing; it has made all monstrous and widely pervading persecutions. in this degree it was not the people who cared who ever persecuted; the people who cared were not sufficiently numerous. it was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. it was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack. there have come some persecutions out of the pain of a passionate certainty; but these produced, not bigotry, but fanaticism--a very different and a somewhat admirable thing. bigotry in the main has always been the pervading omnipotence of those who do not care crushing out those who care in darkness and blood. there are people, however, who dig somewhat deeper than this into the possible evils of dogma. it is felt by many that strong philosophical conviction, while it does not (as they perceive) produce that sluggish and fundamentally frivolous condition which we call bigotry, does produce a certain concentration, exaggeration, and moral impatience, which we may agree to call fanaticism. they say, in brief, that ideas are dangerous things. in politics, for example, it is commonly urged against a man like mr. balfour, or against a man like mr. john morley, that a wealth of ideas is dangerous. the true doctrine on this point, again, is surely not very difficult to state. ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. he is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. the man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller. it is a common error, i think, among the radical idealists of my own party and period to suggest that financiers and business men are a danger to the empire because they are so sordid or so materialistic. the truth is that financiers and business men are a danger to the empire because they can be sentimental about any sentiment, and idealistic about any ideal, any ideal that they find lying about. just as a boy who has not known much of women is apt too easily to take a woman for the woman, so these practical men, unaccustomed to causes, are always inclined to think that if a thing is proved to be an ideal it is proved to be the ideal. many, for example, avowedly followed cecil rhodes because he had a vision. they might as well have followed him because he had a nose; a man without some kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of a monstrosity as a noseless man. people say of such a figure, in almost feverish whispers, "he knows his own mind," which is exactly like saying in equally feverish whispers, "he blows his own nose." human nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind; as the sanity of the old testament truly said, where there is no vision the people perisheth. but it is precisely because an ideal is necessary to man that the man without ideals is in permanent danger of fanaticism. there is nothing which is so likely to leave a man open to the sudden and irresistible inroad of an unbalanced vision as the cultivation of business habits. all of us know angular business men who think that the earth is flat, or that mr. kruger was at the head of a great military despotism, or that men are graminivorous, or that bacon wrote shakespeare. religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of danger. but there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy and soaked in religion. briefly, then, we dismiss the two opposite dangers of bigotry and fanaticism, bigotry which is a too great vagueness and fanaticism which is a too great concentration. we say that the cure for the bigot is belief; we say that the cure for the idealist is ideas. to know the best theories of existence and to choose the best from them (that is, to the best of our own strong conviction) appears to us the proper way to be neither bigot nor fanatic, but something more firm than a bigot and more terrible than a fanatic, a man with a definite opinion. but that definite opinion must in this view begin with the basic matters of human thought, and these must not be dismissed as irrelevant, as religion, for instance, is too often in our days dismissed as irrelevant. even if we think religion insoluble, we cannot think it irrelevant. even if we ourselves have no view of the ultimate verities, we must feel that wherever such a view exists in a man it must be more important than anything else in him. the instant that the thing ceases to be the unknowable, it becomes the indispensable. there can be no doubt, i think, that the idea does exist in our time that there is something narrow or irrelevant or even mean about attacking a man's religion, or arguing from it in matters of politics or ethics. there can be quite as little doubt that such an accusation of narrowness is itself almost grotesquely narrow. to take an example from comparatively current events: we all know that it was not uncommon for a man to be considered a scarecrow of bigotry and obscurantism because he distrusted the japanese, or lamented the rise of the japanese, on the ground that the japanese were pagans. nobody would think that there was anything antiquated or fanatical about distrusting a people because of some difference between them and us in practice or political machinery. nobody would think it bigoted to say of a people, "i distrust their influence because they are protectionists." no one would think it narrow to say, "i lament their rise because they are socialists, or manchester individualists, or strong believers in militarism and conscription." a difference of opinion about the nature of parliaments matters very much; but a difference of opinion about the nature of sin does not matter at all. a difference of opinion about the object of taxation matters very much; but a difference of opinion about the object of human existence does not matter at all. we have a right to distrust a man who is in a different kind of municipality; but we have no right to mistrust a man who is in a different kind of cosmos. this sort of enlightenment is surely about the most unenlightened that it is possible to imagine. to recur to the phrase which i employed earlier, this is tantamount to saying that everything is important with the exception of everything. religion is exactly the thing which cannot be left out--because it includes everything. the most absent-minded person cannot well pack his gladstone-bag and leave out the bag. we have a general view of existence, whether we like it or not; it alters or, to speak more accurately, it creates and involves everything we say or do, whether we like it or not. if we regard the cosmos as a dream, we regard the fiscal question as a dream. if we regard the cosmos as a joke, we regard st. paul's cathedral as a joke. if everything is bad, then we must believe (if it be possible) that beer is bad; if everything be good, we are forced to the rather fantastic conclusion that scientific philanthropy is good. every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly. the possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to have forgotten all about its existence. this latter situation is certainly possible; in fact, it is the situation of the whole modern world. the modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. it may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. it may be thought "dogmatic," for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. but it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic. or, again, we see nothing "dogmatic" in the inspiring, but certainly most startling, theory of physical science, that we should collect facts for the sake of facts, even though they seem as useless as sticks and straws. this is a great and suggestive idea, and its utility may, if you will, be proving itself, but its utility is, in the abstract, quite as disputable as the utility of that calling on oracles or consulting shrines which is also said to prove itself. thus, because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to find the sepulchre of christ. but being in a civilization which does believe in this dogma of fact for facts' sake, we do not see the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the north pole. i am not speaking of a tenable ultimate utility which is true both of the crusades and the polar explorations. i mean merely that we do see the superficial and aesthetic singularity, the startling quality, about the idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place where a man died. but we do not see the aesthetic singularity and startling quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man can live--a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the meeting-place of some lines that do not exist. let us, then, go upon a long journey and enter on a dreadful search. let us, at least, dig and seek till we have discovered our own opinions. the dogmas we really hold are far more fantastic, and, perhaps, far more beautiful than we think. in the course of these essays i fear that i have spoken from time to time of rationalists and rationalism, and that in a disparaging sense. being full of that kindliness which should come at the end of everything, even of a book, i apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists. there are no rationalists. we all believe fairy-tales, and live in them. some, with a sumptuous literary turn, believe in the existence of the lady clothed with the sun. some, with a more rustic, elvish instinct, like mr. mccabe, believe merely in the impossible sun itself. some hold the undemonstrable dogma of the existence of god; some the equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door. truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. and the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. we who are liberals once held liberalism lightly as a truism. now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. we who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. we who are christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-christian writers pointed it out to us. the great march of mental destruction will go on. everything will be denied. everything will become a creed. it is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. it is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. we shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. we shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. we shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. we shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed. the end (images generously made available by the internet archive.) six major prophets by edwin e. slosson, m.s., ph.d. literary editor of "the independent" associate in the columbia school of journalism author of "major prophets of to-day," etc. whoever dies without recognizing the prophet of his time dies the death of a pagan. mohammedan proverb. boston little, brown, and company 1917 to my son preston william slosson whose thoughts and phrases i have more freely incorporated than i am willing to acknowledge elsewhere than on this page, this volume is gratefully dedicated [illustration: g. b. shaw] preface a few years ago it occurred to me that there were living on the same planet and at the same time as myself some interesting people whom i had never seen and did not know so much about as i should. since they or i might die at any moment, i determined not to delay longer. so i prepared a list of twelve men who seemed to me most worth knowing, and then i set out to see them; not with the hope of becoming personally acquainted with them or even with the object of interviewing them, but chiefly to satisfy myself that they really existed. one does not go to switzerland to find out how high the alps are or how they look. the traveler can get their altitude from baedeker and their appearance from photographs, but if he is to talk about them with any sense of self-confidence he must have come within hailing distance of the mountains themselves. it is sufficient to say that i got close enough to the alps i had chosen to be able to vouch for their actuality. the men i selected for study were those who, whether they called themselves philosophers or not, seemed to me to have a definite philosophy of life, those who had a message for their own times of sufficient importance and distinctiveness to merit public attention. it is my purpose in these sketches to show the trend and importance of these diverse theories, so that a reader who had not had the opportunity to range over the complete works of a dozen authors might find which of them was best adapted to serve him as "guide, philosopher, and friend." in a word, my part is merely to act as the host at a reception who introduces his guests and then leaves them to follow up such acquaintanceships as seem profitable. my aim is exposition rather than criticism. although i have not thought it necessary absolutely to suppress my own opinions, i trust this has not prevented me from giving a fair and sufficiently sympathetic presentation of each man's views in turn. my list of the "twelve major prophets of today" consisted of the following names: maurice maeterlinck, henri bergson, henri poincaré, elie metchnikoff, wilhelm ostwald, ernst haeckel, george bernard shaw, herbert george wells, gilbert keith chesterton, f. c. s. schiller, john dewey, and rudolf eucken. i had not taken nationality into consideration, but i found that i had chosen four from england, three from germany, two from france, and one each from belgium, russia, and the united states of america. four of the twelve were professors of philosophy; four were men of science, one of these a mathematician, one a physician, one a zoologist, one a chemist; and four were men of letters, authors of novels, dramas, or essays. the twelve sketches appeared in _the independent_ during the last few years, but they have been considerably extended for book publication. the first six named above were published in the volume "major prophets of to-day." the other six are given in the following pages. edwin e. slosson contents preface i george bernard shaw ii h. g. wells iii g. k. chesterton iv f. c. s. schiller v john dewey vi rudolf eucken list of portraits george bernard shaw h. g. wells g. k. chesterton f. c. s. schiller john dewey rudolf eucken to write a book about a man who has written books about himself is an impertinence which only an irresistible charm of manner can carry off. the unpardonable way of doing it, and the commonest, is to undertake to tell the public what a writer has already told them himself, and tell it worse or tell it wrong. g. b. shaw. six major prophets chapter i george bernard shaw dramatic critic of life i am a journalist, proud of it, deliberately cutting out of my works all that is not journalism, convinced that nothing that is not journalism will live long as literature, or be of any use whilst it does live. i deal with all periods, but i never study any period but the present; and as a dramatist i have no clue to any historical or other personage save that part of him which is also myself.... the man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.--g. b. s., in "the sanity of art." august 4, 1914, cuts time in two like a knife. the continuity of human progress in science, arts, letters, commerce, philosophy, everything, was broken off at that point--to be taken up again, who knows when? nothing in the world can remain quite the same as before. everything is seen in a new light. all our old ideas, even the most ancient and most reverenced, will have to be taken out and looked over to see how many of them remain intact and useful, just as after an earthquake one overhauls the china closet. "the transvaluation of all values", which nietzsche looked for, has come to pass sooner than he expected, although the results of this reëstimation are not likely to be what he anticipated. it is not merely that the geographies will have to be revised and the histories rewritten, but all books will be classified as antebellum or postbellum literature. it will, however, not be necessary to mark them a. b. or p. b., for they will by their style of thought and language bear an indelible though invisible date with reference to this line of demarcation. we are already beginning to look back upon the antebellum days as a closed period, and those who were conspicuous in it are being seen in an historical perspective such as the lapse of a generation of ordinary times is needed to produce. some reputations are shrinking, others are rising, as mountains seem from a departing train to rearrange themselves according to their true height. the true prophets are becoming distinguishable from the false. among those who have taken the test and stand higher than before is george bernard shaw. whether he will write better plays than before remains to be seen. perhaps he will write no more of any kind. but those he has written will be regarded with more respect because we can see their essential truth, whereas before we feared lest we might be merely fascinated by their glitter. warnings which the world took for jokes because of their fantastic guise now turn out too terribly real, and advice which the world ignored would better have been heeded. few writers have as little to take back on account of the war as shaw, although few have expressed such decided opinions in such extreme language on so many topics. for instance, kipling's "the bear that walks like a man" makes queer reading now that england is fighting to give russia what then she was ready to fight to prevent her getting. but the full significance of shaw's fable farce of "androcles and the lion" is now for the first time being realized. the philosophy of this, his most frivolous and serious play, is summed up by ferrovius, a converted giant of the ursus type, who finds it impossible to keep to his christian principle of nonresistance when brought into the arena. the natural man rises in him and he slays six gladiators single-handed. this delights the emperor, who thereupon offers him a post in the pretorian guards which he had formerly refused. the fallen and victorious ferrovius accepts, saying: in my youth i worshiped mars, the god of war. i turned from him to serve the christian god; but to-day the christian god forsook me; and mars overcame me and took back his own. the christian god is not yet. he will come when mars and i are dust; but meanwhile i must serve the gods that are, not the god that will be. until then i accept service in the guard, caesar. the great cataclysm does not seem to have changed shaw's opinions one iota, but all england is changed, and so he appears in a different light. more of his countrymen agree with what he used to preach to them than ever before, yet he was never so disliked as he is to-day--which is saying a great deal. the british press has boycotted him. his letters, once so sought after by the most dignified journals, now no longer appear except in _the new statesman_. his speeches, be they never so witty and timely, are not reported or even announced. consequently those who wish to hear him have to resort to the advertising expedients of the era before printing. a friend of mine just back from london tells me that he saw chalked on the side-walk a notice of a meeting to be addressed by shaw in some out-of-the-way hall. going there, he found it packed with an enthusiastic crowd gathered to hear shaw discuss the questions of the day. the anti-shavian press said that he had to keep to his house, that he was afraid to stir abroad for fear of a mob, that his career was over, that he was exploded, repudiated, disgraced, boycotted, dead and done for. at the very time when we were reading things like this, he was, as we since have learned, addressing weekly meetings in one of the largest halls in london. reporters who were sent to see him hounded off the platform witnessed an ovation instead. the audience at his invitation asked him many questions, but not of a hostile character. shaw thrives on unpopularity or at least on public disapproval, which is not quite the same thing. it is not only that shaw would rather be right than prime minister; he would rather be leader of the opposition than prime minister. he would be "in the right with two or three"; in fact, if his followers increased much beyond the poet's minimum, he would begin to feel uneasy and suspect that he was wrong. when shaw sees a lonely mistreated kitten or a lonely mistreated theory, his tender heart yearns over it. for instance, when all his set started sneering at "natural rights" as eighteenth-century pedantry, he appeared as their champion, and, practically alone among modern radicals and art lovers, he has dared to commend the puritans. the iconoclastic views which he expressed as dramatic and musical critic in the nineties have been vindicated by events, and now when a young reader opens for the first time "the quintessence of ibsenism", "the perfect wagnerite", and the collection of "dramatic opinions and essays", he wonders only why shaw should get so excited about such conventional and undisputed things. it is no wonder shaw is "the most hated man in england." nothing is more irritating than to say "i told you so", and he can--and does--ay it oftener than anybody else, unless it is doctor dillon. shaw's brain secretes automatically the particular antitoxin needed to counteract whatever disease may be epidemic in the community at the time. this injected with some vigor into the veins of thought may not effect a cure, but always excites a feverish state in the organism. it is his habit of seeing that there is another side to a question and calling attention to it at inconvenient times that makes him so irritating to the public. his opponents tried to intern him in coventry as a pro-german on account of his pamphlet, "commonsense about the war." but this is almost the only thing produced in england during the first weeks of the war that reads well now. compare it with its numerous replies and see which seems absurd. doubtless it was not tactful, it might have been called treasonable, but it certainly was sensible. shaw kept his head level when others lost theirs. that was because he had thought out things in advance and so did not have to make up his mind in a hurry with the great probability of making it up wrong. in that pamphlet he presented the case for the allies in a way much more convincing to the american mind than many that came to us in the early days of the war, and his arguments have been strengthened by the course of events, while others advanced at that time have been weakened. shaw was arguing before a neutral and international jury, and so he did not rest his case on the specious and patriotic pleas that passed muster at that time with the british public. as for the charge of pro-germanism, that may best be met by quoting from a letter written by him to a friend in vienna early in 1915. the language is evidently not pure shavian. it has been translated into austrian-german and thence retranslated into british journalese. as regards myself, i am not what is called a pro-german. the germans would not respect me, were i at such a time as this, when all thoughts of culture have vanished, not to stand by my people. but also, i am not an anti-german. the war brings us all on to the same plane of savagery. every london coster can stick his bayonet deeper into the stomach of richard strauss than richard strauss would care to do to him. militarism has just now compelled me to pay a thousand pounds war taxation in order that some "brave little servian" may be facilitated in cutting your throat or, that a russian mujik may cleave your skull in twain, although i would gladly pay twice that sum to save your life, or to buy some beautiful picture in vienna for our national gallery. shaw has always condemned militarism because of the type of mind it engenders in officers and men. but he has never been opposed to preparedness or to the use of force. in the london _daily news_ of january 1, 1914,--note the date,--he said: i like courage (like most constitutionally timid civilians) and the active use of strength for the salvation of the world. it is good to have a giant's strength and it is not at all tyrannous to use it like a giant provided you are a decent sort of giant. what on earth is strength for but to be used and will any reasonable man tell me that we are using our strength now to any purpose? let us get the value of our money in strength and influence instead of casting every new cannon in an ecstasy of terror and then being afraid to aim it at anybody. at that time, seven months before the storm burst, he not only anticipated the war, but said that it might be averted, by politely announcing that war between france and germany would be so inconvenient to england that the latter country is prepared to pledge herself to defend either country if attacked by the other. if we are asked how we are to decide which nation is really the aggressor we can reply that we shall take our choice, or when the problem is unsolvable we shall toss up, but that we will take a hand in the war anyhow. international warfare is an unmitigated nuisance. have as much character-building civil war as you like, but there must be no sowing of dragon's teeth like the franco-prussian war. england can put a stop to such a crime single-handed easily enough if she can keep her knees from knocking together in her present militarist fashion. of course shaw may have been wrong in supposing that an open announcement of great britain's determination to enter the war would have deterred germany, but as we now know from the white paper this same opinion was held by the governments of both france and russia. on july 30 the president of france said to the british ambassador at paris that if his majesty's government announced that england would come to the aid of france in the event of a conflict between france and germany as a result of the present differences between austria and servia, there would be no war, for germany would at once modify her attitude. and on july 25, m. sazonof, the russian foreign minister, said to the british ambassador at petrograd that he did not believe that germany really wanted war, but her attitude was decided by ours. if we took our stand firmly with france and russia, there would be no war. if we failed her now, rivers of blood would flow, and we would in the end be dragged into war. shaw now gives the same advice to the united states that he gave to his own country before the war, that is, to increase its armament and not be afraid to use it. in a recent letter to the american _intercollegiate socialist_ he said: i should strenuously recommend the united states to build thirty-two new dreadnoughts instead of sixteen, and to spend two billion dollars on its armament program instead of one. this would cost only a fraction of the money you are wasting every year in demoralizing luxury, a good deal of it having been in the past scattered over the continental countries which are now using what they saved out of it to slaughter one another. if the united states wishes to stop war as an institution, that is, to undertake the policing of the world, it will need a very big club for the purpose. if i were an american statesman i should tell the country flatly that it should maintain a pacific navy capable of resisting an attack from japan and an atlantic navy capable of resisting an attack from england, with zeppelins on the same scale, a proportionate land equipment of siege guns, and so forth. and until the nations see the suicidal folly of staking everything in the last instance on the ordeal of battle, no other advice will be honest advice. in "major barbara" cusins abandons the teaching of greek to take up the manufacture of munitions because he has the courage "to make war on war." it is in this play that is expounded the theory on which president wilson based his policy. lady britomart tells cusins: "you must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals." but undershaft, the munition-maker, replies: "no; none of that. you must keep the true faith of an armorer, or you don't come in here." and when cusins asks: "what on earth is the true faith of an armorer?" he answers: to give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles; to aristocrat and republican, to nihilist and tsar, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.... i will take an order from a good man as cheerfully as from a bad one. if you good people prefer preaching and shirking to buying my weapons and fighting the rascals, don't blame me. i can make cannons; i cannot make courage and conviction. in this same conversation shaw also gives a hint of his theology, when cusins says to undershaft: "you have no power. you do not drive this place; it drives you. and what drives this place?" undershaft answers, enigmatically, "a will of which i am a part." this doctrine of an immanent god working through nature and man to higher things was developed more definitely in an address which mr. shaw delivered some years ago in the city temple at the invitation of the reverend r. j. campbell. here he argued that god created human beings to be "his helpers and servers, not his sycophants and apologists." shaw continues: if my actions are god's nobody can fairly hold me responsible for them; my conscience is mere lunacy.... but if i am a part of god, if my eyes are god's eyes, my hands god's hands, and my conscience god's conscience then also i share his responsibility for the world; and wo is me if the world goes wrong! this position enables him to explain evil on evolutionary principles as "the method of trial and error." when blake asks of the tiger, "did he who made the lamb make thee?" shaw conceives the life-force as replying: yes, it was the best i could devise at the time; but now that i have evolved something better, part of the work of that something better, man, to wit, is to kill out my earlier attempt. and in due time i hope to evolve superman, who will in his turn kill out and supersede man, whose abominable cruelties, stupidities and follies have utterly disappointed me. in the unactable third act of his "man and superman",[1] this theology is put into the mouths of two most unpromising preachers, don juan and the devil. here is found one of the most eloquent arraignments of war in all literature. it is, remember, the devil who is speaking: i tell you that in the arts of life man invests nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. the peasant i tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. but when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. in the arts of peace man is a bungler. i have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. i know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles; they are toys compared to the maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. there is nothing in man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth. his heart is in his weapons.... man measures his force by his destructiveness.... in the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of god and the littleness of man. nowadays the chronicles describe battles. in a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. and this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. over such battles the people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty and pestilence in which they themselves daily walk.... the plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and the crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough; something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows and the executioner; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism, and all the other isms by which even those clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all destroyers. three years before the war shaw wrote a little satirical skit, "press cuttings",[2] which was deemed so dangerous to both britain and germany that the censors of both countries agreed in prohibiting its production on the stage. since the british censor seemed to fear that the principal characters, "balsquith" and "mitchener", might be taken by the public as referring to certain well-known statesmen, shaw offered to change the names to "bones" and "johnson." but even that concession would not satisfy the censor's scruples, so the play was never publicly put on the stage, though, since there was then no censorship of literature, it was published as a book. here is a bit of the dialogue: _balsquith_--the germans have laid down four more dreadnoughts. _mitchener_--then you must lay down twelve. _balsquith_--oh, yes; it's easy to say that; but think of what they'll cost. _mitchener_--think of what it would cost to be invaded by germany and forced to pay an indemnity of five hundred millions.... _balsquith_--after all, why should the germans invade us? _mitchener_--why shouldn't they? what else have their army to do? what else are they building a navy for? _balsquith_--well, we never think of invading germany. _mitchener_--yes, we do. i have thought of nothing else for the last ten years. say what you will, balsquith, the germans have never recognized, and until they get a stern lesson, they never _will_ recognize, the plain fact that the interests of the british empire are paramount, and that the command of the sea belongs by nature to england. _balsquith_--but if they wont recognize it, what can i do? _mitchener_--shoot them down. _balsquith_--i cant shoot them down. _mitchener_--yes, you can. you dont realize it; but if you fire a rifle into a german he drops just as surely as a rabbit does. _balsquith_--but dash it all, man, a rabbit hasn't got a rifle and a german has. suppose he shoots you down. _mitchener_--excuse me, balsquith; but that consideration is what we call cowardice in the army. a soldier always assumes that he is going to shoot, not to be shot. _balsquith_--oh, come! i like to hear you military people talking of cowardice. why, you spend your lives in an ecstasy of terror of imaginary invasions. i don't believe you ever go to bed without looking under it for a burglar. _mitchener_--a very sensible precaution, _balsquith._ i always take it. and in consequence i've never been burgled. _balsquith_--neither have i. anyhow dont you taunt me with cowardice. i never look under my bed for a burglar. i'm not always looking under the nation's bed for an invader. and if it comes to fighting, im quite willing to fight without being three to one. _mitchener_--these are the romantic ravings of a jingo civilian, balsquith. at least you'll not deny that the absolute command of the sea is essential to our security. _balsquith_--the absolute command of the sea is essential to the security of the principality of monaco. but monaco isn't going to get it. _mitchener_--and consequently monaco enjoys no security. what a frightful thing! how do the inhabitants sleep with the possibility of invasion, of bombardment, continually present to their minds? would you have our english slumbers broken in this way? are we also to live without security? _balsquith_--yes. theres no such thing as security in the world; and there never can be as long as men are mortal. england will be secure when england is dead, just as the streets of london will be safe when there is no longer a man in her streets to be run over, or a vehicle to run over him. when you military chaps ask for security you are crying for the moon. _mitchener_--let me tell you, balsquith, that in these days of aeroplanes and zeppelin airships, the question of the moon is becoming one of the greatest importance. it will be reached at no very distant date. can you as an englishman tamely contemplate the possibility of having to live under a german moon? the british flag must be planted there at all hazards. the play ends with the establishment of universal military training and equal suffrage, thus doing away with a militarism that was both timorous and tyrannical, snobbish and inefficient, and at the same time making the nation truly democratic. it is characteristic of shaw that recently, when the papers were discussing what sort of a monument should commemorate edith cavell, he interjected the unwelcome suggestion that the country could honor her best by enfranchising her sex. there is ever something in bernard shaw that suggests the eighteenth century, the age of swift and voltaire and doctor johnson. on the credit side we must reckon lucidity, incisive wit, cleareyed logic, unashamed common sense, love of discussion and openness to new ideas, freedom from prejudice of race or class, humanitarian aspiration --in a word the _aufklärung_. on the debit side some items must unhappily be listed also: doctrinaire intellectualism, inability to see either the limits of one's own doctrines or the point in other people's, inadequate appreciation of historic institutions and popular sentiments, contempt for romance, intolerance for science, and incapacity for poetry. shaw seems to have inherited the famous _saeva indignatio_ of his great countryman, swift. for all his simple diet he is not so eupeptic as chesterton. chesterton is most closely akin to dickens, as may be seen from his sympathetic appreciations of dickens's works. if i may be permitted to express the relationship of the four in a mathematical formula, i should put it: shaw: chesterton = swift: dickens. the mordant wit of the two irishmen is a very different thing from the genial humor of the two englishmen. chesterton as usual makes a theological issue out of it. he says of shaw: he is not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as voltaire. humor is akin to agnosticism, which is only the negative side of mysticism. but pure wit is akin to puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. very briefly, the man who sees consistency in things is a wit--and a calvinist. the man who sees inconsistency in things is a humorist--and a catholic. however this may be, bernard shaw exhibits all that is purest in the puritan; the desire to see truth face to face even if it slay us, the high impatience with irrelevant sentiment or obstructive symbol; the constant effort to keep the soul at its highest pressure and speed. his instincts upon all social customs and questions are puritan. his favorite author is bunyan. but along with what was inspiring and direct in puritanism, bernard shaw has inherited also some of the things that were cumbersome and traditional. if ever shaw exhibits a prejudice it is a puritan prejudice. when shaw in the preface of his "plays for puritans" declared himself "a puritan in art" it was regarded as one of his jokes. so it was, but, as the world has found out since, his jokes are not nonsense. the main reason why the assumption and ascription of the term "puritan" to shaw was thought absurd was because of the prevalent misconception of what sort of people the puritans were. the word in its common acceptance implies orthodoxy, conventionality, prudishness, asceticism. now the real puritan was a revolutionary of the most radical type. of all the socialists, anarchists, and extremists of various views with whom i am acquainted, there is not one who lives in antagonism to his conventional contemporaries on so many points as did the puritan in his day. milton's pamphlets in favor of republicanism, free speech, divorce, and new theology were as scandalous to the seventeenth century as shaw's "revolutionist's handbook" to the nineteenth. the puritans insisted that marriage was a purely civil contract to be made and annulled by the state, and they even forbade ministers to perform the ceremony, while catholics, roman and anglican, hold the contrary theory, that marriage is a religious rite, only performed by priests and indissoluble. the pilgrim fathers who had a dozen children and two or three wives apiece--consecutive, of course--are not to be classed as ascetics; and if any one thinks them prudish, he has not read their literature. of course shaw's opinions are different from those of the puritans, indeed quite the opposite on some points. the puritans, for example, were not averse to blood, either in their food, their politics, or their theology, while shaw is almost buddhistic in his tender-heartedness. androcles is his caricature of himself. but still we may say that shaw is puritanical in his type of mind, his attitude toward the established institutions and moral codes of his time, and even in his faults. consider for instance his intolerance. no, i do not mean dogmatism. that he comes to emphatic conclusions is much to his credit and differentiates him from the colloidal-minded mass of modern writers who hold no convictions to have the courage of. but he does not, for instance, content himself with the attitude: "for the life of me i can't see what you find to admire in that absurd, romantic, weak-minded, sentimental, butcherly scott." he would be quite justified in expressing his opinion thus-wise. he must add: "there's nothing to him and if you say there is, you are deceiving me or--what is wickeder--yourself. in either case you are an idealist, which in my unique vocabulary means liar." to which we might return an answer of the quaker sort: "friend, thee has two eyes and the usual number of brains and so a right to thine opinion. but it need not follow that because thee sees not a merit in a writer that it does in nowise exist." every one of shaw's early heroes and heroines, from the unsocial socialist and the daughter of mrs. warren to undershaft and larry doyle, admires himself or herself immensely for saying to every upholder of supposedly current morality: "bah! humbug! hypocrite!" to which again the gentle reply should come: "friend, i be not an humbug, nor yet an hypocrite, nor even a bah. a man may differ from thee and yet be sincere in his views, although this fact be dreamed not in thy philosophy. i may be right or i may be wrong, but if thee call me an idealist yet again, lo, i will lift this brick and cast it at thee." wells and shaw are quite commonly bracketed like scylla and charybdis, dickens and thackeray, tennyson and browning, and the royal bloodsweating chesterbelloc of holy writ. these couplings are often absurd but rarely arbitrary. some likeness of thought or mood or some contrast of viewpoint usually accounts for if not justifies such literary _mésalliances_. wells and shaw are both socialists, but this is not the tie, for, as the english aristocrat said: "we are all socialists now." the real likeness is that each is an intellectual anarchist, although a political socialist. shaw is an isolated, not to say eccentric, figure even for a socialist. wells has gone further yet in his self-isolation by leaving the fabian movement. but the unlikeness between the two men lies in the motive driving them to their respective hermitages. shaw may often change his point of view, but at any given moment it is almost brutally clear and detailed, and he insists upon the fullest conformity on the part of his would-be followers. if they fall a step short of his iron boundary they are mere philistines and bourgeois, if they go a step beyond they are inefficient and contemptible sentimental revolutionists. shaw always has "doots o' jamie's orthodoxy." but wells seeks a socialism without boundaries. marxian socialism, fabian socialism, state socialism are all too narrow and dogmatic for his taste as he has said time and time again. finding no true all-inclusive, universe-wide socialism he erects his own banner for the nations to rally to and as a result suffers the universal fate of those who try to found churches of humanity and world languages, that is, merely succeeding in founding a new sect and a new dialect. shaw has two defects which militate against his popularity; first, he is too conventional, and, second, his conventions are peculiarly his own. "there is," says his undershaft, "only one true morality for every man, but not every man has the same morality." shaw is easily shocked, but never by the same things that shock other people. he himself ascribes his inability to see the same as others to his sight being abnormally normal. the oculist who examined them said they were the only pair of absolutely correct eyes he had ever come across. of course this illusion of possessing perfect mental vision is common to everybody. all the opinions i hold at this moment are, i believe, absolutely correct; otherwise i should change them instanter, though i must admit, seeing how often i have erred in the past, that _a priori_ the chances are against my being altogether right now. but what shaw means by his normality of vision is not merely common confidence in one's own orthodoxy, but has reference to his fanatical efforts to tear away all the illusions of life and see things as they are. i do not think that he often succeeds. isis has many veils, and those who have torn away the first and the second are all the more likely to be deceived in mistaking the third for the naked truth. there is no doubting shaw's intent to undeceive the world or his willingness to undeceive himself. "my way of joking is to tell the truth," says his father keegan in "john bull's other island." but when he strains his eyes to see something clearly he sees only that one thing. by following consistently one line of logic--instead of several as he should--he gets tangled up in illogicalities. his mode of reasoning is often the _reductio ad absurdum_ of his own theories, and this is not a persuasive way of argumentation. by temperament shaw is a mystic, but his conscience compels him to assume the method of cold intellectualism. he is an artist in the disguise of a scientist, not an uncommon thing to see in this so-called age of science. probably shaw is not more inconsistent than any man of agile mind who is capable of seeing in succession different sides of a thing, but he is franker in expressing the point of view he holds at the time. consequently he has many admirers but few followers. they can't keep up. the only possible shavian is shaw. as somebody has remarked there are two ways of saying a thing; there are writers who provoke thought and writers who provoke thinkers. shaw does both. this is intentional, and he defends it on the ground that; "if you don't say a thing in an irritating way, you may just as well not say it at all--since nobody will trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them." in short shaw first got the ear of the public by pulling it, and he does not know how to let go. shaw's argument is a wedge, but it is driven in blunt end first. a startling statement, some monstrous paradox, is presented to the reader and rouses his antagonism, then it is gradually qualified and whittled down, or wittily diverted, so that it seems, in contrast to its first form, quite innocuous and acceptable, and the reader is so relieved at not having to swallow the dose first presented to him that he willingly takes more than he otherwise would. shaw has not the judicial mind and does not want to have. "the way to get at the merits of a case," he says "is not to listen to a fool who imagines himself impartial, but to get it argued with reckless bias for and against." put this on your bookmark when you read shaw. george bernard shaw's collection of opinions is unique. perhaps no single view of his is quite original, but the combination certainly is. he belongs to no type and has founded no school. this makes shaw an exasperating person for some people to read and causes them to set him down as frivolous or inconsistent. they find, for instance, from "the revolutionist's handbook" that shaw believes in eugenics and the importance of natural science. "good!" people say, "now we can classify him." they read "the doctor's dilemma" and find him a rabid antivivisectionist and filled with a profound contempt for modern medicine in general. or they find out that he is a vegetarian, a teetotaler, and a puritan, and classify him as some nonconformist minister of a pallid and overconscientious type. when they read what he actually has to say about marriage in "misalliance", about popular religion and salvation by money and gunpowder in "major barbara", they rush to the opposite conclusion that he is constitutionally an unconstitutional rebel with a fondness for aimless violence such as appears in "fanny's first play." reading "the conversion of blanco bosnet" they discover that he is a devout theist. reading the preface to "androcles" they find him a higher critic. as a fabian pamphleteer he is in favor of abolishing all individual property of a productive sort and has no use for _laissez faire_. but when it comes to children (see "misalliance") there cannot be too much _laissez faire_. he appears as an ultramodernist, a universal cynic, a disillusioned ibsenite, and a disbeliever in the very existence of progress. (preface to "man and superman".) he offended half the radicals by his "impossibilities of anarchism" and the other half by his "illusions of socialism", and the conservatives by both. but those who will take the trouble to compare these apparent antinomies will find that the contradictions are not so great as they seem from their paradoxical and partisan form, and that shaw has preserved his intellectual consistency to a remarkable degree. when shaw first burst into london, a young, red-haired irishman, he announced himself as an atheist, an anarchist, and a vegetarian, these heresies being arranged in crescendo fashion, putting last what was most calculated to shock the british public. now when we look back over his career we find that he has not been any more successful in sticking to his youthful heresy than others are in sticking to their youthful orthodoxy. whether he has ever violated his vegetarian faith by eating a beefsteak on the sly i do not know, but he has drifted far from orthodox anarchism, for socialism is, in theory at least, at the opposite pole from anarchy. once when shaw was talking socialism in hyde park, he was much annoyed by the anarchists who circulated through the crowd, selling copies of an early pamphlet of his on "the illusions of socialism." as for his atheism he seems to have left that still farther behind, for his present theological views, if expressed in less provocative language, would pass muster in many a pulpit to-day. in fact, they have as it is. in a recent letter to me, mr. shaw refers to the cordial reception he always received when reverend reginald campbell invited him to occupy the pulpit of city temple,[3] and adds: my greatest and surest successes as a public speaker have been on religious subjects to religious audiences; but this is the common experience of all speakers. people are still more concerned about religion than anything else, and any reasonably good preacher can easily leave the best political spellbinder behind. shaw as a socialist differs from others who bear that name. he is too intense an individualist to be a good party man. he puts no faith in marx as the prophet of the millennium, and he has no utopian vision of his own. but what chiefly distinguishes him as a reformer is his power of penetrating through shams to fundamental realities and his ability to do original constructive thinking.[4] all of us can find fault with the existing order of things, and most of us do. but to point out just "what's wrong with the world" and to suggest a practical line of improvement is not so easy. the fabian society has done more than set off fireworks and stir up mud. the minority report on the reform of the poor law is a fine piece of constructive statesmanship. this minority report was largely the work of the fabian society, though how much shaw had to do with it personally i do not know. we now know, however, that he was the author of fabian tract number 2 of 1884 that startled the conservative classes of england, including the orthodox marxians. here are a few of the "opinions held by the fabians" set forth in this famous tract: that since competition among producers admittedly secures to the public the most satisfactory products, the state should compete with all its might in every department of production. that no branch of industry should be carried on at a profit by the central administration. that men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against women, and that the sexes should henceforth enjoy equal political rights. that the established government has no more right to call itself the state than the smoke of london has to call itself the weather. shaw also wrote fabian tract number 45 on "the impossibilities of anarchism", in which he pointed out what was not so clear in 1888 as it is to-day, that society was rapidly becoming communistic through the efforts of those who were most opposed to communism as a theory: most people will tell you that communism is known in this country only as a visionary project advocated by a handful of amiable cranks. then they will stroll across a common bridge, along the common embankment, by the light of the common street lamp shining alike on the just and the unjust, up the common street and into the common trafalgar square where on the smallest hint that communism is to be tolerated for an instant in a civilized country, they will be handily bludgeoned by a common policeman and hauled off to the common gaol. shaw's latest contribution to fabian literature, the appendix to pease's "history of the fabian society", seems to me one of the most important, for in the final paragraphs he points out clearly a defect in our democracy that is rarely recognized and altogether unremedied: another subject which has hardly yet been touched, and which also must begin with deductive treatment, is what may be called the democratization of democracy, and its extension from mere negative and very uncertain check on tyranny to a positive organizing force. no experienced fabian believes that society can be reconstructed (or rather constructed, for the difficulty is that society is as yet only half removed from chaos) by men of the type produced by popular election under existing circumstances likely to be achieved before the reconstruction. the fact that a hawker cannot ply his trade without a license whilst a man may sit in parliament without any relevant qualifications is a typical and significant anomaly which will certainly not be removed by allowing everybody to be a hawker at will. sooner or later, unless democracy is to be discarded in a reaction of disgust such as killed it in ancient athens, democracy will demand that only such men should be presented to its choice as have proved themselves qualified for more serious and disinterested work than "stoking up" election meetings to momentary and foolish excitement. without qualified rulers a socialist state is impossible; and it must not be forgotten (though the reminder is as old as plato) that the qualified men may be very reluctant men instead of very ambitious ones. it is this doubt, more or less clearly felt, lest a genuinely democratic society will fail to secure able and qualified leaders, that lies at the bottom of the prevalent distrust of popular government and causes many persons to cling to antiquated and irrational institutions like aristocracy and even monarchy. i sent mr. shaw a copy of an editorial entitled, "and there shall be no more kings", in _the independent_ of march 22, 1915, and the following, penned on the margin of the clipping in his careful handwriting, is his comment on what he calls "a wise and timely article." this war raises in an acute form the whole question of republicanism versus german dynasticism. after the mischief done by franz josef's second childhood as displayed in his launching the forty-eight-hour ultimatum to serbia before the kaiser could return from stockholm, the world has the right--indeed the duty--to demand that monarchies shall at least be subject to superannuation as well as to constitutional limitation. all recent historical research has shown that the position of a king, even in a jealously limited monarchy like the british, makes him so strong that george iii, who was childish when he was not under restraint as an admitted lunatic, was uncontrollable by the strongest body of statesmen the eighteenth century produced. it is undoubtedly inconvenient that the head of the state should be selected at short intervals; but it does not follow that he (or she) should be an unqualified person or hold office for life or be a member of a dynasty. i may add that if the policy of dismembering the central empires by making separate national states of bohemia, poland and hungary, and making serbia include bosnia and herzegovina, is seriously put forward, it would involve making them republics; for if they were kingdoms their thrones would be occupied by cousins of the hohenzollerns, hapsburgs and romanoffs, strengthening the german hegemony instead of restraining it. perhaps the reader will think that i am rather too presumptuous in professing to know just what shaw means and believes, when most people are puzzled by him. so i should explain that i have the advantage of a personal acquaintance with shaw. i may say without boasting--or at least without lying--that at one period of his life i was nearer to him than any other human being. the distance between us was in fact the diameter of one of those round tables in the a. b. c. restaurants, and the period was confined to the time it took to consume a penny bun and a cup of tea, both being paid for by him. i resorted to thorough fletchering for the purpose of prolonging the interview, and i wished that either he or i had been a smoker. but although a vegetarian, he eschews the weed, and smoking did not seem to be in accordance with fabian tactics. the occasion was a recess in a fabian society conference. i did not suppose that anything could shut off socialists in the midst of debate. the theme of discussion was the house of lords, which the fabians unanimously agreed ought to be abolished, though no two of them agreed on the substitute. but while they were iconoclasts as to one british institution, they rendered homage to another by stopping to take tea in the midst of a lovely scrap. the fabian society was indirectly the fruit of one of the seeds which thomas davidson scattered in many lands. you can track this peripatetic philosopher through life, as you can johnny appleseed, by the societies that sprung up along his pathway. in the adirondacks he founded the glenmore school of philosophy. in the jewish quarter of new york city another of his schools still thrives and is enthused with something of his zeal for learning. the circle of earnest young men and women whom he gathered about him in london were the founders of the society for psychical research, the fellowship of the new life, and the fabian society. yet davidson himself was neither a spiritualist nor a socialist.[5] at the fabian society one sees shaw in his element. every creature, says browning, like the moon, boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, one to show a woman when he loves her. the fabian society is shaw's own true love, and to her he turns a different face than to the outside world. as i watched him during the afternoon--preceding and following the brief period of personal contact of which i have been bragging--i was struck by the tact and kindliness which he showed in the course of the discussion. there was in his occasional remarks no trace of the caustic and dogmatic tone which one gets from his writings. he has been not so much the "shining light" or "presiding genius" of the society, as one of the "wheel horses", and devoted himself diligently to the detailed and inconspicuous work of the organization. he had for twenty-seven years served on the executive committee of the society when in 1911 he resigned to make way for the younger generation. the question under discussion was, as i have said, that of the reconstruction of the house of lords. this was shortly before the war, when such questions were regarded as important. various plans were proposed in order to secure the election of the fittest, when shaw took the floor in defense of genuine democracy. his argument ran like this, as i remember it: our idea is that any 670 people is as good as any other for governing, just as any twelve chosen by chance on the jury have our lives and property in their hands. now if i and mr. sydney webb here were sent to the house of commons it should be with unlimited opportunity to talk but not to vote. to give us a vote would be to permit the violation of the fundamental principle of democracy that people should never be governed better than they want to be. if you had a government of saints and philosophers the people would be miserable. for instance, i would want to stop all smoking and meat-eating and liquor drinking, but like all superior persons now i have to convince other people because i cannot compel them. no elected body can possibly be representative, because no man is elected as a normal man, but as an exceptional one. the house of lords is more representative than the house of commons, because a man in the house of commons is there because he has uncommon abilities, high or low. representatives ought to be, like jurymen, samples of the commonalty picked at random and compelled to serve. their function is to explain where the shoe pinches. but the shoe must be made by skilled legislators and statesmen, and these should be eligible only when they have satisfied a very high standard of qualification, and should sit without votes though with unlimited powers of explanation and criticism. these remarks, delivered in a musical and sympathetic voice with frequent flashes of a broad row of white teeth, sounded very different from the way they read in cold type. i do hope the phonograph will be perfected before shaw dies or his voice goes cracked, so posterity can have a vocal version of his plays and prefaces. otherwise his personality stands little chance of being understood. shaw is tall and uses his eyeglasses for gesticulating as an orchestra leader uses a baton. his hair was once a fiery red, but is now tempered into gray. his eyes are light blue. between his brows there are three perpendicular wrinkles, but not of the cross and fretful type. his face is long and pointed, but he looks not in the least mephistophelian as the caricaturists represent him. in short, shaw is not so black as he is painted by himself and others. it is not necessary in this chapter, as it was in the case of some of my "twelve major prophets of to-day", for me to give biographical details at any length, for these are easily accessible. shaw has not been reticent in talking about himself in various books and prefaces, and he is fortunate in having in professor henderson of the university of north carolina a biographer of the boswell kind--probably the best kind there is. his big volume contains as much about shaw's life and words up to the time it was published, 1911, as any one needs to know. chesterton's book on shaw is an impressionistic sketch rather than a portrait, giving the author an opportunity of saying "what's wrong with the world", including shaw. other lives of shaw are mentioned in the appendix of this chapter. george bernard shaw was born in dublin, july 25, 1856. his father was an irish gentleman, protestant, improvident and respectable, a wholesale dealer in corn, with a profound contempt for all retail tradesmen. his mother was a musician, and it was to her that mr. shaw owed his own moderate talent and remarkable knowledge of music. when he went to london at the age of twenty, with artistic, musical and literary ambitions, his mother practically supported the family by teaching music there. as shaw says in one of his autobiographical fragments: i did not throw myself into the struggle for life. i threw my mother into it. i was not a staff to my father's old age. i hung on to his coat tails. his reward was to live just long enough to read a review of one of these silly novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend of my own, prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable author. i think, myself, that this is a handsome reward, far better worth having than a nice pension from a dutiful son struggling slavishly for his parents' bread in some sordid trade. his only schooling was at dublin, where he says he learned little, and this is confirmed by the school records which place him near the bottom of his class. his opinion of the sort of education he got he has expressed in several places, especially in the preface to "misalliance." my school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything but greek and latin.... to this day, though i can still decline a latin noun and repeat some of the old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks to me, i have never yet seen a latin inscription on a tomb that i could translate throughout. of greek i can decipher perhaps the greater part of the greek alphabet. in short i am, as to classical education, another shakespeare. i can read french as easily as english; and under pressure of necessity, i can turn to account some scraps of german and a little operatic italian; but these three were never taught at school. instead, i was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards. why is it that british authors give us such horrible pictures of their school days? they usually look back upon them as a most unpleasant and unprofitable period of their lives, and when they attempt to eulogize it they make it all the more shocking. kipling in "stalky and company" reveals an even more detestable state of affairs than dickens does of "dotheboys hall." shaw takes the american view of it and condemns with horror the "flagellomania" of the british schoolmaster. it is curious to observe that in great britain the schoolmasters have weapons, and the policemen have none. in america clubs have been given to the police, and the canes taken away from the teachers. the new york school-teachers are not allowed to deliver even a casual box on the ear or a friendly shaking, yet they are making very decent citizens out of most unpromising material, and the policemen's clubs are mostly used on the immigrants who have been trained in the flagellant schools of europe. it is doubtless a good thing that shaw did not go through oxford, but he should have had a course in biology under huxley such as wells had. this would have given him an acquaintance with the aims and methods of modern science and freed him from such prejudice as he displayed, for instance, in "the doctor's dilemma" and "the philanderer." shaw's early efforts at authorship did not meet with encouragement. if we may take his word for it, he earned six pounds in nine years by his pen, and five of those came from writing a patent medicine advertisement. he wrote five novels in five years, all at first rejected by the book publishers. four of them, "the unsocial socialist", "the irrational knot", "cashel byron's profession", and "love among the artists" have since been reprinted from the short-lived socialist periodicals in which they originally appeared. the first novel he wrote, "immaturity", has never been printed. william archer sent these novels to robert louis stevenson, then trying to recover his health at saranac lake in the adirondacks. stevenson's letters refer to them as "blooming gaseous folly", "horrid fun", "a fever dream of the most feverish", "i say, archer, my god, what women!" "if mr. shaw is below five and twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had best be told that he is a romantic and pursue romance with his eyes opened; perhaps he knows it; god knows!--my brain is softened." a plan to relieve struggling authors and secure the earlier recognition of genius by means of an endowment fund and a system of substantial prizes was once proposed by upton sinclair, author of "the jungle", who wrote to a number of authors, asking their opinion of the scheme. among those who responded were wells, bennett, de morgan, philpotts, galsworthy, london, and shaw.[6] i quote part of what shaw said about it because of its biographical interest: there is only one serious and effective way of helping young men of the kind in view, and that is by providing everybody with enough leisure in the intervals of well-paid and not excessive work to enable them to write books in their spare time and pay for the printing of them. nothing else seems to me to be really hopeful. i myself seem an example of a man who achieved literary eminence without assistance; but as a matter of fact certain remnants of family property made all the difference. for fully nine years i had to sponge shamelessly on my father and mother; but even at that we only squeezed through because my mother's grandfather had been a rich man. in fact, i was just the man for whom upton wants to establish his fund. yet for the life of me i cannot see how any committee in the world could have given me a farthing. all i had to show was five big novels which nobody would publish, and as the publishers' readers by whose advice they were rejected included lord morley and george meredith, it cannot be said that i was in any worse hands than those of any committee likely to be appointed. of course sinclair may say to this that if morley and meredith, instead of having to advise a publisher as to the prospects of a business speculation, had only had to consider how to help a struggling talent without reference to commercial consideration, they might have come to my rescue. unfortunately, i have seen both their verdicts; and i can assure sinclair that i produced on both of them exactly the impression that is inevitably produced in every such case: that is, that i was a young man with more cleverness than was good for me and that what i needed was snubbing and not encouraging. no doubt there are talents which are not aggressive and do not smell of brimstone; but these are precisely the talents which are marketable, except, of course, in the case of the highest poetry, which, however, is out of the question anyhow as a means of livelihood. william morris, when he was at the height of his fame as a poet, long after the publication of his popular poem, "the earthly paradise", told me that his income from his poems was about a hundred a year; and i happen to know that robert browning threatened to leave the country because the income tax commissioners assessed him with a modest but wholly imaginary income on the strength of his reputation. poetry is thus frankly a matter of endowment, but for the rest i think a writer's chance of being helped by the fund would be in inverse ratio to his qualifications as conceived by upton sinclair. shaw's first essays in the field where he was to attain his greatest success were as discouraging as his efforts at novel writing. his first play, "widower's houses", dealing with tainted money, shocked but did not attract the public. his "the philanderer" was published before a theater would accept it. his third play, "mrs. warren's profession", was prohibited by the censor. of the seven that followed only one could be called a decided success on its first presentation in london. but in book form, with attractively written stage directions and argumentative prefaces, they found a host of readers who wanted to see them in the theater. "candida" was not presented in london till 1904, nearly ten years after it was written. it was with "candida" that arnold daly introduced shaw to the theater-going public of america, and for the last few years there have often been three shaw plays running at the same time in new york. shaw's plays were popular in america when they were tabooed or pooh-poohed in england. his "pygmalion" had its _première_ in the hofburg-theater in vienna instead of london. i saw it, or rather heard it, since it is a phonetic instead of a spectacular play, at the deutsches theater of irving place, new york, in march, 1914, six months before mrs. patrick campbell gave it here in english. in spite of the fact that the play depends upon variations in english dialects, it was given better in the german than in the english. shaw is in fact an internationalist, much more honored in america, russia, germany, france, scandinavia, and japan than in his own country, that is, ireland. it must be interesting to see "you never can tell" or "man and superman" on the tokyo stage. the _kobe herald_ says: "he appeals to the japanese of progressive ideas because he prefers potatoes, cabbages and beans to porter-house steak and lamb chops." the reason why shaw's prefaces read so well and his plays go better on the stage than would be anticipated is because they are composed by ear. since reading aloud has gone out of fashion, there has arisen a generation of young writers who do not realize that language is intended to be spoken. consequently one has to read them by eye only, switching off for the time the internal auditory apparatus so as to avoid their discords and dull rhythm. a little girl who was trying to read to herself a story by one of our pyrotechnic authors suddenly threw down the magazine with the cry: "i can't read this any more! it dazzles my ears." shaw is a musician, and he writes musical prose. he uses shorthand in composing, which is the next best thing to dictating to a phonograph. naturally he resents the established spelling of english which preserves the form of words while allowing the words themselves to decay, thus sacrificing speech to print. he has often argued for phonetic spelling,[7] and has used as much of it in his works as his publisher would permit. the point he makes in the following passage is undeniably proving true: all that the conventional spelling has done is to conceal the one change that a phonetic spelling might have checked; namely, the changes in pronunciation, including the waves of debasement that produced the half-rural cockney of sam weller and the modern metropolitan cockney of drinkwater in "captain brassbound's conversion."... refuse to teach the board school legions your pronunciation, and they will force theirs on you by mere force of numbers. and serve you right. shaw's treatment of the salvation army in "major barbara" showed that he knew more about religion than some of his churchly critics. so, too, his defense of the salvation army music in the london standard in 1905 proved that he knew more about music than those who sneered at the army bands. the germans, who are now fond of analyzing the english character, have discussed at length the question of why such an unmusical people should have good music in the salvation army.[8] the 125-page preface to "androcles and the lion" is devoted to a rereading of the gospels and a rewriting of the life of christ. shaw interprets the new testament like a higher critic but applies it like an early christian. he rejects the resurrection but accepts the communism. he believes in the life force and its superman as others do in god and his messiah. shaw's superman obviously belongs to another genus from nietzsche's uebermensch. he says in the preface to "misalliance": the precise formula for the superman, _ci-devant_ the just made perfect, has not yet been discovered. until it is, every birth is an experiment in a great research which is being conducted by the life force to discover that formula. this eugenical and well meaning, but far from omnipotent creator, bears a strong resemblance to bergson's _elan vital_, but shaw was writing about the life force long before bergson wrote his "creative evolution." if there was any borrowing about it, both borrowed from schopenhauer. but shaw and bergson, being kindly men and no pessimists, have put a kind heart into schopenhauer's ruthless will. if i were to sum up shaw in two words it would be that his distinguishing characteristics are courage and kind-heartedness. the sight of suffering and injustice drives him mad, and then he runs amuck, slashing right and left, without much regard to whom he hits and no regard at all as to who hits him. he is, like swift, a cruel satirist through excess of sympathy. if ibsen is right, that "the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone", then george bernard shaw is not to be ignored. how to read shaw it does not matter much which of shaw's books you read first, for after reading it, whichever it is, you will probably read all the others that you can get your hands on. if i must be more specific in recommending a book to begin on, i would suggest that "major barbara", "man and superman", and "androcles and the lion" will give you an idea of what shaw is like; then, if you are interested, you can pick out others from the following chronological list in which i have indicated by a few words the theme, scene, or argument of the play and its preface. all shaw's works are published by brentano's, new york, three plays in one volume, or separately. "widowers' houses", 1892 (tainted money). "the philanderer", 1893 (ibsenites and esthetes). "mrs. warren's profession", 1893 (prostitution). "arms and the man", 1894 (serbian and bulgarian war; anti-militarism). "candida", 1894 (triangle). "you never can tell", 1895 (farce comedy; the most popular of shaw's plays on the stage). "the man of destiny", 1895 (one act, napoleon in an unconventional aspect). "the devil's disciple", 1896 (american revolution). "caesar and cleopatra", 1898 (egypt anglicized). "captain brassbound's conversion", 1899 (morocco; raisuli, perdicaris, _et al._) "the admirable bashville or constancy unrewarded", 1902 (his novel: "cashel byron's profession" put into blank verse "because it is easier to write than prose"). "man and superman", 1903 (romance topsy-turvey; marriage by conquest on the part of the woman; containing "the revolutionist's handbook" and interlude on heaven and hell). "john bull's other island", 1904 (irish and english temperament contrasted, home rule question). "passion, poison and petrification", 1905 (burlesque extravaganza). "major barbara", 1905 (salvation army and munition manufacture; problem of poverty). "how he lied to her husband", 1905 (parody on "candida"). "the doctor's dilemma", 1906 (satire on medical professor and attack on vivisection). "getting married", 1908 (absurdities of marriage laws). "the showing-up of blanco bosnet", 1909 (wild west; psychology of conversion; prohibited by censor). "press cuttings", 1909 (anti-militarism). "misalliance", 1909 ("a debate in one sitting"; preface on parents and children). "the dark lady of the sonnets", 1910 (showing how shakespeare got his phrases). "fanny's first play", 1911 (satire of dramatic critics and middle-class morality). "androcles and the lion", 1911 (early christians; lion from oz; disquisition on the canon of the new testament and the possibility of living christianity). "overruled", 1912 (philandering again). "pygmalion", 1913 (phonetics and class prejudice, with a postscript proving that you never can tell how a shaw play will come out). "great catherine", 1913 (boisterous farce of catherine ii; contrast of russian and british temperament). "the music cure", 1914 (marconi scandal; used as curtain raiser for chesterton's "magic", unpublished). "three plays by brieux", (brentano's, 1911; contain "damaged goods" and other plays in which the french playwright attacks social evils as vigorously and outspokenly though not so wittily as shaw. they are translated by mrs. bernard shaw, and mr. shaw provides a preface). two farcical plays of the war, "the inca of perusalem" and "augustus does his bit", produced by the london stage society and the former also in new york, are ascribed to shaw though unacknowledged by him. of shaw's critical work we have in book form "the perfect wagnerite", 1895, and "the quintessence of ibsen", 1890, which championed two unpopular causes; "the sanity of art", 1908, attacking nordau's theory of the degeneracy of artists; and two volumes of "dramatic opinions and essays", which, although reviews of current plays of the nineties, retain a permanent value. shaw's four early novels "cashel byron's profession", "an unsocial socialist", "love among the artists", and "the irrational knot" are of less interest than his plays. his socialism has found expression in "the common sense of municipal trading" and "fabian essays in socialism", and numerous other tracts and articles as well as most of his plays and prefaces. shaw's fugitive contributions to journalism are too numerous and scattered to be cited here, but i will mention a few of them that are of special interest: "the case against chesterton" (_metropolitan_, 1916); "the case for equality" (_metropolitan_, 1913); "the german case against germany" (_new york times_, april 16, 1916). more has been written about shaw's personality than about all the rest of my "twelve major prophets" put together. the chief and authorized biography is "george bernard shaw: his life and work" by professor archibald henderson of the university of north carolina. (cincinnati: stewart and kidd, 1911.) it contains a full bibliography up to its date and some twenty portraits as well as much inaccessible and unpublished material. besides this we have: "george bernard shaw: a critical study" by joseph mccabe (london: paul, french, trubner, 1914); "bernard shaw: a critical study" by percival p. howe (dodd, mead, 1915); "george bernard shaw" by g. k. chesterton (john lane, 1909); "bernard shaw as artist-philosopher", an exposition of shavianism, by renée m. deacon (john lane, 1910); "george bernard shaw: his plays" by h. l. mencken (luce, 1909); "bernard shaw" by holbrook jackson (jacobs, 1907); and "the innocence of bernard shaw" by d. scott (doran, 1914). latest of all is "bernard shaw: the man and the mask" by richard burton, a study of his plays in chronological order by the ex-president of the drama league of america (henry holt, november, 1916). "bernard shaw: an epitaph" by john palmer (london: richards, 1915), "harlequin or patriot" (century). mr. palmer comes to bury shaw, not to praise him, yet gives him more credit than many of his admirers. biographical data and criticism are also to be found in archibald henderson's "european dramatists" (stewart and kidd) and his "interpreters of life and the modern spirit" (kennerley); ford madox hueffer's "memories and impressions"; r. a. scott-james's "personality in literature" which also contains sketches of wells and chesterton (london: seeker, 1913); e. e. hale's "dramatists of to-day" (holt, 1911); j. g. huneker's "iconoclasts" (scribner, 1905); cyril maude's "the haymarket theater"; edward pease's "history of the fabian society" (london, 1916); herman bernstein's "with master minds" (universal series co., new york, 1913); and "bernard shaw et son oeuvre" by professor cestre of the university of bordeaux (mercure de france, 1912). augustine f. hamon, who has translated many of shaw's plays into french, has published the lectures he gave on them at the sorbonne in the volume "le molière du xxe siècle" (paris: figuière, 1913) which has been translated "the twentieth century molière" (stokes, 1915), and a separate chapter of it as "the technique of bernard shaw's plays" (london: daniel, 1912). the following articles on shaw are noteworthy for one reason or another: "shaw contra mundum" by c. b. chilton in _the independent_, march 8, 1906, with a sharp retort by shaw; personal reminiscences by frank harris in _pearson's_, 1916; controversies of shaw with hilaire belloc and g. k. chesterton in _the new witness_, 1916; "bernard shaw, musician" by florence boylston pelo in _the bookman_, march, 1916; "shaw in portrait and caricature" by h. jackson in _the idler_, 1908; "shavian religion" by the rev. p. gavan duffy in _the century_, vol. 87, p. 908; "mr. bernard shaw's philosophy" by a. k. rogers in _hibbert journal_, 1910; "george bernard shaw" by d. a. lord in _catholic world_, march and april, 1916; "bernard shaw et la guerre" by christabel pankhurst in _la revue_, 1915; "the philosophy of shaw" by archibald henderson in _atlantic_, vol. 103, p. 227; "die quintessenz des shawismus" by helene richter (leipzig, 1913); "bernard shaw" by julius bab (berlin: fischer). the ingenious allen upward has written a futuristic satire on shaw in the form of a play: "paradise found or the superman found out" (houghton mifflin, 1915). in act i the sleeper wakes, à la wells, two hundred years hence, finding himself in the shaw memorial hall in the custody of the most noble order of hereditary fabians, chief of whom are the lady wells and the lord keir-hardie. the second act is set in the headquarters of the anti-shavian league, which the awakened and disillusionized shaw joins. the third act is in the cabinet of h. v. m. maharajah sri singh bahadar, for of course india outvoted england as soon as universal suffrage was introduced into the british empire. [1] published by brentano's, 1904. [2] published by brentano's, 1909. [3] mr. mccabe, in his life of shaw, gives an interesting account of one of these addresses, that on "christian economics" at the city temple in 1913. but shaw is too much of a christian still to suit mccabe. [4] see for instance shaw's book on "the common sense of municipal trading", based upon his experience as vestryman and borough councillor. [5] pease, in his "history of the fabian society", gives an interesting account of these diverse movements which in their inception were closely allied. see also knight's "memorials of thomas davidson: the wandering scholar" and james' delightful sketch, "the knight-errant of the intellectual life", in his posthumous volume of "memories and studies." [6] printed in the independent, july 28, 1910. [7] for shaw's opinions on phonetics see "pygmalion", "captain brassbound's conversion", and henderson's biography, p. 326. [8] von unmusikalischen england und seiner musikalischen heilsarmee. deutscher wille, february, 1916. chapter ii h. g. wells scientific futurist we are in the beginning of the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. there is no shock, no epoch-making incident--but then there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. at no point can we say, "here it commences, now; last minute was night and this is morning." but insensibly we are in the day. if we care to look, we can foresee growing knowledge, growing order, and presently a deliberate improvement of the blood and character of the race. and what we can see and imagine gives us a measure and gives us faith for what surpasses the imagination. it is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. it is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. we cannot see, there is no need for us to see, what this world will be like when the day has fully come. we are creatures of the twilight. but it is out of our race and lineage that minds will spring that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves, and that will reach forward fearlessly to comprehend this future that defeats our eyes. all this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars.--"the discovery of the future" (1902). is wells also among the prophets? surely, and none with better right, even though we use the word "prophet" in its narrowest and most ordinary sense as one who foretells the future. he has foretold many futures for us, some utterly abhorrent, others more or less attractive. if we shudder at the thought of humanity on a freezing world fighting a losing battle with gigantic crustaceans as in "the time machine", or being suffocated on a blazing world as in "the star", or being crushed under the tyranny of an omnipotent trust as in "when the sleeper wakes"--if none of these please us, then we have the option of a businesslike and efficient organization of society under the domination of the engineer as in "anticipations", or a socialistic state under the beneficent sway of the samurai as in "a modern utopia," or an instantaneous amelioration of human nature as "in the days of the comet." in thus presenting various solutions to the world problem wells is not inconsistent. every complicated equation has several roots, some of them imaginary. in solving a physical problem the scientist begins by disentangling the forces involved and then, taking them one at a time, calculates what would be the effect if the other forces did not act. so wells is applying the scientific method to sociology when he attempts to isolate social forces and deal with them singly. if nothing intervenes to divert it, says the hydraulic engineer, the water of this mountain stream will develop such a momentum on reaching the valley. if no limitations are placed upon the consolidation of capital, says mr. wells, we may have a handful of directors ruling the world, as depicted in "when the sleeper wakes." in its power to forecast the future science finds both its validation and justification. by this alone it tests its conclusions and demonstrates its usefulness. in fact, the sole object of science is prophecy, as ostwald and poincaré make plain. the mind of the scientific man is directed forward and he has no use for history except as it gives him data by which to draw a curve that he may project into the future. it is, therefore, not a chance direction of his fancy that so many of wells's books, both romances and studies, deal with the future. it is the natural result of his scientific training, which not only led him to a rich unworked field of fictional motives, but made him consider the problems of life from a novel and very illuminative point of view. he gave definite expression to this philosophy in a remarkable address on "the discovery of the future", delivered at the royal institution of london, january 24, 1902. here he shows that there is a growing tendency in modern times to shift the center of gravity from the past to the future and to determine the moral value of an act by its consequences rather than by its relation to some precedent. the justification of a war, for instance, may either be by reference to the past or to the future; that is, it may be based either upon some supposititious claim and violated treaty, or upon the assumed advantage to one or both parties. this idea, that in the moral evaluation of an act its results should be taken into consideration, has been popularly ascribed to the jesuits, but since they have repeatedly and indignantly denied that it ever formed part of their teaching, it is questionable whether they could claim it now when it is becoming fashionable. at any rate, it is interesting to note that wells gave very clear expression to this pragmatic principle five years before the publication of "pragmatism" by james. i hope that mr. wells will work out in detail his theory of prevision as a motive for morality. we cannot have too many such motives, and it is quite possible that this factor has not been fully recognized in our ethical systems, though i have no doubt that, as is usually the case with discoveries, especially in ethics, the theory is not quite so novel as it seems to him. in the meantime, i would call his attention to two weak points in argument, as he has sketched it in this lecture. he gives as an example of the two ways of looking at a problem the old question of whether a bad promise is better broken or kept. the "legal mind" would regard the promise as inviolable; the "creative mind" would say that in view of future consequences it should be disregarded. but i would suggest that, if morality is, as he defines it, "an overriding of immediate and personal considerations out of regard to something to be attained in the future", the one who viewed the act most clearly in the light of the future would keep the promise even at the cost of some suffering to himself and others rather than bring the lack of confidence which results from a violated oath. i would also point out that the followers of dogma are not to be classed so positively with those who look only on the past. certainly those whose morality is based on the hope of heaven and the fear of hell--and this is too numerous a class to be ignored--are as truly guided by their ideas of the future as are those who are working for the prosperity of the "beyond-man" some thousand years hence. jonathan edwards's first resolution was typical. it reads: i. resolved, that _i will do whatsoever_ i think to be most to god's glory and my own good, profit and pleasure, on the whole; without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriads of ages hence; to do whatever i think to be my duty, and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general--whatever _difficulties_ i meet with, how many and how great soever. the highest morality is attained, in my opinion, by the class which mr. wells despises--namely, those who disregard neither causes nor effects, but consider every act in the light of both the past and the future. for this reason we are grateful to mr. wells for the light he is giving us on the future by his efforts in scientific prophecy. wells defines two divergent types of mind by the relative importance they attach to things past or things to come. the former type he calls the legal or submissive mind, "because the business, the practice and the training of a lawyer dispose him toward it; he of all men must most constantly refer to the law made, the right established, the precedent set, and most consistently ignore or condemn the thing that is only seeking to establish itself." in opposition to this is "the legislative, creative, organizing, masterful type", which is perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things; it is constructive and "interprets the present and gives value to this or that entirely in relation to things designed or foreseen." the use of the term "legislative" for this latter type is confusing, at least to an american, because unfortunately most of our legislators are lawyers and have minds of the legal or conventional type. "scientific" would be a better term than "legislative", because most of our real revolutions in thought and industry originate in the laboratory. in his "modern utopia" wells introduces a more complete classification of mankind into (1) the poietic, that is, the creative and original genius, often erratic or abnormal; (2) the kinetic, that is, the efficient, energetic, "business man" type; (3) the dull, "the people who never seem to learn thoroughly or hear distinctly or think clearly", and (4) the base, those deficient in moral sense. the first two categories of wells, the poietic and kinetic, correspond roughly to ostwald's romanticist and classicist types of scientific men.[1] i have laid stress upon wells's point of view and classification of temperaments because it seems to me that it gives the clue to his literary work. this is voluminous and remarkably varied, yet through all its forms can be traced certain simple leading motives. indeed i am unable to resist the temptation to formulate his favorite theme as: _the reaction of society against a disturbing force._ this certainly is the basic idea of much of his work and most of the best of it. he hit upon it early and he has repeated it in endless variations since. the disturbing force may be an individual of the creative or poietic type, an overpowering passion, a new idea, a social organization or a material change in the conditions of life. whatever it may be, the natural inertia of society causes it to resist the foreign influence, to enforce compliance upon the aberrant individual, or to meet the new conditions by as little readjustment as possible. usually the social organism is successful in overpowering the intruder or rebel, and on the whole we must admit that this is advantageous, even though it sometimes does involve the sacrifice of genius and the retardation of progress. certainly no one is good enough or wise enough to be trusted with irresponsible power. this is the lesson of "the invisible man." we all have been struck, probably, by a thought of the advantages which personal invisibility would confer. it is one of the most valued of fairy gifts. but perhaps only wells has thought of the disadvantages of invisibility, how demoralizing such a condition would be to the individual, and yet how powerless he would be against the mass of ordinary people. assuming that a man had discovered a way to become invisible by altering the refractive power of his body, as broken glass becomes invisible in water, in what situation would he be? he would be naked, of course, and he could not carry anything in his hands or eat in public. if it were winter he would leave tracks and would catch cold and sneeze. so the invisible man who starts to rob and murder at his own sweet will is soon run down by boys, dogs, and villagers as ignominiously as any common thief. a more artistic expression to the same theme is given in "the country of the blind." a young man tumbled into an isolated valley of the andes where lived a community which had through some hereditary disease lost many generations ago the power of sight. the stranger first thought of the proverb, "in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king", but when he tried to demonstrate his superiority he found it impossible. his talk about "seeing" the natives held to be the ravings of a madman and his clumsiness in their dark houses as proof of defective senses. he was as much at a disadvantage in a community where everything is adapted to the sightless as a blind man is in ours. he falls in love with a girl, but before he is allowed to marry her he must be cured of his hallucinations; a simple surgical operation, the removal of the two irritable bodies protuberant from his brain, will restore him to normality, say the blind surgeons, and make a sane and useful citizen of him. the entreaties of his lady love are added to the coercion of public opinion to induce him to consent. the exceptional man is beaten, he must either conform to the community or leave it. no matter how the story ends. the true novelist and dramatist, like the true mathematician, finds his satisfaction in correctly stating a problem, not in working it out. the theme of these parables, the comparative powerlessness of the individual, however exceptionally endowed, against the coercive force of environment, wells has developed at length in his novels; in "the new machiavelli", for instance, where a statesman at the height of his public usefulness is overthrown and banished because he had succumbed to selfish passion and violated the moral code. parnell is popularly supposed to be the model for this character rather more than the original machiavelli, but it is, unfortunately, a type not rare either in history or fiction. indeed this may be called the common plot of tragedy from the time when it began to be written, the vulnerable heel of achilles, the little defect of character or ability that precipitates the catastrophe. in wells's hands this motive takes most fantastic forms. there was, for example, "the man who could work miracles"; "his name was george mcwhirter fotheringay--not the sort of name by any means to lead to any expectation of miracles--and he was clerk at gomshott's"; "he was a little man and had eyes of a hot brown, very erect red hair, a mustache with ends he twisted up, and freckles." this unpromising looking individual, and he was a blatant skeptic, too, becomes suddenly possessed of the power to make anything happen that he wills, but he finds the use of this mysterious gift by no means to his advantage. it brings him and others into all sorts of trouble, and only his renunciation of it saves the world from destruction. mr. fotheringay lived in church row, and since mr. wells lives in the same street he perhaps knew him personally. in "the war of worlds" the earth is invaded by martians, who are not in the least like those of du maurier or professor flournoy, but octopus-like creatures as far above mankind in intellect and command of machinery as we are above the animals, supermen surpassing the imagination of nietzsche. they stride over the earth in machines of impregnable armor and devastate town and country with searchlights projecting rays more destructive than those of radium and much like bulwer-lytton's "vril." they feed on human blood and, if humanity is not to perish or become as sheep to these invaders, men and women must take to sewers and such like hiding places and wage incessant warfare against overwhelming odds. in a passage that is to me the most gripping of anything wells has written, a few unconquerable spirits plan the life that mankind must lead under these terrible conditions, but they are relieved from the necessity of putting it into execution by the interposition of an unexpected ally in the form of the most minute of creatures, the microbe. the men from mars, not being immune to terrestrial diseases, are annihilated by one of them. the formula remains the same although conditions are reversed in "the first men in the moon", for men, being naturally larger than the lunar people, might be supposed to dominate them, but, on the contrary, the ant-like inhabitants of the moon conquer the earthly invaders. in "the wonderful visit" a curate goes out hunting for rare birds and shoots an angel on the wing. but the heavenly visitant does not play the rôle of the angel in jerome's "the passing of the third floor back" and transform the character of all he meets. wells's angel does not fit into the parish life, and everybody is relieved when he disappears. the same idea, the reaction of conventional society toward the unusual, is illustrated by "the sea-lady", where, instead of an angel from the sky, we have a mermaid from the ocean brought into the circle of a summer resort. mr. wells has said that by the sea-lady he meant to symbolize "love as a disturbing passion", the same theme as "the new machiavelli." it may be taken to mean that, of course, or half a dozen other things as well. we are at liberty to disregard mr. wells's interpretation if we like. it is not an author's business to explain what his works mean. in fact it seems a bit officious and impertinent for him to attempt it. how little would there be left of the great literature of the world if it were reduced to what the author literally and consciously had in mind when he wrote. the value of any work of art depends upon what may be got out of it, not what was put into it. "the food of the gods" is a case in point. these children who are fed on "boom-food" (presumably an extract from the pituitary body of the brain) and grow to gianthood may be taken to represent any new transforming force. if the story was conceived in wells's earlier days he may have meant by it the power of science. if in the days of "anticipations" he more likely had in mind efficiency or "scientific management." if when he was a member of the fabian society it doubtless stood for socialism. such questions may well be left to the future biographer who will take an interest in tracing out the genesis of his thought. really it makes no difference to the reader, for the essential thing is to note that the reaction of society toward any unprecedented factor is the same. that in various parts of the country a new and gigantic race was growing up aroused at first a certain sensational interest, but this soon died down. people became accustomed to seeing the giant boys and girls and even set them at work. later as it was realized that the giants could not be adapted to the existing social structure, but meant its overthrow, the government attempted to segregate and limit them, and at length, finding no compromise possible, determined to exterminate them. this brings about a duel to the death between the little race and the big, and there could be no doubt as to the issue. chesterton says[2]: "the food of the gods" is the tale of "jack the giant-killer" told from the point of view of the giant. this has not, i think, been done before in literature; but i have little doubt that the psychological substance of it existed in fact. i have little doubt that the giant whom jack killed did regard himself as the superman. it is likely enough that he considered jack a narrow and parochial person who wished to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force. if (as not infrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than one. he would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment, enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to correct himself with promptitude. but jack was the champion of the enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head, and one man one conscience, of the single head and the single heart and the single eye. jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the giant was a particularly gigantic giant. all he wished to know was whether he was a good giant--that is, a giant who was any good to us. what were the giant's religious views; what his views on politics and the duties of the citizen? was he fond of children--or fond of them only in a dark and sinister sense? to use a fine phrase for emotional sanity, was his heart in the right place? jack had sometimes to cut him up with a sword in order to find out. nothing could better illustrate the difference in standpoint between chesterton and wells than this. the sympathies of wells are undoubtedly with the giants, with the new forces that aim to transform the world, though he is not always confident of their ultimate triumph. being a man of scientific training, he is a determinist but not a fatalist. all his prophecies are conditional. if the gulf between industrial and parasitic classes keeps on widening there will eventually be two races, and the former will be master; this is the lesson of "the time machine." if the engineer and business manager get control we shall have the well ordered prosperity of "anticipations." if socialism prevails we shall have the great state. his stories of the future are about equally divided between optimistic and pessimistic prophecy, between allurements and warnings. "in the days of the comet"[3] he uses again the mechanism of the most artistic of his earlier short stories, "the star", which is a little gem in its way without a superfluous word or a false tone. but those were the days when mr. wells was writing for pleasure; now he writes for a purpose, so the two stories resemble each other only in their common theme, the swishing across the earth of a comet's tail. in the former tale the event was viewed by a man in mars who reported to his fellow scientists that the earth was little damaged, for the destruction of all life on it was too insignificant an event to be noticed at that distance. in the present book the earth was decidedly benefited, and the history is told by a man more foreign to us than the martian, for he is a citizen of the new civilization that followed the "great change." a wonderful transformation had been effected in our atmosphere by its mingling with the cometary gases. the inert nitrogen of the air had been changed to some life-giving, clarifying, and stimulating gas; it would be unfair to the author to infer that this was nitrous oxid, more familiarly known as "laughing gas." under its influence the inhabitants of the earth perceive the evils of our present régime and realize that they are mostly avoidable if everybody had good intentions and good sense. as an argument for socialism it is a very weak one, for it gives away the case by conceding, at the outset, the main objection of the conservative, that you will have to change human nature before socialism becomes possible. of course, if all men were well-meaning and wise socialism would be practical. it would also be unnecessary, because any social machinery, or, indeed, none at all, would work well enough under these conditions. the difficulty is to devise any changes that will make it work better with people as they are. that better people than we would be able to make for themselves better ways of living, nobody denies. that social, institutions influence the character of individuals, and that individuals influence the character of institutions, are correlative truths, but it is difficult for most people to keep them both in mind. mr. wells's collectivist conversion by a "green gas" is much the same thing as individualist conversion by religious influence, but we know of instances of the latter, while the former is purely hypothetical. but, of course, the object of the book is not to show how socialism can come about, but to assist in making it come about by acting on readers as a dose of the "green gas" and opening our eyes to the vulgarity, silliness, squalor, and wastefulness of our daily life. mr. wells is an artist by nature and a scientist by training, and ugliness and stupidity worry him more than wickedness and injustice. in fact, he would probably class all the evils of civilization under stupidity. but long ago it was said that against stupidity even the gods fight in vain, and it remains to be seen whether socialists will succeed better. the most attractive pages of the book to me are those that describe "the festival of the rubbish burnings", though wells does not improve upon washington irving's treatment of the same theme. there are several things owned by our neighbors, even by relatives, which we should like to cast upon the flames. but we are afraid to light the bonfire lest the neighbors should burn up some of our treasures. that war is also an example of human stupidity, we agree, but just how to prevent it altogether until the rest of the world comes to our opinion, we do not understand. it takes two to stop a quarrel. the fleets of england and germany were engaged in bombarding each other when the renovating comet struck the earth, but as soon as the eyes of the combatants and the "statesmen" who had instigated it were opened, and their anger quenched, it seemed incredible to them that they should have sought to kill each other for such trivial and remote causes. jules verne has a similar scene in "dr. ox's experiment", but in that case the gas acts in the opposite way to excite the sluggish inhabitants of a peaceful flemish village to make war against the neighboring village, and as soon as they are out of the contaminated atmosphere they look in bewilderment at the deadly weapons in their hands. eight years later wells's worst forebodings came to pass, but no "green gas" came to clear the air of hate. but the particular passion that wells would sweep away by the breath of his comet is one which, in the opinion of most people, is necessary to the maintenance of morality, that is, jealousy. the young english workingman who tells the story is infuriated against the young aristocrat who had seduced his sweetheart and is pursuing them with a revolver when the "great change" comes. then he is content to share her affections with his former rival, and they all lived together happily ever after. in his works on socialism wells gives his reasons for thinking that, whether we wish it or not, the family is disintegrating, and that only under socialism, which will insure a support sufficient for independence to both men and women, can better relations be established. we might have known that as soon as science discovered the new world inside the atom the story-writer would follow close behind. we might also have known that h. g. wells would be the first to exploit this new territory annexed to human knowledge, for he has always kept an eye on scientific progress even while seemingly engrossed in british politics and marriage problems. so he wrote a romance of the atom, "the world set free", describing the great war months before it happened. our sleepy earth has been caught napping by every great change that has thus far reached humanity, and probably mr. wells is quite right in supposing that a sudden release of the vast stores of energy hidden in the atom would find civilization as unprepared for the social, economic, political, and intellectual results of the new energies in industry as it was for the effects of the great industrial revolution which followed the introduction of steam power not much more than a century ago. but mr. wells has the alertest literary imagination of any modern writer; the significance of the new physics has not escaped him as it has the common run of novelists intently searching for good plots and neglecting entirely the rich ore awaiting any writer who happened to have an elementary knowledge of modern science. many short stories and one or two novels have introduced more or less accurate accounts of radium as a side-show to a love story or an incident in a detective tale. but it required the boldness of mr. wells to throw overboard entirely the conventional novel plot and make a hero of the cosmic energies. "the world set free" resembles "the war in the air" in its vivid account of world-wide war, nations armed with novel weapons and forces, appalling power for destruction and attack in the hands of every nation, together with complete incapacity for defense by any nation, the resulting collapse of credit, panic, starvation, anarchy and a general social _débâcle_. but while the "war in the air" meant the end of civilization, the war with "atomic bombs" in the present book results in a general treaty of peace, the foundation of a world state under a provisional government, and a successful reorganization of society in which the forces which had been used by nations and empires to conquer each other are directed to the task of subduing nature to human aims. like the reconstructed world of "in the days of the comet" the future state is very faintly depicted, hinted at rather than described, in "the world set free." it differs from the numerous other utopias of mr. wells in that, whereas the world states of "anticipations", "a modern utopia", "in the days of the comet", etc., could be brought about by nothing more than taking the author's advice on politics, law, economics, and social customs, "the world set free" depends upon scientific discovery. a new hypothesis, in short, has given the inhabitants of this utopia an advantage over all previous utopias. they have energy at their command almost as freely accessible as water or air, and so the labor question is annihilated, the whole world becomes a leisure class, and everybody is free to devote his life to gardening, artistic decoration, and scientific research. country life becomes a constant delight. the agriculturist shrinks to less than one per cent of the population. the lawyer follows the warrior into extinction. "contentious professions cease to be an honorable employment for men." the parliament of the world, which came into existence after the atomic explosions of 1950, was simple and sensible; fifty new representatives elected every five years; proportional representation; every man and woman with an equal vote; election for life subject to recall; each voter putting on his ballot the names of those he wishes elected and those he wishes recalled; a representative recallable by as many votes as the quota that elected him. but political machinery does not count for much in this most modern of utopias. a scrap of the conversation between the president of the united states and king egbert, "the young king of the most venerable kingdom in europe", will illustrate the point of view: "science," the king cried presently, "is the new king of the world." "our view," said the president, "is that sovereignty resides with the people." "no," said the king, "the sovereign is a being more subtle than that, and less arithmetical; neither my family nor your emancipated people. it is something that floats about us and above us and through us. it is that common impersonal will and sense of necessity of which science is the best understood and most typical aspect. it is the mind of the race. it is that which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to its demands." the agency which effects this transformation is the discovery of how to release the internal energy of the atom, which we now know exists, although we do not know how to get at it. since wealth is essentially nothing but energy this means that we have within reach enough to make multi-millionaires of all of us; a tantalizing thought. the new disintegrating element, according to mr. wells, is carolinum, an element that professor baskerville also discovered on paper a few years ago. this exhaustless supply of energy being utilized in machinery sets free the laborer and swells the army of the unemployed; and since, incidentally, one of the by-products of its decomposition is gold, the financial systems of the world go to smash. but naturally carolinum finds speedy employment in war. a bomb of it buried in the soil becomes a perpetual volcano, half of it exploding every seventeen days. a few bombs of this radioactive element dropped from aeroplanes demolish paris and berlin and throw the world into a chaos of confusion, which wells's characteristic style, with its flashlight visions, its tumultuous phrases, and its shifting points of view, its alternations of generalization and detail, is particularly adapted to depict. the value of this romance, aside from its interest, lies in the emphatic way in which it teaches the lesson that civilization is primarily a matter of the utilization of natural energy and is measurable in horse power. unfortunately we have to depend upon the sunshine, either that of the present or of the carboniferous era; we have no key to the treasure-house of the atom. radium gives out its energy without haste or rest, just as fast at the temperature of liquid air as at the temperature of liquid iron, always keeping itself a little hotter than its surroundings, however hot these may be. if only we could get at this source of exhaustless energy--but let wells say what that would mean: not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships or drive one of our giant liners across the atlantic; but we should also have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our finest measurements. every scrap of solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force. it would mean a change in human conditions that i can only compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the brute. we stand to-day toward radio-activity exactly as our ancestor stood toward fire before he had learnt to make it. he knew it then only as a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. so it is that we know radio-activity to-day. this--this is the dawn of a new day in human living. at the climax of that civilization which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilization. the energy we need for our very existence, and with which nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. we cannot pick that lock at present, but.... then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare surplus of nature's energies will cease to be the lot of man. man will step from the pinnacle of this civilization to the beginning of the next.[4] wells is a futurist in the true sense of the word, appraising all things by what shall come out of them. this led him to a realization of the importance of eugenics long before the fad came in. in "mankind in the making" he formulated his test of civilization in these words: any collective human enterprise, institution, party, or state, is to be judged as a whole and completely, as it conduces more or less to wholesome and hopeful births and according to the qualitative and quantitative advance due to its influence toward a higher and ampler standard of life. but when it comes to practical measures for securing these advantages, wells shows a characteristic timidity. he condemns certain obvious dysgenic measures, such as the action of school boards in imposing celibacy upon women teachers, but in several respects legislation in america has already gone beyond what he ten years ago considered possible. so, too, in his "anticipations" he suggested as future possibilities inventions and practices that were then familiar to us in this country. it is hard for a man nowadays to be a prophet. if he doesn't look sharp he will find himself an historian instead. when h. g. wells in 1902 essayed the rôle of prophet and in his volume entitled "anticipations" tried to forecast the future of the world on scientific principles, he excited the same popular interest that any guess at coming events arouses, but there were few who took him seriously. now, however, "anticipations" makes very interesting reading. much of it has already come to pass, and we see that wells's chief mistake lay in putting his forecast too far ahead; for instance, when he says that he is "inclined to believe.... that very probably before 1950 a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound." the chapter on war in "anticipations" shows astonishing power of prescience in what he says of the use of the submarine and armored automobile, the development of trench warfare, the substitution of the machine gun for the rifle, and the abolition of the distinction between military and civilian parts of a nation. his discussion of the new forms of warfare and the inadequacy of the old methods of management and training is full of warnings which it were well for his country to have heeded. this is shown if we compare that feeling passage in which he describes a future british army setting out to meet a scientifically organized foe with an actual battle on the artois field as seen from the german side. the first column is quoted from "anticipations", published fifteen years ago. the second column is taken from kellermann's picture of the battle of loos, september 22, 1915, published in the _continental times_ of berlin. bernard kellermann, one of the most brilliant of the younger writers of germany, is well known in america through his novel, "the tunnel", dealing with a submarine passage to europe. the prophecy, 1902 i seem to see, almost as if he were symbolic, the gray old general--the general who learned his art of war away in the vanished nineteenth century, the altogether too elderly general with his epaulettes and decorations, his uniform that has still its historical value, his spurs and his sword--riding along on his obsolete horse, by the side of his doomed column. above all things he is a gentleman. and the column looks at him lovingly with its countless boys' faces, and the boys' eyes are infinitely trustful, for he has won battles in the old time. they will believe in him to the end. they have been brought up in their schools to believe in him and his class, their mothers have mingled respect for the gentlefolk with the simple doctrines of their faith, their first lesson on entering the army was the salute. the "smart" helmets his majesty, or some such unqualified person, chose for them lie hotly on their young brows, and over their shoulders slope their obsolete, carelessly-sighted guns. tramp, tramp, they march, doing what they have been told to do, incapable of doing anything they have not been told to do, trustful and pitiful, marching to wounds and disease, hunger, hardship, and death. they know nothing of what they are going to meet, nothing of what they will have to do; religion and the rate-payer and the rights of the parent working through the instrumentality of the best club in the world have kept their souls and minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered with the thinnest sham of training or knowledge. tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men unseen. and beside them, an absolute stranger to them, a stranger even in habits of speech and thought, and at any rate to be shot with them fairly and squarely, marches the sub­altern--the son of the school-burking, share-holding class--a slightly taller sort of boy, as ill-taught as they are in all that concerns the realities of life, ignorant of how to get food, how to get water, how to keep fever down and strength up, ignorant of his practical equality with the men beside him, carefully trained under a clerical head­master to use a crib, play cricket rather nicely, look all right whatever happens, believe in his gentility, and avoid talking "shop." so the gentlemanly old general--the polished drover to the shambles--rides, and his doomed column march by, in this vision that haunts my mind. i cannot foresee what such a force will even attempt to do against modern weapons. nothing can happen but the needless and most wasteful and pitiful killing of these poor lads, who make up the infantry battalions, the main mass of all the european armies of to-day, whenever they come against a sanely organized army. there is nowhere they can come in; there is nothing they can do. the scattered, invisible marks­men with their supporting guns will shatter their masses, pick them off individually, cover their line of retreat and force them into wholesale surrenders. it will be more like herding sheep than actual fighting. yet the bitterest and crudest things will have to happen, thousands and thousands of poor boys will be smashed in all sorts of dreadful ways and given over to every conceivable form of avoidable hardship and painful disease before the obvious fact that war is no longer a business for half-trained lads in uniform, led by parson-bred sixth-form boys and men of pleasure and old men, but an exhaustive demand upon very carefully educated adults for the most strenuous best that is in them, will get its practical recognition.[5] the fulfillment, 1915 they made the essay with absolutely new, absolutely antiquated tactics--tactics which are no longer recognized in this war. it was something really un­heard of! our staff officers stood and regarded it--their mouths open in astonishment. it was observed, shortly before noon, that the english were advancing toward our positions in dense masses, eight lines deep in echelon--from loos. a hail of shells that churned up the ground was supposed to smooth the way for the storming columns. at the same time, to the east of loos (there is a bit of rising ground there scarcely noticeable as you drive over it in a wagon, called hill 70), we saw english artillery come riding up--quite open--in the broad of day--under the naked heavens! these batteries carried bridge materials with them for the crossing of trenches and natural obstacles. the english general we caught describes this action as one that was especially "sporting." there can be no doubt about its dashing quality. but there was more to come. in the distance, on the level plain, one or two english cavalry regiments were visible--dragoons of the guard. eight lines of infantry? artillery driving across the open? cavalry in the background? it was really unbelievable! it was the plan of a veritable pitched battle from a forgotten age, the masterly idea of a senile brain, which had come limping along fifty years behind the times! generals in our day grow obsolete as rapidly as inventions and sciences. the war has taught us that the blood of nations, the incalculably precious blood, is to be entrusted only to the freshest, the most elastic, the most gifted of military spirits, the very cream of the crop. those old celebrities of theirs, staggering under their orders, should have been consigned to relay stations by the english. the english troops carried out their attack with a splendid gesture, with admirable bravoure. they were young and they bore no orders on their uniforms. they carried out the commands of their celebrated and senile authorities, carried them out with a blind courage--in this day of mortars, telephones and machine-guns. as magnificent as was their bearing, even so pitiful was the collapse of their onslaught. before the eightfold storming columns had been able to make ten steps, they came under our combined fire-rifles, machine-guns, cannon. the batteries were lying in wait and they obeyed the telephone. the english knights and baronets had not reckoned with this. fresh reserves came running up and were mown down in the cross-fire of our machine-guns. those riding batteries came to a miserable end. they too came within the zone of the machine-guns, and our heavy mortars, notified by telephone, got hold of them so swiftly and so thoroughly, that they were not even given time to unlimber. the regiments of cavalry that were waiting in the background, ready to come dashing through, got salvoes of the heaviest shells full in their faces, and drew back without having drawn a blade from the scabbard. that finished the pitched battle. and the attack broke to pieces in front of our wire entanglements. a prodigious number of their dead lay before our trenches. we had made 800 prisoners, among them a colonel, four majors, and fifteen officers. at a conservative estimate, the losses of the english in this single section of the division, may be fixed in dead and wounded as at least 20,000. it was clear that, apart from a small local success, it had been a disastrous job for the britishers. never before has it been so clearly proved that war is not a sport for a dozen or two of privileged dilettantes.[6] wells made his first hit with "the time machine", written under high pressure of the idea within a fortnight by keeping at his desk almost continuously from nine in the morning to eleven at night. it is based upon the theory that time is a fourth dimension of space,[7] and by a suitable invention one may travel back and forth along that line. having once got his seat in his time-machine wells has never abandoned it. he uses it still in his novels, in "tono-bungay," "the new machiavelli", and "the passionate friends", telling the story partly in retrospect, partly in prospect, flying back and forth in the most mystifying manner, producing thereby a remarkable effect of the perpetual contemporaneity of existence, though some readers are dizzied by it. the charm of a masked ball is that it enables people to do and say what they please, in short to reveal themselves because their faces are concealed. anonymity has the same effect, as many a name from "currer bell" to "fiona mcleod" attests. so it is not surprising that the book[8] which purports to have been written by one "george boon" and compiled by one "reginald bliss" shows wellsian characteristics more pronounced than any of the volumes of which h. g. wells owns authorship. for one thing wells obviously likes to start things better than to finish them. he is apt to run out of breath before he comes to the end of a novel, and if he gets his second wind it is likely to be some other kind of wind. in most of his books except the short stories the reader feels that the author is saying to himself, "i wish i had this thing off my hands so i could get at that new idea of mine." then, too, wells is fond of putting a story inside of a story, like the arabian nights, and it often happens that the "flash-backs", to borrow a cinema phrase, are confusing. the framework of "the modern utopia" is an instance of this. it is sometimes hard to tell in this where we are or who is speaking. wells is inimitable in his ability to sketch a character in a few swift strokes, but he does not care much for the character afterward. he delights in taking such snapshots, but he hates to develop them. his mind is quick to change. he is liable to be disconcerted by a sudden vision of an opposing view. sometimes in the middle of a sentence he will be seized with a doubt of what he is saying, and being an honest man, he leaves it in air rather than finish it after he has lost confidence. he may double on his track like a hunted fox within the compass of a single volume. finally, wells is fond of satirizing his contemporaries, including his best friends and his former selves. he is given to mixing realistic description with recondite symbolism, desultory argumentation with extraneous personalities, and other incongruous combinations of style and thought. now all these peculiarities, call them faults or merits as you like, are to be found intensified in "boon" _etc._ first mr. wells introduces mr. bliss, who then introduces mr. boon, a famous author deceased, and tells how they together invented mr. hallery, who introduces a host of living writers, big and little, known and unknown, at the world conference on the mind of the race. he has given me the honor of a seat on a special committee of section s, devoted to poiometry, the scientific measurement of literary greatness. the volume is illustrated by the author--whoever he may be--but the best caricatures are not the graphic but the verbal ones with their amusing parodies of style. perhaps the best of these is an imaginary conversation between henry james and george moore, in which both gentlemen pursue entirely independent trains of thought. here's the sketch of "dodd." we recognize him, although we do not know who dodd is: dodd is a leading member of the rationalist press association, a militant agnostic, and a dear compact man, one of those middle victorians who go about with a preoccupied, caulking air, as though, having been at great cost and pains to banish god from the universe, they were resolved not to permit him back on any terms whatever. he has constituted himself a sort of alert customs officer of a materialistic age, saying suspiciously: "here, now, what's this rapping under the table here?" and examining every proposition to see that the creator wasn't being smuggled back under some specious new generalization. boon used to declare that every night dodd looked under his bed for the deity, and slept with a large revolver under his pillow for fear of a revelation. one advantage of anonymity is that wells can contradict himself with even more freedom than usual. for instance, he expresses great contempt for bergson and his "pragmatism for ladies." but not long ago, in "marriage", he was contemptuous of "doctor quiller [schiller] of oxford," for "ignoring bergson and fulminating a preposterous insular pragmatism." much of the volume was manifestly written in the calm days before the war, but the fragment entitled "the wild asses of the devil" expresses in fantastic guise his--and the world's--confusion and despair at the catastrophe which has overwhelmed the human race. "it is like a dying man strangling a robber in his death grip. we shall beat them, but we shall be dead beat in doing it," says boon, and he rejects all suggestions that it may be a good thing in the end: no! war is just the killing of things and the smashing of things. and when it is all over, then civilization will have to begin all over again. they will have to begin lower down and against a heavier load and the days of our jesting are done. the wild asses of the devil are loose and there is no restraining them. what is the good of pretending that the wild asses are the instruments of providence kicking better than we know? it is all evil. evil. there are many different wellses. probably nobody likes all of them. he does not like all of himselves. in writing a preface or otherwise referring to an earlier work he is, after the manner of maeterlinck, almost apologetic, and looks back upon the author with a curious wonder as to how he came to hold such opinions and express them in such a way. those of us who have grown up with him, so to speak, and followed his mind through all its metamorphoses in their natural order can understand him better, i believe, than those of the younger generation who begin with the current serial and read his works backward. mr. wells is just about my age. we were in the laboratory together and breathed the same atmosphere, although five thousand miles apart. when he began to write i was ready to read and to admire the skill with which he utilized for literary purposes the wealth of material to be found in the laboratory. jules verne had worked the same rich vein, clumsily but with great success. poe had done marvels in the short story with such scanty science as he had at his command. but wells, trained under huxley in biology at the university of london, had all this new knowledge to draw upon. he could handle technicalities with a far defter touch than verne and almost rivaled poe in the evocation of emotions of horror and mystery. besides this he possessed what both these authors lacked, a sense of humor, a keen appreciation of the whimsicalities of human nature. so he was enabled to throw off in the early nineties a swift succession of short stories astonishingly varied in style and theme. as he became more experienced in the art of writing, or rather of marketing manuscripts, he seems to have regretted this youthful prodigality of bright ideas. many of them he later worked over on a more extensive scale as the metallurgist goes back to a mine and with an improved process extracts more gold from the tailings and dump than the miner got out of the ore originally. "the star" was the first of these i came across, clipping it for my scrap book from _harper's weekly_, i believe. first loves in literature make an indelible impression, so i will always hold that nothing wells has done since can equal it. certainly it was not improved by expanding it to "in the days of the comet." the germ of that creepy tale of advanced vivisection, "the island of dr. moreau", appeared first in the _saturday review_, january, 1895, as a brief sketch, "doctor moreau explains." "the dream of armageddon", vivid and swift as a landscape under a flash of lightning, served in large part for two later volumes, "when the sleeper wakes" and "the new machiavelli." it was, as i have said, "the star" that first attracted me to wells. it was "the sea-lady" who introduced me to him personally. it was in the back room of a little italian restaurant in new york, one of those sixty-cent table d'hôtes where rich soup and huge haystacks of spaghetti serve to conceal the meagerness of the other five courses. here foregathered for years a group of socialists, near-socialists, and others of less definable types, alike in holding the belief that the world could be moved and ought to be, but disagreeing agreeably as to where the fulcrum could be placed and what power should move the lever. we called ourselves the "x club", partly because the outcome of such a combination of diverse factors was highly problematical, partly perhaps in emulation of the celebrated london x. one evening some ten years ago, as i came late to the dinner, i noticed that the members were not all talking at once, as usual, but concentrated their attention upon a guest, a quiet, unassuming individual, rather short, with a sunbrowned face, tired eyes, and a pessimistic mustache--a londoner, i judged from his accent. then i was introduced to him as "the man who knows all your works by heart, mr. wells." this disconcerting introduction was their revenge for my too frequent quotation in debate. the reason, i suppose, for the old saying, "beware the man of one book", is because he is such a bore. mr. wells appeared to take the introduction literally and began to examine me on the subject. "did you ever read 'the sea-lady'?" i happily was able to say i had, and was let off from any further questions, for he said that he had never met but two persons before who admitted having read the book. i am glad he did not ask me what it meant, for while i had an opinion on the subject, it might not have agreed with his. then we turned the tables on mr. wells and for the rest of the evening asked him questions and criticized his views; all of which he took very good-naturedly and was apparently not displeased thereby, since in the book about his trip, "the future in america", he expressed disappointment at not finding in washington any "such mentally vigorous discussion centers as the new york x club." five years later i had another glimpse of mr. wells, this time a jolly evening at his home, where he kept his guests, a dozen young men and women, entertained, first by playing on the pianola, which he bought at the suggestion of mr. shaw; afterward by improvising a drama for the occasion, the star rôle being taken by his wife, whom i had seen a few days before marching in the great london suffrage procession. mr. wells's home differs from most london houses in having a view and a park. the back windows look over all the sea of houses, the shipping in the thames, and, smoke permitting, the surrey hills beyond. on the other side of the house five minutes' walk uphill brings one to hampstead heath, the largest of london's public places, which serves mr. wells for his long walks. mr. wells perhaps got his love of outdoor life from his father, joseph wells, who was a professional cricketer and the son of the head gardener of lord de lisle at penhurst castle, in kent. his mother was the daughter of an innkeeper at midhurst. herbert george wells was born in bromley, kent, september 21, 1866, and his childhood impressions of his mother's kitchen and his father's garden and shop he has described in "first and last things" and in "tono-bungay." in this novel, the first, perhaps, to be devoted to that conspicuous feature of modern life, the patent medicine, he has utilized his brief experience as a chemist's apprentice, or, as we would say, a drug clerk. next an unsuccessful attempt was made to train him as a draper's assistant--a dry goods clerk, in our language, though we have fortunately nothing that exactly corresponds. the hardships and humiliations of this experience seem to have cut deep into his soul, for he recurs to it again and again, always with bitterness, as in "mr. polly", "kipps", and "the wheels of chance", for example. but to untangle the autobiographical threads from the purely fictional in wells's novels would be to cheat some future candidate for a ph. d. in english literature of his thesis. [illustration: h. g. wells] the interesting point to observe is that temperament and training have combined to give him on the one hand a hatred of this muddled, blind, and inefficient state of society in which we live, and on the other a distrust of the orderly, logical, and perfected civilization usually suggested as a possible substitute. he detests chaos, but is skeptical of cosmos. set between these antipathetic poles, he vibrates continually like an electrified pith ball. he has a horror of waste, war, dirt, cruelty, cowardice, incompetency, vagueness of mind, dissipation of energy, inconvenience of households, and all friction, mental or physical. but yet his ineradicable realization of the concrete will not allow him to escape from these disagreeables by taking refuge in such artificial paradises as fourier's phalanx or morris' idyllic anarchism. wells is a socialist, yet he finds not merely the marxians, but even the fabians, too dogmatic and strait-laced for him. his "modern utopia" is, i think, the first to mar the perfection of its picture by admitting a rebel, a permanently irreconcilable, antagonistic individuality, a spirit that continually denies. yet we know that if a utopia is to come on earth it must have room for such. wells would never make a leader in any popular movement. he has the zeal of the reformer, but he has his doubts, and, what's worse, he admits them. in the midst of his most eloquent passages he stops, shakes his head, runs in a row of dots, and adds a few words, hinting at another point of view. he has what james defined as the scientific temperament, an intense desire to prove himself right coupled with an equally intense fear lest he may be wrong. your true party man must be quite color blind. he must see the world in black and white; must ignore tints and intermediate shades. wells as socialist could not help seeing--and saying--that there were many likable things about the liberals. as a liberal he must admit that the tories have the advantage in several respects. he professes to view religion rationalistically, yet there are outbursts of true mysticism to be found in his books, passages which prove that he has experienced the emotion of personal religion more clearly than many a church member. he has the courage of his convictions, but it does not extend much beyond putting them into print. i doubt whether, if he were given autocratic power, he would inaugurate his "modern utopia" or any other of his visions. at least he has hitherto resisted all efforts to induce him to carry them into effect. for instance, one of the most original and interesting features of his "modern utopia" was the samurai, the ruling caste, an order of voluntary noblemen; submitting to a peculiar discipline; wearing a distinctive dress; having a bible of their own selected from the inspiring literature of all ages; spending at least a week of every year in absolute solitude in the wilderness as a sort of spiritual retreat and restorative of self-reliance. a curious conception it was, a combination of puritanism and bushido, of fourier and st. francis, of bacon's salomon's house, plato's philosophers ruling the republic, and cecil rhodes's secret order of millionaires ruling the world. one day a group of ardent young men and women, inspired by this ideal, came to wells and announced that they had established the order, they had become samurai, and expected him to become their leader, or at least to give them his blessing; instead of which wells gave them a lecture on the sin of priggishness and sent them about their business. i have no doubt he was right about it, nor does his disapproval of this premature attempt to incorporate the samurai in london prove that there was not something worth while in the idea. but it shows that wells knew what his work was in the world and proposed to stick to it, differing therein from other utopians: edward bellamy, who because his fantastic romance, "looking backward", happened to strike fire, spent the rest of his life in trying to bring about the coöperative commonwealth by means of clubs, papers, and parties; dr. hertzka, who wasted his substance in efforts to found a real freeland on the steppes of kilimanjaro, africa. perhaps the matter with wells is simply that he cannot find his proper pigeon-hole. perhaps i can find it. wells has little sympathy with any political grouping or ideal regnant to-day. the orthodox tory is in his view simply a man without imagination. the orthodox liberal is a mere sentimentalist substituting democratic phrases for science and discipline. the imperialist, though touching wells at some points, repels him by his mania for military expenditure and his ignorant race prejudice. the socialist or labor party man is appallingly narrow and totally unimpressed with the need for intelligence to rule the state. in "the new machiavelli" the hero hovers distressfully over the entire field of modern politics, finding as little rest for his soul as noah's dove on the first trip from the ark found for its feet. once and once only has wells's ideal found even partial embodiment, and that was in the best days of the roman empire. there was the great state (in the familiar capital letters); a world state so far as the world was known and civilized. there was a universal language, exact and lucid. there was freedom and security of travel, at least as great as in those same countries to-day. true, wells would have disapproved of slavery. but so did the stoics of the empire disapprove of slavery, at least in theory. their ideal was a universal citizenship. in the later empire every freeman in the roman empire was called a citizen. there was tolerance, not only of religion but of manners, such as the narrow and parochial states of western europe which succeeded its fall have never known till within a hundred years. statecraft was a science; devotion to the state a cult. there were the legions, examples of duty and discipline and scientific warfare, and yet a few thousands of troops sufficed to police and guard a whole civilized, wealthy, complex world state. but most important of all was the roman law. based on logical principles; divested of superstitious accessories and irrational taboos; universal and in the main equitable; raised above the empire and the muddy immediacies of politics till it seemed the voice of nature itself; flexible and changing, but by growth rather than whim, it was the intellectual fabric of the empire. it so happened that a despotic emperor wielded the power of state, but still it was the state and not the mere person of the emperor that was really reverenced. it was certainly not the man or the artist that was divine in nero, but the office. even in its decadent and byzantine days traces of the old ideal remained, and it was not "charles richard henry etcetera, by the grace of god king of anyland, duke of somewherelse, knight of the golden spur, most reverend lord of the free cities of lower ruritania" in the silly medieval (and modern) style, but "senatus populusque romani" and "res publica." the medieval papacy was as universal in structure, but was obscurantist in basis, and left behind it as a legacy the memory of the crusades and the monasteries and great cathedrals as its monuments. the roman empire was rationalist in basis, and left behind it laws, straight roads, aqueducts, baths, theaters, libraries, and municipal organizations. chesterton is a romantic and rather likes than otherwise the whimsical eccentricities of modern national institutions. but wells, though he loves to play with science, takes statecraft as seriously as marcus aurelius, and, like him, he is a citizen of the great state, the cosmopolis. the "modern utopia" might have grown out of the actual roman empire had the right turnings been taken from that time to this; no other state or civilization would have formed its basis. the significance of wells's advocacy of socialism lies in the fact that it is addressed to the middle classes. he might be called "the apostle to the genteels." he took part for a time in the aggressive socialistic campaign led by the fabian society on lines distinct from but parallel to the marxian working class propaganda. the orthodox marxian has little use for middle-class people. he expects them to become extinct so shortly that it is no use trying to convert them. he takes no more interest in them than missionaries do in the tasmanians. they will be ground fine between the upper and nether millstones of the trusts and the unions. such individuals who survive will be able to do so only by becoming retainers of the capitalists, and as such will be engulfed with them in the revolutionary cataclysm which will end the present era. with a firm faith in this theory, it is no wonder that he often manifests annoyance at the slowness of the bourgeoisie in carrying out the part assigned them in the marxian program. they do not disappear fast enough, nor do they show any eagerness to take sides either with the proletariat or with the capitalists. on the contrary, they view both with a certain distrust and antipathy, and maintain a curious confidence in their ability to manage both factions in the future as they have in the past. in short, they are not a negligible quantity, but hold the balance of power, at least for the present, and can retard or accelerate the progress of socialism to a considerable though an indefinite extent. obviously, if the middle class as a whole is to be converted to socialism, it must be by different arguments than those found effective with the proletariat. the manifesto does not appeal to them, because they have more to lose than their "chains." there must be something more alluring than a universal competency and a steady job to arouse them to the need of radical changes. the sight of capitalists excites emulation and ambition rather than hatred and despair. a man is not inclined to vote millionaires out of existence so long as he cherishes a secret hope of becoming one. they do not see the proletarian papers and would be repelled by them if they did. wells's outline of the form that middle-class propaganda should take presents several novel and interesting points, but the most conspicuous is his discussion of the effect of socialism on family relations. his frankness and honesty in bringing that question into the open is in commendable contrast with the tendency of most advocates of socialism to conceal or minimize the fact that any such profound rearrangement of economic relations as is involved in socialism must inevitably affect the family, because the economic factor in this institution is undeniably great, although how great is a matter of dispute. wells boldly attempts to convert a prejudice into an argument by appealing to the very classes which, it is generally supposed, would be repelled by the bare mention of the subject, to save the family from its impending disintegration by adopting socialism. that wells is right in thinking that the problem of the family is a serious one at the present time is clearly shown by the statistics collected by sidney webb for the fabian society. he proves: that the decline in the birthrate which is depriving england and wales of at least one-fifth of every year's normal crop of babies is not accounted for by any alteration in the age, sex or marital condition of the population, by any refusal or postponement of marriage, or by any of the effects of "urbanization" or physical deterioration of sections of the community. the statistical evidence points, in fact, unmistakably to the existence of a volitional regulation of the marriage state that is now ubiquitous throughout england and wales, among, apparently, a large majority of the population. so much other statisticians have deduced, but mr. webb went farther and obtained a direct proof of his conclusion by the circulation of several hundred question blanks among middle-class families. the results are startling. out of a total of one hundred and twenty families reporting in one category, there were only seven in which the number of children was not intentionally limited. the average number of children in such limited families is one and a half, which is only one third what it was twenty-five years ago. in about sixty per cent of the cases "the poverty of the parents in relation to their standard of comfort" was a cause in the limitation of the family. this shows how important a factor the increased expense of raising children has become in well-to-do families, and unless the population of the future is to be recruited very largely by the improvident, ignorant, and debased, it points toward some form of state encouragement of the production of well-born children. wells suggested a differential income tax. doctor galton advocated the endowment of gifted parents. the war has brought this question out of the realm of speculative controversy into that of practical necessity. some of the remedies proposed now make the measures suggested by wells ten years before seem timid and conservative. his early training in dynamical physics and evolutionary biology furnished him with the modern scientific point of view when he entered upon the old battlegrounds of sociology and metaphysics. he therefore never could believe in a static state, socialistic or other, and he saw clearly that much of what passes for sound philosophical reasoning is fallacious, because the world cannot be divided up into distinct things of convenient size for handling, each done up in a neat package and plainly labeled as formal logic requires. here he is extremely radical, going quite as far as bergson in his anti-intellectualism though attacking the subject in a very different way. he denies the categories, the possibility of number, definition, and classification.[9] he brings three charges against our instrument of knowledge: first, that it can work only by disregarding individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects in this respect or that; and, second, that it can only deal freely with negative terms by treating them as though they were positive; and, third, that the sort of reasoning which is valid for one level of human thought may not work at another. no two things are exactly alike, and when we try to define a class of varied objects we get a term which represents none of them exactly and may therefore lead to an erroneous conclusion when brought back again to a concrete case. or, as wells puts it in his laboratory language: "the forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it." "of everything we need to say this is true, but it is not quite true." what the artist long ago taught us, that there are no lines in nature, the scientist has come to believe, and perhaps in time the logicians will come to see it too. at present, however, they are, as wells says, in that stage of infantile intelligence that cannot count above two. this is amusingly illustrated in a defense of logic by mr. jourdain in which he says:[10] to these strictures of mr. wells on logic we may reply, it seems to me, that either they are psychological--in which case they are irrelevant to logic--or they are false. thus the principle that "no truth is quite true", implying as it does that itself is quite true, implies its own falsehood, and is therefore false. this sort of thing might have passed as a good joke in the days of epimenides, the cretan, when logic was a novelty, and people amused themselves, like boys learning to lasso, in tripping each other up with it. but it is funny to see this ancient weapon of scholasticism brought out to ward off the attacks of modernism, such attacks from without the ramparts as wells's essay and from within as f. c. s. schiller's big volume, "formal logic." wells has not only the sense of continuity in space, but, what is rarer, the sense of continuity in time. "the race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents. this is not any sort of poetical statement: it is a statement of fact." "we are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves." there is a desperate sincerity about the man that i like. he seems always to be struggling to express himself with more exactness than language allows, to say neither more nor less than he really believes at the time. i do not think that he takes delight in shocking the bourgeoisie as shaw does. wells would rather, i believe, agree with other people than disagree. he is not a congenital and inveterate nonconformist. but he insists always on "painting the thing as he sees it." his later novels have come under the ban of the british public libraries because, conceiving sex as a disturbing element in life, he put it into his novels as a disturbing element, thus offending both sides, those of puritanical temperament who wanted it left out altogether and those of profligate temperament who wanted to read of amorous adventure with no unpleasant facts obtruded. his sociological works, in which, while insisting on permanent monogamy as the ideal, he prophesied that the future would show greater toleration toward other forms of marital relationship, aroused less criticism than the frank portrayal of existing conditions in his novels. all his longer novels are largely concerned with the problem of marital life but the only one of them that comes near to a solution is that entitled "marriage." the couple in this case, the traffords, are exceptionally decent people for characters in a modern novel, and if their marriage is not a success it is not on account of any interference from a third party, but rather because of the cares and complications that come from family life and financial prosperity. the heroine is a charming specimen of the modern young woman, educated at "oxbridge", whose chief fault is a constitutional inability to keep her accounts straight. she spends money with excellent taste, but without regard to her husband's bank balance. consequently trafford has to lay aside his researches in molecular physics to work out a successful process for synthetic rubber--easy to a man of his ability. mr. wells apparently adopts the theory formulated by professor devine, of columbia, as to the normal division of labor between husband and wife, that men should be experts in the art of getting money and women experts in the art of spending it. where both parties fail is in regarding these duties as ends in themselves, the men getting absorbed in business and the women buying things that they do not want, that nobody needs, just for the sake of buying. apparently mr. wells has hope of curing the men, but none of curing the women. premature attempts at realization, the demand for immediate results, the disregard of purely scientific research, the swamping of life by restless activity and futile efforts at reform, these are the ailments of the modern world, according to our author. his satire spares neither conservatives nor radicals. the following passage would apply to new york as well as london: london, of course, is always full of movements. essentially they are absorbents of superfluous feminine energy. they have a common flavor of progress and revolutionary purpose, and common features in abundant meetings, officials, and organization generally. few are expensive and still fewer produce any tangible results in the world. they direct themselves at the most various ends: the poor, that favorite butt, either as a whole or in such typical sections as the indigent invalid or the indigent aged, the young, public health, the woman's cause, the prevention of animal food, anti-vivisection, the gratuitous advertisement of shakespeare (that neglected poet), novel but genteel modifications of medical or religious practice, dress reform, the politer aspects of socialism, the encouragement of aeronautics, universal military service, garden suburbs, domestic arts, proportional representation, duodecimal arithmetic, and the liberation of the drama. they range in size and importance from campaigns on a plessingtonian scale to sober little intellectual beckingham things that arrange to meet half yearly and die quietly before the second assembly. if heaven by some miracle suddenly gave every movement in london all it professed to want, our world would be standing on its head and everything would be extremely unfamiliar and disconcerting. but, as mr. roosevelt once remarked, the justifying thing about life is the effort and not the goal, and few movements involve any real and impassioned struggle to get to the ostensible object. they exist as an occupation; they exercise the intellectual and moral activities without undue disturbance of the normal routines of life. in the days when everybody was bicycling an ingenious mechanism called hacker's home bicycle used to be advertised. hacker's home bicycle was a stand bearing small rubber wheels, upon which one placed one's bicycle (properly equipped with a cyclometer) in such a way that it could be mounted and ridden without any sensible forward movement whatever. in bad weather, or when the state of the roads made cycling abroad disagreeable, hacker's home bicycle could be placed in front of an open window and ridden furiously for any length of time. whenever the rider tired, he could descend--comfortably at home again--and examine the cyclometer to see how far he had been. in exactly the same way the ordinary london movement gives scope for the restless and progressive impulse in human nature without the risk of personal entanglements or any inconvenient disturbance of the milieu.[11] to accomplish a cure, or at least to obtain a diagnosis of the evil, mr. wells resorts to a curious expedient which he suggested first in his "modern utopia", where he laid down as one of the rules of his new order of samurai that a man who aspired to be a leader of men should for a week every year go off into the desert and live absolutely alone, without books or other distractions to keep him from thinking. but in "marriage" mr. wells improves upon this plan, for trafford and his wife go into the wilds of labrador together. "how sweet is solitude," as the irishman said, "when you have your sweetheart with you." so, indeed, they found it, and in their fight with cold, starvation, and wild beasts they learned how to found their love upon mutual comprehension and respect, and made of their marriage a true union. the change of heart which trafford experiences is not altogether unlike what christians call conversion. his line of argument, or, more properly speaking, development of thought, finds expression in fragmentary sentences muttered in the delirium of fever, a freudian emergence of fundamental feelings, as in the following passage: "of course," he said, "i said it--or somebody said it--about this collective mind being mixed with other things. it's something arising out of life--not the common stuff of life. an exhalation. ... it's like the little tongues of fire that came at pentecost.... queer how one comes drifting back to these images. perhaps i shall die a christian yet.... the other christians won't like me if i do. what was i saying?... it's what i reach up to, what i desire shall pervade me, not what i am. just as far as i give myself purely to knowledge, to making feeling and thought clear in my mind and words, to the understanding and expression of the realities and relations of life, just so far do i achieve salvation.... salvation!... "i wonder is salvation the same for every one? perhaps for one man salvation is research and thought, and for another expression in art, and for another nursing lepers. provided he does it in the spirit. he has to do it in the spirit.... "this flame that arises out of life, that redeems life from purposeless triviality, _isn't_ life. let me get hold of that. that's a point. that's a very important point." this passage from "marriage" showed that in 1912 wells's thought was entering upon a new phase, considerably in advance of that revealed in his "first and last things." he seemed to be working toward some sort of belief in god, a bergsonian god, struggling upward in spite of and by means of inert matter and recalcitrant humanity. it would indeed be queer to find wells not only among the prophets, but among the christian prophets, and, as he intimates, some of the other christians would not like it. wells's catholicity of sympathy recognizes no limitations of race. he has an abhorrence for race prejudice of every kind. the greatest blot he found upon american civilization was our ill treatment of the negro.[12] in his article on "race prejudice" he puts it foremost among the evils of the age but even his "anticipations" could not conceive of such an insensate revival of racial animosity between civilized nations as the great war has, brought about: knight errantry is as much a part of a wholesome human being as falling in love or self-assertion, and therein lies one's hope for mankind. nearly every one, i believe--i've detected the tendency in old cheats even and disreputable people of all sorts--is ready to put in a little time and effort in dragon-slaying now and then, and if any one wants a creditable dragon to write against, talk against, study against, subscribe against, work against, i am convinced they can find no better one--that is to say, no worse one--than race prejudice. i am convinced myself that there is no more evil thing in this present world than race prejudice; none at all. i write deliberately--it is the worst single thing in life now. it justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of error in the world. through its body runs the black blood of coarse lust, suspicion, jealousy and persecution and all the darkest poisons of the human soul. it is this much like the dragons of old, that it devours youth, spoils life, holds beautiful people in shame and servitude, and desolates wide regions. it is a monster begotten of natural instincts and intellectual confusion, to be fought against by all men of good intent, each in our own dispersed modern manner doing his fragmentary, inestimable share. the abolition of hatred between castes and classes and countries, the growth of toleration and extension of coöperation, the improvement of education, and the advancement of science, are what will lead toward his ideal. and his ideal is that of an evolutionist, the opportunity for continuous growth. he has exp rest it best, perhaps, in "the food of the gods," in the speech of one of the new race of giants, of supermen, to his fellows as they are about to give battle to the community of ordinary people determined to destroy them: it is not that we would oust the little people from the world in order that we, who are no more than one step upward from their littleness, may hold their world forever. it is the step we fight for and not ourselves.... we are here, brothers, to what end? to serve the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. we fight not for ourselves--for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of the life of the world. through us and through the little folk the spirit looks and learns. from us by word and birth and act it must pass--to still greater lives. this earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing place, else indeed we might put our throats to the little people's knife, having no greater right to live than they. and they in their turn might yield to the ants and vermin. we fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth that goes on forever. to-morrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. that is the law of the spirit forevermore. to grow according to the will of god! to grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! greater, he said, speaking with slow deliberation, greater, my brothers! and then--still greater. to grow and again--to grow. to grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of god. the great war has inspired or at least instigated many works of fiction already, but the best of these, in my opinion, is wells's "mr. britling sees it through." it does not deal much with the fighting at the front. the author is chiefly concerned with another aspect of the war, its effect upon the psychology of the englishman. the book is divided into two parts; the first half is light, carefree and amusing after the manner of wells's earlier romances; the other half is darkened by the war cloud and is written with more emotional power than he has hitherto shown. knowing wells's habit of introducing autobiographical details into his romances, we inevitably surmise that mr. britling is himself. mr. britling is a writer whom "lots of people found interesting and stimulating, and a few found seriously exasperating." "he had ideas in the utmost profusion about races and empires and social order and political institutions and gardens and automobiles and the future of india and china and esthetics and america and the education of mankind in general.... and all that sort of thing." this certainly reads like wells's repertory of ideas. and to make the resemblance closer mr. britling writes a pamphlet, "and now war ends", shortly after the war began--just as mr. wells wrote "the war that will end war." several of the characters are recognizable as mr. wells' neighbors. at any rate we may be sure that the book reveals the changing moods not only of the author but of every thinking englishman as the enormity, the awfulness, the all-pervasiveness of the war became slowly realized in the course of many months. as a contrast to his typical englishman mr. wells brings in an american, handled with more skill than british writers usually show in dealing with american psychology. the delight of his mr. direck at the recognition of the scenes and customs he had known from history and novels is well presented: the thames, when he sallied out to see it, had been too good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a marked accent and accosting some passerby with the question, "say! but is this little wet ditch here the historical river thames?" in america, it must be explained, mr. direck spoke a very good and careful english indeed, but he now found the utmost difficulty in controlling his impulse to use a high-pitched nasal drone and indulge in dry americanisms and poker metaphors upon all occasions. when people asked him questions he wanted to say "yep" or "sure", words he would no more have used in america than he could have used a bowie knife. but he had a sense of rôle. he wanted to be just exactly what he supposed an englishman would expect him to be. every american tourist in england has felt this temptation. he also has the experience ascribed by mr. wells to his american of finding that england on closer acquaintance is not so antiquated as she looks. when asked what his impression of england is mr. direck answers: that it looks and feels more like the traditional old england than any one could possibly have believed, and that in reality it is less like the traditional old england than any one would ever possibly have imagined. i thought when i looked out of the train this morning that i had come to the england of washington irving. i find that it is not even the england of mrs. humphry ward. to complete this study of national psychology there is also a german in the family circle at first, a tutor whose hobbies are ido and internationalism and a universal index, traits drawn from professor ostwald apparently. he is not caricatured but we suspect that like mr. direck, the american, herr heinrich is affected by british expectations and appears more german than he is. the book reëchoes all the passions of the war,--love, hatred, courage, despair, meanness, sacrifice, heroism, selfishness, stoicism and mad wrath,--but ends upon a clear religious tone such as has been heard but faintly in any work of mr. wells before. what mr. britling sees through is not the war, for nobody can yet see so far as that, but he sees through the doubt and turmoil of his own mind and finds internal peace in the midst of warfare. when he sits down to write a letter to the parents of heinrich, who like his own son had fallen in france, his mind is torn by conflicting emotions, but finally these are resolved into one common chord and he writes: religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found god and been found by god, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end. he may have his friendships, his partial loyalties, his scraps of honor. but all these things fall into place and life falls into place only with god. only with god. god, who fights through men against blind force and night and non-existence; who is the end, who is the meaning. he is the only king.... of course i must write about him. i must tell all my world of him. and before the coming of the true king, the inevitable king, the king who is present whenever just men foregather, this bloodstained rubbish of the ancient world, these puny kings and tawdry emperors, these wily politicians and artful lawyers, these men who claim and grab and trick and compel, these war makers and oppressors, will presently shrivel and pass--like paper thrust into a flame. our sons have shown us god. how to read wells the curious thing about h. g. wells is his diversity. for a person of any intellectual consistency it is impossible thoroughly to appreciate him in certain moods without disliking him in others. he is the stern moralist of "the sleeper awakes", the detached and exquisite artist of "thirty strange stories" and "tales of space and time", the genial and conciliatory sociologist of "new worlds for old", the intolerant imperialist of "anticipations", the subtle anti-moralist of "the new machiavelli" and "ann veronica", the sympathetic if somewhat cynical portrayer of the shop-keeping classes of "mr. polly" and "the wheels of chance", the vague philosopher at large of "first and last things", the imaginative rationalist of "a modern utopia", the jules-vernish romancer of "the war of worlds" and "the first men in the moon", the scientific transcendentalist of "the food of the gods", and in addition he seriously chronicles "floor games" with his boys and takes interest in fugitive essays on modern warfare and "the misery of boots." unless one is alien to everything human (and superhuman), it is impossible to escape being interested in at least some of these. wells's philosophy is, as i have said, expressed symbolically in many of his stories. it is most fully explained in "first and last things: a confession of faith and a rule of life" (putnam), and in the two essays previously referred to, "scepticism of the instrument" (in "a modern utopia") and "the discovery of the future", first published in _nature_, february 6, 1902, and in the "report of the smithsonian institution", 1902, and later in book form (huebsch, new york, 1913). his sociological studies comprise the following volumes: "anticipations" (1901, harper), "mankind in the making" (1903, scribner), "a modern utopia" (1904, scribner), "the future in america" (1906, harper), "new worlds for old" (1908, macmillan), "socialism and the great state", with the collaboration of fourteen other authors (1911, harper), "social forces in england and america" (1914, harper), published in england under the title "an englishman looks at the world" (cassell), "the war that will end war" (1915), "what is coming?" (1916, macmillan), "italy, france and britain at war" (1917, macmillan), and "god the invisible king" (1917, macmillan). his short stories have been collected in several different volumes, in part overlapping: "thirty strange stories" (1898, harper), "tales of time and space" (1899, doubleday), "twelve stories and a dream" (1903, scribner), "the plattner story and others" (1897, macmillan), "the stolen bacillus and other incidents" (1895, macmillan). eight of the best of his short stories (including "the star", "armageddon" and "the country of the blind") are published in a sumptuous edition with coburn's photographic illustrations by mitchell kennerley ("the door in the wall and other stories", 1911). his romances include: "the time machine" (1895, holt), "the wonderful visit" (1895), "the island of dr. moreau" (1896, duffield), "the war of the worlds" (1898, harper), "the invisible man" (1897, harper), "the sea-lady" (1902) "the first men in the moon" (1901), "when the sleeper wakes" (1899, harper), rewritten (1911) as "the sleeper awakes" (nelson, london), "in the days of the comet" (1906, century), "the food of the gods" (1904, scribner), "the war in the air" (1908, macmillan), "the world set free" (1914, macmillan). his novels fall naturally into two classes: first those of a lighter and humorous character: "the wheels of chance" (1896, macmillan), "love and mr. lewisham" (1900, stokes), "kipps" (1906, scribner), "the history of mr. polly" (1910, duffield), "bealby" (1915, macmillan), "boon" etc. (1915, doran). his longer and more serious novels are: "ann veronica" (1909, harper), "the new machiavelli" (1910, duffield), "tono-bungay" (1908, duffield), "marriage" (duffield), "the passionate friends" (1913, harper), "the wife of sir isaac harmon" (1914, macmillan), "the research magnificent" (1915, macmillan), "mr. britling sees it through" (1916, macmillan). to these we must add some early works: a "textbook on biology" in two volumes (1892) and two volumes of essays, "select conversations with an uncle" (1895, saalfield) and "certain personal matters" (1897). he has, like stevenson, devoted much attention to devising floor games for children and has published two books upon it: "floor games" and "little wars" (small, maynard). wells still awaits his boswell, but we have "the world of h. g. wells" by van wyck-brooks (1915, kennerley), a lively and appreciative critique, and "h. g. wells, a biography and a critical estimate of his work" by j. d. beresford (1915, holt), still briefer, equally interesting, and containing a list of his writings to date. an autobiographical sketch was written for the russian edition of his works (1909) and published in t. p.'s magazine (1912). of magazine articles and critiques the following have for one reason or another special interest: "les idées de wells sur l'humanité future" by charles duguet in _revue des idées_, 1908. "wells" by chesterton in _american magazine_, vol. 71, p. 32 (1910). "wells and his point of view" in _catholic world_, vol. 91 (four articles, 1910). "wells and bergson" by p. e. b. jourdain in _hibbert journal_, vol. 10, p. 835, july, 1912. "h. g. wells et la pensée contemporaine" by rené leguy in _mercure de france_ (1912). the contributions of mr. wells to current magazines and newspapers are too numerous to enumerate, but i must not omit the two articles on socialism which he contributed to _the independent_, october 25 and november 3, 1906, and an article on "the nature of love" (_the independent_, august 13, 1908). [1] see "major prophets of to-day", p. 232. [2] "heretics", by g. k. chesterton, p. 85. [3] "in the days of the comet", by h. g. wells. new york: the century company. [4] the world set free. [5] from wells's "anticipations." [6] from kellermann's account of the battle of loos. [7] it would be interesting to learn where wells happened to get hold of the idea that time is the fourth dimension of reality and how much he knew then of the history of the conception. he could not, at any rate, for all his prophetic powers, have foreseen the important part it was to play in scientific thought and metaphysical speculation in the coming century. lorentz, einstein and minkowski have incorporated it into their new theory of relativity which threatens to abolish the ether and to make mass a variable, dependent on velocity. our ordinary euclidean or three dimensional space would thus be a cross-section at a certain time. (see "the time-space manifold of relativity", by edwin b. wilson and g. n. lewis, in _proceedings of the american academy of arts and sciences_, november, 1912.) heinrich czolbe in 1875 brought forward the theory (see müller, _archiv für systematische philosophie_, xvii, p. 106), and lotze discusses it in his "microcosmos." bergson's philosophy is based upon the distinction he draws between psychological duration and the physical treatment of time as a kind of space. professor pitkin of columbia criticizes wells's time-machine from the metaphysical standpoint in "time and pure activity" (_journal philosophy, psychology and scientific methods_, vol. ii, no. 19). [8] "boon, the mind of the race, the wild asses of the devil, and the last trump. being a first selection from the literary remains of george boon, appropriate to the times. prepared for publication by reginald bliss, with an ambiguous introduction by h. g. wells." (doran, 1915.) [9] he has given three statements of his views on this point: first, in an article, "rediscovery of the unique", in fortnightly review, july, 1891; second, in a paper read to the oxford philosophical society and published in mind, xiii, no. 51, and as an appendix to "a modern utopia"; and, third, in book i of "first and last things." [10] "logic, m. bergson and mr. h. g. wells", by philip e. b. jourdain in _hibbert journal_, x, p. 835. [11] "marriage," duffield and company, 1912. [12] see "the tragedy of color", chapter xii of "the future in america", and his article on "race prejudice", in _the independent_ of february 14, 1907. chapter iii g. k. chesterton knight errant of orthodoxy the central truth to be uttered about mr. chesterton is that he is the greatest prophet of our generation. he is as great as tolstoy or ibsen. it may seem rash to set him beside these great prophets, but time will ratify my rashness. a prophet is a man of genius with a spiritual message for his age. the spiritual message delivered by mr. chesterton is mightier than any other sounding in our ears. he is a bigger man than maeterlinck or bergson, though we know it not. as a prophet he is larger in every way than mr. shaw or mr. wells or mr. arnold bennett, because he deals with the soul, whereas they deal with the soul's environment. they deal with man as a social animal. he deals with man as a spiritual being. our failure to salute the prophet is complete, and it is emphasized by our failure to perceive that he is the authentic voice of that english soul which is now wrestling with the teutonic soul for the soul of the world. _he is the soul of england_.--james douglas in the _observer_, 1916. can a journalist have a philosophy of life, and if so would it be worth talking about? in answer to the first question i shall quote chesterton to the effect that everybody has a philosophy, even generals and journalists. to prove the affirmative of the second i shall present, as exhibit b, the whole body of chesterton's works. perhaps the most heretical passage of his book on "heretics" was that which begins: but there are some people, nevertheless--and i am one of them--who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. we think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. we think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. we think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them. like many other things in chesterton's works this does not sound so heretical now as when it was written, about the time when the weary old world had finished chapter xix of the second volume of his history and had turned over the page in hopes of finding something new and exciting in chapter xx--and found it. chesterton's countrymen then were keeping careful count of germany's soldiers and ships, but they were contentedly ignorant of german philosophy. but as soon as the war broke out they began with feverish haste to translate and study treitschke, nietzsche, bernhardi, and any other books which might throw light upon the german _weltanschauung_, but which in the leisurely days of peace they had no time to read. it is convenient to compare shaw and chesterton because they are antithetic in temperament and opinion and represent two opposite currents of modern thought. shaw stands for the earlier rationalistic, socialistic revolt against the conventions of society. chesterton stands for the later conservative reaction to all this, for ecclesiasticism, nationalism, and traditionalism. shaw is a vegetarian and teetotaler. chesterton is quite the opposite; he champions the public house as a good old english institution. shaw is a suffragist; chesterton is dead set against anything of the kind. shaw came from the most pronounced protestant stock, the ulster kind, and, as we can see from his introduction to "androcles and the lion", he has constructed a sort of religion for himself, though he could hardly be accounted orthodox. chesterton is a catholic, though of the anglican rather than the roman variety, a champion of orthodoxy, and a defender of all forms of ritualism and medievalism. chesterton makes it his business to find a logical basis for popular traditions, customs, and superstitions which have always been regarded as purely irrational and arbitrary even by those who liked them and defended them as poetic and conforming to a deeper reality than that of reason. shaw is always showing how absurd and illogical are the soundest axioms and the most unquestioned platitudes, whether of orthodox conservative or orthodox revolutionary thought. chesterton discovers new reasons in things; shaw discovers new unreasons in things. chesterton appears in the capacity of permanent minority leader. but this is in respect to that really small minority of professional writers, speakers, and agitators who set the fashions for the zeitgeist. actually he has the backing of the great inarticulate immobile mass of the people. chesterton has discovered how to be witty though orthodox. but his orthodoxy is so extreme that it seems heterodoxy to most of us. perhaps that accounts for his success in making it sound paradoxical. as wesley determined that the devil had no right to all the pretty music, so chesterton determined that the iconoclasts should not monopolize all the cleverness. his originality consists in his genius for turning platitudes into epigrams. he can put the most unquestioned axiom in a way to shock the world. if he is right in what he says in his books on watts that "there is only one thing that requires real courage to say and that is a truism", chesterton must be the bravest man alive. but even he finds it necessary to promulgate his truisms in the disguise of sensational novelties. chesterton's ideal is a complete democracy, not merely democracy in politics but democracy in science, religion, literature, sport, and art. if you say this is impracticable he doubtless would retort that it was the essence of an ideal to be impracticable, otherwise it would be confounded with dull reality. he always champions the opinion of the many against that of the few, the laymen against the expert. once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. if scientific civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will laugh because he can laugh better than the rest.--"heretics." it was absurd to say that waterloo was won on eton cricket fields. but it might have fairly been said that waterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket. ... it is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. it shows that all the people are doing them. and it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them and that the nation is merely looking on.--"all things considered." on this ground he hated germany even before the war, as a nation ruled by experts. he denounced its workingmen's insurance, its governmental efficiency, its higher criticism, and the like. "i am all for german fantasy, but i will resist german earnestness till i die. i am all for grimm's fairy tales; but if there is such a thing as grimm's law, i would break it if i knew what it was."[1] it is on the basis of democracy that he defends religion: that christianity is identical with democracy is the hardest of gospels: there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as that they are all sons of god.--"twelve types." it is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. it is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. the man who quotes some german historian against the tradition of the catholic church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. he is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. it is quite easy to see why a legend is treated and ought to be treated more respectfully than a book of history. the legend is generally made by the majority of people in a village, who are sane. the book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.... if we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes--our ancestors. it is the democracy of the dead.... democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom: tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.--"orthodoxy." i expect some time to find chesterton defending the trinity on the ground that it is more democratic than mohammedan monotheism, a sort of commission government extended to the universe. chesterton has the true artist's love for the individual and the concrete. he delights in clear outlines and bright colors. he thinks in pictures. i have never seen any of his painting, but he must have the color sense strongly developed. he will halt in a stern chase or in the height of an argument to describe a sunset with the most chromatic language at his command. he studied art at the slade school in london, and although he was soon switched off into journalism he still reverts to the pencil on occasion. he has supplied the illustrations to three of belloc's books; "the great enquiry", "the green overcoat", and "emmanuel burden."[2] the last, a satire on imperialistic financiering, is one of the cleverest pieces of irony to be found in all literature, but it raises the question of whether the ironical tone can be sustained through a whole volume without a decline of interest. when the question of illustration arose chesterton sent out for a bundle of wrapping paper, and in the course of one evening drew all of the portraits in the book as well as a lot that were not used. for the understanding of chesterton's romances it is necessary to remember that the more non-sensical they seem, the more sense they have in them. this is because when he gets blinded by a big idea he sees men as concepts walking. he is too much of a platonist to be a good novelist. he admires dickens but never imitates him, for chesterton's stories are singularly devoid of individuals. all the little variations and accidental peculiarities that make a type into a person in the great novels of the world are lacking. in "the ball and the cross" mac ian is simply the archetype of the catholic romanticist and turnbull of the revolutionary rationalist. neither of them ever does anything out of character, but then neither of them has any character outside of the idea that made them what they are. each falls in love with a girl of the opposite type, drawn to scale. this is carried farther yet by the introduction of an incredibly consistent tolstoyan and a nietzschean beside whom nietzsche would seem all too human. thus the whole book is balanced and matched like old-fashioned wall paper or an italian garden. manalive comes closer to being real. he certainly is alive, but he is not a man; he is an ideal, chesterton's superman. "all habits are bad habits" is the text of g. k. chesterton's "manalive", which proved as delightful to his admirers and distasteful to his antipathists as any of his former productions. in his essays mr. chesterton's method is first to set down something that sounds like a wild absurdity and then to argue the reader into the admission--cheerful or indignant, according to his temperament--that it is a very sensible thing after all. in his romances his method is essentially the same. nobody could act crazier than mr. innocent smith in the first chapters of this volume, but in the end he is proved, by a long legal process, to be the only really sane man of the lot. he is accused of about as many crimes as the hero of jokai's tale, "the death's head", confessed to, but he turns out to be quite as guiltless. charges of murder, burglary, bigamy, and kidnaping, amply certificated, slip off him like water off a duck's back. neither prison nor asylum can hold manalive. smith's theory is that if you keep the commandments, you may violate the conventions; which, being the reverse of the ordinary rule of procedure, gets him into all sorts of misunderstandings. he had evidently read schopenhauer's theory that the only happiness is the pursuit of happiness, and, what is more, he acts upon it by letting go what he most delights in that he may recapture it. he goes round the world in search of his own home, and his series of amorous adventures are conducted in strict accord with monogamous morality. by getting outside of himself he can gain the joy of coveting his own possessions. the economic law of diminishing returns applies to all our habitual pleasures, and to escape it we must be continually seeking new investments. so manalive is distinguished from ordinary men in that he has legs that he uses. he is not rooted. he breaks out and runs around and discovers the most novel and wonderful things in the most commonplace environment. mr. chesterton is as fond of a chase as a fox hunter or a kinetoscope man. we have it in "manalive" as we have it in "the man who was thursday" and "the ball and the cross." as usual he stops every little while and paints a cloudscape to rest our eyes; and all along he enlivens the way by epigrams and inverted proverbs. here are a few: when men are weary they fall into anarchy; but when they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. we are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist until it is declared by authority. for she was one of those women who at bottom regard all men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species. though she never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any minute. perhaps this is the very definition of a companion. all that the parsons say is unproved. all that the doctors say is disproved. that's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been or ever will be. the academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still. with our weak spirits we should grow old in eternity, if we were not kept young by death. providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers. the most fantastic and therefore characteristic of chesterton's romances is "the man who was thursday" which the french are able more concisely to entitle _nommé jeudi_. the author calls it "a nightmare", and it is. the only books to compare with it are george macdonald's "lilith", strindberg's "dream plays", and andreyev's "masked ball"; but for wild imagining, grotesquerie, farcicality, and swift transformations it cannot be matched. it is a detective story, a motion-picture chase, and a system of theology, all in one. like all dreams, according to freud, it is symbolic, but the symbolism is not to be interpreted in the usual freudian way, for chesterton is clean-minded. the clue to it is to be found in his earliest book of essays, "the defendant", when he argues for the moral value of the detective story in the following fashion: "by dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war upon a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but traitors within our gates." the detective, he says, who stands alone and fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves' kitchen, is the original and poetic figure, and the criminals surrounding him represent cosmic conservatism. but in "the man who was thursday" each one of the six detectives, separately commissioned by the mysterious head of the secret police to enter the inner circle of seven anarchists, believes himself to be fighting single-handed for law and order against a criminal conspiracy to destroy civilization. the seven pseudo-anarchists go through all sorts of perilous and absurd adventures in the course of which they are metamorphosed successively into the seven days of the week, the seven days of creation, the seven orders of created things, and the seven angels of heaven. finally seated upon seven thrones, robed in state, blazoned--of course, since it is chesterton--with heraldic devices, they recognize one another as friends and allies through all their strange strife. it reminds one of emerson's brahma: "if the red slayer thinks he slays." but chesterton is too much of a manichean to let it go at that. one of the anarchists turns out to be genuine, the only real one in the world, the irreconcilable rebel, the eternal anarchist, the spirit that continually denies, the leader of his majesty's opposition. in some ways chesterton's conception of the devil reminds one of andreyev's "anathema" or perhaps rather of the satan whom dostoievsky introduces into his "brothers karamazarov." chesterton's mind seems to have a curious affinity to the russian, though so far as i remember his writings show no evidence of being influenced by russian literature. "the man who was thursday" affects readers variously. to some it seems ridiculous; to others blasphemous. julius west, usually sympathetic, dismisses it in his biography of chesterton as incomprehensible and tiresome. yet three people i know--a man, a woman, and a child--consider it one of the most wonderful books in the world, and know it almost by heart. my own opinion is that it shows that chesterton has not yet found the true medium for the expression of his genius. drawing and writing are too slow and cold to give scope to his pictorial imagination. he should, like d'annunzio, take to the screen. "the man who was thursday" would make a magnificent scenario as it stands, and chesterton could then add all of the things he thought of or saw while composing it but could not put into words. blake, too, was a man who would have done wonders with the cinematograph if it had only been invented sooner. chesterton, in his sketch of blake, explains his difficulties of expression by word and picture: how shall we manage to state in an obvious and alphabetical manner the ultimate query, the primordial pivot on which the whole modern problem turns? it cannot be done in long rationalistic words: they convey by their very sound the suggestion of something subtle. one must try to think of something in the way of a plain street metaphor or an obvious analogy. for the thing is not too hard for human speech: it is actually too obvious for human speech. chesterton's theory of the use of symbolism, even absurd symbolism, is given in his "defense of nonsense". every great literature has always been allegorical--allegorical of some view of the whole universe. the iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the odyssey because all life is a journey, the book of job because all life is a riddle.... nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out leviathan with a hook. chesterton at the beginning of his career wrote "a defense of detective stories"[3] and he has since shown that he knows how to write them, in the collections entitled "the club of queer trades", "the innocence of father brown", and "the wisdom of father brown." but they are different from ordinary detective stories not merely because a mild-mannered priest takes the place of sherlock holmes but more because they frequently have nothing to do with crime and all parties turn out, as in "thursday", to have the best of intentions, whatever their actions. chesterton's method in these stories is much the same as he employs in his essays; that is, he piles up paradoxical impossibilities, and then by some simple expedient resolves them into apparent reasonableness. the author's obvious enjoyment of his own ingenuity adds to the reader's delight. it would be interesting to know whether he has in mind the solution when he lays out the plot or whether he is not playing a game with himself like jackstraws, pitting his skill as a disentangler against a muddle of his own making. as an artist chesterton has always been attracted by the orient, with its mystical fanaticisms, its cruel colors, and its unfamiliar habits of thought. but while turkey is all very well at a distance, turkey in europe is to him a distinct and horrible menace. in "the flying inn" we have a story of mohammedan influence not only in europe but in england itself. this novel is an allegory of the war between the sacred symbol of the cross and the sacred symbol of the crescent, as chesterton has similarly related the struggle of the ball and the cross in his book of that name. the champions of the crescent are misysra ammon, the prophet of the moon, and lord ivywood, an eccentric nobleman, a fanatic against the liquor traffic as the embodiment of christian custom as opposed to moslem. misysra, who is as fertile with impossible theories as with plausible arguments to support them, maintains that england is mohammedan at heart and proves it in a hundred ways from the contempt with which the pig is popularly spoken of to the absence of any "idolatrous" animal or vegetable forms in modern cubist painting. lord ivywood's persecution of the inn-keepers sends one of them adrift throughout the country carrying his inn-sign with him and accompanied by captain dalroy, an athletic irishman who champions the cause of the cross. so far we have a straight chesterton novel, a symbolic theme variegated by satires on modern life. but chesterton really seems uncertain that he aimed to write a prose novel at all, for the book is plentifully interspersed with verses, serious, comic, ironical, militant, in good meter and in bad, till the novel takes on the not unpleasant appearance of a chesterton anthology of songs. everybody who likes g. k. chesterton has wished that he might be induced to follow the example of charles dickens and write a child's history of england. when a literary man of wayward genius undertakes to interpret and record the story of his country the result is almost always worth while. we do not get the white sunlight of impartiality, but we get a beautiful rainbow of prejudices, personal opinions, and mystical insight. chesterton has still to write us a complete english history, but he has dealt faithfully with about a century and a half of it in "the crimes of england." it is due to him to say that the unhistorical character of the work is caused rather by partisan emphasis than by any inaccuracy of detail. rarely if ever has chesterton written with such care for his facts, and, as for his transcendental interpretation of them, he has as much warrant to philosophize as carlyle or taine or any other literary historian. but one does tend to get the impression from the book that only prussians had ever incurred the scriptural curse on him who removes his neighbor's landmark. for the "crimes of england" are really the crimes of prussia, and england's guilt is summed up in the phrase that english politics has been devoted ever since the time of frederick the great to "the belittlement of france and the gross exaggeration of germany." chesterton denounces the part played by his country in the wars of frederick the great, in the napoleonic struggles, in the repression of ireland, in tolerating bismarck's schemes of aggrandizement, only to bring into darker relief the wickedness of the state which used england throughout all these years as a catspaw. yet the indictment of england as prussia's accomplice is delivered in very sharp terms; so far as chesterton shows bias it is pro-french or pro-irish rather than pro-british. he really believes that the war is an epic struggle between the old soul of christendom, most clearly incarnated in the catholic nations, and a blast of sinister materialism from the wastes and forests of brandenburg. in this belief he writes not only seriously, but soberly, as befits the great hour, and concludes his book with a vivid and moving description of the battle of the marne which has in it a world of eloquence and no "cleverness" at all. the large volume of "criticisms and appreciations of dickens" is composed of his prefaces to the separate books of dickens. although not so important a piece of work as chesterton's biography of dickens, they are well worth bringing together in this way, because they form not only a brilliant piece of literary interpretation, but because they show that it is possible to write prefaces to the classics which will increase the desire to read the book instead of dampening one's ardor at the start with a mass of dry and trivial details of the author's life and environment. chesterton has the first requisite of a good introducer, an enthusiasm for his subject and a belief in the importance of his message for the times in which we live. his comparison of dickens and thackeray, if not quite fair, has at least sufficient point to suggest thought. thackeray has become classical; but dickens has done more; he has remained modern. there was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we watched anxiously to see whether dickens was fading from the modern world. we have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin to realize that it is the modern world that is fading. all that universe of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which dickens was called a caricaturist, all that victorian universe in which he seemed vulgar--all that is itself--breaking up like a cloud-land. and only the caricatures of dickens remain like things carved in stone. but whether his medium is fiction, criticism, or editorial, chesterton is always a moralist, differing, however, from most moralists in that he is never prosy and never directs his preachments at obsolete evils and deceased sinners. prose and poetry are such widely sundered fields that a reputation made in one does not carry over into the other. when scott dropped poetry to take up novel writing he found it expedient to leave his name behind. when kipling passed in the reverse direction from prose to poetry he had to cultivate a new _clientèle_. it is very amusing to hear two lovers of hardy or of meredith sing peans of praise to their favorite author in strophe and antistrophe until on descending from the general to the particular they discover that one was extolling the poet and the other the novelist and that each had never read, or but lightly esteemed what the other most admired. so while the essays and romances of gilbert keith chesterton reach thousands of readers week by week through the journals, and are bought with avidity in volume form, his poems are but little known to readers of his prose, although they have, i fancy, a circle of their own. yet no one can understand chesterton fully who ignores his verse, for his thought, expressed through this medium, is seen from another angle and so gains solidity to the view. chesterton, like tennyson, has taken one of england's legendary heroes as the theme of an epic by which to express his philosophy of life and his message to his age. the stories of alfred he accepts as uncritically and handles as freely as tennyson did those of arthur, but the poems resultant show not merely the difference between the authors, but also, in a way, the difference between the past century and the present one, the contrast between a faintly hopeful agnosticism and a robustious affirmation of faith. in his "alarms and discursions" he has told us in prose of the impressions made upon him by his visit to the vale of the white horse and ethandune. these he transmutes into poetry in "the ballad of the white horse."[4] in the beautiful dedication to his wife he gives her credit for having opened his eyes to the christian significance of the wars of alfred against the danes. miss frances blogg, whom he married in 1900, was described by one who knew her then as "a conservative rebel against the conventions of the unconventional." we may assume that it was largely through her influence that he was converted from youthful atheism to extremest orthodoxy. i can quote only a few stanzas from this dedication although such fragments are distressing to those who know the whole and aggravating to those who do not. lady, by one light only we look from alfred's eyes, we know he saw athwart the wreck the sign that hangs about your neck, where one more than melchizedek is dead and never dies. therefore i bring these rimes to you, who brought the cross to me, since on you flaming without flaw i saw the sign that guthrum saw when he let break his ships of awe, and laid peace upon the sea. do you remember when we went under a dragon moon, and 'mid volcanic tints of night walked where they fought the unknown fight and saw black trees on the battle-height, black thorn on ethandune? and i thought "i will go with you, as man with god has gone, and wander with a wandering star, the wandering heart of things that are, the fiery cross of love and war that like your self goes on." o go you onward, where you are shall honor and laughter be, past purpled forest and pearled foam, god's winged pavilion free to roam, your face, that is a wandering home, a flying home to me. * * * * * up through an empty house of stars being what heart you are, up the inhuman steeps of space as on a staircase go in grace, carrying the firelight on your face beyond the loneliest star. it is hard to carry the ballad meter through a whole volume without its growing monotonous. chesterton's poetry, like his prose, should be taken in small doses. "the ballad of the white horse" contains some wearisome stretches, particularly in the most exciting parts, the fights. when i want real zest in blood letting and the enjoyment of hand to hand combat i should turn to percy's reliques, or to homer. my volume of the "ballad" opens easiest, as it has opened oftenest, at three passages. the first is that where king alfred as a fugitive in the forest is set to mind the cakes and gets to musing, not, as we children used to be told, about how to beat the danes, but, according to the chestertonian version, about the christian view of the labor question. as the old, bent woman leaves the hut alfred wonders what shall become of such as she. and well may god with the serving-folk cast in his dreadful lot: is not he too a servant and is not he forgot? for was not god my gardener and silent like a slave: that opened oaks on the uplands or thicket in graveyard grave? and was not god my armorer, all patient and unpaid, that sealed my skull as a helmet and ribs for hauberk made? * * * * * for god is a great servant and rose before the day, from some primordial slumber torn; but all things living later born sleep on, and rise after the morn, and the lord has gone away. on things half sprung from sleeping, all sleepy suns have shone; they stretch stiff arms, the yawning trees, the beasts blink upon hands and knees, man is awake and does and sees- but heaven has done and gone. * * * * * but some see god like guthrum crowned, with a great beard curled, but i see god like a good giant, that, laboring, lifts the world. wherefore was god in golgotha, slain as a serf is slain: and hate he had of prince and peer, and love he had and made good cheer of them that, like this woman here, go powerfully in pain. but whether alfred pondered problems of war or labor the cakes got burnt just the same. next i turn to the page where men come to alfred on the island of athelney and beg him to become the ruler of all england. this gives chesterton a chance to expound his anti-imperialism. and alfred in the orchard, among apples green and red, with the little book in his bosom, looked at green leaves and said: "when all philosophies shall fail, this word alone shall fit; that a sage feels too small for life, and a fool too large for it. "asia and all imperial plains are all too little for a fool: but for one man whose eyes can see, the little island of athelney is too large a land to rule. * * * * * "an island like a little book, full of a hundred tales, like the gilt page the good monks pen that is all smaller than a wren, yet hath high towers, meteors and" men, and suns and spouting whales. "a land having a light in it, in a river dark and fast, an isle with utter, clearness lit, because a saint has stood in it, where flowers are flowers indeed and fit, and trees are trees at last." as his men clear the weeds from the white horse that had ages before been cut upon the chalk bluff, alfred has a vision of the day when the ancient symbol shall be again overgrown and forgotten and when a new and less manly kind of heathen than the danes shall overrun england: i know that weeds shall grow in it faster than man can burn: and though they scatter now and go, in some far century, sad and slow, i have a vision, and i know the heathen shall return. they shall not come with war-ships, they shall not waste with brands, but books be all their eating, and ink be on their hands. * * * * * the dear sun dwarfed of dreadful suns, like fiercer flowers on stalk, earth lost and little like a pea, in high heaven's towering forestry --these be the small weeds ye shall see crawl, covering the chalk. * * * * * by terror and the cruel tales of curse in bone and kin, by weird and weakness winning, accursed from the beginning, by detail of the sinning, and denial of the sin: by thought a crawling ruin, by life a leaping mire, by a broken heart in the breast of the world, and the end of the world's desire: by god and man dishonored, by death and life made vain, know ye the old barbarian, the barbarian come again. when is great talk of trend and tide, and wisdom and destiny, hail that undying heathen that is sadder than the sea. in this specification of "the marks of the beast" we may recognize chesterton's antipathies; materialism, commercialism, darwinism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, pacifism, and socialism. he is haunted by the same nightmare as samuel butler, that the day may come when machines will master the world and men be merely their slaves. for relief he looks to a revolution like the french revolution, only worse. chesterton is like the eton boys who, after a debate over woman suffrage, passed a unanimous resolution disapproving of the aim of the suffragettes but approving of their methods. the socialists say we must have a revolution, peaceful if possible. chesterton would say, "we must have a revolution, bloody if possible." the guillotine, he says somewhere, had many sins to answer for, but, at least, there was nothing evolutionary about it. and he makes the english people say: it may be we shall rise the last as frenchmen rose the first. our wrath come after russia's wrath and our wrath be the worst. like hilaire belloc and other neo-catholics, he manages somehow to combine an admiration for the french revolution with a devotion to catholicism. they are ardent advocates of democracy notwithstanding the very explicit condemnations of popular government by the popes. they are more inclined toward syndicalism than socialism and place their hopes in the peasant proprietorship instead of in the nationalized trust. it is an interesting novelty in the labor problem, for it cuts across the old classifications, and i hope it will have a chance to develop into something concrete. the similar movement in france, the _sillon_ of marc sangnier, was crushed out by a papal encyclical in 1912. chesterton might be called an english sillonist, and in a literal sense if we recall his essay on the furrows in "alarms and discursions." chesterton sometimes praises the achievements of modern science and industry, but always as ingenious toys. he is convinced that mankind in the mass will never take the city seriously. when the rest of the world was looking for the advent of cosmopolitanism and the reign of peace, the earth lapped in universal law and all the local idiosyncrasies ironed out, wherein all obstacles to freedom of movement had been crushed out and one could buy a tourist ticket to timbuktu with the same accommodation all along the route, chesterton set his bugle to his lips and blew a fanfare of audacious challenge to the spirit of the times in the form of a nonsensical romance, "the napoleon of notting hill." in this he carries particularism to an extreme, breaking up london again into warring wards, each with its own banner and livery, its gilds and folk ways. the book is inscribed, as we might expect, to his friend, hilaire belloc, and i quote part of the dedication as it sums up the message of the volume and is strangely prophetic: for every tiny town or place god made the stars especially: babies look up with owlish face and see them tangled in a tree; you saw a moon from sussex downs, a sussex moon, untraveled still. i saw a moon that was the town's, the largest lamp on campden hill. yes, heaven is everywhere at home, the big blue cap that always fits, and so it is (be calm; they come to goal at last, my wandering wits), so it is with the heroic thing this shall not end for the world's end, and though the sullen engines swing, be you not much afraid, my friend. this did not end by nelson's urn where an immortal england sits- nor where your tall young men in turn drank death like wine at austerlitz. and when the pedants bade us mark what cold mechanic happenings must come; our souls said in the dark, "belike; but there are likelier things." likelier across these flats afar, these sulky levels smooth and free, the drums shall crash a waltz of war and death shall dance with liberty! likelier the barricades shall flare slaughter below and smoke above, and death and hate and hell declare that men have found a thing to love.[5] remember this was written in 1904, at a time when it was commonly thought that the last of the wars had been fought and the nations might disarm, for henceforth the hague court would hold sway; when the socialists were becoming opportunists and the anarchists had laid aside their bombs; when such scientists as metchnikoff were saying that self-sacrifice and heroism of the fighting sort were antiquated virtues for which the peaceful and sanitary world of the future would have little use. chesterton was wrong about the nature of the catastrophe. he was looking and, i fear, hoping for a social revolution, and that has not yet come although it seems now less improbable than it did then. but the great war has given an irresistible impulse to the movement toward particularism as against cosmopolitanism. whether we like it or not, we must admit that the tide has turned in the other direction and that it will be many years, perhaps more than one generation, before there will be the freedom of trade, intercourse, and migration that prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century. even england has abandoned free trade, and every country will hereafter strive to secure economic independence by developing its own resources. even before the war there was a tendency toward the sort of local differentiation of which chesterton gave a fantastic forecast in "the napoleon of notting hill." this tendency manifested itself in a variety of ways; in the cultivation of local industries, the revival of folk dances and historic costumes, in pageantry and community celebrations, in the interest in town history and in the struggle to reëstablish disappearing languages, like gaelic, czech, and ruthenian. from chesterton's latest book devoted to the crimes of germany, and characteristically entitled "the crimes of england",[6] we can see that it is the primitive little peasant kingdom of montenegro that he most admires and the machine-like efficiency of the german empire that he most abhors. montenegro, since he wrote this volume, has been overwhelmed by the tide of war, but probably chesterton has faith to believe that it will reappear like ararat when the waters subside. this faith he expressed in the poem, "the march of the black mountain", written during the balkan war which montenegro initiated by a single-handed attack upon the turk: but men shall remember the mountain, though it fall down like a tree, they shall see the sign of the mountain faith cast into the sea; though the crooked swords overcome it and the crooked moon ride free, when the mountain comes to mahomet it has more life than he. chesterton has a better right to appear now as the champion of small nationalities than some other english authors we could name, for he first entered the lists of public life to break a lance in defense of the boers at a time when it was most unpopular if not dangerous to say a word in their favor. he refers to these youthful days in his "song of defeat", published some ten years afterward. i quote part of one stanza: i dream of the days when work was scrappy, and rare in our pockets the mark of the mint: when we were angry and poor and happy, and proud of seeing our names in print. for so they conquered and-so we scattered, when the devil rode and his dogs smelt gold, and the peace of a harmless folk was shattered, when i was twenty and odd years old. when mongrel men that the market classes, had slimy hands on england's rod and sword in hand upon afric's passes her last republic cried to god![7] one of his youthful dreams was to see a reunion of the united states and england which he imagined would come about in some great foreign war. but by 1905, when he included the poem on "the anglo-saxon alliance" in a volume,[8] he had lost faith in such ethnic generalities as the anglo-saxon race, so he explains in his preface: i have come to see that our hopes of brotherhood with america are the same in kind as our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent nations of christendom. and a very small study of history was sufficient to show me that the american nation, which-is a hundred years old, is at least fifty years older than the anglo-saxon race. but the poem, both because he wrote it and because he repudiated it, has an especial interest now when american sympathy with england is stronger than ever before, the traditional hostility has been largely swept away, and there is talk of joining england in this bloodiest of all wars. this is the weird of a world-old folk, that not till the last link breaks not till the night is blackest, the blood of hengist wakes. when the sun is black in heaven, the moon as blood above, and the earth is full of hatred, this people tells its love. in change, eclipse and peril, under the whole world's scorn, by blood and death and darkness the saxon peace is sworn; that all our fruit be gathered, and all our race take hands, and the sea be a saxon river that runs through saxon lands. * * * * * deep grows the hate of kindred. its roots take hold on hell; no peace or praise can heal it, but a stranger heals it well. seas shall be red as sunsets, and kings' bones float as foam, and heaven be dark with vultures, the night our son comes home. in some respects we should expect chesterton to go better in verse than in prose. he thinks in metaphors and pictures, vivid, fantastic, and colorful. the peculiarities of his prose style that grate upon the taste of some readers, such as the repetition of the same words, the alliteration, the unqualified assertion of half truths, the queer rhythms, the verbal tricks, and the superabundance of tropes, are by tradition permissible in poetry and so arouse no resentment. on the other hand, poetry is a painstaking art, and chesterton does not like to take pains. he is too indolent or too indifferent to hunt for the best possible word or rime. consequently we find in his verse many a perfect line, rarely a perfect stanza, and never a perfect poem. but scattered all through his verse, even in the most nonsensical, we happen upon curious cadences that linger in the memory like the chant of some strange ritual. his ballads abound in unconventional rhythms that haunt one like those of lanier's "ballad of the trees and the master." although chesterton often seems to disregard the canons of versification from carelessness or caprice, yet at other times he takes delight in subjecting himself to the most rigid of models, as, for instance, the old french _ballade_, which, he says, is "the easiest because it is the most restricted." he shows us how he constructs one in "the ballade of a strange town."[9] the strange town into which he was shunted by the accident of taking the wrong tramcar one rainy day while "fooling about flanders" was lierre, an unknown and uninteresting way station then, but now one of the famous places of world history, for it stood for days the shock of the german attack on antwerp. while waiting for the next car to take him away chesterton scribbled on the back of an envelope with an aniline pencil a poem which begins in nonsense but ends with as good an expression of his creed as he has given anywhere: happy is he and more than wise who sees with wondering eyes and clean this world through all the gray disguise of sleep and custom in between. yes: we may pass the heavenly screen, but shall we know when we are there? who know not what these dead stones mean, the lovely city of lierre. chesterton is so fond of the _ballade_ that i must quote one specimen complete.[10] for the benefit of those who have taken no interest in versification i may call attention to the technical difficulties of the form of the _ballade_ that he has chosen. it consists of three octaves and a quatrain all ending in the same refrain and using only two rimes. the first rime is used in the first and third lines of the first quatrain and in the second and fourth of the second quatrain. the second rime is used in the second and fourth lines of the first quatrain and in the first and third of the second quatrain. the closing quatrain or _l'envoi_ is in the _ballade_ addressed to a prince or other royal personage. since chesterton hates princes his apostrophe to the prince in this _ballade_ is not in the usual sycophantic style. a ballade of suicide the gallows in my garden, people say, is new and neat and adequately tall. i tie the noose on in a knowing way as one that knots his necktie for a ball; but just as all the neighbors--on the wall- are drawing a long breath to shout "hurray!" the strangest whim has seized me... after all i think i will not hang myself to-day. to-morrow is the time i get my pay- my uncle's sword is hanging in the hall- i see a little cloud all pink and grey- perhaps the rector's mother will _not_ call- i fancy that i heard from mr. gall that mushrooms could be cooked another way- i never read the works of juvenal- i think i will not hang myself to-day. the world will have another washing day; the decadents decay; the pedants pall; and h. g. wells has found that children play, and bernard shaw discovered that they squall; rationalists are growing rational- and through thick woods one finds a stream astray, so secret that the very sky seems small- i think i will not hang myself to-day. l'envoi prince, i can hear the trumpet of germinal, the tumbrils toiling up the terrible way; even to-day your royal head may fall- i think i will not hang myself to-day. those who assisted--with more or less enthusiasm--in the shakespeare tercentenary celebration will appreciate chesterton's verses about a similar commemoration decreed by the calendar. _the shakespeare memorial_ /$ lord lilac thought it rather rotten that shakespeare should be quite forgotten, and therefore got on a committee with several chaps out of the city, and shorter and sir herbert tree, lord rothschild and lord rosebery, and f. c. g. and comyns carr, two dukes and a dramatic star, also a clergyman now dead; and while the vain world careless sped unheeding the heroic name- the souls most fed with shakespeare's flame still sat unconquered in a ring, remembering him like anything. lord lilac did not long remain, lord lilac did not come again, he softly lit a cigarette and sought some other social set where, in some other knots or rings, people were doing cultured things, --miss zwilt's humane vivarium --the little men who paint on gum --the exquisite gorilla girl.... he sometimes in the giddy whirl (not being really bad at heart), remembered shakespeare with a start- but not with that grand constancy of clement shorter, herbert tree, lord rosebery, and comyns carr and all the other names there are; who stuck like limpets to the spot, lest they forgot, lest they forgot. lord lilac was of slighter stuff; lord lilac had had quite enough.[11] chesterton's poetic versatility range may be inferred from the fact that he has written a drinking song that is used as a whisky advertisement and a devotional song that has been incorporated into the hymn book. the former may be found in "the flying inn", the latter in the "english hymnal", also in "poems." the hymn is as follows, omitting, as the preachers always say,[12] the third stanza. sing it to the tune of "webb." o god of earth and altar, bow down and hear our cry, our earthly rulers falter, our people drift and die. the walls of gold entomb us, the swords of scorn divide, take not thy thunder from us but take away our pride. from all that terror teaches, from lies of tongue and pen, from all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men, from sale and profanation of honor and the sword, from sleep and from damnation deliver us, good lord! but i know of some people--and more sensible people than you would suppose--who say that they like "quoodle" the best of chesterton's poetry. since there is no accounting for taste and some of my readers may have taste, i must also quote this: song of the dog named quoodle they haven't got no noses, the fallen sons of eve. even the smell of roses is not what they supposes, but more than mind discloses, and more than men believe. they haven't got no noses, they cannot even tell when door and darkness closes the park old gluck encloses, where even the law of moses will let you steal a smell. the brilliant smell of water, the brave smell of a stone, the smell of dew and thunder, and old bones buried under are things in which they blunder and err, if left alone. the wind from winter forests, the scent of scentless flowers, the breath of bride's adorning the smell of snare and warning, the smell of sunday morning, god gave to us for ours. * * * * * and quoodle here discloses all things that quoodle can; they haven't got no noses, they haven't got no noses, and goodness only knowses the noselessness of man.[13] according to mendelism new species are most apt to come from the crossing of diverse forms. we should then naturally expect chesterton's verse to be original, since it is the result of a cross between whitman and swinburne. at any rate these were the poets who most influenced chesterton when in his teens he began to write poetry. in philosophy of life whitman and swinburne were not so far apart, since they were both pagans and democrats, but in form they are antipodes. whitman was the father or the grandfather of the _vers-librists_. he cultivated the unconventional and introduced the most unpoetic and uncouth words. swinburne, on the other hand, sought his themes in the classics and sacrificed anything to the music of his lines. the early poetry of chesterton shows traces of both influences. one very interesting instance of this is found in a poem that he wrote at school, when he was about sixteen. it is an ave maria in the swinburnian meter. that is, he has borrowed the weapon of the atheist and used it in defense of catholicism--a trick that he has been playing ever since. the poem begins: hail mary! thou blest among women; generations shall rise up to greet, after ages of wrangle and dogma, i come with a prayer to thy feet. where gabriel's red plumes are a wind in the lanes of thy lilies at eve we pray, who have done with the churches; we worship, who may not believe. from his twelfth to his seventeenth year he went to st. paul's school, where, as he says, "i did no work but wrote a lot of bad poetry which fortunately perished with the almost equally bad exercises. i got a prize for one of these poems--golly, what a bad poem it was!" the prize was known as the milton prize and the subject assigned to the pupils competing for it was st. francis xavier. a soliloquy of danton on the scaffold, written at the age of sixteen, shows how early began his fascination for the french revolution. his fondness for discussion was cultivated at the st. paul's school in the junior debating club, of which he was chairman, and the monthly periodical of the society, _the debater_, contains many essays and poems signed "g. k. c." his first contribution to the outside press was a socialist poem appearing in _the clarion_, but a few years later he was busy trying to puncture the balloon of socialism with his sharp-pointed pen. after leaving st. paul's he studied art at the slade school in london and has illustrated half a dozen books with cartoons, for he draws as readily as he writes. his first book was a volume of jingles and sketches entitled "gray-beards at play; literature and art for old gentlemen." his propensity for dropping into nonsense rhymes and sketches may be ascribed to heredity, for his father, edward chesterton, though a respectable real estate agent by profession, was responsible for a slim volume of child verse and drawings, "the wonderful story of dunder van haeden and his seven little daughters." [illustration: g. k. chesterton] g. k. chesterton was born in kensington, london, may 29, 1874. there is nothing in his heredity or early training to account for his conservative and high church tendencies, for his father was a liberal in politics and religion and attended bedford chapel where the reverend stopford brooke was preaching what was then called "the new theology." although educated as an artist, g. k. chesterton soon passed from sketching through art criticism to journalism. he began by writing pro-boer articles for _the speaker_, a liberal weekly. the originality of his thought and the vigor of his style attracted public attention, and _the daily news_ took him over to write a weekly article in spite of the fact that he differed in opinion from the editors and readers on certain points. as his anonymous biographer says: "thousands of peaceful semi-tolstoyan non-conformists have for years been compelled to listen every saturday morning to a fiery apostle preaching consistently the praise of three things which seem to them most obviously the sign-manuals of hell--war, drink, and catholicism." but more recently his antagonism to "cocoa"--extended symbolically to the politics as well as to the beverage of cadbury--became so great as to break this incongruous alliance and he has found in his brother's weekly _the new witness_ a more congenial although a smaller audience. he has also contributed for many years a weekly page to _the illustrated london news_, which is under entirely different management from _the daily news_. besides these and frequent contributions to other periodicals on both sides of the atlantic, he manages to turn out a volume or two of stories every year as well as poetry and criticism, an amazing output considering that there is hardly a dull page in it. to keep it up so long and steadily must be a strain upon one of his easy-going temperament. fleet street men tell me that it is hard to get his copy on time. as press day draws near runners are sent around to his clubs and other london haunts to tell him that the editor must have his article immediately. once caught chesterton surrenders good-naturedly and taking any paper handy will dash off his essay, carrying on a lively conversation at the same time. producing under such pressure or at least under the compulsion of filling a certain number of columns every week with witty comment on current events inevitably tends to careless writing. chesterton's work is all equally readable, but not all equally worth reading. he is an inspired writer, but he goes on writing quite as brilliantly after the inspiration has given out, just as a man writing in the dark goes on after his fountain pen has run dry and is only making meaningless scratches on the paper. his display of gems of thought is hardly to be matched by any other show window, but there are so many paste diamonds among them of equal brilliancy that the half of the world which does not like chesterton takes it for granted that they are all paste. they may even quote chesterton in support of their view for he says: "all is gold that glitters for the glitter is the gold." when ex-president roosevelt, on his return from africa, was given a dinner by the journalists of london, he was asked by the committee on arrangements whom he would like to have placed by his side to talk with during the meal, and he promptly chose chesterton. i was of much the same mind when i went to england, but not being in a position to summon him to my side i sought him out in his home, overroads. this is a little way out of london, near the town of beaconsfield from which disraeli took his title,--uncomfortable quarters, i should say, for chesterton, considering his antipathy for disraeli and his race. arriving at beaconsfield by the tea-time train i walked up the hill to where i saw a big man sitting on the little porch of a little house. he impressed me as sunday impressed symes. i do not mean billy sunday, but quite a different personage, the sunday of "the man who was thursday." great men are apt to shrink when you get too close to them. mr. chesterton did not. he was too big to fit his environment. the house was what we should call a bungalow; i don't know what they call it in england. it was on a little triangular lot set with trees half his height and a rustic arbor patiently awaiting vines. afterward i saw in the paper that mr. chesterton broke a leg on that arbor. i suppose he must have tripped over it like a croquet wicket. mr. chesterton has a big head covered with curly locks, two of them gray. he is gifted with a taft-like smile, and talks in a deep-toned, wheezy voice, punctuating his remarks with an engaging chuckle. it is no trouble to interview him. i never met a man who talked more easily or more interestingly. "there are no uninteresting subjects," he says, "there are only uninterested persons." start any idea you please as unexpectedly as a rabbit from its lair, and he will after it in a second and follow all its turns and windings until he runs it down. his mind is as agile as a movie actor. epigrams, paradoxes, puns, anecdotes, characterizations, metaphors, fell from his lips in such profusion that i, who knew the market value of such verbal gems, felt as nervous as a jeweler who sees a lady break her necklace. i wanted him to stop while i got down on my knees and picked them up. but he did not mind wasting clever things on me, for there were so many more where those came from. besides they were not so completely lost as i feared. i recognized some of them a few weeks later in his _causerie_ page of _the illustrated london news_. but when you visit mr. chesterton don't make the mistake that i did and attempt to please him by telling him how much he reminds you of doctor johnson. he admitted to me that he had "paged a bit" in that rôle, but i judge from what he says in "the mystery of a pageant"[14] he does not regard his selection for the part as altogether complimentary to his personal appearance. perhaps he would not like it any better to be told that the resemblance was more psychical than physical. chesterton is doubtless the most dogmatic man england has seen since doctor johnson died. he has equally violent prejudices, and he expresses them with equal wit. unfortunately he has no boswell. chesterton has written a book about shaw, but so far shaw has shown no disposition to return the compliment. shaw, in speaking of coburn's portrait of chesterton says: "he is our quinbus flestrin, the young man mountain, a large abounding gigantically cherubic person." it is shaw's theory that g. k. chesterton and hilaire belloc are not two persons, but one mythological monster to be known as "the chesterbelloc." chesterton's ideals are large and generous and very solid: a divinely ordered church, a really democratic state, and a life of that hopeful and humble wonder that men call romance. but his usefulness as a moral philosopher is impaired by the possession of a number of blind spots or inveterate prejudices that prevent him from seeing clearly. he is like the tenor who had aelurophobia and was upset whenever a cat came into the room. so whenever one of these phobias comes into his mind chesterton loses his poise and sings false. some of the things for which he has a particular abhorrence are: cocoa, colonies, divorce, equal suffrage, esperanto, eugenics, large scale production, latitudinarianism, lloyd george, official sanitation, organized charity, peace movement, pragmatism, prohibition, public schools, simplified spelling, vaccination, vivisection, and workingmen's insurance, all of which some of the rest of us look upon with favor. his inability to see any good in these and a score of other modern movements brings him into curious inconsistencies. for instance, he is an enthusiast for universal manhood suffrage. but any mention of woman suffrage is like waving a red coat before an irish bull. his statement that there are three things which women can never understand, liberty, equality, and fraternity, is as brutal and untrue as anything nietzsche or strindberg has said. in his essay on william james he says "pragmatism is bosh", yet his whole system of apologetics is based upon the pragmatic argument; religion is true because it works. "if christianity makes a man happy while his legs are being eaten off by a lion, might it not make me happy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down the street?" in order to make due allowance for chesterton's class and race prejudices while reading his works, it is convenient to keep a list like this as a bookmark: table of chesterton's affections and aversions classes he likes most: 1. children 2. peasants 3. domestic women 4. artisans and laborers 5. priests and soldiers 6. poets and adventurers 7. shopkeepers (hereabouts is a great gulf fixed) 8. business and professional men 9. criminals (including politicians) 10. the conceited professional classes (the intellectuals) 11. landlords 12. millionaires he dislikes most: 13. multimillionaires races he likes most: 1. irish 2. french 3. english 4. russians 5. turks 6. jews 7. germans he dislikes most: 8. cosmopolites in his youth chesterton wrote a poem in defense of dreyfus, "to a certain nation", but by the time he came to publish it in his first volume, "the wild knight", he had so changed his opinion that he makes a partial apology for it in the preface. since then he has, in connection with his brother cecil and mr. belloc, introduced into british journalism a foreign element from which it had formerly been free, the political anti-semitism which has been the cause of so much disturbance in france, russia, and germany. almost every number of _the new witness_, edited by cecil chesterton, contains sneers at jewish financiers and politicians, and in 1912 he went so far that he was fined five hundred dollars and costs for defamatory libel of godfrey isaacs, director of the marconi company. the prosecution significantly was conducted by sir edward carson and f. e. smith. it is greatly to be hoped that _the new witness_ group may get rid of their race prejudice and cut down on their muckraking, which, though often necessary, is never nice, and bring forward the constructive part of their program, for this is the time when there is a chance to do something. for instance, the british party system against which they so long clamored without effect has now broken down under stress of the war, but there is nothing in sight to take its place. g. k. chesterton was quite right when he said that "the party system of england is an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing political conflicts",[15] and that what party politics had done was to turn balfour from the analysis of the doubtful to the defense of the dubious and morley from writing on compromise to practicing it. and again, "i think the cabinet minister should be taken a little less seriously and the cabinet maker a little more."[16] chesterton protests against being regarded as a mere obstructionist and reactionary in such language as the following: i do not propose (like some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public schools. i propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make them public. i do not wish to make parliament stop working, but rather to make it work; not to shut up the churches, but rather to open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of property, but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly universal and property decently proper.[17] man has always believed in a paradise, but he has never been certain whether to look for it in the past or the future, or both. we have very detailed descriptions of atlantis, valhalla, the golden age, utopia, and the like, but the tense of the verb is indeterminable. chesterton is equally uncertain as to whether to look forward or backward for his ideal state. his "christmas song for three gilds" is headed "to be sung a long time ago--or hence." he has not yet favored us with a blueprint of his utopia, so we are left to surmise what he likes from the very plain indications he has given us of what he does not like. chesterton seems to obey a negative magnetism and orients himself by his antipathies. we may infer that his ideal would be a self-governing community of equally well-to-do, leisurely, patriotic, domestic, religious, jolly, beer-drinking, pork-eating, art-loving, freehold farmers and gild craftsmen, clustered about the village inn and church. they would all be of one race and creed, healthy without doctors, wealthy without financiers, governed without politicians. he believes with belloc that the nearest historical approach to this ideal was western europe about 1200-1500. he probably would agree with doctor james j. walsh in calling the thirteenth "the greatest of all centuries." among contemporary communities i should say that the mujiks of the russian mir come the nearest to complying with his specifications, although he has not, to my knowledge, shown any disposition to leave london and take to the steppes in order to live the simple life in these communities of pure democracy. but perhaps this is because women vote in the mir. of the made-to-order utopias i presume that of william morris's "news from nowhere" would suit him better than the socialists for whom it was written. to sum up chesterton in a sentence, i must borrow the words of the _forum_ article of o. w. firkins: a man who preaches an impassioned and romantic christianity, and who adds to that the jeffersonian doctrine of democracy, the wordsworthian and tolstoyan doctrine of the majesty of the untutored man, the carlylean doctrine of wonder, the emersonian doctrine of the spirituality latent in all objects, the dickensian faith in the worth and wisdom of the feeble-minded, the browningesque standard of optimism, affects us as a man with whom, whatever his vagaries and harlequinries, it would be wholesome and inspiriting to live. how to read chesterton read whatever is handiest, for there is no order and sequence is not important. chesterton expresses much the same philosophy of life in essays, stories, and poems and there has been little change in his opinions or style in the sixteen years he has been writing. nowhere has he given a complete and orderly presentation of his views. he is a born journalist and prefers to fire at a moving target. about once a year he gathers up a sheaf of his contributions to the press and puts them out under as general and indefinite a title as he can think up, but he never can think up a title broad enough to cover the variety of topics he treats. the heading to a chapter gives no clue to the theme or its importance. one is apt to find his deepest philosophy tucked away in some corner of a discourse on cheese or mumming or penny dreadfuls. he is like a submarine; when he goes under you never can tell where he will come out. consequently, as i say, it does not matter much which volume you pick up; they are equally brilliant and inconsequential. his views on religion and society are expounded most thoroughly in "orthodoxy" (1908), "heretics" (1905) both published by john lane company, and "what's wrong with the world" (1910, published by dodd, mead & company). somewhat briefer, more varied, and trivial in topic are "all things considered" (1908, lane), "tremendous trifles" (1909, dodd), "alarms and discursions" (1910, dodd), "a miscellany of men" (1912, dodd). since the war began he has published "the barbarism of berlin" (1914), "the appetite of tyranny" including "letters to an old garibaldian" (1915, dodd), and "the crimes of england" (1916, lane). to this we should add his first work, "the defendant" (1901, dodd). in _the new witness_ he has been running a weekly page under the head of "at the sign of the world's end", and when his brother, cecil chesterton, enlisted as a private in october, 1916, he assumed the editorship of that lively journal. his youthful poetry is in "the wild knight and other poems" (1900, dutton). "the ballad of the white horse" (1911, lane) contains his epic of king alfred, and "poems" (1915, lane) contains all the rest of his poetry except what still remains buried in "the files." of these i must mention "the wife of flanders", which may be found in the _literary digest, current opinion_, or _living age_ of 1914. chesterton has written one play, "magic: a fantastic comedy" (1913, putnam), which was a success on the london and new york stage. of his allegorical fantasias i have discussed at some length "the man who was thursday" (1908, dodd). "the ball and the cross" (1910, lane) describes the conflict between a religious fanatic and an equally intolerant atheist. "manalive" (1912, lane) deals with domesticity, and "the flying inn" (1915, lane) is a defense of the public house. in "napoleon of notting hill" (1908, lane), his first romance, he preaches parochialism. his detective or rather mystery stories are: "the club of queer trades" (1905, harper); "the innocence of father brown" (1911, lane); and "the wisdom of father brown" (1914, lane). his literary criticism, mostly written as prefaces to standard reprints, makes delightful reading, although sometimes he uses his author merely as a point of departure. of dickens he has written most and best in the prefaces to everyman's library edition (collected in "appreciations and criticism of dickens", dutton) and "charles dickens; a critical study" (1906, dodd). his "victorian age in literature" (1913, home university library, holt) is not quite so interesting because he does not have room to ramble. his "george bernard shaw" (1910, lane) is not much of a biography, but it is valuable as bringing into close contrast these representatives of opposing points of view. his "robert browning" forms an admirable volume of the english men of letters series (1908, macmillan). besides these he has written many biographical sketches and critiques, among which may be mentioned: "five types" (1911, holt); "varied types" (1902, dodd); "g. f. watts" (1902, dutton); "william blake" (1910, dutton); "samuel johnson" (1903, and 1911); "carlyle" (1902 and 1904) and "r. l. stevenson" (pott). chesterton is eminently quotable, and the pocket volume of "wit and wisdom of chesterton" (1911, dodd) will afford plenty of food for thought for any one. there are two biographies of chesterton. one published anonymously in 1908 gives the best account of his early life; the other by julius west (1916, dodd) gives the most complete criticism of his work up to date, with a bibliography. his picturesque personality and peculiar views have supplied innumerable journalists with material for articles. specially noteworthy for one reason or another are: the excellent piece of criticism by o. w. firkins in _the forum_ (vol. 48,. p. 597). "the defender of the discarded", the forum (vol. 44, p. 707), is harsh and unsympathetic. "chesterton as an artist" by joseph b. gilder (_bookman_, vol. 39, p. 468, see also vol. 34, p. 117), containing his sketches, a sketch by henry murray, with sixteen portraits from childhood up, in the london bookman, may, 1910. wells, in his "social forces in england and america" (p. 205), discusses chesterton and belloc. "a visit to g. k. c." by b. russell herts in _the independent_, november 7, 1912, contains some of chesterton's sketches; reprinted with other interviews in herts's "depreciations" (1915, boni). chesterton wrote on "shall the united states fight?" in _the independent_, january 12, 1916. [1] "the crimes of england", p. 98. [2] for specimens of his sketches see "chesterton as an artist" by joseph b. gilder in _the bookman_. [3] see also "the divine detective" in "a miscellany of men." [4] published, 1911, by john lane co., new york. [5] republished, 1913, in "poems" (john lane co., new york). [6] published, 1916, by john lane co., new york. [7] from "poems" (john lane). [8] "the wild knight" (dutton & co., new york). [9] "in tremendous trifles ", 1909 (dodd, mead & co., new york). [10] from "poems" (john lane). [11] from "poems" (john lane). [12] it has always been a puzzle to me why congregations have to be warned against singing the third stanza of any hymn. i never could see that it was any worse than the rest, but i assume the clergy know best about it. [13] i quote from _the new witness_. the version in "the flying inn" is a trifle different. [14] "tremendous trifles", p. 317. [15] in chesterton's book on shaw. [16] "miscellany of men." [17] "what's wrong with the world." chapter iv f. c. s. schiller a british pragmatist the world knows nothing of its greatest men, because by the time it knows something about them they have ceased to be the greatest. f. c. s. schiller. a dozen years ago i happened upon the word "pragmatism", as it was printed, rather inappropriately,[1] upon the slip cover of santayana's "life of reason." being a queer looking word and unknown to me, i started to find out what it meant and that led me on a long chase. the farther i went the more interested i became, for i soon discovered that i had been a pragmatist all my life without knowing it. i was as delighted as m. jourdain when he was told that he had been unconsciously talking prose all his life. i felt as relieved as huxley when he invented "agnostic" as a tag for himself. i had come by my pragmatism honestly enough, for i had got my training as a journalist through the study of chemistry, and in science the pragmatic mode of thinking is universal and unquestioned. so when i went to writing about other things,--politics, law, ethics, history, religion, and the like,--i naturally used my brains in the same way as in science, that is, i persisted in the valuation of all acts by their consequences instead of their causes and in the validation of all truths by practicality instead of precedent. but when i found how this way of thinking shocked, annoyed, or amused people i began to fear that i should have to drop it as i had other evidences of my buried past, such as the habit of using words like "catalysis" and "parachlorbenzamidine" in casual conversation. but when i heard of the pragmatists i knew that i was no longer alone in the world. there were others, it seemed, even men of standing in philosophical circles, whose minds ran in this way and who were not ashamed to own it. i got their names and started to find them wherever they might be. i ran down dewey in the adirondacks and bergson in the alps. poincaré i unearthed in a paris flat, james i heard in a columbia lecture room; ostwald i found in a saxon village; schiller i caught in an oxford quad. i was thinking of going to china to see wang yang-ming, but fortunately before i had bought my steamer ticket or learned chinese i discovered that he had been dead for three centuries.[2] some who have read or tried to read what i said about bergson and poincaré[3] have complained that i used too many big words, and one man wrote me to say that if i would define pragmatism in words of one syllable perhaps he might understand what i was talking about. i could not guarantee that, of course, but i had no hesitation about complying with his request. confucius wrote his immortal works in words of one syllable, and i would not be beaten by a chinaman. even herbert spencer once condescended to translate his famous definition of evolution into anglo-saxon. since i am obliged to use the word "pragmatism" more than once in this book i may forestall criticism by putting here my monosyllabic definition of pragmatism the one way to find out if a thing is true is to try it and see how it works. if it works well for a long time and for all folks, it must have some truth in it. if it works wrong it is false, at least in part. if there is no way to test it, then it has no sense. it means naught to us when we cannot tell what odds it makes if we hold to it or not. a creed is just a guide to life. we must live to learn. if a man would know what is right he must try to do what is right. then he can find out. prove all things and hold fast to that which is good. the will to have faith in a thing oft makes the faith come true. so it can be said in a way that we make truth for our own use. what we think must be of use to us in some way, else why should we think it? the truth is what is good for us, what helps us, what gives us joy and strength, what shows us how to act, what ties up fact to fact, so the chain will hold, what makes us see all things clear and straight, and what keeps us from stray paths that turn out wrong in the end. thought is a tool, a means to an end. man has to act, and so he must think. in this way he asks the world what it means to him. the need for thought first comes when man asks "why?" or "which?" so that he may know what to do to gain his end. the mind as it thinks makes such facts as it can to best serve its use. out of the facts so come by is made a law, and this law in turn serves as a rule to guide one's acts. but the reader should be warned that no two pragmatists can be got to agree upon any definition of pragmatism, and that the opponents of pragmatism differ still more widely in their conception of it. schiller says that the most serious drawback in the name is that "it condemns every exponent of pragmatism to consume at least half an hour of his limited time in explaining the word." schiller himself employs the term "humanism" instead which being less novel is less disturbing to the conventional mind but on the other hand has the serious disadvantage of having been applied to a very different thing, namely, the spirit of the renaissance. since c. s. peirce who invented the term "pragmatism" and william james who popularized it are both dead, the word finds few defenders, although the mode of reasoning it tried to stand for is obviously permeating all fields of thought. like many other things pragmatism seems likely to conquer the world incognito.[4] a man in the act of dismounting from a bicycle is temporarily incapacitated from the effective use of either mode of locomotion, and it was at this psychological moment that i caught doctor schiller at the gate of corpus christi college. otherwise i might have missed him, for he is as alert and agile physically as he is mentally. he usually spends his summers mountain climbing in the alps, though i suppose he has suspended this pastime during the last three years while the tyrolean alps are being used for other purposes than tourism. mr. schiller wears the pointed beard that was the distinguishing mark of the radical of the nineties. he has a shakespearean-shaped forehead, but wears un-shakespearean glasses. he is as interesting to converse with as he is to read, which is more than you can say of many authors. he talks best while in motion, a real peripatetic philosopher. i wondered why he did not take his students out of the old gloomy lecture room and walk with them as he did with me, up and down the lawn between the trees and the ivy-clad walls of the college garden. curious turf it was, close-cut and springy; i never felt anything like it under my feet except an asphalt pavement on a hot summer day. but i suppose it would be against the oxford customs to adopt the greek method in teaching greek philosophy. at any rate when i went to mr. schiller's lecture on logic i found it as conventional in form as it was revolutionary in spirit. one would have thought that printing had never been invented, nor even the mimeograph. the lecture was delivered slowly, and necessarily without feeling, clause by clause, with frequent repetitions, so every word could be taken down. it was really a brilliant lecture as i discovered afterwards when i read over my notes, but at the time it sounded as dull as proof-reading, for the lecturer dictated even the punctuation marks, as he went along: "colon", "italics", "inverted commas", etc. the english leave out the punctuation marks in legal documents where they are needed and put them into lectures where they do not belong. the students, in short black gowns, were seated uncomfortably on benches carved with the names of many generations, and were writing awkwardly on long boards. these were furnished with ink-wells and quill pens, although the students sensibly used fountain pens. i suppose it is somebody's perquisite to supply such things as quills and snuff to the college even if nobody uses them. an american college president told me that he thought there was more graft at oxford than anywhere else in the world. [illustration: f. c. s. schiller.] if mr. schiller had remained in america he would now be lecturing to one or two hundred at a time, largely teachers who had come from all parts of the country expressly to hear his ideas and who would in turn transmit them to their students. but in that room there were only these fifteen boys, many of whom doubtless had no special interest in logic or in schiller's views of logic and who took his lectures simply because they were required for examination, after which they could be forgotten. i could not help contrasting this scene with the big lecture room at jena, modern yet satisfying to the esthetic and historic taste, where eucken's fiery eloquence held men and women gathered from five continents, or with the collège de france, where bergson had attracted an even larger and equally cosmopolitan audience. a man in schiller's position must gain his disciples chiefly through his books, and for a man of schiller's attractive personality this is a great disadvantage. print can never take the place of "the spoken word", but to have its effect the spoken word must be widely heard. the american visitor to oxford meets a double mystery: how it is that oxford accomplishes so much with a poor and antiquated plant and how it is that american universities do not accomplish more with their modern and convenient plants. one hates to conclude that plumbing and ventilation are incompatible with high thinking. but if spencer is right in defining life as the power of adaptation to environment, the oxford dons are most alive of any human beings. they have shown the adaptability of hermit crabs in fitting themselves into their awkward environment. they somehow manage to make themselves comfortable in buildings that a new york tenement house inspector--who is never regarded as unduly particular--would order torn down. they work contentedly under conditions that would cause a strike in any well-regulated union. oxford is the favorite resort of american tourists because it is the most satisfactory of all the sights of great britain. the tower of london and stratford-on-avon do not compare with it. they are as disappointing as an extinct volcano. but oxford is an antiquity in action. our common feeling in regard to it was best expressed by a lady tourist who was being personally conducted through one of the college quadrangles when a student stuck his head out of a dormer window. "oh, my! are these ruins inhabited?" was her delighted exclamation. that is a characteristic trait of the english, the economical utilization of antiquated buildings and institutions. the house of lords actually does something, even though what it does is wrong. westminster abbey is not a mere mausoleum, like the paris panthéon. it is a church where one may worship and hear sermons of decidedly modernistic tone. the french, when they made up their minds that they did not need a king any longer, cut his head off, which was a waste. the english keep their king and make use of him for spectacular and advertising purposes. oxford is cluny and sorbonne in one, a curious combination of old and new, useful and superfluous, progress and reaction, that puzzles and fascinates every american visitor. ferdinand canning scott schiller, m. a., d. sc., fellow and senior tutor of corpus christi college, oxford--to give for once his full name and titles--was born in 1864. while at rugby he showed decided symptoms of intelligence, so he was picked as a probable winner in the scholastic race and put in training for the classical scholarships. the british turn all things into sport, even war and education, and since public opinion does not allow headmasters to keep racehorses they indulge their sporting instincts by backing their boys for the blue ribbon, the balliol scholarships. these boys are then given daily doses of classical verse competition; i infer for the same reason that jockeys are fed on gin. it is curious to see how widely educators differ as to the fundamental principles of their business. the british system is built upon competitions, prizes, and examinations. the american state universities in the days of their pristine purity--i mean by that of course, when i was a student--regarded competition as vicious, prizes as demoralizing, and examinations as an evil to be eliminated if possible. but it ill becomes a pragmatist to condemn a system that works so well as the british, whatever theoretical objections may occur. much as schiller detested making verses in a dead language, he did it so well that he got a major exhibition. this gave him three hundred and fifty dollars for five years as well as four hundred and fifty dollars in exhibitions from rugby. but it also meant that he had sold himself to run in harness for another four years at balliol and was obliged to master a philosophy which he already felt to be a fraud. t. h. green had died just before schiller came up and had been sainted for the greater glory of balliol, and it seemed to the tutors good pedagogy to set their pupils to begin the study of philosophy with green's "prolegomena to ethics." most of the boys confronted with this abstruse introduction came to the conclusion that it was wonderful, but that they had no head for metaphysics because they could not see any sense in it. schiller very curiously came to the opposite conclusion from the same premise. orthodox oxford was at that time under the sway of the great philosophic trinity of plato, aristotle, and hegel, which was supposed somehow to be concordant with or at least allied to the theological trinity, and therefore fit food for the souls of innocent young men. the third person of the philosophic trinity was kept much in the dark, because the tutors generally were not fond of reading german. they knew still less of science and apparently did not suspect that darwin and his evolution might prove to have some bearing upon philosophy. schiller took his first classes at oxford, although he was given to asking awkward questions and was known to be reading "out of bounds." one of his examiners complained that he used such queer terms in his papers, "solipsism" and "epistemology" for instance. the years 1893-1897 schiller spent as instructor at cornell university, and at the end of that period an amusing incident occurred, though what it was and how it came about i don't know; possibly because i never thought it best to inquire of any of the few who were in the room at the time. the bare fact is interesting enough, that a young man who had written one of the most brilliant volumes of the times on metaphysics, "riddles of the sphinx", and who carried in his pocket a call to teach philosophy at a leading college of oxford, was flunked in cornell on his oral examination for ph.d. in philosophy! anybody who is curious can pick up half a dozen inconsistent versions of this famous episode on almost any campus. one is, that being fortified by the crinkle of the above mentioned letter over his heart and knowing that an american degree would have no value in england, schiller did not take the examination seriously and neglected the necessary cramming. another version of the story is that he turned tables upon his examiners by bringing into action for the first time the pragmatic arguments so much to their discomfiture and bewilderment that he was penalized for these foul blows. but probably the details, if one knew them, would prove to be quite commonplace compared with either of these versions or the more picturesque legends that are in circulation, so it is better to remain in ignorance and file it in the envelope with such cases as john henry newman, who got only a third class; f. h. bradley, who got a second; gustave doré, who failed in drawing; darwin who was called a stupid student, grant who was graduated in the lower half of his class, mendel who was never allowed to graduate at vienna, and the like, good material all for some one who wants to investigate the psychology of students--and examiners. the chief benefit that schiller got out of his american sojourn was an acquaintance with william james. it was a case of love at first sight and of lifelong devotion. schiller dedicated his "humanism" "to my dear friend, the humanest of philosophers, william james, without whose example and unfailing encouragement this book would never have been written." in 1897 schiller was called back to england to become tutor in corpus christi college. the president of that college, the late thomas fowler, belonged rather to the pre-hegelian oxford generation of the mill-british-empiricism school of thought: he liked things to be made intelligible, and he was so much struck by the lucidity of schiller's "riddles of the sphinx" that he called him from cornell to oxford. here then he has for twenty years lived the quiet, sheltered, contemplative life of the oxford don, varied only by such daring adventures as his hunt for the hidden fallacies of formal logic, his single combats with mr. bradley, and his ascent of the bleak heights of speculative philosophy, where the absolute is supposed to dwell in solitude. our american universities are putting up some very fair imitations of oxford architecture now. some have transplanted ivy and it is growing. some have transplanted tutors and they are growing. but one oxford custom has not yet been introduced into our universities, the custom of giving the professors time to think. in oxford all the men have time to think and some of them do. in america if a man shows a tendency to become absorbed in thought he is made a dean or put on the committee of accredited high schools, which cures him. in the british "who's who" mr. schiller's recreations are ordinarily put down as "mountaineering, golf, etc." but in one edition of that handy volume of contemporary autobiography it is stated that his chief recreation is "editing _mind!_" thus was revealed the secret of the mysterious appearance at christmas, 1901, of a periodical which in looks resembled one of the regular numbers of that staid blue-covered review of philosophy, _mind_, but with most startling contents. the frontispiece is a "portrait of its immanence, the absolute." this is followed by an article on "the place of humour in the absolute, by f. h. badley"; "the critique of pure rot, by i. cant"; "a commentary on the snark"; "more riddles from worse sphinxes", and the like. the advertisements were likewise unusual--"a dictionary of oxford mythology, in six volumes, containing a complete account of the stories told in the common rooms and the men to whom they have from time to time been attached"; "a fine consignment of assorted weltanschauungen just received from germany"; phonograms of all the lectures, jokes extra, with colored cinematographs of the most famous professors in action, for armchair study, etc. the history of philosophy in fifty-one limericks, covering all systems from thales to nietzsche, would be useful on examination time by students of "philosophy four." we hedonists, said aristippus, discomforts detest when they grip us, so wealth we adore, the moment live for and take what the rich 'arries tip us. the infinite self-absorbed brahma was dreaming the world-panorama: he groaned and he snored, till at length he grew bored, and woke up, and broke up the drama. "to multiply beings", said occam, "is needless, 'tis better to dock 'em." so he seized on his razor, this pestilent phraser, and ran out to bloodily block 'em. a pessimist, great schopenhauer, found living exceedingly sour, at hegel he cursed, his grievances nursed, and poured forth his wrath by the hour. as will be seen from the above, _mind!_ reads much like the junior annual of an american college, but at oxford the students are deficient in journalistic enterprise, so the duty of keeping things cheerful devolves upon their betters. according to its cover _mind!_ was "edited by a troglodyte" but as there was only one philosopher in england who would have the cheek to do it and who could parody the style and expose the weak points of the regular contributors to _mind_, the troglodyte was soon tracked to his cave. the author of a similar _jeu d'esprit_, "the joysome history of education", which surreptitiously circulates about columbia university, has so far as i know never been disclosed to the public. but schiller has not been able to confine his humor to that uniquity, _mind!_ he allows it to creep into his contributions to _mind_-without-the-exclamation-point and other serious journals. he is a keen debater and does not follow the ordinary rules of fencing, but frequently disconcerts his antagonists by parrying their thrusts with a pun or a personality. he is, so far as i know, the first philosopher to find room for jokes in his formal philosophy, as the following passage shows: when we map out the whole region of truth-claim or formal truth, we find that it contains (1) lies, (2) errors, (3) methodological fictions, (4) methodological assumptions, (5) postulates, (6) validated truths, (7) axioms, and (8) jokes. most philosophers in fact would not only ignore his eighth category, but would neglect his first and second, accepting any statement that claimed to be true and devoting themselves to the study of its logical implications. but the pragmatist is more interested in finding out how and in what way an assertion comes to be called true and how it _makes good_ its claim after it has been asserted. as schiller puts it:[5] what then is common to all sorts of truth and error, and renders them species of a common genus? nothing but their psychological side; "truth" is the proper term for what satisfies, "error" for what thwarts, a human purpose in cognitive activity. the difference between truth and error, therefore, is ultimately one in value. the "true" way of conceiving an object or judging a situation is simply the way most valuable for our purpose; the "false" way is one which is, at least relatively, worthless. "truth" is a eulogistic, "error" a dyslogistic, way of valuing a cognitive situation. truth and error therefore are continuous, as history shows. either may develop out of the other, and both are rooted in the same problems of knowing, which are ultimately problems of living. the "truths" of one generation become the "errors" of the next, when it has achieved more valuable and efficient modes of interpreting and manipulating the apparent "facts", which the new "truths" are continuously transforming. and conversely, what is now scouted as "error" may hereafter become the fruitful parent of a long progeny of "truths." it follows also that (as every examiner who marks a paper knows) truth and error admit of quantitative differences. both can vary in importance, and can attain (or fail of) their purpose to a greater or a less degree. but neither is absolute. an answer to a question is in general called true, if it is true enough for the purpose in hand. but this does not preclude a greater exactitude if (for a different purpose) it should be required. it is a true answer to the question--"when do you leave?" to reply "to-morrow"; but if necessary i can specify the train i go by. thus the demand for absolute exactness is both humanly unnecessary and scientifically unmeaning. indeed a degree of accuracy higher than the situation demands would be irrational. no one wants to know the height of a mountain in millimeters, and if he did, he could not ascertain it, because his methods would not measure fine enough. scientific truths are infinitely perfectible, but never absolute.[6] now if philosophers are wise, they will accept this sort of truth, and admit that any truth is "absolute" enough so soon as it is equal to the demands made upon it, while none must ever be so absolute as to become incorrigible and incapable of further growth. a human factor, an element of personal desire, enters into all our thinking; otherwise why should we bother to think? even our most abstract and general theorems have a hidden _hinterland_ of subconscious motives, limitations, and conditions. the abstract statement that "two and two make four" is always incomplete. we need to know to what "twos" and "fours" the dictum is applied. it would not be true of lions and lambs, nor of drops of water, nor of pleasures and pains.[7] this suppressed context of thought is of course largely personal, and with it is suppressed the human interest of philosophy. hence the endeavor to drag it to light was very properly called humanism. schiller conceives every thought as some one's experiment for which he is responsible. "every thought", he says, "is an act and even the most 'theoretical' assertions are made to gratify an interest." he finds in the present war a most unpleasant confirmation of his theory that thought is subordinate to action and never free from human volitional influence:[8] if only philosophers could be got to face the facts of actual life, could any of them fail to observe the enormous object-lesson in the truth of pragmatism which the world has been exhibiting in the present crisis? everywhere the "truths" believed in are relative to the nationality and sympathies of their believers. it is, indeed, lamentable that such an orgy of the will to believe should have been needed to illustrate the pragmatic nature of truth, but who will dispute that for months say 999 persons out of 1000 have been believing what they please, and consciously or unconsciously making it "true" with a fervor rarely bestowed even by the most ardent philosophers on the most self-evident truths? no improbability, no absurdity, no atrocity has been too great to win credence, and the uniformity of human nature has been signally attested by the way in which the same stories (_mutatis mutandis_) have been credited on both sides. since the controversy over pragmatism hinges on this theory of truth, i will quote in condensed form what schiller says in his discussion with miss stebbing:[9] it is an inevitable corollary of the belief in absolute truth that absolute truth cannot find lodgment in human mind, nor be attained by way of human science. we were led, therefore, to examine how in fact belief in the accepted "truths" grew up. we found that every thought was essentially a _personal experiment_ that might succeed or fail, and that whether it did or not depended on its consequences. but it seemed clear that "true" was the term appropriated by language to the success, as false was to failure, of such experiments. of course both "success" and "truth" are relative terms. _absolute_ "success" is found as little as absolute "truth" and for the same reason. all "truths" remain (preferred) truth-claims and retain an infinite appetite for assimilating further confirmation. but there does come a point, alike in the individual's experience and in social opinion at any time, at which it seems that certain truth-claims have received confirmation enough to make them _pragmatically_ certain. these form the reigning truths. but they never form a closed oligarchy or an immutable system. merit can force its way into their ranks, and inefficiency entails degradation. thus, though their position is (psychologically) unchallenged, it is never (logically) unchallenged. so it can not be said that because they work they are _absolutely_ true. they are _called_ true because they work, and there is no sense in calling anything true for any other reason; but the progress of knowledge may nevertheless supersede them at the next step. since schiller indignantly repudiates the formula often ascribed to pragmatism that "all that works is true", and since mr. bradley has come to say[10] "i agree that any idea which in any way 'works' has in some degree truth", it would seem that these old antagonists are really not so far apart in their opinions as their words would indicate. for classical authority for his humanism schiller goes back to the famous dictum of protagoras: "man is the measure of all things." in plato's "dialogues", protagoras is represented as having been argued quite out of court by socrates, but schiller appeals to posterity against this decision, and he has written several supplemental dialogues of his own to prove that protagoras was really in the right.[11] schiller's most serious work so far is his destructive criticism of the aristotelian logic. since my own study of logic came to an abrupt end as soon as i had secured a passing mark on jevons, i shall not attempt to express an opinion upon the value of schiller's "formal logic", but will instead quote from the review of the volume by professor dewey of columbia.[12] in substance, the volume (a large octavo of about four hundred pages) is an unrelenting, dogged pursuit of the traditional logic, chapter by chapter, section by section. not a single doctrine, nor, i think, a single distinction of the official textbooks escapes schiller's demolishing hand.... a vital and wholesome sense of the realities of actual thinking pervades the whole book; it supplies the background against which the criticisms of formal doctrine are projected. mr. schiller brings out, in case after case, with a cumulative effect which is fairly deadly, that at the crucial point each formal distinction is saved from complete meaninglessness only by an unacknowledged and surreptitious appeal to some matter of context, need, aim, and use. why not, then, frankly recognize the indispensableness of such volitional and emotional factors, and instead of pretending to a logic that excludes them, build up a logic that corresponds to human intellectual endeavor and achievement. it is difficult to see how even the most hardened devotee of a purely theoretical intellectualism can lay down the book without such questions haunting him.... while traditional logic has much to say about truth, the truth it talks about is mere formal consistency, since it declines to consider the material application of its premises. relevance--a fundamental conception of concrete thought--is excluded because it goes with selection, with selection of the part that is useful, while formal logic professes an all-inclusive ideal. selection, moreover, is a voluntary and hence arbitrary act, and so is shut out from a doctrine that acknowledges only what is purely theoretical. finally, formal logic, with its creed of absolute certitude, abhors the very mention of adventure and risk, the life blood of actual human thinking, which is aroused by doubts and questions, and proceeds by guesses, hypotheses, and experiments, to a decision which is always somewhat arbitrary and subject to the risk of later revision. much of the criticism of "formal logic" contained in this large volume is too technical for any save professionals to follow, but at my request mr. schiller was kind enough to write an article for _the independent_ putting the main points of it in a form "understanded of the common people." from this i quote the passage in which he shows that the syllogism cannot lead unerringly to new truth: the peculiar aim of logic hitherto has been to discover a form of "valid inference." by this was meant a form of words so _fool-proof_ that it could not be _misapplied_, and that the use of it would absolutely guarantee the soundness of the conclusion if only the reasoning had been fortunate enough to start from true premises. in the syllogism it was supposed that such a form had been found. from _all swans are white_ and _this bird is a swan_ it was to follow inevitably that _this bird is white_, and the course of nature would eternally conform to the prophetic demonstrations of logic. yet logicians also had soon to note that even formally there was something wrong about this syllogistic form. it seemed to "prove" what was either nothing new or nothing known. to justify the "major premise" "_all_ swans are white", must not its assert or have already seen _this_ swan and know that _it_ is white? or, if he did _not_ know this, is he not _risking_ an assertion about some "swans" on the strength of what he knows about others? and what right had he thus to argue from the known to the unknown? can an "inference" be "valid" if it involves a _risk_? when therefore _black_ swans arrive from australia to upset his dogmatizing, what is he to do? will he say his major premise was a definition, and no bird, however swan-like, shall be _called_ a "swan" if it cannot pass his color-test? if so, his reasoning is still caught in the old dilemma, that he either "proves" nothing _new_ or begs the question in another way. for he then had no right to assert his "minor premise", _this bird is a swan_, if he knew not it was white. or will he, desperately, say "in both of these interpretations the syllogistic form is fatuous; but kindly understand it as asserting a _law of nature_ which is immutable, and applied to the particular case in the minor premise." but, if so, how does he know that his "law" applies to the "case"? that the "case" is such as he takes it to be? that he has picked out the right "law" to deal with the case and formulated it correctly? if it is quite certain that the "law" applies to the "case", his conclusion proves nothing new; if it is not, he runs the risk that the case of which he is trying to predict the behavior may be so exceptional as to break or modify his law. and if he runs that risk, is he not renouncing his ideal of reaching fool-proof certainty? there seems to be _no_ way, therefore, of saving "valid inference", of so interpreting the syllogism that it is both formally valid and humanly instructive. if it is to be instructive, it can only enlighten human ignorance, and then its premises _cannot_ be _certainly_ true.[13] some critics, having in mind how little attention is paid to formal logic in american schools, have expressed the opinion that schiller was wasting his powder on dead game. but however little it may be used in reasoning, formal logic is still the object of formal reverence everywhere, and in oxford it is strongly entrenched and heavily subsidized as schiller says in the passage: that the same doctrine, in perfect verbal continuity, should have been taught and examined on for over two thousand years would be the most stupendous fact in education, were it not surpassed by the still more surprising fact that during all this time no one has arisen to call it nonsense through and through, and that every would-be improvement has been countered by the retort that it was "not in aristotle." ... the great mass of logicians have always been true to their salt. for aristotle is still very heavily endowed. in the university of oxford alone three philosophy professors, twenty-eight _literae humaniores_ tutors, and about 460 classical scholars and exhibitioners are paid, at an annual cost of over £50,000, to believe that the theory of thought has stood still, or stumbled into error when it tried to move, ever since the composition of the "organon", and that all modern science may be read into and out of the obscurities of the "posterior analytics." the secret doctrine in which this is taught has never been divulged in print, but examiners know that there are passages in the ordinary oxford logic lecture which must have been copied down by two hundred generations of students ever since the twelfth century. like james and bergson and unlike dewey, schiller has interested himself in psychical research as a possible way of proving personal immortality.[14] he does not seem from his published work to have yet obtained any satisfactory experimental evidence of a future life, but he regards immortality as an ethical postulate, necessary to the conceptions of a moral universe, for if we reject it "we should be plunged in that unfathomable abyss where scepticism fraternizes with pessimism and they hug their miseries in chaos undisguised." but in his earliest work "riddles of the sphinx" he expressed the opinion that nowadays few people took a real interest in the question of immortality and that it had little influence upon conduct. this unconventional opinion was confirmed many years later when the society for psychical research conducted a _questionnaire_ on the subject and found that of the many thousand persons interrogated a large proportion did not regard a future life as of practical importance to them.[15] within the last few years schiller has entered a new field, the eugenics movement, where his keen wit and power of analysis are doing good service. in his review of nietzsche's work[16] he recognizes that nietzsche is not without reason when he asserts that the moral qualities he dislikes, such as pity and sympathy, may lead to decadence, for, as schiller elsewhere shows, social reform, unless it is eugenically directed, may lead to the growth of the evils it aims to alleviate. in a very remarkable article published shortly before the outbreak of the war,[17] he foretold the collapse of european civilization and suggested that the japanese or chinese, through the greater importance they attach to the family, might be found more worthy of preeminence. if the ancestor-worship of the animist can be developed into the descendant-worship of the eugenist, i can see no reason why one should not prognosticate for both of them a rosier future and a more assured continuance than for our european societies, if these latter yield to the pressure of those, whether called individualists, socialists, or militarists, who tempt them to destruction. the danger to european culture lies, he says, in that "our hellenistic political philosophy exhibits all the marks of senile dementia and progressive paranoia." the evidence goes to show that throughout the most valuable part of the nation, not only in the upper classes but also in the middle classes and in the best parts of the working classes, the birth-rate per marriage has in a generation sunk from four and a half to two, and is now only half the size required to keep up the numbers in those classes. in other words, society is now so ordered that in every generation it sheds one-half of the classes it itself values most highly, and supplies their places with the offspring of the feeble-minded and casual-labourer classes, whose families still average more than seven. what seriously aggravates the evil is the whole trend of social legislation. social reform costs money, and the money is raised by taxation, which bears very hardly on the middle classes, who cannot curtail luxuries like the rich, and will not lower their standard of comfort. they meet the extra expense, therefore, by further postponing the age of marriage, and further reducing their output of children. one of the chief effects, therefore, of our present methods of improving social conditions is to deteriorate the race. and this in a twofold manner: they eliminate the middle class, and they promote the survival of the unfit and defective. it is perfectly possible, therefore, to tax the middle classes out of existence. indeed, it has been done. history exhibits a great object-lesson in the decline of the roman empire. this appears to have been mainly due to an unscientific system of taxation which crushed the middle class and left no breeding ground for ability and ambition between the millionaire nobles, who had nothing to rise to, and the pauperised masses, who had no chance of rising. consequently, the empire had to take from without its borders the men it needed to conduct its military and civil administration. the barbarians alone could furnish the men to run the empire, and consequently the barbarians inevitably came to overrun the empire. the great war which he could not foresee has immeasurably accelerated the degenerative process which he foretold. the death roll of university students and graduates, representing, however inadequate the examination system, a selected class of young men of superior intellectual ability, is probably higher than in any other class. when i visited oxford a few years before the war the students were already drilling for the impending conflict and practically all who were eligible enlisted at the first call. raising an army by appeals to patriotism as was done in england means sending to the front to bear the brunt of battle longest those who are most energetic, self-sacrificing, and intelligent, while the slackers, the incompetent, the weaklings, the selfish, and the dull were left to the last or not taken at all. besides this the burden of taxation resting upon the middle classes that schiller thought unbearable in 1914 has been multiplied and will act as a deterrent to large families more strongly than ever in the future. a royal commission has been appointed to consider methods for checking the alarming decline in the birth-rate. one anti-eugenic agency which schiller fails to mention but which strikes an outsider as very serious is labanism. it was formerly the custom to require all oxford fellows to remain celibate. later they were allowed to marry after serving seven years, whence the name. recently this prohibition has been removed, but the antiquated social organization of the colleges acts as a practical deterrent of marriage. so by this elaborate and expensive system of examination, competitions, and promotions--which unfortunately is not so inefficient as its occasional mistakes might lead us to think--the university prevents those whom it deems to have the brightest minds from transmitting their mental endowments to posterity. the devil could not have devised a more ingenious scheme for the promotion of mediocrity. since oxford has been in existence for about eight hundred years it must have had a considerable influence on the reduction of british genius. as schiller points out, any measures to be eugenically effective must apply to the young. the rewards bestowed upon ability are not only frequently misapplied but they are invariably too long delayed. the youthful genius is too often forced to give up having a family or compelled to support it on faith, hope and charity. to this defect in our civilization schiller has given the apt name of "social hysteresis."[18] in all the professions (except, perhaps, that of the actress) the young are underpaid, and established reputations are overpaid. it would be eugenically preferable to do the opposite. yet the existing practice is largely due to unintentional stupidity, and failure to discover ability soon enough. now to the individual this system brings compensation, if he lives long enough, because he continues to be rewarded for work he has done long ago, and even is no longer capable of doing, and is eventually raised to the status of a "grand old man" whom ancient institutions delight to honour, by dint of sheer longevity. but eugenically this social _hysteresis_, this delay in recompensing merit, has a fatal effect. it renders the capable, ambitious and rising members of the professional classes unduly sterile, owing to compulsory celibacy, postponement of marriage, overwork, etc. thus a large proportion of the ability which rises to the top of the social ladder lasts only for one generation, and does not permanently benefit the race. from this passage it will be seen that schiller does not fall into the common fallacy of unconsciously assuming that the upper classes of our present social system necessarily consist of superior individuals. but he does lay stress upon something often overlooked, that this assumption is more justified as society becomes more democratic: precisely in proportion as a society improves the opportunities of the able to rise, it must accelerate the elimination of fitness in the racial stock. so long as a relatively rigid social order rendered it almost impossible for ability to rise from the ranks, reservoirs of ability could accumulate unseen in the lower social strata, and burst forth in times of need, as in the french revolution: but the more successfully a _carrière ouverte aux talents_ is instituted, the more surely are these strata _kept drained_, and incapacitated from retrieving the waste of ability in the upper layers of society. now it is doubtless true that the _primary_ need of society is to find persons capable of conducting its affairs ably, and that a social order which does not allow ability to rise is therefore bad: but nations cannot with impunity so order themselves as to eliminate the very qualities they most admire and desire, and must husband their resources in men as in the other sources of their wealth and welfare.[19] that is to say, it did not matter much if in former times the nobility did tend to die out in a few generations, for in hereditable ability they were not much above the average. but in the more just regime that we are trying to introduce, especially in america, when the opportunities for higher education and advancement are extended to the gifted of all classes, it will be disastrous if the professional and well-to-do classes fail to contribute their share to the future population, for it means a continuous reversal of the method of the survival of the fittest by which evolution has been accomplished. this is not a law that man can repeal however he may disregard it. so it happens that civilized societies tend to die at the top and the human race makes little or no progress in native ability. as schiller says: the inventor of the wheel or even of a new mode of chipping flints may well have been as great a genius as the human race has produced, and it accords well with this that the early paleolithic races seem to have possessed a cranial capacity, not less, but greater than our own. for in the dim red dawn of man the fool-killing apparatus of nature was terribly effective, and society could do little to mitigate its horrors and to protect its inefficient members. the injustice, and what is more important, the injurious effects of the present distribution of honors and emoluments he exposes in his article on "national self-selection": is it not nonsense to say that the archbishop of canterbury is paid £15,000 a year and prof. j. j. thomson seven or eight hundred, because the persons fitted to perform the latter's functions are twenty times as common as those suited to the former's? is not the real reason plainly that the former is the beneficiary of a long social development which has liberally endowed the church, while the social appreciation of the value of science is only just beginning, and has not yet raised the makers of new truths to a par with the custodians of time-honoured revelations? our example, however, draws attention to a very general fact, viz., that the social position of various functions is very largely the product of past valuations which have persisted from mere habit. hence their present salaries do not really prove that an archbishop is twenty times as valuable to a nation as a scientific genius, or thrice as precious as a premier, nor even that men now think so. how many of us, for example, really now believe that mere descent from an illiterate medieval baron attests sufficient merit to entitle a man to a hereditary seat in the house of lords? if we continued to value fighting qualities as highly as of yore, we should promote our actual fighting men. when we want really to defend the house of lords, we point to its sagacity in gauging the will of the people and to the economic value of its attractiveness for foreign heiresses. hence one of the chief needs of a society which desires to reconstitute itself on eugenical principles is a thorough revision of social status. it must bring the social position of various services into closer agreement with their present value. and it must induce a greater feeling of responsibility about the popular valuations and transvaluations of functions, which are constantly exalting the position of the caterers to individual pleasures above the consolidators of man's permanent welfare. it is _not_ good for a society that a cricketer or a prize-fighter or a dancer should be esteemed and rewarded more highly than the man who discovers a cure for malaria or cancer.[20] the humanistic view of metaphysics schiller expresses in the preface to the 1910 edition of his earliest work "riddles of the sphinx." practically a system of metaphysics, with whatever pretensions to pure thought and absolute rationality it may start is always in the end one man's personal vision about the universe, and the "metaphysical craving" often so strong in the young is nothing but the desire to tell the universe what one thinks of it. of course, the tale may be worth telling if told well. this describes the "riddles of the sphinx" exactly. in it the youthful schiller tells the universe what he thinks of it and it is told well. but his thoughts have changed in the twenty-five years since this volume was published so that even in its revised form it does not so well express his views as do his later volumes, "humanism" and "studies in humanism", of which revised editions were brought out in 1912. the doctrine known as absolute idealism was, schiller explains, imported from germany, "soon after its demise in its native country", for the purpose of counteracting the anti-religious developments of science. but the abstract conception of the absolute is, in his opinion, of no value to religion or anything else. the pragmatic demand for god is, first, as "a human _moral_ principle of help and justice", and second, as "an aid to the _intellectual_ comprehension of the universe", but the metaphysical absolute satisfies neither of these cravings, for it is too impersonal to help anybody and too general to explain anything. in his chapter on "absolutism and the dissociation of personality"[21] he generously offers his aid to the idealistic monists who have difficulty in conceiving how the one became the many and why the individualistic minds included in the universal mind should be so antagonistic. schiller suggests that it is an analogous case to the dissociation of that celebrated boston lady "miss beauchamp" into several secondary personalities. but he admits that it is "a little startling at first to think of the absolute as morbidly dissociated or even as downright mad", especially since in the case of the absolute there is no outsider, like doctor morton prince, to put the parts together again. many years before he had said[22] the conception of a deity absorbed in perfect, unchanging and eternal bliss is a blasphemy upon the divine energy which might be permitted to the heathen ignorance of aristotle, but which should be abhorred by all who have learnt the lesson of the crucifixion. a theology which denies that the imperfection of the world must be reflected in the sorrows of the deity simply shows itself blind to the deepest and truest meaning of the figure of him that was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" and deaf to the gospel of divine sympathy with the world. thus the world-process is the process of the _redemption_ alike of god, of the world and of our own selves. the conception of a struggling and self-developing god which schiller adduced from christian principles is remarkably like that to which bergson was led by other lines of reasoning.[23] the value of the pragmatic method to religion is discussed by schiller in his article on "faith, reason and religion",[24] where he shows that even the most rigorous scientific reasoning involves the element of faith, and on the other hand that faith is devoid of value unless it is verified in the only way by which anything can be verified, that is, by works. he says: christianity is an essentially human and thoroughly pragmatic religion, hampered throughout its history and at times almost strangled by an alien theology, based upon the intellectualistic speculations of greek philosophers. fortunately the greek metaphysic embodied (mainly) in the "athanasian" creed is too obscure to have ever been really functional; its chief mischief has always been to give theological support to "philosophic" criticisms, which by identifying god with "the one" have aimed at eliminating the human elements from the christian religion. as against all such attempts, however, we must hold fast to the principle that the truest religion is that which issues in and fosters the best life. the pragmatic criterion of truth, that all truths must work, is not a lax one as its opponents assert but the most stringent that can be applied. it means--"you shall back your beliefs with your acts and shall not assert the truth of whatever suits you without any testing at all." it eliminates as meaningless all theories that make no difference whether they are believed or disbelieved. it demands constant confirmation of all beliefs by their consequences. it insists upon the unity of theory and practice, of faith and works. this point was plainly put by schiller in his address before the pan-anglican church congress of 1908: for any theory to work, it must be believed in, e.g., believed to be _true_. it is impossible, e.g., to practice prayer merely as a piece of spiritual hygiene, and in order to get the strengthening which is said to result from the practice. the practice need not, of course, start with a firm belief in the reality of its object. but unless it engenders a real belief, it will become inefficacious. hence, to conceive of pragmatism as ultimately sanctioning an "act-as-if" attitude of religious make-believe is a misapprehension; it is to confound it with the discredited and ineffectual dualism of kant's antithesis of practical and theoretic "reason." lastly, it should be noted that any theory which works must evoke some response from the objective nature of things. if there were no "god", i.e., nothing that could afford any satisfaction to any religious emotion, the whole religious attitude would be futile. if it is not, it must contain essential truth, though it may remain to be determined what is the objective fact corresponding to the postulate. how to read schiller "humanism" (1903, new edition 1912) and "studies in humanism" (1907, new edition 1912) are both collections of papers presenting various phases of schiller's philosophy. either one may serve as an introduction to the author. "riddles of the sphinx" (1891), though also revised (1910), represents an earlier mode of thought. "formal logic" (1912) is too technical for any but well prepared students. all schiller's works are published by the macmillan company. the reader who loves a fight and does not faint at the sight of inkshed will find what he wants in almost any volume of the oxford mind or the columbia _journal of philosophy, psychology and scientific methods_. where the conflict rages most fiercely there schiller will be seen in the midst of the combatants, thrusting in all directions at the weak points in their armor. to enumerate all of his controversial and fugitive writings would be impossible here, but the following articles at least must be mentioned: "do men desire immortality?" (_fortnightly_, vol. 76, p. 430). "the desire for a future life" (_independent_, september 15, 1904). "psychical research" (_fortnightly_, vol. 83, p. 60). presidential address (proceedings society for psychical research, 1914-1915). miss beauchamp (_journal philosophy, psychology and scientific methods_, vol. 4, p. 20; and _mind_, no. 70, p. 183). "the philosophy of friedrich nietzsche" (_quarterly review_, 1913). "choice" and "infallibility" (_hibbert journal_, 1909). "plato" (_quarterly review_, vol. 204, p. 62). "pluralism" (_proceedings of aristotelian society_, 1908-1909). "the rational conception of truth" (_proceedings aristotelian society_, 1906). "oxford of the workingman" (_fortnightly_, february, 1913). "cosmopolitan oxford" (_fortnightly_, may, 1902). "war prophecies" (_journal society psychical research_, june, 1916). "criticism of perry's realism" (_mind_, 1914). discussions of pragmatism (_mind_, 1913, 1915). "new developments of mr. bradley's philosophy" (_mind_, 1915). "present phase of idealistic philosophy" (_mind_, january and october, 1910). __ "realism, pragmatism, and william james" (_mind_, 1915) "the humanism of protagoras" (mind, april, 1911). "logic _versus_ life" (_independent_, vol. 73, p. 375). "aristotle's refutation of the aristotelian logic" (_mind_, vol. 23, pp. 1, 395, 558). "the working of truths and their criterion" (_mind_, vol. 22, no. 88). "error" (iv congresso internazionale di filosofia, bologna, 1911). "relevance" (_mind_, vol. 21, no. 82). "the working of truths" (_mind_, vol. 21, no. 84). "national self-selection" (_eugenics review_, april, 1914) "our critic criticized" (_eugenics review_, january, 1914). criticism of schiller and other pragmatists may be found in the controversies referred to, but i may also add the following references: "vital lies" by vernon lee (john lane company, 1913). "pragmatism" (_quarterly review_, april, 1909). "british exponents of pragmatism" by professor m'gilvary (_hibbert journal_, april, 1908). "der pragmatismus von james und schiller," by doctor werner bloch (1913). [1] schiller says that "professor santayana, though a pragmatist in epistemology is a materialist in metaphysics." [2] the philosophy of wang yang-ming is now accessible in english, through the translation of doctor henke (open court publishing company, chicago, 1916). [3] "major prophets of to-day," first series, 1914. little, brown, and company, boston. [4] of course any one who wants to find out at first hand what pragmatism is will not bother with what i say but will turn to william james's "pragmatism" or invest fifty cents in the briefer and more comprehensive survey of the movement in d. l. murray's primer of "pragmatism." a definition of pragmatism that is anything but monosyllabic may be found in the chapter on dewey. the story is told of a college woman who was asked what professor james's lecture on pragmatism was going to be about and replied that she thought it had something to do with the royal succession in austria. schiller's own definition is to be found in his "studies in humanism:" pragmatism is the doctrine (i) that truths are logical values; (2) that the "truth" of an assertion depends on its application; (3) that the meaning of a rule lies in its application; (4) that ultimately all meaning depends on purpose; (5) that all mental life is purposive. pragmatism is (6) a systematic protest against all ignoring of the purposiveness of actual knowing, and it is (7) a conscious application to epistemology (or logic) of a teleological psychology, which implies, ultimately, a voluntaristic metaphysic. [5] address on "error" before the congresso internazionale di filosofia, bologna, 1911. [6] i find the following incident reported of a boston school which would indicate that the philosophy of william james is influencing the younger generation in his home city: "well, waldo," said the professor of geometry, "can you prove any of to-day's theorems?" "no, sir, i'm afraid i can't," said waldo hopefully; "but i can render several of them highly probable." [7] "studies in humanism." [8] "realism, pragmatism and william james." _mind_, 1915. [9] _mind_, vol. 22, p. 534, 1913. [10] "essays on truth and reality" by f. h. bradley. see schiller's "new developments of mr. bradley's philosophy" in _mind_, 1915. [11] see "protagoras the humanist", and "gods and priests" in "studies in humanism", and "useless knowledge" and "plato or protagoras" in "humanism." [12] _the independent_. schiller's "formal logic" gave rise to much controversy. see for instance _mind_, vol. 23, p. 1, 398, 558. one critic called it "a sympathetic appreciation of all known logical fallacies." [13] "logic _versus_ life" in _the independent_, vol. 73, p. 375. [14] the latter part of "humanism" and of "riddles of the sphinx" is devoted to this topic. schiller succeeded bergson as president of the society for psychical research in 1914. [15] see schiller's article on this in _the independent_ of september 15, 1904, or in _fortnightly review_, vol. 76, p. 430. [16] _quarterly review_, 1913. [17] "eugenics and politics" in _the hibbert journal_, january, 1914. [18] "practical eugenics in education." [19] "practical eugenics in education." [20] _eugenics review_, april, 1910. [21] in "studies in humanism." [22] "riddles of the sphinx," p. 431. [23] see "creative evolution" and chapter ii of "major prophets of to-day"; also wells and shaw in this volume. [24] in "studies in humanism" and _hibbert journal_, january, 1906. see also "science and religion" in "riddles of the sphinx", new edition. chapter v john dewey teacher of teachers if some historian should construct an intellectual weather map of the united states he would find that in the eighties the little arrows that show which way the wind blows were pointing in toward ann arbor, michigan, in the nineties toward chicago, illinois, and in the nineteen hundreds toward new york city, indicating that at these points there was a rising current of thought. and if he went so far as to investigate the cause of these local upheavals of the academic atmosphere he would discover that john dewey had moved from one place to the other. it might be a long time before the psychometeorologist would trace these thought currents spreading over the continent back to their origin, a secluded classroom where the most modest man imaginable was seated and talking in a low voice for an hour or two a day. john dewey is not famous like w. j. bryan or charlie chaplin. he is not even known by name to most of the millions whose thought he is guiding and whose characters he is forming. this is because his influence has been indirect. he has inspired individuals and instigated reforms in educational methods which have reached the remotest schoolhouses of the land. the first of the dewey cyclones revolved about psychology, the second about pedagogy, and the third about philosophy. i was a thousand miles away from the first storm center, yet i distinctly felt the vibrations. that was in the university of kansas when the psychology class was put in charge of a young man named templin just back from his _wanderjahr_ in germany. this study had hitherto belonged _ex officio_ to the chancellor of the university who put the finishing touch on the seniors' brains with aid of mccosh. but the queer looking brown book stamped "psychology--john dewey" that was put into our hands in 1887 relegated the princeton philosopher to the footnotes and instead told about helmholtz, weber, wundt and a lot of other foreigners who, it seemed, were not content to sit down quietly and search their own minds--surely as good as anybody's--but went about watching the behavior of children, animals, and crazy folks and spent their time in a laboratory--the idea!--measuring the speed of thought and dissecting brains. this young man in michigan made bold to claim psychology as a natural science instead of a minor branch of metaphysics, and he did the best he could to prove it with such meager materials as were available at the time. his "psychology" appeared, as should be remembered, three years before the epoch-making work of james and before any permanent psychological laboratory had been opened in the united states. in taking down again my battered brown copy of dewey's "psychology" i am surprised to find how trite and old-fashioned some of it sounds. although dewey thought he had thrown overboard all metaphysics it is evident that he was then carrying quite a cargo of it unconsciously. but the commotion started by dewey's "psychology" was a tempest in an inkpot compared with the cyclone that swept over the country when he began to put his theories into practice at the university of chicago in 1894. i heard echoes of it as far west as wyoming. the teachers who went to the summer session of the university of chicago came back shocked, fascinated, inspired, or appalled, according to their temperaments. the very idea of an "experimental school" was disconcerting, suggesting that the poor children were being subjected to some sort of vivisection or--what was worse--implying that the established educational methods were all wrong. "he lets the children do whatever they want to do," whispered the teachers to their stay-at-home colleagues, who, like themselves, were spending their time in keeping the children from doing what they wanted to do and in making them do what they did not want to do. "he lets the children talk and run around and help one another with their lessons!" and all the teachers looked at each other with a wild surmise silent on the school-room platform. could it be that there was a better way, that this task on which they were wearing out their nerves, trying to reduce to rigidity for five hours a roomful of wriggling children, was no less harmful to the children than to themselves? "i'd like to see john dewey try to manage my sixty," remarks the presiding teacher as she suppresses a little girl on the front seat with a smile and a big boy on the back seat with a tap of her pencil. as a matter of fact, the children neither studied nor did what they pleased, but the idea was that if children had a sufficient variety of activities provided they would like what they did and their activities could be so arranged as to result in getting knowledge and in forming good habits of thought. the common assumption that the main idea was to have the children do and study what they liked was a complete missing of the intellectual idea or philosophy of the school, which was an attempt to work out the theory that knowledge, with respect to both sense observation and general principles, is an offshoot of activities, and that the practical problems arising in connection with consecutive occupations afford the means for a development of interest in scientific problems for their own sake. the social grouping of children, and the attempt to get coöperative group work, was always just as important a phase as individual freedom--not only on moral grounds, but because of the theoretical conception that human intelligence developed under social conditions and for social purposes--in other words, "mind" has developed not only with respect to activity having purpose, but also social activity. these same notions of the central place of intelligence in action and the social nature of intelligence are fundamental in dewey's "ethics." the real distinguishing characteristic of schools of the dewey type is not absence of discipline but a new ideal of discipline. this is most clearly stated in one of his more recent works: discipline of mind is in truth a result rather than a cause. any mind is disciplined in a subject in which independent intellectual initiative and control have been achieved. discipline represents original native endowment turned through gradual exercise into effective power.... discipline is positive and constructive. discipline, however, is frequently regarded as something negative--as a painfully disagreeable forcing of mind away from channels congenial to it into channels of constraint, a process grievous at the time, but necessary as preparation for a more or less remote future. discipline is then generally identified with drill; and drill is conceived after the mechanical analogy of driving, by unremitting blows, a foreign substance into a resistant material; or is imaged after the analogy of the mechanical routine by which raw recruits are trained to a soldierly bearing and habits that are naturally wholly foreign to their possessors. training of this latter sort, whether it be called discipline or not, is not mental discipline. its aim and result are not _habits of thinking_ but uniform _external habits of action_. by failing to ask what he means by discipline, many a teacher is misled into supposing that he is developing mental force and efficiency by methods which in fact restrict and deaden intellectual activity, and which tend to create mechanical routine, or mental passivity and servility.--"how we think", p. 63. but even more revolutionary than dewey's rejection of the strict discipline then prevailing in the schools was his introduction of industrial training as an integral part of education, not merely for the purpose of giving the pupils greater manual skill, still less with the object of improving their chances of getting a job or of making them more efficient for the benefit of the employer, but chiefly because it is only through participation in industry that one can get an understanding of the meaning of science and the constitution of the social organism. in the old days when most industries were carried on in the household or the neighborhood children learned them by observation and participation. school was then a place where this very effective form of home education could be supplemented by "book learning." but dewey faced frankly the fact that the house-hold arts and handicrafts had passed away for keeps, and he refused to join in the pretense that they could be profitably "revived" by the various esthetic and socialist movements of the william morris and ruskin type. he recognized that the machine and the factory had come to stay, and if the worker is not to become a factory machine himself he must receive in school such a broad and diversified training as will make him realize the significance of the work he does. or as dewey said in "school and society" in 1899: we sometimes hear the introduction of manual training, art and science into the elementary, and even into the secondary, schools deprecated on the ground that they tend toward the production of specialists--that they detract from our present system of generous, liberal culture. the point to this objection would be ludicrous if it were not often so effective as to make it tragic. it is our present education which is highly specialized, one-sided and narrow. it is an education dominated almost entirely by the medieval conception of learning. it is something which appeals for the most part simply to the intellectual aspect of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or art. mere "manual training", then all the rage, has failed, as dewey said it would, because of its fictitious and adventitious character. his method was as different from the ordinary kind of "manual training" as hay-making is from dumb-bell exercise. we must conceive of work in wood and metal, of weaving, sewing and cooking, as methods of living and learning, not as distinct studies. we must conceive of them in their social significance, as types of processes by which society keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing home to the child some of the primal necessities of community life, and as ways in which these needs have been met by the growing insight and ingenuity of man; in short as instrumentalities through which the school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons. so dewey set the children to solving the problems of primitive man and retracing for themselves the steps in the evolution of industrial processes. they picked the cotton from the boll, carded, spun it into thread and wove it into cloth on machines of their own making and for the most part of their own devising. this gave opportunity for personal experimenting and taught them history by repeating history, not repeating a verbal version of history. and the history they thus learnt was the history of the human race, not the history of some chosen people. this recapitulation theory, like all others, has since been carried to an extreme. acting on the idea that children normally pass through the same stages as european civilization some teachers seem to think it necessary to keep them to the chronological curriculum. so they cultivate a pseudo-savagery for a year or two, then make them pagans and later teach the ideals of the age of chivalry which are hardly less repugnant to the modern mind. so careful are they to avoid anachronism that if a boy should by any accident behave like a christian before he reached the grade corresponding to a.d. 28 he would be likely to get a bad mark for it. so, too, i have known teachers of mathematics who would not allow their pupils to take a short cut to the answer by way of algebra unless it was in the algebra class and teachers of chemistry who would not permit the word "atom" to be mentioned in classroom until the term was half through. but such extravagances find no countenance in dewey's writings or the examples he cites. in the laboratory school of the university of chicago professor and mrs. dewey had for several years a free hand in developing and trying out their theories. their aim was to utilize instead of to suppress the fourfold impulses of childhood; the interest in conversation, the interest in inquiry, the interest in construction and the interest in artistic expression. the volume in which professor dewey explained what he was trying to do and why, "school and society", was first published in 1899 and has been reprinted almost every year up to the present.[1] it might well have borne the same title as benjamin tucker's volume on anarchism: "instead of a book, by a man too busy to write one." it consists of the stenographic reports of three informal talks by professor dewey to the parents of his pupils and the friends of his school, supplemented by some fugitive papers. yet it has an influence comparable to no other modern book of its size unless perhaps herbert spencer's tract on "education." how far the seed was sown is shown by "schools of to-morrow",[2] which tells of a dozen places where the ideas that were so novel and startling in the nineties are in practical operation. but it is characteristic of dewey's self-effacement that he makes no claim for priority, and there is no hint anywhere in the volume that many of the methods described were first devised and tried out in the dewey school at chicago nearly twenty years ago. he gives the credit for the theory to rousseau and the credit for the practice to mr. wirt of gary, mrs. johnson of fairhope, mr. valentine of indianapolis, professor merriam of missouri, and others. mr. wirt who organized the school system of the steel city of gary, indiana, and who is now employed in remodeling some of the schools of new york city, owes his inspiration and ideas, as i have heard him say, very largely to dewey.[3] the gary system differs from the trade schools in that the industries are used for their educative value. the pupils are shifted around from one shop to another three times a year. their tasks are artificial, symbolic or imitative, but from the fifth grade up real constructive work, for the boys making school furniture, iron castings, laying concrete, and printing; and for the girls, sewing, cooking, marketing, millinery, and laundry, and for both, gardening, pottery, designing, bookbinding and bookkeeping. arithmetic, writing, history, and geography come in necessarily and naturally in connection with their work. under this régime the pupils make better progress in the traditional subjects than those who devote their whole time to books. that it does not divert them from higher education is shown by the fact that one third of all the pupils who have left the gary schools in the eight years of their existence are now in the state university, an engineering school, or a business college, a remarkable record for a population mostly composed of foreign-born steel mill laborers. all the schoolrooms are in use for something all day long, so the "peak load" is avoided and a great economy effected. the grounds and buildings also serve as community centers and the last trace of the ancient feud between "town and gown" has been wiped out. the chief advantage which these "schools of tomorrow" have over those of the past is, in dewey's opinion, that they come a step nearer toward giving the type of training necessary to prepare citizens for democracy. in this new book, then, he is working toward the ideal he promulgated at the beginning of his career when he entered the faculty of the university of michigan as the youngest man ever appointed to a professorship in that institution. he sounded the note of his philosophy thirty years ago in a paper on "the ethics of democracy",[4] and he has never faltered in his allegiance to the high ideal he there set forth, although he has broken away from the hegelian mode of thought he then used. the paper was written to confute sir henry maine who, in his "popular government", argued that democracy was an historical accident and the most fragile, insecure, and unprogressive form of government. dewey objects to his mechanical and mathematical conception of democratic government and sets forth a very different conception as the following quotations will show: the majority have a right to "rule" because their majority is not the mere sign of a surplus in numbers, but is the manifestation of the purpose of the social organism. government is to the state what language is to the thought: it not only communicates the purposes of the state, but in so doing gives them for the first time articulation and generality. a vote is not the impersonal counting of one; it is a manifestation of some tendency of the social organism through a member of that organism. the democratic formula that government derives its powers from the consent of the governed ... means that in democracy the governors and the governed are not of two classes, but two aspects of the same fact--the fact of the possession by society of a unified and articulate will. the aristocratic idea implies that the mass of men are to be inserted by wisdom, or, if necessary, thrust by force, into their proper positions in the social organism.... democracy means that _personality_ is the first and final reality.... it holds that the spirit of personality indwells in every individual, and that the choice to develop it must proceed from that individual. from this central position of democracy result the other notes of democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity--words which are not mere words to catch a mob, but symbols of the highest ethical idea which humanity has yet reached--the idea that _personality_ is the one thing of permanent and abiding worth, and that in every human individual there lies personality.... it means that in every individual there lives an infinite and universal possibility: that of being a king or priest. aristocracy is blasphemy against personality. even in those days when socialism had hardly begun to be whispered, at least in academic circles, dewey was not afraid to say that: "democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and political.... a democracy of wealth is a necessity." twenty-five years later i saw professor dewey giving a public demonstration of his faith in democracy when i found him marching with a small body of men at the tail end of a suffrage procession while the crowds that lined fifth avenue jeered and hissed at us. who would then have thought that five years later all parties would be committed to equal suffrage and four presidential candidates would be bidding against one another for the privilege of giving the women the vote! education for democracy is the burden of dewey's message to the world, and i must give one more quotation on this point: democracy, the crucial expression of modern life, is not so much an addition to the scientific and industrial tendencies as it is the perception of their social or spiritual meaning. democracy is an absurdity where faith in the individual as individual is impossible; and this faith is impossible where intelligence is regarded as a cosmic power, not an adjustment and application of individual tendencies. ... democracy is estimable only through the changed conception of intelligence that forms modern science, and of want, that forms modern industry. it is essentially a changed psychology. the conventional type of education which trains children in docility and obedience, to the careful performance of imposed tasks because they are imposed, regardless of where they lead, is suited to an autocratic society. these are the traits needed in a state where there is one head to plan and care for the lives and institutions of the people. but in a democracy they interfere with the successful conduct of society and government.... if we train our children to take orders, to do things simply because they are told to, and fail to give them confidence to act and think for themselves, we are putting an almost insurmountable obstacle in the way of overcoming the present defects of our system and of establishing the truth of democratic ideals. children in school must be allowed freedom so that they will know what its use means when they become the controlling body, and they must be allowed to develop active qualities of initiative, independence, and resourcefulness, before the abuses and failures will disappear.--"school and society", p. 304. the old theory of education has been most pungently put by "mr. dooley", the saloon-keeper of archey road, in one of his monologues with mr. hennessy: "it don't matter much what you study--so long as you don't like it." professor dewey takes almost the opposite ground when he says:[5] "interest ought to be the basis for selection because children are interested in the things they need to learn." this, as he shows, does not mean that in the new schools things are "made easy"; on the contrary the pupils work harder because things are made interesting. the range of the material is not in any way limited by making interest a standard of selection. work that appeals to pupils as worth while, that holds out the promise of resulting in something to their own interests, involves just as much persistence and concentration as the work that is given by the sternest advocate of disciplinary drill. the latter requires the pupil to strive for ends which he cannot see, so that he has to be kept at the task by means of offering artificial ends, marks, and promotions, and by isolating him in an atmosphere where his mind and senses are not being constantly besieged by the call of life which appeals so strongly to him. but the pupil presented with a problem, the solution of which will give him an immediate sense of accomplishment and satisfied curiosity, will bend all his powers to the work: the end itself will furnish the stimulus necessary to carry him through the drudgery.... since the children are no longer working for rewards, the temptation to cheat is reduced to a minimum. there is no motive for doing dishonest acts, since the result shows whether the child has done the work, the only end recognized.--"school and society." we have then two fundamentally different theories of training, the dooley versus the dewey system. they are now on trial in some degree all the way up from the beginning of the primary to the end of the college.[6] one is authoritarian; the other libertarian. one cultivates obedience; the other initiative. one strives for uniformity; the other diversity. in one the impelling motive is duty; in the other desire. in one the attitude of the student is receptivity; in the other activity. in one there is compulsory coördination; in the other voluntary coöperation. obviously neither could be carried to an exclusive extreme, and in practice we find each more or less unconsciously borrowing methods from the others. doubtless the optima for different temperaments, ages, and studies will be found at different points along the line connecting the two extremes. how far one may safely go in either direction is to be determined by the pragmatic test of experiment. but at present it is safe to say that the tide of reform is running in the direction dewey pointed out a quarter of a century before, though recently a strong counter-current of militarism has set in. that dewey is a true prophet is proved by the extent to which his ideas are being carried out in these "schools of tomorrow" that are already in existence to-day. the third period in dewey's life began with his appointment to the chair of philosophy at columbia university in 1905. this relieved him of the burden of responsibility for the conduct of the laboratory school at chicago and enabled him to concentrate his thought upon the fundamental problems of knowledge. it was then perceived that he belonged on the left or radical wing of that movement to which james applied peirce's name of "pragmatism." but dewey is reluctant to call himself a pragmatist, partly because of his constitutional dislike to wearing a tag of any kind, partly, i surmise, because he has an aversion to the spiritualistic tendencies of the two men who are usually classed with him as the leaders of the pragmatic movement--james of harvard and schiller of oxford. dewey's doctrine of cognition, the theory of instrumentalism, is now to be found in two recent volumes, one technical and the other popular. the ordinary skimming reader will find the "essays in experimental logic" rather hard sledding, so he will be relieved to find that it has been translated by the author into ordinary english in the little volume entitled "how we think." this is intended primarily for teachers whose business is supposed to be that of teaching their youngsters how to think, though in reality most of their time has to be taken up with the imparting of information. [illustration: john dewey.] the "ethics" of john dewey and james h. tufts (1908) is not only a practical textbook admirably clear in expounding the conflicting theories and eminently fair in criticizing them, but it would be useful to any reader for broadening the mind and pointing the proper way of approach to modern problems. professor tawney of the university of cincinnati in reviewing it for the _american journal of sociology_ says: "probably no more convincing effort to construct a system of moral philosophy by a strictly scientific method has ever been carried out." moral philosophers are generally disposed to keep their carefully constructed systems of ethics under a glass bell jar rather than risk the hard knocks they must receive if taken into the street and marketplace. but dewey as a professed experimentalist could not consistently adopt this cautious method. his is no cloistered morality but a doctrine reduced from practical life and referable to the same authority for the validification of its influences. an interesting instance of the practical application of his principles is found in his essay on "force and coercion."[7] here he discusses chiefly the question of the allowability of the use of force by a government as in war or by a class as in a strike and repudiates the tolstoyan view that all use of force is wrong. on such a delicate question it would be improper for me to paraphrase his argument, so i quote instead his own summary of his conclusions: first, since the attainment of ends requires the use of means, law is essentially a formulation of the use of force. secondly, the only question which can be raised about the justification of force is that of comparative efficiency and economy in its use. thirdly, what is justly objected to as violence or undue coercion is a reliance upon wasteful and destructive means of accomplishing results. fourthly, there is always a possibility that what passes as a legitimate use of force may be so wasteful as to be really a use of violence; and per contra that measures condemned as recourse to mere violence may, under the given circumstances, represent an intelligent utilization of energy. in no case, can antecedents or _a priori_ principles be appealed to as more than presumptive: the point at issue is concrete utilization of means for ends. in this essay dewey inclines to the view that "all political questions are simply questions of the extension and restriction of exercise of power on the part of specific groups in the community", and says further that: "with a few notable exceptions, the doctrine that the state rests upon or is common will seems to turn out but a piece of phraseology to justify the uses actually made of force. practices of coercion and constraint which would become intolerable if frankly labelled force seem to become laudable when baptized with the name of will, although they otherwise remain the same." i trust that dewey is one of "the few notable exceptions", for the quotations from his paper on the "ethics of democracy" which i have given on a previous page show that dewey in his earlier years went as far as fichte in his later years toward identifying government--and a bare majority at that--with the common will of the social organism. such a germanic doctrine of the power of the state could be used to justify worse things than the german government has ever done, and it is perhaps a realization of this that has led dewey latterly to look with more favor upon the use of force by the minority. the proper use of force is, in dewey's opinion, "the acute question of social philosophy in the world to-day", and "a generation which has beheld the most stupendous manifestation of force in all history is not going to be content unless it has found some answer to the question." in an article on "force, violence and law"[8] he discusses the possibilities of the peace movement in the following fashion: at various times of my life i have, with other wearied souls, assisted at discussions between those who were tolstoyans and--well, those who weren't. in reply to the agitated protests of the former against war and the police and penal measures, i have listened to the time-honored queries about what you should do when the criminal attacked your friend or child. i have rarely heard it stated that since one cannot even walk the street without using force, the only question which persons can discuss with one another concerns the most effective use of force in gaining ends in specific situations. if one's end is the saving of one's soul immaculate, or maintaining a certain emotion unimpaired, doubtless force should be used to inhibit natural muscular reactions. if the end is something else, a hearty fisticuff may be the means of realizing it. what is intolerable is that men should condemn or eulogize force at large, irrespective of its use as a means of getting results. to be interested in ends and to have contempt for the means which alone secure them is the last stage of intellectual demoralization. it is hostility to force as force, to force intrinsically, which has rendered the peace movement so largely an anti-movement, with all the weaknesses which appertain to everything that is primarily anti-anything. unable to conceive the task of organizing the existing forces so they may achieve their greatest efficiency, pacifists have had little recourse save to decry evil emotions and evil-minded men as the causes of war.... and no league to enforce peace will fare prosperously save as it is the natural accompaniment of a constructive adjustment of the concrete interests which are already at work.... the passage of force under law occurs only when all the cards are on the table, when the objective facts which bring conflicts in their train are acknowledged, and when intelligence is used to devise mechanisms which will afford to the forces at work all the satisfaction that conditions permit. dewey's primary purpose has always been the development of a type of ethical thinking and a method of school training suited to the democratic and industrial society of modern america. speaking of the mental revolution that has been effected by the advance of science he says: whether the consequent revolution in moral philosophy be termed pragmatism or be given the happier title of the applied and experimental habit of mind is of little account. what is of moment is that intelligence has descended from its lonely isolation at the remote edge of things, whence it operated as unmoved mover and ultimate good, to take its seat in the moving affairs of men. theory may therefore become responsible to the practices that have generated it; the good be connected with nature, but with nature naturally, not metaphysically conceived, and social life be cherished in behalf of its own immediate possibilities, not on the ground of its remote connections with a cosmic reason and absolute end.--"influence of darwin", p. 55. in the preface to the "influence of darwin" he quotes a german definition of pragmatism:[9] epistemologically, nominalism; psychologically, voluntarism; cosmologically, energism; metaphysically, agnosticism; ethically, meliorism on the basis of the bentham-mill-utilitarianism. dewey, who dislikes to wear even one tag--and that a nice new clean one--naturally resents having these five old ones tied to him, so he says: it may be that pragmatism will turn out to be all of this formidable array, but even should it the one who thus defines it has hardly come within earshot of it. for whatever else pragmatism is or is not, the pragmatic spirit is primarily a revolt against that habit of mind which disposes of anything whatever--even so humble an affair as a new method in philosophy--by tucking it away, after this fashion, in the pigeon-holes of a filing cabinet.... it is better to view pragmatism quite vaguely as part and parcel of a general movement of intellectual reconstruction. for otherwise we seem to have no recourse save to define pragmatism--as does our german author--in terms of the very past systems against which it is a reaction; or, in escaping that alternative, to regard it as a fixed rival system making like claim to completeness and finality. and if, as i believe, one of the marked traits of the pragmatic movement is just the surrender of every such claim, how have we furthered our understanding of pragmatism? in one of his socratic dialogues[10] dewey brings in at the close chesterton's flip refutation of pragmatism: _pupil._ what you say calls to mind something of chesterton's that i read recently: "i agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. but i say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth. pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist." you would say, if i understand you aright, that to fall back upon the necessity of the "human mind" to believe in certain absolute truths, is to evade a proper demand for testing the human mind and all its works. _teacher._ my son, i am glad to leave the last word with you. this _enfant terrible_ of intellectualism has revealed that the chief objection of absolutists to the pragmatic doctrine of the personal (or "subjective") factor in belief is that the pragmatist has spilled the personal milk in the absolutist's coconut. it is curious to see how many different classes are now holding up germany as a horrible example of the dangers of the theories they oppose. the anglican catholics blame luther for the war and look upon the prospective triumph of the allies as the final destruction of protestantism in the world. the orthodox believe that germany got into trouble through higher criticism. the classicists say that she is suffering from an overdose of science. the absolute idealists ascribe the bad conduct of germany to her desertion of kant, hegel, and fichte to follow after the new gods--or no gods--of haeckel and nietzsche. but dewey, on the contrary, holds kant, hegel, and fichte responsible for it all. "that philosophical absolutism may be practically as dangerous as matter-of-fact political absolutism history testifies." this is no new notion cooked up for the occasion, like so many of them, but one which dewey plainly stated six years before the outbreak of the war in his address on ethics at columbia university. in speaking of kant's denudation of pure reason of all concrete attributes he said: reason became a mere voice, which having nothing particular to say, said law, duty, in general, leaving to the existing social order of the prussia of frederick the great the congenial task of declaring just what was obligatory in the concrete. the marriage of freedom and authority was thus celebrated with the understanding that sentimental primacy went to the former and practical control to the latter.--"influence of darwin", p. 65. after the war began he expanded this idea in his mcnair lectures at the university of north carolina.[11] because germany has developed continuously without any decided break with its past like the french revolution or the transplanting of europeans to america, german thinkers have come to declare all progress as the unfolding of national life and to declare impossible the construction of constitutions such as we have in the new world. dewey traces the intellectual process by which the german people have reached the very startling opinions they now hold as to their mission in the world as follows: the premises of the historic syllogism are plain. first, the german luther who saved for mankind the principle of spiritual freedom against latin externalism; then kant and fichte, who wrought out the principle into a final philosophy of science, morals and the state; as conclusion, the german nation organized in order to win the world to a recognition of the principle, and thereby to establish the rule of freedom and science in humanity as a whole.... in the grosser sense of the words, germany has not held that might makes right. but it has been instructed by a long line of philosophers that it is the business of ideal right to gather might to itself in order that it may cease to be merely ideal. the state represents exactly this incarnation of ideal law and right in effective might. a hundred years ago fichte in his "addresses to the german nation" roused his countrymen to make a stand against napoleon and fulfill their mission to "elevate the german name to that of the most glorious of all peoples, making this nation the regenerator and restorer of the world." "there is no middle ground: if you sink, so sinks humanity entire with you, without hope of future restoration." this sounds very much like what we hear in germany to-day, although the present german empire differs markedly in some respects from the ideal state that fichte foresaw. it is also the same sort of language as is being used in england and the other allied countries. in fact every nation has the same sense of its historic divine mission and unique importance to the world's civilization. certainly we cannot deny the existence of that feeling among americans. to quote again from fichte: "while cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement thence spread over the entire race." this might seem a harmless and indeed inspiring conception of patriotism, but when the fichtean idea of a particular state as the incarnation of the divine will is combined with the hegelian idea of progress through conflict, it makes a fatal mixture, as dewey shows: philosophical justification of war follows inevitably from a philosophy of history composed in nationalistic terms. history is the movement, the march of god on earth through time. only one nation at a time can be the latest and hence the fullest realization of god. the movement of god in history is thus particularly manifest in those changes by which unique place passes from one nation to another. war is the signally visible occurrence of such a flight of the divine spirit in its onward movement. this fallacious line of argument is, in dewey's opinion, the logical outcome of the _a priori_ and absolutist metaphysics which has prevailed in europe during the last century, and for which he would substitute the method of intelligent experimentation. he says, "the present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of nationalism, political, racial and cultural," and he urges as a substitute the promotion of "the efficacy of human intercourse irrespective of class, racial, geographical and national limits." when we see the appalling results to which the doctrine of nationalism has led, we may indeed regard it with dewey as a logical breakdown, but i fear that actually it has become more powerful, pervading, and firmly fixed than ever through the psychological and economic experiences of the war.[12] doctor f. c. s. schiller of oxford calls dewey's "german philosophy and politics" "an entirely admirable book; clear, calm, cogent, and popular without being shallow" and he further says: professor dewey was assuredly the ideal person to handle the subject. for though he had made a deep and sympathetic study of german philosophy, he had in the end turned away from it to become a leader in the movement which is most antithetical to the traditionally german type of philosophizing. it must not indeed be alleged that the anglo-saxon world has a monopoly of the pragmatic habit of mind; for all men have to act and pragmatism is only the theoretic apprehension of the attitude which imposes itself on every agent everywhere. but it is probably right to regard this habit of mind as characteristically congenial to anglo-saxon life, and it was a perception of this that so infuriated our germanized professors who prided themselves on their superiority to the vulgar practicality of the national bent.[13] a stranger who drops into one of professor dewey's classes is at first apt to be puzzled to account for the extent of his influence and the devotion of his disciples. there is nothing in his manner of delivery to indicate that he is saying anything of importance, and it takes some time to realize that he is. he talks along in a casual sort of way with a low and uneventful voice and his eyes mostly directed toward the bare desk or out of the window. occasionally he wakes up to the fact that the students in the back seats are having difficulty in hearing him, and then he comes down with explosive stress on the next word, a preposition as like as not. his lectures are punctuated by pauses but not in a way to facilitate their comprehension. sometimes in the midst of a sentence, perhaps between an adjective and its noun, his train of thought will be shunted off on to another line, and the class has to sit patiently at the junction station until it comes back, as it always does eventually. the difficulty of utterance in his lectures, like the tortuous style of his technical writings, results from overconscientiousness. when he misses the right word he does not pick any one at hand and go on but stops talking until he finds the one he wants, and he is so anxious to avoid a misunderstanding that he sometimes fails to insure an understanding. talking has never become a reflex action with dewey. he has to think before he speaks. few professors and almost no instructors are bothered that way. in profile professor dewey looks something like robert louis stevenson, the same long lean face and neck and nose. from the front one would take him to be a kentucky colonel disguised in spectacles. his long straight black hair, parted in the middle, is now getting gray, but his drooping mustaches, being twenty years younger, are still dark. his eyes are black and keen, and one can catch a twinkle in them if the lids do not drop too quick. his neck-tie is usually awry, and several thousands of orderly schoolma'ams have felt their hands itch to jerk it straight. his drawling careless tone and hesitant manner quite disguise the boldness of his thought and the logical order of its wording. questions from the class never disconcert him, however inopportune, and the more he is heckled the better he talks. one of his former students at columbia, randolph s. bourne, gives this pen sketch of professor dewey:[14] nothing is more symbolic of professor dewey's democratic attitude towards life than the disintegrated array of his published writings. where the neatly uniform works of william james are to be found in every public library, you must hunt long and far for the best things of the man who, since the other's death, is the most significant thinker in america. pamphlets and reports of obscure educational societies; school journals, university monographs, and philosophical journals, limited to the pedant few; these are the burial-places of much of this intensely alive, futuristic philosophy.... no man, i think, with such universally important things to say on almost every social and intellectual activity of the day, was ever published in forms more ingeniously contrived to thwart the interest of the prospective public. professor dewey's thought is inaccessible because he has always carried his simplicity of manner, his dread of show or self-advertisement, almost to the point of extravagance. in all his psychology there is no place for the psychology of prestige. his democracy seems almost to take that extreme form of refusing to bring one's self or one's ideas to the attention of others. on the college campus or in the lecture-room he seems positively to efface himself. the uncertainty of his silver-gray hair and drooping mustache, of his voice, of his clothes, suggests that he has almost studied the technique of protective coloration. it will do you no good to hear him lecture. his sentences, flowing and exact and lucid when read, you will find strung in long festoons of obscurity between pauses for the awaited right word. the whole business of impressing yourself on other people, of getting yourself over to the people who want to and ought to have you, has simply never come into his ultra-democratic mind. a prophet dressed in the clothes of a professor of logic, he seems almost to feel shame that he has seen the implications of democracy more clearly than anybody else in the great would-be democratic society about him, and so been forced into the unwelcome task of teaching it. knowing that every biographer is expected to show that the subject of his sketch got his peculiar talents by honest inheritance, i wrote to professor dewey to inquire what there was in his genealogy to account for his becoming a philosopher. his ancestry is discouraging to those who would find an explanation for all things in heredity. my ancestry, particularly on my father's side, is free from all blemish. all my forefathers earned an honest living as farmers, wheelwrights, coopers. i was absolutely the first one in seven generations to fall from grace. in the last few years atavism has set in and i have raised enough vegetables and fruit really to pay for my own keep. john dewey was born in burlington, vermont, october 20, 1859, the son of archibald s. and lucina a. (rich) dewey. his elder brother, davis rich dewey, is professor of economics and statistics in the massachusetts institute of technology and the author of the special report on employees and wages in the 12th census as well as of many other works on finance and industry. john dewey went to the state university in his native town and received his a. b. degree at twenty. being then uncertain whether his liking for philosophical studies was sufficient to be taken as a call to that calling he applied to the one man in america most competent and willing to decide such a question, w. t. harris, afterward united states commissioner for education, but then superintendent of schools in st. louis. think of the courage and enterprise of a man who while filling this busy position and when the war was barely over started a _journal of speculative philosophy_ and founded a philosophical society and produced a series of translations of hegel, fichte, and other german metaphysicians. it would be hard to estimate the influence of doctor harris in raising the standards of american schools and in arousing an interest in intellectual problems. when young dewey sent him a brief article with a request for personal advice he returned so encouraging a reply that dewey decided to devote himself to philosophy. so, after a year spent at home reading under the direction of professor torrey of the university of vermont, one of the old type of scholarly gentleman, dewey went to johns hopkins university, the first american university to make graduate and research work its main object. here he studied under george s. morris and followed him to the university of michigan as instructor in philosophy after receiving his ph.d. at johns hopkins in 1884. two years later he married alice chipman of fenton, michigan, who has been ever since an effective collaborator in his educational and social work. in 1888 he went to the university of minnesota as professor of philosophy but was called back to michigan at the end of one year. when president harper went through the country picking up brilliant and promising young men for the new university of chicago, dewey was his choice for the chair of philosopher. during the ten years dewey spent on the midway plaisance he had the opportunity to try out the radical ideas of education of which i have spoken. in 1904 dewey was called to columbia university, where he has since remained. besides his classwork he has always been active though rarely conspicuous in many educational and social movements. one of the latest of these is the formation of the association of university professors, of which he was the first president. the title of his latest volume, "democracy and education", gives the keynote of his philosophy and the aim of his life. in a recent article[15] he puts it in these words: i am one of those who think that the only test and justification of any form of political and economic society is its contribution to art and science--to what may roundly be called culture. that america has not yet so justified itself is too obvious for even lament.. .. since we can neither beg nor borrow a culture without betraying both it and ourselves, nothing remains save to produce one.. .. our culture must be consonant with realistic science and with machine industry, instead of a refuge from them.... it is for education to bring the light of science and the power of work to the aid of every soul that it may discover its quality. for in a spiritually democratic society every individual would realize distinction. culture would then be for the first time in human history an individual achievement and not a class possession. how to read dewey as has been said previously, dewey's writings are scattered far and wide in various periodicals and educational series. he has never been able to say "no" to any struggling journal of socialism or school reform that begged him for an article although it meant no pay, little influence, and speedy oblivion for his contribution. the graduate student of twenty-five years hence who undertakes to get a ph.d. by making a complete collection of dewey's works will earn his degree. the main principles of dewey's philosophy, imparted viva voce to successive generations of students, have never been printed in a complete and systematic form, though his ideas have interfused the schools of the country through the teachers he has trained and the educational books he has written. the nearest thing to a short cut to dewey's philosophy that he has given us is "how we think" (heath, 1910), and with this the reader may well begin. "essays in experimental logic" (university of chicago press, 1916) requires for its complete comprehension some knowledge of current controversies in philosophy. but the review of james's "pragmatism", contained in the chapter "what pragmatism means", will be of interest to any reader seeking an answer to that question. his epoch-making work, "the school and society" (university of chicago press, first edition 1899, second edition 1915), has by no means lost its value although much that was prophecy then is now fulfilled. most readers will be more interested in the fulfillments as described in "schools of tomorrow" (dutton, 1915). this contains, besides the description of the new schools by his daughter, evelyn dewey, several chapters by professor dewey on the theory and aims of the educational movement they represent. a more complete and systematic exposition of the principles of education under modern conditions is to be found in his most recent book, "democracy and education" (macmillan, 1916). professor moore of chicago who reviews this volume in the _international journal of ethics_ (1916, p. 547) says of it: "the thinking world has long since learned to expect from professor dewey matters of prime importance. of the general significance of this, volume it is perhaps enough to say that, in the reviewer's opinion, it is the most important of professor dewey's productions thus far. in defiance of possible imputations of chauvinism, the reviewer will also say that it would be difficult to overstate its import and value for all students of education, philosophy, and society." the volume clumsily entitled "the influence of darwin on philosophy and other essays in contemporary thought" (holt, 1910) contains, besides the anniversary address which gives it its title, ten essays chiefly concerned with the exposition and defense of dewey's form of pragmatism, "immediate empiricism." "german philosophy and politics" (holt, 1915) is discussed in the preceding pages. dewey's "psychology" (harper, 1886) has largely lost its interest through the rapid advance of the science and the altered viewpoint of the author. the "ethics" which he wrote in collaboration with professor tufts i have previously mentioned (holt, 1908). the practical applications of dewey's philosophy to current educational and public questions may best be found in the brief and popular articles that he contributed frequently to _the new republic_ (new york) in 1915-1916. his professional contributions to logical theory and epistemology appear mostly in the fortnightly organ of the philosophical department of columbia university, the _journal of philosophy, psychology and scientific methods_. a volume of eight essays on the pragmatic attitude was published in january 1917 by henry holt under the title of "creative intelligence." the leading essay on "the need for a recovery of philosophy" is by john dewey. besides the articles to which reference has been made in the footnotes of the preceding pages the following writings of dewey should be mentioned: "science as subject-matter and as method", the vice presidential address of the section on education of the boston meeting of the american association for the advancement of science, 1909, (in _science_, january 28, 1910); "the problem of truth", george leib harrison lectures before the university of pennsylvania, 1911 (in _old penn weekly review_), "maeterlinck" (_hibbert journal_, vol. 9, p. 765) and "is nature good?" (_hibbert journal_, vol. 7, p. 827); "the existence of the world as a problem" (_philosophical review_, vol. 24, p. 357); "darwin's influence upon philosophy" (_popular science monthly_, vol. 75, p. 90); presidential address to the american association of university professors (_science_, january 29, 1915); "professional spirit among teachers" (_american teacher_, new york, october, 1913); _the international journal of ethics_ published "force and coercion" (vol. 26, p. 359); "progress" (vol. 26, p. 311); "nature and reason in law" (vol. 25, p. 25); "history for the educator" and other articles appeared in _progressive journal of education_, chicago, 1909; "voluntarism in the roycean philosophy" in the _philosophical review_, may, 1916; "logical foundations of the scientific treatment of morality" in the decennial publications of the university of chicago. a criticism of bergson by dewey under the title of "perception and organic action" may be found in the _journal of philosophy, psychology and scientific methods_, november 21, 1912. professor wilhelm ostwald, who, as i said in my chapter on him, has devoted much attention to educational reforms, includes a sketch of dewey by franz ludwig in the series on _moderne schulreforme in das monistische jahrhundert_ of may 31, 191-5. for a criticism of dewey's social philosophy see the articles by lester lee bernhard of the university of chicago in _american journal of sociology_. no biography of dewey has yet been written and none ever will be if he can prevent it. h. w. schneider of columbia university has prepared a complete bibliography of dewey's writings, not yet published. [1] the university of chicago press published a second edition of "school and society", revised and enlarged, in 1915. [2] "schools of to-morrow", by john dewey and evelyn dewey (dutton), 1915. [3] doctor georg kerschensteiner who founded the famous "workshop schools" of munich also acknowledges his indebtedness to dewey. [4] no. i of series 2 of philosophical papers of the university of michigan, 1887. [5] "schools of to-morrow", p. 301. [6] see the admirable article in _atlantic monthly_ of november, 1908, by president pritchett of the carnegie foundation, contrasting harvard and west point, "the college of freedom and the college of discipline." [7] _international journal of ethics_, vol. 26, p. 359-367. [8] _the new republic_, january 22, 1916. [9] to get the full force of this portentous definition one must read it in the original: _gewiss ist der pragmatismus erkenntniss-theoretisch nominalismus, psychologisch voluntarismus, naturphilosophisch energismus, metaphysisch agnosticismus, ethisch meliorismus auf grundlage des bentham-millschen utilitarismus._ [10] "a catechism concerning truth" in "the influence of darwin on philosophy and other essays." [11] published as "german philosophy and politics" (holt), 1915. [12] "german philosophy and politics" is sympathetically reviewed by professor santayana in the _journal of philosophy, psychology and scientific methods_ for november 25, 1915. the same journal reprints (vol. xii, p. 584) a criticism appearing in _the new republic_ (vol. iv, p. 234) by professor hocking of harvard, who thinks that the fault of the germans is being too pragmatic. professor dewey's reply is published with it. see also dewey's admirable analysis of the national psychology of germany, france, and england in his article "on understanding the mind of germany", _atlantic_, vol. 117, p. 251. [13] _mind_, april, 1916. [14] _the new republic_, march 13, 1915. [15] _the new republic_, july 1, 1916. chapter vi rudolf eucken apostle of the spiritual life to the history of and criticism of these conceptions and their terminology professor eucken has brought thorough and careful reading, acute and candid criticism, and a clear and solid style. while he is at home among the systems of the past, he seems equally familiar with the controversies of the present. above all, he has studied brevity, and has mastered the art of expressing in a few words the results of patient research and critical discrimination. the writer of this notice was constrained to recommend the work for translation to his friend and former pupil by his estimate of the intrinsic value of the treatise and the desire that it might be brought within reach of english readers as eminently suited to the times. he can say with assured confidence that there are few books within his knowledge which are better fitted to aid the student who wishes to acquaint himself with the course of superlative and scientific thinking and to form an intelligent estimate of most of the current theories.[1] these were the words with which professor eucken was introduced to the american public in 1880 by one who was a good judge of men and books, the primary qualification of a college president. thirty-two years later professor eucken came to america; this time in person, but under the auspices of harvard and the university of new york, instead of yale. this time he reached a larger audience; partly owing to his greater fame, partly to a change in the popular attitude toward the views he presents. in 1908, when eucken received the nobel prize for the greatest work of idealistic literature, there was no book of his accessible to the english reader, for the translation instigated by president porter was out of print. since then all his important works have been brought out in england and america; and the periodical indexes record a growing interest in his thought, corresponding to that which is manifested in germany. the nobel prizes have failed to carry out the intention of their founder, which was to place $100,000 or so immediately into the hands of a man who had made a signal contribution to science, literature, or peace. instead of this, the nobel committees absorb a liberal moiety of the income of the fund in local "administrative expenses" and usually give the residue, now amounting to some $37,000, to men whose reputations have long been established; for example, in literature, sully-prudhomme, mommsen, björnson, mistral, kipling, and heyse. but in so interpreting their mandate the nobel committees have fulfilled another useful function, possibly as much needed as that conceived by alfred nobel. if they have not discovered original genius, they have at least pointed it out to the world at large. the men thus distinguished as having contributed to human progress have extended their influence over their contemporaries, as well as received a due appreciation of their efforts. the nobel prize does not add to the stature of a man, but it does elevate him to a pulpit. in the case of eucken the value of this is evident. he did not need the assistance of the nobel fund in order to prosecute his researches, for the laboratory expenses of a metaphysician are but slight, and jena is as cheap a place to live as can nowadays be found in civilized lands. the award of the prize did not, of course, add to his reputation in philosophical circles, but eucken does not believe that the influence of a philosopher should be confined to philosophical circles. he repudiates entirely the aloof, impartial, disinterested spectator attitude which philosophers in general have thought it necessary to pretend to assume. the question is, in short, what kind of a scientist the philosopher should imitate: the chemist who transforms the world in which he lives, or the meteorologist who merely records the atmospheric currents without attempting to guide them? eucken is not only a teacher; he is a preacher. he has a message which he believes of vital importance to his contemporaries, so it cannot be a matter of indifference to him that he is, in his later years, gaining a wider audience, that his works are the most widely current philosophical writings of the present day in germany,[2] and are being extensively translated into other languages. this growing popularity is all the more noteworthy since it is not attained by any novelty of form, or even brilliancy of style. eucken never tries to stimulate thought by shocking the reader with audacious paradoxes, as did schopenhauer and nietzsche, as do shaw and chesterton. he has none of the freshness of phraseology and wealth of novel illustrations which attract to james and bergson their wide circle of admirers. he does not, like ostwald and haeckel, make use of the direct and concrete mode of expression which has been introduced into literature by modern science. eucken always writes in a serious and methodical style, elaborating his line of thought as he goes along with exactness and just proportion; expressing himself in general and abstract terms, rarely making use of imagery or concrete illustrations, never introducing personalities. a sweeter-tempered philosopher never lived. he speaks no evil, even of the dead. he indulges in no polemics with his contemporaries. in his historical works he passes through all fields of thought, gleaning good grain wherever he goes, and saying as little as possible about the tares and brambles that he finds with it. very curiously, it has been eucken's lot to have been closely associated, on the faculties of small universities, with the two men whose views are most antagonistic to his: at basel with nietzsche and at jena with haeckel, and he has been on the best of terms with both of them. i was particularly interested in what professor eucken told me of nietzsche, whose personality and philosophy were in such violent contradiction. this advocate of ruthless brutality, this scorner of sympathy and compassion, was in reality a most tender-hearted man, but too shy and sensitive to be popular; and when his feelings were hurt he wrote down in a passion what he felt at the moment. at the university of basel professor eucken often served with nietzsche on the examining committee of candidates for the doctorate in classical philology. on such occasions, if the student appeared to be getting the worst of it in the verbal contest, nietzsche would be observed to become more and more nervous until, finally, he could contain himself no longer and would break in with leading questions: "i suppose you mean so-and-so?" or "do you not believe this or that?" until he got the student to say just about what he should have said in the first place. professor eucken does not regard the widespread influence of nietzsche as altogether evil, believing he should not be held responsible for all the vagaries and extravagances of his devotees. the reason of nietzsche's popularity, according to eucken, is his strong individualism; for the germans, in spite of governmental control and the social democracy, are pronounced individualists in character. the german will insist upon having his own house, his own seat, his own opinion. this sounded strange to the american, accustomed to have germany referred to as the most regimented of nations. but modern germany is a land of incongruities and contradictions, a wild confusion of swirling cross-currents. the increase of population, the checking of emigration, the amazing prosperity, the extension of commerce, the demand for territorial expansion, would indicate a sound physical constitution and a healthful growth. the immense sale of serious works on religion and philosophy shows a revival of interest in spiritual affairs. yet, if we were to judge of the character of the people by the most conspicuous of its achievements in art and literature, we should say that modern germany is hopelessly decadent and corrupt. in drama and fiction gallic license is allied with gothic coarseness. in pictorial art hideousness and viciousness are depicted by means of strange and violent methods. germany of to-day, as seen by the tourist, is a land of spotted painting, spotted literature, and spotted faces.[3] in the little university town of jena the incongruities of modern germany are curiously conspicuous. in this historic stronghold of protestantism, this leader in the enlightenment, the home of goethe, schiller, novalis, fichte, the humboldts, hegel, schelling, and wieland, the barbarous customs of the past have the strongest hold. a student is likely to miss his seven o'clock wednesday lecture on the spiritual life because he sat up till two o'clock drinking compulsory beer with his corps brothers in the middle of the marketplace. and he may cut out his eight o'clock saturday lecture because he has an imperative engagement to cut off the nose or the ear of a fellow student at the mensurort of döllnitz. among the nobler manifestations of the spirit of new germany the tourist is likely to take most interest in the architecture. here, indeed, he will find much that is displeasing and eccentric, but that in itself is encouraging, for it shows that we are in the presence of a living art which is not content to keep to the safe and beaten paths, but would strike out new ways for itself. in city and country unexpected forms and colors delight the eye on villa, monument, and public building; new and ingenious solutions of problems as old as man. the modern german architect is not the imitator, but the rival, of the master builders of the past. he knows how to harmonize the old with the new, utilizing the old to give him inspiration, but not permitting it to hamper him. a striking example of this is the new university buildings of jena, erected on the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the university in 1908. the whole group cost only three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, not so much as some single buildings in our leading universities, yet i know of none more satisfactory from both the utilitarian and the esthetic point of view. here the problem of harmonization was particularly difficult; not only must the new buildings fit into the picture of old jena, but a tower of the ancient ducal castle was actually to be incorporated. yet the architect, theodor fischer, has made no sacrifices to the spirit of antiquity. at oxford the newer buildings either clash violently with their elders or imitate them so closely as to be almost equally inconvenient and uncomfortable. the jena buildings look as though they might well have been built by kurfürst johann friedrich der grossmütige in 1558, but are up to date, commodious, hygienic, well ventilated, steam heated, equipped with electric lights and clocks, and electric vacuum cleaners. there are no superfluous statues stuck around in niches and on pedestals. the adornment, plastic and polychromatic, is strictly structural. it is put where it belongs. with the possible exception of a rodin bust of minerva in the vestibule, i did not see any "objects of art" that i could have carried off without tearing down the building. on the stone of the north façade are roughly chiseled the ephesian diana in the gable, and, beneath, four egyptian-like figures representing the four faculties. that of _philosophie_, with solemn and inscrutable face, is very appropriately nearest to the lecture room of professor eucken. as we enter we see opposite the portal to the _aula_, the university hall of state, on either side of which are gigantic paintings emblematic of the transmission of culture, a grown man on one side holding out his torch to a young man, that he may light his torch by it. the most important picture at the jena university is the _auszug deutscher studenten im jahre 1815_ by hodler, who used as a model for the middle figure the youngest son of professor eucken. auditorium number 1, the largest classroom of the new building, is assigned to eucken, and we find it already about half filled, although it is not yet seven o'clock in the morning. some seventy students i count, and among them about a dozen women, not segregated, but scattered here and there, for jena is coeducational now, and masculine resentment at the intrusion of women has quite died out. the students may seat themselves wherever they choose, affixing a card with name and hour if they want to hold a particular place. these cards and even the desks are scrawled with automatic writing and sketches by the inattentive hands of students. the seats, long benches with a fixed desk and book rack in front, are better than those found in english universities, but not so good as the american individual seats. there are plenty of windows along one side of the room, and the walls--white above, light green below--diffuse the rays agreeably. the floor slants down to a plain pine desk and a small blackboard. on the wall is a mosaic portrait of the late professor abbé, the real patron of the university, for a prosperous optician is of much more use to a modern university than a needy gross-herzog. promptly on the hour a vigorous shuffling and stamping of feet announces the arrival of the professor, who begins with "_mein' herren und damen_" as his first foot steps upon the platform. a german professor always gives good measure, a full hourful, pressed down, shaken together, and running over; no period of preliminary meditation on what he shall say and of casual conversation at the end, as often in america. nor do the german professors find it necessary to adopt the low voice, indifferent air and hesitating utterance regarded at oxford and harvard as the mark of the gentleman and the scholar. in fact i find, in roaming about our universities, that so many of our younger men have adopted this pitch and tempo, being often inaudible and never impressive to the back seats, that i am tempted to lay down the law that the younger the instructor the poorer the voice. when i complain of it they reply coldly: "one can never shout and tell the truth." but eucken is evidently not afraid that being heard will impair his veracity. you might take him for a revivalist. you would not be wrong if you did. his voice rings out loud and clear. he is tremendously in earnest. occasionally, when he thinks of it, he sits down. but not for long. he springs to his feet and throws himself forward on the reading-desk in the effort to really reach his audience. he clasps his hands to his breast and then throws his arms out wide, as though to seize the _geistesleben_ with which his heart is overflowing and spread it far over a materialistic and indifferent generation. who can doubt the reality of "the spiritual life" after he has seen eucken? it shines in his face. we do not need to be told that activism is his philosophy. it shows in his movements. he lives his theories. few philosophers do, luckily for most of them. "happiness" is the subject of this lecture. the spiritual life is the theme of it, as always. the spiritual life, he says, goes out from within and transforms the world, thus giving true happiness. we must work with the world movement if we would partake of its divine purpose. and here he quotes plotinus, the first religious philosopher, for whom he has as high regard as have maeterlinck and bergson. we must utilize the force of faith; must bring this christian power into modern life. true ability is moral ability. labor is not merely activity; it has a purpose; it is directed against opposition. by strife and striving we must reach the reality of the spiritual life. through labor and love we attain our true selves. the fulfilling of duty is inner freedom. the unrest and stress of the present day are the signs of a new spiritual birth. the function of philosophy is not to afford intellectual or esthetic gratification, but it is to deepen and enrich life. to the fine old german saying, "a man is more than his work", eucken added "mankind is more than his culture." it is a _lebensanschauung_ rather than a _weltanschauung_ that he teaches, for to him a theory of life is more important than a theory of the cosmos. these are merely a few fragmentary thoughts that i gathered in that memorable hour. of no value in themselves, i give them merely to prove that i got something out of the lecture, for i never understood spoken german until i heard eucken. but even a deaf man would have found it profitable to be there. a second lecture followed immediately, on "pessimism and optimism", delivered with the same vigor and listened to with the same interest. professor eucken was then sixty-seven years old, and would have been carnegied if he were in an american university, instead of giving lectures from seven to nine. his hair and beard are pure white, but set off handsomely his pink cheeks and his bright blue eyes still unspectacled. and when he leaves the lecture room he does not leave his work, but goes to more of it at home. on one wall of his study is a photograph of michael angelo's "creation", from the sistine chapel, and on the opposite a cast of a section of the parthenon frieze. between these is the desk of the man who has brought together the highest aspirations of greek and christian culture; a table stacked high with papers and manuscripts. his correspondence is now voluminous, but he answers all letters promptly and carefully, writing his replies in the old-fashioned way, with a pen. he receives all visitors and will talk of his philosophy to a single auditor with the same unwearied enthusiasm as to an audience. even those who are repelled by the severity of his literary style are attracted by the charm of his personality, and this accounts in large part for his devoted following in all parts of the world. after granting me an interview which took the heart out of his afternoon, professor eucken returned good for evil by inviting me to dinner in the evening, when i found that the lady on my right was from nebraska and the one on my left from switzerland, while around the table i saw a young boer from the transvaal, a don from oxford, a professor from tokyo, and representatives of i don't know how many other nationalities. [illustration: mit beste grüssen ihr ... rudolf eucken] the extension of the influence of professor eucken through this hearty hospitality is due largely to his wife. frau eucken has happily not confined herself to the duties which the kaiser prescribes as woman's only sphere, _kirche, kueche und kinder_.[4] she is not only wife, mother and housekeeper, but artist and musician as well. her success in managing what might be called an international salon of philosophy is facilitated by her ability to converse in many languages. on account of the generous hospitality extended to students and strangers by the eucken household a removal was made last year to a new villa in the suburbs. professor eucken's wife and daughter came with him on his visit to america. eucken's philosophy of life is dramatic. his life has been undramatic; the even, ordered course of the typical german professor, made even more uneventful by reason of his mastery of the gentle art of not making enemies. born in aurich, east friesland, january 5, 1846, he studied at göttingen under lotze, and at berlin under trendelenburg; taught for four years in a _gymnasium_; then for three years in the university of basel; in 1874 was called to the university of jena, where he has ever since remained, in spite of calls to larger institutions. his inner life has been as uneventful as its external aspects; a continuous, methodical, logical development of thought, without leaps or backslidings. first, in 1878, he laid the foundations in the study of the concepts of philosophy which attracted the attention of president porter. seven years later he was ready to outline his own guiding theory in a volume bearing the characteristically germanic title of "a prolegomena for the investigation of the unity of the spiritual life in the consciousness and acts of mankind." from this standpoint of the unique significance of the spiritual life he then reviewed the whole history of the evolution of philosophy from plato to nietzsche. his purpose in this work, known in english as "the problem of human life", was, as he explains, "to afford historical confirmation of the view that conceptions are determined by life, not life by conceptions", and "that human destinies are not decided by mere opinions and whims, either of individuals or of masses of individuals, but rather that they are ruled by spiritual necessities with a spiritual aim and purport, and that for man a new world dawns, transcending the merely natural domain--the world, namely, of the spiritual life." the sentences quoted are alone enough to show that eucken's "history of philosophy" is a very different thing from what usually goes by that name, that is the chronicling of the speculations of successive generations of metaphysicians, each one wiping clean the slate before he began to write. eucken sees an aim and purpose in philosophic thought. he does not regard it as a mere amusement or as an intellectual exercise, but rather as a method by which humanity may grow into a higher sphere of existence. the vital need of the day, then, is to awaken the present indifferent and busy generation to a realization of the supreme importance of spiritual things and to the necessity of bringing the christian religion into vital connection with modern thought. this is the task to which eucken devoted his energies when by the close of the nineteenth century he had fully matured his views, and the rapid succession of volumes which have since come from his pen are concerned with the moral and intellectual difficulties which nowadays impede religious progress. the development of natural science and especially the theory of evolution have led to the identification of man with nature. yet the very fact that we have come to know that we belong to nature shows that we are more than nature. a transcendence of nature is already accomplished in the process of thought. a consideration of all the facts leads us to the result that a life consisting solely of nature and intelligence involves an intolerable inconsistency; form and content are sharply separated from each other; thought is strong enough to disturb the sense of satisfaction with nature, but is too weak to construct a new world in opposition to it. life is in a state of painful uncertainty and man is a prometheus bound in that he must experience all the constraint and meaninglessness of the life of nature, and must suffer therefrom an increasing pain without being able to change this state in any way.[5] from time to time in the course of history, spiritual impulses arise which are fundamentally different from physical self-preservation. "they force human activity into particular channels; they speak to us with a tone of command and require absolute obedience. neither the interests of individuals nor those of whole classes prevail against them; every consideration of utility vanishes before their inner necessity." religious movements show life in a particular form; something emerges in it which, unconcerned with the weal and the woe of man, follows its own course and makes absolute demands. man is not altogether the creature of his environment, nor are his moral standards determined by society. the individual is able in the light of his own conscience to approve and value something which all around him reject; and conversely to condemn and reject something which all around him esteem and respect. this opposition of individuals to the condition of things in the social environment has been the main source of all inner progress in matters of morality. this line of thought leads eucken to the conclusion that a new life distinct from that of nature arises in our soul. the spiritual life is not the product of a gradual development from the life of nature, but has an independent origin and evolves new powers and standards. we must recognize in the spiritual life a universal life which transcends man, is shared by him and raises him to itself. the philosophical treatment of history ought first of all to trace the liberation of life from the mere human; the inner elevation of our being to a more than human. in discussing the question of how man attains the spiritual life, eucken steers carefully between the position of buddhism, that each man must work out his own salvation without any aid from above, and the extreme calvinistic position, that man is purely passive and altogether undeserving. or to quote his own words: it is necessary to acknowledge that in all the spiritual movement which appears in the domain of man, there is a revelation of the spiritual world; as merely human power cannot lead the whole to new heights, in all development of the spiritual life the communication of the new world must precede the activity of man. at the same time, where we are concerned with a life that is independent, and of which the activity is conscious and self-determined, the change cannot possibly merely _happen_ to man; it must be taken up by his own activity; it needs his own decision and acceptance. only through ceaseless activity can life remain at the height to which it has attained. this leads to the distinctive form of eucken's philosophy of life, known as activism. this is like pragmatism in its rejection of the mere intellectualistic view of life and in basing truth upon a more spontaneous and essential activity. but eucken's objection to pragmatism is stated in the following language: pragmatism, which has recently made so much headway among english-speaking peoples and beyond them, is more inclined to shape the world and life in accordance with human conditions and needs than to invest spiritual activity with an independence in relation to these, and apply its standards to the testing and sifting of the whole content of human life. at its highest, religion has always been concerned with winning a new world and a new humanity, not with the achievement of something within the old world and for the old humanity. it will be seen that eucken does not fall in with the tendency of the times to subordinate the individual to society. the spiritual life springs up, not in the "social consciousness", but in the soul of the individual, elevating his spiritual nature above all environment. but such a person is guarded against the arrogance of a superman by realizing that this superiority is not due to personal merit, but solely to the presence of the spiritual world. this, as eucken recognizes, may be called a form of mysticism, but it differs decidedly from the older mysticism in some important respects. it is not quietism, but its opposite, activism. eucken does not regard the individual as seeking a peaceful haven by absorption into the infinite; on the contrary, the infinite enters the individual and rouses him to intensest and creative activity. here eucken shows a striking similarity to bergson. the _geistesleben_ might be regarded as a higher development or manifestation of the _élan vital_. both involve the conception of an upward impulse acting at individual points which thus become centers of spontaneous vital activity. it is curious that this view, so characteristically modern and as novel as anything can be in the realm of metaphysical speculation, should have simultaneously and independently been made a fundamental doctrine by two philosophers so unlike in temperament and training, the french philosopher starting from the standpoint of mathematical physics and spencerian evolution, and the german from academic metaphysics and christian theology. such a coincidence, as well as the reception which the teachings of bergson and eucken have received in many lands, show that their common principle is in harmony with the spirit of the age. eucken and bergson met for the first time at columbia university in 1912. it might be feared that eucken, emphasizing as he does the individualistic origin of religious inspiration and realizing as he does the injury done to the christian cause by clinging to antiquated formulas and medieval conceptions, would be inclined to undervalue ecclesiastical institutions and to advocate too violent a break with historic christianity. but here again his moderation and sanity are manifest. he cannot be called orthodox from the standpoint of the established lutheran church. he agrees entirely with his colleague haeckel in condemning the union of church and state, but for opposite reasons; haeckel because the church receives thereby artificial support; eucken because the church is thereby hampered in its freedom of development. he never, however, falls into the error of thinking that a "new" religion can be made to order to suit the times, or even the needs of any one person. he finds in historic christianity all the essentials of a permanent and universal religion, capable, when properly understood and presented, of satisfying the severe requirements of modern thought and feeling. but this is not to be accomplished by merely eliminating whatever the modern mind finds objectionable. a religion is not primarily a mere theory concerning things human and divine--such a theory can, of course, be quite easily put together with a little ingenuity--it discloses ultimate revelations of the spiritual life, further developments of reality, great organizations of living energy, movements, in a word, which have convulsed the age in which they came victoriously to birth, and have subsequently proved themselves strong enough to attract large portions of mankind, weld each of these inwardly together, and set an invisible world before it as the main basis of life. in such upheavals of the life of the people there is opened a rich mine of fact which becomes the property of all men, and includes valuable experiences of humanity as a whole. he who would cut himself off from this great stream of experience, inward as well as outward, will soon find out how little the isolated individual can do in matters of this kind. it is easy to find fault with what tradition hands down, no less easy to draw up vague views of one's own, but how immense is the distance which separates procedure such as this from the creative effort which urges its sure way forward, from the synthesis which embraces all men's lives and exercises an elemental compulsion upon them.[6] eucken's clairvoyant faith sees through the present anti-religious atmosphere the dawning of a new era in which the spiritual life shall again be dominant. yet no one has recognized more clearly the alienation of the church from the cultural and the practical life of the day. this chasm is no doubt greater in germany, where the catholic and protestant churches are state institutions and identified with reactionary elements, than it is in our own country, where there is fortunately no church, but many churches, all equally free to adapt themselves to changing conditions and to prove themselves useful to society in their own way. but it must be admitted that our churches are not availing themselves of this exceptional freedom and do not show the originality and diversity which is characteristic of life and growth. eucken is conciliatory, but no compromiser. he does not solicit for religion a humble place in modern life by using arguments like those employed in the sale of "patent medicines", that it is innocuous at the least and may somehow do some good. he meets modern science upon her own ground. he claims for religion an equal practicality and efficiency; he demands for it a greater certitude, and he is willing, as jesus was willing, to put it to the pragmatic test. since we have found that religion is linked thus closely with the whole, we need not make any timid compromise with certain superficial contemporary movements and content ourselves with a lower degree of certainty, saying, for instance, that we can never altogether eliminate the subjective element, and that religious truths can never have the certainty of such formulae as 2 x 2 = 4. on the contrary, we maintain that it is a very poor conception of religion which deems any certainty superior to hers, and does not claim for her truth a far more primary certainty than that of the formula 2 x 2 = 4. only a shallow and perverse conception of truth can allow the certainty of the part to exceed the certainty of the whole.[7] either religion is merely a product of human wishes and ideas under the sanction of tradition and social convention--and then neither art nor might nor cunning can prevent so frail a fabrication from being whelmed by the advancing spiritual tide--or else religion is based on facts of a suprahuman order, and in that case the most violent onslaught cannot shake her; rather will it help her in the end, through all the stress and toil of human circumstance, to discover where her true strength lies, and to express in purer ways the eternal truth that is in her.[8] postscript, 1917 i have thought best to leave the article on eucken just as i published it in _the independent_ of february 27, 1913, with only a few slight changes in tense and time references. it presents a picture of german life and thought as i saw it shortly before the war, and it would be impossible for me to bring it up to date now when the british censorship prevents german books and papers from reaching america. i can only add some quotations from eucken's recent writings to show his attitude toward the war. in the fall of 1914, eucken joined with his colleague in the university and his opponent in philosophy, professor ernst haeckel, in a public statement charging that british greed and egotism had caused the great war.[9] in the following spring eucken sent an appeal to the american people in the form of eight questions which i quote entire. you say that we are a nation militarist and greedy for conquest. permit us a few questions with regard to that rash statement. first.--how do you explain that in times gone by germany did not take advantage of the difficulties of her present opponents--as, for instance, england's difficulty during the boer war or russia's difficulty during the japanese war? if we had meant conquest should we have chosen the very moment when half the world was against us, and we were numerically in the minority? do you really think that we are as stupid as all that? second.--next, how do you explain that all parties in germany approve of the policy of the government and loyally hold together, including the social democrats? yesterday they were our decided opponents. do you believe that the socialists have overnight, as it were, become changed from decided opponents to adherents of militarism? third.--how do you explain the fact that the americans who were in germany at the outbreak of the war in an overwhelming majority sided with us? does not the opinion of those who see events quite near--nay, who live through them--carry greater weight than the view of such as observe occurrences from a remote distance? fourth.--you believe that the germans are oppressed and narrowed down by the rule of militarism. how do you explain that education and technical and scientific research are so highly developed and universally esteemed in germany and that for this reason so many americans come to germany in order to study sciences and arts? fifth.--you always discuss war with regard to belgium, france and england only. have you forgotten russia, with her one hundred and fifty million inhabitants and her army, which is by far the largest in the whole world? russia is a danger to germany and to the whole of europe and just now insists on the possession of constantinople. have you forgotten that russia, by interfering with the servian murder case, began the war, and that england, according to the parliamentary statement made by foreign secretary sir edward grey, was determined, even before the german invasion of belgium, to abandon her neutrality in favor of france? sixth.--you generally argue that all europe was in profound peace and that only the greed of germany disturbed that peace. have you forgotten that long before the war there was a triple entente which was directed against germany and that the entente newspapers openly discussed the war plans hatched against germany and even recommended 1916 as a suitable year for commencing hostilities? seventh.--you want to be good christians and as such work for peace among the nations. can you reconcile such christianity with the fact that your country sends huge consignments of arms and ammunition to our opponents and thus intensifies and lengthens the war? can you further reconcile that with neutrality, a neutrality in spirit and not merely in the letter? eighth.--do not you think that a great nation with a glorious past should see the events of the day with its own eyes and that such independence of thought is the highest test of true liberty? but you contemplate present history more or less through english spectacles, as if your country were still a british colony and not an independent empire with its own goals and standards. in such a passion-stirred age as ours neutrals have the lofty duty to keep out of party strife and to endeavor to be just and impartial to both sides. this endeavor is lacking in germany's american opponents. that even the antagonisms aroused by the war have not shaken eucken's faith in the power of religion and philosophy to heal the wounds of humanity is shown by a recent article on "the international character of modern philosophy" in the _homiletic review_ of new york. in this he discusses with great impartiality the contributions which england, france, germany, and italy have made to philosophy and concludes as follows: after all, philosophy is summoned to proclaim the unity of mankind over against the present split among the peoples. to be sure, this does not mean that individual philosophers are less earnest to put forward the claims of their own people than the claims of others; for they are not mere scholars, they are also living men and citizens of their own nation. when they see this assaulted and its existence put in peril, it is for them a holy duty to come to the defense of the fatherland--if not with the weapons of war, at least to do their best with the weapons of the intellect. meanwhile, the belief is entirely proper that the intellectual gains which are the result of philosophical labor remain unharmed by war, that a realm of intellectual creation will retain full recognition beyond the enmities of man. keenest blame is deserved by the attempt to array against each other the intellectual leaders of a people which is for the moment a foe, or to disparage the entire mental character of the opponent. that is the stamp of a small and vengeful disposition--he who aims to depreciate others to whom great thanks are due dishonors himself. let each, therefore, remain true to his own people, but never forget the task and aim of philosophy--to consider things under the form of perpetuity, maintaining for humanity in the present a world superior to all the littlenesses of human action. a further and much more weighty task is from this arising for philosophy--to work mightily for the inner unity of human life and endeavor; the lack of such a unity has contributed not a little to whet the antagonisms of the nations.... only when we are convinced that we belong together essentially, that we have a great work to accomplish in common and have to raise mankind from the stage of nature to that of intellect--that we have to carry on unitedly a fight against the manifold unreason of life--only by the strengthening and operation of such convictions can the division of humanity into hostile nationalities be successfully withstood. not through elegant addresses and articles, only by means of a dynamic deepening of life and the introduction of new power can we progress in the solution of these problems.[10] how to read eucken eucken is not a man of one book. he has put forth his ideas in many different forms; large volumes and little, works historical, expository, argumentative, theoretical and practical, but his point of view has remained throughout his long productive career essentially unchanged, and is so clearly indicated in all his works that one may be sure of obtaining the fundamental principles of his philosophy from whatever volume he selects. if, however, i am expected to prescribe a particular book as an introduction to eucken, i should say that the general reader who is interested in the relation of philosophy to religion--and one who is not interested in that would not care to read eucken anyway--would find "christianity and the new idealism" (translated by lucy judge gibson and w. r. boyce gibson, harper) most suitable for the purpose. it is a small volume, as easy reading as anything of eucken's, and discusses frankly the present crisis in religious thought and indicates what he believes the churches ought to discard and what they must maintain of their inherited doctrines and forms. "the truth of religion" (translated by w. tudor jones, putnam) covers similar ground, but in a more thorough and theoretical manner. the volumes entitled in their english version "the meaning and value of life" (gibson translation, macmillan); "the life of the spirit" (translated by f. l. pogson, putnam), are intended for the non-philosophical reader; while "life's basis and life's ideals" (translated by alban g. widgery, macmillan); "main currents of modern thought: a study of the spiritual and intellectual movements of the present day" (translated by meyrick booth, scribner); and "the contest for the spiritual life" (putnam) are of a more technical character. "the problem of human life as viewed by great thinkers from plato to the present time" (translated by williston s. hough and w. r. boyce gibson, scribner) differs decidedly from the ordinary history of philosophy in that the author is not trying to set at odds and overthrow the successive philosophers, but is seeking for whatever in them is good and permanent, finally coming to "see them linked together as workers in one common task: the task of building up a spiritual world within the realm of human life, of proving our existence to be both spiritual and natural." single lectures and articles by eucken readily accessible in english are: "religion and life" (putnam); "back to religion" (pilgrim press); "can we still be christians?" (macmillan); "naturalism or idealism" (the nobel lecture). twenty of his papers are included in "collected essays of rudolf eucken" (scribner, 1914). the titles of eucken's chief works in german and in the english versions are as follows: "die grundbegriffe der gegenwart" (the main currents of modern thought), 1878; "die einheit des geisteslebens in bewusstsein und tat der menschheit", 1888; "die lebensanschauungen der grossen denker" (the problem of human life), 1890; "der kampf um einen geistigen lebensinhalt", 1896; "der wahrheitsgehalt der religion" (the truth of religion), 1901; "grundlinien einer neuen lebensanschauung" (life's basis and life's ideal), 1907; "hauptprobleme der religionsphilosophie der gegenwart" (christianity and the new idealism), 1907; "sinn und wert des lebens" (the meaning and value of life), 1905; "einführung in eine philosophie des geisteslebens" (the life of the spirit), 1908; "erkennen und leben" (knowledge and life, 1912). of the numerous books and articles about eucken which have appeared in europe, it will be sufficient to mention: "rudolf eucken. die erneuerer des deutschen idealismus", by theodor kappstein (berlin-schöneberg: bucherlag der "hilfe"); "rudolf eucken's werk, eine neue idealistische lösung des lebensproblems", by kurt kesseler (bunzlau: kreuschmer, 1911); "eucken's dramatische lebensphilosophie", by otto braun (_zeitschrift für philosophie und philosophische kritik_, 1909); "rudolf eucken's christenthum", by ludwig von gerdtell (verlag von becker). on eucken's seventieth birthday, january 5, 1916, the _zeitschrift für philosophie_ published a _festschrift_ devoted to his work. "la philosophie de m. rudolph eucken", by emile boutroux (_académie des sciences morales et politiques_, 1910). it is unnecessary to give a list of articles about eucken in american magazines because any library that contains the files will have a periodical index, but a few references may be given: "religious philosophy of eucken", harvard theological review (vol. 2, p. 465, 1909); "eucken and st. paul", by richard roberts, _contemporary review_ (vol. 97, p. 71); "religious philosophy of eucken", by baron f. von hügel, _hibbert journal_ (vol. 10, p. 660); "eucken's philosophy of life", by w. fite, the nation (vol. 95, p. 29); "eucken's new gospel of activism", _current literature_ (vol. 53, p. 67); "idealism of rudolf eucken", by s. h. mellone, _international journal of ethics_ (vol. 21, p. 15). there are two excellent expositions of eucken's philosophy in english, by his students and translators: "rudolf eucken's philosophy of life", by w. r. boyce gibson (macmillan), and "an interpretation of rudolf eucken's philosophy", by w. tudor jones (putnam). a briefer compendium, "eucken: a philosophy of life", by a. j. jones, has appeared in a series of handy volumes known as "the people's books" (new york: dodge publishing company). meyrick booth (ph.d. of jena) has published "rudolf eucken: his philosophy and influence," london (unwin, 1913). [1] "the fundamental concepts of modern philosophic thought, critically and historically considered" by rudolf eucken, professor in jena. translated by m. stuart phelps, professor in smith college. with additions and corrections by the author and an introduction by noah porter, president of yale college. appleton, 1880. [2] so says professor heinrich weinel in an interesting article on "religious life and thought in germany to-day", in the _hibbert journal_, july, 1909. [3] my visit to jena, described in the following pages, was made in 1910. [4] these must, i suppose, be translated into english as "kirk, kitchen and kids." [5] "life's basis and life's ideal", p. 118. [6] "christianity and the new idealism", p. 146. [7] "christianity and the new idealism", p. 28. [8] "the truth of religion." [9] published in _the independent_, september 28, 1914. [10] "the international character of modern philosophy," _homiletic review_, april, 1916. what i saw in america by g. k. chesterton hodder and stoughton limited london mcmxxii printed in great britain by t. and a. constable ltd. at the edinburgh university press _contents_ page what is america? 1 a meditation in a new york hotel 19 a meditation in broadway 33 irish and other interviewers 47 some american cities 63 in the american country 80 the american business man 97 presidents and problems 121 prohibition in fact and fancy 145 fads and public opinion 163 the extraordinary american 182 the republican in the ruins 195 is the atlantic narrowing? 208 lincoln and lost causes 222 wells and the world state 235 a new martin chuzzlewit 253 the spirit of america 267 the spirit of england 281 the future of democracy 295 _what is america?_ i have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. at least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving laplanders, embracing chinamen, and clasping patagonians to his heart in hampstead or surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. this is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. the human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. on the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. man is inside all men. in a real sense any man may be inside any men. but to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside. so long as he thought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. by going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand each other. in reality that is the moment of supreme danger--the moment when they meet. we might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel. travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travellers are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. i do not blame them for being amused; it is perfectly natural to be amused at a dutchman for being dutch or a chinaman for being chinese. where they are wrong is that they take their own amusement seriously. they base on it their serious ideas of international instruction. it was said that the englishman takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despising foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. he comes to scoff and does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate. hence in international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too much sneering. but i believe that there is a better way which largely consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is actually founded on differences. to hint at some such better way is the only excuse of this book. let me begin my american impressions with two impressions i had before i went to america. one was an incident and the other an idea; and when taken together they illustrate the attitude i mean. the first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny. the reaction of his senses and superficial habits of mind against something new, and to him abnormal, is a perfectly healthy reaction. but the mind which imagines that mere unfamiliarity can possibly prove anything about inferiority is a very inadequate mind. it is inadequate even in criticising things that may really be inferior to the things involved here. it is far better to laugh at a negro for having a black face than to sneer at him for having a sloping skull. it is proportionally even more preferable to laugh rather than judge in dealing with highly civilised peoples. therefore i put at the beginning two working examples of what i felt about america before i saw it; the sort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy as a joke, and the sort of thing he has a duty to understand and respect, because it is the explanation of the joke. when i went to the american consulate to regularise my passports, i was capable of expecting the american consulate to be american. embassies and consulates are by tradition like islands of the soil for which they stand; and i have often found the tradition corresponding to a truth. i have seen the unmistakable french official living on omelettes and a little wine and serving his sacred abstractions under the last palm-trees fringing a desert. in the heat and noise of quarrelling turks and egyptians, i have come suddenly, as with the cool shock of his own shower-bath, on the listless amiability of the english gentleman. the officials i interviewed were very american, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of martin chuzzlewit, i have always found americans by far the politest people in the world. they put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all appearance like other forms i had filled up in other passport offices. but in reality it was very different from any form i had ever filled up in my life. at least it was a little like a freer form of the game called 'confessions' which my friends and i invented in our youth; an examination paper containing questions like, 'if you saw a rhinoceros in the front garden, what would you do?' one of my friends, i remember, wrote, 'take the pledge.' but that is another story, and might bring mr. pussyfoot johnson on the scene before his time. one of the questions on the paper was, 'are you an anarchist?' to which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, 'what the devil has that to do with you? are you an atheist?' along with some playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes an [greek: archê]. then there was the question, 'are you in favour of subverting the government of the united states by force?' against this i should write, 'i prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning.' the inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity, had then written down, 'are you a polygamist?' the answer to this is, 'no such luck' or 'not such a fool,' according to our experience of the other sex. but perhaps a better answer would be that given to w. t. stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, 'shall i slay my brother boer?'--the answer that ran, 'never interfere in family matters.' but among many things that amused me almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully. i like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip into america with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to write with a beautiful gravity, 'i am an anarchist. i hate you all and wish to destroy you.' or, 'i intend to subvert by force the government of the united states as soon as possible, sticking the long sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into mr. harding at the earliest opportunity.' or again, 'yes, i am a polygamist all right, and my forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as secretaries.' there seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and they are certain to tell no lies. now that is a model of the sort of foreign practice, founded on foreign problems, at which a man's first impulse is naturally to laugh. nor have i any intention of apologising for my laughter. a man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. what he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. the very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself. superficially this is rather a queer business. it would be easy enough to suggest that in this america has introduced a quite abnormal spirit of inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all the ancient despotisms and aristocracies. about that there will be something to be said later; but superficially it is true that this degree of officialism is comparatively unique. in a journey which i took only the year before i had occasion to have my papers passed by governments which many worthy people in the west would vaguely identify with corsairs and assassins; i have stood on the other side of jordan, in the land ruled by a rude arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the brigands looked like. but they did not ask me whether i had come to subvert the power of the shereef; and they did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of civil authority. these ministers of ancient moslem despotism did not care about whether i was an anarchist; and naturally would not have minded if i had been a polygamist. the arab chief was probably a polygamist himself. these slaves of asiatic autocracy were content, in the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire into my thoughts. they held their power as limited to the limitation of practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. it would be easy to argue here that western democracy persecutes where even eastern despotism tolerates or emancipates. it would be easy to develop the fancy that, as compared with the sultans of turkey or egypt, the american constitution is a thing like the spanish inquisition. only the traveller who stops at that point is totally wrong; and the traveller only too often does stop at that point. he has found something to make him laugh, and he will not suffer it to make him think. and the remedy is not to unsay what he has said, not even, so to speak, to unlaugh what he has laughed, not to deny that there is something unique and curious about this american inquisition into our abstract opinions, but rather to continue the train of thought, and follow the admirable advice of mr. h. g. wells, who said, 'it is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out.' it is not to deny that american officialism is rather peculiar on this point, but to inquire what it really is which makes america peculiar, or which is peculiar to america. in short, it is to get some ultimate idea of what america _is_; and the answer to that question will reveal something much deeper and grander and more worthy of our intelligent interest. it may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the american constitution to the spanish inquisition. but oddly enough, it does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a compliment. the american constitution does resemble the spanish inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. america is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. that creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the declaration of independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. it enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. it certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of god and government it is naturally god whose claim is taken more lightly. the point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things. now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the world. in its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of all men. in its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of all men. this was true of the christian church, which was truly said to exclude neither jew nor greek, but which did definitely substitute something else for jewish religion or greek philosophy. it was truly said to be a net drawing in of all kinds; but a net of a certain pattern, the pattern of peter the fisherman. and this is true even of the most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and true among others of the spanish inquisition. it may have been narrow touching theology, it could not confess to being narrow about nationality or ethnology. the spanish inquisition might be admittedly inquisitorial; but the spanish inquisition could not be merely spanish. such a spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be broader than his own empire. he might burn a philosopher because he was heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. and we see, even in modern times, that the same church which is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. now in a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the same idea at the back of the great american experiment; the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot. but even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. the melting-pot must not melt. the original shape was traced on the lines of jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless. america invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. only, so far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious because it is not racial. the missionary can condemn a cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a sandwich islander. and in something of the same spirit the american may exclude a polygamist, precisely because he cannot exclude a turk. now for america this is no idle theory. it may have been theoretical, though it was thoroughly sincere, when that great virginian gentleman declared it in surroundings that still had something of the character of an english countryside. it is not merely theoretical now. there is nothing to prevent america being literally invaded by turks, as she is invaded by jews or bulgars. in the most exquisitely inconsequent of the _bab ballads_, we are told concerning pasha bailey ben:- one morning knocked at half-past eight a tall red indian at his gate. in turkey, as you 'r' p'raps aware, red indians are extremely rare. but the converse need by no means be true. there is nothing in the nature of things to prevent an emigration of turks increasing and multiplying on the plains where the red indians wandered; there is nothing to necessitate the turks being extremely rare. the red indians, alas, are likely to be rarer. and as i much prefer red indians to turks, not to mention jews, i speak without prejudice; but the point here is that america, partly by original theory and partly by historical accident, does lie open to racial admixtures which most countries would think incongruous or comic. that is why it is only fair to read any american definitions or rules in a certain light, and relatively to a rather unique position. it is not fair to compare the position of those who may meet turks in the back street with that of those who have never met turks except in the _bab ballads_. it is not fair simply to compare america with england in its regulations about the turk. in short, it is not fair to do what almost every englishman probably does; to look at the american international examination paper, and laugh and be satisfied with saying, 'we don't have any of that nonsense in england.' we do not have any of that nonsense in england because we have never attempted to have any of that philosophy in england. and, above all, because we have the enormous advantage of feeling it natural to be national, because there is nothing else to be. england in these days is not well governed; england is not well educated; england suffers from wealth and poverty that are not well distributed. but england is english; _esto perpetua_. england is english as france is french or ireland irish; the great mass of men taking certain national traditions for granted. now this gives us a totally different and a very much easier task. we have not got an inquisition, because we have not got a creed; but it is arguable that we do not need a creed, because we have got a character. in any of the old nations the national unity is preserved by the national type. because we have a type we do not need to have a test. take that innocent question, 'are you an anarchist?' which is intrinsically quite as impudent as 'are you an optimist?' or 'are you a philanthropist?' i am not discussing here whether these things are right, but whether most of us are in a position to know them rightly. now it is quite true that most englishmen do not find it necessary to go about all day asking each other whether they are anarchists. it is quite true that the phrase occurs on no british forms that i have seen. but this is not only because most of the englishmen are not anarchists. it is even more because even the anarchists are englishmen. for instance, it would be easy to make fun of the american formula by noting that the cap would fit all sorts of bald academic heads. it might well be maintained that herbert spencer was an anarchist. it is practically certain that auberon herbert was an anarchist. but herbert spencer was an extraordinarily typical englishman of the nonconformist middle class. and auberon herbert was an extraordinarily typical english aristocrat of the old and genuine aristocracy. every one knew in his heart that the squire would not throw a bomb at the queen, and the nonconformist would not throw a bomb at anybody. every one knew that there was something subconscious in a man like auberon herbert, which would have come out only in throwing bombs at the enemies of england; as it did come out in his son and namesake, the generous and unforgotten, who fell flinging bombs from the sky far beyond the german line. every one knows that normally, in the last resort, the english gentleman is patriotic. every one knows that the english nonconformist is national even when he denies that he is patriotic. nothing is more notable indeed than the fact that nobody is more stamped with the mark of his own nation than the man who says that there ought to be no nations. somebody called cobden the international man; but no man could be more english than cobden. everybody recognises tolstoy as the iconoclast of all patriotism; but nobody could be more russian than tolstoy. in the old countries where there are these national types, the types may be allowed to hold any theories. even if they hold certain theories, they are unlikely to do certain things. so the conscientious objector, in the english sense, may be and is one of the peculiar by-products of england. but the conscientious objector will probably have a conscientious objection to throwing bombs. now i am very far from intending to imply that these american tests are good tests, or that there is no danger of tyranny becoming the temptation of america. i shall have something to say later on about that temptation or tendency. nor do i say that they apply consistently this conception of a nation with the soul of a church, protected by religious and not racial selection. if they did apply that principle consistently, they would have to exclude pessimists and rich cynics who deny the democratic ideal; an excellent thing but a rather improbable one. what i say is that when we realise that this principle exists at all, we see the whole position in a totally different perspective. we say that the americans are doing something heroic, or doing something insane, or doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of simply wondering what the devil they are doing. when we realise the democratic design of such a cosmopolitan commonwealth, and compare it with our insular reliance or instincts, we see at once why such a thing has to be not only democratic but dogmatic. we see why in some points it tends to be inquisitive or intolerant. any one can see the practical point by merely transferring into private life a problem like that of the two academic anarchists, who might by a coincidence be called the two herberts. suppose a man said, 'buffle, my old oxford tutor, wants to meet you; i wish you'd ask him down for a day or two. he has the oddest opinions, but he's very stimulating.' it would not occur to us that the oddity of the oxford don's opinions would lead him to blow up the house; because the oxford don is an english type. suppose somebody said, 'do let me bring old colonel robinson down for the week-end; he's a bit of a crank but quite interesting.' we should not anticipate the colonel running amuck with a carving-knife and offering up human sacrifice in the garden; for these are not among the daily habits of an old english colonel; and because we know his habits, we do not care about his opinions. but suppose somebody offered to bring a person from the interior of kamskatka to stay with us for a week or two, and added that his religion was a very extraordinary religion, we should feel a little more inquisitive about what kind of religion it was. if somebody wished to add a hairy ainu to the family party at christmas, explaining that his point of view was so individual and interesting, we should want to know a little more about it and him. we should be tempted to draw up as fantastic an examination paper as that presented to the emigrant going to america. we should ask what a hairy ainu was, and how hairy he was, and above all what sort of ainu he was. would etiquette require us to ask him to bring his wife? and if we did ask him to bring his wife, how many wives would he bring? in short, as in the american formula, is he a polygamist? merely as a point of housekeeping and accommodation the question is not irrelevant. is the hairy ainu content with hair, or does he wear any clothes? if the police insist on his wearing clothes, will he recognise the authority of the police? in short, as in the american formula, is he an anarchist? of course this generalisation about america, like other historical things, is subject to all sorts of cross divisions and exceptions, to be considered in their place. the negroes are a special problem, because of what white men in the past did to them. the japanese are a special problem, because of what men fear that they in the future may do to white men. the jews are a special problem, because of what they and the gentiles, in the past, present, and future, seem to have the habit of doing to each other. but the point is not that nothing exists in america except this idea; it is that nothing like this idea exists anywhere except in america. this idea is not internationalism; on the contrary it is decidedly nationalism. the americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic americans. but it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. in a word, what is unique is not america but what is called americanisation. we understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to americanise the kamskatkan and the hairy ainu. we are not trying to anglicise thousands of french cooks or italian organ-grinders. france is not trying to gallicise thousands of english trippers or german prisoners of war. america is the one place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. and the process, as i have pointed out, is _not_ internationalisation. it would be truer to say it is the nationalisation of the internationalised. it is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles. this is what at once illuminates and softens the moral regulations which we may really think faddist or fanatical. they are abnormal; but in one sense this experiment of a home for the homeless is abnormal. in short, it has long been recognised that america was an asylum. it is only since prohibition that it has looked a little like a lunatic asylum. it was before sailing for america, as i have said, that i stood with the official paper in my hand and these thoughts in my head. it was while i stood on english soil that i passed through the two stages of smiling and then sympathising; of realising that my momentary amusement, at being asked if i were not an anarchist, was partly due to the fact that i was not an american. and in truth i think there are some things a man ought to know about america before he sees it. what we know of a country beforehand may not affect what we see that it is; but it will vitally affect what we appreciate it for being, because it will vitally affect what we expect it to be. i can honestly say that i had never expected america to be what nine-tenths of the newspaper critics invariably assume it to be. i never thought it was a sort of anglo-saxon colony, knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different colonists. during the war i felt that the very worst propaganda for the allies was the propaganda for the anglo-saxons. i tried to point out that in one way america is nearer to europe than england is. if she is not nearer to bulgaria, she is nearer to bulgars; if she is not nearer to bohemia, she is nearer to bohemians. in my new york hotel the head waiter in the dining-room was a bohemian; the head waiter in the grill-room was a bulgar. americans have nationalities at the end of the street which for us are at the ends of the earth. i did my best to persuade my countrymen not to appeal to the american as if he were a rather dowdy englishman, who had been rusticating in the provinces and had not heard the latest news about the town. i shall record later some of those arresting realities which the traveller does not expect; and which, in some cases i fear, he actually does not see because he does not expect. i shall try to do justice to the psychology of what mr. belloc has called 'eye-openers in travel.' but there are some things about america that a man ought to see even with his eyes shut. one is that a state that came into existence solely through its repudiation and abhorrence of the british crown is not likely to be a respectful copy of the british constitution. another is that the chief mark of the declaration of independence is something that is not only absent from the british constitution, but something which all our constitutionalists have invariably thanked god, with the jolliest boasting and bragging, that they had kept out of the british constitution. it is the thing called abstraction or academic logic. it is the thing which such jolly people call theory; and which those who can practise it call thought. and the theory or thought is the very last to which english people are accustomed, either by their social structure or their traditional teaching. it is the theory of equality. it is the pure classic conception that no man must aspire to be anything more than a citizen, and that no man should endure to be anything less. it is by no means especially intelligible to an englishman, who tends at his best to the virtues of the gentleman and at his worst to the vices of the snob. the idealism of england, or if you will the romance of england, has not been primarily the romance of the citizen. but the idealism of america, we may safely say, still revolves entirely round the citizen and his romance. the realities are quite another matter, and we shall consider in its place the question of whether the ideal will be able to shape the realities or will merely be beaten shapeless by them. the ideal is besieged by inequalities of the most towering and insane description in the industrial and economic field. it may be devoured by modern capitalism, perhaps the worst inequality that ever existed among men. of all that we shall speak later. but citizenship is still the american ideal; there is an army of actualities opposed to that ideal; but there is no ideal opposed to that ideal. american plutocracy has never got itself respected like english aristocracy. citizenship is the american ideal; and it has never been the english ideal. but it is surely an ideal that may stir some imaginative generosity and respect in an englishman, if he will condescend to be also a man. in this vision of moulding many peoples into the visible image of the citizen, he may see a spiritual adventure which he can admire from the outside, at least as much as he admires the valour of the moslems and much more than he admires the virtues of the middle ages. he need not set himself to develop equality, but he need not set himself to misunderstand it. he may at least understand what jefferson and lincoln meant, and he may possibly find some assistance in this task by reading what they said. he may realise that equality is not some crude fairy tale about all men being equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe but cannot believe in anybody believing. it is an absolute of morals by which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity as intangible as death. he may at least be a philosopher and see that equality is an idea; and not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics who, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne in tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other twenty times over, with unwearied iteration, that equality is an illusion. in truth it is inequality that is the illusion. the extreme disproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing of changing lights and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies and distortions. we find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find him forgotten; we see a race dominant and cannot linger to see it decay. it is the experience of men that always returns to the equality of men; it is the average that ultimately justifies the average man. it is when men have seen and suffered much and come at the end of more elaborate experiments, that they see men as men under an equal light of death and daily laughter; and none the less mysterious for being many. nor is it in vain that these western democrats have sought the blazonry of their flag in that great multitude of immortal lights that endure behind the fires we see, and gathered them into the corner of old glory whose ground is like the glittering night. for veritably, in the spirit as well as in the symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our skies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration; and wherever the old shadow stoops upon the earth, the stars return. _a meditation in a new york hotel_ all this must begin with an apology and not an apologia. when i went wandering about the states disguised as a lecturer, i was well aware that i was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. i was even in the worst possible position to be a sight-seer. a lecturer to american audiences can hardly be in the holiday mood of a sight-seer. it is rather the audience that is sight-seeing; even if it is seeing a rather melancholy sight. some say that people come to see the lecturer and not to hear him; in which case it seems rather a pity that he should disturb and distress their minds with a lecture. he might merely display himself on a stand or platform for a stipulated sum; or be exhibited like a monster in a menagerie. the circus elephant is not expected to make a speech. but it is equally true that the circus elephant is not allowed to write a book. his impressions of travel would be somewhat sketchy and perhaps a little over-specialised. in merely travelling from circus to circus he would, so to speak, move in rather narrow circles. jumbo the great elephant (with whom i am hardly so ambitious as to compare myself), before he eventually went to the barnum show, passed a considerable and i trust happy part of his life in regent's park. but if he had written a book on england, founded on his impressions of the zoo, it might have been a little disproportionate and even misleading in its version of the flora and fauna of that country. he might imagine that lions and leopards were commoner than they are in our hedgerows and country lanes, or that the head and neck of a giraffe was as native to our landscapes as a village spire. and that is why i apologise in anticipation for a probable lack of proportion in this work. like the elephant, i may have seen too much of a special enclosure where a special sort of lions are gathered together. i may exaggerate the territorial, as distinct from the vertical space occupied by the spiritual giraffe; for the giraffe may surely be regarded as an example of uplift, and is even, in a manner of speaking, a high-brow. above all, i shall probably make generalisations that are much too general; and are insufficient through being exaggerative. to this sort of doubt all my impressions are subject; and among them the negative generalisation with which i shall begin this rambling meditation on american hotels. in all my american wanderings i never saw such a thing as an inn. they may exist; but they do not arrest the traveller upon every road as they do in england and in europe. the saloons no longer existed when i was there, owing to the recent reform which restricted intoxicants to the wealthier classes. but we feel that the saloons have been there; if one may so express it, their absence is still present. they remain in the structure of the street and the idiom of the language. but the saloons were not inns. if they had been inns, it would have been far harder even for the power of modern plutocracy to root them out. there will be a very different chase when the white hart is hunted to the forests or when the red lion turns to bay. but people could not feel about the american saloon as they will feel about the english inns. they could not feel that the prohibitionist, that vulgar chucker-out, was chucking chaucer out of the tabard and shakespeare out of the mermaid. in justice to the american prohibitionists it must be realised that they were not doing quite such desecration; and that many of them felt the saloon a specially poisonous sort of place. they did feel that drinking-places were used only as drug-shops. so they have effected the great reconstruction, by which it will be necessary to use only drug-shops as drinking-places. but i am not dealing here with the problem of prohibition except in so far as it is involved in the statement that the saloons were in no sense inns. secondly, of course, there are the hotels. there are indeed. there are hotels toppling to the stars, hotels covering the acreage of villages, hotels in multitudinous number like a mob of babylonian or assyrian monuments; but the hotels also are not inns. broadly speaking, there is only one hotel in america. the pattern of it, which is a very rational pattern, is repeated in cities as remote from each other as the capitals of european empires. you may find that hotel rising among the red blooms of the warm spring woods of nebraska, or whitened with canadian snows near the eternal noise of niagara. and before touching on this solid and simple pattern itself, i may remark that the same system of symmetry runs through all the details of the interior. as one hotel is like another hotel, so one hotel floor is like another hotel floor. if the passage outside your bedroom door, or hallway as it is called, contains, let us say, a small table with a green vase and a stuffed flamingo, or some trifle of the sort, you may be perfectly certain that there is exactly the same table, vase, and flamingo on every one of the thirty-two landings of that towering habitation. this is where it differs most perhaps from the crooked landings and unexpected levels of the old english inns, even when they call themselves hotels. to me there was something weird, like a magic multiplication, in the exquisite sameness of these suites. it seemed to suggest the still atmosphere of some eerie psychological story. i once myself entertained the notion of a story, in which a man was to be prevented from entering his house (the scene of some crime or calamity) by people who painted and furnished the next house to look exactly like it; the assimilation going to the most fantastic lengths, such as altering the numbering of houses in the street. i came to america and found an hotel fitted and upholstered throughout for the enactment of my phantasmal fraud. i offer the skeleton of my story with all humility to some of the admirable lady writers of detective stories in america, to miss carolyn wells, or miss mary roberts rhinehart, or mrs. a. k. green of the unforgotten leavenworth case. surely it might be possible for the unsophisticated nimrod k. moose, of yellow dog flat, to come to new york and be entangled somehow in this net of repetitions or recurrences. surely something tells me that his beautiful daughter, the rose of red murder gulch, might seek for him in vain amid the apparently unmistakable surroundings of the thirty-second floor, while he was being quietly butchered by the floor-clerk on the thirty-third floor, an agent of the green claw (that formidable organisation); and all because the two floors looked exactly alike to the virginal western eye. the original point of my own story was that the man to be entrapped walked into his own house after all, in spite of it being differently painted and numbered, simply because he was absent-minded and used to taking a certain number of mechanical steps. this would not work in the hotel; because a lift has no habits. it is typical of the real tameness of machinery, that even when we talk of a man turning mechanically we only talk metaphorically; for it is something that a mechanism cannot do. but i think there is only one real objection to my story of mr. moose in the new york hotel. and that is unfortunately a rather fatal one. it is that far away in the remote desolation of yellow dog, among those outlying and outlandish rocks that almost seem to rise beyond the sunset, there is undoubtedly an hotel of exactly the same sort, with all its floors exactly the same. anyhow the general plan of the american hotel is commonly the same, and, as i have said, it is a very sound one so far as it goes. when i first went into one of the big new york hotels, the first impression was certainly its bigness. it was called the biltmore; and i wondered how many national humorists had made the obvious comment of wishing they had built less. but it was not merely the babylonian size and scale of such things, it was the way in which they are used. they are used almost as public streets, or rather as public squares. my first impression was that i was in some sort of high street or market-place during a carnival or a revolution. true, the people looked rather rich for a revolution and rather grave for a carnival; but they were congested in great crowds that moved slowly like people passing through an overcrowded railway station. even in the dizzy heights of such a sky-scraper there could not possibly be room for all those people to sleep in the hotel, or even to dine in it. and, as a matter of fact, they did nothing whatever except drift into it and drift out again. most of them had no more to do with the hotel than i have with buckingham palace. i have never been in buckingham palace, and i have very seldom, thank god, been in the big hotels of this type that exist in london or paris. but i cannot believe that mobs are perpetually pouring through the hotel cecil or the savoy in this fashion, calmly coming in at one door and going out of the other. but this fact is part of the fundamental structure of the american hotel; it is built upon a compromise that makes it possible. the whole of the lower floor is thrown open to the public streets and treated as a public square. but above it and all round it runs another floor in the form of a sort of deep gallery, furnished more luxuriously and looking down on the moving mobs beneath. no one is allowed on this floor except the guests or clients of the hotel. as i have been one of them myself, i trust it is not unsympathetic to compare them to active anthropoids who can climb trees, and so look down in safety on the herds or packs of wilder animals wandering and prowling below. of course there are modifications of this architectural plan, but they are generally approximations to it; it is the plan that seems to suit the social life of the american cities. there is generally something like a ground floor that is more public, a half-floor or gallery above that is more private, and above that the bulk of the block of bedrooms, the huge hive with its innumerable and identical cells. the ladder of ascent in this tower is of course the lift, or, as it is called, the elevator. with all that we hear of american hustle and hurry it is rather strange that americans seem to like more than we do to linger upon long words. and indeed there is an element of delay in their diction and spirit, very little understood, which i may discuss elsewhere. anyhow they say elevator when we say lift, just as they say automobile when we say motor and stenographer when we say typist, or sometimes (by a slight confusion) typewriter. which reminds me of another story that never existed, about a man who was accused of having murdered and dismembered his secretary when he had only taken his typing machine to pieces; but we must not dwell on these digressions. the americans may have another reason for giving long and ceremonious titles to the lift. when first i came among them i had a suspicion that they possessed and practised a new and secret religion, which was the cult of the elevator. i fancied they worshipped the lift, or at any rate worshipped in the lift. the details or data of this suspicion it were now vain to collect, as i have regretfully abandoned it, except in so far as they illustrate the social principles underlying the structural plan of the building. now an american gentleman invariably takes off his hat in the lift. he does not take off his hat in the hotel, even if it is crowded with ladies. but he always so salutes a lady in the elevator; and this marks the difference of atmosphere. the lift is a room, but the hotel is a street. but during my first delusion, of course, i assumed that he uncovered in this tiny temple merely because he was in church. there is something about the very word elevator that expresses a great deal of his vague but idealistic religion. perhaps that flying chapel will eventually be ritualistically decorated like a chapel; possibly with a symbolic scheme of wings. perhaps a brief religious service will be held in the elevator as it ascends; in a few well-chosen words touching the utmost for the highest. possibly he would consent even to call the elevator a lift, if he could call it an uplift. there would be no difficulty, except what i cannot but regard as the chief moral problem of all optimistic modernism. i mean the difficulty of imagining a lift which is free to go up, if it is not also free to go down. i think i know my american friends and acquaintances too well to apologise for any levity in these illustrations. americans make fun of their own institutions; and their own journalism is full of such fanciful conjectures. the tall building is itself artistically akin to the tall story. the very word sky-scraper is an admirable example of an american lie. but i can testify quite as eagerly to the solid and sensible advantages of the symmetrical hotel. it is not only a pattern of vases and stuffed flamingoes; it is also an equally accurate pattern of cupboards and baths. it is a dignified and humane custom to have a bathroom attached to every bedroom; and my impulse to sing the praises of it brought me once at least into a rather quaint complication. i think it was in the city of dayton; anyhow i remember there was a laundry convention going on in the same hotel, in a room very patriotically and properly festooned with the stars and stripes, and doubtless full of promise for the future of laundering. i was interviewed on the roof, within earshot of this debate, and may have been the victim of some association or confusion; anyhow, after answering the usual questions about labour, the league of nations, the length of ladies' dresses, and other great matters, i took refuge in a rhapsody of warm and well-deserved praise of american bathrooms. the editor, i understand, running a gloomy eye down the column of his contributor's 'story,' and seeing nothing but metaphysical terms such as justice, freedom, the abstract disapproval of sweating, swindling, and the like, paused at last upon the ablutionary allusion, and his eye brightened. 'that's the only copy in the whole thing,' he said, 'a bath-tub in every home.' so these words appeared in enormous letters above my portrait in the paper. it will be noted that, like many things that practical men make a great point of, they miss the point. what i had commended as new and national was a bathroom in every bedroom. even feudal and moss-grown england is not entirely ignorant of an occasional bath-tub in the home. but what gave me great joy was what followed. i discovered with delight that many people, glancing rapidly at my portrait with its prodigious legend, imagined that it was a commercial advertisement, and that i was a very self-advertising commercial traveller. when i walked about the streets, i was supposed to be travelling in bath-tubs. consider the caption of the portrait, and you will see how similar it is to the true commercial slogan: 'we offer a bath-tub in every home.' and this charming error was doubtless clinched by the fact that i had been found haunting the outer courts of the temple of the ancient guild of lavenders. i never knew how many shared the impression; i regret to say that i only traced it with certainty in two individuals. but i understand that it included the idea that i had come to the town to attend the laundry convention, and had made an eloquent speech to that senate, no doubt exhibiting my tubs. such was the penalty of too passionate and unrestrained an admiration for american bathrooms; yet the connection of ideas, however inconsequent, does cover the part of social practice for which these american institutions can really be praised. about everything like laundry or hot and cold water there is not only organisation, but what does not always or perhaps often go with it, efficiency. americans are particular about these things of dress and decorum; and it is a virtue which i very seriously recognise, though i find it very hard to emulate. but with them it is a virtue; it is not a mere convention, still less a mere fashion. it is really related to human dignity rather than to social superiority. the really glorious thing about the american is that he does not dress like a gentleman; he dresses like a citizen or a civilised man. his puritanic particularity on certain points is really detachable from any definite social ambitions; these things are not a part of getting into society but merely of keeping out of savagery. those millions and millions of middling people, that huge middle class especially of the middle west, are not near enough to any aristocracy even to be sham aristocrats, or to be real snobs. but their standards are secure; and though i do not really travel in a bath-tub, or believe in the bath-tub philosophy and religion, i will not on this matter recoil misanthropically from them: i prefer the tub of dayton to the tub of diogenes. on these points there is really something a million times better than efficiency, and that is something like equality. in short, the american hotel is not america; but it is american. in some respects it is as american as the english inn is english. and it is symbolic of that society in this among other things: that it does tend too much to uniformity; but that that very uniformity disguises not a little natural dignity. the old romans boasted that their republic was a nation of kings. if we really walked abroad in such a kingdom, we might very well grow tired of the sight of a crowd of kings, of every man with a gold crown on his head or an ivory sceptre in his hand. but it is arguable that we ought not to grow tired of the repetition of crowns and sceptres, any more than of the repetition of flowers and stars. the whole imaginative effort of walt whitman was really an effort to absorb and animate these multitudinous modern repetitions; and walt whitman would be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bathrooms. i do not sneer at the generous effort of the giant; though i think, when all is said, that it is a criticism of modern machinery that the effort should be gigantic as well as generous. while there is so much repetition there is little repose. it is the pattern of a kaleidoscope rather than a wall-paper; a pattern of figures running and even leaping like the figures in a zoetrope. but even in the groups where there was no hustle there was often something of homelessness. i do not mean merely that they were not dining at home; but rather that they were not at home even when dining, and dining at their favourite hotel. they would frequently start up and dart from the room at a summons from the telephone. it may have been fanciful, but i could not help feeling a breath of home, as from a flap or flutter of st. george's cross, when i first sat down in a canadian hostelry, and read the announcement that no such telephonic or other summonses were allowed in the dining-room. it may have been a coincidence, and there may be american hotels with this merciful proviso and canadian hotels without it; but the thing was symbolic even if it was not evidential. i felt as if i stood indeed upon english soil, in a place where people liked to have their meals in peace. the process of the summons is called 'paging,' and consists of sending a little boy with a large voice through all the halls and corridors of the building, making them resound with a name. the custom is common, of course, in clubs and hotels even in england; but in england it is a mere whisper compared with the wail with which the american page repeats the formula of 'calling mr. so and so.' i remember a particularly crowded _parterre_ in the somewhat smoky and oppressive atmosphere of pittsburg, through which wandered a youth with a voice the like of which i have never heard in the land of the living, a voice like the cry of a lost spirit, saying again and again for ever, 'carling mr. anderson.' one felt that he never would find mr. anderson. perhaps there never had been any mr. anderson to be found. perhaps he and every one else wandered in an abyss of bottomless scepticism; and he was but the victim of one out of numberless nightmares of eternity, as he wandered a shadow with shadows and wailed by impassable streams. this is not exactly my philosophy, but i feel sure it was his. and it is a mood that may frequently visit the mind in the centres of highly active and successful industrial civilisation. such are the first idle impressions of the great american hotel, gained by sitting for the first time in its gallery and gazing on its drifting crowds with thoughts equally drifting. the first impression is of something enormous and rather unnatural, an impression that is gradually tempered by experience of the kindliness and even the tameness of so much of that social order. but i should not be recording the sensations with sincerity, if i did not touch in passing the note of something unearthly about that vast system to an insular traveller who sees it for the first time. it is as if he were wandering in another world among the fixed stars; or worse still, in an ideal utopia of the future. yet i am not certain; and perhaps the best of all news is that nothing is really new. i sometimes have a fancy that many of these new things in new countries are but the resurrections of old things which have been wickedly killed or stupidly stunted in old countries. i have looked over the sea of little tables in some light and airy open-air café; and my thoughts have gone back to the plain wooden bench and wooden table that stands solitary and weather-stained outside so many neglected english inns. we talk of experimenting in the french café, as of some fresh and almost impudent innovation. but our fathers had the french café, in the sense of the free-and-easy table in the sun and air. the only difference was that french democracy was allowed to develop its café, or multiply its tables, while english plutocracy prevented any such popular growth. perhaps there are other examples of old types and patterns, lost in the old oligarchy and saved in the new democracies. i am haunted with a hint that the new structures are not so very new; and that they remind me of something very old. as i look from the balcony floor the crowds seem to float away and the colours to soften and grow pale, and i know i am in one of the simplest and most ancestral of human habitations. i am looking down from the old wooden gallery upon the courtyard of an inn. this new architectural model, which i have described, is after all one of the oldest european models, now neglected in europe and especially in england. it was the theatre in which were enacted innumerable picaresque comedies and romantic plays, with figures ranging from sancho panza to sam weller. it served as the apparatus, like some gigantic toy set up in bricks and timber, for the ancient and perhaps eternal game of tennis. the very terms of the original game were taken from the inn courtyard, and the players scored accordingly as they hit the buttery-hatch or the roof. singular speculations hover in my mind as the scene darkens and the quadrangle below begins to empty in the last hours of night. some day perhaps this huge structure will be found standing in a solitude like a skeleton; and it will be the skeleton of the spotted dog or the blue boar. it will wither and decay until it is worthy at last to be a tavern. i do not know whether men will play tennis on its ground floor, with various scores and prizes for hitting the electric fan, or the lift, or the head waiter. perhaps the very words will only remain as part of some such rustic game. perhaps the electric fan will no longer be electric and the elevator will no longer elevate, and the waiter will only wait to be hit. but at least it is only by the decay of modern plutocracy, which seems already to have begun, that the secret of the structure even of this plutocratic palace can stand revealed. and after long years, when its lights are extinguished and only the long shadows inhabit its halls and vestibules, there may come a new noise like thunder; of d'artagnan knocking at the door. _a meditation in broadway_ when i had looked at the lights of broadway by night, i made to my american friends an innocent remark that seemed for some reason to amuse them. i had looked, not without joy, at that long kaleidoscope of coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks, advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of god; colour and fire. i said to them, in my simplicity, 'what a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.' here it is but a text for a further suggestion. but let us suppose that there does walk down this flaming avenue a peasant, of the sort called scornfully an illiterate peasant; by those who think that insisting on people reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies who read in all languages and the forgers who write in all hands. on this principle indeed, a peasant merely acquainted with things of little practical use to mankind, such as ploughing, cutting wood, or growing vegetables, would very probably be excluded; and it is not for us to criticise from the outside the philosophy of those who would keep out the farmer and let in the forger. but let us suppose, if only for the sake of argument, that the peasant is walking under the artificial suns and stars of this tremendous thoroughfare; that he has escaped to the land of liberty upon some general rumour and romance of the story of its liberation, but without being yet able to understand the arbitrary signs of its alphabet. the soul of such a man would surely soar higher than the sky-scrapers, and embrace a brotherhood broader than broadway. realising that he had arrived on an evening of exceptional festivity, worthy to be blazoned with all this burning heraldry, he would please himself by guessing what great proclamation or principle of the republic hung in the sky like a constellation or rippled across the street like a comet. he would be shrewd enough to guess that the three festoons fringed with fiery words of somewhat similar pattern stood for 'government of the people, for the people, by the people'; for it must obviously be that, unless it were 'liberty, equality, fraternity.' his shrewdness would perhaps be a little shaken if he knew that the triad stood for 'tang tonic to-day; tang tonic to-morrow; tang tonic all the time.' he will soon identify a restless ribbon of red lettering, red hot and rebellious, as the saying, 'give me liberty or give me death.' he will fail to identify it as the equally famous saying, 'skyoline has gout beaten to a frazzle.' therefore it was that i desired the peasant to walk down that grove of fiery trees, under all that golden foliage, and fruits like monstrous jewels, as innocent as adam before the fall. he would see sights almost as fine as the flaming sword or the purple and peacock plumage of the seraphim; so long as he did not go near the tree of knowledge. in other words, if once he went to school it would be all up; and indeed i fear in any case he would soon discover his error. if he stood wildly waving his hat for liberty in the middle of the road as chunk chutney picked itself out in ruby stars upon the sky, he would impede the excellent but extremely rigid traffic system of new york. if he fell on his knees before a sapphire splendour, and began saying an ave maria under a mistaken association, he would be conducted kindly but firmly by an irish policeman to a more authentic shrine. but though the foreign simplicity might not long survive in new york, it is quite a mistake to suppose that such foreign simplicity cannot enter new york. he may be excluded for being illiterate, but he cannot be excluded for being ignorant, nor for being innocent. least of all can he be excluded for being wiser in his innocence than the world in its knowledge. there is here indeed more than one distinction to be made. new york is a cosmopolitan city; but it is not a city of cosmopolitans. most of the masses in new york have a nation, whether or no it be the nation to which new york belongs. those who are americanised are american, and very patriotically american. those who are not thus nationalised are not in the least internationalised. they simply continue to be themselves; the irish are irish; the jews are jewish; and all sorts of other tribes carry on the traditions of remote european valleys almost untouched. in short, there is a sort of slender bridge between their old country and their new, which they either cross or do not cross, but which they seldom simply occupy. they are exiles or they are citizens; there is no moment when they are cosmopolitans. but very often the exiles bring with them not only rooted traditions, but rooted truths. indeed it is to a great extent the thought of these strange souls in crude american garb that gives a meaning to the masquerade of new york. in the hotel where i stayed the head waiter in one room was a bohemian; and i am glad to say that he called himself a bohemian. i have already protested sufficiently, before american audiences, against the pedantry of perpetually talking about czecho-slovakia. i suggested to my american friends that the abandonment of the word bohemian in its historical sense might well extend to its literary and figurative sense. we might be expected to say, 'i'm afraid henry has got into very czecho-slovakian habits lately,' or 'don't bother to dress; it's quite a czecho-slovakian affair.' anyhow my bohemian would have nothing to do with such nonsense; he called himself a son of bohemia, and spoke as such in his criticisms of america, which were both favourable and unfavourable. he was a squat man, with a sturdy figure and a steady smile; and his eyes were like dark pools in the depth of a darker forest, but i do not think he had ever been deceived by the lights of broadway. but i found something like my real innocent abroad, my real peasant among the sky-signs, in another part of the same establishment. he was a much leaner man, equally dark, with a hook nose, hungry face, and fierce black moustaches. he also was a waiter, and was in the costume of a waiter, which is a smarter edition of the costume of a lecturer. as he was serving me with clam chowder or some such thing, i fell into speech with him and he told me he was a bulgar. i said something like, 'i'm afraid i don't know as much as i ought to about bulgaria. i suppose most of your people are agricultural, aren't they?' he did not stir an inch from his regular attitude, but he slightly lowered his low voice and said, 'yes. from the earth we come and to the earth we return; when people get away from that they are lost.' to hear such a thing said by the waiter was alone an epoch in the life of an unfortunate writer of fantastic novels. to see him clear away the clam chowder like an automaton, and bring me more iced water like an automaton or like nothing on earth except an american waiter (for piling up ice is the cold passion of their lives), and all this after having uttered something so dark and deep, so starkly incongruous and so startlingly true, was an indescribable thing, but very like the picture of the peasant admiring broadway. so he passed, with his artificial clothes and manners, lit up with all the ghastly artificial light of the hotel, and all the ghastly artificial life of the city; and his heart was like his own remote and rocky valley, where those unchanging words were carved as on a rock. i do not profess to discuss here at all adequately the question this raises about the americanisation of the bulgar. it has many aspects, of some of which most englishmen and even some americans are rather unconscious. for one thing, a man with so rugged a loyalty to land could not be americanised in new york; but it is not so certain that he could not be americanised in america. we might almost say that a peasantry is hidden in the heart of america. so far as our impressions go, it is a secret. it is rather an open secret; covering only some thousand square miles of open prairie. but for most of our countrymen it is something invisible, unimagined, and unvisited; the simple truth that where all those acres are there is agriculture, and where all that agriculture is there is considerable tendency towards distributive or decently equalised property, as in a peasantry. on the other hand, there are those who say that the bulgar will never be americanised, that he only comes to be a waiter in america that he may afford to return to be a peasant in bulgaria. i cannot decide this issue, and indeed i did not introduce it to this end. i was led to it by a certain line of reflection that runs along the great white way, and i will continue to follow it. the criticism, if we could put it rightly, not only covers more than new york but more than the whole new world. any argument against it is quite as valid against the largest and richest cities of the old world, against london or liverpool or frankfort or belfast. but it is in new york that we see the argument most clearly, because we see the thing thus towering into its own turrets and breaking into its own fireworks. i disagree with the aesthetic condemnation of the modern city with its sky-scrapers and sky-signs. i mean that which laments the loss of beauty and its sacrifice to utility. it seems to me the very reverse of the truth. years ago, when people used to say the salvation army doubtless had good intentions, but we must all deplore its methods, i pointed out that the very contrary is the case. its method, the method of drums and democratic appeal, is that of the franciscans or any other march of the church militant. it was precisely its aims that were dubious, with their dissenting morality and despotic finance. it is somewhat the same with things like the sky-signs in broadway. the aesthete must not ask me to mingle my tears with his, because these things are merely useful and ugly. for i am not specially inclined to think them ugly; but i am strongly inclined to think them useless. as a matter of art for art's sake, they seem to me rather artistic. as a form of practical social work they seem to me stark stupid waste. if mr. bilge is rich enough to build a tower four hundred feet high and give it a crown of golden crescents and crimson stars, in order to draw attention to his manufacture of the paradise tooth paste or the seventh heaven cigar, i do not feel the least disposition to thank him for any serious form of social service. i have never tried the seventh heaven cigar; indeed a premonition moves me towards the belief that i shall go down to the dust without trying it. i have every reason to doubt whether it does any particular good to those who smoke it, or any good to anybody except those who sell it. in short mr. bilge's usefulness consists in being useful to mr. bilge, and all the rest is illusion and sentimentalism. but because i know that bilge is only bilge, shall i stoop to the profanity of saying that fire is only fire? shall i blaspheme crimson stars any more than crimson sunsets, or deny that those moons are golden any more than that this grass is green? if a child saw these coloured lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other coloured toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to dance in respectful imitation of the child. indeed i am in a mood of so much sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city, that i should be almost sorry to see social sanity and a sense of proportion return to extinguish them. i fear the day is breaking, and the broad daylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this delightful nightmare of new york at night. peasants and priests and all sorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, and their stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial, useless things. they will not believe in the seventh heaven cigar, even when they see it shining as with stars in the seventh heaven. they will not be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests and peasants of the middle ages would have been affected by advertisements. only a very soft-headed, sentimental, and rather servile generation of men could possibly be affected by advertisements at all. people who are a little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually independent, see the rather simple joke; and are not impressed by this or any other form of self-praise. almost any other men in almost any other age would have seen the joke. if you had said to a man in the stone age, 'ugg says ugg makes the best stone hatchets,' he would have perceived a lack of detachment and disinterestedness about the testimonial. if you had said to a medieval peasant, 'robert the bowyer proclaims, with three blasts of a horn, that he makes good bows,' the peasant would have said, 'well, of course he does,' and thought about something more important. it is only among people whose minds have been weakened by a sort of mesmerism that so transparent a trick as that of advertisement could ever have been tried at all. and if ever we have again, as for other reasons i cannot but hope we shall, a more democratic distribution of property and a more agricultural basis of national life, it would seem at first sight only too likely that all this beautiful superstition will perish, and the fairyland of broadway with all its varied rainbows fade away. for such people the seventh heaven cigar, like the nineteenth-century city, will have ended in smoke. and even the smoke of it will have vanished. but the next stage of reflection brings us back to the peasant looking at the lights of broadway. it is not true to say in the strict sense that the peasant has never seen such things before. the truth is that he has seen them on a much smaller scale, but for a much larger purpose. peasants also have their ritual and ornament, but it is to adorn more real things. apart from our first fancy about the peasant who could not read, there is no doubt about what would be apparent to a peasant who could read, and who could understand. for him also fire is sacred, for him also colour is symbolic. but where he sets up a candle to light the little shrine of st. joseph, he finds it takes twelve hundred candles to light the seventh heaven cigar. he is used to the colours in church windows showing red for martyrs or blue for madonnas; but here he can only conclude that all the colours of the rainbow belong to mr. bilge. now upon the aesthetic side he might well be impressed; but it is exactly on the social and even scientific side that he has a right to criticise. if he were a chinese peasant, for instance, and came from a land of fireworks, he would naturally suppose that he had happened to arrive at a great firework display in celebration of something; perhaps the sacred emperor's birthday, or rather birthnight. it would gradually dawn on the chinese philosopher that the emperor could hardly be born every night. and when he learnt the truth the philosopher, if he was a philosopher, would be a little disappointed ... possibly a little disdainful. compare, for instance, these everlasting fireworks with the damp squibs and dying bonfires of guy fawkes day. that quaint and even queer national festival has been fading for some time out of english life. still, it was a national festival, in the double sense that it represented some sort of public spirit pursued by some sort of popular impulse. people spent money on the display of fireworks; they did not get money by it. and the people who spent money were often those who had very little money to spend. it had something of the glorious and fanatical character of making the poor poorer. it did not, like the advertisements, have only the mean and materialistic character of making the rich richer. in short, it came from the people and it appealed to the nation. the historical and religious cause in which it originated is not mine; and i think it has perished partly through being tied to a historical theory for which there is no future. i think this is illustrated in the very fact that the ceremonial is merely negative and destructive. negation and destruction are very noble things as far as they go, and when they go in the right direction; and the popular expression of them has always something hearty and human about it. i shall not therefore bring any fine or fastidious criticism, whether literary or musical, to bear upon the little boys who drag about a bolster and a paper mask, calling out guy fawkes guy hit him in the eye. but i admit it is a disadvantage that they have not a saint or hero to crown in effigy as well as a traitor to burn in effigy. i admit that popular protestantism has become too purely negative for people to wreathe in flowers the statue of mr. kensit or even of dr. clifford. i do not disguise my preference for popular catholicism; which still has statues that can be wreathed in flowers. i wish our national feast of fireworks revolved round something positive and popular. i wish the beauty of a catherine wheel were displayed to the glory of st. catherine. i should not especially complain if roman candles were really roman candles. but this negative character does not destroy the national character; which began at least in disinterested faith and has ended at least in disinterested fun. there is nothing disinterested at all about the new commercial fireworks. there is nothing so dignified as a dingy guy among the lights of broadway. in that thoroughfare, indeed, the very word guy has another and milder significance. an american friend congratulated me on the impression i produced on a lady interviewer, observing, 'she says you're a regular guy.' this puzzled me a little at the time. 'her description is no doubt correct,' i said, 'but i confess that it would never have struck me as specially complimentary.' but it appears that it is one of the most graceful of compliments, in the original american. a guy in america is a colourless term for a human being. all men are guys, being endowed by their creator with certain ... but i am misled by another association. and a regular guy means, i presume, a reliable or respectable guy. the point here, however, is that the guy in the grotesque english sense does represent the dilapidated remnant of a real human tradition of symbolising real historic ideals by the sacramental mystery of fire. it is a great fall from the lowest of these lowly bonfires to the highest of the modern sky-signs. the new illumination does not stand for any national ideal at all; and what is yet more to the point, it does not come from any popular enthusiasm at all. that is where it differs from the narrowest national protestantism of the english institution. mobs have risen in support of no popery; no mobs are likely to rise in defence of the new puffery. many a poor crazy orangeman has died saying, 'to hell with the pope'; it is doubtful whether any man will ever, with his last breath, frame the ecstatic words, 'try hugby's chewing gum.' these modern and mercantile legends are imposed upon us by a mercantile minority, and we are merely passive to the suggestion. the hypnotist of high finance or big business merely writes his commands in heaven with a finger of fire. all men really are guys, in the sense of dummies. we are only the victims of his pyrotechnic violence; and it is he who hits us in the eye. this is the real case against that modern society that is symbolised by such art and architecture. it is not that it is toppling, but that it is top-heavy. it is not that it is vulgar, but rather that it is not popular. in other words, the democratic ideal of countries like america, while it is still generally sincere and sometimes intense, is at issue with another tendency, an industrial progress which is of all things on earth the most undemocratic. america is not alone in possessing the industrialism, but she is alone in emphasising the ideal that strives with industrialism. industrial capitalism and ideal democracy are everywhere in controversy; but perhaps only here are they in conflict. france has a democratic ideal; but france is not industrial. england and germany are industrial; but england and germany are not really democratic. of course when i speak here of industrialism i speak of great industrial areas; there is, as will be noted later, another side to all these countries; there is in america itself not only a great deal of agricultural society, but a great deal of agricultural equality; just as there are still peasants in germany and may some day again be peasants in england. but the point is that the ideal and its enemy the reality are here crushed very close to each other in the high, narrow city; and that the sky-scraper is truly named because its top, towering in such insolence, is scraping the stars off the american sky, the very heaven of the american spirit. that seems to me the main outline of the whole problem. in the first chapter of this book, i have emphasised the fact that equality is still the ideal though no longer the reality of america. i should like to conclude this one by emphasising the fact that the reality of modern capitalism is menacing that ideal with terrors and even splendours that might well stagger the wavering and impressionable modern spirit. upon the issue of that struggle depends the question of whether this new great civilisation continues to exist, and even whether any one cares if it exists or not. i have already used the parable of the american flag, and the stars that stand for a multitudinous equality; i might here take the opposite symbol of these artificial and terrestrial stars flaming on the forehead of the commercial city; and note the peril of the last illusion, which is that the artificial stars may seem to fill the heavens, and the real stars to have faded from sight. but i am content for the moment to reaffirm the merely imaginative pleasure of those dizzy turrets and dancing fires. if those nightmare buildings were really all built for nothing, how noble they would be! the fact that they were really built for something need not unduly depress us for a moment, or drag down our soaring fancies. there is something about these vertical lines that suggests a sort of rush upwards, as of great cataracts topsy-turvy. i have spoken of fireworks, but here i should rather speak of rockets. there is only something underneath the mind murmuring that nothing remains at last of a flaming rocket except a falling stick. i have spoken of babylonian perspectives, and of words written with a fiery finger, like that huge unhuman finger that wrote on belshazzar's wall.... but what did it write on belshazzar's wall?... i am content once more to end on a note of doubt and a rather dark sympathy with those many-coloured solar systems turning so dizzily, far up in the divine vacuum of the night. 'from the earth we come and to the earth we return; when people get away from that they are lost.' _irish and other interviewers_ it is often asked what should be the first thing that a man sees when he lands in a foreign country; but i think it should be the vision of his own country. at least when i came into new york harbour, a sort of grey and green cloud came between me and the towers with multitudinous windows, white in the winter sunlight; and i saw an old brown house standing back among the beech-trees at home, the house of only one among many friends and neighbours, but one somehow so sunken in the very heart of england as to be unconscious of her imperial or international position, and out of the sound of her perilous seas. but what made most clear the vision that revisited me was something else. before we touched land the men of my own guild, the journalists and reporters, had already boarded the ship like pirates. and one of them spoke to me in an accent that i knew; and thanked me for all i had done for ireland. and it was at that moment that i knew most vividly that what i wanted was to do something for england. then, as it chanced, i looked across at the statue of liberty, and saw that the great bronze was gleaming green in the morning light. i had made all the obvious jokes about the statue of liberty. i found it had a soothing effect on earnest prohibitionists on the boat to urge, as a point of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to be given back to the french, a vicious race abandoned to the culture of the vine. i proposed that the last liquors on board should be poured out in a pagan libation before it. and then i suddenly remembered that this liberty was still in some sense enlightening the world, or one part of the world; was a lamp for one sort of wanderer, a star of one sort of seafarer. to one persecuted people at least this land had really been an asylum; even if recent legislation (as i have said) had made them think it a lunatic asylum. they had made it so much their home that the very colour of the country seemed to change with the infusion; as the bronze of the great statue took on a semblance of the wearing of the green. it is a commonplace that the englishman has been stupid in his relations with the irish; but he has been far more stupid in his relations with the americans on the subject of the irish. his propaganda has been worse than his practice; and his defence more ill-considered than the most indefensible things that it was intended to defend. there is in this matter a curious tangle of cross-purposes, which only a parallel example can make at all clear. and i will note the point here, because it is some testimony to its vivid importance that it was really the first i had to discuss on american soil with an american citizen. in a double sense i touched ireland before i came to america. i will take an imaginary instance from another controversy; in order to show how the apology can be worse than the action. the best we can say for ourselves is worse than the worst that we can do. there was a time when english poets and other publicists could always be inspired with instantaneous indignation about the persecuted jews in russia. we have heard less about them since we heard more about the persecuting jews in russia. i fear there are a great many middle-class englishmen already who wish that trotsky had been persecuted a little more. but even in those days englishmen divided their minds in a curious fashion; and unconsciously distinguished between the jews whom they had never seen, in warsaw, and the jews whom they had often seen in whitechapel. it seemed to be assumed that, by a curious coincidence, russia possessed not only the very worst anti-semites but the very best semites. a moneylender in london might be like judas iscariot; but a moneylender in moscow must be like judas maccabaeus. nevertheless there remained in our common sense an unconscious but fundamental comprehension of the unity of israel; a sense that some things could be said, and some could not be said, about the jews as a whole. suppose that even in those days, to say nothing of these, an english protest against russian anti-semitism had been answered by the russian anti-semites, and suppose the answer had been somewhat as follows:-'it is all very well for foreigners to complain of our denying civic rights to our jewish subjects; but we know the jews better than they do. they are a barbarous people, entirely primitive, and very like the simple savages who cannot count beyond five on their fingers. it is quite impossible to make them understand ordinary numbers, to say nothing of simple economics. they do not realise the meaning or the value of money. no jew anywhere in the world can get into his stupid head the notion of a bargain, or of exchanging one thing for another. their hopeless incapacity for commerce or finance would retard the progress of our people, would prevent the spread of any sort of economic education, would keep the whole country on a level lower than that of the most prehistoric methods of barter. what russia needs most is a mercantile middle class; and it is unjust to ask us to swamp its small beginnings in thousands of these rude tribesmen, who cannot do a sum of simple addition, or understand the symbolic character of a threepenny bit. we might as well be asked to give civic rights to cows and pigs as to this unhappy, half-witted race who can no more count than the beasts of the field. in every intellectual exercise they are hopelessly incompetent; no jew can play chess; no jew can learn languages; no jew has ever appeared in the smallest part in any theatrical performance; no jew can give or take any pleasure connected with any musical instrument. these people are our subjects; and we understand them. we accept full responsibility for treating such troglodytes on our own terms.' it would not be entirely convincing. it would sound a little far-fetched and unreal. but it would sound exactly like our utterances about the irish, as they sound to all americans, and rather especially to anti-irish americans. that is exactly the impression we produce on the people of the united states when we say, as we do say in substance, something like this: 'we mean no harm to the poor dear irish, so dreamy, so irresponsible, so incapable of order or organisation. if we were to withdraw from their country they would only fight among themselves; they have no notion of how to rule themselves. there is something charming about their unpracticability, about their very incapacity for the coarse business of politics. but for their own sakes it is impossible to leave these emotional visionaries to ruin themselves in the attempt to rule themselves. they are like children; but they are our own children, and we understand them. we accept full responsibility for acting as their parents and guardians.' now the point is not only that this view of the irish is false, but that it is the particular view that the americans know to be false. while we are saying that the irish could not organise, the americans are complaining, often very bitterly, of the power of irish organisation. while we say that the irishman could not rule himself, the americans are saying, more or less humorously, that the irishman rules them. a highly intelligent professor said to me in boston, 'we have solved the irish problem here; we have an entirely independent irish government.' while we are complaining, in an almost passionate manner, of the impotence of mere cliques of idealists and dreamers, they are complaining, often in a very indignant manner, of the power of great gangs of bosses and bullies. there are a great many americans who pity the irish, very naturally and very rightly, for the historic martyrdom which their patriotism has endured. but there are a great many americans who do not pity the irish in the least. they would be much more likely to pity the english; only this particular way of talking tends rather to make them despise the english. thus both the friends of ireland and the foes of ireland tend to be the foes of england. we make one set of enemies by our action, and another by our apology. it is a thing that can from time to time be found in history; a misunderstanding that really has a moral. the english excuse would carry much more weight if it had more sincerity and more humility. there are a considerable number of people in the united states who could sympathise with us, if we would say frankly that we fear the irish. those who thus despise our pity might possibly even respect our fear. the argument i have often used in other places comes back with prodigious and redoubled force, after hearing anything of american opinion; the argument that the only reasonable or reputable excuse for the english is the excuse of a patriotic sense of peril; and that the unionist, if he must be a unionist, should use that and no other. when the unionist has said that he dare not let loose against himself a captive he has so cruelly wronged, he has said all that he has to say; all that he has ever had to say; all that he will ever have to say. he is like a man who has sent a virile and rather vindictive rival unjustly to penal servitude; and who connives at the continuance of the sentence, not because he himself is particularly vindictive, but because he is afraid of what the convict will do when he comes out of prison. this is not exactly a moral strength, but it is a very human weakness; and that is the most that can be said for it. all other talk, about celtic frenzy or catholic superstition, is cant invented to deceive himself or to deceive the world. but the vital point to realise is that it is cant that cannot possibly deceive the american world. in the matter of the irishman the american is not to be deceived. it is not merely true to say that he knows better. it is equally true to say that he knows worse. he knows vices and evils in the irishman that are entirely hidden in the hazy vision of the englishman. he knows that our unreal slanders are inconsistent even with the real sins. to us ireland is a shadowy isle of sunset, like atlantis, about which we can make up legends. to him it is a positive ward or parish in the heart of his huge cities, like whitechapel; about which even we cannot make legends but only lies. and, as i have said, there are some lies we do not tell even about whitechapel. we do not say it is inhabited by jews too stupid to count or know the value of a coin. the first thing for any honest englishman to send across the sea is this; that the english have not the shadow of a notion of what they are up against in america. they have never even heard of the batteries of almost brutal energy, of which i had thus touched a live wire even before i landed. people talk about the hypocrisy of england in dealing with a small nationality. what strikes me is the stupidity of england in supposing that she is dealing with a small nationality; when she is really dealing with a very large nationality. she is dealing with a nationality that often threatens, even numerically, to dominate all the other nationalities of the united states. the irish are not decaying; they are not unpractical; they are scarcely even scattered; they are not even poor. they are the most powerful and practical world-combination with whom we can decide to be friends or foes; and that is why i thought first of that still and solid brown house in buckinghamshire, standing back in the shadow of the trees. among my impressions of america i have deliberately put first the figure of the irish-american interviewer, standing on the shore more symbolic than the statue of liberty. the irish interviewer's importance for the english lay in the fact of his being an irishman, but there was also considerable interest in the circumstance of his being an interviewer. and as certain wild birds sometimes wing their way far out to sea and are the first signal of the shore, so the first americans the traveller meets are often american interviewers; and they are generally birds of a feather, and they certainly flock together. in this respect, there is a slight difference in the etiquette of the craft in the two countries, which i was delighted to discuss with my fellow craftsmen. if i could at that moment have flown back to fleet street i am happy to reflect that nobody in the world would in the least wish to interview me. i should attract no more attention than the stone griffin opposite the law courts; both monsters being grotesque but also familiar. but supposing for the sake of argument that anybody did want to interview me, it is fairly certain that the fact of one paper publishing such an interview would rather prevent the other papers from doing so. the repetition of the same views of the same individual in two places would be considered rather bad journalism; it would have an air of stolen thunder, not to say stage thunder. but in america the fact of my landing and lecturing was evidently regarded in the same light as a murder or a great fire, or any other terrible but incurable catastrophe, a matter of interest to all pressmen concerned with practical events. one of the first questions i was asked was how i should be disposed to explain the wave of crime in new york. naturally i replied that it might possibly be due to the number of english lecturers who had recently landed. in the mood of the moment it seemed possible that, if they had all been interviewed, regrettable incidents might possibly have taken place. but this was only the mood of the moment, and even as a mood did not last more than a moment. and since it has reference to a rather common and a rather unjust conception of american journalism, i think it well to take it first as a fallacy to be refuted, though the refutation may require a rather longer approach. i have generally found that the traveller fails to understand a foreign country, through treating it as a tendency and not as a balance. but if a thing were always tending in one direction it would soon tend to destruction. everything that merely progresses finally perishes. every nation, like every family, exists upon a compromise, and commonly a rather eccentric compromise; using the word 'eccentric' in the sense of something that is somehow at once crazy and healthy. now the foreigner commonly sees some feature that he thinks fantastic without seeing the feature that balances it. the ordinary examples are obvious enough. an englishman dining inside a hotel on the boulevards thinks the french eccentric in refusing to open a window. but he does not think the english eccentric in refusing to carry their chairs and tables out on to the pavement in ludgate circus. an englishman will go poking about in little swiss or italian villages, in wild mountains or in remote islands, demanding tea; and never reflects that he is like a chinaman who should enter all the wayside public-houses in kent and sussex and demand opium. but the point is not merely that he demands what he cannot expect to enjoy; it is that he ignores even what he does enjoy. he does not realise the sublime and starry paradox of the phrase, _vin ordinaire_, which to him should be a glorious jest like the phrase 'common gold' or 'daily diamonds.' these are the simple and self-evident cases; but there are many more subtle cases of the same thing; of the tendency to see that the nation fills up its own gap with its own substitute; or corrects its own extravagance with its own precaution. the national antidote generally grows wild in the woods side by side with the national poison. if it did not, all the natives would be dead. for it is so, as i have said, that nations necessarily die of the undiluted poison called progress. it is so in this much-abused and over-abused example of the american journalist. the american interviewers really have exceedingly good manners for the purposes of their trade, granted that it is necessary to pursue their trade. and even what is called their hustling method can truly be said to cut both ways, or hustle both ways; for if they hustle in, they also hustle out. it may not at first sight seem the very warmest compliment to a gentleman to congratulate him on the fact that he soon goes away. but it really is a tribute to his perfection in a very delicate social art; and i am quite serious when i say that in this respect the interviewers are artists. it might be more difficult for an englishman to come to the point, particularly the sort of point which american journalists are supposed, with some exaggeration, to aim at. it might be more difficult for an englishman to ask a total stranger on the spur of the moment for the exact inscription on his mother's grave; but i really think that if an englishman once got so far as that he would go very much farther, and certainly go on very much longer. the englishman would approach the churchyard by a rather more wandering woodland path; but if once he had got to the grave i think he would have much more disposition, so to speak, to sit down on it. our own national temperament would find it decidedly more difficult to disconnect when connections had really been established. possibly that is the reason why our national temperament does not establish them. i suspect that the real reason that an englishman does not talk is that he cannot leave off talking. i suspect that my solitary countrymen, hiding in separate railway compartments, are not so much retiring as a race of trappists as escaping from a race of talkers. however this may be, there is obviously something of practical advantage in the ease with which the american butterfly flits from flower to flower. he may in a sense force his acquaintance on us, but he does not force himself on us. even when, to our prejudices, he seems to insist on knowing us, at least he does not insist on our knowing him. it may be, to some sensibilities, a bad thing that a total stranger should talk as if he were a friend, but it might possibly be worse if he insisted on being a friend before he would talk like one. to a great deal of the interviewing, indeed much the greater part of it, even this criticism does not apply; there is nothing which even an englishman of extreme sensibility could regard as particularly private; the questions involved are generally entirely public, and treated with not a little public spirit. but my only reason for saying here what can be said even for the worst exceptions is to point out this general and neglected principle; that the very thing that we complain of in a foreigner generally carries with it its own foreign cure. american interviewing is generally very reasonable, and it is always very rapid. and even those to whom talking to an intelligent fellow creature is as horrible as having a tooth out may still admit that american interviewing has many of the qualities of american dentistry. another effect that has given rise to this fallacy, this exaggeration of the vulgarity and curiosity of the press, is the distinction between the articles and the headlines; or rather the tendency to ignore that distinction. the few really untrue and unscrupulous things i have seen in american 'stories' have always been in the headlines. and the headlines are written by somebody else; some solitary and savage cynic locked up in the office, hating all mankind, and raging and revenging himself at random, while the neat, polite, and rational pressman can safely be let loose to wander about the town. for instance, i talked to two decidedly thoughtful fellow journalists immediately on my arrival at a town in which there had been some labour troubles. i told them my general view of labour in the very largest and perhaps the vaguest historical outline; pointing out that the one great truth to be taught to the middle classes was that capitalism was itself a crisis, and a passing crisis; that it was not so much that it was breaking down as that it had never really stood up. slaveries could last, and peasantries could last; but wage-earning communities could hardly even live, and were already dying. all this moral and even metaphysical generalisation was most fairly and most faithfully reproduced by the interviewer, who had actually heard it casually and idly spoken. but on the top of this column of political philosophy was the extraordinary announcement in enormous letters, 'chesterton takes sides in trolley strike.' this was inaccurate. when i spoke i not only did not know that there was any trolley strike, but i did not know what a trolley strike was. i should have had an indistinct idea that a large number of citizens earned their living by carrying things about in wheel-barrows, and that they had desisted from the beneficent activities. any one who did not happen to be a journalist, or know a little about journalism, american and english, would have supposed that the same man who wrote the article had suddenly gone mad and written the title. but i know that we have here to deal with two different types of journalists; and the man who writes the headlines i will not dare to describe; for i have not seen him except in dreams. another innocent complication is that the interviewer does sometimes translate things into his native language. it would not seem odd that a french interviewer should translate them into french; and it is certain that the american interviewer sometimes translates them into american. those who imagine the two languages to be the same are more innocent than any interviewer. to take one out of the twenty examples, some of which i have mentioned elsewhere, suppose an interviewer had said that i had the reputation of being a nut. i should be flattered but faintly surprised at such a tribute to my dress and dashing exterior. i should afterwards be sobered and enlightened by discovering that in america a nut does not mean a dandy but a defective or imbecile person. and as i have here to translate their american phrase into english, it may be very defensible that they should translate my english phrases into american. anyhow they often do translate them into american. in answer to the usual question about prohibition i had made the usual answer, obvious to the point of dullness to those who are in daily contact with it, that it is a law that the rich make knowing they can always break it. from the printed interview it appeared that i had said, 'prohibition! all matter of dollar sign.' this is almost avowed translation, like a french translation. nobody can suppose that it would come natural to an englishman to talk about a dollar, still less about a dollar sign--whatever that may be. it is exactly as if he had made me talk about the skelt and stevenson toy theatre as 'a cent plain, and two cents coloured' or condemned a parsimonious policy as dime-wise and dollar-foolish. another interviewer once asked me who was the greatest american writer. i have forgotten exactly what i said, but after mentioning several names, i said that the greatest natural genius and artistic force was probably walt whitman. the printed interview is more precise; and students of my literary and conversational style will be interested to know that i said, 'see here, walt whitman was your one real red-blooded man.' here again i hardly think the translation can have been quite unconscious; most of my intimates are indeed aware that i do not talk like that, but i fancy that the same fact would have dawned on the journalist to whom i had been talking. and even this trivial point carries with it the two truths which must be, i fear, the rather monotonous moral of these pages. the first is that america and england can be far better friends when sharply divided than when shapelessly amalgamated. these two journalists were false reporters, but they were true translators. they were not so much interviewers as interpreters. and the second is that in any such difference it is often wholesome to look beneath the surface for a superiority. for ability to translate does imply ability to understand; and many of these journalists really did understand. i think there are many english journalists who would be more puzzled by so simple an idea as the plutocratic foundation of prohibition. but the american knew at once that i meant it was a matter of dollar sign; probably because he knew very well that it is. then again there is a curious convention by which american interviewing makes itself out much worse than it is. the reports are far more rowdy and insolent than the conversations. this is probably a part of the fact that a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and to some vulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal. it must always be grasped that this vulgarity is an ideal even more than it is a reality. it is an ideal when it is not a reality. a very quiet and intelligent young man, in a soft black hat and tortoise-shell spectacles, will ask for an interview with unimpeachable politeness, wait for his living subject with unimpeachable patience, talk to him quite sensibly for twenty minutes, and go noiselessly away. then in the newspaper next morning you will read how he beat the bedroom door in, and pursued his victim on to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore from him replies to all sorts of bald and ruthless questions printed in large black letters. i was often interviewed in the evening, and had no notion of how atrociously i had been insulted till i saw it in the paper next morning. i had no notion i had been on the rack of an inquisitor until i saw it in plain print; and then of course i believed it, with a faith and docility unknown in any previous epoch of history. an interesting essay might be written upon points upon which nations affect more vices than they possess; and it might deal more fully with the american pressman, who is a harmless clubman in private, and becomes a sort of highway-robber in print. i have turned this chapter into something like a defence of interviewers, because i really think they are made to bear too much of the burden of the bad developments of modern journalism. but i am very far from meaning to suggest that those bad developments are not very bad. so far from wishing to minimise the evil, i would in a real sense rather magnify it. i would suggest that the evil itself is a much larger and more fundamental thing; and that to deal with it by abusing poor journalists, doing their particular and perhaps peculiar duty, is like dealing with a pestilence by rubbing at one of the spots. what is wrong with the modern world will not be righted by attributing the whole disease to each of its symptoms in turn; first to the tavern and then to the cinema and then to the reporter's room. the evil of journalism is not in the journalists. it is not in the poor men on the lower level of the profession, but in the rich men at the top of the profession; or rather in the rich men who are too much on top of the profession even to belong to it. the trouble with newspapers is the newspaper trust, as the trouble might be with a wheat trust, without involving a vilification of all the people who grow wheat. it is the american plutocracy and not the american press. what is the matter with the modern world is not modern headlines or modern films or modern machinery. what is the matter with the modern world is the modern world; and the cure will come from another. _some american cities_ there is one point, almost to be called a paradox, to be noted about new york; and that is that in one sense it is really new. the term very seldom has any relevance to the reality. the new forest is nearly as old as the conquest, and the new theology is nearly as old as the creed. things have been offered to me as the new thought that might more properly be called the old thoughtlessness; and the thing we call the new poor law is already old enough to know better. but there is a sense in which new york is always new; in the sense that it is always being renewed. a stranger might well say that the chief industry of the citizens consists of destroying their city; but he soon realises that they always start it all over again with undiminished energy and hope. at first i had a fancy that they never quite finished putting up a big building without feeling that it was time to pull it down again; and that somebody began to dig up the first foundations while somebody else was putting on the last tiles. this fills the whole of this brilliant and bewildering place with a quite unique and unparalleled air of rapid ruin. ruins spring up so suddenly like mushrooms, which with us are the growth of age like mosses, that one half expects to see ivy climbing quickly up the broken walls as in the nightmare of the time machine, or in some incredibly accelerated cinema. there is no sight in any country that raises my own spirits so much as a scaffolding. it is a tragedy that they always take the scaffolding away, and leave us nothing but a mere building. if they would only take the building away and leave us a beautiful scaffolding, it would in most cases be a gain to the loveliness of earth. if i could analyse what it is that lifts the heart about the lightness and clarity of such a white and wooden skeleton, i could explain what it is that is really charming about new york; in spite of its suffering from the curse of cosmopolitanism and even the provincial superstition of progress. it is partly that all this destruction and reconstruction is an unexhausted artistic energy; but it is partly also that it is an artistic energy that does not take itself too seriously. it is first because man is here a carpenter; and secondly because he is a stage carpenter. indeed there is about the whole scene the spirit of scene-shifting. it therefore touches whatever nerve in us has since childhood thrilled at all theatrical things. but the picture will be imperfect unless we realise something which gives it unity and marks its chief difference from the climate and colours of western europe. we may say that the back-scene remains the same. the sky remained, and in the depths of winter it seemed to be blue with summer; and so clear that i almost flattered myself that clouds were english products like primroses. an american would probably retort on my charge of scene-shifting by saying that at least he only shifted the towers and domes of the earth; and that in england it is the heavens that are shifty. and indeed we have changes from day to day that would seem to him as distinct as different magic-lantern slides; one view showing the bay of naples and the next the north pole. i do not mean, of course, that there are no changes in american weather; but as a matter of proportion it is true that the most unstable part of our scenery is the most stable part of theirs. indeed we might almost be pardoned the boast that britain alone really possesses the noble thing called weather; most other countries having to be content with climate. it must be confessed, however, that they often are content with it. and the beauty of new york, which is considerable, is very largely due to the clarity that brings out the colours of varied buildings against the equal colour of the sky. strangely enough i found myself repeating about this vista of the west two vivid lines in which mr. w. b. yeats has called up a vision of the east:- and coloured like the eastern birds at evening in their rainless skies. to invoke a somewhat less poetic parallel, even the untravelled englishman has probably seen american posters and trade advertisements of a patchy and gaudy kind, in which a white house or a yellow motor-car are cut out as in cardboard against a sky like blue marble. i used to think it was only new art, but i found that it is really new york. it is not for nothing that the very nature of local character has gained the nickname of local colour. colour runs through all our experience; and we all know that our childhood found talismanic gems in the very paints in the paint-box, or even in their very names. and just as the very name of 'crimson lake' really suggested to me some sanguine and mysterious mere, dark yet red as blood, so the very name of 'burnt sienna' became afterwards tangled up in my mind with the notion of something traditional and tragic; as if some such golden italian city had really been darkened by many conflagrations in the wars of mediaeval democracy. now if one had the caprice of conceiving some city exactly contrary to one thus seared and seasoned by fire, its colour might be called up to a childish fancy by the mere name of 'raw umber'; and such a city is new york. i used to be puzzled by the name of 'raw umber,' being unable to imagine the effect of fried umber or stewed umber. but the colours of new york are exactly in that key; and might be adumbrated by phrases like raw pink or raw yellow. it is really in a sense like something uncooked; or something which the satiric would call half-baked. and yet the effect is not only beautiful, it is even delicate. i had no name for this nuance; until i saw that somebody had written of 'the pastel-tinted towers of new york'; and i knew that the name had been found. there are no paints dry enough to describe all that dry light; and it is not a box of colours but of crayons. if the englishman returning to england is moved at the sight of a block of white chalk, the american sees rather a bundle of chalks. nor can i imagine anything more moving. fairy tales are told to children about a country where the trees are like sugar-sticks and the lakes like treacle, but most children would feel almost as greedy for a fairyland where the trees were like brushes of green paint and the hills were of coloured chalks. but here what accentuates this arid freshness is the fragmentary look of the continual reconstruction and change. the strong daylight finds everywhere the broken edges of things, and the sort of hues we see in newly-turned earth or the white sections of trees. and it is in this respect that the local colour can literally be taken as local character. for new york considered in itself is primarily a place of unrest, and those who sincerely love it, as many do, love it for the romance of its restlessness. a man almost looks at a building as he passes to wonder whether it will be there when he comes back from his walk; and the doubt is part of an indescribable notion, as of a white nightmare of daylight, which is increased by the very numbering of the streets, with its tangle of numerals which at first makes an english head reel. the detail is merely a symbol; and when he is used to it he can see that it is, like the most humdrum human customs, both worse and better than his own. '271 west 52nd street' is the easiest of all addresses to find, but the hardest of all addresses to remember. he who is, like myself, so constituted as necessarily to lose any piece of paper he has particular reason to preserve, will find himself wishing the place were called 'pine crest' or 'heather crag' like any unobtrusive villa in streatham. but his sense of some sort of incalculable calculations, as of the vision of a mad mathematician, is rooted in a more real impression. his first feeling that his head is turning round is due to something really dizzy in the movement of a life that turns dizzily like a wheel. if there be in the modern mind something paradoxical that can find peace in change, it is here that it has indeed built its habitation or rather is still building and unbuilding it. one might fancy that it changes in everything and that nothing endures but its invisible name; and even its name, as i have said, seems to make a boast of novelty. that is something like a sincere first impression of the atmosphere of new york. those who think that is the atmosphere of america have never got any farther than new york. we might almost say that they have never entered america, any more than if they had been detained like undesirable aliens at ellis island. and indeed there are a good many undesirable aliens detained in manhattan island too. but of that i will not speak, being myself an alien with no particular pretensions to be desirable. anyhow, such is new york; but such is not the new world. the great american republic contains very considerable varieties, and of these varieties i necessarily saw far too little to allow me to generalise. but from the little i did see, i should venture on the generalisation that the great part of america is singularly and even strikingly unlike new york. it goes without saying that new york is very unlike the vast agricultural plains and small agricultural towns of the middle west, which i did see. it may be conjectured with some confidence that it is very unlike what is called the wild and sometimes the woolly west, which i did not see. but i am here comparing new york, not with the newer states of the prairie or the mountains, but with the other older cities of the atlantic coast. and new york, as it seems to me, is quite vitally different from the other historic cities of america. it is so different that it shows them all for the moment in a false light, as a long white searchlight will throw a light that is fantastic and theatrical upon ancient and quiet villages folded in the everlasting hills. philadelphia and boston and baltimore are more like those quiet villages than they are like new york. if i were to call this book 'the antiquities of america,' i should give rise to misunderstanding and possibly to annoyance. and yet the double sense in such words is an undeserved misfortune for them. we talk of plato or the parthenon or the greek passion for beauty as parts of the antique, but hardly of the antiquated. when we call them ancient it is not because they have perished, but rather because they have survived. in the same way i heard some new yorkers refer to philadelphia or baltimore as 'dead towns.' they mean by a dead town a town that has had the impudence not to die. such people are astonished to find an ancient thing alive, just as they are now astonished, and will be increasingly astonished, to find poland or the papacy or the french nation still alive. and what i mean by philadelphia and baltimore being alive is precisely what these people mean by their being dead; it is continuity; it is the presence of the life first breathed into them and of the purpose of their being; it is the benediction of the founders of the colonies and the fathers of the republic. this tradition is truly to be called life; for life alone can link the past and the future. it merely means that as what was done yesterday makes some difference to-day, so what is done to-day will make some difference to-morrow. in new york it is difficult to feel that any day will make any difference. these moderns only die daily without power to rise from the dead. but i can truly claim that in coming into some of these more stable cities of the states i felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which is satisfied in the eternal cities of the mediterranean. i felt in america what many americans suppose can only be felt in europe. i have seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than when i saw from afar off, above the vast grey labyrinth of philadelphia, great penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned a new world; and remembered that his body lay buried in a field at the turning of a lane, a league from my own door. for this aspect of america is rather neglected in the talk about electricity and headlines. needless to say, the modern vulgarity of avarice and advertisement sprawls all over philadelphia or boston; but so it does over winchester or canterbury. but most people know that there is something else to be found in canterbury or winchester; many people know that it is rather more interesting; and some people know that alfred can still walk in winchester and that st. thomas at canterbury was killed but did not die. it is at least as possible for a philadelphian to feel the presence of penn and franklin as for an englishman to see the ghosts of alfred and of becket. tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. it means that it still matters what penn did two hundred years ago or what franklin did a hundred years ago; i never could feel in new york that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago. and these things did and do matter. quakerism is not my favourite creed; but on that day when william penn stood unarmed upon that spot and made his treaty with the red indians, his creed of humanity did have a triumph and a triumph that has not turned back. the praise given to him is not a priggish fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions have illogically curtailed it. the nonconformists have been rather unfair to penn even in picking their praises; and they generally forget that toleration cuts both ways and that an open mind is open on all sides. those who deify him for consenting to bargain with the savages cannot forgive him for consenting to bargain with the stuarts. and the same is true of the other city, yet more closely connected with the tolerant experiment of the stuarts. the state of maryland was the first experiment in religious freedom in human history. lord baltimore and his catholics were a long march ahead of william penn and his quakers on what is now called the path of progress. that the first religious toleration ever granted in the world was granted by roman catholics is one of those little informing details with which our victorian histories did not exactly teem. but when i went into my hotel at baltimore and found two priests waiting to see me, i was moved in a new fashion, for i felt that i touched the end of a living chain. nor was the impression accidental; it will always remain with me with a mixture of gratitude and grief, for they brought a message of welcome from a great american whose name i had known from childhood and whose career was drawing to its close; for it was but a few days after i left the city that i learned that cardinal gibbons was dead. on the top of a hill on one side of the town stood the first monument raised after the revolution to washington. beyond it was a new monument saluting in the name of lafayette the american soldiers who fell fighting in france in the great war. between them were steps and stone seats, and i sat down on one of them and talked to two children who were clambering about the bases of the monument. i felt a profound and radiant peace in the thought that they at any rate were not going to my lecture. it made me happy that in that talk neither they nor i had any names. i was full of that indescribable waking vision of the strangeness of life, and especially of the strangeness of locality; of how we find places and lose them; and see faces for a moment in a far-off land, and it is equally mysterious if we remember and mysterious if we forget. i had even stirring in my head the suggestion of some verses that i shall never finish- if i ever go back to baltimore the city of maryland. but the poem would have to contain far too much; for i was thinking of a thousand things at once; and wondering what the children would be like twenty years after and whether they would travel in white goods or be interested in oil, and i was not untouched (it may be said) by the fact that a neighbouring shop had provided the only sample of the substance called 'tea' ever found on the american continent; and in front of me soared up into the sky on wings of stone the column of all those high hopes of humanity a hundred years ago; and beyond there were lighted candles in the chapels and prayers in the ante-chambers, where perhaps already a prince of the church was dying. only on a later page can i even attempt to comb out such a tangle of contrasts, which is indeed the tangle of america and this mortal life; but sitting there on that stone seat under that quiet sky, i had some experience of the thronging thousands of living thoughts and things, noisy and numberless as birds, that give its everlasting vivacity and vitality to a dead town. two other cities i visited which have this particular type of traditional character, the one being typical of the north and the other of the south. at least i may take as convenient anti-types the towns of boston and st. louis; and we might add nashville as being a shade more truly southern than st. louis. to the extreme south, in the sense of what is called the black belt, i never went at all. now english travellers expect the south to be somewhat traditional; but they are not prepared for the aspects of boston in the north which are even more so. if we wished only for an antic of antithesis, we might say that on one side the places are more prosaic than the names and on the other the names are more prosaic than the places. st. louis is a fine town, and we recognise a fine instinct of the imagination that set on the hill overlooking the river the statue of that holy horseman who has christened the city. but the city is not as beautiful as its name; it could not be. indeed these titles set up a standard to which the most splendid spires and turrets could not rise, and below which the commercial chimneys and sky-signs conspicuously sink. we should think it odd if belfast had borne the name of joan of arc. we should be slightly shocked if the town of johannesburg happened to be called jesus christ. but few have noted a blasphemy, or even a somewhat challenging benediction, to be found in the very name of san francisco. but on the other hand a place like boston is much more beautiful than its name. and, as i have suggested, an englishman's general information, or lack of information, leaves him in some ignorance of the type of beauty that turns up in that type of place. he has heard so much about the purely commercial north as against the agricultural and aristocratic south, and the traditions of boston and philadelphia are rather too tenuous and delicate to be seen from across the atlantic. but here also there are traditions and a great deal of traditionalism. the circle of old families, which still meets with a certain exclusiveness in philadelphia, is the sort of thing that we in england should expect to find rather in new orleans. the academic aristocracy of boston, which oliver wendell holmes called the brahmins, is still a reality though it was always a minority and is now a very small minority. an epigram, invented by yale at the expense of harvard, describes it as very small indeed:- here is to jolly old boston, the home of the bean and the cod, where cabots speak only to lowells, and lowells speak only to god. but an aristocracy must be a minority, and it is arguable that the smaller it is the better. i am bound to say, however, that the distinguished dr. cabot, the present representative of the family, broke through any taboo that may tie his affections to his creator and to miss amy lowell, and broadened his sympathies so indiscriminately as to show kindness and hospitality to so lost a being as an english lecturer. but if the thing is hardly a limit it is very living as a memory; and boston on this side is very much a place of memories. it would be paying it a very poor compliment merely to say that parts of it reminded me of england; for indeed they reminded me of english things that have largely vanished from england. there are old brown houses in the corners of squares and streets that are like glimpses of a man's forgotten childhood; and when i saw the long path with posts where the autocrat may be supposed to have walked with the schoolmistress, i felt i had come to the land where old tales come true. i pause in this place upon this particular aspect of america because it is very much missed in a mere contrast with england. i need not say that if i felt it even about slight figures of fiction, i felt it even more about solid figures of history. such ghosts seemed particularly solid in the southern states, precisely because of the comparative quietude and leisure of the atmosphere of the south. it was never more vivid to me than when coming in, at a quiet hour of the night, into the comparatively quiet hotel at nashville in tennessee, and mounting to a dim and deserted upper floor where i found myself before a faded picture; and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of andrew jackson, watchful like a white eagle. at that moment, perhaps, i was in more than one sense alone. most englishmen know a good deal of american fiction, and nothing whatever of american history. they know more about the autocrat of the breakfast-table than about the autocrat of the army and the people, the one great democratic despot of modern times; the napoleon of the new world. the only notion the english public ever got about american politics they got from a novel, _uncle tom's cabin_; and to say the least of it, it was no exception to the prevalence of fiction over fact. hundreds of us have heard of tom sawyer for one who has heard of charles sumner; and it is probable that most of us could pass a more detailed examination about toddy and budge than about lincoln and lee. but in the case of andrew jackson it may be that i felt a special sense of individual isolation; for i believe that there are even fewer among englishmen than among americans who realise that the energy of that great man was largely directed towards saving us from the chief evil which destroys the nations to-day. he sought to cut down, as with a sword of simplicity, the new and nameless enormity of finance; and he must have known, as by a lightning flash, that the people were behind him, because all the politicians were against him. the end of that struggle is not yet; but if the bank is stronger than the sword or the sceptre of popular sovereignty, the end will be the end of democracy. it will have to choose between accepting an acknowledged dictator and accepting dictation which it dare not acknowledge. the process will have begun by giving power to people and refusing to give them their titles; and it will have ended by giving the power to people who refuse to give us their names. but i have a special reason for ending this chapter on the name of the great popular dictator who made war on the politicians and the financiers. this chapter does not profess to touch on one in twenty of the interesting cities of america, even in this particular aspect of their relation to the history of america, which is so much neglected in england. if that were so, there would be a great deal to say even about the newest of them; chicago, for instance, is certainly something more than the mere pork-packing yard that english tradition suggests; and it has been building a boulevard not unworthy of its splendid position on its splendid lake. but all these cities are defiled and even diseased with industrialism. it is due to the americans to remember that they have deliberately preserved one of their cities from such defilement and such disease. and that is the presidential city, which stands in the american mind for the same ideal as the president; the idea of the republic that rises above modern money-getting and endures. there has really been an effort to keep the white house white. no factories are allowed in that town; no more than the necessary shops are tolerated. it is a beautiful city; and really retains something of that classical serenity of the eighteenth century in which the fathers of the republic moved. with all respect to the colonial place of that name, i do not suppose that wellington is particularly like wellington. but washington really is like washington. in this, as in so many things, there is no harm in our criticising foreigners, if only we would also criticise ourselves. in other words, the world might need even less of its new charity, if it had a little more of the old humility. when we complain of american individualism, we forget that we have fostered it by ourselves having far less of this impersonal ideal of the republic or commonwealth as a whole. when we complain, very justly, for instance, of great pictures passing into the possession of american magnates, we ought to remember that we paved the way for it by allowing them all to accumulate in the possession of english magnates. it is bad that a public treasure should be in the possession of a private man in america, but we took the first step in lightly letting it disappear into the private collection of a man in england. i know all about the genuine national tradition which treated the aristocracy as constituting the state; but these very foreign purchases go to prove that we ought to have had a state independent of the aristocracy. it is true that rich americans do sometimes covet the monuments of our culture in a fashion that rightly revolts us as vulgar and irrational. they are said sometimes to want to take whole buildings away with them; and too many of such buildings are private and for sale. there were wilder stories of a millionaire wishing to transplant glastonbury abbey and similar buildings as if they were portable shrubs in pots. it is obvious that it is nonsense as well as vandalism to separate glastonbury abbey from glastonbury. i can understand a man venerating it as a ruin; and i can understand a man despising it as a rubbish-heap. but it is senseless to insult a thing in order to idolatrise it; it is meaningless to desecrate the shrine in order to worship the stones. that sort of thing is the bad side of american appetite and ambition; and we are perfectly right to see it not only as a deliberate blasphemy but as an unconscious buffoonery. but there is another side to the american tradition, which is really too much lacking in our own tradition. and it is illustrated in this idea of preserving washington as a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without personal commerce. nobody could buy the white house or the washington monument; it may be hinted (as by an inhabitant of glastonbury) that nobody wants to; but nobody could if he did want to. there is really a certain air of serenity and security about the place, lacking in every other american town. it is increased, of course, by the clear blue skies of that half-southern province, from which smoke has been banished. the effect is not so much in the mere buildings, though they are classical and often beautiful. but whatever else they have built, they have built a great blue dome, the largest dome in the world. and the place does express something in the inconsistent idealism of this strange people; and here at least they have lifted it higher than all the sky-scrapers, and set it in a stainless sky. _in the american country_ the sharpest pleasure of a traveller is in finding the things which he did not expect, but which he might have expected to expect. i mean the things that are at once so strange and so obvious that they must have been noticed, yet somehow they have not been noted. thus i had heard a thousand things about jerusalem before i ever saw it; i had heard rhapsodies and disparagements of every description. modern rationalistic critics, with characteristic consistency, had blamed it for its accumulated rubbish and its modern restoration, for its antiquated superstition and its up-to-date vulgarity. but somehow the one impression that had never pierced through their description was the simple and single impression of a city on a hill, with walls coming to the very edge of slopes that were almost as steep as walls; the turreted city which crowns a cone-shaped hill in so many mediaeval landscapes. one would suppose that this was at once the plainest and most picturesque of all the facts; yet somehow, in my reading, i had always lost it amid a mass of minor facts that were merely details. we know that a city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid; and yet it would seem that it is exactly the hill that is hid; though perhaps it is only hid from the wise and the understanding. i had a similar and simple impression when i discovered america. i cannot avoid the phrase; for it would really seem that each man discovers it for himself. thus i had heard a great deal, before i saw them, about the tall and dominant buildings of new york. i agree that they have an instant effect on the imagination; which i think is increased by the situation in which they stand, and out of which they arose. they are all the more impressive because the building, while it is vertically so vast, is horizontally almost narrow. new york is an island, and has all the intensive romance of an island. it is a thing of almost infinite height upon very finite foundations. it is almost like a lofty lighthouse upon a lonely rock. but this story of the sky-scrapers, which i had often heard, would by itself give a curiously false impression of the freshest and most curious characteristic of american architecture. told only in terms of these great towers of stone and brick in the big industrial cities, the story would tend too much to an impression of something cold and colossal like the monuments of asia. it would suggest a modern babylon altogether too babylonian. it would imply that a man of the new world was a sort of new pharaoh, who built not so much a pyramid as a pagoda of pyramids. it would suggest houses built by mammoths out of mountains; the cities reared by elephants in their own elephantine school of architecture. and new york does recall the most famous of all sky-scrapers--the tower of babel. she recalls it none the less because there is no doubt about the confusion of tongues. but in truth the very reverse is true of most of the buildings in america. i had no sooner passed out into the suburbs of new york on the way to boston than i began to see something else quite contrary and far more curious. i saw forests upon forests of small houses stretching away to the horizon as literal forests do; villages and towns and cities. and they were, in another sense, literally like forests. they were all made of wood. it was almost as fantastic to an english eye as if they had been all made of cardboard. i had long outlived the silly old joke that referred to americans as if they all lived in the backwoods. but, in a sense, if they do not live in the woods, they are not yet out of the wood. i do not say this in any sense as a criticism. as it happens, i am particularly fond of wood. of all the superstitions which our fathers took lightly enough to love, the most natural seems to me the notion it is lucky to touch wood. some of them affect me the less as superstitions, because i feel them as symbols. if humanity had really thought friday unlucky it would have talked about bad friday instead of good friday. and while i feel the thrill of thirteen at a table, i am not so sure that it is the most miserable of all human fates to fill the places of the twelve apostles. but the idea that there was something cleansing or wholesome about the touching of wood seems to me one of those ideas which are truly popular, because they are truly poetic. it is probable enough that the conception came originally from the healing of the wood of the cross; but that only clinches the divine coincidence. it is like that other divine coincidence that the victim was a carpenter, who might almost have made his own cross. whether we take the mystical or the mythical explanation, there is obviously a very deep connection between the human working in wood and such plain and pathetic mysticism. it gives something like a touch of the holy childishness to the tale, as if that terrible engine could be a toy. in the same fashion a child fancies that mysterious and sinister horse, which was the downfall of troy, as something plain and staring, and perhaps spotted, like his own rocking-horse in the nursery. it might be said symbolically that americans have a taste for rocking-horses, as they certainly have a taste for rocking-chairs. a flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still. something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the matter; but i think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. i think there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is innocent, and easily pleased. it is not altogether untrue, still less is it unfriendly, to say that the landscape seems to be dotted with dolls' houses. it is the true tragedy of every fallen son of adam that he has grown too big to live in a doll's house. these things seem somehow to escape the irony of time by not even challenging it; they are too temporary even to be merely temporal. these people are not building tombs; they are not, as in the fine image of mrs. meynell's poem, merely building ruins. it is not easy to imagine the ruins of a doll's house; and that is why a doll's house is an everlasting habitation. how far it promises a political permanence is a matter for further discussion; i am only describing the mood of discovery; in which all these cottages built of lath, like the palaces of a pantomime, really seemed coloured like the clouds of morning; which are both fugitive and eternal. there is also in all this an atmosphere that comes in another sense from the nursery. we hear much of americans being educated on english literature; but i think few americans realise how much english children have been educated on american literature. it is true, and it is inevitable, that they can only be educated on rather old-fashioned american literature. mr. bernard shaw, in one of his plays, noted truly the limitations of the young american millionaire, and especially the staleness of his english culture; but there is necessarily another side to it. if the american talked more of macaulay than of nietzsche, we should probably talk more of emerson than of ezra pound. whether this staleness is necessarily a disadvantage is, of course, a different question. but, in any case, it is true that the old american books were often the books of our childhood, even in the literal sense of the books of our nursery. i know few men in england who have not left their boyhood to some extent lost and entangled in the forests of _huckleberry finn_. i know few women in england, from the most revolutionary suffragette to the most carefully preserved early victorian, who will not confess to having passed a happy childhood with the little women of miss alcott. _helen's babies_ was the first and by far the best book in the modern scriptures of baby-worship. and about all this old-fashioned american literature there was an undefinable savour that satisfied, and even fed, our growing minds. perhaps it was the smell of growing things; but i am far from certain that it was not simply the smell of wood. now that all the memory comes back to me, it seems to come back heavy in a hundred forms with the fragrance and the touch of timber. there was the perpetual reference to the wood-pile, the perpetual background of the woods. there was something crude and clean about everything; something fresh and strange about those far-off houses, to which i could not then have put a name. indeed, many things become clear in this wilderness of wood, which could only be expressed in symbol and even in fantasy. i will not go so far as to say that it shortened the transition from log cabin to white house; as if the white house were itself made of white wood (as oliver wendell holmes said), 'that cuts like cheese, but lasts like iron for things like these.' but i will say that the experience illuminates some other lines by holmes himself:- little i ask, my wants are few, i only ask a hut of stone. i should not have known, in england, that he was already asking for a good deal even in asking for that. in the presence of this wooden world the very combination of words seems almost a contradiction, like a hut of marble, or a hovel of gold. it was therefore with an almost infantile pleasure that i looked at all this promising expansion of fresh-cut timber and thought of the housing shortage at home. i know not by what incongruous movement of the mind there swept across me, at the same moment, the thought of things ancestral and hoary with the light of ancient dawns. the last war brought back body-armour; the next war may bring back bows and arrows. and i suddenly had a memory of old wooden houses in london; and a model of shakespeare's town. it is possible indeed that such elizabethan memories may receive a check or a chill when the traveller comes, as he sometimes does, to the outskirts of one of these strange hamlets of new frame-houses, and is confronted with a placard inscribed in enormous letters, 'watch us grow.' he can always imagine that he sees the timbers swelling before his eyes like pumpkins in some super-tropical summer. but he may have formed the conviction that no such proclamation could be found outside shakespeare's town. and indeed there is a serious criticism here, to any one who knows history; since the things that grow are not always the things that remain; and pumpkins of that expansiveness have a tendency to burst. i was always told that americans were harsh, hustling, rather rude and perhaps vulgar; but they were very practical and the future belonged to them. i confess i felt a fine shade of difference; i liked the americans; i thought they were sympathetic, imaginative, and full of fine enthusiasms; the one thing i could not always feel clear about was their future. i believe they were happier in their frame-houses than most people in most houses; having democracy, good education, and a hobby of work; the one doubt that did float across me was something like, 'will all this be here at all in two hundred years?' that was the first impression produced by the wooden houses that seemed like the waggons of gipsies; it is a serious impression, but there is an answer to it. it is an answer that opens on the traveller more and more as he goes westward, and finds the little towns dotted about the vast central prairies. and the answer is agriculture. wooden houses may or may not last; but farms will last; and farming will always last. the houses may look like gipsy caravans on a heath or common; but they are not on a heath or common. they are on the most productive and prosperous land, perhaps, in the modern world. the houses might fall down like shanties, but the fields would remain; and whoever tills those fields will count for a great deal in the affairs of humanity. they are already counting for a great deal, and possibly for too much, in the affairs of america. the real criticism of the middle west is concerned with two facts, neither of which has been yet adequately appreciated by the educated class in england. the first is that the turn of the world has come, and the turn of the agricultural countries with it. that is the meaning of the resurrection of ireland; that is the meaning of the practical surrender of the bolshevist jews to the russian peasants. the other is that in most places these peasant societies carry on what may be called the catholic tradition. the middle west is perhaps the one considerable place where they still carry on the puritan tradition. but the puritan tradition was originally a tradition of the town; and the second truth about the middle west turns largely on its moral relation to the town. as i shall suggest presently, there is much in common between this agricultural society of america and the great agricultural societies of europe. it tends, as the agricultural society nearly always does, to some decent degree of democracy. the agricultural society tends to the agrarian law. but in puritan america there is an additional problem, which i can hardly explain without a periphrasis. there was a time when the progress of the cities seemed to mock the decay of the country. it is more and more true, i think, to-day that it is rather the decay of the cities that seems to poison the progress and promise of the countryside. the cinema boasts of being a substitute for the tavern, but i think it a very bad substitute. i think so quite apart from the question about fermented liquor. nobody enjoys cinemas more than i, but to enjoy them a man has only to look and not even to listen, and in a tavern he has to talk. occasionally, i admit, he has to fight; but he need never move at the movies. thus in the real village inn are the real village politics, while in the other are only the remote and unreal metropolitan politics. and those central city politics are not only cosmopolitan politics but corrupt politics. they corrupt everything that they reach, and this is the real point about many perplexing questions. for instance, so far as i am concerned, it is the whole point about feminism and the factory. it is very largely the point about feminism and many other callings, apparently more cultured than the factory, such as the law court and the political platform. when i see women so wildly anxious to tie themselves to all this machinery of the modern city my first feeling is not indignation, but that dark and ominous sort of pity with which we should see a crowd rushing to embark in a leaking ship under a lowering storm. when i see wives and mothers going in for business government i not only regard it as a bad business but as a bankrupt business. it seems to me very much as if the peasant women, just before the french revolution, had insisted on being made duchesses or (as is quite as logical and likely) on being made dukes. it is as if those ragged women, instead of crying out for bread, had cried out for powder and patches. by the time they were wearing them they would be the only people wearing them. for powder and patches soon went out of fashion, but bread does not go out of fashion. in the same way, if women desert the family for the factory, they may find they have only done it for a deserted factory. it would have been very unwise of the lower orders to claim all the privileges of the higher orders in the last days of the french monarchy. it would have been very laborious to learn the science of heraldry or the tables of precedence when all such things were at once most complicated and most moribund. it would be tiresome to be taught all those tricks just when the whole bag of tricks was coming to an end. a french satirist might have written a fine apologue about jacques bonhomme coming up to paris in his wooden shoes and demanding to be made gold stick in waiting in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity; but i fear the stick in waiting would be waiting still. one of the first topics on which i heard conversation turning in america was that of a very interesting book called _main street_, which involves many of these questions of the modern industrial and the eternal feminine. it is simply the story, or perhaps rather the study than the story, of a young married woman in one of the multitudinous little towns on the great central plains of america; and of a sort of struggle between her own more restless culture and the provincial prosperity of her neighbours. there are a number of true and telling suggestions in the book, but the one touch which i found tingling in the memory of many readers was the last sentence, in which the master of the house, with unshaken simplicity, merely asks for the whereabouts of some domestic implement; i think it was a screw-driver. it seems to me a harmless request, but from the way people talked about it one might suppose he had asked for a screw-driver to screw down the wife in her coffin. and a great many advanced persons would tell us that wooden house in which she lived really was like a wooden coffin. but this appears to me to be taking a somewhat funereal view of the life of humanity. for, after all, on the face of it at any rate, this is merely the life of humanity, and even the life which all humanitarians have striven to give to humanity. revolutionists have treated it not only as the normal but even as the ideal. revolutionary wars have been waged to establish this; revolutionary heroes have fought, and revolutionary martyrs have died, only to build such a wooden house for such a worthy family. men have taken the sword and perished by the sword in order that the poor gentleman might have liberty to look for his screw-driver. for there is here a fact about america that is almost entirely unknown in england. the english have not in the least realised the real strength of america. we in england hear a great deal, we hear far too much, about the economic energy of industrial america, about the money of mr. morgan, or the machinery of mr. edison. we never realise that while we in england suffer from the same sort of successes in capitalism and clockwork, we have not got what the americans have got; something at least to balance it in the way of a free agriculture, a vast field of free farms dotted with small freeholders. for the reason i shall mention in a moment, they are not perhaps in the fullest and finest sense a peasantry. but they are in the practical and political sense a pure peasantry, in that their comparative equality is a true counterweight to the toppling injustice of the towns. and, even in places like that described as main street, that comparative equality can immediately be felt. the men may be provincials, but they are certainly citizens; they consult on a common basis. and i repeat that in this, after all, they do achieve what many prophets and righteous men have died to achieve. this plain village, fairly prosperous, fairly equal, untaxed by tyrants and untroubled by wars, is after all the place which reformers have regarded as their aim; whenever reformers have used their wits sufficiently to have any aim. the march to utopia, the march to the earthly paradise, the march to the new jerusalem, has been very largely the march to main street. and the latest modern sensation is a book written to show how wretched it is to live there. all this is true, and i think the lady might be more contented in her coffin, which is more comfortably furnished than most of the coffins where her fellow creatures live. nevertheless, there is an answer to this, or at least a modification of it. there is a case for the lady and a case against the gentleman and the screw-driver. and when we have noted what it really is, we have noted the real disadvantage in a situation like that of modern america, and especially the middle west. and with that we come back to the truth with which i started this speculation; the truth that few have yet realised, but of which i, for one, am more and more convinced--that industrialism is spreading because it is decaying; that only the dust and ashes of its dissolution are choking up the growth of natural things everywhere and turning the green world grey. in this relative agricultural equality the americans of the middle west are far in advance of the english of the twentieth century. it is not their fault if they are still some centuries behind the english of the twelfth century. but the defect by which they fall short of being a true peasantry is that they do not produce their own spiritual food, in the same sense as their own material food. they do not, like some peasantries, create other kinds of culture besides the kind called agriculture. their culture comes from the great cities; and that is where all the evil comes from. if a man had gone across england in the middle ages, or even across europe in more recent times, he would have found a culture which showed its vitality by its variety. we know the adventures of the three brothers in the old fairy tales who passed across the endless plain from city to city, and found one kingdom ruled by a wizard and another wasted by a dragon, one people living in castles of crystal and another sitting by fountains of wine. these are but legendary enlargements of the real adventures of a traveller passing from one patch of peasantry to another, and finding women wearing strange head-dresses and men singing new songs. a traveller in america would be somewhat surprised if he found the people in the city of st. louis all wearing crowns and crusading armour in honour of their patron saint. he might even feel some faint surprise if he found all the citizens of philadelphia clad in a composite costume, combining that of a quaker with that of a red indian, in honour of the noble treaty of william penn. yet these are the sort of local and traditional things that would really be found giving variety to the valleys of mediaeval europe. i myself felt a perfectly genuine and generous exhilaration of freedom and fresh enterprise in new places like oklahoma. but you would hardly find in oklahoma what was found in oberammergau. what goes to oklahoma is not the peasant play, but the cinema. and the objection to the cinema is not so much that it goes to oklahoma as that it does not come from oklahoma. in other words, these people have on the economic side a much closer approach than we have to economic freedom. it is not for us, who have allowed our land to be stolen by squires and then vulgarised by sham squires, to sneer at such colonists as merely crude and prosaic. they at least have really kept something of the simplicity and, therefore, the dignity of democracy; and that democracy may yet save their country even from the calamities of wealth and science. but, while these farmers do not need to become industrial in order to become industrious, they do tend to become industrial in so far as they become intellectual. their culture, and to some great extent their creed, do come along the railroads from the great modern urban centres, and bring with them a blast of death and a reek of rotting things. it is that influence that alone prevents the middle west from progressing towards the middle ages. for, after all, linked up in a hundred legends of the middle ages, may be found a symbolic pattern of hammers and nails and saws; and there is no reason why they should not have also sanctified screw-drivers. there is no reason why the screw-driver that seemed such a trifle to the author should not have been borne in triumph down main street like a sword of state, in some pageant of the guild of st. joseph of the carpenters or st. dunstan of the smiths. it was the catholic poetry and piety that filled common life with something that is lacking in the worthy and virile democracy of the west. nor are americans of intelligence so ignorant of this as some may suppose. there is an admirable society called the mediaevalists in chicago; whose name and address will strike many as suggesting a certain struggle of the soul against the environment. with the national heartiness they blazon their note-paper with heraldry and the hues of gothic windows; with the national high spirits they assume the fancy dress of friars; but any one who should essay to laugh at them instead of with them would find out his mistake. for many of them do really know a great deal about mediaevalism; much more than i do, or most other men brought up on an island that is crowded with its cathedrals. something of the same spirit may be seen in the beautiful new plans and buildings of yale, deliberately modelled not on classical harmony but on gothic irregularity and surprise. the grace and energy of the mediaeval architecture resurrected by a man like mr. r. a. cram of boston has behind it not merely artistic but historical and ethical enthusiasm; an enthusiasm for the catholic creed which made mediaeval civilisation. even on the huge puritan plains of the middle west the influence strays in the strangest fashion. and it is notable that among the pessimistic epitaphs of the spoon river anthology, in that churchyard compared with which most churchyards are cheery, among the suicides and secret drinkers and monomaniacs and hideous hypocrites of that happy village, almost the only record of respect and a recognition of wider hopes is dedicated to the catholic priest. but main street is main street in the main. main street is modern street in its multiplicity of mildly half-educated people; and all these historic things are a thousand miles from them. they have not heard the ancient noise either of arts or arms; the building of the cathedral or the marching of the crusade. but at least they have not deliberately slandered the crusade and defaced the cathedral. and if they have not produced the peasant arts, they can still produce the peasant crafts. they can sow and plough and reap and live by these everlasting things; nor shall the foundations of their state be moved. and the memory of those colossal fields, of those fruitful deserts, came back the more readily into my mind because i finished these reflections in the very heart of a modern industrial city, if it can be said to have a heart. it was in fact an english industrial city, but it struck me that it might very well be an american one. and it also struck me that we yield rather too easily to america the dusty palm of industrial enterprise, and feel far too little apprehension about greener and fresher vegetables. there is a story of an american who carefully studied all the sights of london or rome or paris, and came to the conclusion that 'it had nothing on minneapolis.' it seems to me that minneapolis has nothing on manchester. there were the same grey vistas of shops full of rubber tyres and metallic appliances; a man felt that he might walk a day without seeing a blade of grass; the whole horizon was so infinite with efficiency. the factory chimneys might have been pittsburg; the sky-signs might have been new york. one looked up in a sort of despair at the sky, not for a sky-sign but in a sense for a sign, for some sentence of significance and judgment; by the instinct that makes any man in such a scene seek for the only thing that has not been made by men. but even that was illogical, for it was night, and i could only expect to see the stars, which might have reminded me of old glory; but that was not the sign that oppressed me. all the ground was a wilderness of stone and all the buildings a forest of brick; i was far in the interior of a labyrinth of lifeless things. only, looking up, between two black chimneys and a telegraph pole, i saw vast and far and faint, as the first men saw it, the silver pattern of the plough. _the american business man_ it is a commonplace that men are all agreed in using symbols, and all differ about the meaning of the symbols. it is obvious that a russian republican might come to identify the eagle as a bird of empire and therefore a bird of prey. but when he ultimately escaped to the land of the free, he might find the same bird on the american coinage figuring as a bird of freedom. doubtless, he might find many other things to surprise him in the land of the free, and many calculated to make him think that the bird, if not imperial, was at least rather imperious. but i am not discussing those exceptional details here. it is equally obvious that a russian reactionary might cross the world with a vow of vengeance against the red flag. but that authoritarian might have some difficulties with the authorities, if he shot a man for using the red flag on the railway between willesden and clapham junction. but, of course, the difficulty about symbols is generally much more subtle than in these simple cases. i have remarked elsewhere that the first thing which a traveller should write about is the thing which he has not read about. it may be a small or secondary thing, but it is a thing that he has seen and not merely expected to see. i gave the example of the great multitude of wooden houses in america; we might say of wooden towns and wooden cities. but after he has seen such things, his next duty is to see the meaning of them; and here a great deal of complication and controversy is possible. the thing probably does not mean what he first supposes it to mean on the face of it; but even on the face of it, it might mean many different and even opposite things. for instance, a wooden house might suggest an almost savage solitude; a rude shanty put together by a pioneer in a forest; or it might mean a very recent and rapid solution of the housing problem, conducted cheaply and therefore on a very large scale. a wooden house might suggest the very newest thing in america or one of the very oldest things in england. it might mean a grey ruin at stratford or a white exhibition at earl's court. it is when we come to this interpretation of international symbols that we make most of the international mistakes. without the smallest error of detail, i will promise to prove that oriental women are independent because they wear trousers, or oriental men subject because they wear skirts. merely to apply it to this case, i will take the example of two very commonplace and trivial objects of modern life--a walking stick and a fur coat. as it happened, i travelled about america with two sticks, like a japanese nobleman with his two swords. i fear the simile is too stately. i bore more resemblance to a cripple with two crutches or a highly ineffectual version of the devil on two sticks. i carried them both because i valued them both, and did not wish to risk losing either of them in my erratic travels. one is a very plain grey stick from the woods of buckinghamshire, but as i took it with me to palestine it partakes of the character of a pilgrim's staff. when i can say that i have taken the same stick to jerusalem and to chicago, i think the stick and i may both have a rest. the other, which i value even more, was given me by the knights of columbus at yale, and i wish i could think that their chivalric title allowed me to regard it as a sword. now, i do not know whether the americans i met, struck by the fastidious foppery of my dress and appearance, concluded that it is the custom of elegant english dandies to carry two walking sticks. but i do know that it is much less common among americans than among englishmen to carry even one. the point, however, is not merely that more sticks are carried by englishmen than by americans; it is that the sticks which are carried by americans stand for something entirely different. in america a stick is commonly called a cane, and it has about it something of the atmosphere which the poet described as the nice conduct of the clouded cane. it would be an exaggeration to say that when the citizens of the united states see a man carrying a light stick, they deduce that if he does that he does nothing else. but there is about it a faint flavour of luxury and lounging, and most of the energetic citizens of this energetic society avoid it by instinct. now, in an englishman like myself, carrying a stick may imply lounging, but it does not imply luxury, and i can say with some firmness that it does not imply dandyism. in a great many englishmen it means the very opposite even of lounging. by one of those fantastic paradoxes which are the mystery of nationality, a walking stick often actually means walking. it frequently suggests the very reverse of the beau with his clouded cane; it does not suggest a town type, but rather specially a country type. it rather implies the kind of englishman who tramps about in lanes and meadows and knocks the tops off thistles. it suggests the sort of man who has carried the stick through his native woods, and perhaps even cut it in his native woods. there are plenty of these vigorous loungers, no doubt, in the rural parts of america, but the idea of a walking stick would not especially suggest them to americans; it would not call up such figures like a fairy wand. it would be easy to trace back the difference to many english origins, possibly to aristocratic origins, to the idea of the old squire, a man vigorous and even rustic, but trained to hold a useless staff rather than a useful tool. it might be suggested that american citizens do at least so far love freedom as to like to have their hands free. it might be suggested, on the other hand, that they keep their hands for the handles of many machines. and that the hand on a handle is less free than the hand on a stick or even a tool. but these again are controversial questions and i am only noting a fact. if an englishman wished to imagine more or less exactly what the impression is, and how misleading it is, he could find something like a parallel in what he himself feels about a fur coat. when i first found myself among the crowds on the main floor of a new york hotel, my rather exaggerated impression of the luxury of the place was largely produced by the number of men in fur coats, and what we should consider rather ostentatious fur coats, with all the fur outside. now an englishman has a number of atmospheric but largely accidental associations in connection with a fur coat. i will not say that he thinks a man in a fur coat must be a wealthy and wicked man; but i do say that in his own ideal and perfect vision a wealthy and wicked man would wear a fur coat. thus i had the sensation of standing in a surging mob of american millionaires, or even african millionaires; for the millionaires of chicago must be like the knights of the round table compared with the millionaires of johannesburg. but, as a matter of fact, the man in the fur coat was not even an american millionaire, but simply an american. it did not signify luxury, but rather necessity, and even a harsh and almost heroic necessity. orson probably wore a fur coat; and he was brought up by bears, but not the bears of wall street. eskimos are generally represented as a furry folk; but they are not necessarily engaged in delicate financial operations, even in the typical and appropriate occupation called freezing out. and if the american is not exactly an arctic traveller rushing from pole to pole, at least he is often literally fleeing from ice to ice. he has to make a very extreme distinction between outdoor and indoor clothing. he has to live in an icehouse outside and a hothouse inside; so hot that he may be said to construct an icehouse inside that. he turns himself into an icehouse and warms himself against the cold until he is warm enough to eat ices. but the point is that the same coat of fur which in england would indicate the sybarite life may here very well indicate the strenuous life; just as the same walking stick which would here suggest a lounger would in england suggest a plodder and almost a pilgrim. and these two trifles are types which i should like to put, by way of proviso and apology, at the very beginning of any attempt at a record of any impressions of a foreign society. they serve merely to illustrate the most important impression of all, the impression of how false all impressions may be. i suspect that most of the very false impressions have come from the careful record of very true facts. they have come from the fatal power of observing the facts without being able to observe the truth. they came from seeing the symbol with the most vivid clarity and being blind to all that it symbolises. it is as if a man who knew no greek should imagine that he could read a greek inscription because he took the greek r for an english p or the greek long e for an english h. i do not mention this merely as a criticism on other people's impressions of america, but as a criticism on my own. i wish it to be understood that i am well aware that all my views are subject to this sort of potential criticism, and that even when i am certain of the facts i do not profess to be certain of the deductions. in this chapter i hope to point out how a misunderstanding of this kind affects the common impression, not altogether unfounded, that the americans talk about dollars. but for the moment i am merely anxious to avoid a similar misunderstanding when i talk about americans. about the dogmas of democracy, about the right of a people to its own symbols, whether they be coins or customs, i am convinced, and no longer to be shaken. but about the meaning of those symbols, in silver or other substances, i am always open to correction. that error is the price we pay for the great glory of nationality. and in this sense i am quite ready, at the start, to warn my own readers against my own opinions. the fact without the truth is futile; indeed the fact without the truth is false. i have already noted that this is especially true touching our observations of a strange country; and it is certainly true touching one small fact which has swelled into a large fable. i mean the fable about america commonly summed up in the phrase about the almighty dollar. i do not think the dollar is almighty in america; i fancy many things are mightier, including many ideals and some rather insane ideals. but i think it might be maintained that the dollar has another of the attributes of deity. if it is not omnipotent it is in a sense omnipresent. whatever americans think about dollars, it is, i think, relatively true that they talk about dollars. if a mere mechanical record could be taken by the modern machinery of dictaphones and stenography, i do not think it probable that the mere word 'dollars' would occur more often in any given number of american conversations than the mere word 'pounds' or 'shillings' in a similar number of english conversations. and these statistics, like nearly all statistics, would be utterly useless and even fundamentally false. it is as if we should calculate that the word 'elephant' had been mentioned a certain number of times in a particular london street, or so many times more often than the word 'thunderbolt' had been used in stoke poges. doubtless there are statisticians capable of carefully collecting those statistics also; and doubtless there are scientific social reformers capable of legislating on the basis of them. they would probably argue from the elephantine imagery of the london street that such and such a percentage of the householders were megalomaniacs and required medical care and police coercion. and doubtless their calculations, like nearly all such calculations, would leave out the only important point; as that the street was in the immediate neighbourhood of the zoo, or was yet more happily situated under the benignant shadow of the elephant and castle. and in the same way the mechanical calculation about the mention of dollars is entirely useless unless we have some moral understanding of why they are mentioned. it certainly does not mean merely a love of money; and if it did, a love of money may mean a great many very different and even contrary things. the love of money is very different in a peasant or in a pirate, in a miser or in a gambler, in a great financier or in a man doing some practical and productive work. now this difference in the conversation of american and english business men arises, i think, from certain much deeper things in the american which are generally not understood by the englishman. it also arises from much deeper things in the englishman, of which the englishman is even more ignorant. to begin with, i fancy that the american, quite apart from any love of money, has a great love of measurement. he will mention the exact size or weight of things, in a way which appears to us as irrelevant. it is as if we were to say that a man came to see us carrying three feet of walking stick and four inches of cigar. it is so in cases that have no possible connection with any avarice or greed for gain. an american will praise the prodigal generosity of some other man in giving up his own estate for the good of the poor. but he will generally say that the philanthropist gave them a 200-acre park, where an englishman would think it quite sufficient to say that he gave them a park. there is something about this precision which seems suitable to the american atmosphere; to the hard sunlight, and the cloudless skies, and the glittering detail of the architecture and the landscape; just as the vaguer english version is consonant to our mistier and more impressionist scenery. it is also connected perhaps with something more boyish about the younger civilisation; and corresponds to the passionate particularity with which a boy will distinguish the uniforms of regiments, the rigs of ships, or even the colours of tram tickets. it is a certain godlike appetite for things, as distinct from thoughts. but there is also, of course, a much deeper cause of the difference; and it can easily be deduced by noting the real nature of the difference itself. when two business men in a train are talking about dollars i am not so foolish as to expect them to be talking about the philosophy of st. thomas aquinas. but if they were two english business men i should not expect them to be talking about business. probably it would be about some sport; and most probably some sport in which they themselves never dreamed of indulging. the approximate difference is that the american talks about his work and the englishman about his holidays. his ideal is not labour but leisure. like every other national characteristic, this is not primarily a point for praise or blame; in essence it involves neither and in effect it involves both. it is certainly connected with that snobbishness which is the great sin of english society. the englishman does love to conceive himself as a sort of country gentleman; and his castles in the air are all castles in scotland rather than in spain. for, as an ideal, a scotch castle is as english as a welsh rarebit or an irish stew. and if he talks less about money i fear it is sometimes because in one sense he thinks more of it. money is a mystery in the old and literal sense of something too sacred for speech. gold is a god; and like the god of some agnostics has no name and is worshipped only in his works. it is true in a sense that the english gentleman wishes to have enough money to be able to forget it. but it may be questioned whether he does entirely forget it. as against this weakness the american has succeeded, at the price of a great deal of crudity and clatter, in making general a very real respect for work. he has partly disenchanted the dangerous glamour of the gentleman, and in that sense has achieved some degree of democracy; which is the most difficult achievement in the world. on the other hand, there is a good side to the englishman's day-dream of leisure, and one which the american spirit tends to miss. it may be expressed in the word 'holiday' or still better in the word 'hobby.' the englishman, in his character of robin hood, really has got two strings to his bow. indeed the englishman really is well represented by robin hood; for there is always something about him that may literally be called outlawed, in the sense of being extra-legal or outside the rules. a frenchman said of browning that his centre was not in the middle; and it may be said of many an englishman that his heart is not where his treasure is. browning expressed a very english sentiment when he said:- i like to know a butcher paints, a baker rhymes for his pursuit, candlestick-maker much acquaints his soul with song, or haply mute blows out his brains upon the flute. stevenson touched on the same insular sentiment when he said that many men he knew, who were meat-salesmen to the outward eye, might in the life of contemplation sit with the saints. now the extraordinary achievement of the american meat-salesman is that his poetic enthusiasm can really be for meat sales; not for money but for meat. an american commercial traveller asked me, with a religious fire in his eyes, whether i did not think that salesmanship could be an art. in england there are many salesmen who are sincerely fond of art; but seldom of the art of salesmanship. art is with them a hobby; a thing of leisure and liberty. that is why the english traveller talks, if not of art, then of sport. that is why the two city men in the london train, if they are not talking about golf, may be talking about gardening. if they are not talking about dollars, or the equivalent of dollars, the reason lies much deeper than any superficial praise or blame touching the desire for wealth. in the english case, at least, it lies very deep in the english spirit. many of the greatest english things have had this lighter and looser character of a hobby or a holiday experiment. even a masterpiece has often been a by-product. the works of shakespeare come out so casually that they can be attributed to the most improbable people; even to bacon. the sonnets of shakespeare are picked up afterwards as if out of a wastepaper basket. the immortality of dr. johnson does not rest on the written leaves he collected, but entirely on the words he wasted, the words he scattered to the winds. so great a thing as pickwick is almost a kind of accident; it began as something secondary and grew into something primary and pre-eminent. it began with mere words written to illustrate somebody else's pictures; and swelled like an epic expanded from an epigram. it might almost be said that in the case of pickwick the author began as the servant of the artist. but, as in the same story of pickwick, the servant became greater than the master. this incalculable and accidental quality, like all national qualities, has its strength and weakness; but it does represent a certain reserve fund of interests in the englishman's life; and distinguishes him from the other extreme type, of the millionaire who works till he drops, or who drops because he stops working. it is the great achievement of american civilisation that in that country it really is not cant to talk about the dignity of labour. there is something that might almost be called the sanctity of labour; but it is subject to the profound law that when anything less than the highest becomes a sanctity, it tends also to become a superstition. when the candlestick-maker does not blow out his brains upon the flute there is always a danger that he may blow them out somewhere else, owing to depressed conditions in the candlestick market. now certainly one of the first impressions of america, or at any rate of new york, which is by no means the same thing as america, is that of a sort of mob of business men, behaving in many ways in a fashion very different from that of the swarms of london city men who go up every day to the city. they sit about in groups with red-indian gravity, as if passing the pipe of peace; though, in fact, most of them are smoking cigars and some of them are eating cigars. the latter strikes me as one of the most peculiar of transatlantic tastes, more peculiar than that of chewing gum. a man will sit for hours consuming a cigar as if it were a sugar-stick; but i should imagine it to be a very disagreeable sugar-stick. why he attempts to enjoy a cigar without lighting it i do not know; whether it is a more economical way of carrying a mere symbol of commercial conversation; or whether something of the same queer outlandish morality that draws such a distinction between beer and ginger beer draws an equally ethical distinction between touching tobacco and lighting it. for the rest, it would be easy to make a merely external sketch full of things equally strange; for this can always be done in a strange country. i allow for the fact of all foreigners looking alike; but i fancy that all those hard-featured faces, with spectacles and shaven jaws, do look rather alike, because they all like to make their faces hard. and with the mention of their mental attitude we realise the futility of any such external sketch. unless we can see that these are something more than men smoking cigars and talking about dollars we had much better not see them at all. it is customary to condemn the american as a materialist because of his worship of success. but indeed this very worship, like any worship, even devil-worship, proves him rather a mystic than a materialist. the frenchman who retires from business when he has money enough to drink his wine and eat his omelette in peace might much more plausibly be called a materialist by those who do not prefer to call him a man of sense. but americans do worship success in the abstract, as a sort of ideal vision. they follow success rather than money; they follow money rather than meat and drink. if their national life in one sense is a perpetual game of poker, they are playing excitedly for chips or counters as well as for coins. and by the ultimate test of material enjoyment, like the enjoyment of an omelette, even a coin is itself a counter. the yankee cannot eat chips as the frenchman can eat chipped potatoes; but neither can he swallow red cents as the frenchman swallows red wine. thus when people say of a yankee that he worships the dollar, they pay a compliment to his fine spirituality more true and delicate than they imagine. the dollar is an idol because it is an image; but it is an image of success and not of enjoyment. that this romance is also a religion is shown in the fact that there is a queer sort of morality attached to it. the nearest parallel to it is something like the sense of honour in the old duelling days. there is not a material but a distinctly moral savour about the implied obligation to collect dollars or to collect chips. we hear too much in england of the phrase about 'making good'; for no sensible englishman favours the needless interlarding of english with scraps of foreign languages. but though it means nothing in english, it means something very particular in american. there is a fine shade of distinction between succeeding and making good, precisely because there must always be a sort of ethical echo in the word good. america does vaguely feel a man making good as something analogous to a man being good or a man doing good. it is connected with his serious self-respect and his sense of being worthy of those he loves. nor is this curious crude idealism wholly insincere even when it drives him to what some of us would call stealing; any more than the duellist's honour was insincere when it drove him to what some would call murder. a very clever american play which i once saw acted contained a complete working model of this morality. a girl was loyal to, but distressed by, her engagement to a young man on whom there was a sort of cloud of humiliation. the atmosphere was exactly what it would have been in england if he had been accused of cowardice or card-sharping. and there was nothing whatever the matter with the poor young man except that some rotten mine or other in arizona had not 'made good.' now in england we should either be below or above that ideal of good. if we were snobs, we should be content to know that he was a gentleman of good connections, perhaps too much accustomed to private means to be expected to be businesslike. if we were somewhat larger-minded people, we should know that he might be as wise as socrates and as splendid as bayard and yet be unfitted, perhaps one should say therefore be unfitted, for the dismal and dirty gambling of modern commerce. but whether we were snobbish enough to admire him for being an idler, or chivalrous enough to admire him for being an outlaw, in neither case should we ever really and in our hearts despise him for being a failure. for it is this inner verdict of instinctive idealism that is the point at issue. of course there is nothing new, or peculiar to the new world, about a man's engagement practically failing through his financial failure. an english girl might easily drop a man because he was poor, or she might stick to him faithfully and defiantly although he was poor. the point is that this girl was faithful but she was not defiant; that is, she was not proud. the whole psychology of the situation was that she shared the weird worldly idealism of her family, and it was wounded as her patriotism would have been wounded if he had betrayed his country. to do them justice, there was nothing to show that they would have had any real respect for a royal duke who had inherited millions; what the simple barbarians wanted was a man who could 'make good.' that the process of making good would probably drag him through the mire of everything bad, that he would make good by bluffing, lying, swindling, and grinding the faces of the poor, did not seem to trouble them in the least. against this fanaticism there is this shadow of truth even in the fiction of aristocracy; that a gentleman may at least be allowed to be good without being bothered to make it. another objection to the phrase about the almighty dollar is that it is an almighty phrase, and therefore an almighty nuisance. i mean that it is made to explain everything, and to explain everything much too well; that is, much too easily. it does not really help people to understand a foreign country; but it gives them the fatal illusion that they do understand it. dollars stood for america as frogs stood for france; because it was necessary to connect particular foreigners with something, or it would be so easy to confuse a moor with a montenegrin or a russian with a red indian. the only cure for this sort of satisfied familiarity is the shock of something really unfamiliar. when people can see nothing at all in american democracy except a yankee running after a dollar, then the only thing to do is to trip them up as they run after the yankee, or run away with their notion of the yankee, by the obstacle of certain odd and obstinate facts that have no relation to that notion. and, as a matter of fact, there are a number of such obstacles to any such generalisation; a number of notable facts that have to be reconciled somehow to our previous notions. it does not matter for this purpose whether the facts are favourable or unfavourable, or whether the qualities are merits or defects; especially as we do not even understand them sufficiently to say which they are. the point is that we are brought to a pause, and compelled to attempt to understand them rather better than we do. we have found the one thing that we did not expect; and therefore the one thing that we cannot explain. and we are moved to an effort, probably an unsuccessful effort, to explain it. for instance, americans are very unpunctual. that is the last thing that a critic expects who comes to condemn them for hustling and haggling and vulgar ambition. but it is almost the first fact that strikes the spectator on the spot. the chief difference between the humdrum english business man and the hustling american business man is that the hustling american business man is always late. of course there is a great deal of difference between coming late and coming too late. but i noticed the fashion first in connection with my own lectures; touching which i could heartily recommend the habit of coming too late. i could easily understand a crowd of commercial americans not coming to my lectures at all; but there was something odd about their coming in a crowd, and the crowd being expected to turn up some time after the appointed hour. the managers of these lectures (i continue to call them lectures out of courtesy to myself) often explained to me that it was quite useless to begin properly until about half an hour after time. often people were still coming in three-quarters of an hour or even an hour after time. not that i objected to that, as some lecturers are said to do; it seemed to me an agreeable break in the monotony; but as a characteristic of a people mostly engaged in practical business, it struck me as curious and interesting. i have grown accustomed to being the most unbusinesslike person in any given company; and it gave me a sort of dizzy exaltation to find i was not the most unpunctual person in that company. i was afterwards told by many americans that my impression was quite correct; that american unpunctuality was really very prevalent, and extended to much more important things. but at least i was not content to lump this along with all sorts of contrary things that i did not happen to like, and call it america. i am not sure of what it really means, but i rather fancy that though it may seem the very reverse of the hustling, it has the same origin as the hustling. the american is not punctual because he is not punctilious. he is impulsive, and has an impulse to stay as well as an impulse to go. for, after all, punctuality belongs to the same order of ideas as punctuation; and there is no punctuation in telegrams. the order of clocks and set hours which english business has always observed is a good thing in its own way; indeed i think that in a larger sense it is better than the other way. but it is better because it is a protection against hustling, not a promotion of it. in other words, it is better because it is more civilised; as a great venetian merchant prince clad in cloth of gold was more civilised; or an old english merchant drinking port in an oak-panelled room was more civilised; or a little french shopkeeper shutting up his shop to play dominoes is more civilised. and the reason is that the american has the romance of business and is monomaniac, while the frenchman has the romance of life and is sane. but the romance of business really is a romance, and the americans are really romantic about it. and that romance, though it revolves round pork or petrol, is really like a love-affair in this; that it involves not only rushing but also lingering. the american is too busy to have business habits. he is also too much in earnest to have business rules. if we wish to understand him, we must compare him not with the french shopkeeper when he plays dominoes, but with the same french shopkeeper when he works the guns or mans the trenches as a conscript soldier. everybody used to the punctilious prussian standard of uniform and parade has noticed the roughness and apparent laxity of the french soldier, the looseness of his clothes, the unsightliness of his heavy knapsack, in short his inferiority in every detail of the business of war except fighting. there he is much too swift to be smart. he is much too practical to be precise. by a strange illusion which can lift pork-packing almost to the level of patriotism, the american has the same free rhythm in his romance of business. he varies his conduct not to suit the clock but to suit the case. he gives more time to more important and less time to less important things; and he makes up his time-table as he goes along. suppose he has three appointments; the first, let us say, is some mere trifle of erecting a tower twenty storeys high and exhibiting a sky-sign on the top of it; the second is a business discussion about the possibility of printing advertisements of soft drinks on the table-napkins at a restaurant; the third is attending a conference to decide how the populace can be prevented from using chewing-gum and the manufacturers can still manage to sell it. he will be content merely to glance at the sky-sign as he goes by in a trolley-car or an automobile; he will then settle down to the discussion with his partner about the table-napkins, each speaker indulging in long monologues in turn; a peculiarity of much american conversation. now if in the middle of one of these monologues, he suddenly thinks that the vacant space of the waiter's shirt-front might also be utilised to advertise the gee whiz ginger champagne, he will instantly follow up the new idea in all its aspects and possibilities, in an even longer monologue; and will never think of looking at his watch while he is rapturously looking at his waiter. the consequence is that he will come late into the great social movement against chewing-gum, where an englishman would probably have arrived at the proper hour. but though the englishman's conduct is more proper, it need not be in all respects more practical. the englishman's rules are better for the business of life, but not necessarily for the life of business. and it is true that for many of these americans business is the business of life. it is really also, as i have said, the romance of life. we shall admire or deplore this spirit, accordingly as we are glad to see trade irradiated with so much poetry, or sorry to see so much poetry wasted on trade. but it does make many people happy, like any other hobby; and one is disposed to add that it does fill their imaginations like any other delusion. for the true criticism of all this commercial romance would involve a criticism of this historic phase of commerce. these people are building on the sand, though it shines like gold, and for them like fairy gold; but the world will remember the legend about fairy gold. half the financial operations they follow deal with things that do not even exist; for in that sense all finance is a fairy tale. many of them are buying and selling things that do nothing but harm; but it does them good to buy and sell them. the claim of the romantic salesman is better justified than he realises. business really is romance; for it is not reality. there is one real advantage that america has over england, largely due to its livelier and more impressionable ideal. america does not think that stupidity is practical. it does not think that ideas are merely destructive things. it does not think that a genius is only a person to be told to go away and blow his brains out; rather it would open all its machinery to the genius and beg him to blow his brains in. it might attempt to use a natural force like blake or shelley for very ignoble purposes; it would be quite capable of asking blake to take his tiger and his golden lions round as a sort of barnum's show, or shelley to hang his stars and haloed clouds among the lights of broadway. but it would not assume that a natural force is useless, any more than that niagara is useless. and there is a very definite distinction here touching the intelligence of the trader, whatever we may think of either course touching the intelligence of the artist. it is one thing that apollo should be employed by admetus, although he is a god. it is quite another thing that apollo should always be sacked by admetus, because he is a god. now in england, largely owing to the accident of a rivalry and therefore a comparison with france, there arose about the end of the eighteenth century an extraordinary notion that there was some sort of connection between dullness and success. what the americans call a bonehead became what the english call a hard-headed man. the merchants of london evinced their contempt for the fantastic logicians of paris by living in a permanent state of terror lest somebody should set the thames on fire. in this as in much else it is much easier to understand the americans if we connect them with the french who were their allies than with the english who were their enemies. there are a great many franco-american resemblances which the practical anglo-saxons are of course too hard-headed (or boneheaded) to see. american history is haunted with the shadow of the plebiscitary president; they have a tradition of classical architecture for public buildings. their cities are planned upon the squares of paris and not upon the labyrinth of london. they call their cities corinth and syracuse, as the french called their citizens epaminondas and timoleon. their soldiers wore the french kepi; and they make coffee admirably, and do not make tea at all. but of all the french elements in america the most french is this real practicality. they know that at certain times the most businesslike of all qualities is 'l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace.' the publisher may induce the poet to do a pot-boiler; but the publisher would cheerfully allow the poet to set the mississippi on fire, if it would boil his particular pot. it is not so much that englishmen are stupid as that they are afraid of being clever; and it is not so much that americans are clever as that they do not try to be any stupider than they are. the fire of french logic has burnt that out of america as it has burnt it out of europe, and of almost every place except england. this is one of the few points on which english insularity really is a disadvantage. it is the fatal notion that the only sort of commonsense is to be found in compromise, and that the only sort of compromise is to be found in confusion. this must be clearly distinguished from the commonplace about the utilitarian world not rising to the invisible values of genius. under this philosophy the utilitarian does not see the utility of genius, even when it is quite visible. he does not see it, not because he is a utilitarian, but because he is an idealist whose ideal is dullness. for some time the english aspired to be stupid, prayed and hoped with soaring spiritual ambition to be stupid. but with all their worship of success, they did not succeed in being stupid. the natural talents of a great and traditional nation were always breaking out in spite of them. in spite of the merchants of london, turner did set the thames on fire. in spite of our repeatedly explained preference for realism to romance, europe persisted in resounding with the name of byron. and just when we had made it perfectly clear to the french that we despised all their flamboyant tricks, that we were a plain prosaic people and there was no fantastic glory or chivalry about us, the very shaft we sent against them shone with the name of nelson, a shooting and a falling star. _presidents and problems_ all good americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen. all good englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen. this difference, deep and perhaps ineradicable in the temperaments of the two peoples, explains a thousand things in their literature and their laws. the american national poet praised his people for their readiness 'to _rise_ against the never-ending audacity of elected persons.' the english national anthem is content to say heartily, but almost hastily, 'confound their politics,' and then more cheerfully, as if changing the subject, 'god save the king.' for this is especially the secret of the monarch or chief magistrate in the two countries. they arm the president with the powers of a king, that he may be a nuisance in politics. we deprive the king even of the powers of a president, lest he should remind us of a politician. we desire to forget the never-ending audacity of elected persons; and with us therefore it really never does end. that is the practical objection to our own habit of changing the subject, instead of changing the ministry. the king, as the irish wit observed, is not a subject; but in that sense the english crowned head is not a king. he is a popular figure intended to remind us of the england that politicians do not remember; the england of horses and ships and gardens and good fellowship. the americans have no such purely social symbol; and it is rather the root than the result of this that their social luxury, and especially their sport, are a little lacking in humanity and humour. it is the american, much more than the englishman, who takes his pleasures sadly, not to say savagely. the genuine popularity of constitutional monarchs, in parliamentary countries, can be explained by any practical example. let us suppose that great social reform, the compulsory haircutting act, has just begun to be enforced. the compulsory haircutting act, as every good citizen knows, is a statute which permits any person to grow his hair to any length, in any wild or wonderful shape, so long as he is registered with a hairdresser who charges a shilling. but it imposes a universal close-shave (like that which is found so hygienic during a curative detention at dartmoor) on all who are registered only with a barber who charges threepence. thus, while the ornamental classes can continue to ornament the street with piccadilly weepers or chin-beards if they choose, the working classes demonstrate the care with which the state protects them by going about in a fresher, cooler, and cleaner condition; a condition which has the further advantage of revealing at a glance that outline of the criminal skull, which is so common among them. the compulsory haircutting act is thus in every way a compact and convenient example of all our current laws about education, sport, liquor and liberty in general. well, the law has passed and the masses, insensible to its scientific value, are still murmuring against it. the ignorant peasant maiden is averse to so extreme a fashion of bobbing her hair; and does not see how she can even be a flapper with nothing to flap. her father, his mind already poisoned by bolshevists, begins to wonder who the devil does these things, and why. in proportion as he knows the world of to-day, he guesses that the real origin may be quite obscure, or the real motive quite corrupt. the pressure may have come from anybody who has gained power or money anyhow. it may come from the foreign millionaire who owns all the expensive hairdressing saloons; it may come from some swindler in the cutlery trade who has contracted to sell a million bad razors. hence the poor man looks about him with suspicion in the street; knowing that the lowest sneak or the loudest snob he sees may be directing the government of his country. anybody may have to do with politics; and this sort of thing is politics. suddenly he catches sight of a crowd, stops, and begins wildly to cheer a carriage that is passing. the carriage contains the one person who has certainly not originated any great scientific reform. he is the only person in the commonwealth who is not allowed to cut off other people's hair, or to take away other people's liberties. he at least is kept out of politics; and men hold him up as they did an unspotted victim to appease the wrath of the gods. he is their king, and the only man they know is not their ruler. we need not be surprised that he is popular, knowing how they are ruled. the popularity of a president in america is exactly the opposite. the american republic is the last mediaeval monarchy. it is intended that the president shall rule, and take all the risks of ruling. if the hair is cut he is the haircutter, the magistrate that bears not the razor in vain. all the popular presidents, jackson and lincoln and roosevelt, have acted as democratic despots, but emphatically not as constitutional monarchs. in short, the names have become curiously interchanged; and as a historical reality it is the president who ought to be called a king. but it is not only true that the president could correctly be called a king. it is also true that the king might correctly be called a president. we could hardly find a more exact description of him than to call him a president. what is expected in modern times of a modern constitutional monarch is emphatically that he should preside. we expect him to take the throne exactly as if he were taking the chair. the chairman does not move the motion or resolution, far less vote it; he is not supposed even to favour it. he is expected to please everybody by favouring nobody. the primary essentials of a president or chairman are that he should be treated with ceremonial respect, that he should be popular in his personality and yet impersonal in his opinions, and that he should actually be a link between all the other persons by being different from all of them. this is exactly what is demanded of the constitutional monarch in modern times. it is exactly the opposite to the american position; in which the president does not preside at all. he moves; and the thing he moves may truly be called a motion; for the national idea is perpetual motion. technically it is called a message; and might often actually be called a menace. thus we may truly say that the king presides and the president reigns. some would prefer to say that the president rules; and some senators and members of congress would prefer to say that he rebels. but there is no doubt that he moves; he does not take the chair or even the stool, but rather the stump. some people seem to suppose that the fall of president wilson was a denial of this almost despotic ideal in america. as a matter of fact it was the strongest possible assertion of it. the idea is that the president shall take responsibility and risk; and responsibility means being blamed, and risk means the risk of being blamed. the theory is that things are done by the president; and if things go wrong, or are alleged to go wrong, it is the fault of the president. this does not invalidate, but rather ratifies the comparison with true monarchs such as the mediaeval monarchs. constitutional princes are seldom deposed; but despots were often deposed. in the simpler races of sunnier lands, such as turkey, they were commonly assassinated. even in our own history a king often received the same respectful tribute to the responsibility and reality of his office. but king john was attacked because he was strong, not because he was weak. richard the second lost the crown because the crown was a trophy, not because it was a trifle. and president wilson was deposed because he had used a power which is such, in its nature, that a man must use it at the risk of deposition. as a matter of fact, of course, it is easy to exaggerate mr. wilson's real unpopularity, and still more easy to exaggerate mr. wilson's real failure. there are a great many people in america who justify and applaud him; and what is yet more interesting, who justify him not on pacifist and idealistic, but on patriotic and even military grounds. it is especially insisted by some that his demonstration, which seemed futile as a threat against mexico, was a very far-sighted preparation for the threat against prussia. but in so far as the democracy did disagree with him, it was but the occasional and inevitable result of the theory by which the despot has to anticipate the democracy. thus the american king and the english president are the very opposite of each other; yet they are both the varied and very national indications of the same contemporary truth. it is the great weariness and contempt that have fallen upon common politics in both countries. it may be answered, with some show of truth, that the new american president represents a return to common politics; and that in that sense he marks a real rebuke to the last president and his more uncommon politics. and it is true that many who put mr. harding in power regard him as the symbol of something which they call normalcy; which may roughly be translated into english by the word normality. and by this they do mean, more or less, the return to the vague capitalist conservatism of the nineteenth century. they might call mr. harding a victorian if they had ever lived under victoria. perhaps these people do entertain the extraordinary notion that the nineteenth century was normal. but there are very few who think so, and even they will not think so long. the blunder is the beginning of nearly all our present troubles. the nineteenth century was the very reverse of normal. it suffered a most unnatural strain in the combination of political equality in theory with extreme economic inequality in practice. capitalism was not a normalcy but an abnormalcy. property is normal, and is more normal in proportion as it is universal. slavery may be normal and even natural, in the sense that a bad habit may be second nature. but capitalism was never anything so human as a habit; we may say it was never anything so good as a bad habit. it was never a custom; for men never grew accustomed to it. it was never even conservative; for before it was even created wise men had realised that it could not be conserved. it was from the first a problem; and those who will not even admit the capitalist problem deserve to get the bolshevist solution. all things considered, i cannot say anything worse of them than that. the recent presidential election preserved some trace of the old party system of america; but its tradition has very nearly faded like that of the party system of england. it is easy for an englishman to confess that he never quite understood the american party system. it would perhaps be more courageous in him, and more informing, to confess that he never really understood the british party system. the planks in the two american platforms may easily be exhibited as very disconnected and ramshackle; but our own party was as much of a patchwork, and indeed i think even more so. everybody knows that the two american factions were called 'democrat' and 'republican.' it does not at all cover the case to identify the former with liberals and the latter with conservatives. the democrats are the party of the south and have some true tradition from the southern aristocracy and the defence of secession and state rights. the republicans rose in the north as the party of lincoln, largely condemning slavery. but the republicans are also the party of tariffs, and are at least accused of being the party of trusts. the democrats are the party of free trade; and in the great movement of twenty years ago the party of free silver. the democrats are also the party of the irish; and the stones they throw at trusts are retorted by stones thrown at tammany. it is easy to see all these things as curiously sporadic and bewildering; but i am inclined to think that they are as a whole more coherent and rational than our own old division of liberals and conservatives. there is even more doubt nowadays about what is the connecting link between the different items in the old british party programmes. i have never been able to understand why being in favour of protection should have anything to do with being opposed to home rule; especially as most of the people who were to receive home rule were themselves in favour of protection. i could never see what giving people cheap bread had to do with forbidding them cheap beer; or why the party which sympathises with ireland cannot sympathise with poland. i cannot see why liberals did not liberate public-houses or conservatives conserve crofters. i do not understand the principle upon which the causes were selected on both sides; and i incline to think that it was with the impartial object of distributing nonsense equally on both sides. heaven knows there is enough nonsense in american politics too; towering and tropical nonsense like a cyclone or an earthquake. but when all is said, i incline to think that there was more spiritual and atmospheric cohesion in the different parts of the american party than in those of the english party; and i think this unity was all the more real because it was more difficult to define. the republican party originally stood for the triumph of the north, and the north stood for the nineteenth century; that is for the characteristic commercial expansion of the nineteenth century; for a firm faith in the profit and progress of its great and growing cities, its division of labour, its industrial science, and its evolutionary reform. the democratic party stood more loosely for all the elements that doubted whether this development was democratic or was desirable; all that looked back to jeffersonian idealism and the serene abstractions of the eighteenth century, or forward to bryanite idealism and some simplified utopia founded on grain rather than gold. along with this went, not at all unnaturally, the last and lingering sentiment of the southern squires, who remembered a more rural civilisation that seemed by comparison romantic. along with this went, quite logically, the passions and the pathos of the irish, themselves a rural civilisation, whose basis is a religion or what the nineteenth century tended to call a superstition. above all, it was perfectly natural that this tone of thought should favour local liberties, and even a revolt on behalf of local liberties, and should distrust the huge machine of centralised power called the union. in short, something very near the truth was said by a suicidally silly republican orator, who was running blaine for the presidency, when he denounced the democratic party as supported by 'rome, rum, and rebellion.' they seem to me to be three excellent things in their place; and that is why i suspect that i should have belonged to the democratic party, if i had been born in america when there was a democratic party. but i fancy that by this time even this general distinction has become very dim. if i had been an american twenty years ago, in the time of the great free silver campaign, i should certainly never have hesitated for an instant about my sympathies or my side. my feelings would have been exactly those that are nobly expressed by mr. vachell lindsay, in a poem bearing the characteristic title of 'bryan, bryan, bryan, bryan.' and, by the way, nobody can begin to sympathise with america whose soul does not to some extent begin to swing and dance to the drums and gongs of mr. vachell lindsay's great orchestra; which has the note of his whole nation in this: that a refined person can revile it a hundred times over as violent and brazen and barbarous and absurd, but not as insincere; there is something in it, and that something is the soul of many million men. but the poet himself, in the political poem referred to, speaks of bryan's fall over free silver as 'defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream'; and it is only too probable that the cause has fallen as well as the candidate. the william jennings bryan of later years is not the man whom i should have seen in my youth, with the visionary eyes of mr. vachell lindsay. he has become a commonplace pacifist, which is in its nature the very opposite of a revolutionist; for if men will fight rather than sacrifice humanity on a golden cross, it cannot be wrong for them to resist its being sacrificed to an iron cross. i came into very indirect contact with mr. bryan when i was in america, in a fashion that made me realise how hard it has become to recover the illusions of a bryanite. i believe that my lecture agent was anxious to arrange a debate, and i threw out a sort of loose challenge to the effect that woman's suffrage had weakened the position of woman; and while i was away in the wilds of oklahoma my lecture agent (a man of blood-curdling courage and enterprise) asked mr. bryan to debate with me. now mr. bryan is one of the greatest orators of modern history, and there is no conceivable reason why he should trouble to debate with a wandering lecturer. but as a matter of fact he expressed himself in the most magnanimous and courteous terms about my personal position, but said (as i understood) that it would be improper to debate on female suffrage as it was already a part of the political system. and when i heard that, i could not help a sigh; for i recognised something that i knew only too well on the front benches of my own beloved land. the great and glorious demagogue had degenerated into a statesman. i had never expected for a moment that the great orator could be bothered to debate with me at all; but it had never occurred to me, as a general moral principle, that two educated men were for ever forbidden to talk sense about a particular topic, because a lot of other people had already voted on it. what is the matter with that attitude is the loss of the freedom of the mind. there can be no liberty of thought unless it is ready to unsettle what has recently been settled, as well as what has long been settled. we are perpetually being told in the papers that what is wanted is a strong man who will do things. what is wanted is a strong man who will undo things; and that will be a real test of strength. anyhow, we could have believed, in the time of the free silver fight, that the democratic party was democratic with a small d. in mr. wilson it was transfigured, his friends would say into a higher and his foes into a hazier thing. and the republican reaction against him, even where it has been healthy, has also been hazy. in fact, it has been not so much the victory of a political party as a relapse into repose after certain political passions; and in that sense there is a truth in the strange phrase about normalcy; in the sense that there is nothing more normal than going to sleep. but an even larger truth is this; it is most likely that america is no longer concentrated on these faction fights at all, but is considering certain large problems upon which those factions hardly troubled to take sides. they are too large even to be classified as foreign policy distinct from domestic policy. they are so large as to be inside as well as outside the state. from an english standpoint the most obvious example is the irish; for the irish problem is not a british problem, but also an american problem. and this is true even of the great external enigma of japan. the japanese question may be a part of foreign policy for america, but it is a part of domestic policy for california. and the same is true of that other intense and intelligent eastern people, the genius and limitations of which have troubled the world so much longer. what the japs are in california, the jews are in america. that is, they are a piece of foreign policy that has become imbedded in domestic policy; something which is found inside but still has to be regarded from the outside. on these great international matters i doubt if americans got much guidance from their party system; especially as most of these questions have grown very recently and rapidly to enormous size. men are left free to judge of them with fresh minds. and that is the truth in the statement that the washington conference has opened the gates of a new world. on the relations to england and ireland i will not attempt to dwell adequately here. i have already noted that my first interview was with an irishman, and my first impression from that interview a vivid sense of the importance of ireland in anglo-american relations; and i have said something of the irish problem, prematurely and out of its proper order, under the stress of that sense of urgency. here i will only add two remarks about the two countries respectively. a great many british journalists have recently imagined that they were pouring oil upon the troubled waters, when they were rather pouring out oil to smooth the downward path; and to turn the broad road to destruction into a butter-slide. they seem to have no notion of what to do, except to say what they imagine the very stupidest of their readers would be pleased to hear, and conceal whatever the most intelligent of their readers would probably like to know. they therefore informed the public that 'the majority of americans' had abandoned all sympathy with ireland, because of its alleged sympathy with germany; and that this majority of americans was now ardently in sympathy with its english brothers across the sea. now to begin with, such critics have no notion of what they are saying when they talk about the majority of americans. to anybody who has happened to look in, let us say, on the city of omaha, nebraska, the remark will have something enormous and overwhelming about it. it is like saying that the majority of the inhabitants of china would agree with the chinese ambassador in a preference for dining at the savoy rather than the ritz. there are millions and millions of people living in those great central plains of the north american continent of whom it would be nearer the truth to say that they have never heard of england, or of ireland either, than to say that their first emotional movement is a desire to come to the rescue of either of them. it is perfectly true that the more monomaniac sort of sinn feiner might sometimes irritate this innocent and isolated american spirit by being pro-irish. it is equally true that a traditional bostonian or virginian might irritate it by being pro-english. the only difference is that large numbers of pure irishmen are scattered in those far places, and large numbers of pure englishmen are not. but it is truest of all to say that neither england nor ireland so much as crosses the mind of most of them once in six months. painting up large notices of 'watch us grow,' making money by farming with machinery, together with an occasional hold-up with six-shooters and photographs of a beautiful murderess or divorcée, fill up the round of their good and happy lives, and fleet the time carelessly as in the golden age. but putting aside all this vast and distant democracy, which is the real 'majority of americans,' and confining ourselves to that older culture on the eastern coast which the critics probably had in mind, we shall find the case more comforting but not to be covered with cheap and false comfort. now it is perfectly true that any englishman coming to this eastern coast, as i did, finds himself not only most warmly welcomed as a guest, but most cordially complimented as an englishman. men recall with pride the branches of their family that belong to england or the english counties where they were rooted; and there are enthusiasms for english literature and history which are as spontaneous as patriotism itself. something of this may be put down to a certain promptitude and flexibility in all american kindness, which is never sufficiently stodgy to be called good nature. the englishman does sometimes wonder whether if he had been a russian, his hosts would not have remembered remote russian aunts and uncles and disinterred a muscovite great-grandmother; or whether if he had come from iceland, they would not have known as much about icelandic sagas and been as sympathetic about the absence of icelandic snakes. but with a fair review of the proportions of the case he will dismiss this conjecture, and come to the conclusion that a number of educated americans are very warmly and sincerely sympathetic with england. what i began to feel, with a certain creeping chill, was that they were only too sympathetic with england. the word sympathetic has sometimes rather a double sense. the impression i received was that all these chivalrous southerners and men mellow with bostonian memories were _rallying_ to england. they were on the defensive; and it was poor old england that they were defending. their attitude implied that somebody or something was leaving her undefended, or finding her indefensible. the burden of that hearty chorus was that england was not so black as she was painted; it seemed clear that somewhere or other she was being painted pretty black. but there was something else that made me uncomfortable; it was not only the sense of being somewhat boisterously forgiven; it was also something involving questions of power as well as morality. then it seemed to me that a new sensation turned me hot and cold; and i felt something i have never before felt in a foreign land. never had my father or my grandfather known that sensation; never during the great and complex and perhaps perilous expansion of our power and commerce in the last hundred years had an englishman heard exactly that note in a human voice. england was being _pitied_. i, as an englishman, was not only being pardoned but pitied. my country was beginning to be an object of compassion, like poland or spain. my first emotion, full of the mood and movement of a hundred years, was one of furious anger. but the anger has given place to anxiety; and the anxiety is not yet at an end. it is not my business here to expound my view of english politics, still less of european politics or the politics of the world; but to put down a few impressions of american travel. on many points of european politics the impression will be purely negative; i am sure that most americans have no notion of the position of france or the position of poland. but if english readers want the truth, i am sure this is the truth about their notion of the position of england. they are wondering, or those who are watching are wondering, whether the term of her success is come and she is going down the dark road after prussia. many are sorry if this is so; some are glad if it is so; but all are seriously considering the probability of its being so. and herein lay especially the horrible folly of our black-and-tan terrorism over the irish people. i have noted that the newspapers told us that america had been chilled in its irish sympathies by irish detachment during the war. it is the painful truth that any advantage we might have had from this we ourselves immediately proceeded to destroy. ireland _might_ have put herself wrong with america by her attitude about belgium, if england had not instantly proceeded to put herself more wrong by her attitude towards ireland. it is quite true that two blacks do not make a white; but you cannot send a black to reproach people with tolerating blackness; and this is quite as true when one is a black brunswicker and the other a black-and-tan. it is true that since then england has made surprisingly sweeping concessions; concessions so large as to increase the amazement that the refusal should have been so long. but unfortunately the combination of the two rather clinches the conception of our decline. if the concession had come before the terror, it would have looked like an attempt to emancipate, and would probably have succeeded. coming so abruptly after the terror, it looked only like an attempt to tyrannise, and an attempt that failed. it was partly an inheritance from a stupid tradition, which tried to combine what it called firmness with what it called conciliation; as if when we made up our minds to soothe a man with a five-pound note, we always took care to undo our own action by giving him a kick as well. the english politician has often done that; though there is nothing to be said of such a fool, except that he has wasted a fiver. but in this case he gave the kick first, received a kicking in return, and _then_ gave up the money; and it was hard for the bystanders to say anything except that he had been badly beaten. the combination and sequence of events seems almost as if it were arranged to suggest the dark and ominous parallel. the first action looked only too like the invasion of belgium, and the second like the evacuation of belgium. so that vast and silent crowd in the west looked at the british empire, as men look at a great tower that has begun to lean. thus it was that while i found real pleasure, i could not find unrelieved consolation in the sincere compliments paid to my country by so many cultivated americans; their memories of homely corners of historic counties from which their fathers came, of the cathedral that dwarfs the town, or the inn at the turning of the road. there was something in their voices and the look in their eyes which from the first disturbed me. so i have heard good englishmen, who died afterwards the death of soldiers, cry aloud in 1914, 'it seems impossible, of those jolly bavarians!' or, 'i will never believe it, when i think of the time i had at heidelberg!' but there are other things besides the parallel of prussia or the problem of ireland. the american press is much freer than our own; the american public is much more familiar with the discussion of corruption than our own; and it is much more conscious of the corruption of our politics than we are. almost any man in america may speak of the marconi case; many a man in england does not even know what it means. many imagine that it had something to do with the propriety of politicians speculating on the stock exchange. so that it means a great deal to americans to say that one figure in that drama is ruling india and another is ruling palestine. and this brings me to another problem, which is also dealt with much more openly in america than in england. i mention it here only because it is a perfect model of the misunderstandings in the modern world. if any one asks for an example of exactly how the important part of every story is left out, and even the part that is reported is not understood, he could hardly have a stronger case than the story of henry ford of detroit. when i was in detroit i had the pleasure of meeting mr. ford, and it really was a pleasure. he is a man quite capable of views which i think silly to the point of insanity; but he is not the vulgar benevolent boss. it must be admitted that he is a millionaire; but he cannot really be convicted of being a philanthropist. he is not a man who merely wants to run people; it is rather his views that run him, and perhaps run away with him. he has a distinguished and sensitive face; he really invented things himself, unlike most men who profit by inventions; he is something of an artist and not a little of a fighter. a man of that type is always capable of being wildly wrong, especially in the sectarian atmosphere of america; and mr. ford has been wrong before and may be wrong now. he is chiefly known in england for a project which i think very preposterous; that of the peace ship, which came to europe during the war. but he is not known in england at all in connection with a much more important campaign, which he has conducted much more recently and with much more success; a campaign against the jews like one of the anti-semitic campaigns of the continent. now any one who knows anything of america knows exactly what the peace ship would be like. it was a national combination of imagination and ignorance, which has at least some of the beauty of innocence. men living in those huge, hedgeless inland plains know nothing about frontiers or the tragedy of a fight for freedom; they know nothing of alarum and armaments or the peril of a high civilisation poised like a precious statue within reach of a mailed fist. they are accustomed to a cosmopolitan citizenship, in which men of all bloods mingle and in which men of all creeds are counted equal. their highest moral boast is humanitarianism; their highest mental boast is enlightenment. in a word, they are the very last men in the world who would seem likely to pride themselves on a prejudice against the jews. they have no religion in particular, except a sincere sentiment which they would call 'true christianity,' and which specially forbids an attack on the jews. they have a patriotism which prides itself on assimilating all types, including the jews. mr. ford is a pure product of this pacific world, as was sufficiently proved by his pacifism. if a man of that sort has discovered that there is a jewish problem, it is because there is a jewish problem. it is certainly not because there is an anti-jewish prejudice. for if there had been any amount of such racial and religious prejudice, he would have been about the very last sort of man to have it. his particular part of the world would have been the very last place to produce it. we may well laugh at the peace ship, and its wild course and inevitable shipwreck; but remember that its very wildness was an attempt to sail as far as possible from the castle of front-de-boeuf. everything that made him anti-war should have prevented him from being anti-semite. we may mock him for being mad on peace; but we cannot say that he was so mad on peace that he made war on israel. it happened that, when i was in america, i had just published some studies on palestine; and i was besieged by rabbis lamenting my 'prejudice.' i pointed out that they would have got hold of the wrong word, even if they had not got hold of the wrong man. as a point of personal autobiography, i do not happen to be a man who dislikes jews; though i believe that some men do. i have had jews among my most intimate and faithful friends since my boyhood, and i hope to have them till i die. but even if i did have a dislike of jews, it would be illogical to call that dislike a prejudice. prejudice is a very lucid latin word meaning the bias which a man has before he considers a case. i might be said to be prejudiced against a hairy ainu because of his name, for i have never been on terms of such intimacy with him as to correct my preconceptions. but if after moving about in the modern world and meeting jews, knowing jews, doing business with jews, and reading and hearing about jews, i came to the conclusion that i did not like jews, my conclusion certainly would not be a prejudice. it would simply be an opinion; and one i should be perfectly entitled to hold; though as a matter of fact i do not hold it. no extravagance of hatred merely following on _experience_ of jews can properly be called a prejudice. now the point is that this new american anti-semitism springs from experience and nothing but experience. there is no prejudice for it to spring from. or rather the prejudice is all the other way. all the traditions of that democracy, and very creditable traditions too, are in favour of toleration and a sort of idealistic indifference. the sympathies in which these nineteenth-century people were reared were all against front-de-boeuf and in favour of rebecca. they inherited a prejudice against anti-semitism; a prejudice of anti-anti-semitism. these people of the plains have found the jewish problem exactly as they might have struck oil; because it is _there_, and not even because they were looking for it. their view of the problem, like their use of the oil, is not always satisfactory; and with parts of it i entirely disagree. but the point is that the thing which i call a problem, and others call a prejudice, has now appeared in broad daylight in a new country where there is no priestcraft, no feudalism, no ancient superstition to explain it. it has appeared because it _is_ a problem; and those are the best friends of the jews, including many of the jews themselves, who are trying to find a solution. that is the meaning of the incident of mr. henry ford of detroit; and you will hardly hear an intelligible word about it in england. the talk of prejudice against the japs is not unlike the talk of prejudice against the jews. only in this case our indifference has really the excuse of ignorance. we used to lecture the russians for oppressing the jews, before we heard the word bolshevist and began to lecture them for being oppressed by the jews. in the same way we have long lectured the californians for oppressing the japs, without allowing for the possibility of their foreseeing that the oppression may soon be the other way. as in the other case, it may be a persecution but it is not a prejudice. the californians know more about the japanese than we do; and our own colonists when they are placed in the same position generally say the same thing. i will not attempt to deal adequately here with the vast international and diplomatic problems which arise with the name of the new power in the far east. it is possible that japan, having imitated european militarism, may imitate european pacifism. i cannot honestly pretend to know what the japanese mean by the one any more than by the other. but when englishmen, especially english liberals like myself, take a superior and censorious attitude towards americans and especially californians, i am moved to make a final remark. when a considerable number of englishmen talk of the grave contending claims of our friendship with japan and our friendship with america, when they finally tend in a sort of summing up to dwell on the superior virtues of japan, i may be permitted to make a single comment. we are perpetually boring the world and each other with talk about the bonds that bind us to america. we are perpetually crying aloud that england and america are very much alike, especially england. we are always insisting that the two are identical in all the things in which they most obviously differ. we are always saying that both stand for democracy, when we should not consent to stand their democracy for half a day. we are always saying that at least we are all anglo-saxons, when we are descended from romans and normans and britons and danes, and they are descended from irishmen and italians and slavs and germans. we tell a people whose very existence is a revolt against the british crown that they are passionately devoted to the british constitution. we tell a nation whose whole policy has been isolation and independence that with us she can bear safely the white man's burden of universal empire. we tell a continent crowded with irishmen to thank god that the saxon can always rule the celt. we tell a populace whose very virtues are lawless that together we uphold the reign of law. we recognise our own law-abiding character in people who make laws that neither they nor anybody else can abide. we congratulate them on clinging to all they have cast away, and on imitating everything which they came into existence to insult. and when we have established all these nonsensical analogies with a nonexistent nation, we wait until there is a crisis in which we really are at one with america, and then we falter and threaten to fail her. in a battle where we really are of one blood, the blood of the great white race throughout the world, when we really have one language, the fundamental alphabet of cadmus and the script of rome, when we really do represent the same reign of law, the common conscience of christendom and the morals of men baptized, when we really have an implicit faith and honour and type of freedom to summon up our souls as with trumpets--_then_ many of us begin to weaken and waver and wonder whether there is not something very nice about little yellow men, whose heroic stories revolve round polygamy and suicide, and whose heroes wore two swords and worshipped the ancestors of the mikado. _prohibition in fact and fancy_ i went to america with some notion of not discussing prohibition. but i soon found that well-to-do americans were only too delighted to discuss it over the nuts and wine. they were even willing, if necessary, to dispense with the nuts. i am far from sneering at this; having a general philosophy which need not here be expounded, but which may be symbolised by saying that monkeys can enjoy nuts but only men can enjoy wine. but if i am to deal with prohibition, there is no doubt of the first thing to be said about it. the first thing to be said about it is that it does not exist. it is to some extent enforced among the poor; at any rate it was intended to be enforced among the poor; though even among them i fancy it is much evaded. it is certainly not enforced among the rich; and i doubt whether it was intended to be. i suspect that this has always happened whenever this negative notion has taken hold of some particular province or tribe. prohibition never prohibits. it never has in history; not even in moslem history; and it never will. mahomet at least had the argument of a climate and not the interest of a class. but if a test is needed, consider what part of moslem culture has passed permanently into our own modern culture. you will find the one moslem poem that has really pierced is a moslem poem in praise of wine. the crown of all the victories of the crescent is that nobody reads the koran and everybody reads the rubaiyat. most of us remember with satisfaction an old picture in _punch_, representing a festive old gentleman in a state of collapse on the pavement, and a philanthropic old lady anxiously calling the attention of a cabman to the calamity. the old lady says, 'i'm sure this poor gentleman is ill,' and the cabman replies with fervour, 'ill! i wish i 'ad 'alf 'is complaint.' we talk about unconscious humour; but there is such a thing as unconscious seriousness. flippancy is a flower whose roots are often underground in the subconsciousness. many a man talks sense when he thinks he is talking nonsense; touches on a conflict of ideas as if it were only a contradiction of language, or really makes a parallel when he means only to make a pun. some of the _punch_ jokes of the best period are examples of this; and that quoted above is a very strong example of it. the cabman meant what he said; but he said a great deal more than he meant. his utterance contained fine philosophical doctrines and distinctions of which he was not perhaps entirely conscious. the spirit of the english language, the tragedy and comedy of the condition of the english people, spoke through him as the god spoke through a teraph-head or brazen mask of oracle. and the oracle is an omen; and in some sense an omen of doom. observe, to begin with, the sobriety of the cabman. note his measure, his moderation; or to use the yet truer term, his temperance. he only wishes to have half the old gentleman's complaint. the old gentleman is welcome to the other half, along with all the other pomps and luxuries of his superior social station. there is nothing bolshevist or even communist about the temperance cabman. he might almost be called distributist, in the sense that he wishes to distribute the old gentleman's complaint more equally between the old gentleman and himself. and, of course, the social relations there represented are very much truer to life than it is fashionable to suggest. by the realism of this picture mr. punch made amends for some more snobbish pictures, with the opposite social moral. it will remain eternally among his real glories that he exhibited a picture in which the cabman was sober and the gentleman was drunk. despite many ideas to the contrary, it was emphatically a picture of real life. the truth is subject to the simplest of all possible tests. if the cabman were really and truly drunk he would not be a cabman, for he could not drive a cab. if he had the whole of the old gentleman's complaint, he would be sitting happily on the pavement beside the old gentleman; a symbol of social equality found at last, and the levelling of all classes of mankind. i do not say that there has never been such a monster known as a drunken cabman; i do not say that the driver may not sometimes have approximated imprudently to three-quarters of the complaint, instead of adhering to his severe but wise conception of half of it. but i do say that most men of the world, if they spoke sincerely, could testify to more examples of helplessly drunken gentlemen put inside cabs than of helplessly drunken drivers on top of them. philanthropists and officials, who never look at people but only at papers, probably have a mass of social statistics to the contrary; founded on the simple fact that cabmen can be cross-examined about their habits and gentlemen cannot. social workers probably have the whole thing worked out in sections and compartments, showing how the extreme intoxication of cabmen compares with the parallel intoxication of costermongers; or measuring the drunkenness of a dustman against the drunkenness of a crossing-sweeper. but there is more practical experience embodied in the practical speech of the english; and in the proverb that says 'as drunk as a lord.' now prohibition, whether as a proposal in england or a pretence in america, simply means that the man who has drunk less shall have no drink, and the man who has drunk more shall have all the drink. it means that the old gentleman shall be carried home in the cab drunker than ever; but that, in order to make it quite safe for him to drink to excess, the man who drives him shall be forbidden to drink even in moderation. that is what it means; that is all it means; that is all it ever will mean. it tends to that in moslem countries; where the luxurious and advanced drink champagne, while the poor and fanatical drink water. it means that in modern america; where the wealthy are all at this moment sipping their cocktails, and discussing how much harder labourers can be made to work if only they can be kept from festivity. this is what it means and all it means; and men are divided about it according to whether they believe in a certain transcendental concept called 'justice,' expressed in a more mystical paradox as the equality of men. so long as you do not believe in justice, and so long as you are rich and really confident of remaining so, you can have prohibition and be as drunk as you choose. i see that some remarks by the rev. r. j. campbell, dealing with social conditions in america, are reported in the press. they include some observations about sinn fein in which, as in most of mr. campbell's allusions to ireland, it is not difficult to detect his dismal origin, or the acrid smell of the smoke of belfast. but the remarks about america are valuable in the objective sense, over and above their philosophy. he believes that prohibition will survive and be a success, nor does he seem himself to regard the prospect with any special disfavour. but he frankly and freely testifies to the truth i have asserted; that prohibition does not prohibit, so far as the wealthy are concerned. he testifies to constantly seeing wine on the table, as will any other grateful guest of the generous hospitality of america; and he implies humorously that he asked no questions about the story told him of the old stocks in the cellars. so there is no dispute about the facts; and we come back as before to the principles. is mr. campbell content with a prohibition which is another name for privilege? if so, he has simply absorbed along with his new theology a new morality which is different from mine. but he does state both sides of the inequality with equal logic and clearness; and in these days of intellectual fog that alone is like a ray of sunshine. now my primary objection to prohibition is not based on any arguments against it, but on the one argument for it. i need nothing more for its condemnation than the only thing that is said in its defence. it is said by capitalists all over america; and it is very clearly and correctly reported by mr. campbell himself. the argument is that employees work harder, and therefore employers get richer. that this idea should be taken calmly, by itself, as the test of a problem of liberty, is in itself a final testimony to the presence of slavery. it shows that people have completely forgotten that there is any other test except the servile test. employers are willing that workmen should have exercise, as it may help them to do more work. they are even willing that workmen should have leisure; for the more intelligent capitalists can see that this also really means that they can do more work. but they are not in any way willing that workmen should have fun; for fun only increases the happiness and not the utility of the worker. fun is freedom; and in that sense is an end in itself. it concerns the man not as a worker but as a citizen, or even as a soul; and the soul in that sense is an end in itself. that a man shall have a reasonable amount of comedy and poetry and even fantasy in his life is part of his spiritual health, which is for the service of god; and not merely for his mechanical health, which is now bound to the service of man. the very test adopted has all the servile implication; the test of what we can get out of him, instead of the test of what he can get out of life. mr. campbell is reported to have suggested, doubtless rather as a conjecture than a prophecy, that england may find it necessary to become teetotal in order to compete commercially with the efficiency and economy of teetotal america. well, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was in america one of the most economical and efficient of all forms of labour. it did not happen to be feasible for the english to compete with it by copying it. there were so many humanitarian prejudices about in those days. but economically there seems to be no reason why a man should not have prophesied that england would be forced to adopt american slavery then, as she is urged to adopt american prohibition now. perhaps such a prophet would have prophesied rightly. certainly it is not impossible that universal slavery might have been the vision of calhoun as universal prohibition seems to be the vision of campbell. the old england of 1830 would have said that such a plea for slavery was monstrous; but what would it have said of a plea for enforced water-drinking? nevertheless, the nobler servile state of calhoun collapsed before it could spread to europe. and there is always the hope that the same may happen to the far more materialistic utopia of mr. campbell and soft drinks. abstract morality is very important; and it may well clear the mind to consider what would be the effect of prohibition in america, if it were introduced there. it would, of course, be a decisive departure from the tradition of the declaration of independence. those who deny that are hardly serious enough to demand attention. it is enough to say that they are reduced to minimising that document in defence of prohibition, exactly as the slave-owners were reduced to minimising it in defence of slavery. they are reduced to saying that the fathers of the republic meant no more than that they would not be ruled by a king. and they are obviously open to the reply which lincoln gave to douglas on the slavery question; that if that great charter was limited to certain events in the eighteenth century, it was hardly worth making such a fuss about in the nineteenth--or in the twentieth. but they are also open to another reply which is even more to the point, when they pretend that jefferson's famous preamble only means to say that monarchy is wrong. they are maintaining that jefferson only meant to say something that he does not say at all. the great preamble does not say that all monarchical government must be wrong; on the contrary, it rather implies that most government is right. it speaks of human governments in general as justified by the necessity of defending certain personal rights. i see no reason whatever to suppose that it would not include any royal government that does defend those rights. still less do i doubt what it would say of a republican government that does destroy those rights. but what are those rights? sophists can always debate about their degree; but even sophists cannot debate about their direction. nobody in his five wits will deny that jeffersonian democracy wished to give the law a general control in more public things, but the citizens a more general liberty in private things. wherever we draw the line, liberty can only be personal liberty; and the most personal liberties must at least be the last liberties we lose. but to-day they are the first liberties we lose. it is not a question of drawing the line in the right place, but of beginning at the wrong end. what are the rights of man, if they do not include the normal right to regulate his own health, in relation to the normal risks of diet and daily life? nobody can pretend that beer is a poison as prussic acid is a poison; that all the millions of civilised men who drank it all fell down dead when they had touched it. its use and abuse is obviously a matter of judgment; and there can be no personal liberty, if it is not a matter of private judgment. it is not in the least a question of drawing the line between liberty and licence. if this is licence, there is no such thing as liberty. it is plainly impossible to find any right more individual or intimate. to say that a man has a right to a vote, but not a right to a voice about the choice of his dinner, is like saying that he has a right to his hat but not a right to his head. prohibition, therefore, plainly violates the rights of man, if there are any rights of man. what its supporters really mean is that there are none. and in suggesting this, they have all the advantages that every sceptic has when he supports a negation. that sort of ultimate scepticism can only be retorted upon itself, and we can point out to them that they can no more prove the right of the city to be oppressive than we can prove the right of the citizen to be free. in the primary metaphysics of such a claim, it would surely be easier to make it out for a single conscious soul than for an artificial social combination. if there are no rights of men, what are the rights of nations? perhaps a nation has no claim to self-government. perhaps it has no claim to good government. perhaps it has no claim to any sort of government or any sort of independence. perhaps they will say _that_ is not implied in the declaration of independence. but without going deep into my reasons for believing in natural rights, or rather in supernatural rights (and jefferson certainly states them as supernatural), i am content here to note that a man's treatment of his own body, in relation to traditional and ordinary opportunities for bodily excess, is as near to his self-respect as social coercion can possibly go; and that when that is gone there is nothing left. if coercion applies to that, it applies to everything; and in the future of this controversy it obviously will apply to everything. when i was in america, people were already applying it to tobacco. i never can see why they should not apply it to talking. talking often goes with tobacco as it goes with beer; and what is more relevant, talking may often lead both to beer and tobacco. talking often drives a man to drink, both negatively in the form of nagging and positively in the form of bad company. if the american puritan is so anxious to be a _censor morum_, he should obviously put a stop to the evil communications that really corrupt good manners. he should reintroduce the scold's bridle among the other blue laws for a land of blue devils. he should gag all gay deceivers and plausible cynics; he should cut off all flattering lips and the tongue that speaketh proud things. nobody can doubt that nine-tenths of the harm in the world is done simply by talking. jefferson and the old democrats allowed people to talk, not because they were unaware of this fact, but because they were fettered by this old fancy of theirs about freedom and the rights of man. but since we have already abandoned that doctrine in a final fashion, i cannot see why the new principle should not be applied intelligently; and in that case it would be applied to the control of conversation. the state would provide us with forms already filled up with the subjects suitable for us to discuss at breakfast; perhaps allowing us a limited number of epigrams each. perhaps we should have to make a formal application in writing, to be allowed to make a joke that had just occurred to us in conversation. and the committee would consider it in due course. perhaps it would be effected in a more practical fashion, and the private citizens would be shut up as the public-houses were shut up. perhaps they would all wear gags, which the policeman would remove at stated hours; and their mouths would be opened from one to three, as now in england even the public-houses are from time to time accessible to the public. to some this will sound fantastic; but not so fantastic as jefferson would have thought prohibition. but there is one sense in which it is indeed fantastic, for by hypothesis it leaves out the favouritism that is the fundamental of the whole matter. the only sense in which we can say that logic will never go so far as this is that logic will never go the length of equality. it is perfectly possible that the same forces that have forbidden beer may go on to forbid tobacco. but they will in a special and limited sense forbid tobacco--but not cigars. or at any rate not expensive cigars. in america, where large numbers of ordinary men smoke rather ordinary cigars, there would be doubtless a good opportunity of penalising a very ordinary pleasure. but the havanas of the millionaire will be all right. so it will be if ever the puritans bring back the scold's bridle and the statutory silence of the populace. it will only be the populace that is silent. the politicians will go on talking. these i believe to be the broad facts of the problem of prohibition; but it would not be fair to leave it without mentioning two other causes which, if not defences, are at least excuses. the first is that prohibition was largely passed in a sort of fervour or fever of self-sacrifice, which was a part of the passionate patriotism of america in the war. as i have remarked elsewhere, those who have any notion of what that national unanimity was like will smile when they see america made a model of mere international idealism. prohibition was partly a sort of patriotic renunciation; for the popular instinct, like every poetic instinct, always tends at great crises to great gestures of renunciation. but this very fact, while it makes the inhumanity far more human, makes it far less final and convincing. men cannot remain standing stiffly in such symbolical attitudes; nor can a permanent policy be founded on something analogous to flinging a gauntlet or uttering a battle-cry. we might as well expect all the yale students to remain through life with their mouths open, exactly as they were when they uttered the college yell. it would be as reasonable as to expect them to remain through life with their mouths shut, while the wine-cup which has been the sacrament of all poets and lovers passed round among all the youth of the world. this point appeared very plainly in a discussion i had with a very thoughtful and sympathetic american critic, a clergyman writing in an anglo-catholic magazine. he put the sentiment of these healthier prohibitionists, which had so much to do with the passing of prohibition, by asking, 'may not a man who is asked to give up his blood for his country be asked to give up his beer for his country?' and this phrase clearly illuminates all the limitations of the case. i have never denied, in principle, that it might in some abnormal crisis be lawful for a government to lock up the beer, or to lock up the bread. in that sense i am quite prepared to treat the sacrifice of beer in the same way as the sacrifice of blood. but is my american critic really ready to treat the sacrifice of blood in the same way as the sacrifice of beer? is bloodshed to be as prolonged and protracted as prohibition? is the normal noncombatant to shed his gore as often as he misses his drink? i can imagine people submitting to a special regulation, as i can imagine them serving in a particular war. i do indeed despise the political knavery that deliberately passes drink regulations as war measures and then preserves them as peace measures. but that is not a question of whether drink and drunkenness are wrong, but of whether lying and swindling are wrong. but i never denied that there might need to be exceptional sacrifices for exceptional occasions; and war is in its nature an exception. only, if war is the exception, why should prohibition be the rule? if the surrender of beer is worthy to be compared to the shedding of blood, why then blood ought to be flowing for ever like a fountain in the public squares of philadelphia and new york. if my critic wants to complete his parallel, he must draw up rather a remarkable programme for the daily life of the ordinary citizens. he must suppose that, through all their lives, they are paraded every day at lunch time and prodded with bayonets to show that they will shed their blood for their country. he must suppose that every evening, after a light repast of poison gas and shrapnel, they are made to go to sleep in a trench under a permanent drizzle of shell-fire. it is surely obvious that if this were the normal life of the citizen, the citizen would have no normal life. the common sense of the thing is that sacrifices of this sort are admirable but abnormal. it is not normal for the state to be perpetually regulating our days with the discipline of a fighting regiment; and it is not normal for the state to be perpetually regulating our diet with the discipline of a famine. to say that every citizen must be subject to control in such bodily things is like saying that every christian ought to tear himself with red-hot pincers because the christian martyrs did their duty in time of persecution. a man has a right to control his body, though in a time of martyrdom he may give his body to be burned; and a man has a right to control his bodily health, though in a state of siege he may give his body to be starved. thus, though the patriotic defence was a sincere defence, it is a defence that comes back on the defenders like a boomerang. for it proves only that prohibition ought to be ephemeral, unless war ought to be eternal. the other excuse is much less romantic and much more realistic. i have already said enough of the cause which is really realistic. the real power behind prohibition is simply the plutocratic power of the pushing employers who wish to get the last inch of work out of their workmen. but before the progress of modern plutocracy had reached this stage, there was a predetermining cause for which there was a much better case. the whole business began with the problem of black labour. i have not attempted in this book to deal adequately with the question of the negro. i have refrained for a reason that may seem somewhat sensational; that i do not think i have anything particularly valuable to say or suggest. i do not profess to understand this singularly dark and intricate matter; and i see no use in men who have no solution filling up the gap with sentimentalism. the chief thing that struck me about the coloured people i saw was their charming and astonishing cheerfulness. my sense of pathos was appealed to much more by the red indians; and indeed i wish i had more space here to do justice to the red indians. they did heroic service in the war; and more than justified their glorious place in the day-dreams and nightmares of our boyhood. but the negro problem certainly demands more study than a sight-seer could give it; and this book is controversial enough about things that i have really considered, without permitting it to exhibit me as a sight-seer who shoots at sight. but i believe that it was always common ground to people of common sense that the enslavement and importation of negroes had been the crime and catastrophe of american history. the only difference was originally that one side thought that, the crime once committed, the only reparation was their freedom; while the other thought that, the crime once committed, the only safety was their slavery. it was only comparatively lately, by a process i shall have to indicate elsewhere, that anything like a positive case for slavery became possible. now among the many problems of the presence of an alien and at least recently barbaric figure among the citizens, there was a very real problem of drink. drink certainly has a very exceptionally destructive effect upon negroes in their native countries; and it was alleged to have a peculiarly demoralising effect upon negroes in the united states; to call up the passions that are the particular temptation of the race and to lead to appalling outrages that are followed by appalling popular vengeance. however this may be, many of the states of the american union, which first forbade liquor to citizens, meant simply to forbid it to negroes. but they had not the moral courage to deny that negroes are citizens. about all their political expedients necessarily hung the load that hangs so heavy on modern politics; hypocrisy. the superior race had to rule by a sort of secret society organised against the inferior. the american politicians dared not disfranchise the negroes; so they coerced everybody in theory and only the negroes in practice. the drinking of the white men became as much a conspiracy as the shooting by the white horsemen of the ku-klux klan. and in that connection, it may be remarked in passing that the comparison illustrates the idiocy of supposing that the moral sense of mankind will ever support the prohibition of drinking as if it were something like the prohibition of shooting. shooting in america is liable to take a free form, and sometimes a very horrible form; as when private bravos were hired to kill workmen in the capitalistic interests of that pure patron of disarmament, carnegie. but when some of the rich americans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered with, because they are only using up their existing stocks of wine, we may well be disposed to smile. when i was there, at any rate, they were using them up very fast; and with no apparent fears about the supply. but if the ku-klux klan had started suddenly shooting everybody they didn't like in broad daylight, and had blandly explained that they were only using up the stocks of their ammunition, left over from the civil war, it seems probable that there would at least have been a little curiosity about how much they had left. there might at least have been occasional inquiries about how long it was likely to go on. it is even conceivable that some steps might have been taken to stop it. no steps are taken to stop the drinking of the rich, chiefly because the rich now make all the rules and therefore all the exceptions, but partly because nobody ever could feel the full moral seriousness of this particular rule. and the truth is, as i have indicated, that it was originally established as an exception and not as a rule. the emancipated negro was an exception in the community, and a certain plan was, rightly or wrongly, adopted to meet his case. a law was made professedly for everybody and practically only for him. prohibition is only important as marking the transition by which the trick, tried successfully on black labour, could be extended to all labour. we in england have no right to be pharisaic at the expense of the americans in this matter; for we have tried the same trick in a hundred forms. the true philosophical defence of the modern oppression of the poor would be to say frankly that we have ruled them so badly that they are unfit to rule themselves. but no modern oligarch is enough of a man to say this. for like all virile cynicism it would have an element of humility; which would not mix with the necessary element of hypocrisy. so we proceed, just as the americans do, to make a law for everybody and then evade it for ourselves. we have not the honesty to say that the rich may bet because they can afford it; so we forbid any man to bet in any place; and then say that a place is not a place. it is exactly as if there were an american law allowing a negro to be murdered because he is not a man within the meaning of the act. we have not the honesty to drive the poor to school because they are ignorant; so we pretend to drive everybody; and then send inspectors to the slums but not to the smart streets. we apply the same ingenuous principle; and are quite as undemocratic as western democracy. nevertheless there is an element in the american case which cannot be present in ours; and this chapter may well conclude upon so important a change. america can now say with pride that she has abolished the colour bar. in this matter the white labourer and the black labourer have at last been put upon an equal social footing. white labour is every bit as much enslaved as black labour; and is actually enslaved by a method and a model only intended for black labour. we might think it rather odd if the exact regulations about flogging negroes were reproduced as a plan for punishing strikers; or if industrial arbitration issued its reports in the precise terminology of the fugitive slave law. but this is in essentials what has happened; and one could almost fancy some negro orgy of triumph, with the beating of gongs and all the secret violence of voodoo, crying aloud to some ancestral mumbo jumbo that the poor white trash was being treated according to its name. _fads and public opinion_ a foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. he is perfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in a reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. i was a foreigner in america; and i can truly claim that the sense of my own laughable position never left me. but when the native and the foreigner have finished with seeing the fun of each other in things that are meant to be serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dangerous ground of things that are meant to be funny. the sense of humour is generally very national; perhaps that is why the internationalists are so careful to purge themselves of it. i had occasion during the war to consider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to have arisen between the english and american soldiers at the front. and, rightly or wrongly, i came to the conclusion that they arose from the failure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he is humorous. and it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke. the english and the american types of humour are in one way directly contrary. the most american sort of fun involves a soaring imagination, piling one house on another in a tower like that of a sky-scraper. the most english humour consists of a sort of bathos, of a man returning to the earth his mother in a homely fashion; as when he sits down suddenly on a butter-slide. english farce describes a man as being in a hole. american fantasy, in its more aspiring spirit, describes a man as being up a tree. the former is to be found in the cockney comic songs that concern themselves with hanging out the washing or coming home with the milk. the latter is to be found in those fantastic yarns about machines that turn live pigs into pig-skin purses or burning cities that serve to hatch an egg. but it will be inevitable, when the two come first into contact, that the bathos will sound like vulgarity and the extravagance will sound like boasting. suppose an american soldier said to an english soldier in the trenches, 'the kaiser may want a place in the sun; i reckon he won't have a place in the solar system when we begin to hustle.' the english soldier will very probably form the impression that this is arrogance; an impression based on the extraordinary assumption that the american means what he says. the american has merely indulged in a little art for art's sake, and abstract adventure of the imagination; he has told an american short story. but the englishman, not understanding this, will think the other man is boasting, and reflecting on the insufficiency of the english effort. the english soldier is very likely to say something like, 'oh, you'll be wanting to get home to your old woman before that, and asking for a kipper with your tea.' and it is quite likely that the american will be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of abstract beauty answered in so personal a fashion. being an american, he will probably have a fine and chivalrous respect for his wife; and may object to her being called an old woman. possibly he in turn may be under the extraordinary delusion that talking of the old woman really means that the woman is old. possibly he thinks the mysterious demand for a kipper carries with it some charge of ill-treating his wife; which his national sense of honour swiftly resents. but the real cross-purposes come from the contrary direction of the two exaggerations, the american making life more wild and impossible than it is, and the englishman making it more flat and farcical than it is; the one escaping from the house of life by a skylight and the other by a trap-door. this difficulty of different humours is a very practical one for practical people. most of those who profess to remove all international differences are not practical people. most of the phrases offered for the reconciliation of severally patriotic peoples are entirely serious and even solemn phrases. but human conversation is not conducted in those phrases. the normal man on nine occasions out of ten is rather a flippant man. and the normal man is almost always the national man. patriotism is the most popular of all the virtues. the drier sort of democrats who despise it have the democracy against them in every country in the world. hence their international efforts seldom go any farther than to effect an international reconciliation of all internationalists. but we have not solved the normal and popular problem until we have an international reconciliation of all nationalists. it is very difficult to see how humour can be translated at all. when sam weller is in the fleet prison and mrs. weller and mr. stiggins sit on each side of the fireplace and weep and groan with sympathy, old mr. weller observes, 'vell, sammy, i hope you find your spirits rose by this 'ere lively visit.' i have never looked up this passage in the popular and successful french version of _pickwick_; but i confess i am curious as to what french past-participle conveys the precise effect of the word 'rose.' a translator has not only to give the right translation of the right word but the right translation of the wrong word. and in the same way i am quite prepared to suspect that there are english jokes which an englishman must enjoy in his own rich and romantic solitude, without asking for the sympathy of an american. but englishmen are generally only too prone to claim this fine perception, without seeing that the fine edge of it cuts both ways. i have begun this chapter on the note of national humour because i wish to make it quite clear that i realise how easily a foreigner may take something seriously that is not serious. when i think something in america is really foolish, it may be i that am made a fool of. it is the first duty of a traveller to allow for this; but it seems to be the very last thing that occurs to some travellers. but when i seek to say something of what may be called the fantastic side of america, i allow beforehand that some of it may be meant to be fantastic. and indeed it is very difficult to believe that some of it is meant to be serious. but whether or no there is a joke, there is certainly an inconsistency; and it is an inconsistency in the moral make-up of america which both puzzles and amuses me. the danger of democracy is not anarchy but convention. there is even a sort of double meaning in the word 'convention'; for it is also used for the most informal and popular sort of parliament; a parliament not summoned by any king. the americans come together very easily without any king; but their coming together is in every sense a convention, and even a very conventional convention. in a democracy riot is rather the exception and respectability certainly the rule. and though a superficial sight-seer should hesitate about all such generalisations, and certainly should allow for enormous exceptions to them, he does receive a general impression of unity verging on uniformity. thus americans all dress well; one might almost say that american women all look well; but they do not, as compared with europeans, look very different. they are in the fashion; too much in the fashion even to be conspicuously fashionable. of course there are patches, both bohemian and babylonian, of which this is not true, but i am talking of the general tone of a whole democracy. i have said there is more respectability than riot; but indeed in a deeper sense the same spirit is behind both riot and respectability. it is the same social force that makes it possible for the respectable to boycott a man and for the riotous to lynch him. i do not object to it being called 'the herd instinct,' so long as we realise that it is a metaphor and not an explanation. public opinion can be a prairie fire. it eats up everything that opposes it; and there is the grandeur as well as the grave disadvantages of a natural catastrophe in that national unity. pacifists who complained in england of the intolerance of patriotism have no notion of what patriotism can be like. if they had been in america, after america had entered the war, they would have seen something which they have always perhaps subconsciously dreaded, and would then have beyond all their worst dreams detested; and the name of it is democracy. they would have found that there are disadvantages in birds of a feather flocking together; and that one of them follows on a too complacent display of the white feather. the truth is that a certain flexible sympathy with eccentrics of this kind is rather one of the advantages of an aristocratic tradition. the imprisonment of mr. debs, the american pacifist, which really was prolonged and oppressive, would probably have been shortened in england where his opinions were shared by aristocrats like mr. bertrand russell and mr. ponsonby. a man like lord hugh cecil could be moved to the defence of conscientious objectors, partly by a true instinct of chivalry; but partly also by the general feeling that a gentleman may very probably have aunts and uncles who are quite as mad. he takes the matter personally, in the sense of being able to imagine the psychology of the persons. but democracy is no respecter of persons. it is no respecter of them, either in the bad and servile or in the good and sympathetic sense. and debs was nothing to democracy. he was but one of the millions. this is a real problem, or question in the balance, touching different forms of government; which is, of course, quite neglected by the idealists who merely repeat long words. there was during the war a society called the union of democratic control, which would have been instantly destroyed anywhere where democracy had any control, or where there was any union. and in this sense the united states have most emphatically got a union. nevertheless i think there is something rather more subtle than this simple popular solidity behind the assimilation of american citizens to each other. there is something even in the individual ideals that drives towards this social sympathy. and it is here that we have to remember that biological fancies like the herd instinct are only figures of speech, and cannot really cover anything human. for the americans are in some ways a very self-conscious people. to compare their social enthusiasm to a stampede of cattle is to ask us to believe in a bull writing a diary or a cow looking in a looking-glass. intensely sensitive by their very vitality, they are certainly conscious of criticism and not merely of a blind and brutal appetite. but the peculiar point about them is that it is this very vividness in the self that often produces the similarity. it may be that when they are unconscious they are like bulls and cows. but it is when they are self-conscious that they are like each other. individualism is the death of individuality. it is so, if only because it is an 'ism.' many americans become almost impersonal in their worship of personality. where their natural selves might differ, their ideal selves tend to be the same. anybody can see what i mean in those strong self-conscious photographs of american business men that can be seen in any american magazine. each may conceive himself to be a solitary napoleon brooding at st. helena; but the result is a multitude of napoleons brooding all over the place. each of them must have the eyes of a mesmerist; but the most weak-minded person cannot be mesmerised by more than one millionaire at a time. each of the millionaires must thrust forward his jaw, offering (if i may say so) to fight the world with the same weapon as samson. each of them must accentuate the length of his chin, especially, of course, by always being completely clean-shaven. it would be obviously inconsistent with personality to prefer to wear a beard. these are of course fantastic examples on the fringe of american life; but they do stand for a certain assimilation, not through brute gregariousness, but rather through isolated dreaming. and though it is not always carried so far as this, i do think it is carried too far. there is not quite enough unconsciousness to produce real individuality. there is a sort of worship of will-power in the abstract, so that people are actually thinking about how they can will, more than about what they want. to this i do think a certain corrective could be found in the nature of english eccentricity. every man in his humour is most interesting when he is unconscious of his humour; or at least when he is in an intermediate stage between humour in the old sense of oddity and in the new sense of irony. much is said in these days against negative morality; and certainly most americans would show a positive preference for positive morality. the virtues they venerate collectively are very active virtues; cheerfulness and courage and vim, otherwise zip, also pep and similar things. but it is sometimes forgotten that negative morality is freer than positive morality. negative morality is a net of a larger and more open pattern, of which the lines or cords constrict at longer intervals. a man like dr. johnson could grow in his own way to his own stature in the net of the ten commandments; precisely because he was convinced there were only ten of them. he was not compressed into the mould of positive beauty, like that of the apollo belvedere or the american citizen. this criticism is sometimes true even of the american woman, who is certainly a much more delightful person than the mesmeric millionaire with his shaven jaw. interviewers in the united states perpetually asked me what i thought of american women, and i confessed a distaste for such generalisations which i have not managed to lose. the americans, who are the most chivalrous people in the world, may perhaps understand me; but i can never help feeling that there is something polygamous about talking of women in the plural at all; something unworthy of any american except a mormon. nevertheless, i think the exaggeration i suggest does extend in a less degree to american women, fascinating as they are. i think they too tend too much to this cult of impersonal personality. it is a description easy to exaggerate even by the faintest emphasis; for all these things are subtle and subject to striking individual exceptions. to complain of people for being brave and bright and kind and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. and yet there is something in the background that can only be expressed by a symbol, something that is not shallowness but a neglect of the subconsciousness and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that can be missed amid all that laughter and light, under those starry candelabra of the ideals of the happy virtues. sometimes it came over me, in a wordless wave, that i should like to see a sulky woman. how she would walk in beauty like the night, and reveal more silent spaces full of older stars! these things cannot be conveyed in their delicate proportion even in the most detached description. but the same thing was in the mind of a white-bearded old man i met in new york, an irish exile and a wonderful talker, who stared up at the tower of gilded galleries of the great hotel, and said with that spontaneous movement of style which is hardly heard except from irish talkers: 'and i have been in a village in the mountains where the people could hardly read or write; but all the men were like soldiers, and all the women had pride.' it sounds like a poem about an earthly paradise to say that in this land the old women can be more beautiful than the young. indeed, i think walt whitman, the national poet, has a line somewhere almost precisely to that effect. it sounds like a parody upon utopia, and the image of the lion lying down with the lamb, to say it is a place where a man might almost fall in love with his mother-in-law. but there is nothing in which the finer side of american gravity and good feeling does more honourably exhibit itself than in a certain atmosphere around the older women. it is not a cant phrase to say that they grow old gracefully; for they do really grow old. in this the national optimism really has in it the national courage. the old women do not dress like young women; they only dress better. there is another side to this feminine dignity in the old, sometimes a little lost in the young, with which i shall deal presently. the point for the moment is that even whitman's truly poetic vision of the beautiful old women suffers a little from that bewildering multiplicity and recurrence that is indeed the whole theme of whitman. it is like the green eternity of leaves of grass. when i think of the eccentric spinsters and incorrigible grandmothers of my own country, i cannot imagine that any one of them could possibly be mistaken for another, even at a glance. and in comparison i feel as if i had been travelling in an earthly paradise of more decorative harmonies; and i remember only a vast cloud of grey and pink as of the plumage of cherubim in an old picture. but on second thoughts, i think this may be only the inevitable effect of visiting any country in a swift and superficial fashion; and that the grey and pink cloud is probably an illusion, like the spinning prairies scattered by the wheel of the train. anyhow there is enough of this equality, and of a certain social unity favourable to sanity, to make the next point about america very much of a puzzle. it seems to me a very real problem, to which i have never seen an answer even such as i shall attempt here, why a democracy should produce fads; and why, where there is so genuine a sense of human dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny. i am not referring solely or even specially to prohibition, which i discuss elsewhere. prohibition is at least a superstition, and therefore next door to a religion; it has some imaginable connection with moral questions, as have slavery or human sacrifice. but those who ask us to model ourselves on the states which punish the sin of drink forget that there are states which punish the equally shameless sin of smoking a cigarette in the open air. the same american atmosphere that permits prohibition permits of people being punished for kissing each other. in other words, there are states psychologically capable of making a man a convict for wearing a blue neck-tie or having a green front-door, or anything else that anybody chooses to fancy. there is an american atmosphere in which people may some day be shot for shaking hands, or hanged for writing a post-card. as for the sort of thing to which i refer, the american newspapers are full of it and there is no name for it but mere madness. indeed it is not only mad, but it calls itself mad. to mention but one example out of many, it was actually boasted that some lunatics were teaching children to take care of their health. and it was proudly added that the children were 'health-mad.' that it is not exactly the object of all mental hygiene to make people mad did not occur to them; and they may still be engaged in their earnest labours to teach babies to be valetudinarians and hypochondriacs in order to make them healthy. in such cases, we may say that the modern world is too ridiculous to be ridiculed. you cannot caricature a caricature. imagine what a satirist of saner days would have made of the daily life of a child of six, who was actually admitted to be mad on the subject of his own health. these are not days in which that great extravaganza could be written; but i dimly see some of its episodes like uncompleted dreams. i see the child pausing in the middle of a cart-wheel, or when he has performed three-quarters of a cart-wheel, and consulting a little note-book about the amount of exercise per diem. i see him pausing half-way up a tree, or when he has climbed exactly one-third of a tree; and then producing a clinical thermometer to take his own temperature. but what would be the good of imaginative logic to prove the madness of such people, when they themselves praise it for being mad? there is also the cult of the infant phenomenon, of which dickens made fun and of which educationalists make fusses. when i was in america another newspaper produced a marvellous child of six who had the intellect of a child of twelve. the only test given, and apparently one on which the experiment turned, was that she could be made to understand and even to employ the word 'annihilate.' when asked to say something proving this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism, 'when common sense comes in, superstition is annihilated.' in reply to which, by way of showing that i also am as intelligent as a child of twelve, and there is no arrested development about me, i will say in the same elegant diction, 'when psychological education comes in, common sense is annihilated.' everybody seems to be sitting round this child in an adoring fashion. it did not seem to occur to anybody that we do not particularly want even a child of twelve to talk about annihilating superstition; that we do not want a child of six to talk like a child of twelve, or a child of twelve to talk like a man of fifty, or even a man of fifty to talk like a fool. and on the principle of hoping that a little girl of six will have a massive and mature brain, there is every reason for hoping that a little boy of six will grow a magnificent and bushy beard. now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among american cranks. anybody may propose to establish coercive eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis--that is, enforce confession without absolution. and i confess i cannot connect this feature with the genuine democratic spirit of the mass. i can only suggest, in concluding this chapter, two possible causes rather peculiar to america, which may have made this great democracy so unlike all other democracies, and in this so manifestly hostile to the whole democratic idea. the first historical cause is puritanism; but not puritanism merely in the sense of prohibitionism. the truth is that prohibitions might have done far less harm as prohibitions, if a vague association had not arisen, on some dark day of human unreason, between prohibition and progress. and it was the progress that did the harm, not the prohibition. men can enjoy life under considerable limitations, if they can be sure of their limited enjoyments; but under progressive puritanism we can never be sure of anything. the curse of it is not limitation; it is unlimited limitation. the evil is not in the restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever restrict the restriction. the prohibitions are bound to progress point by point; more and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for it is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. thus the worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so much puritanism as sectarianism. it searched for truth not by synthesis but by subdivision. it not only broke religion into small pieces, but it was bound to choose the smallest piece. there is in america, i believe, a large religious body that has felt it right to separate itself from christendom because it cannot believe in the morality of wearing buttons. i do not know how the schism arose; but it is easy to suppose, for the sake of argument, that there had originally existed some puritan body which condemned the frivolity of ribbons though not of buttons. i was going to say of badges but not buttons; but on reflection i cannot bring myself to believe that any american, however insane, would object to wearing badges. but the point is that as the holy spirit of progressive prophesy rested on the first sect because it had invented a new objection to ribbons, so that holy spirit would then pass from it to the new sect who invented a further objection to buttons. and from them it must inevitably pass to any rebel among them who shall choose to rise and say that he disapproves of trousers because of the existence of trouser-buttons. each secession in turn must be right because it is recent, and progress must progress by growing smaller and smaller. that is the progressive theory, the legacy of seventeenth-century sectarianism, the dogma implied in much modern politics, and the evident enemy of democracy. democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. but progress says that the minority is always right. progressives are prophets; and fortunately not all the people are prophets. thus in the atmosphere of this slowly dying sectarianism anybody who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannise over the people. if he chooses to say that drinking is always wrong, or that kissing is always wrong, or that wearing buttons is always wrong, people are afraid to contradict him for fear they should be contradicting their own great-grandchild. for their superstition is an inversion of the ancestor-worship of china; and instead of vainly appealing to something that is dead, they appeal to something that may never be born. there is another cause of this strange servile disease in american democracy. it is to be found in american feminism, and feminist america is an entirely different thing from feminine america. i should say that the overwhelming majority of american girls laugh at their female politicians at least as much as the majority of american men despise their male politicians. but though the aggressive feminists are a minority, they are in this atmosphere which i have tried to analyse; the atmosphere in which there is a sort of sanctity about the minority. and it is this superstition of seriousness that constitutes the most solid obstacle and exception to the general and almost conventional pressure of public opinion. when a fad is frankly felt to be anti-national, as was abolitionism before the civil war, or pro-germanism in the great war, or the suggestion of racial admixture in the south at all times, then the fad meets far less mercy than anywhere else in the world; it is snowed under and swept away. but when it does not thus directly challenge patriotism or popular ideas, a curious halo of hopeful solemnity surrounds it, merely because it is a fad, but above all if it is a feminine fad. the earnest lady-reformer who really utters a warning against the social evil of beer or buttons is seen to be walking clothed in light, like a prophetess. perhaps it is something of the holy aureole which the east sees shining around an idiot. but i think there is another explanation, feminine rather than feminist, and proceeding from normal women and not from abnormal idiots. it is something that involves an old controversy, but one upon which i have not, like so many politicians, changed my opinion. it concerns the particular fashion in which women tend to regard, or rather to disregard, the formal and legal rights of the citizen. in so far as this is a bias, it is a bias in the directly opposite direction from that now lightly alleged. there is a sort of underbred history going about, according to which women in the past have always been in the position of slaves. it is much more to the point to note that women have always been in the position of despots. they have been despotic because they ruled in an area where they had too much common sense to attempt to be constitutional. you cannot grant a constitution to a nursery; nor can babies assemble like barons and extort a great charter. tommy cannot plead a habeas corpus against going to bed; and an infant cannot be tried by twelve other infants before he is put in the corner. and as there can be no laws or liberties in a nursery, the extension of feminism means that there shall be no more laws or liberties in a state than there are in a nursery. the woman does not really regard men as citizens but as children. she may, if she is a humanitarian, love all mankind; but she does not respect it. still less does she respect its votes. now a man must be very blind nowadays not to see that there is a danger of a sort of amateur science or pseudo-science being made the excuse for every trick of tyranny and interference. anybody who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed. in other words, it is a danger of turning the policeman into a sort of benevolent burglar. against this protests are already being made, and will increasingly be made, if men retain any instinct of independence or dignity at all. but to complain of the woman interfering in the home will always sound like complaining of the oyster intruding into the oyster-shell. to object that she has too much power over education will seem like objecting to a hen having too much to do with eggs. she has already been given an almost irresponsible power over a limited region in these things; and if that power is made infinite it will be even more irresponsible. if she adds to her own power in the family all these alien fads external to the family, her power will not only be irresponsible but insane. she will be something which may well be called a nightmare of the nursery; a mad mother. but the point is that she will be mad about other nurseries as well as her own, or possibly instead of her own. the results will be interesting; but at least it is certain that under this softening influence government of the people, by the people, for the people, will most assuredly perish from the earth. but there is always another possibility. hints of it may be noted here and there like muffled gongs of doom. the other day some people preaching some low trick or other, for running away from the glory of motherhood, were suddenly silenced in new york; by a voice of deep and democratic volume. the prigs who potter about the great plains are pygmies dancing round a sleeping giant. that which sleeps, so far as they are concerned, is the huge power of human unanimity and intolerance in the soul of america. at present the masses in the middle west are indifferent to such fancies or faintly attracted by them, as fashions of culture from the great cities. but any day it may not be so; some lunatic may cut across their economic rights or their strange and buried religion; and then he will see something. he will find himself running like a nigger who has wronged a white woman or a man who has set the prairie on fire. he will see something which the politicians fan in its sleep and flatter with the name of the people, which many reactionaries have cursed with the name of the mob, but which in any case has had under its feet the crowns of many kings. it was said that the voice of the people is the voice of god; and this at least is certain, that it can be the voice of god to the wicked. and the last antics of their arrogance shall stiffen before something enormous, such as towers in the last words that job heard out of the whirlwind; and a voice they never knew shall tell them that his name is leviathan, and he is lord over all the children of pride. _the extraordinary american_ when i was in america i had the feeling that it was far more foreign than france or even than ireland. and by foreign i mean fascinating rather than repulsive. i mean that element of strangeness which marks the frontier of any fairyland, or gives to the traveller himself the almost eerie title of the stranger. and i saw there more clearly than in countries counted as more remote from us, in race or religion, a paradox that is one of the great truths of travel. we have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. so long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character. if when we see an event we can promptly provide an explanation, we may be pretty certain that we had ourselves prepared the explanation before we saw the event. it follows from this that the best picture of a foreign people can probably be found in a puzzle picture. if we can find an event of which the meaning is really dark to us, it will probably throw some light on the truth. i will therefore take from my american experiences one isolated incident, which certainly could not have happened in any other country i have ever clapped eyes on. i have really no notion of what it meant. i have heard even from americans about five different conjectures about its meaning. but though i do not understand it, i do sincerely believe that if i did understand it, i should understand america. it happened in the city of oklahoma, which would require a book to itself, even considered as a background. the state of oklahoma is a district in the south-west recently reclaimed from the red indian territory. what many, quite incorrectly, imagine about all america is really true of oklahoma. it is proud of having no history. it is glowing with the sense of having a great future--and nothing else. people are just as likely to boast of an old building in nashville as in norwich; people are just as proud of old families in boston as in bath. but in oklahoma the citizens do point out a colossal structure, arrogantly affirming that it wasn't there last week. it was against the colours of this crude stage scenery, as of a pantomime city of pasteboard, that the fantastic figure appeared which still haunts me like a walking note of interrogation. i was strolling down the main street of the city, and looking in at a paper-stall vivid with the news of crime, when a stranger addressed me; and asked me, quite politely but with a curious air of having authority to put the question, what i was doing in that city. he was a lean brown man, having rather the look of a shabby tropical traveller, with a grey moustache and a lively and alert eye. but the most singular thing about him was that the front of his coat was covered with a multitude of shining metallic emblems made in the shape of stars and crescents. i was well accustomed by this time to americans adorning the lapels of their coats with little symbols of various societies; it is a part of the american passion for the ritual of comradeship. there is nothing that an american likes so much as to have a secret society and to make no secret of it. but in this case, if i may put it so, the rash of symbolism seemed to have broken out all over the man, in a fashion that indicated that the fever was far advanced. of this minor mystery, however, his first few sentences offered a provisional explanation. in answer to his question, touching my business in oklahoma, i replied with restraint that i was lecturing. to which he replied without restraint, but rather with an expansive and radiant pride, 'i also am lecturing. i am lecturing on astronomy.' so far a certain wild rationality seemed to light up the affair. i knew it was unusual, in my own country, for the astronomer royal to walk down the strand with his coat plastered all over with the solar system. indeed, it was unusual for any english astronomical lecturer to advertise the subject of his lectures in this fashion. but though it would be unusual, it would not necessarily be unreasonable. in fact, i think it might add to the colour and variety of life, if specialists did adopt this sort of scientific heraldry. i should like to be able to recognise an entomologist at sight by the decorative spiders and cockroaches crawling all over his coat and waistcoat. i should like to see a conchologist in a simple costume of shells. an osteopath, i suppose, would be agreeably painted so as to resemble a skeleton, while a botanist would enliven the street with the appearance of a jack-in-the-green. so while i regarded the astronomical lecturer in the astronomical coat as a figure distinguishable, by a high degree of differentiation, from the artless astronomers of my island home (enough their simple loveliness for me) i saw in him nothing illogical, but rather an imaginative extreme of logic. and then came another turn of the wheel of topsy-turvydom, and all the logic was scattered to the wind. expanding his starry bosom and standing astraddle, with the air of one who owned the street, the strange being continued, 'yes, i am lecturing on astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, palaeontology, embryology, eschatology,' and so on in a thunderous roll of theoretical sciences apparently beyond the scope of any single university, let alone any single professor. having thus introduced himself, however, he got to business. he apologised with true american courtesy for having questioned me at all, and excused it on the ground of his own exacting responsibilities. i imagined him to mean the responsibility of simultaneously occupying the chairs of all the faculties already mentioned. but these apparently were trifles to him, and something far more serious was clouding his brow. 'i feel it to be my duty,' he said, 'to acquaint myself with any stranger visiting this city; and it is an additional pleasure to welcome here a member of the upper ten.' i assured him earnestly that i knew nothing about the upper ten, except that i did not belong to them; i felt, not without alarm, that the upper ten might be another secret society. he waved my abnegation aside and continued, 'i have a great responsibility in watching over this city. my friend the mayor and i have a great responsibility.' and then an extraordinary thing happened. suddenly diving his hand into his breast-pocket, he flashed something before my eyes like a hand-mirror; something which disappeared again almost as soon as it appeared. in that flash i could only see that it was some sort of polished metal plate, with some letters engraved on it like a monogram. but the reward of a studious and virtuous life, which has been spent chiefly in the reading of american detective stories, shone forth for me in that hour of trial; i received at last the prize of a profound scholarship in the matter of imaginary murders in tenth-rate magazines. i remembered who it was who in the yankee detective yarn flashes before the eyes of slim jim or the lone hand crook a badge of metal sometimes called a shield. assuming all the desperate composure of slim jim himself, i replied, 'you mean you are connected with the police authorities here, don't you? well, if i commit a murder here, i'll let you know.' whereupon that astonishing man waved a hand in deprecation, bowed in farewell with the grace of a dancing master; and said, 'oh, those are not things we expect from members of the upper ten.' then that moving constellation moved away, disappearing in the dark tides of humanity, as the vision passed away down the dark tides from sir galahad and, starlike, mingled with the stars. that is the problem i would put to all americans, and to all who claim to understand america. who and what was that man? was he an astronomer? was he a detective? was he a wandering lunatic? if he was a lunatic who thought he was an astronomer, why did he have a badge to prove he was a detective? if he was a detective pretending to be an astronomer, why did he tell a total stranger that he was a detective two minutes after saying he was an astronomer? if he wished to watch over the city in a quiet and unobtrusive fashion, why did he blazon himself all over with all the stars of the sky, and profess to give public lectures on all the subjects of the world? every wise and well-conducted student of murder stories is acquainted with the notion of a policeman in plain clothes. but nobody could possibly say that this gentleman was in plain clothes. why not wear his uniform, if he was resolved to show every stranger in the street his badge? perhaps after all he had no uniform; for these lands were but recently a wild frontier rudely ruled by vigilance committees. some americans suggested to me that he was the sheriff; the regular hard-riding, free-shooting sheriff of bret harte and my boyhood's dreams. others suggested that he was an agent of the ku-klux klan, that great nameless revolution of the revival of which there were rumours at the time; and that the symbol he exhibited was theirs. but whether he was a sheriff acting for the law, or a conspirator against the law, or a lunatic entirely outside the law, i agree with the former conjectures upon one point. i am perfectly certain he had something else in his pocket besides a badge. and i am perfectly certain that under certain circumstances he would have handled it instantly, and shot me dead between the gay bookstall and the crowded trams. and that is the last touch to the complexity; for though in that country it often seems that the law is made by a lunatic, you never know when the lunatic may not shoot you for keeping it. only in the presence of that citizen of oklahoma i feel i am confronted with the fullness and depth of the mystery of america. because i understand nothing, i recognise the thing that we call a nation; and i salute the flag. but even in connection with this mysterious figure there is a moral which affords another reason for mentioning him. whether he was a sheriff or an outlaw, there was certainly something about him that suggested the adventurous violence of the old border life of america; and whether he was connected with the police or no, there was certainly violence enough in his environment to satisfy the most ardent policeman. the posters in the paper-shop were placarded with the verdict in the hamon trial; a _cause célèbre_ which reached its crisis in oklahoma while i was there. senator hamon had been shot by a girl whom he had wronged, and his widow demanded justice, or what might fairly be called vengeance. there was very great excitement culminating in the girl's acquittal. nor did the hamon case appear to be entirely exceptional in that breezy borderland. the moment the town had received the news that clara smith was free, newsboys rushed down the street shouting, 'double stabbing outrage near oklahoma,' or 'banker's throat cut on main street,' or otherwise resuming their regular mode of life. it seemed as much as to say, 'do not imagine that our local energies are exhausted in shooting a senator,' or 'come, now, the world is young, even if clara smith is acquitted, and the enthusiasm of oklahoma is not yet cold.' but my particular reason for mentioning the matter is this. despite my friend's mystical remarks about the upper ten, he lived in an atmosphere of something that was at least the very reverse of a respect for persons. indeed, there was something in the very crudity of his social compliment that smacked, strangely enough, of that egalitarian soil. in a vaguely aristocratic country like england, people would never dream of telling a total stranger that he was a member of the upper ten. for one thing, they would be afraid that he might be. real snobbishness is never vulgar; for it is intended to please the refined. nobody licks the boots of a duke, if only because the duke does not like his boots cleaned in that way. nobody embraces the knees of a marquis, because it would embarrass that nobleman. and nobody tells him he is a member of the upper ten, because everybody is expected to know it. but there is a much more subtle kind of snobbishness pervading the atmosphere of any society trial in england. and the first thing that struck me was the total absence of that atmosphere in the trial at oklahoma. mr. hamon was presumably a member of the upper ten, if there is such a thing. he was a member of the senate or upper house in the american parliament; he was a millionaire and a pillar of the republican party, which might be called the respectable party; he is said to have been mentioned as a possible president. and the speeches of clara smith's counsel, who was known by the delightfully oklahomite title of wild bill mclean, were wild enough in all conscience; but they left very little of my friend's illusion that members of the upper ten could not be accused of crimes. nero and borgia were quite presentable people compared with senator hamon when wild bill mclean had done with him. but the difference was deeper, and even in a sense more delicate than this. there is a certain tone about english trials, which does at least begin with a certain scepticism about people prominent in public life being abominable in private life. people do vaguely doubt the criminality of 'a man in that position'; that is, the position of the marquise de brinvilliers or the marquis de sade. _prima facie_, it would be an advantage to the marquis de sade that he was a marquis. but it was certainly against hamon that he was a millionaire. wild bill did not minimise him as a bankrupt or an adventurer; he insisted on the solidity and size of his fortune, he made mountains out of the 'hamon millions,' as if they made the matter much worse; as indeed i think they do. but that is because i happen to share a certain political philosophy with wild bill and other wild buffaloes of the prairies. in other words, there is really present here a democratic instinct against the domination of wealth. it does not prevent wealth from dominating; but it does prevent the domination from being regarded with any affection or loyalty. despite the man in the starry coat, the americans have not really any illusions about the upper ten. mclean was appealing to an implicit public opinion when he pelted the senator with his gold. but something more is involved. i became conscious, as i have been conscious in reading the crime novels of america, that the millionaire was taken as a type and not an individual. this is the great difference; that america recognises rich crooks as a _class_. any englishman might recognise them as individuals. any english romance may turn on a crime in high life; in which the baronet is found to have poisoned his wife, or the elusive burglar turns out to be the bishop. but the english are not always saying, either in romance or reality, 'what's to be done, if our food is being poisoned by all these baronets?' they do not murmur in indignation, 'if bishops will go on burgling like this, something must be done.' the whole point of the english romance is the exceptional character of a crime in high life. that is not the tone of american novels or american newspapers or american trials like the trial in oklahoma. americans may be excited when a millionaire crook is caught, as when any other crook is caught; but it is at his being caught, not at his being discovered. to put the matter shortly, england recognises a criminal class at the bottom of the social scale. america also recognises a criminal class at the top of the social scale. in both, for various reasons, it may be difficult for the criminals to be convicted; but in america the upper class of criminals is recognised. in both america and england, of course, it exists. this is an assumption at the back of the american mind which makes a great difference in many ways; and in my opinion a difference for the better. i wrote merely fancifully just now about bishops being burglars; but there is a story in new york, illustrating this, which really does in a sense attribute a burglary to a bishop. the story was that an anglican lord spiritual, of the pompous and now rather antiquated school, was pushing open the door of a poor american tenement with all the placid patronage of the squire and rector visiting the cottagers, when a gigantic irish policeman came round the corner and hit him a crack over the head with a truncheon on the assumption that he was a house-breaker. i hope that those who laugh at the story see that the laugh is not altogether against the policeman; and that it is not only the policeman, but rather the bishop, who had failed to recognise some fine logical distinctions. the bishop, being a learned man, might well be called upon (when he had sufficiently recovered from the knock on the head) to define what is the exact difference between a house-breaker and a home-visitor; and why the home-visitor should not be regarded as a house-breaker when he will not behave as a guest. an impartial intelligence will be much less shocked at the policeman's disrespect for the home-visitor than by the home-visitor's disrespect for the home. but that story smacks of the western soil, precisely because of the element of brutality there is in it. in england snobbishness and social oppression are much subtler and softer; the manifestations of them at least are more mellow and humane. in comparison there is indeed something which people call ruthless about the air of america, especially the american cities. the bishop may push open the door without an apology, but he would not break open the door with a truncheon; but the irish policeman's truncheon hits both ways. it may be brutal to the tenement dweller as well as to the bishop; but the difference and distinction is that it might really be brutal to the bishop. it is because there is after all, at the back of all that barbarism, a sort of a negative belief in the brotherhood of men, a dark democratic sense that men are really men and nothing more, that the coarse and even corrupt bureaucracy is not resented exactly as oligarchic bureaucracies are resented. there is a sense in which corruption is not so narrow as nepotism. it is upon this queer cynical charity, and even humility, that it has been possible to rear so high and uphold so long that tower of brass, tammany hall. the modern police system is in spirit the most inhuman in history, and its evil belongs to an age and not to a nation. but some american police methods are evil past all parallel; and the detective can be more crooked than a hundred crooks. but in the states it is not only possible that the policeman is worse than the convict, it is by no means certain that he thinks that he is any better. in the popular stories of o. henry there are light allusions to tramps being kicked out of hotels which will make any christian seek relief in strong language and a trust in heaven--not to say in hell. and yet books even more popular than o. henry's are those of the 'sob-sisterhood' who swim in lachrymose lakes after love-lorn spinsters, who pass their lives in reclaiming and consoling such tramps. there are in this people two strains of brutality and sentimentalism which i do not understand, especially where they mingle; but i am fairly sure they both work back to the dim democratic origin. the irish policeman does not confine himself fastidiously to bludgeoning bishops; his truncheon finds plenty of poor people's heads to hit; and yet i believe on my soul he has a sort of sympathy with poor people not to be found in the police of more aristocratic states. i believe he also reads and weeps over the stories of the spinsters and the reclaimed tramps; in fact, there is much of such pathos in an american magazine (my sole companion on many happy railway journeys) which is not only devoted to detective stories, but apparently edited by detectives. in these stories also there is the honest, popular astonishment at the upper ten expressed by the astronomical detective, if indeed he was a detective and not a demon from the dark red-indian forests that faded to the horizon behind him. but i have set him as the head and text of this chapter because with these elements of the third degree of devilry and the seventh heaven of sentimentalism i touch on elements that i do not understand; and when i do not understand, i say so. _the republican in the ruins_ the heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone; especially to a wood-cut or a lithographic stone. modern people put their trust in pictures, especially scientific pictures, as much as the most superstitious ever put it in religious pictures. they publish a portrait of the missing link as if he were the missing man, for whom the police are always advertising; for all the world as if the anthropoid had been photographed before he absconded. the scientific diagram may be a hypothesis; it may be a fancy; it may be a forgery. but it is always an idol in the true sense of an image; and an image in the true sense of a thing mastering the imagination and not the reason. the power of these talismanic pictures is almost hypnotic to modern humanity. we can never forget that we have seen a portrait of the missing link; though we should instantly detect the lapse of logic into superstition, if we were told that the old greek agnostics had made a statue of the unknown god. but there is a still stranger fashion in which we fall victims to the same trick of fancy. we accept in a blind and literal spirit, not only images of speculation, but even figures of speech. the nineteenth century prided itself on having lost its faith in myths, and proceeded to put all its faith in metaphors. it dismissed the old doctrines about the way of life and the light of the world; and then it proceeded to talk as if the light of truth were really and literally a light, that could be absorbed by merely opening our eyes; or as if the path of progress were really and truly a path, to be found by merely following our noses. thus the purpose of god is an idea, true or false; but the purpose of nature is merely a metaphor; for obviously if there is no god there is no purpose. yet while men, by an imaginative instinct, spoke of the purpose of god with a grand agnosticism, as something too large to be seen, something reaching out to worlds and to eternities, they speak of the purpose of nature in particular and practical problems of curing babies or cutting up rabbits. this power of the modern metaphor must be understood, by way of an introduction, if we are to understand one of the chief errors, at once evasive and pervasive, which perplex the problem of america. america is always spoken of as a young nation; and whether or no this be a valuable and suggestive metaphor, very few people notice that it is a metaphor at all. if somebody said that a certain deserving charity had just gone into trousers, we should recognise that it was a figure of speech, and perhaps a rather surprising figure of speech. if somebody said that a daily paper had recently put its hair up, we should know it could only be a metaphor, and possibly a rather strained metaphor. yet these phrases would mean the only thing that can possibly be meant by calling a corporate association of all sorts of people 'young'; that is, that a certain institution has only existed for a certain time. i am not now denying that such a corporate nationality may happen to have a psychology comparatively analogous to the psychology of youth. i am not even denying that america has it. i am only pointing out, to begin with, that we must free ourselves from the talismanic tyranny of a metaphor which we do not recognise as a metaphor. men realised that the old mystical doctrines were mystical; they do not realise that the new metaphors are metaphorical. they have some sort of hazy notion that american society must be growing, must be promising, must have the virtues of hope or the faults of ignorance, merely _because_ it has only had a separate existence since the eighteenth century. and that is exactly like saying that a new chapel must be growing taller, or that a limited liability company will soon have its second teeth. now in truth this particular conception of american hopefulness would be anything but hopeful for america. if the argument really were, as it is still vaguely supposed to be, that america must have a long life before it, because it only started in the eighteenth century, we should find a very fatal answer by looking at the other political systems that did start in the eighteenth century. the eighteenth century was called the age of reason; and there is a very real sense in which the other systems were indeed started in a spirit of reason. but starting from reason has not saved them from ruin. if we survey the europe of to-day with real clarity and historic comprehension, we shall see that it is precisely the most recent and the most rationalistic creations that have been ruined. the two great states which did most definitely and emphatically deserve to be called modern states were prussia and russia. there was no real prussia before frederick the great; no real russian empire before peter the great. both those innovators recognised themselves as rationalists bringing a new reason and order into an indeterminate barbarism; and doing for the barbarians what the barbarians could not do for themselves. they did not, like the kings of england or france or spain or scotland, inherit a sceptre that was the symbol of a historic and patriotic people. in this sense there was no russia but only an emperor of russia. in this sense prussia was a kingdom before it was a nation; if it ever was a nation. but anyhow both men were particularly modern in their whole mood and mind. they were modern to the extent of being not only anti-traditional, but almost anti-patriotic. peter forced the science of the west on russia to the regret of many russians. frederick talked the french of voltaire and not the german of luther. the two experiments were entirely in the spirit of voltairean rationalism; they were built in broad daylight by men who believed in nothing but the light of common day; and already their day is done. if then the promise of america were in the fact that she is one of the latest births of progress, we should point out that it is exactly the latest born that were the first to die. if in this sense she is praised as young, it may be answered that the young have died young, and have not lived to be old. and if this be confused with the argument that she came in an age of clarity and scepticism, uncontaminated by old superstitions, it could still be retorted that the works of superstition have survived the works of scepticism. but the truth is, of course, that the real quality of america is much more subtle and complex than this; and is mixed not only of good and bad, and rational and mystical, but also of old and new. that is what makes the task of tracing the true proportions of american life so interesting and so impossible. to begin with, such a metaphor is always as distracting as a mixed metaphor. it is a double-edged tool that cuts both ways; and consequently opposite ways. we use the same word 'young' to mean two opposite extremes. we mean something at an early stage of growth, and also something having the latest fruits of growth. we might call a commonwealth young if it conducted all its daily conversation by wireless telegraphy; meaning that it was progressive. but we might also call it young if it conducted all its industry with chipped flints; meaning that it was primitive. these two meanings of youth are hopelessly mixed up when the word is applied to america. but what is more curious, the two elements really are wildly entangled in america. america is in some ways what is called in advance of the times, and in some ways what is called behind the times; but it seems a little confusing to convey both notions by the same word. on the one hand, americans often are successful in the last inventions. and for that very reason they are often neglectful of the last but one. it is true of men in general, dealing with things in general, that while they are progressing in one thing, such as science, they are going back in another thing, such as art. what is less fully realised is that this is true even as between different methods of science. the perfection of wireless telegraphy might well be followed by the gross imperfection of wires. the very enthusiasm of american science brings this out very vividly. the telephone in new york works miracles all day long. replies from remote places come as promptly as in a private talk; nobody cuts anybody off; nobody says, 'sorry you've been troubled.' but then the postal service of new york does not work at all. at least i could never discover it working. letters lingered in it for days and days, as in some wild village of the pyrenees. when i asked a taxi-driver to drive me to a post-office, a look of far-off vision and adventure came into his eyes, and he said he had once heard of a post-office somewhere near west ninety-seventh street. men are not efficient in everything, but only in the fashionable thing. this may be a mark of the march of science; it does certainly in one sense deserve the description of youth. we can imagine a very young person forgetting the old toy in the excitement of a new one. but on the other hand, american manners contain much that is called young in the contrary sense; in the sense of an earlier stage of history. there are whole patches and particular aspects that seem to me quite early victorian. i cannot help having this sensation, for instance, about the arrangement for smoking in the railway carriages. there are no smoking carriages, as a rule; but a corner of each of the great cars is curtained off mysteriously, that a man may go behind the curtain and smoke. nobody thinks of a woman doing so. it is regarded as a dark, bohemian, and almost brutally masculine indulgence; exactly as it was regarded by the dowagers in thackeray's novels. indeed, this is one of the many such cases in which extremes meet; the extremes of stuffy antiquity and cranky modernity. the american dowager is sorry that tobacco was ever introduced; and the american suffragette and social reformer is considering whether tobacco ought not to be abolished. the tone of american society suggests some sort of compromise, by which women will be allowed to smoke, but men forbidden to do so. in one respect, however, america is very old indeed. in one respect america is more historic than england; i might almost say more archaeological than england. the record of one period of the past, morally remote and probably irrevocable, is there preserved in a more perfect form as a pagan city is preserved at pompeii. in a more general sense, of course, it is easy to exaggerate the contrast as a mere contrast between the old world and the new. there is a superficial satire about the millionaire's daughter who has recently become the wife of an aristocrat; but there is a rather more subtle satire in the question of how long the aristocrat has been aristocratic. there is often much misplaced mockery of a marriage between an upstart's daughter and a decayed relic of feudalism; when it is really a marriage between an upstart's daughter and an upstart's grandson. the sentimental socialist often seems to admit the blue blood of the nobleman, even when he wants to shed it; just as he seems to admit the marvellous brains of the millionaire, even when he wants to blow them out. unfortunately (in the interests of social science, of course) the sentimental socialist never does go so far as bloodshed or blowing out brains; otherwise the colour and quality of both blood and brains would probably be a disappointment to him. there are certainly more american families that really came over in the _mayflower_ than english families that really came over with the conqueror; and an english county family clearly dating from the time of the _mayflower_ would be considered a very traditional and historic house. nevertheless, there are ancient things in england, though the aristocracy is hardly one of them. there are buildings, there are institutions, there are even ideas in england which do preserve, as in a perfect pattern, some particular epoch of the past, and even of the remote past. a man could study the middle ages in lincoln as well as in rouen; in canterbury as well as in cologne. even of the renaissance the same is true, at least on the literary side; if shakespeare was later he was also greater than ronsard. but the point is that the spirit and philosophy of the periods were present in fullness and in freedom. the guildsmen were as christian in england as they were anywhere; the poets were as pagan in england as they were anywhere. personally i do not admit that the men who served patrons were freer than those who served patron saints. but each fashion had its own kind of freedom; and the point is that the english, in each case, had the fullness of that kind of freedom. but there was another ideal of freedom which the english never had at all; or, anyhow, never expressed at all. there was another ideal, the soul of another epoch, round which we built no monuments and wrote no masterpieces. you will find no traces of it in england; but you will find them in america. the thing i mean was the real religion of the eighteenth century. its religion, in the more defined sense, was generally deism, as in robespierre or jefferson. in the more general way of morals and atmosphere it was rather stoicism, as in the suicide of wolfe tone. it had certain very noble and, as some would say, impossible ideals; as that a politician should be poor, and should be proud of being poor. it knew latin; and therefore insisted on the strange fancy that the republic should be a public thing. its republican simplicity was anything but a silly pose; unless all martyrdom is a silly pose. even of the prigs and fanatics of the american and french revolutions we can often say, as stevenson said of an american, that 'thrift and courage glowed in him.' and its virtue and value for us is that it did remember the things we now most tend to forget; from the dignity of liberty to the danger of luxury. it did really believe in self-determination, in the self-determination of the self, as well as of the state. and its determination was really determined. in short, it believed in self-respect; and it is strictly true even of its rebels and regicides that they desired chiefly to be respectable. but there were in it the marks of religion as well as respectability; it had a creed; it had a crusade. men died singing its songs; men starved rather than write against its principles. and its principles were liberty, equality, and fraternity, or the dogmas of the declaration of independence. this was the idea that redeemed the dreary negations of the eighteenth century; and there are still corners of philadelphia or boston or baltimore where we can feel so suddenly in the silence its plain garb and formal manners, that the walking ghost of jefferson would hardly surprise us. there is not the ghost of such a thing in england. in england the real religion of the eighteenth century never found freedom or scope. it never cleared a space in which to build that cold and classic building called the capitol. it never made elbow-room for that free if sometimes frigid figure called the citizen. in eighteenth-century england he was crowded out, partly perhaps by the relics of better things of the past, but largely at least by the presence of much worse things in the present. the worst things kept out the best things of the eighteenth century. the ground was occupied by legal fictions; by a godless erastian church and a powerless hanoverian king. its realities were an aristocracy of regency dandies, in costumes made to match brighton pavilion; a paganism not frigid but florid. it was a touch of this aristocratic waste in fox that prevented that great man from being a glorious exception. it is therefore well for us to realise that there is something in history which we did not experience; and therefore probably something in americans that we do not understand. there was this idealism at the very beginning of their individualism. there was a note of heroic publicity and honourable poverty which lingers in the very name of cincinnati. but i have another and special reason for noting this historical fact; the fact that we english never made anything upon the model of a capitol, while we can match anybody with the model of a cathedral. it is far from improbable that the latter model may again be a working model. for i have myself felt, naturally and for a long time, a warm sympathy with both those past ideals, which seem to some so incompatible. i have felt the attraction of the red cap as well as the red cross, of the marseillaise as well as the magnificat. and even when they were in furious conflict i have never altogether lost my sympathy for either. but in the conflict between the republic[1] and the church, the point often made against the church seems to me much more of a point against the republic. it is emphatically the republic and not the church that i venerate as something beautiful but belonging to the past. in fact i feel exactly the same sort of sad respect for the republican ideal that many mid-victorian free-thinkers felt for the religious ideal. the most sincere poets of that period were largely divided between those who insisted, like arnold and clough, that christianity might be a ruin, but after all it must be treated as a picturesque ruin; and those, like swinburne, who insisted that it might be a picturesque ruin, but after all it must be treated as a ruin. but surely their own pagan temple of political liberty is now much more of a ruin than the other; and i fancy i am one of the few who still take off their hats in that ruined temple. that is why i went about looking for the fading traces of that lost cause, in the old-world atmosphere of the new world. but i do not, as a fact, feel that the cathedral is a ruin; i doubt if i should feel it even if i wished to lay it in ruins. i doubt if mr. m'cabe really thinks that catholicism is dying, though he might deceive himself into saying so. nobody could be naturally moved to say that the crowded cathedral of st. patrick in new york was a ruin, or even that the unfinished anglo-catholic cathedral at washington was a ruin, though it is not yet a church; or that there is anything lost or lingering about the splendid and spirited gothic churches springing up under the inspiration of mr. cram of boston. as a matter of feeling, as a matter of fact, as a matter quite apart from theory or opinion, it is not in the religious centres that we now have the feeling of something beautiful but receding, of something loved but lost. it is exactly in the spaces cleared and levelled by america for the large and sober religion of the eighteenth century; it is where an old house in philadelphia contains an old picture of franklin, or where the men of maryland raised above their city the first monument of washington. it is there that i feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted, whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead, and all save he departed. it is then that i feel as if i were the last republican. but when i say that the republic of the age of reason is now a ruin, i should rather say that at its best it is a ruin. at its worst it has collapsed into a death-trap or is rotting like a dunghill. what is the real republic of our day as distinct from the ideal republic of our fathers, but a heap of corrupt capitalism crawling with worms; with those parasites, the professional politicians? i was re-reading swinburne's bitter but not ignoble poem, 'before a crucifix,' in which he bids christ, or the ecclesiastical image of christ, stand out of the way of the onward march of a political idealism represented by united italy or the french republic. i was struck by the strange and ironic exactitude with which every taunt he flings at the degradation of the old divine ideal would now fit the degradation of his own human ideal. the time has already come when we can ask his goddess of liberty, as represented by the actual liberals, 'have _you_ filled full men's starved-out souls; have _you_ brought freedom on the earth?' for every engine in which these old free-thinkers firmly and confidently trusted has itself become an engine of oppression and even of class oppression. its free parliament has become an oligarchy. its free press has become a monopoly. if the pure church has been corrupted in the course of two thousand years, what about the pure republic that has rotted into a filthy plutocracy in less than a hundred? o, hidden face of man, whereover the years have woven a viewless veil, if thou wert verily man's lover what did thy love or blood avail? thy blood the priests make poison of; and in gold shekels coin thy love. which has most to do with shekels to-day, the priests or the politicians? can we say in any special sense nowadays that clergymen, as such, make a poison out of the blood of the martyrs? can we say it in anything like the real sense, in which we do say that yellow journalists make a poison out of the blood of the soldiers? but i understand how swinburne felt when confronted by the image of the carven christ, and, perplexed by the contrast between its claims and its consequences, he said his strange farewell to it, hastily indeed, but not without regret, not even really without respect. i felt the same myself when i looked for the last time on the statue of liberty. footnote: [1] in the conclusion of this chapter i mean by the republic not merely the american republic, but the whole modern representative system, as in france or even in england. _is the atlantic narrowing?_ a certain kind of question is asked very earnestly in our time. because of a certain logical quality in it, connected with premises and data, it is very difficult to answer. thus people will ask what is the hidden weakness in the celtic race that makes them everywhere fail or fade away; or how the germans contrived to bring all their organisation into a state of such perfect efficiency; and what was the significance of the recent victory of prussia. or they will ask by what stages the modern world has abandoned all belief in miracles; and the modern newspapers ceased to print any news of murders. they will ask why english politics are free from corruption; or by what mental and moral training certain millionaires were enabled to succeed by sheer force of character; in short, they will ask why plutocrats govern well and how it is that pigs fly, spreading their pink pinions to the breeze or delighting us as they twitter and flutter from tree to tree. the logical difficulty of answering these questions is connected with an old story about charles the second and a bowl of goldfish, and with another anecdote about a gentleman who was asked, 'when did you leave off beating your wife?' but there is something analogous to it in the present discussions about the forces drawing england and america together. it seems as if the reasoners hardly went far enough back in their argument, or took trouble enough to disentangle their assumptions. they are still moving with the momentum of the peculiar nineteenth-century notion of progress; of certain very simple tendencies perpetually increasing and needing no special analysis. it is so with the international _rapprochement_ i have to consider here. in other places i have ventured to express a doubt about whether nations can be drawn together by an ancient rumour about races; by a sort of prehistoric chit-chat or the gossip of the stone age. i have ventured farther; and even expressed a doubt about whether they ought to be drawn together, or rather dragged together, by the brute violence of the engines of science and speed. but there is yet another horrible doubt haunting my morbid mind, which it will be better for my constitution to confess frankly. and that is the doubt about whether they are being drawn together at all. it has long been a conversational commonplace among the enlightened that all countries are coming closer and closer to each other. it was a conversational commonplace among the enlightened, somewhere about the year 1913, that all wars were receding farther and farther into a barbaric past. there is something about these sayings that seems simple and familiar and entirely satisfactory when we say them; they are of that consoling sort which we can say without any of the mental pain of thinking what we are saying. but if we turn our attention from the phrases we use to the facts that we talk about, we shall realise at least that there are a good many facts on the other side and examples pointing the other way. for instance, it does happen occasionally, from time to time, that people talk about ireland. he would be a very hilarious humanitarian who should maintain that ireland and england have been more and more assimilated during the last hundred years. the very name of sinn fein is an answer to it, and the very language in which that phrase is spoken. curran and sheil would no more have dreamed of uttering the watchword of 'repeal' in gaelic than of uttering it in zulu. grattan could hardly have brought himself to believe that the real repeal of the union would actually be signed in london in the strange script as remote as the snaky ornament of the celtic crosses. it would have seemed like washington signing the declaration of independence in the picture-writing of the red indians. ireland has clearly grown away from england; and her language, literature, and type of patriotism are far less english than they were. on the other hand, no one will pretend that the mass of modern englishmen are much nearer to talking gaelic or decorating celtic crosses. a hundred years ago it was perfectly natural that byron and moore should walk down the street arm in arm. even the sight of mr. rudyard kipling and mr. w. b. yeats walking down the street arm in arm would now arouse some remark. i could give any number of other examples of the same new estrangement of nations. i could cite the obvious facts that norway and sweden parted company not very long ago, that austria and hungary have again become separate states. i could point to the mob of new nations that have started up after the war; to the fact that the great empires are now nearly all broken up; that the russian empire no longer directs poland, that the austrian empire no longer directs bohemia, that the turkish empire no longer directs palestine. sinn fein is the separatism of the irish. zionism is the separatism of the jews. but there is one simple and sufficing example, which is here more to my purpose, and is at least equally sufficient for it. and that is the deepening national difference between the americans and the english. let me test it first by my individual experience in the matter of literature. when i was a boy i read a book like _the autocrat of the breakfast-table_ exactly as i read another book like _the book of snobs_. i did not think of it as an american book, but simply as a book. its wit and idiom were like those of the english literary tradition; and its few touches of local colour seemed merely accidental, like those of an englishman who happened to be living in switzerland or sweden. my father and my father's friends were rightly enthusiastic for the book; so that it seemed to come to me by inheritance like _gulliver's travels_ or _tristram shandy_. its language was as english as ruskin, and a great deal more english than carlyle. well, i have seen in later years an almost equally wide and well-merited popularity of the stories of o. henry. but never for one moment could i or any one else reading them forget that they were stories by an american about america. the very first fact about them is that they are told with an american accent, that is, in the unmistakable tones of a brilliant and fascinating foreigner. and the same is true of every other recent work of which the fame has managed to cross the atlantic. we did not say that _the spoon river anthology_ was a new book, but that it was a new book from america. it was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported from russia or italy. we were in no danger of confusing it with the 'elegy in a country churchyard.' people in england who heard of main street were not likely to identify it with a high street; with the principal thoroughfare in any little town in berkshire or buckinghamshire. but when i was a boy i practically identified the boarding-house of the autocrat with any boarding-house i happened to know in brompton or brighton. no doubt there were differences; but the point is that the differences did not pierce the consciousness or prick the illusion. i said to myself, 'people are like this in boarding-houses,' not 'people are like this in boston.' this can be seen even in the simple matter of language, especially in the sense of slang. take, for instance, the delightful sketch in the causerie of oliver wendell holmes; the character of the young man called john. he is the very modern type in every modern country who does specialise in slang. he is the young fellow who is something in the city; the everyday young man of the gilbertian song, with a stick and a pipe and a half-bred black-and-tan. in every country he is at once witty and commonplace. in every country, therefore, he tends both to the vivacity and the vulgarity of slang. but when he appeared in holmes's book, his language was not very different from what it would have been in a brighton instead of a boston boarding-house; or, in short, if the young man called john had more commonly been called 'arry. if he had appeared in a modern american book, his language would have been almost literally unintelligible. at the least an englishman would have had to read some of the best sentences twice, as he sometimes has to read the dizzy and involved metaphors of o. henry. nor is it an answer that this depended on the personalities of the particular writers. a comparison between the real journalism of the time of holmes and the real journalism of the time of henry reveals the same thing. it is the expansion of a slight difference of style into a luxuriant difference of idiom; and the process continued indefinitely would certainly produce a totally different language. after a few centuries the signatures of american ambassadors would look as fantastic as gaelic, and the very name of the republic be as strange as sinn fein. it is true that there has been on the surface a certain amount of give and take; or at least, as far as the english are concerned, of take rather than give. but it is true that it was once all the other way; and indeed the one thing is something like a just nemesis of the other. indeed, the story of the reversal is somewhat singular, when we come to think of it. it began in a certain atmosphere and spirit of certain well-meaning people who talked about the english-speaking race; and were apparently indifferent to how the english was spoken, whether in the accent of a jamaican negro or a convict from botany bay. it was their logical tendency to say that dante was a dago. it was their logical punishment to say that disraeli was an englishman. now there may have been a period when this anglo-american amalgamation included more or less equal elements from england and america. it never included the larger elements, or the more valuable elements of either. but, on the whole, i think it true to say that it was not an allotment but an interchange of parts; and that things first went all one way and then all the other. people began by telling the americans that they owed all their past triumphs to england; which was false. they ended up by telling the english that they would owe all their future triumphs to america; which is if possible still more false. because we chose to forget that new york had been new amsterdam, we are now in danger of forgetting that london is not new york. because we insisted that chicago was only a pious imitation of chiswick, we may yet see chiswick an inferior imitation of chicago. our anglo-saxon historians attempted that conquest in which howe and burgoyne had failed, and with infinitely less justification on their side. they attempted the great crime of the anglicisation of america. they have called down the punishment of the americanisation of england. we must not murmur; but it is a heavy punishment. it may lift a little of its load, however, if we look at it more closely; we shall then find that though it is very much on top of us, it is only on top. in that sense such americanisation as there is is very superficial. for instance, there is a certain amount of american slang picked up at random; it appears in certain pushing types of journalism and drama. but we may easily dwell too much on this tragedy; of people who have never spoken english beginning to speak american. i am far from suggesting that american, like any other foreign language, may not frequently contribute to the common culture of the world phrases for which there is no substitute; there are french phrases so used in england and english phrases in france. the word 'high-brow,' for instance, is a real discovery and revelation, a new and necessary name for something that walked nameless but enormous in the modern world, a shaft of light and a stroke of lightning. that comes from america and belongs to the world, as much as 'the raven' or _the scarlet letter_ or the novels of henry james belong to the world. in fact, i can imagine henry james originating it in the throes of self-expression, and bringing out a word like 'high-browed,' with a sort of gentle jerk, at the end of searching sentences which groped sensitively until they found the phrase. but most of the american slang that is borrowed seems to be borrowed for no particular reason. it either has no point or the point is lost by translation into another context and culture. it is either something which does not need any grotesque and exaggerative description, or of which there already exists a grotesque and exaggerative description more native to our tongue and soil. for instance, i cannot see that the strong and simple expression 'now it is for you to pull the police magistrate's nose' is in any way strengthened by saying, 'now it is up to you to pull the police magistrate's nose.' when tennyson says of the men of the light brigade 'theirs but to do and die,' the expression seems to me perfectly lucid. 'up to them to do and die' would alter the metre without especially clarifying the meaning. this is an example of ordinary language being quite adequate; but there is a further difficulty that even wild slang comes to sound like ordinary language. very often the english have already as humorous and fanciful idiom of their own, only that through habit it has lost its humour. when keats wrote the line, 'what pipes and timbrels, what wild ecstasy!' i am willing to believe that the american humorist would have expressed the same sentiment by beginning the sentence with 'some pipe!' when that was first said, somewhere in the wilds of colorado, it was really funny; involving a powerful understatement and the suggestion of a mere sample. if a spinster has informed us that she keeps a bird, and we find it is an ostrich, there will be considerable point in the colorado satirist saying inquiringly, 'some bird?' as if he were offering us a small slice of a small plover. but if we go back to this root and rationale of a joke, the english language already contains quite as good a joke. it is not necessary to say, 'some bird'; there is a far finer irony in the old expression, 'something like a bird.' it suggests that the speaker sees something faintly and strangely birdlike about a bird; that it remotely and almost irrationally reminds him of a bird; and that there is about ostrich plumes a yard long something like the faint and delicate traces of a feather. it has every quality of imaginative irony, except that nobody even imagines it to be ironical. all that happens is that people get tired of that turn of phrase, take up a foreign phrase and get tired of that, without realising the point of either. all that happens is that a number of weary people who used to say, 'something like a bird,' now say, 'some bird,' with undiminished weariness. but they might just as well use dull and decent english; for in both cases they are only using jocular language without seeing the joke. there is indeed a considerable trade in the transplantation of these american jokes to england just now. they generally pine and die in our climate, or they are dead before their arrival; but we cannot be certain that they were never alive. there is a sort of unending frieze or scroll of decorative designs unrolled ceaselessly before the british public, about a hen-pecked husband, which is indistinguishable to the eye from an actual self-repeating pattern like that of the greek key, but which is imported as if it were as precious and irreplaceable as the elgin marbles. advertisement and syndication make mountains out of the most funny little mole-hills; but no doubt the mole-hills are picturesque enough in their own landscape. in any case there is nothing so national as humour; and many things, like many people, can be humorous enough when they are at home. but these american jokes are boomed as solemnly as american religions; and their supporters gravely testify that they are funny, without seeing the fun of it for a moment. this is partly perhaps the spirit of spontaneous institutionalism in american democracy, breaking out in the wrong place. they make humour an institution; and a man will be set to tell an anecdote as if to play the violin. but when the story is told in america it really is amusing; and when these jokes are reprinted in england they are often not even intelligible. with all the stupidity of the millionaire and the monopolist, the enterprising proprietor prints jokes in england which are necessarily unintelligible to nearly every english person; jokes referring to domestic and local conditions quite peculiar to america. i saw one of these narrative caricatures the other day in which the whole of the joke (what there was of it) turned on the astonishment of a housewife at the absurd notion of not having an ice-box. it is perfectly true that nearly every ordinary american housewife possesses an ice-box. an ordinary english housewife would no more expect to possess an ice-box than to possess an iceberg. and it would be about as sensible to tow an iceberg to an english port all the way from the north pole, as to trail that one pale and frigid joke to fleet street all the way from the new york papers. it is the same with a hundred other advertisements and adaptations. i have already confessed that i took a considerable delight in the dancing illuminations of broadway--in broadway. everything there is suitable to them, the vast interminable thoroughfare, the toppling houses, the dizzy and restless spirit of the whole city. it is a city of dissolving views, and one may almost say a city in everlasting dissolution. but i do not especially admire a burning fragment of broadway stuck up opposite the old georgian curve of regent street. i would as soon express sympathy with the republic of switzerland by erecting a small alp, with imitation snow, in the middle of st. james's park. but all this commercial copying is very superficial; and above all, it never copies anything that is really worth copying. nations never _learn_ anything from each other in this way. we have many things to learn from america; but we only listen to those americans who have still to learn them. thus, for instance, we do not import the small farm but only the big shop. in other words, we hear nothing of the democracy of the middle west, but everything of the plutocracy of the middleman, who is probably as unpopular in the middle west as the miller in the middle ages. if mr. elihu k. pike could be transplanted bodily from the neighbourhood of his home town of marathon, neb., with his farm and his frame-house and all its fittings, and they could be set down exactly in the spot now occupied by selfridge's (which could be easily cleared away for the purpose), i think we could really get a great deal of good by watching him, even if the watching were inevitably a little too like watching a wild beast in a cage or an insect under a glass case. urban crowds could collect every day behind a barrier or railing, and gaze at mr. pike pottering about all day in his ancient and autochthonous occupations. we could see him growing indian corn with all the gravity of an indian; though it is impossible to imagine mrs. pike blessing the cornfield in the manner of minnehaha. as i have said, there is a certain lack of humane myth and mysticism about this puritan peasantry. but we could see him transforming the maize into pop-corn, which is a very pleasant domestic ritual and pastime, and is the american equivalent of the glory of roasting chestnuts. above all, many of us would learn for the first time that a man can really live and walk about upon something more productive than a pavement; and that when he does so he can really be a free man, and have no lord but the law. instead of that, america can give nothing to london but those multiple modern shops, of which it has too many already. i know that many people entertain the innocent illusion that big shops are more efficient than small ones; but that is only because the big combinations have the monopoly of advertisement as well as trade. the big shop is not in the least remarkable for efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency. it is secure in its reputation for always sacking the wrong man. a big shop, considered as a place to shop in, is simply a village of small shops roofed in to keep out the light and air; and one in which none of the shopkeepers is really responsible for his shop. if any one has any doubts on this matter, since i have mentioned it, let him consider this fact: that in practice we never do apply this method of commercial combination to anything that matters very much. we do not go to the surgical department of the stores to have a portion of our brain removed by a delicate operation; and then pass on to the advocacy department to employ one or any of its barristers, when we are in temporary danger of being hanged. we go to men who own their own tools and are responsible for the use of their own talents. and the same truth applies to that other modern method of advertisement, which has also so largely fallen across us like the gigantic shadow of america. nations do not arm themselves for a mortal struggle by remembering which sort of submarine they have seen most often on the hoardings. they can do it about something like soap, precisely because a nation will not perish by having a second-rate sort of soap, as it might by having a second-rate sort of submarine. a nation may indeed perish slowly by having a second-rate sort of food or drink or medicine; but that is another and much longer story, and the story is not ended yet. but nobody wins a great battle at a great crisis because somebody has told him that cadgerboy's cavalry is the best. it may be that commercial enterprise will eventually cover these fields also, and advertisement-agents will provide the instruments of the surgeon and the weapons of the soldier. when that happens, the armies will be defeated and the patients will die. but though we modern people are indeed patients, in the sense of being merely receptive and accepting things with astonishing patience, we are not dead yet; and we have lingering gleams of sanity. for the best things do not travel. as i appear here as a traveller, i may say with all modesty that the best people do not travel either. both in england and america the normal people are the national people; and i repeat that i think they are growing more and more national. i do not think the abyss is being bridged by cosmopolitan theories; and i am sure i do not want it bridged by all this slang journalism and blatant advertisement. i have called all that commercial publicity the gigantic shadow of america. it may be the shadow of america, but it is not the light of america. the light lies far beyond, a level light upon the lands of sunset, where it shines upon wide places full of a very simple and a very happy people; and those who would see it must seek for it. _lincoln and lost causes_ it has already been remarked here that the english know a great deal about past american literature, but nothing about past american history. they do not know either, of course, as well as they know the present american advertising, which is the least important of the three. but it is worth noting once more how little they know of the history, and how illogically that little is chosen. they have heard, no doubt, of the fame and the greatness of henry clay. he is a cigar. but it would be unwise to cross-examine any englishman, who may be consuming that luxury at the moment, about the missouri compromise or the controversies with andrew jackson. and just as the statesman of kentucky is a cigar, so the state of virginia is a cigarette. but there is perhaps one exception, or half-exception, to this simple plan. it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that plymouth rock is a chicken. any english person keeping chickens, and chiefly interested in plymouth rocks considered as chickens, would nevertheless have a hazy sensation of having seen the word somewhere before. he would feel subconsciously that the plymouth rock had not always been a chicken. indeed, the name connotes something not only solid but antiquated; and is not therefore a very tactful name for a chicken. there would rise up before him something memorable in the haze that he calls his history; and he would see the history books of his boyhood and old engravings of men in steeple-crowned hats struggling with sea-waves or red indians. the whole thing would suddenly become clear to him if (by a simple reform) the chickens were called pilgrim fathers. then he would remember all about it. the pilgrim fathers were champions of religious liberty; and they discovered america. it is true that he has also heard of a man called christopher columbus; but that was in connection with an egg. he has also heard of somebody known as sir walter raleigh; and though his principal possession was a cloak, it is also true that he had a potato, not to mention a pipe of tobacco. can it be possible that he brought it from virginia, where the cigarettes come from? gradually the memories will come back and fit themselves together for the average hen-wife who learnt history at the english elementary schools, and who has now something better to do. even when the narrative becomes consecutive, it will not necessarily become correct. it is not strictly true to say that the pilgrim fathers discovered america. but it is quite as true as saying that they were champions of religious liberty. if we said that they were martyrs who would have died heroically in torments rather than tolerate any religious liberty, we should be talking something like sense about them, and telling the real truth that is their due. the whole puritan movement, from the solemn league and covenant to the last stand of the last stuarts, was a struggle _against_ religious toleration, or what they would have called religious indifference. the first religious equality on earth was established by a catholic cavalier in maryland. now there is nothing in this to diminish any dignity that belongs to any real virtues and virilities in the pilgrim fathers; on the contrary, it is rather to the credit of their consistency and conviction. but there is no doubt that the note of their whole experiment in new england was intolerance, and even inquisition. and there is no doubt that new england was then only the newest and not the oldest of these colonial experiments. at least two cavaliers had been in the field before any puritans. and they had carried with them much more of the atmosphere and nature of the normal englishman than any puritan could possibly carry. they had established it especially in virginia, which had been founded by a great elizabethan and named after the great elizabeth. before there was any new england in the north, there was something very like old england in the south. relatively speaking, there is still. whenever the anniversary of the _mayflower_ comes round, there is a chorus of anglo-american congratulation and comradeship, as if this at least were a matter on which all can agree. but i knew enough about america, even before i went there, to know that there are a good many people there at any rate who do not agree with it. long ago i wrote a protest in which i asked why englishmen had forgotten the great state of virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; and why a few crabbed nonconformists should have the right to erase a record that begins with raleigh and ends with lee, and incidentally includes washington. the great state of virginia was the backbone of america until it was broken in the civil war. from virginia came the first great presidents and most of the fathers of the republic. its adherence to the southern side in the war made it a great war, and for a long time a doubtful war. and in the leader of the southern armies it produced what is perhaps the one modern figure that may come to shine like st. louis in the lost battle, or hector dying before holy troy. again, it is characteristic that while the modern english know nothing about lee they do know something about lincoln; and nearly all that they know is wrong. they know nothing of his southern connections, nothing of his considerable southern sympathy, nothing of the meaning of his moderation in face of the problem of slavery, now lightly treated as self-evident. above all, they know nothing about the respect in which lincoln was quite un-english, was indeed the very reverse of english; and can be understood better if we think of him as a frenchman, since it seems so hard for some of us to believe that he was an american. i mean his lust for logic for its own sake, and the way he kept mathematical truths in his mind like the fixed stars. he was so far from being a merely practical man, impatient of academic abstractions, that he reviewed and revelled in academic abstractions, even while he could not apply them to practical life. he loved to repeat that slavery was intolerable while he tolerated it, and to prove that something ought to be done while it was impossible to do it. this was probably very bewildering to his brother-politicians; for politicians always whitewash what they do not destroy. but for all that this inconsistent consistency beat the politicians at their own game, and this abstracted logic proved the most practical of all. for when the chance did come to do something, there was no doubt about the thing to be done. the thunderbolt fell from the clear heights of heaven; it had not been tossed about and lost like a common missile in the market-place. the matter is worth mentioning, because it has a moral for a much larger modern question. a wise man's attitude towards industrial capitalism will be very like lincoln's attitude towards slavery. that is, he will manage to endure capitalism; but he will not endure a defence of capitalism. he will recognise the value, not only of knowing what he is doing, but of knowing what he would like to do. he will recognise the importance of having a thing clearly labelled in his own mind as bad, long before the opportunity comes to abolish it. he may recognise the risk of even worse things in immediate abolition, as lincoln did in abolitionism. he will not call all business men brutes, any more than lincoln would call all planters demons; because he knows they are not. he will regard many alternatives to capitalism as crude and inhuman, as lincoln regarded john brown's raid; because they are. but he will clear his _mind_ from cant about capitalism; he will have no doubt of what is the truth about trusts and trade combines and the concentration of capital; and it is the truth that they endure under one of the ironic silences of heaven, over the pageants and the passing triumphs of hell. but the name of lincoln has a more immediate reference to the international matters i am considering here. his name has been much invoked by english politicians and journalists in connection with the quarrel with ireland. and if we study the matter, we shall hardly admire the tact and sagacity of those journalists and politicians. history is an eternal tangle of cross-purposes; and we could not take a clearer case, or rather a more complicated case, of such a tangle, than the facts lying behind a political parallel recently mentioned by many politicians. i mean the parallel between the movement for irish independence and the attempted secession of the southern confederacy in america. superficially any one might say that the comparison is natural enough; and that there is much in common between the quarrel of the north and south in ireland and the quarrel of the north and south in america. in both cases the south was on the whole agricultural, the north on the whole industrial. true, the parallel exaggerates the position of belfast; to complete it we must suppose the whole federal system to have consisted of pittsburg. in both the side that was more successful was felt by many to be less attractive. in both the same political terms were used, such as the term 'union' and 'unionism.' an ordinary englishman comes to america, knowing these main lines of american history, and knowing that the american knows the similar main lines of irish history. he knows that there are strong champions of ireland in america; possibly he also knows that there are very genuine champions of england in america. by every possible historical analogy, he would naturally expect to find the pro-irish in the south and the pro-english in the north. as a matter of fact, he finds almost exactly the opposite. he finds boston governed by irishmen, and nashville containing people more pro-english than englishmen. he finds virginians not only of british blood, like george washington, but of british opinions almost worthy of george the third. but i do not say this, as will be seen in a moment, as a criticism of the comparative toryism of the south. i say it as a criticism of the superlative stupidity of english propaganda. on another page i remark on the need for a new sort of english propaganda; a propaganda that should be really english and have some remote reference to england. now if it were a matter of making foreigners feel the real humours and humanities of england, there are no americans so able or willing to do it as the americans of the southern states. as i have already hinted, some of them are so loyal to the english humanities, that they think it their duty to defend even the english inhumanities. new england is turning into new ireland. but old england can still be faintly traced in old dixie. it contains some of the best things that england herself has had, and therefore (of course) the things that england herself has lost, or is trying to lose. but above all, as i have said, there are people in these places whose historic memories and family traditions really hold them to us, not by alliance but by affection. indeed, they have the affection in spite of the alliance. they love us in spite of our compliments and courtesies and hands across the sea; all our ambassadorial salutations and speeches cannot kill their love. they manage even to respect us in spite of the shady jew stockbrokers we send them as english envoys, or the 'efficient' men, who are sent out to be tactful with foreigners because they have been too tactless with trades unionists. this type of traditional american, north or south, really has some traditions connecting him with england; and though he is now in a very small minority, i cannot imagine why england should wish to make it smaller. england once sympathised with the south. the south still sympathises with england. it would seem that the south, or some elements in the south, had rather the advantage of us in political firmness and fidelity; but it does not follow that that fidelity will stand every shock. and at this moment, and in this matter, of all things in the world, our political propagandists must try to bolster british imperialism up, by kicking southern secession when it is down. the english politicians eagerly point out that we shall be justified in crushing ireland exactly as sumner and stevens crushed the most english part of america. it does not seem to occur to them that this comparison between the unionist triumph in america and a unionist triumph in britain is rather hard upon our particular sympathisers, who did not triumph. when england exults in lincoln's victory over his foes, she is exulting in his victory over her own friends. if her diplomacy continues as delicate and chivalrous as it is at present, they may soon be her only friends. england will be defending herself at the expense of her only defenders. but however this may be, it is as well to bear witness to some of the elements of my own experience; and i can answer for it, at least, that there are some people in the south who will not be pleased at being swept into the rubbish heap of history as rebels and ruffians; and who will not, i regret to say, by any means enjoy even being classed with fenians and sinn feiners. now touching the actual comparison between the conquest of the confederacy and the conquest of ireland, there are, of course, a good many things to be said which politicians cannot be expected to understand. strange to say, it is not certain that a lost cause was never worth winning; and it would be easy to argue that the world lost very much indeed when that particular cause was lost. these are not days in which it is exactly obvious that an agricultural society was more dangerous than an industrial one. and even southern slavery had this one moral merit, that it was decadent; it has this one historic advantage, that it is dead. the northern slavery, industrial slavery, or what is called wage slavery, is not decaying but increasing; and the end of it is not yet. but in any case, it would be well for us to realise that the reproach of resembling the confederacy does not ring in all ears as an unanswerable condemnation. it is scarcely a self-evident or sufficient argument, to some hearers, even to prove that the english are as delicate and philanthropic as sherman, still less that the irish are as criminal and lawless as lee. nor will it soothe every single soul on the american continent to say that the english victory in ireland will be followed by a reconstruction, like the reconstruction exhibited in the film called 'the birth of a nation.' and, indeed, there is a further inference from that fine panorama of the exploits of the ku-klux klan. it would be easy, as i say, to turn the argument entirely in favour of the confederacy. it would be easy to draw the moral, not that the southern irish are as wrong as the southern states, but that the southern states were as right as the southern irish. but upon the whole, i do not incline to accept the parallel in that sense any more than in the opposite sense. for reasons i have already given elsewhere, i do believe that in the main abraham lincoln was right. but right in what? if lincoln was right, he was right in guessing that there was not really a northern nation and a southern nation, but only one american nation. and if he has been proved right, he has been proved right by the fact that men in the south, as well as the north, do now feel a patriotism for that american nation. his wisdom, if it really was wisdom, was justified not by his opponents being conquered, but by their being converted. now, if the english politicians must insist on this parallel, they ought to see that the parallel is fatal to themselves. the very test which proved lincoln right has proved them wrong. the very judgment which may have justified him quite unquestionably condemns them. we have again and again conquered ireland, and have never come an inch nearer to converting ireland. we have had not one gettysburg, but twenty gettysburgs; but we have had no union. and that is where, as i have remarked, it is relevant to remember that flying fantastic vision on the films that told so many people what no histories have told them. i heard when i was in america rumours of the local reappearance of the ku-klux klan; but the smallness and mildness of the manifestation, as compared with the old southern or the new irish case, is alone a sufficient example of the exception that proves the rule. to approximate to any resemblance to recent irish events, we must imagine the ku-klux klan riding again in more than the terrors of that vision, wild as the wind, white as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. if there were really such a revival of the southern action, there would equally be a revival of the southern argument. it would be clear that lee was right and lincoln was wrong; that the southern states were national and were as indestructible as nations. if the south were as rebellious as ireland, the north would be as wrong as england. but i desire a new english diplomacy that will exhibit, not the things in which england is wrong but the things in which england is right. and england is right in england, just as she is wrong in ireland; and it is exactly that rightness of a real nation in itself that it is at once most difficult and most desirable to explain to foreigners. now the irishman, and to some extent the american, has remained alien to england, largely because he does not truly realise that the englishman loves england, still less can he really imagine why the englishman loves england. that is why i insist on the stupidity of ignoring and insulting the opinions of those few virginians and other southerners who really have some inherited notion of why englishmen love england; and even love it in something of the same fashion themselves. politicians who do not know the english spirit when they see it at home, cannot of course be expected to recognise it abroad. publicists are eloquently praising abraham lincoln, for all the wrong reasons; but fundamentally for that worst and vilest of all reasons--that he succeeded. none of them seems to have the least notion of how to look for england in england; and they would see something fantastic in the figure of a traveller who found it elsewhere, or anywhere but in new england. and it is well, perhaps, that they have not yet found england where it is hidden in england; for if they found it, they would kill it. all i am concerned to consider here is the inevitable failure of this sort of anglo-american propaganda to create a friendship. to praise lincoln as an englishman is about as appropriate as if we were praising lincoln as an english town. we are talking about something totally different. and indeed the whole conversation is rather like some such cross-purposes about some such word as 'lincoln'; in which one party should be talking about the president and the other about the cathedral. it is like some wild bewilderment in a farce, with one man wondering how a president could have a church-spire, and the other wondering how a church could have a chin-beard. and the moral is the moral on which i would insist everywhere in this book; that the remedy is to be found in disentangling the two and not in entangling them further. you could not produce a democrat of the logical type of lincoln merely out of the moral materials that now make up an english cathedral town, like that on which old tom of lincoln looks down. but on the other hand, it is quite certain that a hundred abraham lincolns, working for a hundred years, could not build lincoln cathedral. and the farcical allegory of an attempt to make old tom and old abe embrace to the glory of the illogical anglo-saxon language is but a symbol of something that is always being attempted, and always attempted in vain. it is not by mutual imitation that the understanding can come. it is not by erecting new york sky-scrapers in london that new york can learn the sacred significance of the towers of lincoln. it is not by english dukes importing the daughters of american millionaires that england can get any glimpse of the democratic dignity of american men. i have the best of all reasons for knowing that a stranger can be welcomed in america; and just as he is courteously treated in the country as a stranger, so he should always be careful to treat it as a strange land. that sort of imaginative respect, as for something different and even distant, is the only beginning of any attachment between patriotic peoples. the english traveller may carry with him at least one word of his own great language and literature; and whenever he is inclined to say of anything 'this is passing strange,' he may remember that it was no inconsiderable englishman who appended to it the answer, 'and therefore as a stranger give it welcome.' _wells and the world state_ there was recently a highly distinguished gathering to celebrate the past, present, and especially future triumphs of aviation. some of the most brilliant men of the age, such as mr. h. g. wells and mr. j. l. garvin, made interesting and important speeches, and many scientific aviators luminously discussed the new science. among their graceful felicitations and grave and quiet analyses a word was said, or a note was struck, which i myself can never hear, even in the most harmless after-dinner speech, without an impulse to leap up and yell, and smash the decanters and wreck the dinner-table. long ago, when i was a boy, i heard it with fury; and never since have i been able to understand any free man hearing it without fury. i heard it when bloch, and the old prophets of pacifism by panic, preached that war would become too horrible for patriots to endure. it sounded to me like saying that an instrument of torture was being prepared by my dentist, that would finally cure me of loving my dog. and i felt it again when all these wise and well-meaning persons began to talk about the inevitable effect of aviation in bridging the atlantic, and establishing alliance and affection between england and america. i resent the suggestion that a machine can make me bad. but i resent quite equally the suggestion that a machine can make me good. it might be the unfortunate fact that a coolness had arisen between myself and mr. fitzarlington blenkinsop, inhabiting the suburban villa and garden next to mine; and i might even be largely to blame for it. but if somebody told me that a new kind of lawn-mower had just been invented, of so cunning a structure that i should be forced to become a bosom-friend of mr. blenkinsop whether i liked it or not, i should be very much annoyed. i should be moved to say that if that was the only way of cutting my grass i would not cut my grass, but continue to cut my neighbour. or suppose the difference were even less defensible; suppose a man had suffered from a trifling shindy with his wife. and suppose somebody told him that the introduction of an entirely new vacuum-cleaner would compel him to a reluctant reconciliation with his wife. it would be found, i fancy, that human nature abhors that vacuum. reasonably spirited human beings will not be ordered about by bicycles and sewing-machines; and a sane man will not be made good, let alone bad, by the things he has himself made. i have occasionally dictated to a typewriter, but i will not be dictated to by a typewriter, even of the newest and most complicated mechanism; nor have i ever met a typewriter, however complex, that attempted such a tyranny. yet this and nothing else is what is implied in all such talk of the aeroplane annihilating distinctions as well as distances; and an international aviation abolishing nationalities. this and nothing else was really implied in one speaker's prediction that such aviation will almost necessitate an anglo-american friendship. incidentally, i may remark, it is not a true suggestion even in the practical and materialistic sense; and the speaker's phrase refuted the speaker's argument. he said that international relations must be more friendly when men can get from england to america in a day. well, men can already get from england to germany in a day; and the result was a mutual invitation of which the formalities lasted for five years. men could get from the coast of england to the coast of france very quickly, through nearly all the ages during which those two coasts were bristling with arms against each other. they could get there very quickly when nelson went down by that burford inn to embark for trafalgar; they could get there very quickly when napoleon sat in his tent in that camp at boulogne that filled england with alarums of invasion. are these the amiable and pacific relations which will unite england and america, when englishmen can get to america in a day? the shortening of the distance seems quite as likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate that endless guerilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas in the middle ages; when french invaders carried away the bells of rye, and the men of those flats of east sussex gloriously pursued and recovered them. i do not know whether american privateers, landing at liverpool, would carry away a few of the more elegant factory chimneys as a substitute for the superstitious symbols of the past. i know not if the english, on ripe reflection, would essay with any enthusiasm to get them back. but anyhow it is anything but self-evident that people cannot fight each other because they are near to each other; and if it were true, there would never have been any such thing as border warfare in the world. as a fact, border warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which it was most difficult to bring under control. and our own traditional position in face of this new logic is somewhat disconcerting. we have always supposed ourselves safer because we were insular and therefore isolated. we have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on having enjoyed peace because we were cut off from our neighbours. and now they are telling us that we shall only enjoy peace when we are joined up with our neighbours. we have pitied the poor nations with frontiers, because a frontier only produces fighting; and now we are trusting to a frontier as the only thing that will produce friendship. but, as a matter of fact, and for a far deeper and more spiritual reason, a frontier will not produce friendship. only friendliness produces friendship. and we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness. but apart from this fallacy about the facts, i feel, as i say, a strong abstract anger against the idea, or what some would call the ideal. if it were true that men could be taught and tamed by machines, even if they were taught wisdom or tamed to amiability, i should think it the most tragic truth in the world. a man so improved would be, in an exceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to save it. but in truth he cannot be so completely coerced into good; and in so far as he is incompletely coerced, he is quite as likely to be coerced into evil. of the financial characters who figure as philanthropists and philosophers in such cases, it is strictly true to say that their good is evil. the light in their bodies is darkness, and the highest objects of such men are the lowest objects of ordinary men. their peace is mere safety, their friendship is mere trade; their international friendship is mere international trade. the best we can say of that school of capitalism is that it will be unsuccessful. it has every other vice, but it is not practical. it has at least the impossibility of idealism; and so far as remoteness can carry it, that inferno is indeed a utopia. all the visible manifestations of these men are materialistic; but at least their visions will not materialise. the worst we suffer; but the best we shall at any rate escape. we may continue to endure the realities of cosmopolitan capitalism; but we shall be spared its ideals. but i am not primarily interested in the plutocrats whose vision takes so vulgar a form. i am interested in the same thing when it takes a far more subtle form, in men of genius and genuine social enthusiasm like mr. h. g. wells. it would be very unfair to a man like mr. wells to suggest that in his vision the englishman and the american are to embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. he is a man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the motley humours of humanity. but the political reconstruction which he proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of necessitarianism. he tells us that our national dignities and differences must be melted into the huge mould of a world state, or else (and i think these are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed by the instruments and machinery we have ourselves made. in effect, men must abandon patriotism or they will be murdered by science. after this, surely no one can accuse mr. wells of an undue tenderness for scientific over other types of training. greek may be a good thing or no; but nobody says that if greek scholarship is carried past a certain point, everybody will be torn in pieces like orpheus, or burned up like semele, or poisoned like socrates. philosophy, theology and logic may or may not be idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the study of philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately forces its students to manufacture racks and thumb-screws against their will; or that even logicians need be so alarmingly logical as all that. science seems to be the only branch of study in which people have to be waved back from perfection as from a pestilence. but my business is not with the scientific dangers which alarm mr. wells, but with the remedy he proposes for them; or rather with the relation of that remedy to the foundation and the future of america. now it is not too much to say that mr. wells finds his model in america. the world state is to be the united states of the world. he answers almost all objections to the practicability of such a peace among states, by pointing out that the american states have such a peace, and by adding, truly enough, that another turn of history might easily have seen them broken up by war. the pattern of the world state is to be found in the new world. oddly enough, as it seems to me, he proposes almost cosmic conquests for the american constitution, while leaving out the most successful thing in that constitution. the point appeared in answer to a question which many, like myself, must have put in this matter; the question of despotism and democracy. i cannot understand any democrat not seeing the danger of so distant and indirect a system of government. it is hard enough anywhere to get representatives to represent. it is hard enough to get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little town, even when the townsmen meet the town councillors every day in the street, and could kick them down the street if they liked. what the same town councillors would be like if they were ruling all their fellow-creatures from the north pole or the new jerusalem, is a vision of oriental despotism beyond the towering fancies of tamberlane. this difficulty in all representative government is felt everywhere, and not least in america. but i think that if there is one truth apparent in such a choice of evils, it is that monarchy is at least better than oligarchy; and that where we have to act on a large scale, the most genuine popularity can gather round a particular person like a pope or a president of the united states, or even a dictator like caesar or napoleon, rather than round a more or less corrupt committee which can only be defined as an obscure oligarchy. and in that sense any oligarchy is obscure. for people to continue to trust twenty-seven men it is necessary, as a preliminary formality, that people should have heard of them. and there are no twenty-seven men of whom everybody has heard as everybody in france had heard of napoleon, as all catholics have heard of the pope or all americans have heard of the president. i think the mass of ordinary americans do really elect their president; and even where they cannot control him at least they watch him, and in the long run they judge him. i think, therefore, that the american constitution has a real popular institution in the presidency. but mr. wells would appear to want the american constitution without the presidency. if i understand his words rightly, he seems to want the great democracy without its popular institution. alluding to this danger, that the world state might be a world tyranny, he seems to take tyranny entirely in the sense of autocracy. he asks whether the president of the world state would not be rather too tremendous a person, and seems to suggest in answer that there need not even be any such person. he seems to imply that the committee controlling the planet could meet almost without any one in the chair, certainly without any one on the throne. i cannot imagine anything more manifestly made to be a tyranny than such an acephalous aristocracy. but while mr. wells's decision seems to me strange, his reason for it seems to me still more extraordinary. he suggests that no such dictator will be needed in his world state because 'there will be no wars and no diplomacy.' a world state ought doubtless to go round the world; and going round the world seems to be a good training for arguing in a circle. obviously there will be no wars and no war-diplomacy if something has the power to prevent them; and we cannot deduce that the something will not want any power. it is rather as if somebody, urging that the germans could only be defeated by uniting the allied commands under marshal foch, had said that after all it need not offend the british generals because the french supremacy need only be a fiction, the germans being defeated. we should naturally say that the german defeat would only be a reality because the allied command was not a fiction. so the universal peace would only be a reality if the world state were not a fiction. and it could not be even a state if it were not a government. this argument amounts to saying, first that the world state will be needed because it is strong, and then that it may safely be weak because it will not be needed. internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy. i do not say it is incompatible with it; but any combination of the two will be a compromise between the two. the only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. the citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities. all irishmen may know roughly the same sort of things about ireland; but it is absurd to say they all know the same things about iceland, when they may include a scholar steeped in icelandic sagas or a sailor who has been to iceland. to make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. if your political outlook really takes in the cannibal islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the cannibal islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back. given this difficulty about quite direct democracy over large areas, i think the nearest thing to democracy is despotism. at any rate i think it is some sort of more or less independent monarchy, such as andrew jackson created in america. and i believe it is true to say that the two men whom the modern world really and almost reluctantly regards with impersonal respect, as clothed by their office with something historic and honourable, are the pope and the president of the united states. but to admire the united states as the united states is one thing. to admire them as the world state is quite another. the attempt of mr. wells to make america a sort of model for the federation of all the free nations of the earth, though it is international in intention, is really as narrowly national, in the bad sense, as the desire of mr. kipling to cover the world with british imperialism, or of professor treitschke to cover it with prussian pan-germanism. not being schoolboys, we no longer believe that everything can be settled by painting the map red. nor do i believe it can be done by painting it blue with white spots, even if they are called stars. the insufficiency of british imperialism does not lie in the fact that it has always been applied by force of arms. as a matter of fact, it has not. it has been effected largely by commerce, by colonisation of comparatively empty places, by geographical discovery and diplomatic bargain. whether it be regarded as praise or blame, it is certainly the truth that among all the things that have called themselves empires, the british has been perhaps the least purely military, and has least both of the special guilt and the special glory that goes with militarism. the insufficiency of british imperialism is not that it is imperial, let alone military. the insufficiency of british imperialism is that it is british; when it is not merely jewish. it is that just as a man is no more than a man, so a nation is no more than a nation; and any nation is inadequate as an international model. any state looks small when it occupies the whole earth. any polity is narrow as soon as it is as wide as the world. it would be just the same if ireland began to paint the map green or montenegro were to paint it black. the objection to spreading anything all over the world is that, among other things, you have to spread it very thin. but america, which mr. wells takes as a model, is in another sense rather a warning. mr. wells says very truly that there was a moment in history when america might well have broken up into independent states like those of europe. he seems to take it for granted that it was in all respects an advantage that this was avoided. yet there is surely a case, however mildly we put it, for a certain importance in the world still attaching to europe. there are some who find france as interesting as florida; and who think they can learn as much about history and humanity in the marble cities of the mediterranean as in the wooden towns of the middle west. europe may have been divided, but it was certainly not destroyed; nor has its peculiar position in the culture of the world been destroyed. nothing has yet appeared capable of completely eclipsing it, either in its extension in america or its imitation in japan. but the immediate point here is perhaps a more important one. there is now no creed accepted as embodying the common sense of all europe, as the catholic creed was accepted as embodying it in mediaeval times. there is no culture broadly superior to all others, as the mediterranean culture was superior to that of the barbarians in roman times. if europe were united in modern times, it would probably be by the victory of one of its types over others, possibly over all the others. and when america was united finally in the nineteenth century, it _was_ by the victory of one of its types over others. it is not yet certain that this victory was a good thing. it is not yet certain that the world will be better for the triumph of the north over the southern traditions of america. it may yet turn out to be as unfortunate as a triumph of the north germans over the southern traditions of germany and of europe. the men who will not face this fact are men whose minds are not free. they are more crushed by progress than any pietists by providence. they are not allowed to question that whatever has recently happened was all for the best. now progress is providence without god. that is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. it is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle. if there be no purpose, or if the purpose permits of human free will, then in either case it is almost insanely unlikely that there should be in history a period of steady and uninterrupted progress; or in other words a period in which poor bewildered humanity moves amid a chaos of complications, without making a single mistake. what has to be hammered into the heads of most normal newspaper-readers to-day is that man has made a great many mistakes. modern man has made a great many mistakes. indeed, in the case of that progressive and pioneering character, one is sometimes tempted to say that he has made nothing but mistakes. calvinism was a mistake, and capitalism was a mistake, and teutonism and the flattery of the northern tribes were mistakes. in the french the persecution of catholicism by the politicians was a mistake, as they found out in the great war; when the memory gave irish or italian catholics an excuse for hanging back. in england the loss of agriculture and therefore of food-supply in war, and the power to stand a siege, was a mistake. and in america the introduction of the negroes was a mistake; but it may yet be found that the sacrifice of the southern white man to them was even more of a mistake. the reason of this doubt is in one word. we have not yet seen the end of the whole industrial experiment; and there are already signs of it coming to a bad end. it may end in bolshevism. it is more likely to end in the servile state. indeed, the two things are not so different as some suppose, and they grow less different every day. the bolshevists have already called in capitalists to help them to crush the free peasants. the capitalists are quite likely to call in labour leaders to whitewash their compromise as social reform or even socialism. the cosmopolitan jews who are the communists in the east will not find it so very hard to make a bargain with the cosmopolitan jews who are capitalists in the west. the western jews would be willing to admit a nominal socialism. the eastern jews have already admitted that their socialism is nominal. it was the bolshevist leader himself who said, 'russia is again a capitalist country.' but whoever makes the bargain, and whatever is its precise character, the substance of it will be servile. it will be servile in the only rational and reliable sense; that is, an arrangement by which a mass of men are ensured shelter and livelihood, in return for being subjected to a law which obliges them to continue to labour. of course it will not be called the servile state; it is very probable that it will be called the socialist state. but nobody seems to realise how very near all the industrial countries are to it. at any moment it may appear in the simple form of compulsory arbitration; for compulsory arbitration dealing with private employers is by definition slavery. when workmen receive unemployment pay, and at the same time arouse more and more irritation by going on strike, it may seem very natural to give them the unemployment pay for good and forbid them the strike for good; and the combination of those two things is by definition slavery. and trotsky can beat any trust magnate as a strike-breaker; for he does not even pretend that his compulsory labour is a free bargain. if trotsky and the trust magnate come to a working compromise, that compromise will be a servile state. but it will also be the supreme and by far the most constructive and conclusive result of the industrial movement in history; of the power of machinery or money; of the huge populations of the modern cities; of scientific inventions and resources; of all the things before which the agricultural society of the southern confederacy went down. but even those who cannot see that commercialism may end in the triumph of slavery can see that the northern victory has to a great extent ended in the triumph of commercialism. and the point at the moment is that this did definitely mean, even at the time, the triumph of one american type over another american type; just as much as any european war might mean the triumph of one european type over another. a victory of england over france would be a victory of merchants over peasants; and the victory of northerners over southerners was a victory of merchants over squires. so that that very unity, which mr. wells contrasts so favourably with war, was not only itself due to a war, but to a war which had one of the most questionable and even perilous of the results of war. that result was a change in the balance of power, the predominance of a particular partner, the exaltation of a particular example, the eclipse of excellent traditions when the defeated lost their international influence. in short, it made exactly the same sort of difference of which we speak when we say that 1870 was a disaster to europe, or that it was necessary to fight prussia lest she should prussianise the whole world. america would have been very different if the leadership had remained with virginia. the world would have been very different if america had been very different. it is quite reasonable to rejoice that the issue went as it did; indeed, as i have explained elsewhere, for other reasons i do on the whole rejoice in it. but it is certainly not self-evident that it is a matter for rejoicing. one type of american state conquered and subjugated another type of american state; and the virtues and value of the latter were very largely lost to the world. so if mr. wells insists on the parallel of a united states of europe, he must accept the parallel of a civil war of europe. he must suppose that the peasant countries crush the industrial countries or vice versa; and that one or other of them becomes the european tradition to the neglect of the other. the situation which seems to satisfy him so completely in america is, after all, the situation which would result in europe if the germanic empires, let us say, had entirely arrested the special development of the slavs; or if the influence of france had really broken off short under a blow from britain. the old south had qualities of humane civilisation which have not sufficiently survived; or at any rate have not sufficiently spread. it is true that the decline of the agricultural south has been considerably balanced by the growth of the agricultural west. it is true, as i have occasion to emphasise in another place, that the west does give the new america something that is nearly a normal peasantry, as a pendant to the industrial towns. but this is not an answer; it is rather an augmentation of the argument. in so far as america is saved it is saved by being patchy; and would be ruined if the western patch had the same fate as the southern patch. when all is said, therefore, the advantages of american unification are not so certain that we can apply them to a world unification. the doubt could be expressed in a great many ways and by a great many examples. for that matter, it is already being felt that the supremacy of the middle west in politics is inflicting upon other localities exactly the sort of local injustice that turns provinces into nations struggling to be free. it has already inflicted what amounts to religious persecution, or the imposition of an alien morality, on the wine-growing civilisation of california. in a word, the american system is a good one as governments go; but it is too large, and the world will not be improved by making it larger. and for this reason alone i should reject this second method of uniting england and america; which is not only americanising england, but americanising everything else. but the essential reason is that a type of culture came out on top in america and england in the nineteenth century, which cannot and would not be tolerated on top of the world. to unite all the systems at the top, without improving and simplifying their social organisation below, would be to tie all the tops of the trees together where they rise above a dense and poisonous jungle, and make the jungle darker than before. to create such a cosmopolitan political platform would be to build a roof above our own heads to shut out the sunlight, on which only usurers and conspirators clad in gold could walk about in the sun. this is no moment when industrial intellectualism can inflict such an artificial oppression upon the world. industrialism itself is coming to see dark days, and its future is very doubtful. it is split from end to end with strikes and struggles for economic life, in which the poor not only plead that they are starving, but even the rich can only plead that they are bankrupt. the peasantries are growing not only more prosperous but more politically effective; the russian moujik has held up the bolshevist government of moscow and petersburg; a huge concession has been made by england to ireland; the league of nations has decided for poland against prussia. it is not certain that industrialism will not wither even in its own field; it is certain that its intellectual ideas will not be allowed to cover every field; and this sort of cosmopolitan culture is one of its ideas. industrialism itself may perish; or on the other hand industrialism itself may survive, by some searching and scientific reform that will really guarantee economic security to all. it may really purge itself of the accidental maladies of anarchy and famine; and continue as a machine, but at least as a comparatively clean and humanely shielded machine; at any rate no longer as a man-eating machine. capitalism may clear itself of its worst corruptions by such reform as is open to it; by creating humane and healthy conditions for labour, and setting the labouring classes to work under a lucid and recognised law. it may make pittsburg one vast model factory for all who will model themselves upon factories; and may give to all men and women in its employment a clear social status in which they can be contented and secure. and on the day when that social security is established for the masses, when industrial capitalism has achieved this larger and more logical organisation and found peace at last, a strange and shadowy and ironic triumph, like an abstract apology, will surely hover over all those graves in the wilderness where lay the bones of so many gallant gentlemen; men who had also from their youth known and upheld such a social stratification, who had the courage to call a spade a spade and a slave a slave. _a new martin chuzzlewit_ the aim of this book, if it has one, is to suggest this thesis; that the very worst way of helping anglo-american friendship is to be an anglo-american. there is only one thing lower, of course, which is being an anglo-saxon. it is lower, because at least englishmen do exist and americans do exist; and it may be possible, though repulsive, to imagine an american and an englishman in some way blended together. but if angles and saxons ever did exist, they are all fortunately dead now; and the wildest imagination cannot form the weakest idea of what sort of monster would be made by mixing one with the other. but my thesis is that the whole hope, and the only hope, lies not in mixing two things together, but rather in cutting them very sharply asunder. that is the only way in which two things can succeed sufficiently in getting outside each other to appreciate and admire each other. so long as they are different and yet supposed to be the same, there can be nothing but a divided mind and a staggering balance. it may be that in the first twilight of time man and woman walked about as one quadruped. but if they did, i am sure it was a quadruped that reared and bucked and kicked up its heels. then the flaming sword of some angel divided them, and they fell in love with each other. should the reader require an example a little more within historical range, or a little more subject to critical tests, than the above prehistoric anecdote (which i need not say was revealed to me in a vision) it would be easy enough to supply them both in a hypothetical and a historical form. it is obvious enough in a general way that if we begin to subject diverse countries to an identical test, there will not only be rivalry, but what is far more deadly and disastrous, superiority. if we institute a competition between holland and switzerland as to the relative grace and agility of their mountain guides, it will be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy; it will also be clear that certain facts about the configuration of holland have escaped our international eye. if we establish a comparison between them in skill and industry in the art of building dykes against the sea, it will be equally clear that the injustice falls the other way; it will also be clear that the situation of switzerland on the map has received insufficient study. in both cases there will not only be rivalry but very unbalanced and unjust rivalry; in both cases, therefore, there will not only be enmity but very bitter or insolent enmity. but so long as the two are sharply divided there can be no enmity because there can be no rivalry. nobody can argue about whether the swiss climb mountains better than the dutch build dykes; just as nobody can argue about whether a triangle is more triangular than a circle is round. this fancy example is alphabetically and indeed artificially simple; but, having used it for convenience, i could easily give similar examples not of fancy but of fact. i had occasion recently to attend the christmas festivity of a club in london for the exiles of one of the scandinavian nations. when i entered the room the first thing that struck my eye, and greatly raised my spirits, was that the room was dotted with the colours of peasant costumes and the specimens of peasant craftsmanship. there were, of course, other costumes and other crafts in evidence; there were men dressed like myself (only better) in the garb of the modern middle classes; there was furniture like the furniture of any other room in london. now, according to the ideal formula of the ordinary internationalist, these things that we had in common ought to have moved me to a sense of the kinship of all civilisation. i ought to have felt that as the scandinavian gentleman wore a collar and tie, and i also wore a collar and tie, we were brothers and nothing could come between us. i ought to have felt that we were standing for the same principles of truth because we were wearing the same pair of trousers; or rather, to speak with more precision, similar pairs of trousers. anyhow, the pair of trousers, that cloven pennon, ought to have floated in fancy over my head as the banner of europe or the league of nations. i am constrained to confess that no such rush of emotions overcame me; and the topic of trousers did not float across my mind at all. so far as those things were concerned, i might have remained in a mood of mortal enmity, and cheerfully shot or stabbed the best dressed gentleman in the room. precisely what did warm my heart with an abrupt affection for that northern nation was the very thing that is utterly and indeed lamentably lacking in my own nation. it was something corresponding to the one great gap in english history, corresponding to the one great blot on english civilisation. it was the spiritual presence of a peasantry, dressed according to its own dignity, and expressing itself by its own creations. the sketch of america left by charles dickens is generally regarded as something which is either to be used as a taunt or covered with an apology. doubtless it was unduly critical, even of the america of that day; yet curiously enough it may well be the text for a true reconciliation at the present day. it is true that in this, as in other things, the dickensian exaggeration is itself exaggerated. it is also true that, while it is over-emphasised, it is not allowed for. dickens tended too much to describe the united states as a vast lunatic asylum; but partly because he had a natural inspiration and imagination suited to the description of lunatic asylums. as it was his finest poetic fancy that created a lunatic over the garden wall, so it was his fancy that created a lunatic over the western sea. to read some of the complaints, one would fancy that dickens had deliberately invented a low and farcical america to be a contrast to his high and exalted england. it is suggested that he showed america as full of rowdy bullies like hannibal chollop, or ridiculous wind-bags like elijah pogram, while england was full of refined and sincere spirits like jonas chuzzlewit, chevy slime, montague tigg, and mr. pecksniff. if _martin chuzzlewit_ makes america a lunatic asylum, what in the world does it make england? we can only say a criminal lunatic asylum. the truth is, of course, that dickens so described them because he had a genius for that sort of description; for the making of almost maniacal grotesques of the same type as quilp or fagin. he made these americans absurd because he was an artist in absurdity; and no artist can help finding hints everywhere for his own peculiar art. in a word, he created a laughable pogram for the same reason that he created a laughable pecksniff; and that was only because no other creature could have created them. it is often said that we learn to love the characters in romances as if they were characters in real life. i wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. there are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story. _martin chuzzlewit_ is itself indeed an unsatisfactory and even unfortunate example; for it is, among its author's other works, a rather unusually harsh and hostile story. i do not suggest that we should feel towards an american friend that exact shade or tint of tenderness that we feel towards mr. hannibal chollop. our enjoyment of the foreigner should rather resemble our enjoyment of pickwick than our enjoyment of pecksniff. but there is this amount of appropriateness even in the particular example; that dickens did show in both countries how men can be made amusing to each other. so far the point is not that he made fun of america, but that he got fun out of america. and, as i have already pointed out, he applied exactly the same method of selection and exaggeration to england. in the other english stories, written in a more amiable mood, he applied it in a more amiable manner; but he could apply it to an american too, when he was writing in that mood and manner. we can see it in the witty and withering criticism delivered by the yankee traveller in the musty refreshment room of mugby junction; a genuine example of a genuinely american fun and freedom satirising a genuinely british stuffiness and snobbery. nobody expects the american traveller to admire the refreshments at mugby junction; but he might admire the refreshment at one of the pickwickian inns, especially if it contained pickwick. nobody expects pickwick to like pogram; but he might like the american who made fun of mugby junction. but the point is that, while he supported him in making fun, he would also think him funny. the two comic characters could admire each other, but they would also be amused at each other. and the american would think the englishman funny because he was english; and a very good reason too. the englishman would think the american amusing because he was american; nor can i imagine a better ground for his amusement. now many will debate on the psychological possibility of such a friendship founded on reciprocal ridicule, or rather on a comedy of comparisons. but i will say of this harmony of humours what mr. h. g. wells says of his harmony of states in the unity of his world state. if it be truly impossible to have such a peace, then there is nothing possible except war. if we cannot have friends in this fashion, then we shall sooner or later have enemies in some other fashion. there is no hope in the pompous impersonalities of internationalism. and this brings us to the real and relevant mistake of dickens. it was not in thinking his americans funny, but in thinking them foolish because they were funny. in this sense it will be noticed that dickens's american sketches are almost avowedly superficial; they are descriptions of public life and not private life. mr. jefferson brick had no private life. but mr. jonas chuzzlewit undoubtedly had a private life; and even kept some parts of it exceeding private. mr. pecksniff was also a domestic character; so was mr. quilp. mr. pecksniff and mr. quilp had slightly different ways of surprising their families; mr. pecksniff by playfully observing 'boh!' when he came home; mr. quilp by coming home at all. but we can form no picture of how mr. hannibal chollop playfully surprised his family; possibly by shooting at them; possibly by not shooting at them. we can only say that he would rather surprise us by having a family at all. we do not know how the mother of the modern gracchi managed the modern gracchi; for her maternity was rather a public than a private office. we have no romantic moonlit scenes of the love-making of elijah pogram, to balance against the love story of seth pecksniff. these figures are all in a special sense theatrical; all facing one way and lit up by a public limelight. their ridiculous characters are detachable from their real characters, if they have any real characters. and the author might perfectly well be right about what is ridiculous, and wrong about what is real. he might be as right in smiling at the pograms and the bricks as in smiling at the pickwicks and the boffins. and he might still be as wrong in seeing mr. pogram as a hypocrite as the great buzfuz was wrong in seeing mr. pickwick as a monster of revolting heartlessness and systematic villainy. he might still be as wrong in thinking jefferson brick a charlatan and a cheat as was that great disciple of lavater, mrs. wilfer, in tracing every wrinkle of evil cunning in the face of mrs. boffin. for mr. pickwick's spectacles and gaiters and mrs. boffin's bonnets and boudoir are after all superficial jokes; and might be equally well seen whatever we saw beneath them. a man may smile and smile and be a villain; but a man may also make us smile and not be a villain. he may make us smile and not even be a fool. he may make us roar with laughter and be an exceedingly wise man. now that is the paradox of america which dickens never discovered. elijah pogram was far more fantastic than his satirist thought; and the most grotesque feature of brick and chollop was hidden from him. the really strange thing was that pogram probably did say, 'rough he may be. so air our bars. wild he may be. so air our buffalers,' and yet was a perfectly intelligent and public-spirited citizen while he said it. the extraordinary thing is that jefferson brick may really have said, 'the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood,' and yet jefferson brick may have served freedom, resisting unto blood. there really has been a florid school of rhetoric in the united states which has made it quite possible for serious and sensible men to say such things. it is amusing simply as a difference of idiom or costume is always amusing; just as english idiom and english costume are amusing to americans. but about this kind of difference there can be no kind of doubt. so sturdy not to say stuffy a materialist as ingersoll could say of so shoddy not to say shady a financial politician as blaine, 'like an arméd warrior, like a pluméd knight, james g. blaine strode down the hall of congress, and flung his spear full and true at the shield of every enemy of his country and every traducer of his fair name.' compared with that, the passage about bears and buffaloes, which mr. pogram delivered in defence of the defaulting post-master, is really a very reasonable and appropriate statement. for bears and buffaloes are wild and rough and in that sense free; while pluméd knights do not throw their lances about like the assegais of zulus. and the defaulting post-master was at least as good a person to praise in such a fashion as james g. blaine of the little rock railway. but anybody who had treated ingersoll or blaine merely as a fool and a figure of fun would have very rapidly found out his mistake. but dickens did not know brick or chollop long enough to find out his mistake. it need not be denied that, even after a full understanding, he might still have found things to smile at or to criticise. i do not insist on his admitting that hannibal chollop was as great a hero as hannibal, or that elijah pogram was as true a prophet as elijah. but i do say very seriously that they had something about their atmosphere and situation that made possible a sort of heroism and even a sort of prophecy that were really less natural at that period in that merry england whose comedy and common sense we sum up under the name of dickens. when we joke about the name of hannibal chollop, we might remember of what nation was the general who dismissed his defeated soldiers at appomatox with words which the historian has justly declared to be worthy of hannibal: 'we have fought through this war together. i have done my best for you.' it is not fair to forget jefferson, or even jefferson davis, entirely in favour of jefferson brick. for all these three things, good, bad, and indifferent, go together to form something that dickens missed, merely because the england of his time most disastrously missed it. in this case, as in every case, the only way to measure justly the excess of a foreign country is to measure the defect of our own country. for in this matter the human mind is the victim of a curious little unconscious trick, the cause of nearly all international dislikes. a man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of adam. he supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. it would astound him to realise that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues. his own faults are things with which he is so much at home that he at once forgets and assumes them abroad. he is so faintly conscious of them in himself that he is not even conscious of the absence of them in other people. he assumes that they are there so that he does not see that they are not there. the englishman takes it for granted that a frenchman will have all the english faults. then he goes on to be seriously angry with the frenchman for having dared to complicate them by the french faults. the notion that the frenchman has the french faults and _not_ the english faults is a paradox too wild to cross his mind. he is like an old chinaman who should laugh at europeans for wearing ludicrous top-hats and curling up their pig-tails inside them; because obviously all men have pig-tails, as all monkeys have tails. or he is like an old chinese lady who should justly deride the high-heeled shoes of the west, considering them a needless addition to the sufficiently tight and secure bandaging of the foot; for, of course, all women bind up their feet, as all women bind up their hair. what these celestial thinkers would not think of, or allow for, is the wild possibility that we do not have pig-tails although we do have top-hats, or that our ladies are not silly enough to have chinese feet, though they are silly enough to have high-heeled shoes. nor should we necessarily have come an inch nearer to the chinese extravagances even if the chimney-pot hat rose higher than a factory chimney or the high heels had evolved into a sort of stilts. by the same fallacy the englishman will not only curse the french peasant as a miser, but will also try to tip him as a beggar. that is, he will first complain of the man having the surliness of an independent man, and then accuse him of having the servility of a dependent one. just as the hypothetical chinaman cannot believe that we have top-hats but not pig-tails, so the englishman cannot believe that peasants are not snobs even when they are savages. or he sees that a paris paper is violent and sensational; and then supposes that some millionaire owns twenty such papers and runs them as a newspaper trust. surely the yellow press is present everywhere to paint the map yellow, as the british empire to paint it red. it never occurs to such a critic that the french paper is violent because it is personal, and personal because it belongs to a real and responsible person, and not to a ring of nameless millionaires. it is a pamphlet, and not an anonymous pamphlet. in a hundred other cases the same truth could be illustrated; the situation in which the black man first assumes that all mankind is black, and then accuses the rest of the artificial vice of painting their faces red and yellow, or the hypocrisy of white-washing themselves after the fashion of whited sepulchres. the particular case of it now before us is that of the english misunderstanding of america; and it is based, as in all these cases, on the english misunderstanding of england. for the truth is that england has suffered of late from not having enough of the free shooting of hannibal chollop; from not understanding enough that the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood. the prosperous englishman will not admit this; but then the prosperous englishman will not admit that he has suffered from anything. that is what he is suffering from. until lately at least he refused to realise that many of his modern habits had been bad habits, the worst of them being contentment. for all the real virtue in contentment evaporates, when the contentment is only satisfaction and the satisfaction is only self-satisfaction. now it is perfectly true that america and not england has seen the most obvious and outrageous official denials of liberty. but it is equally true that it has seen the most obvious flouting of such official nonsense, far more obvious than any similar evasions in england. and nobody who knows the subconscious violence of the american character would ever be surprised if the weapons of chollop began to be used in that most lawful lawlessness. it is perfectly true that the libation of freedom must sometimes be drunk in blood, and never more (one would think) than when mad millionaires forbid it to be drunk in beer. but america, as compared with england, is the country where one can still fancy men obtaining the libation of beer by the libation of blood. vulgar plutocracy is almost omnipotent in both countries; but i think there is now more kick of reaction against it in america than in england. the americans may go mad when they make laws; but they recover their reason when they disobey them. i wish i could believe that there was as much of that destructive repentance in england; as indeed there certainly was when cobbett wrote. it faded gradually like a dying fire through the victorian era; and it was one of the very few realities that dickens did not understand. but any one who does understand it will know that the days of cobbett saw the last lost fight for english democracy; and that if he had stood at that turning of the historic road, he would have wished a better fate to the frame-breakers and the fury against the first machinery, and luck to the luddite fires. anyhow, what is wanted is a new martin chuzzlewit, told by a wiser mark tapley. it is typical of something sombre and occasionally stale in the mood of dickens when he wrote that book, that the comic servant is not really very comic. mark tapley is a very thin shadow of sam weller. but if dickens had written it in a happier mood, there might have been a truer meaning in mark tapley's happiness. for it is true that this illogical good humour amid unreason and disorder is one of the real virtues of the english people. it is the real advantage they have in that adventure all over the world, which they were recently and reluctantly induced to call an empire. that receptive ridicule remains with them as a secret pleasure when they are colonists--or convicts. dickens might have written another version of the great romance, and one in which america was really seen gaily by mark instead of gloomily by martin. mark tapley might really have made the best of america. then america would have lived and danced before us like pickwick's england, a fairyland of happy lunatics and lovable monsters, and we might still have sympathised as much with the rhetoric of lafayette kettle as with the rhetoric of wilkins micawber, or with the violence of chollop as with the violence of boythorn. that new martin chuzzlewit will never be written; and the loss of it is more tragic than the loss of _edwin drood_. but every man who has travelled in america has seen glimpses and episodes in that untold tale; and far away on the red-indian frontiers or in the hamlets in the hills of pennsylvania, there are people whom i met for a few hours or for a few moments, whom i none the less sincerely like and respect because i cannot but smile as i think of them. but the converse is also true; they have probably forgotten me; but if they remember they laugh. _the spirit of america_ i suggest that diplomatists of the internationalist school should spend some of their money on staging farces and comedies of cross-purposes, founded on the curious and prevalent idea that england and america have the same language. i know, of course, that we both inherit the glorious tongue of shakespeare, not to mention the tune of the musical glasses; but there have been moments when i thought that if we spoke greek and they spoke latin we might understand each other better. for greek and latin are at least fixed, while american at least is still very fluid. i do not know the american language, and therefore i do not claim to distinguish between the american language and the american slang. but i know that highly theatrical developments might follow on taking the words as part of the english slang or the english language. i have already given the example of calling a person 'a regular guy,' which in the states is a graceful expression of respect and esteem, but which on the stage, properly handled, might surely lead the way towards a divorce or duel or something lively. sometimes coincidence merely clinches a mistake, as it so often clinches a misprint. every proof-reader knows that the worst misprint is not that which makes nonsense but that which makes sense; not that which is obviously wrong but that which is hideously right. he who has essayed to write 'he got the book,' and has found it rendered mysteriously as 'he got the boob' is pensively resigned. it is when it is rendered quite lucidly as 'he got the boot' that he is moved to a more passionate mood of regret. i have had conversations in which this sort of accident would have wholly misled me, if another accident had not come to the rescue. an american friend of mine was telling me of his adventures as a cinema-producer down in the south-west where real red indians were procurable. he said that certain indians were 'very bad actors.' it passed for me as a very ordinary remark on a very ordinary or natural deficiency. it would hardly seem a crushing criticism to say that some wild arab chieftain was not very good at imitating a farmyard; or that the grand llama of thibet was rather clumsy at making paper boats. but the remark might be natural in a man travelling in paper boats, or touring with an invisible farmyard for his menagerie. as my friend was a cinema-producer, i supposed he meant that the indians were bad cinema actors. but the phrase has really a high and austere moral meaning, which my levity had wholly missed. a bad actor means a man whose actions are bad or morally reprehensible. so that i might have embraced a red indian who was dripping with gore, or covered with atrocious crimes, imagining there was nothing the matter with him beyond a mistaken choice of the theatrical profession. surely there are here the elements of a play, not to mention a cinema play. surely a new england village maiden might find herself among the wigwams in the power of the formidable and fiendish 'little blue bison,' merely through her mistaken sympathy with his financial failure as a film star. the notion gives me glimpses of all sorts of dissolving views of primeval forests and flamboyant theatres; but this impulse of irrelevant theatrical production must be curbed. there is one example, however, of this complication of language actually used in contrary senses, about which the same figure can be used to illustrate a more serious fact. suppose that, in such an international interlude, an english girl and an american girl are talking about the fiancé of the former, who is coming to call. the english girl will be haughty and aristocratic (on the stage), the american girl will of course have short hair and skirts and will be cynical; americans being more completely free from cynicism than any people in the world. it is the great glory of americans that they are not cynical; for that matter, english aristocrats are hardly ever haughty; they understand the game much better than that. but on the stage, anyhow, the american girl may say, referring to her friend's fiancé, with a cynical wave of the cigarette, 'i suppose he's bound to come and see you.' and at this the blue blood of the vere de veres will boil over; the english lady will be deeply wounded and insulted at the suggestion that her lover only comes to see her because he is forced to do so. a staggering stage quarrel will then ensue, and things will go from bad to worse; until the arrival of an interpreter who can talk both english and american. he stands between the two ladies waving two pocket dictionaries, and explains the error on which the quarrel turns. it is very simple; like the seed of all tragedies. in english 'he is bound to come and see you' means that he is obliged or constrained to come and see you. in american it does not. in american it means that he is bent on coming to see you, that he is irrevocably resolved to do so, and will surmount any obstacle to do it. the two young ladies will then embrace as the curtain falls. now when i was lecturing in america i was often told, in a radiant and congratulatory manner, that such and such a person was bound to come and hear me lecture. it seemed a very cruel form of conscription, and i could not understand what authority could have made it compulsory. in the course of discovering my error, however, i thought i began to understand certain american ideas and instincts that lie behind this american idiom. for as i have urged before, and shall often urge again, the road to international friendship is through really understanding jokes. it is in a sense through taking jokes seriously. it is quite legitimate to laugh at a man who walks down the street in three white hats and a green dressing gown, because it is unfamiliar; but after all the man has _some_ reason for what he does; and until we know the reason we do not understand the story, or even understand the joke. so the outlander will always seem outlandish in custom or costume; but serious relations depend on our getting beyond the fact of difference to the things wherein it differs. a good symbolical figure for all this may be found among the people who say, perhaps with a self-revealing simplicity, that they are bound to go to a lecture. if i were asked for a single symbolic figure summing up the whole of what seems eccentric and interesting about america to an englishman, i should be satisfied to select that one lady who complained of mrs. asquith's lecture and wanted her money back. i do not mean that she was typically american in complaining; far from it. i, for one, have a great and guilty knowledge of all that amiable american audiences will endure without complaint. i do not mean that she was typically american in wanting her money; quite the contrary. that sort of american spends money rather than hoards it; and when we convict them of vulgarity we acquit them of avarice. where she was typically american, summing up a truth individual and indescribable in any other way, is that she used these words: 'i've risen from a sick-bed to come and hear her, and i want my money back.' the element in that which really amuses an englishman is precisely the element which, properly analysed, ought to make him admire an american. but my point is that only by going through the amusement can he reach the admiration. the amusement is in the vision of a tragic sacrifice for what is avowedly a rather trivial object. mrs. asquith is a candid lady of considerable humour; and i feel sure she does not regard the experience of hearing her read her diary as an ecstasy for which the sick should thus suffer martyrdom. she also is english; and had no other claim but to amuse americans and possibly to be amused by them. this being so, it is rather as if somebody said, 'i have risked my life in fire and pestilence to find my way to the music hall,' or, 'i have fasted forty days in the wilderness sustained by the hope of seeing totty toddles do her new dance.' and there is something rather more subtle involved here. there is something in an englishman which would make him feel faintly ashamed of saying that he had fasted to hear totty toddles, or risen from a sick-bed to hear mrs. asquith. he would feel that it was undignified to confess that he had wanted mere amusement so much; and perhaps that he had wanted anything so much. he would not like, so to speak, to be seen rushing down the street after totty toddles, or after mrs. asquith, or perhaps after anybody. but there is something in it distinct from a mere embarrassment at admitting enthusiasm. he might admit the enthusiasm if the object seemed to justify it; he might perfectly well be serious about a serious thing. but he cannot understand a person being proud of serious sacrifices for what is not a serious thing. he does not like to admit that a little thing can excite him; that he can lose his breath in running, or lose his balance in reaching, after something that might be called silly. now that is where the american is fundamentally different. to him the enthusiasm itself is meritorious. to him the excitement itself is dignified. he counts it a part of his manhood to fast or fight or rise from a bed of sickness for something, or possibly for anything. his ideal is not to be a lock that only a worthy key can open, but a 'live wire' that anything can touch or anybody can use. in a word, there is a difference in the very definition of virility and therefore of virtue. a live wire is not only active, it is also sensitive. thus sensibility becomes actually a part of virility. something more is involved than the vulgar simplification of the american as the irresistible force and the englishman as the immovable post. as a fact, those who speak of such things nowadays generally mean by something irresistible something simply immovable, or at least something unalterable, motionless even in motion, like a cannon ball; for a cannon ball is as dead as a cannon. prussian militarism was praised in that way--until it met a french force of about half its size on the banks of the marne. but that is not what an american means by energy; that sort of prussian energy is only monotony without repose. american energy is not a soulless machine; for it is the whole point that he puts his soul into it. it is a very small box for so big a thing; but it is not an empty box. but the point is that he is not only proud of his energy, he is proud of his excitement. he is not ashamed of his emotion, of the fire or even the tear in his manly eye, when he tells you that the great wheel of his machine breaks four billion butterflies an hour. that is the point about american sport; that it is not in the least sportive. it is because it is not very sportive that we sometimes say it is not very sporting. it has the vices of a religion. it has all the paradox of original sin in the service of aboriginal faith. it is sometimes untruthful because it is sincere. it is sometimes treacherous because it is loyal. men lie and cheat for it as they lied for their lords in a feudal conspiracy, or cheated for their chieftains in a highland feud. we may say that the vassal readily committed treason; but it is equally true that he readily endured torture. so does the american athlete endure torture. not only the self-sacrifice but the solemnity of the american athlete is like that of the american indian. the athletes in the states have the attitude of the athletes among the spartans, the great historical nation without a sense of humour. they suffer an ascetic régime not to be matched in any monasticism and hardly in any militarism. if any tradition of these things remains in a saner age, they will probably be remembered as a mysterious religious order of fakirs or dancing dervishes, who shaved their heads and fasted in honour of hercules or castor and pollux. and that is really the spiritual atmosphere though the gods have vanished; and the religion is subconscious and therefore irrational. for the problem of the modern world is that it has continued to be religious when it has ceased to be rational. americans really would starve to win a cocoa-nut shy. they would fast or bleed to win a race of paper boats on a pond. they would rise from a sick-bed to listen to mrs. asquith. but it is the real reason that interests me here. it is certainly not that americans are so stupid as not to know that cocoa-nuts are only cocoa-nuts and paper boats only made of paper. americans are, on an average, rather more intelligent than englishmen; and they are well aware that hercules is a myth and that mrs. asquith is something of a mythologist. it is not that they do not know that the object is small in itself; it is that they do really believe that the enthusiasm is great in itself. they admire people for being impressionable. they admire people for being excited. an american so struggling for some disproportionate trifle (like one of my lectures) really feels in a mystical way that he is right, because it is his whole morality to be keen. so long as he wants something very much, whatever it is, he feels he has his conscience behind him, and the common sentiment of society behind him, and god and the whole universe behind him. wedged on one leg in a hot crowd at a trivial lecture, he has self-respect; his dignity is at rest. that is what he means when he says he is bound to come to the lecture. now the englishman is fond of occasional larks. but these things are not larks; nor are they occasional. it is the essential of the englishman's lark that he should think it a lark; that he should laugh at it even when he does it. being english myself, i like it; but being english myself, i know it is connected with weaknesses as well as merits. in its irony there is condescension and therefore embarrassment. this patronage is allied to the patron, and the patron is allied to the aristocratic tradition of society. the larks are a variant of laziness because of leisure; and the leisure is a variant of the security and even supremacy of the gentleman. when an undergraduate at oxford smashes half a hundred windows he is well aware that the incident is merely a trifle. he can be trusted to explain to his parents and guardians that it was merely a trifle. he does not say, even in the american sense, that he was bound to smash the windows. he does not say that he had risen from a sick-bed to smash the windows. he does not especially think he has risen at all; he knows he has descended (though with delight, like one diving or sliding down the banisters) to something flat and farcical and full of the english taste for the bathos. he has collapsed into something entirely commonplace; though the owners of the windows may possibly not think so. this rather indescribable element runs through a hundred english things, as in the love of bathos shown even in the sound of proper names; so that even the yearning lover in a lyric yearns for somebody named sally rather than salome, and for a place called wapping rather than a place called westermain. even in the relapse into rowdiness there is a sort of relapse into comfort. there is also what is so large a part of comfort; carelessness. the undergraduate breaks windows because he does not care about windows, not because he does care about more fresh air like a hygienist, or about more light like a german poet. still less does he heroically smash a hundred windows because they come between him and the voice of mrs. asquith. but least of all does he do it because he seriously prides himself on the energy apart from its aim, and on the will-power that carries it through. he is not 'bound' to smash the windows, even in the sense of being bent upon it. he is not bound at all but rather relaxed; and his violence is not only a relaxation but a laxity. finally, this is shown in the fact that he only smashes windows when he is in the mood to smash windows; when some fortunate conjunction of stars and all the tints and nuances of nature whisper to him that it would be well to smash windows. but the american is always ready, at any moment, to waste his energies on the wilder and more suicidal course of going to lectures. and this is because to him such excitement is not a mood but a moral ideal. as i note in another connection, much of the english mystery would be clear to americans if they understood the word 'mood.' englishmen are very moody, especially when they smash windows. but i doubt if many americans understand exactly what we mean by the mood; especially the passive mood. it is only by trying to get some notion of all this that an englishman can enjoy the final crown and fruit of all international friendship; which is really liking an american to be american. if we only think that parts of him are excellent because parts of him are english, it would be far more sensible to stop at home and possibly enjoy the society of a whole complete englishman. but anybody who does understand this can take the same pleasure in an american being american that he does in a thunderbolt being swift and a barometer being sensitive. he can see that a vivid sensibility and vigilance really radiate outwards through all the ramifications of machinery and even of materialism. he can see that the american uses his great practical powers upon very small provocation; but he can also see that there is a kind of sense of honour, like that of a duellist, in his readiness to be provoked. indeed, there is some parallel between the american man of action, however vulgar his aims, and the old feudal idea of the gentleman with a sword at his side. the gentleman may have been proud of being strong or sturdy; he may too often have been proud of being thick-headed; but he was not proud of being thick-skinned. on the contrary, he was proud of being thin-skinned. he also seriously thought that sensitiveness was a part of masculinity. it may be very absurd to read of two irish gentlemen trying to kill each other for trifles, or of two irish-american millionaires trying to ruin each other for trash. but the very pettiness of the pretext and even the purpose illustrates the same conception; which may be called the virtue of excitability. and it is really this, and not any rubbish about iron will-power and masterful mentality, that redeems with romance their clockwork cosmos and its industrial ideals. being a live wire does not mean that the nerves should be like wires; but rather that the very wires should be like nerves. another approximation to the truth would be to say that an american is really not ashamed of curiosity. it is not so simple as it looks. men will carry off curiosity with various kinds of laughter and bravado, just as they will carry off drunkenness or bankruptcy. but very few people are really proud of lying on a door-step, and very few people are really proud of longing to look through a key-hole. i do not speak of looking through it, which involves questions of honour and self-control; but few people feel that even the desire is dignified. now i fancy the american, at least by comparison with the englishman, does feel that his curiosity is consistent with his dignity, because dignity is consistent with vivacity. he feels it is not merely the curiosity of paul pry, but the curiosity of christopher columbus. he is not a spy but an explorer; and he feels his greatness rather grow with his refusal to turn back, as a traveller might feel taller and taller as he neared the source of the nile or the north-west passage. many an englishman has had that feeling about discoveries in dark continents; but he does not often have it about discoveries in daily life. the one type does believe in the indignity and the other in the dignity of the detective. it has nothing to do with ethics in the merely external sense. it involves no particular comparison in practical morals and manners. it is something in the whole poise and posture of the self; of the way a man carries himself. for men are not only affected by what they are; but still more, when they are fools, by what they think they are; and when they are wise, by what they wish to be. there are truths that have almost become untrue by becoming untruthful. there are statements so often stale and insincere that one hesitates to use them, even when they stand for something more subtle. this point about curiosity is not the conventional complaint against the american interviewer. it is not the ordinary joke against the american child. and in the same way i feel the danger of it being identified with the cant about 'a young nation' if i say that it has some of the attractions, not of american childhood, but of real childhood. there is some truth in the tradition that the children of wealthy americans tend to be too precocious and luxurious. but there is a sense in which we can really say that if the children are like adults, the adults are like children. and that sense is in the very best sense of childhood. it is something which the modern world does not understand. it is something that modern americans do not understand, even when they possess it; but i think they do possess it. the devil can quote scripture for his purpose; and the text of scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, 'the kingdom of heaven is within you.' that text has been the stay and support of more pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace that passes all understanding. and the text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little child. what we are to have inside is the childlike spirit; but the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. it is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is outside. the most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder at the world. we might almost say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else. _the spirit of england_ nine times out of ten a man's broad-mindedness is necessarily the narrowest thing about him. this is not particularly paradoxical; it is, when we come to think of it, quite inevitable. his vision of his own village may really be full of varieties; and even his vision of his own nation may have a rough resemblance to the reality. but his vision of the world is probably smaller than the world. his vision of the universe is certainly much smaller than the universe. hence he is never so inadequate as when he is universal; he is never so limited as when he generalises. this is the fallacy in the many modern attempts at a creedless creed, at something variously described as essential christianity or undenominational religion or a world faith to embrace all the faiths in the world. it is that every sectarian is more sectarian in his unsectarianism than he is in his sect. the emancipation of a baptist is a very baptist emancipation. the charity of a buddhist is a very buddhist charity, and very different from christian charity. when a philosophy embraces everything it generally squeezes everything, and squeezes it out of shape; when it digests it necessarily assimilates. when a theosophist absorbs christianity it is rather as a cannibal absorbs christian missionaries. in this sense it is even possible for the larger thing to be swallowed by the smaller; and for men to move about not only in a clapham sect but in a clapham cosmos under clapham moon and stars. but if this danger exists for all men, it exists especially for the englishman. the englishman is never so insular as when he is imperial; except indeed when he is international. in private life he is a good friend and in practical politics generally a good ally. but theoretical politics are more practical than practical politics. and in theoretical politics the englishman is the worst ally the world ever saw. this is all the more curious because he has passed so much of his historical life in the character of an ally. he has been in twenty great alliances and never understood one of them. he has never been farther away from european politics than when he was fighting heroically in the thick of them. i myself think that this splendid isolation is sometimes really splendid; so long as it is isolation and does not imagine itself to be imperialism or internationalism. with the idea of being international, with the idea of being imperial, comes the frantic and farcical idea of being impartial. generally speaking, men are never so mean and false and hypocritical as when they are occupied in being impartial. they are performing the first and most typical of all the actions of the devil; they are claiming the throne of god. even when it is not hypocrisy but only mental confusion, it is always a confusion worse and worse confounded. we see it in the impartial historians of the victorian age, who now seem far more victorian than the partial historians. hallam wrote about the middle ages; but hallam was far less mediaeval than macaulay; for macaulay was at least a fighter. huxley had more mediaeval sympathies than herbert spencer for the same reason; that huxley was a fighter. they both fought in many ways for the limitations of their own rationalistic epoch; but they were nearer the truth than the men who simply assumed those limitations as rational. the war of the controversionalists was a wider thing than the peace of the arbiters. and in the same way the englishman never cuts a less convincing figure before other nations than when he tries to arbitrate between them. i have by this time heard a great deal about the necessity of saving anglo-american friendship, a necessity which i myself feel rather too strongly to be satisfied with the ambassadorial and editorial style of achieving it. i have already said that the worst style of all is to be anglo-american; or, as the more illiterate would express, to be anglo-saxon. i am more and more convinced that the way for the englishman to do it is to be english; but to know that he is english and not everything else as well. thus the only sincere answer to irish nationalism is english nationalism, which is a reality; and not english imperialism, which is a reactionary fiction, or english internationalism, which is a revolutionary one. for the english are reviled for their imperialism because they are not imperialistic. they dislike it, which is the real reason why they do it badly; and they do it badly, which is the real reason why they are disliked when they do it. nobody calls france imperialistic because she has absorbed brittany. but everybody calls england imperialistic because she has not absorbed ireland. the englishman is fixed and frozen for ever in the attitude of a ruthless conqueror; not because he has conquered such people, but because he has not conquered them; but he is always trying to conquer them with a heroism worthy of a better cause. for the really native and vigorous part of what is unfortunately called the british empire is not an empire at all, and does not consist of these conquered provinces at all. it is not an empire but an adventure; which is probably a much finer thing. it was not the power of making strange countries similar to our own, but simply the pleasure of seeing strange countries because they were different from our own. the adventurer did indeed, like the third son, set out to seek his fortune, but not primarily to alter other people's fortunes; he wished to trade with people rather than to rule them. but as the other people remained different from him, so did he remain different from them. the adventurer saw a thousand strange things and remained a stranger. he was the robinson crusoe on a hundred desert islands; and on each he remained as insular as on his own island. what is wanted for the cause of england to-day is an englishman with enough imagination to love his country from the outside as well as the inside. that is, we need somebody who will do for the english what has never been done for them, but what is done for any outlandish peasantry or even any savage tribe. we want people who can make england attractive; quite apart from disputes about whether england is strong or weak. we want somebody to explain, not that england is everywhere, but what england is anywhere; not that england is or is not really dying, but why we do not want her to die. for this purpose the official and conventional compliments or claims can never get any farther than pompous abstractions about law and justice and truth; the ideals which england accepts as every civilised state accepts them, and violates as every civilised state violates them. that is not the way in which the picture of any people has ever been painted on the sympathetic imagination of the world. enthusiasts for old japan did not tell us that the japs recognised the existence of abstract morality; but that they lived in paper houses or wrote letters with paint-brushes. men who wished to interest us in arabs did not confine themselves to saying that they are monotheists or moralists; they filled our romances with the rush of arab steeds or the colours of strange tents or carpets. what we want is somebody who will do for the englishman with his front garden what was done for the jap and his paper house; who shall understand the englishman with his dog as well as the arab with his horse. in a word, what nobody has really tried to do is the one thing that really wants doing. it is to make england attractive as a nationality, and even as a small nationality. for it is a wild folly to suppose that nations will love each other because they are alike. they will never really do that unless they are really alike; and then they will not be nations. nations can love each other as men and women love each other, not because they are alike but because they are different. it can easily be shown, i fancy, that in every case where a real public sympathy was aroused for some unfortunate foreign people, it has always been accompanied with a particular and positive interest in their most foreign customs and their most foreign externals. the man who made a romance of the scotch high-lander made a romance of his kilt and even of his dirk; the friend of the red indians was interested in picture writing and had some tendency to be interested in scalping. to take a more serious example, such nations as serbia had been largely commended to international consideration by the study of serbian epics, or serbian songs. the epoch of negro emancipation was also the epoch of negro melodies. those who wept over uncle tom also laughed over uncle remus. and just as the admiration for the redskin almost became an apology for scalping, the mysterious fascination of the african has sometimes almost led us into the fringes of the black forest of voodoo. but the sort of interest that is felt even in the scalp-hunter and the cannibal, the torturer and the devil-worshipper, that sort of interest has never been felt in the englishman. and this is the more extraordinary because the englishman is really very interesting. he is interesting in a special degree in this special manner; he is interesting because he is individual. no man in the world is more misrepresented by everything official or even in the ordinary sense national. a description of english life must be a description of private life. in that sense there is no public life. in that sense there is no public opinion. there have never been those prairie fires of public opinion in england which often sweep over america. at any rate, there have never been any such popular revolutions since the popular revolutions of the middle ages. the english are a nation of amateurs; they are even a nation of eccentrics. an englishman is never more english than when he is considered a lunatic by the other englishmen. this can be clearly seen in a figure like dr. johnson, who has become national not by being normal but by being extraordinary. to express this mysterious people, to explain or suggest why they like tall hedges and heavy breakfasts and crooked roads and small gardens with large fences, and why they alone among christians have kept quite consistently the great christian glory of the open fireplace, here would be a strange and stimulating opportunity for any of the artists in words, who study the souls of strange peoples. that would be the true way to create a friendship between england and america, or between england and anything else; yes, even between england and ireland. for this justice at least has already been done to ireland; and as an indignant patriot i demand a more equal treatment for the two nations. i have already noted the commonplace that in order to teach internationalism we must talk nationalism. we must make the nations as nations less odious or mysterious to each other. we do not make men love each other by describing a monster with a million arms and legs, but by describing the men as men, with their separate and even solitary emotions. as this has a particular application to the emotions of the englishman, i will return to the topic once more. now americans have a power that is the soul and success of democracy, the power of spontaneous social organisation. their high spirits, their humane ideals are really creative, they abound in unofficial institutions; we might almost say in unofficial officialism. nobody who has felt the presence of all the leagues and guilds and college clubs will deny that whitman was national when he said he would build states and cities out of the love of comrades. when all this communal enthusiasm collides with the englishman, it too often seems literally to leave him cold. they say he is reserved; they possibly think he is rude. and the englishman, having been taught his own history all wrong, is only too likely to take the criticism as a compliment. he admits that he is reserved because he is stern and strong; or even that he is rude because he is shrewd and candid. but as a fact he is not rude and not especially reserved; at least reserve is not the meaning of his reluctance. the real difference lies, i think, in the fact that american high spirits are not only high but level; that the hilarious american spirit is like a plateau, and the humorous english spirit like a ragged mountain range. the englishman is moody; which does not in the least mean that the englishman is morose. dickens, as we all feel in reading his books, was boisterously english. dickens was moody when he wrote _oliver twist_; but he was also moody when he wrote _pickwick_. that is, he was in another and much healthier mood. the mood was normal to him in the sense that nine times out of ten he felt and wrote in that humorous and hilarious mood. but he was, if ever there was one, a man of moods; and all the more of a typical englishman for being a man of moods. but it was because of this, almost entirely, that he had a misunderstanding with america. in america there are no moods, or there is only one mood. it is the same whether it is called hustle or uplift; whether we regard it as the heroic love of comrades or the last hysteria of the herd instinct. it has been said of the typical english aristocrats of the government offices that they resemble certain ornamental fountains and play from ten till four; and it is true that an englishman, even an english aristocrat, is not always inclined to play any more than to work. but american sociability is not like the trafalgar fountains. it is like niagara. it never stops, under the silent stars or the rolling storms. there seems always to be the same human heat and pressure behind it; it is like the central heating of hotels as explained in the advertisements and announcements. the temperature can be regulated; but it is not. and it is always rather overpowering for an englishman, whose mood changes like his own mutable and shifting sky. the english mood is very like the english weather; it is a nuisance and a national necessity. if any one wishes to understand the quarrel between dickens and the americans, let him turn to that chapter in _martin chuzzlewit_, in which young martin has to receive endless defiles and deputations of total strangers each announced by name and demanding formal salutation. there are several things to be noticed about this incident. to begin with, it did not happen to martin chuzzlewit; but it did happen to charles dickens. dickens is incorporating almost without alteration a passage from a diary in the middle of a story; as he did when he included the admirable account of the prison petition of john dickens as the prison petition of wilkins micawber. there is no particular reason why even the gregarious americans should so throng the portals of a perfectly obscure steerage passenger like young chuzzlewit. there was every reason why they should throng the portals of the author of _pickwick_ and _oliver twist_. and no doubt they did. if i may be permitted the aleatory image, you bet they did. similar troops of sociable human beings have visited much more insignificant english travellers in america, with some of whom i am myself acquainted. i myself have the luck to be a little more stodgy and less sensitive than many of my countrymen; and certainly less sensitive than dickens. but i know what it was that annoyed him about that unending and unchanging stream of american visitors; it was the unending and unchanging stream of american sociability and high spirits. a people living on such a lofty but level tableland do not understand the ups and downs of the english temperament; the temper of a nation of eccentrics or (as they used to be called) of humorists. there is something very national in the very name of the old play of _every man in his humour_. but the play more often acted in real life is 'every man out of his humour.' it is true, as matthew arnold said, that an englishman wants to do as he likes; but it is not always true even that he likes what he likes. an englishman can be friendly and yet not feel friendly. or he can be friendly and yet not feel hospitable. or he can feel hospitable and yet not welcome those whom he really loves. he can think, almost with tears of tenderness, about people at a distance who would be bores if they came in at the door. american sociability sweeps away any such subtlety. it cannot be expected to understand the paradox or perversity of the englishman, who thus can feel friendly and avoid friends. that is the truth in the suggestion that dickens was sentimental. it means that he probably felt most sociable when he was solitary. in all these attempts to describe the indescribable, to indicate the real but unconscious differences between the two peoples, i have tried to balance my words without the irrelevant bias of praise and blame. both characteristics always cut both ways. on one side this comradeship makes possible a certain communal courage, a democratic derision of rich men in high places, that is not easy in our smaller and more stratified society. on the other hand the englishman has certainly more liberty, if less equality and fraternity. but the richest compensation of the englishman is not even in the word 'liberty,' but rather in the word 'poetry.' that humour of escape or seclusion, that genial isolation, that healing of wounded friendship by what christian science would call absent treatment, that is the best atmosphere of all for the creation of great poetry; and out of that came 'bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang' and 'thou wast not made for death, immortal bird.' in this sense it is indeed true that poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity; which may be extended to mean affection remembered in loneliness. there is in it a spirit not only of detachment but even of distance; a spirit which does desire, as in the old english rhyme, to be not only over the hills but also far away. in other words, in so far as it is true that the englishman is an exception to the great truth of aristotle, it is because he is not so near to aristotle as he is to homer. in so far as he is not by nature a political animal, it is because he is a poetical animal. we see it in his relations to the other animals; his quaint and almost illogical love of dogs and horses and dependants whose political rights cannot possibly be defined in logic. many forms of hunting or fishing are but an excuse for the same thing which the shameless literary man does without any excuse. sport is speechless poetry. it would be easy for a foreigner, by taking a few liberties with the facts, to make a satire about the sort of silent shelley who decides ultimately to shoot the skylark. it would be easy to answer these poetic suggestions by saying that he himself might be responsible for ruining the choirs where late the sweet birds sang, or that the immortal bird was likely to be mortal when he was out with his gun. but these international satires are never just; and the real relations of an englishman and an english bird are far more delicate. it would be equally easy and equally unjust to suggest a similar satire against american democracy; and represent americans merely as birds of a feather who can do nothing but flock together. but this would leave out the fact that at least it is not the white feather; that democracy is capable of defiance and of death for an idea. touching the souls of great nations, these criticisms are generally false because they are critical. but when we are quite sure that we rejoice in a nation's strength, then and not before we are justified in judging its weakness. i am quite sure that i rejoice in any democratic success without _arrière pensée_; and nobody who knows me will credit me with a covert sneer at civic equality. and this being granted, i do think there is a danger in the gregariousness of american society. the danger of democracy is not anarchy; on the contrary, it is monotony. and it is touching this that all my experience has increased my conviction that a great deal that is called female emancipation has merely been the increase of female convention. now the males of every community are far too conventional; it was the females who were individual and criticised the conventions of the tribe. if the females become conventional also, there is a danger of individuality being lost. this indeed is not peculiar to america; it is common to the whole modern industrial world, and to everything which substitutes the impersonal atmosphere of the state for the personal atmosphere of the home. but it is emphasised in america by the curious contradiction that americans do in theory value and even venerate the individual. but individualism is still the foe of individuality. where men are trying to compete with each other they are trying to copy each other. they become featureless by 'featuring' the same part. personality, in becoming a conscious ideal, becomes a common ideal. in this respect perhaps there is really something to be learnt from the englishman with his turn or twist in the direction of private life. those who have travelled in such a fashion as to see all the american hotels and none of the american houses are sometimes driven to the excess of saying that the americans have no private life. but even if the exaggeration has a hint of truth, we must balance it with the corresponding truth; that the english have no public life. they on their side have still to learn the meaning of the public thing, the republic; and how great are the dangers of cowardice and corruption when the very state itself has become a state secret. the english are patriotic; but patriotism is the unconscious form of nationalism. it is being national without understanding the meaning of a nation. the americans are on the whole too self-conscious, kept moving too much in the pace of public life, with all its temptations to superficiality and fashion; too much aware of outside opinion and with too much appetite for outside criticism. but the english are much too unconscious; and would be the better for an increase in many forms of consciousness, including consciousness of sin. but even their sin is ignorance of their real virtue. the most admirable english things are not the things that are most admired by the english, or for which the english admire themselves. they are things now blindly neglected and in daily danger of being destroyed. it is all the worse that they should be destroyed, because there is really nothing like them in the world. that is why i have suggested a note of nationalism rather than patriotism for the english; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not as the nature of things. we say of some ballad from the balkans or some peasant costume in the netherlands that it is unique; but the good things of england really are unique. our very isolation from continental wars and revolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique. the particular kind of beauty there is in an english village, the particular kind of humour there is in an english public-house, are things that cannot be found in lands where the village is far more simply and equally governed, or where the vine is far more honourably served and praised. yet we shall not save them by merely sinking into them with the conservative sort of contentment, even if the commercial rapacity of our plutocratic reforms would allow us to do so. we must in a sense get far away from england in order to behold her; we must rise above patriotism in order to be practically patriotic; we must have some sense of more varied and remote things before these vanishing virtues can be seen suddenly for what they are; almost as one might fancy that a man would have to rise to the dizziest heights of the divine understanding before he saw, as from a peak far above a whirlpool, how precious is his perishing soul. _the future of democracy_ the title of this final chapter requires an apology. i do not need to be reminded, alas, that the whole book requires an apology. it is written in accordance with a ritual or custom in which i could see no particular harm, and which gives me a very interesting subject, but a custom which it would be not altogether easy to justify in logic. everybody who goes to america for a short time is expected to write a book; and nearly everybody does. a man who takes a holiday at trouville or dieppe is not confronted on his return with the question, 'when is your book on france going to appear?' a man who betakes himself to switzerland for the winter sports is not instantly pinned by the statement, 'i suppose your history of the helvetian republic is coming out this spring?' lecturing, at least my kind of lecturing, is not much more serious or meritorious than ski-ing or sea-bathing; and it happens to afford the holiday-maker far less opportunity of seeing the daily life of the people. of all this i am only too well aware; and my only defence is that i am at least sincere in my enjoyment and appreciation of america, and equally sincere in my interest in its most serious problem, which i think a very serious problem indeed; the problem of democracy in the modern world. democracy may be a very obvious and facile affair for plutocrats and politicians who only have to use it as a rhetorical term. but democracy is a very serious problem for democrats. i certainly do not apologise for the word democracy; but i do apologise for the word future. i am no futurist; and any conjectures i make must be taken with the grain of salt which is indeed the salt of the earth; the decent and moderate humility which comes from a belief in free will. that faith is in itself a divine doubt. i do not believe in any of the scientific predictions about mankind; i notice that they always fail to predict any of the purely human developments of men; i also notice that even their successes prove the same truth as their failures; for their successful predictions are not about men but about machines. but there are two things which a man may reasonably do, in stating the probabilities of a problem, which do not involve any claim to be a prophet. the first is to tell the truth, and especially the neglected truth, about the tendencies that have already accumulated in human history; any miscalculation about which must at least mislead us in any case. we cannot be certain of being right about the future; but we can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past. the other thing that he can do is to note what ideas necessarily go together by their own nature; what ideas will triumph together or fall together. hence it follows that this final chapter must consist of two things. the first is a summary of what has really happened to the idea of democracy in recent times; the second a suggestion of the fundamental doctrine which is necessary for its triumph at any time. the last hundred years has seen a general decline in the democratic idea. if there be anybody left to whom this historical truth appears a paradox, it is only because during that period nobody has been taught history, least of all the history of ideas. if a sort of intellectual inquisition had been established, for the definition and differentiation of heresies, it would have been found that the original republican orthodoxy had suffered more and more from secessions, schisms, and backslidings. the highest point of democratic idealism and conviction was towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the american republic was 'dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.' it was then that the largest number of men had the most serious sort of conviction that the political problem could be solved by the vote of peoples instead of the arbitrary power of princes and privileged orders. these men encountered various difficulties and made various compromises in relation to the practical politics of their time; in england they preserved aristocracy; in america they preserved slavery. but though they had more difficulties, they had less doubts. since their time democracy has been steadily disintegrated by doubts; and these political doubts have been contemporary with and often identical with religious doubts. this fact could be followed over almost the whole field of the modern world; in this place it will be more appropriate to take the great american example of slavery. i have found traces in all sorts of intelligent quarters of an extraordinary idea that all the fathers of the republic owned black men like beasts of burden because they knew no better, until the light of liberty was revealed to them by john brown and mrs. beecher stowe. one of the best weekly papers in england said recently that even those who drew up the declaration of independence did not include negroes in its generalisation about humanity. this is quite consistent with the current convention, in which we were all brought up; the theory that the heart of humanity broadens in ever larger circles of brotherhood, till we pass from embracing a black man to adoring a black beetle. unfortunately it is quite inconsistent with the facts of american history. the facts show that, in this problem of the old south, the eighteenth century was _more_ liberal than the nineteenth century. there was _more_ sympathy for the negro in the school of jefferson than in the school of jefferson davis. jefferson, in the dark estate of his simple deism, said the sight of slavery in his country made him tremble, remembering that god is just. his fellow southerners, after a century of the world's advance, said that slavery in itself was good, when they did not go farther and say that negroes in themselves were bad. and they were supported in this by the great and growing modern suspicion that nature is unjust. difficulties seemed inevitably to delay justice, to the mind of jefferson; but so they did to the mind of lincoln. but that the slave was human and the servitude inhuman--that was, if anything, clearer to jefferson than to lincoln. the fact is that the utter separation and subordination of the black like a beast was a _progress_; it was a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and experiment; a triumph of science over superstition. it was 'the way the world was going,' as matthew arnold reverentially remarked in some connection; perhaps as part of a definition of god. anyhow, it was not jefferson's definition of god. he fancied, in his far-off patriarchal way, a father who had made all men brothers; and brutally unbrotherly as was the practice, such democratical deists never dreamed of denying the theory. it was not until the scientific sophistries began that brotherhood was really disputed. gobineau, who began most of the modern talk about the superiority and inferiority of racial stocks, was seized upon eagerly by the less generous of the slave-owners and trumpeted as a new truth of science and a new defence of slavery. it was not really until the dawn of darwinism, when all our social relations began to smell of the monkey-house, that men thought of the barbarian as only a first and the baboon as a second cousin. the full servile philosophy has been a modern and even a recent thing; made in an age whose invisible deity was the missing link. the missing link was a true metaphor in more ways than one; and most of all in its suggestion of a chain. by a symbolic coincidence, indeed, slavery grew more brazen and brutal under the encouragement of more than one movement of the progressive sort. its youth was renewed for it by the industrial prosperity of lancashire; and under that influence it became a commercial and competitive instead of a patriarchal and customary thing. we may say with no exaggerative irony that the unconscious patrons of slavery were huxley and cobden. the machines of manchester were manufacturing a great many more things than the manufacturers knew or wanted to know; but they were certainly manufacturing the fetters of the slave, doubtless out of the best quality of steel and iron. but this is a minor illustration of the modern tendency, as compared with the main stream of scepticism which was destroying democracy. evolution became more and more a vision of the break-up of our brotherhood, till by the end of the nineteenth century the genius of its greatest scientific romancer saw it end in the anthropophagous antics of the time machine. so far from evolution lifting us above the idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at least with a logical and potential argument for eating them. in the case of the american negroes, it may be remarked, it does at any rate permit the preliminary course of roasting them. all this materialistic hardening, which replaced the remorse of jefferson, was part of the growing evolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of the human race, or rather that there was really no such thing as the human race. the south had begun by agreeing reluctantly to the enslavement of men. the south ended by agreeing equally reluctantly to the emancipation of monkeys. that is what had happened to the democratic ideal in a hundred years. anybody can test it by comparing the final phase, i will not say with the ideal of jefferson, but with the ideal of johnson. there was far more horror of slavery in an eighteenth-century tory like dr. johnson than in a nineteenth-century democrat like stephen douglas. stephen douglas may be mentioned because he is a very representative type of the age of evolution and expansion; a man thinking in continents, like cecil rhodes, human and hopeful in a truly american fashion, and as a consequence cold and careless rather than hostile in the matter of the old mystical doctrines of equality. he 'did not care whether slavery was voted up or voted down.' his great opponent lincoln did indeed care very much. but it was an intense individual conviction with lincoln exactly as it was with johnson. i doubt if the spirit of the age was not much more behind douglas and his westward expansion of the white race. i am sure that more and more men were coming to be in the particular mental condition of douglas; men in whom the old moral and mystical ideals had been undermined by doubt but only with a negative effect of indifference. their positive convictions were all concerned with what some called progress and some imperialism. it is true that there was a sincere sectional enthusiasm against slavery in the north; and that the slaves were actually emancipated in the nineteenth century. but i doubt whether the abolitionists would ever have secured abolition. abolition was a by-product of the civil war; which was fought for quite other reasons. anyhow, if slavery had somehow survived to the age of rhodes and roosevelt and evolutionary imperialism, i doubt if the slaves would ever have been emancipated at all. certainly if it had survived till the modern movement for the servile state, they would never have been emancipated at all. why should the world take the chains off the black man when it was just putting them on the white? and in so far as we owe the change to lincoln, we owe it to jefferson. exactly what gives its real dignity to the figure of lincoln is that he stands invoking a primitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up the tables of an ancient law, _against_ the trend of the nineteenth century; repeating, 'we hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator, etc.,' to a generation that was more and more disposed to say something like this: 'we hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,' and so on. i do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have founded a state; and i am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would never have overthrown a slave state. what it did do, as i have said, was to produce some very wonderful literary and artistic flights of sceptical imagination. the world did have new visions, if they were visions of monsters in the moon and martians striding about like spiders as tall as the sky, and the workmen and capitalists becoming two separate species, so that one could devour the other as gaily and greedily as a cat devours a bird. no one has done justice to the meaning of mr. wells and his original departure in fantastic fiction; to these nightmares that were the last apocalypse of the nineteenth century. they meant that the bottom had fallen out of the mind at last, that the bridge of brotherhood had broken down in the modern brain, letting up from the chasms this infernal light like a dawn. all had grown dizzy with degree and relativity; so that there would not be so very much difference between eating dog and eating darkie, or between eating darkie and eating dago. there were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt that we were the superior sort. against all this irresistible force stood one immovable post. against all this dance of doubt and degree stood something that can best be symbolised by a simple example. an ape cannot be a priest, but a negro can be a priest. the dogmatic type of christianity, especially the catholic type of christianity, had riveted itself irrevocably to the manhood of all men. where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils it could not save itself even by surrender. it could not gradually dilute democracy, as could a merely sceptical or secular democrat. there stood, in fact or in possibility, the solid and smiling figure of a black bishop. and he was either a man claiming the most towering spiritual privileges of a man, or he was the mere buffoonery and blasphemy of a monkey in a mitre. that is the point about christian and catholic democracy; it is not that it is necessarily at any moment more democratic, it is that its indestructible minimum of democracy really is indestructible. and by the nature of things that mystical democracy was destined to survive, when every other sort of democracy was free to destroy itself. and whenever democracy destroying itself is suddenly moved to save itself, it always grasps at rag or tag of that old tradition that alone is sure of itself. hundreds have heard the story about the mediaeval demagogue who went about repeating the rhyme when adam delved and eve span, who was then the gentleman? many have doubtless offered the obvious answer to the question, 'the serpent.' but few seem to have noticed what would be the more modern answer to the question, if that innocent agitator went about propounding it. 'adam never delved and eve never span, for the simple reason that they never existed. they are fragments of a chaldeo-babylonian mythos, and adam is only a slight variation of tag-tug, pronounced uttu. for the real beginning of humanity we refer you to darwin's _origin of species_.' and then the modern man would go on to justify plutocracy to the mediaeval man by talking about the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest; and how the strongest man seized authority by means of anarchy, and proved himself a gentleman by behaving like a cad. now i do not base my beliefs on the theology of john ball, or on the literal and materialistic reading of the text of genesis; though i think the story of adam and eve infinitely less absurd and unlikely than that of the prehistoric 'strongest man' who could fight a hundred men. but i do note the fact that the idealism of the leveller could be put in the form of an appeal to scripture, and could not be put in the form of an appeal to science. and i do note also that democrats were still driven to make the same appeal even in the very century of science. tennyson was, if ever there was one, an evolutionist in his vision and an aristocrat in his sympathies. he was always boasting that john bull was evolutionary and not revolutionary, even as these frenchmen. he did not pretend to have any creed beyond faintly trusting the larger hope. but when human dignity is really in danger, john bull has to use the same old argument as john ball. he tells lady clara vere de vere that 'the gardener adam and his wife smile at the claim of long descent'; their own descent being by no means long. lady clara might surely have scored off him pretty smartly by quoting from 'maud' and 'in memoriam' about evolution and the eft that was lord of valley and hill. but tennyson has evidently forgotten all about darwin and the long descent of man. if this was true of an evolutionist like tennyson, it was naturally ten times truer of a revolutionist like jefferson. the declaration of independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that god created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. there is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. that is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world will find out more and more to be a fact. every other basis is a sort of sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds. those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of constraining the tyrant. an idealist may say to a capitalist, 'don't you sometimes feel in the rich twilight, when the lights twinkle from the distant hamlet in the hills, that all humanity is a holy family?' but it is equally possible for the capitalist to reply with brevity and decision, 'no, i don't,' and there is no more disputing about it further than about the beauty of a fading cloud. and the modern world of moods is a world of clouds, even if some of them are thunderclouds. for i have only taken here, as a convenient working model, the case of negro slavery; because it was long peculiar to america and is popularly associated with it. it is more and more obvious that the line is no longer running between black and white but between rich and poor. as i have already noted in the case of prohibition, the very same arguments of the inevitable suicide of the ignorant, of the impossibility of freedom for the unfit, which were once applied to barbarians brought from africa are now applied to citizens born in america. it is argued even by industrialists that industrialism has produced a class submerged below the status of emancipated mankind. they imply that the missing link is no longer missing, even from england or the northern states, and that the factories have manufactured their own monkeys. scientific hypotheses about the feeble-minded and the criminal type will supply the masters of the modern world with more and more excuses for denying the dogma of equality in the case of white labour as well as black. and any man who knows the world knows perfectly well that to tell the millionaires, or their servants, that they are disappointing the sentiments of thomas jefferson, or disregarding a creed composed in the eighteenth century, will be about as effective as telling them that they are not observing the creed of st. athanasius or keeping the rule of st. benedict. the world cannot keep its own ideals. the secular order cannot make secure any one of its own noble and natural conceptions of secular perfection. that will be found, as time goes on, the ultimate argument for a church independent of the world and the secular order. what has become of all those ideal figures from the wise man of the stoics to the democratic deist of the eighteenth century? what has become of all that purely human hierarchy of chivalry, with its punctilious pattern of the good knight, its ardent ambition in the young squire? the very name of knight has come to represent the petty triumph of a profiteer, and the very word squire the petty tyranny of a landlord. what has become of all that golden liberality of the humanists, who found on the high tablelands of the culture of hellas the very balance of repose in beauty that is most lacking in the modern world? the very greek language that they loved has become a mere label for snuffy and snobbish dons, and a mere cock-shy for cheap and half-educated utilitarians, who make it a symbol of superstition and reaction. we have lived to see a time when the heroic legend of the republic and the citizen, which seemed to jefferson the eternal youth of the world, has begun to grow old in its turn. we cannot recover the earthly estate of knighthood, to which all the colours and complications of heraldry seemed as fresh and natural as flowers. we cannot re-enact the intellectual experiences of the humanists, for whom the greek grammar was like the song of a bird in spring. the more the matter is considered the clearer it will seem that these old experiences are now only alive, where they have found a lodgment in the catholic tradition of christendom, and made themselves friends for ever. st. francis is the only surviving troubadour. st. thomas more is the only surviving humanist. st. louis is the only surviving knight. it would be the worst sort of insincerity, therefore, to conclude even so hazy an outline of so great and majestic a matter as the american democratic experiment, without testifying my belief that to this also the same ultimate test will come. so far as that democracy becomes or remains catholic and christian, that democracy will remain democratic. in so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly undemocratic. its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at least of patronage. its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in method but in aim; since they are but the negations of the human appetites of property and personality. eighteenth-century ideals, formulated in eighteenth-century language, have no longer in themselves the power to hold all those pagan passions back. even those documents depended upon deism; their real strength will survive in men who are still deists; and the men who are still deists are more than deists. men will more and more realise that there is no meaning in democracy if there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights. there is truth in every ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that finds the symbol of the republic in the bird that bore the bolts of jove. owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun. transcriber's note this electronic edition is intended to contain the complete, unaltered text of the first published edition of _gilbert keith chesterton_ by maisie ward (new york: sheed & ward, 1943), with the following exceptions: the index, and a few other references to page numbers that do not exist in this edition, have been omitted. italics are represented by underscores at the beginning and end, _like this_. footnotes* have been placed directly below the paragraph referring to them and enclosed in brackets. [* like this.] any other deviations from the text of the first edition may be regarded as defects and attributed to the transcriber. gilbert keith chesterton by maisie ward contents introduction: chiefly concerning sources chapter i background for gilbert keith chesterton ii childhood iii school days iv art schools and university college v the notebook vi towards a career vii incipit vita nova viii to frances ix a long engagement x who is g.k.c.? xi married life in london xii clearing the ground for orthodoxy xiii orthodoxy xiv bernard shaw xv from battersea to beaconsfield xvi a circle of friends xvii the disillusioned liberal xviii the eye witness xix marconi xx the eve of the war (1911-1915) xxi the war years xxii after the armistice xxiii rome via jerusalem xxiv completion xxv the reluctant editor (1925-1930) xxvi the distributist league and distributism xxvii silver wedding xxviii columbus xxix the soft answer xxx our lady's tumbler xxxi the living voice xxxii last days appendices: appendix a--an earlier chesterton appendix b--prize poem written at st. paul's appendix c--_the chestertons_ bibliography introduction chiefly concerning sources the material for this book falls roughly into two parts: spoken and written. gilbert chesterton was not an old man when he died and many of his friends and contemporaries have told me incidents and recalled sayings right back to his early boyhood. this part of the material has been unusually rich and copious so that i could get a clearer picture of the boy and the young man than is usually granted to the biographer. the book has been in the making for six years and in three countries. several times i hid it aside for some months so as to be able to get a fresh view of it. i talked to all sorts of people, heard all sorts of ideas, saw my subject from every side; i went to paris to see one old friend, to indiana to see others, met for the first time in lengthy talk maurice baring, h. g. wells and bernard shaw; went to kingsland to see mr. belloc; gathered gilbert's boyhood friends of the junior debating club in london and visited "father brown" among his yorkshire moors. armed with a notebook, i tried to miss none who had known gilbert well, especially in his youth: e. c. bentley, lucian oldershaw, lawrence solomon, edward fordham. i had ten long letters from annie firmin, my most valuable witness as to gilbert's childhood. for information on the next period of his life, i talked to monsignor o'connor, to hilaire belloc, maurice baring, charles somers cocks, f. y. eccles and others, besides being now able to draw on my own memories. frances i had talked with on and off about their early married years ever since i had first known them, but she was, alas, too ill and consequently too emotionally unstrung during the last months for me to ask her all the questions springing in my mind. "tell maisie," she said to dorothy collins, "not to talk to me about gilbert. it makes me cry." for the time at beaconsfield, out of a host of friends the most valuable were dr. pocock and dr. bakewell. among priests, monsignors o'connor and ronald knox, fathers vincent mcnabb, o.p. and ignatius rice, o.s.b. were especially intimate. dorothy collins's evidence covers a period of ten years. that of h. g. wells and bernard shaw is reinforced by most valuable letters which they have kindly allowed me to publish. then too gilbert was so much of a public character and so popular with his fellow journalists that stories of all kinds abound: concerning him there is a kind of evidence, and very valuable it is, that may be called a boswell collective. it is fitting that it should be so. we cannot picture g.k. like the great lexicographer accompanied constantly by one ardent and observant witness, pencil in hand, ready to take notes over the teacups. (and by the way, in spite of an acquaintance who regretted in this connection that g.k. was not latterly more often seen in taverns, it was over the teacups, even more than over the wine glasses, that boswell made his notes. i have seen boswell's signature after wine--on the minutes of a meeting of the club--and he was in no condition then for the taking of notes. even the signature is almost illegible.) but it is fitting that gilbert, who loved all sorts of men so much, should be kept alive for the future by all sorts of men. from the focussing of many views from many angles this picture has been composed, but they are all views of one man, and the picture will show, i think, a singular unity. when whistler, as gilbert himself once said, painted a portrait he made and destroyed many sketches--how many it did not matter, for all, even of his failures, were fruitful--but it would have mattered frightfully if each time he looked up he found a new subject sitting placidly for his portrait. gilbert was fond of asking in the _new witness_ of people who expressed admiration for lloyd george: "which george do you mean?" for, chameleon-like, the politician has worn many colours and the portrait painted in 1906 would have had to be torn up in 1916. but gather the chesterton portraits: read the files when he first grew into fame: talk to mr. titterton who worked with him on the _daily news_ in 1906 and on _g.k.'s weekly_ in 1936, collect witnesses from his boyhood to his old age, from dublin to vancouver: individuals who knew him, groups who are endeavoring to work out his ideas: all will agree on the ideas and on the man as making one pattern throughout, one developing but integrated mind and personality. gathering the material for a biography bears some resemblance to interrogating witnesses in a court of law. there are good witnesses and bad: reliable and unreliable memories. i remember an old lady, a friend of my mother's, who remarked with candour after my mother had confided to her something of importance: "my dear, i must go and write that down immediately before my imagination gets mixed with my memory." one witness must be checked against another: there will be discrepancies in detail but the main facts will in the end emerge. just now and again, however, a biographer, like a judge, meets a totally unreliable witness. one event in this biography has caused me more trouble than anything else: the marconi scandal and the trial of cecil chesterton for criminal libel which grew out of it. as luck would have it, it was on this that i had to interrogate my most unreliable witness. i had seen no clear and unbiased account so i had to read the many pages of blue book and law reports besides contemporary comment in various papers. i have no legal training, but one point stuck out like a spike. cecil chesterton had brought accusations against godfrey isaacs not only concerning his own past career as a company promoter, but also concerning his dealings with the government over the marconi contract, in connection with which he had also fiercely attacked rufus isaacs, herbert samuel and other ministers of the crown. but in the witness box he accepted the word of the very ministers he had been attacking, and declared that he no longer accused them of corruption: which seemed to me a complete abandonment of his main position. having drafted my chapter on marconi, i asked mrs. cecil chesterton to read it, but more particularly to explain this point. she gave me a long and detailed account of how cecil had been intensely reluctant to take this course, but violent pressure had been exerted on him by his father and by gilbert who were both in a state of panic over the trial. unlikely as this seemed, especially in gilbert's case, the account was so circumstantial, and from so near a connection, that i felt almost obliged to accept it. what was my amazement a few months later at receiving a letter in which she stated that after "a great deal of close research work, re-reading of papers, etc." (in connection with her own book _the chestertons_) and after a talk with cecil's solicitors, she had become convinced that cecil had acted as he had because "the closest sleuthing had been unable to discover any trace" of investments by rufus isaacs in english marconis. "for this reason cecil took the course he did--not through family pressure. that pressure, _i still feel_,* was exerted, though possibly not until the trial was over." [* italics mine.] it was, then, the lady's feelings and not facts that had been offered to me as evidence, and it was the merest luck that my book had not appeared before cecil's solicitors had spoken. the account given in lord birkenhead's _famous trials_ is the speech for the prosecution. mrs. cecil chesterton's chapter is an impressionist sketch of the court scene by a friend of the defendant. what was wanted was an impartial account, but i tried in vain to write it. the chronology of events, the connection between the government commission and the libel case, the connection between the english and american marconi companies--it was all too complex for the lay mind, so i turned the chapter over to my husband who has had a legal training and asked him to write it for me. _the chestertons_ is concerned with gilbert and frances as well as with cecil; and the confusion between memory and imagination--to say nothing of reliance on feelings unsupported by facts--pervades the book. it can only be called a legend, so long growing in mrs. cecil's mind that i am convinced that when she came to write her book she firmly believed in it herself. the starting-point was so ardent a dislike for frances that every incident poured fuel on the flame and was seen only by its light. when i saw her, the legend was beginning to shape. she told me various stories showing her dislike: facts offered by me were either denied or twisted to fit into the pattern. i do not propose to discuss here the details of a thoroughly unreliable book. most of them i think answer themselves in the course of this biography. with one or two points i deal in appendix c. but i will set down here one further incident that serves to show just how little help this particular witness could ever be. for, like cecil's solicitors, i spoilt one telling detail for her. she told me with great enthusiasm that cecil had said that gilbert was really in love not with frances but with her sister gertrude, and that gertrude's red hair accounted for the number of red-headed heroines in his stories. i told her, however, on the word of their brother-in-law, that gertrude's hair was not red. mr. oldershaw in fact seemed a good deal amused: he said that gilbert never looked at either of the other sisters, who were "not his sort," and had eyes only for frances. mrs. cecil however would not relinquish this dream of red hair and another love. in her book she wishes "red-gold" hair on to annie firmin, because in the _autobiography_ gilbert had described her golden plaits. but unluckily for this new theory annie's hair was yellow,* which is quite a different colour. and annie, who is still alive, is also amused at the idea that gilbert had any thought of romance in her connection. [* see g.k.'s letter to her daughter, p. 633 [chapter xxxi].] when frances chesterton gave me the letters and other documents, she said: "i don't want the book to appear in a hurry: not for at least five years. there will be lots of little books written about gilbert; let them all come out first. i want your book to be the final and definitive biography." the first part of this injunction i have certainly obeyed, for it will be just seven years after his death that this book appears. for the second half, i can say only that i have done the best that in me lies to obey it also. and i am very grateful to those who have preceded me with books depicting one aspect or another of my subject. i have tried to make use of them all as part of my material, and some are "little" merely in the number of their pages. i am especially grateful to hilaire belloc, emile cammaerts, cyril clemens and "father brown" (who have allowed me to quote with great freedom). i want to thank mr. seward collins, mr. cyril clemens and the university of notre dame for the loan of books; mrs. bambridge for the use of a letter from kipling and a poem from _the years between_. even greater has been the kindness of those friends of my own and of gilbert chesterton's who have read this book in manuscript and made very valuable criticisms and suggestions: may chesterton, dorothy collins, edward connor, ross hoffman, mrs. robert kidd, arnold lunn, mgr. knox, father murtagh, father vincent mcnabb, lucian oldershaw, beatrice warde, douglas woodruff, monsignor o'connor. most of the criticisms were visibly right, while even those with which i could not concur showed me the weak spot in my work that had occasioned them. they have helped me to improve the book--i think i may say enormously. one suggestion i have not followed--that one name should be used throughout: either chesterton or gilbert or g.k., but not all three. i had begun with the idea of using "chesterton" when speaking of him as a public character and also when speaking of the days before i did in fact call him "gilbert." but this often left him and cecil mixed up: then too, though i seldom used "g.k." myself, other friends writing to me of him often used it. i began to go through the manuscript unifying--and then i noticed that in a single paragraph of his _bernard shaw_ gilbert uses "gbs," "shaw," "bernard shaw," and "mr. shaw." here was a precedent indeed, and it seemed to me that it was really the natural thing to do. after all we do talk of people now by one name, now by another: it is a matter of slight importance if of any, and i decided to let it go. as to size, i am afraid the present book is a large one--although not as large as boswell's _johnson_ or _gone with the wind_. but in this matter i am unrepentant, for i have faith in chesterton's own public. the book is large because there is no other way of getting chesterton on to the canvas. it is a joke he would himself have enjoyed, but it is also a serious statement. for a complete portrait of chesterton, even the most rigorous selection of material cannot be compressed into a smaller space. i have first written at length and then cut and cut. at first i had intended to omit all matter already given in the _autobiography_. then i realised that would never do. for some things which are vital to a complete biography of chesterton are not only told in the _autobiography_ better than i could tell them, but are recorded there and nowhere else. and this book is not merely a supplement to the _autobiography_. it is the life of chesterton. the same problem arises with regard to the published books and i have tried to solve it on the same line. there has rung in my mind mr. belloc's saying: "a man is his mind." to tell the story of a man of letters while avoiding quotation from or reference to his published works is simply not to tell it. at christopher dawson's suggestion i have re-read all the books _in the order in which they were written_, thus trying to get the development of gilbert's mind perfectly clear to myself and to trace the influences that affected him at various dates. for this reason i have analysed certain of the books and not others--those which showed this mental development most clearly at various stages, or those (too many alas) which are out of print and hard to obtain. but whenever possible in illustrating his mental history i have used unpublished material, so that even the most ardent chestertonian will find much that is new to him. for the period of gilbert's youth there are many exercise books, mostly only half filled, containing sketches and caricatures, lists of titles for short stories and chapters, unfinished short stories. several completed fairy stories and some of the best drawings were published in _the coloured lands_. others are hints later used in his own novels: there is a fragment of _the ball and the cross_, a first suggestion for _the man who was thursday_, a rather more developed adumbration of _the napoleon of notting hill_. this i think is later than most of the notebooks; but, after the change in handwriting, apparently deliberately and carefully made by gilbert around the date at which he left st. paul's for the slade school, it is almost impossible to establish a date at all exactly for any one of these notebooks. notes made later when he had formed the habit of dictation became difficult to read, not through bad handwriting, but because words are abbreviated and letters omitted. some of the exercise books appear to have been begun, thrown aside and used again later. there is among them one only of real biographical importance, a book deliberately used for the development of a philosophy of life, dated in two places, to which i devote a chapter and which i refer to as _the_ notebook. this book is as important in studying chesterton as the pensã©es would be for a student of pascal. he is here already a master of phrase in a sense which makes a comparison with pascal especially apt. for he often packs so much meaning into a brilliant sentence or two that i have felt it worth while, in dealing especially with some of the less remembered books, to pull out a few of these sentences for quotation apart from their context. other important material was to be found in _g.k.'s weekly_, in articles in other periodicals, and in unpublished letters. with some of the correspondences i have made considerable use of both sides, and if anyone pedantically objects that that is unusual in a biography i will adapt a phrase of bernard shaw's which you will find in this book, and say, "hang it all, be reasonable! if you had the choice between reading me and reading wells and shaw, wouldn't you choose wells and shaw." gilbert keith chesterton chapter i background for gilbert keith chesterton it is usual to open a biography with some account of the subject's ancestry. chesterton, in his _browning_, after some excellent foolery about pedigree-hunting, makes the suggestion that middle-class ancestry is far more varied and interesting than the ancestry of the aristocrat: the truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other people in the world. for since it is their principle to marry only within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. it is in the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of eastern or celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime. this may provide fun for a guessing game but is not very useful to a biographer. the chesterton family, like many another, had had the ups and downs in social position that accompany the ups and downs of fortune. upon all this edward chesterton, gilbert's father, as head of the family possessed many interesting documents. after his death, gilbert's mother left his papers undisturbed. but when she died gilbert threw away, without examination, most of the contents of his father's study, including all family records. thus i cannot offer any sort of family tree. but it is possible to show the kind of family and the social atmosphere into which gilbert chesterton was born. some of the relatives say that the family hailed from the village of chesterton--now merged into cambridge, of which they were lords of the manor, but gilbert refused to take this seriously. in an introduction to a book called _life in old cambridge_, he wrote: i have never been to cambridge except as an admiring visitor; i have never been to chesterton at all, either from a sense of unworthiness or from a faint superstitious feeling that i might be fulfilling a prophecy in the countryside. anyone with a sense of the savour of the old english country rhymes and tales will share my vague alarm that the steeple might crack or the market cross fall down, for a smaller thing than the coincidence of a man named chesterton going to chesterton. at the time of the regency, the head of the family was a friend of the prince's and (perhaps as a result of such company) dissipated his fortunes in riotous living and incurred various terms of imprisonment for debt. from his debtors' prisons he wrote letters, and sixty years later mr. edward chesterton used to read them to his family: as also those of another interesting relative, captain george laval chesterton, prison reformer and friend of mrs. fry and of charles dickens. a relative recalls the sentence: "i cried, dickens cried, we all cried," which makes one rather long for the rest of the letter. george laval chesterton left two books, one a kind of autobiography, the other a work on prison reform. it was a moment of enthusiasm for reform, of optimism and of energy. dickens was stirring the minds of englishmen to discover the evils in their land and rush to their overthrow. darwin was writing his _origin of species_, which in some curious way increased the hopeful energy of his countrymen: they seemed to feel it much more satisfying to have been once animal and have become human than to be fallen gods who could again be made divine. anyhow, there were giants in those days and it was hope that made them so. when by an odd confusion the _tribune_ described g. k. chesterton as having been born about the date that captain chesterton published his books, he replied in a ballade which at once saluted and attacked: i am not fond of anthropoids as such, i never went to mr. darwin's school, old tyndall's ether, that he liked so much leaves me, i fear, comparatively cool. i cannot say my heart with hope is full because a donkey, by continual kicks, turns slowly into something like a mule- i was not born in 1856. age of my fathers: truer at the touch than mine: great age of dickens, youth and yule: had your strong virtues stood without a crutch, i might have deemed man had no need of rule, but i was born when petty poets pule, when madmen used your liberty to mix lucre and lust, bestial and beautiful, i was not born in 1856.* [* quoted in _g. k. chesterton: a criticism_. aliston rivers (1908) pp. 243-244.] both _autobiography_ and _prison life_ are worth reading.* they breathe the "great gusto" seen by gilbert in that era. he does not quote them in his _autobiography_, but, just mentioning captain chesterton, dwells chiefly on his grandfather, who, while george laval chesterton was fighting battles and reforming prisons, had succeeded to the headship of a house agents' business in kensington. (for, the family fortunes having been dissipated, gilbert's great-grandfather had become first a coal merchant and then a house agent.) a few of the letters between this ancestor and his son remain and they are interesting, confirming gilbert's description in the _autobiography_ of his grandfather's feeling that he himself was something of a landmark in kensington and that the family business was honourable and important. [* see appendix a.] the chestertons, whatever the ups and downs of their past history, were by now established in that english middle-class respectability in which their son was to discover--or into which he was to bring--a glow and thrill of adventurous romance. edward chesterton, gilbert's father, belonged to a serious family and a serious generation, which took its work as a duty and its profession as a vocation. i wonder what young house-agent today, just entering the family business, would receive a letter from his father adjuring him to "become an active steady and honourable man of business," speaking of "abilities which only want to be judiciously brought out, of course assisted with your earnest co-operation." gilbert's mother was marie grosjean, one of a family of twenty-three children. the family had long been english, but came originally from french switzerland. marie's mother was from an aberdeen family of keiths, which gave gilbert his second name and a dash of scottish blood which "appealed strongly to my affections and made a sort of scottish romance in my childhood." marie's father, whom gilbert never saw, had been "one of the old wesleyan lay-preachers and was thus involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended to his grandchild. he was also one of the leaders of the early teetotal movement, a characteristic which has not."* [* _autobiography_, pp. 11-12.] when edward became engaged to marie grosjean he complained that his "dearest girl" would not believe that he had any work to do, but he was in fact much occupied and increasingly responsible for the family business. there is a flavour of a world very remote from ours in the packet of letters between the two and from their various parents, aunts and sisters to one another during their engagement. edward illuminates poems "for a certaln dear good little child," sketches the "look out from home" for her mother, hopes they did not appear uncivil in wandering into the garden together at an aunt's house and leaving the rest of the company for too long. he praises a friend of hers as "intellectual and unaffected, two excellent things in woman," describes a clerk sent to france with business papers who "lost them all, the careless dog, except the _illustrated london news_." a letter to marie from her sister harriette is amusing. she describes her efforts at entertaining in the absence of her mother. the company were "great swells" so that her brother "took all the covers of the chairs himself and had the wine iced and we dined in full dress--it was very awful--considering myself as hostess." poor girl, it was a series of misfortunes. "the dinner was three-quarters of an hour late, the fish done to rags." she had hired three dozen wine-glasses to be sure of enough, but they were "brought in in twos and threes at a time and then a hiatus as if they were being washed which they were not." in the letters from parents and older relatives religious observances are taken for granted and there is an obvious sincerity in the many allusions to god's will and god's guidance of human life. no one reading them could doubt that the description of a dying relative as "ready for the summons" and to "going home" is a sincere one. other letters, notably harriette's, do not lack a spice of malice in speaking of those whose religion was unreal and affected--a phenomenon that only appears in an age when real religion abounds. doubtless her generation was beginning to see christianity with less than the simplicity of their parents. they were hearing of darwin and spencer, and the optimism which accompanied the idea of evolution was turning religion into a vague glow which would, they felt, survive the somewhat childish dogmas in which our rude ancestors had tried to formulate it. but with an increased vagueness went also, with the more liberal--and the chestertons were essentially liberal both politically and theologically--an increased tolerance. in several of his letters, edward chesterton mentions the catholic church, and certainly with no dislike. he went on one occasion to hear manning preach and much admired the sermon, although he notes too that he found in it "no distinctively roman catholic doctrine." he belonged, however, to an age that on the whole found the rest of life more exciting and interesting than religion, an age that had kept the christian virtues and still believed that these virtues could stand alone, without the support of the christian creed. the temptation to describe dresses has always to be sternly resisted when dealing with any part of the victorian era, so merely pausing to note that it seems to have been a triumph on the part of mrs. grosjean to have cut a _short_ skirt out of 8â½ yards of material, i reluctantly lay aside the letters at the time when edward chesterton and marie were married and had set about living happily ever after. these two had no fear of life: they belonged to a generation which cheerfully created a home and brought fresh life into being. in doing it, they did a thousand other things, so that the home they made was full of vital energies for the children who were to grow up in it. gilbert recollects his father as a man of a dozen hobbies, his study as a place where these hobbies formed strata of exciting products, awakening youthful covetousness in the matter of a new paint-box, satisfying youthful imagination by the production of a toy-theatre. his character, serene and humorous as his son describes him, is reflected in his letters. edward chesterton did not use up his mental powers in the family business. taught by his father to be a good man of business, he was in his private life a man of a thousand other energies and ideas. "on the whole," says his son, "i am glad he was never an artist. it might have stood in his way in becoming an amateur. it might have spoilt his career; his private career. he could never have made a vulgar success of all the thousand things be did so successfully." here, gilbert sees a marked distinction between that generation of business men and the present in the use of leisure; he sees hobbies as superior to sport. "the old-fashioned englishman, like my father, sold houses for his living but filled his own house with his life. a hobby is not merely a holiday. . . . it is not merely exercising the body instead of the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised thing. it is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected thing." edward chesterton practised "water-colour painting and modelling and photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic lanterns and mediaeval illumination." and, moreover, "knew all his english literature backwards." it has become of late the fashion for any one who writes of his own life to see himself against a dark background, to see his development frustrated by some shadow of heredity or some horror of environment. but gilbert saw his life rather as the ancients saw it when _pietas_ was a duty because we had received so much from those who brought us into being. this englishman was grateful to his country, to his parents, to his home for all that they had given him. i regret that i have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. i regret that there was nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a remote and mildly impecunious uncle; and that i cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever i am. i am not clear about what that is; but i am pretty sure that most of it is my own fault. and i am compelled to confess that i look back to that landscape of my first days with a pleasure that should doubtless be reserved for the utopias of the futurist.* [* g. k. chesterton. _autobiography_, pp. 22-3.] chapter ii childhood gilbert keith chesterton was born on may 29, 1874 at a house in sheffield terrace, campden hill, just below the great tower of the waterworks which so much impressed his childish imagination. lower down the hill was the anglican church of st. george, and here he was baptised. when he was about five, the family moved to warwick gardens. as old-fashioned london houses go, 11 warwick gardens is small. on the ground floor, a back and front room were for the chestertons drawing-room and dining-room with a folding door between, the only other sitting-room being a small study built out over the garden. a long, narrow, green strip, which must have been a good deal longer before a row of garages was built at the back, was gilbert's playground. his bedroom was a long room at the top of a not very high house. for what is in most london houses the drawing-room floor is in this house filled by two bedrooms and there is only one floor above it. cecil was five years younger than gilbert, who welcomed his birth with the remark, "now i shall always have an audience," a prophecy remembered by all parties because it proved so singularly false. as soon as cecil could speak, he began to argue and the brothers' intercourse thenceforward consisted of unending discussion. they always argued, they never quarrelled. there was also a little sister beatrice who died when gilbert was very young, so young that he remembered a fall she had from a rocking-horse more clearly than he remembered her death, and in his memory linked with the fall the sense of loss and sorrow that came with the death. it would be impossible to tell the story of his childhood one half so well as he has told it himself. it is the best part of his _autobiography_. indeed, it is one of the best childhoods in literature. for gilbert chesterton most perfectly remembered the exact truth, not only about what happened to a child, but about how a child thought and felt. what is more, he sees childhood not as an isolated fragment or an excursion into fairyland, but as his "real life; the real beginnings of what should have been a more real life; a lost experience in the land of the living." i was subconsciously certain then, as i am consciously certain now, that there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of the life of man; and that it is man who afterwards darkens it with dreams or goes astray from it in self-deception. it is only the grown man who lives a life of make-believe and pretending; and it is he who has his head in a cloud.* [* _autobiography_, p. 49.] here are the beginnings of the man's philosophy in the life and experience of the child. he was living in a world of reality, and that reality was beautiful, in the clear light of "an eternal morning," which "had a sort of wonder in it, as if the world were as new as myself." a child in this world, like god in the moment of creation, looks upon it and sees that it is very good. it was not that he was never unhappy as a child, and he had his share of bodily pain. "i had a fair amount of toothache and especially earache." but the child has his own philosophy and makes his own proportion, and unhappiness and pain "are of a different texture or held on a different tenure." what was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. it was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world. what gives me this shock is almost anything i really recall; not the things i should think most worth recalling. this is where it differs from the other great thrill of the past, all that is connected with first love and the romantic passion; for that, though equally poignant, comes always to a point; and is narrow like a rapier piercing the heart, whereas the other was more like a hundred windows opened on all sides of the head.* [* _autobiography_, pp. 31-32.] these windows opening on all sides so much more swiftly for the genius than for the rest of us, led to a result often to be noted in the childhood of exceptional men: a combination of backwardness and precocity. gilbert chesterton was in some ways a very backward child. he did not talk much before three. he learnt to read only at eight. he loved fairy tales; as a child he read them or had them read aloud to him: as a big boy he wrote and illustrated a good many, some of which are printed in _the coloured lands_. i have found several fragments in praise of hans andersen written apparently in his schooldays. in the chapter of _orthodoxy_ called "the ethics of elfland" he shows how the truth about goodness and happiness came to him out of the old fairy tales and made the first basis for his philosophy. and george macdonald's story _the princess and the goblin_ made, he says, "a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start." it is the story of a house where goblins were in the cellar and a kind of fairy godmother in a hidden room upstairs. this story had made "all the ordinary staircases and doors and windows into magical things." it was the awakening of the sense of wonder and joy in the ordinary things always to be his. still more important was the realization represented by the goblins below stairs, that "when the evil things besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside." in life as in this story there is . . . a house that is our home, that is rightly loved as our home, but of which we hardly know the best or the worst, and must always wait for the one and watch against the other. . . . since i first read that story some five alternative philosophies of the universe have come to our colleges out of germany, blowing through the world like the east wind. but for me that castle is still standing in the mountains, its light is not put out.* [* introduction to _george macdonald and his wife_.] all this to gilbert made the story the "most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life" of any story he ever read--then or later! another recurrent image in books by the same author is that of a great white horse. and gilbert says, "to this day i can never see a big white horse in the street without a sudden sense of indescribable things."* [* ibid.] of his playmates, "one of my first memories," he writes in the _autobiography_, "is playing in the garden under the care of a girl with ropes of golden hair; to whom my mother afterwards called out from the house, 'you are an angel'; which i was disposed to accept without metaphor. she is now living in vancouver as mrs. robert kidd." mrs. kidd, then annie firmin, was the daughter of a girlhood friend of mrs. chesterton's. she called her "aunt marie." she and her sister, gilbert says in the _autobiography_, "had more to do with enlivening my early years than most." she has a vivid memory of sheffield terrace where all three chesterton children were born and where the little sister, beatrice, whom they called birdie, died. gilbert, in those days, was called diddie, his father then and later was "mr. ed" to the family and intimate friends. soon after birdie's death they moved to warwick gardens. mrs. kidd writes: . . . the little boys were never allowed to see a funeral. if one passed down warwick gardens, they were hustled from the nursery window at once. possibly this was because gilbert had such a fear of sickness or accident. if cecil gave the slightest sign of choking at dinner, gilbert would throw down his spoon or fork and rush from the room. i have seen him do it so many times. cecil was fond of animals. gilbert wasn't. cecil had a cat that he named faustine, because he wanted her to be abandoned and wicked--but faustine turned out to be a gentleman! gilbert's story-telling and verse-making began very early, but not, i think, in great abundance; his drawing even earlier, and of this there is a great deal. there is nothing very striking in the written fragments that remain, but his drawings even at the age of five are full of vigour. the faces and figures are always rudimentary human beings, sometimes a good deal more, and they are taken through lengthy adventures drawn on the backs of bits of wall paper, of insurance forms, in little books sewn together, or sometimes on long strips glued end to end by his father. these drawings can often be dated exactly, for edward chesterton, who later kept collections of press-cuttings and photographs of his son, had already begun to collect his drawings, writing the date on the back of each. with the earlier ones he may, one sometimes suspects, have helped a little, but it soon becomes easy to distinguish between the two styles. edward chesterton was the most perfect father that could have been imagined to help in the opening of windows on every side. "my father might have reminded people of mr. pickwick, except that he was always bearded and never bald; he wore spectacles and had all the pickwickian evenness of temper and pleasure in the humours of travel." he had, as his son further notes in the _autobiography_, a power of invention which "created for children the permanent anticipation of what is profoundly called a 'surprise.'" the child of today chooses his christmas present in advance and decides between peter pan and the pantomime (when he does not get both). the chesterton children saw their first glimpses of fantasy through the framework of a toy-theatre of which their father was carpenter, scene-painter and scene-shifter, author and creator of actors and actresses a few inches high. gilbert's earliest recollection is of one of these figures in a golden crown carrying a golden key, and his father was all through his childhood a man with a golden key who admitted him into a world of wonders. i think gilbert's father meant more to him than his mother, fond as he was of her. most of their friends seem to feel that cecil was her favorite son. "neither was ever demonstrative," annie firmin says, "i never saw either of them kiss his mother." but in some ways the mother spoilt both boys. they had not the training that a strict mother or an efficient nurse usually accomplishes with the most refractory. gilbert was never refractory, merely absent-minded; but it is doubtful whether he was sent upstairs to wash his hands or brush his hair, except in preparation for a visit or ceremonial occasion ("not even then!" interpolates annie). and it is perfectly certain that he ought to have been so sent several times a day. no one minded if he was late for meals; his father, too, was frequently late and frances during her engagement often saw his mother put the dishes down in the fireplace to keep hot, and wait patiently--in spite of gilbert's description of her as "more swift, relentless and generally radical in her instincts" than his father. annie firmin's earlier memories fit this description better. much as she loved her "aunt," she writes: aunt marie was a bit of a tyrant in her own family! i have been many times at dinner, when there might be a joint, say, and a chicken--and she would say positively to mr. ed, "which will you have, edward?" edward: "i think i'd like a bit of chicken!" aunt m. fiercely: "no, you won't, you'll have mutton!" that happened so often. sometimes alice grosjean, the youngest of aunt m.'s family, familiarly known as "sloper," was there. when asked her preference she would say, diffidently, "i think i'll take a little mutton!" "don't be a fool, alice, you know you like chicken,"--and chicken she got. visitors to the house in later years dwell on mrs. chesterton's immense spirit of hospitality, the gargantuan meals, the eager desire that guests should eat enormously, and the wittiness of her conversation. schoolboy contemporaries of gilbert say that although immensely kind, she alarmed them by a rather forbidding appearance--"her clothes thrown on anyhow, and blackened and protruding teeth which gave her a witchlike appearance. . . . the house too was dusty and untidy." she called them always by their surnames, both when they were little boys and after they grew up, "oldershaw, bentley, solomon." "not only," says miss may chesterton, "did aunt marie address gilbert's friends by their surnames, but frequently added darling to them. i have heard her address bentley when a young man thus; 'bentley darling, come and sit over here,' to which invitation he turned a completely deaf ear as he was perfectly content to remain where he was!" "indiscriminately, she also addressed her maids waiting at table with the same endearment." a letter written when gilbert was only six would seem to show that mrs. chesterton had not yet become so reckless about her appearance, and was still open to the appeal of millinery. ("she always was," says annie.) the letter is from john barker of high street, kensington, and is headed in handwriting, "drapery and millinery establishment, kensington high street, september 21, 1880." madam, we are in receipt of instructions from mr. edward chesterton to wait upon you for the purpose of offering for your selection a bonnet of the latest parisian taste, of which we have a large assortment ready for your choice; or can, if preferred, make you one to order. our assistant will wait upon you at any time you may appoint, unless you would prefer to pay a visit to our millinery department yourself. mr. chesterton informs us that as soon as you have made your selection he will hand us a cheque for the amount. we are given to understand that mr. chesterton proposes this transaction as a remembrance of the anniversary of what, he instructs us to say, he regards as a happy and auspicious event. we have accordingly entered it in our books in that aspect. in conveying, as we are desired to do, mr. chesterton's best wishes for your health and happiness for many future anniversaries, may we very respectfully join to them our own, and add that during many years to come we trust to be permitted to supply you with goods of the best description for cash, on the principle of the lowest prices consistent with excellence of quality and workmanship. we have the honour to be madam your most obedient servants john barker & co. the order entered in their books "under that aspect," the readiness to provide millinery "for cash," convinces you (as g.k. himself says of another story) that dick swiveller really did say, "when he who adores thee has left but the name--in case of letters and parcels." dickens _must_ have dictated the letter to john barker. after all, he was only dead ten years. "aunt marie used to say," adds annie firmin, "that mr. ed married her for her beautiful hair, it was auburn, and very long and wavy. he used to sit behind her in church. she liked pretty clothes, but lacked the vanity to buy them for herself. i have a little blue hanging watch that he bought her one day--she always appreciated little attentions." the playmates of gilbert's childhood are not described in the _autobiography_ except for annie's "long ropes of golden hair." but in one of the innumerable fragments written in his early twenties, he describes a family of girls who had played with him when they were very young together. it is headed, "chapter i. a contrast and a climax," and several other odd bits of verse and narrative introduce the vivian family as early and constant playmates. one of the best ways of feeling a genuine friendly enthusiasm for persons of the other sex, without gliding into anything with a shorter name, is to know a whole family of them. the most intellectual idolatry at one shrine is apt to lose its purely intellectual character, but a genial polytheism is always bracing and platonic. besides, the vivians lived in the same street or rather "gardens" as ourselves, and were amusing as bringing one within sight of what an old friend of mine, named bentley, called with more than his usual gloom and severity of expression, "the remote outpost of kensington society." for these reasons, and a great many much better ones, i was very much elated to have the family, or at least the three eldest girls who represent it to the neighbourhood, standing once more on the well-rubbed lawn of our old garden, where some of my earliest recollections were of subjecting them to treatment such as i considered appropriate to my own well-established character of robber, tying them to trees to the prejudice of their white frocks, and otherwise misbehaving myself in the funny old days, before i went to school and became a son of gentlemen only. i have never been able, in fact i have never tried, to tell which of the three i really liked best. and if the severer usefulness and domesticity of the eldest girl, with her quiet art-colours, and broad, brave forehead as pale as the white roses that clouded the garden, if these maturer qualities in nina demanded my respect more than the levity of the others, i fear they did not prevent me feeling an almost equal tide of affection towards the sleepy acumen and ingrained sense of humour of ida, the second girl and book-reader for the family: or violet, a veritably delightful child, with a temper as formless and erratic as her tempest of red hair. "what old memories this garden calls up," said nina, who like many essentially simple and direct people, had a strong dash of sentiment and a strong penchant for being her own emotional pint-stoup on the traditional subjects and occasions. "i remember so well coming here in a new pink frock when i was a little girl. it wasn't so new when i went away." "i certainly must have been a brute," i replied. "but i have endeavoured to make a lifetime atone for my early conduct." and i fell to thinking how even nina, miracle of diligence and self-effacement, remembered a new pink frock across the abyss of the years. . . . walking with my old friends round the garden, i found in every earth-plot and tree-root the arenas of an active and adventurous life in early boyhood. . . .* [* unpublished fragment.] edward chesterton was a liberal politically and what has been called a liberal christian religiously. when the family went to church--which happened very seldom--it was to listen to the sermons of stopford brooke. some twenty years later, cecil was to remark with amusement that he had as a small boy heard every part of the teaching now (1908) being set out by r. j. campbell under the title, "the new religion." the chesterton liberalism entered into the view of history given to their children, and it produced from gilbert the only poem of his childhood worth quoting. i cannot date it, but the very immature handwriting and curious spelling mark it as early. probably most children have read, or at any rate up to my own generation, had read, aytoun's _lays of the scottish cavaliers_, and played at being cavaliers as a result. but gilbert could not play at being a cavalier. he had learned from his father to be a roundhead, as had every good liberal of that day. what was to be done about it? he took the _lays_ and rewrote them in an excellent imitation of aytoun, but on the opposite side. in view of his own later developments such a line as "drive the trembling papists backwards" has an ironic humour. but one wonders what aytoun himself would have made of a small boy who took his rhythm and sometimes his very words, turned his hero into a traitor ("false montrose") and his traitor argyll into a hero! i have left the spelling untouched. sing of the great lord archibald sing of his glorious name sing of his covenenting faith and his evelasting fame. one day he summoned all his men to meet on cruerchin's brow three thousand covenenting chiefs who no master would allow three thousand knights with clamores drawn and targets tough and strong knights who for the right would ever fight and never bear the wrong. and he creid (his hand uplifted) "soldiers of scotland hear my vow ere the morning shall have risen i will lay the trators low or as ye march from the battle marching back in battle file ye shall there among the corpses find the body of argyll. soldiers soldiers onward onward onward soldiers follow me come, remember ye the crimes of the fiend of fell dundee onward let us draw our clamores let us draw them on our foes now then i am threatened with the fate of false montrose. drive the trembling papists backwards drive away the tory's hord let them tell thier hous of villians they have felt the campbell's sword." and the next morn he arose and he girded on his sword they asked him many questions but he answered not a word. and he summoned all his men and he led them to the field and we creid unto our master that we'd die and never yield. that same morn we drove right backwards all the servants of the pope and our lord archibald we saved from a halter and a rope far and fast fled all the trators far and fast fled all the graemes fled that cursed tribe who lately stained there honour and thier names. chapter iii school days curiously enough gilbert does not in the _autobiography_ speak of any school except st. paul's. he went however first to colet court, usually called at that time bewsher's, from the name of the headmaster. though it is not technically the preparatory school for st. paul's, large numbers of paulines do pass through it. it stands opposite st. paul's in the hammersmith road and must have been felt by gilbert as one thing with his main school experience, for he nowhere differentiates between the two. st. paul's school is an old city foundation which has had among its scholars milton and marlborough, pepys and sir philip francis and a host of other distinguished men. the editor of a correspondence column wrote a good many years later in answer to an enquirer: "yes, milton and g. k. chesterton were both educated at st. paul's school. we fancy however that milton had left before chesterton entered the school." in an early life of sir thomas more we learn of the keen rivalry existing in his day between his own school of st. anthony and st. paul's, of scholastic "disputations" between the two, put an end to by dean colet because they led to brawling among the boys, when the paulines would call those of st. anthony "pigs" and the pigs would call the paulines "pigeons"--from the pigeons of st. paul's cathedral. now, however, st. anthony's is no more, and st. paul's school has long moved to the suburbs and lies about seven minutes' walk along the hammersmith road from warwick gardens. gilbert chesterton was twelve when he entered st. paul's (in january 1887) and he was placed in the second form. his early days at school were very solitary, his chief occupation being to draw all over his books. he drew caricatures of his masters, he drew scenes from shakespeare, he drew prominent politicians. he did not at first make many friends. in the _autobiography_ he makes a sharp distinction between being a child and being a boy, but it is a distinction that could only be drawn by a man. and most men, i fancy, would find it a little difficult to say at what moment the transformation occurred. g.k. seems to put it at the beginning of school life, but the fact that st. paul's was a day-school meant that the transition from home to school, usual in english public-school education,* was never in his case completely made. no doubt he is right in speaking in the _autobiography_ of "the sort of prickly protection like hair" that "grows over what was once the child," of the fact that schoolboys in his time "could be blasted with the horrible revelation of having a sister, or even a christian name." nevertheless, he went home every evening to a father and mother and small brother; he went to his friends' houses and knew their sisters; school and home life met daily instead of being sharply divided into terms and holidays. [* the terminology for english schools came into being largely before the state concerned itself with education. a private school is one run by an individual or a group for private profit. a public school is not run for private profit; any profits there may be are put back into the school. mostly they are run by a board of governors and very many of them hold the succession to the old monastic schools of england (e.g., charterhouse, westminster, st. paul's). they are usually, though not necessarily, boarding schools, and the fees are usually high. elementary schools called board schools were paid for out of local rates and run by elected school boards. they were later replaced by schools run by the county councils.] this fact was of immense significance in gilbert's development. years later he noted as the chief defect of oxford that it consisted almost entirely of people educated at boarding-schools. for good, for evil, or for both, a boy at a day-school is educated chiefly at home. in the atmosphere of st. paul's is found little echo of the dogma of the head master of christ's hospital. "boy! the school is your father! boy! the school is your mother." nor, as far as we know has any pauline been known to desire the substitution of the august abstraction for the guardianship of his own people. friendships formed in this school have a continual reference to home life, nor can a boy possibly have a friend long without making the acquaintance and feeling the influence of his parents and his surroundings. . . . the boys' own amusements and institutions, the school sports, the school clubs, the school magazine, are patronised by the masters, but they are originated and managed by the boys. the play-hours of the boys are left to their several pleasures, whether physical or intellectual, nor have any foolish observations about the battle of waterloo being won on the cricket-field, or such rather unmeaning oracles, yet succeeded in converting the boys' amusements into a compulsory gymnastic lesson. the boys are, within reasonable limits, free.* [* ms. _history of j.d.c_. written about 1894.] gilbert calls the chapter on his school days, "how to be a dunce," and although in mature life he was "on the side of his masters" and grateful to them "that my persistent efforts not to learn latin were frustrated; and that i was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of aristotle and demosthenes," he still contrasts childhood as a time when one "wants to know nearly everything" with "the period of what is commonly called education; that is, the period during which i was being instructed by somebody i did not know about something i did not want to know." the boy who sat next to him in class, lawrence solomon (later senior tutor of university college, london), remembered him as sleepy and indifferent in manner but able to master anything when he cared to take the trouble--as he very seldom did. he was in a class with boys almost all his juniors. lucian oldershaw, who later became his brother-in-law, says of gilbert's own description of his school life that it was as near a pose as gilbert ever managed to get. he wanted desperately to be the ordinary schoolboy, but he never managed to fulfil this ambition. tall, untidy, incredibly clumsy and absent-minded, he was marked out from his fellows both physically and intellectually. when in the later part of his school life some sort of physical exercises were made compulsory, the boys used to form parties to watch his strange efforts on the trapeze or parallel bars. in these early days, he was (he says of himself) "somewhat solitary," but not unhappy, and perfectly good-humoured about the tricks which were inevitably played on a boy who always appeared to be half asleep. "he sat at the back of the room," says mr. fordham, "and never distinguished himself. we thought him the most curious thing that ever was." his schoolfellows noted how he would stride along, "apparently muttering poetry, breaking into inane laughter." the kind of thing he was muttering we learn from a sentence in the _autobiography:_ "i was one day wandering about the streets in that part of north kensington, telling myself stories of feudal sallies and sieges, in the manner of walter scott, and vaguely trying to apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar around me." "i can see him now," wrote mr. fordham, "very tall and lanky, striding untidily along kensington high street, smiling and sometimes scowling as he talked to himself, apparently oblivious of everything he passed; but in reality a far closer observer than most, and one who not only observed but remembered what he had seen." it was only of himself that he was really oblivious. mr. oldershaw remembers that on one occasion on a very cold day they filled his pockets with snow in the playground. when class reassembled, the snow began to melt and pools to appear on the floor. a small boy raised his hand: "please sir, i think the laboratory sink must be leaking again. the water is coming through and falling all over chesterton." the laboratory sink was an old offender and the master must have been short-sighted. "chesterton," he said, "go up to mr. ---and ask him with my compliments to see that the trouble with the sink is put right immediately." gilbert, with water still streaming from both pockets, obediently went upstairs, gave the message and returned without discovering what had happened. the boys who played these jokes on him had at the same time an extraordinary respect, both for his intellectual acquirements and for his moral character. one boy, who rather prided himself in private life on being a man about town, stopped him one day in the passage and said solemnly, "chesterton, i am an abandoned profligate." g.k. replied, "i'm sorry to hear it." "we watched our talk," one of them said to me, "when he was with us." his home and upbringing were felt by some of his schoolfellows to have definitely a puritan tinge about them, although on the other hand the more conservative elements regarded them as politically dangerous. mr. oldershaw relates that his own father, who was a conservative in politics and had also joined the catholic church, seriously warned him against the agnosticism and republicanism of the chesterton household. but even at this age his schoolfellows recognised that he had begun the great quest of his life. "we felt," said oldershaw, "that he was looking for god." i suppose it was in part the keenness of the inner vision that produced the effect of external sleepiness and made it possible to pack gilbert's pockets with snow; but it was also the fact that he was observing very keenly the kind of thing that other people do not bother to observe. i remember my mother telling me, when i first came out, that she had almost ceased trying to draw people's characters and imaginatively construct their home lives, because for the first time in her life she was trying to notice how they were dressed. she was not noticeably successful. gilbert chesterton never even tried to see what everyone else saw. all the time he was seeing qualities in his friends, ideas in literature and possibilities in life. and all this world of imagination had, on his own theory, to be carefully concealed from his masters. in the _autobiography_ he describes himself walking to school fervently reciting verses which he afterwards repeated in class with a determined lack of expression and woodenness of voice; but when he assumes that this is how all boys behave, he surely attributes his own literary enthusiasms far too widely. one would rather gather that he supposed the whole of st. paul's school to be in the conspiracy to conceal their love of literature from their masters! such of his own schoolboy papers as can be found show an imagination rare enough at any age, and an enthusiasm not commonly to be found among schoolboys. a very early one, to judge by the handwriting, is on the advantages for an historical character of having long hair, illustrated by the history of mary queen of scots and charles the first. in the contrast he draws between mary and elizabeth, appear qualities of historical imagination that might well belong to a mature and experienced writer. . . . as in the cause of the fleeting heartless helen, the trojan war is stirred up, and great ajax perishes, and the gentle patroclus is slain, and mighty hector falls, and godlike achilles is laid low, and the dun plains of hades are thickened with the shades of kings, so round this lovely giddy french princess, fall one by one the haughty dauphin, the princely darnley, the accomplished rizzio, the terrible bothwell, and when she dies, she dies as a martyr before the weeping eyes of thousands, and is given a popular pity and regret denied to her rival, with all her faults of violence and vanity, a greater and a purer woman. it must indeed have been a terrible scene, the execution of that unhappy queen, and it is a scene that has been described by too many and too able writers for me to venture on a picture of it. but the continually lamented death of mary of scotland seems to me happy compared with the end of her greater and sterner rival. as i think on the two, the vision of the black scaffold, the grim headsman, the serene captive, and the weeping populace fades from me and is replaced by a sadder vision: the vision of the dimly-lighted state-bedroom of whitehall. elizabeth, haggard and wild-eyed has flung herself prone upon the floor and refuses to take meat or drink, but lies there, surrounded by ceremonious courtiers, but seeing with that terrible insight that was her curse, that she was alone, that their homage was a mockery, that they were waiting eagerly for her death to crown their intrigues with her successor, that there was not in the whole world a single being who cared for her: seeing all this, and bearing it with the iron fortitude of her race, but underneath that invincible silence the deep woman's nature crying out with a bitter cry that she is loved no longer: thus gnawed by the fangs of a dead vanity, haunted by the pale ghost of essex, and helpless and bitter of heart, the greatest of englishwomen passed silently away. of a truth, there are prisons more gloomy than fotheringay and deaths more cruel than the axe. is there no pity due to those who undergo these? it is surprising to read the series of form reports written on a boy who at fifteen or sixteen could do work of this quality. here are the half-yearly reports made by his form masters from his first year in the school at the age of thirteen to the time he left at the age of eighteen. _december 1887_. too much for me: means well by me, i believe, but has an inconceivable knack of forgetting at the shortest notice, is consequently always in trouble, though some of his work is well done, when he does remember to do it. he ought to be in a studio not at school. never troublesome, but for his lack of memory and absence of mind. _july 1888_. wildly inaccurate about everything; never thinks for two consecutive moments to judge by his work: plenty of ability, perhaps in other directions than classics. _december 1888_. fair. improving in neatness. has a very fair stock of general knowledge. _july 1889_. a great blunderer with much intelligence. _december 1889_. means well. would do better to give his time to "modern" subjects. _july 1890_. can get up any work, but originates nothing. _december 1890_. takes an interest in his english work, but otherwise has not done well. _july 1891_. he has a decided literary aptitude, but does not trouble himself enough about school work. _december 1891. report missing_. _july 1892_. not on the same plane with the rest: composition quite futile, but will translate well and appreciate what he reads. not a quick brain, but possessed by a slowly moving tortuous imagination. conduct always admirable. what is much clearer from the mass of notebooks and odd sheets of paper belonging to these years than from the _autobiography_ is the degree to which the two processes of resisting and absorbing knowledge were going on simultaneously. at school he was, he says, asleep but dreaming in his sleep; at home he was still learning literature from his father, going to museums and picture galleries for enjoyment, listening to political talk and engaging in arguments, writing historical plays and acting them, and above all drawing. to most of his early writing it is nearly impossible to affix a date--with the exception of a "dramatic journal," kept by fits and starts during the christmas holidays when he was sixteen. g.k. solemnly tells the reader of this diary to take warning by it, to beware of prolixity, and it does in fact contain many more words to many fewer ideas than any of his later writings. but it is useful in giving the atmosphere of those years. great part is in dialogue, the author appearing throughout as your humble servant, his young brother cecil as the innocent child. the first scene is the rehearsal of a dramatic version of scott's _woodstock_. this has been written by your humble servant who is at the same time engaged on a historic romance. at intervals in the languid rehearsing, endless discussions take place: between oldershaw and g.k. on thackeray, between oldershaw, his father and g.k. on royal supremacy in the church of england. the boys, walking between their two houses, "discuss roman catholicism, supremacy, papal v. protestant persecutions. your humble servant arrives at 11 warwick gardens to meet mr. mawer cowtan, master sidney wells and master william wells. conversation about frederick the great, voltaire and macaulay. cheerful and enlivening discourse on germs, dr. koch, consumption and tuberculosis." "conservative" oldershaw regards his friend as a "red hot raging republican" and it is interesting to note already faint foreshadowings of gilbert's future political views. his parents had made him a liberal but it seemed to him later, as he notes in the _autobiography_, that their generation was insufficiently alive to the condition and sufferings of the poor. open-eyed in so many matters, they were not looking in that particular direction. and so it was only very gradually that he himself began to look. your humble servant read oldershaw elizabeth browning's "cry of the children," which the former could scarcely trust himself to read, but which the latter candidly avowed that he did not like. part and parcel of oldershaw's optimism is a desire not to believe in pictures of real misery, and a desire to find out compensating pleasures. i think there was a good deal in what he said, but at the same time i think that there is real misery, physical and mental, in the low and criminal classes, and i don't believe in crying peace where there is no peace. of his brother, gilbert notes, "innocent child's fault is not a servile reverence for his elder brother, whom he regards, i believe, as a mild lunatic." and oldershaw recalls his own detestation of cecil, who would insist on monopolising the conversation when gilbert's friends wanted to talk to him. "an ugly little boy creeping about," mr. fordham calls him. "cecil had no vanity," writes mrs. kidd, "and thoroughly appreciated the fact that he was not beautiful; when he was about 14 he said at dinner one day: 'i think i shall marry x (a very plain cousin); between us we might produce the missing link.' aunt marie was shocked!" many of the games arise from the skill in drawing of both gilbert and his father. a long history of two of the masters drawn by gilbert shows them in the salvation army, as christy minstrels, as editors of a new revolutionary paper, "la guillotine," as besieged in their office by a mob headed by lord salisbury, the archbishop of canterbury and other conservative leaders. getting tired at last of the adventures of these two mild scholars, gilbert starts a series of shakespeare plays drawn in modern dress. shylock as an aged hebrew vendor of dilapidated vesture, with a tiara of hats, antonio as an opulent and respectable city-merchant, bassanio as a fashionable swell and gratiano as his loud and disreputable "pal" with large checks and a billy-cock hat. portia was attired as a barrister in wig and gown and nerissa as a clerk with a green bag and a pen behind his ear. this being much appreciated, your humble servant questions what portion of the bard of avon he shall next burlesque. the little group seems certainly at this date to be living in a land in which 'tis always afternoon. in one house or another tea-time goes on until signs of dinner make their appearance. the boys only move from one hospitable dining-room to another, or adjourn to their own bedrooms where gilbert piles book on book and reduces even neat shelves to the same chaos that reigns in his own room. the christmas holidays to which the "dramatic journal" belongs came a few months after the founding of the junior debating club, which became so central in gilbert's life and which he treated with a gravity, solemnity even, such as he never showed later for any cause, a gravity untouched by humour. it was a group of about a dozen boys, started with the idea that it should be a shakespeare club, but immediately changed into a general discussion club. they met every week at the home of one or other and after a hearty tea some member read a paper which was then debated. at the age of twenty, when he had left school two years, g.k. wrote a solemn history of this institution in which the question of whether it was right or wrong to insist on penny fines for rowdy behaviour is canvassed with passionate feeling! one boy who was expelled asked to be readmitted, saying, "i feel so lonely without it." gilbert's enthusiasm over this incident could be no greater had he been a bishop welcoming the return of an apostate to the christian fold. i suppose it was partly because of his early solitary life at school, partly because of the general trend of his thought, partly that at this later date he was under the influence of walt whitman and cast back upon his earlier years a sort of glow or haze of whitman idealism. anyhow, the junior debating club became to him a symbol of the ideal friendship. they were knights of the round table. they were jongleurs de dieu. they were the human club through whom and in whom he had made the grand discovery of man. they were his youth personified. the note is still struck in the letters of his engagement period, and it was only forty years later, writing his _autobiography_, that he was able to picture with a certain humorous detachment this group of boys who met to eat buns and criticise the universe. a year after their first meeting, the energy of lucian oldershaw produced a magazine called _the debater_. at first it was turned out at home on a duplicator--the efficiency of the production being such that the author of any given paper was able occasionally to recognise a few words of his own contribution. later it was printed and gives a good record of the meetings and discussions. it shows the energy and ardour of the debaters and also their serious view of themselves and their efforts. at first they are described as mr. c, mr. f, etc. later the full name is given. besides the weekly debates, they started a library, a chess club, a naturalists' society and a sketching club, regular meetings of which are chronicled. "the chairman [g.k.c.] said a few words," runs a record, after some months of existence, "stating his pride at the success of the club, and his belief in the good effect such a literary institution might have as a protest against the lower and unworthy phases of school life. his view having been vehemently corroborated, the meeting broke up." in one fairly typical month papers were read on "three comedies of shakespeare," "pope," and "herodotus," and when no paper was produced there was a discussion on capital punishment. in another, the subjects were "the brontã«s," "macaulay as an essayist," "frank buckland" (the naturalist) and "tennyson." a pretty wide range of reading was called for from schoolboys in addition to their ordinary work, even though on one occasion the secretary sternly notes that the reading of the paper occupied only three and one-half minutes. but they were not daunted by difficulties or afraid of bold attempts. mr. digby d'avigdor on one occasion "delivered a paper entitled 'the nineteenth century: a retrospect.' he gave a slight resumã© of the principal events, with appropriate tribute to the deceased great of this century." mr. bertram, reading a paper on milton, "dealt critically with his various poems, noting the effective style of 'l'allegro,' giving the story of the writing of 'comus' and cursorily analysing 'paradise lost,' and 'paradise regained.'" "after discussing the adaptability of _hamlet_ to the stage, mr. maurice solomon"--who may have been quite fifteen--"passed on to review the chief points in the character of the prince of denmark, concluding with a slight review of the other characters which he did not think shakespeare had given much attention to." in a discussion on the new humorists, we find the secretary "taking grievous umbrage at certain unwarrantable attacks which he considered mr. andrew lang had lately made on these choice spirits." this discussion arose from a paper by the chairman on the new school of poetry "in which, in spite of its good points, he condemned the absence of the sentiment of the moral, which he held to be the really stirring and popular element in literature." evidently some of his friends tended towards a youthful cynicism for in a paper on barrie's _window in thrums_ gilbert apologises to "such of you as are much bitten with the george moore state of mind." the book which describes the rusty emotions and toilsome lives of the thrums weavers will always remain a book that has given me something, and the fact that mine is merely the popular view and that what i feel in it can be equally felt by the majority of fellow-creatures, this fact, such is my hardened and abandoned state, only makes me like the book more. i have long found myself in that hopeless minority that is engaged in protecting the majority of mankind from the attacks of all men. . . . in this sentiment we recognise the g.k. that is to be, but not when we find him seconding mr. bentley in the motion that "a scientific education is much more useful than a classic." "mr. m," reading a paper on herodotus, "gave a minute account of the life of the historian, dwelling much upon the doubt and controversy surrounding his birth and several incidents of his history"; while "mr. f. read a paper on newspapers, tracing their growth from the acta diurna of the later roman empire to the hordes of papers of the present day." perhaps best of all these efforts was that of mr. l.d., who "after describing the governments of england, france, russia, germany and the united states, proceeded to give his opinion on their various merits, first saying that he personally was a republican." of the boys that appear in _the debater_, robert vernã¨de was killed in the great war; laurence solomon at his death in 1940 was senior tutor of university college, london; his brother maurice who became one of the directors of the general electric company is now an invalid. i read a year or so ago an interesting _times_ obituary of mr. bertram, who was director of civil aviation in the air ministry; mr. salter became a principal in the treasury, having practised as a solicitor up to the war; mr. fordham, a barrister, was one of the legal advisers to the ministry of labour and has now retired. the two outstanding "debaters" in g.k.'s life were lucian oldershaw who became his brother-in-law and will often reappear in these pages, and edmund clerihew bentley, his friend of friends. closely united as was the whole group, lucian oldershaw once told me that they were frantically jealous of one another: "we would have done anything to get the first place with gilbert." "but you know," i said "who had it." "yes," he replied, "our jealousy of bentley was overwhelming." mr. bentley became a journalist and was for long on the editorial staff of the _daily telegraph_, but he is best known for his detective stories--especially _trent's last case_--and as the inventor of a special form of rhyme, known from his second name as the clerihew. he wrote the first of these while still at school, and the best were later published in a volume called _biography for beginners_, which g.k. illustrated. everyone has his favourite. my own is: sir christopher wren said "i am going to dine with some men, if anybody calls say i'm designing st. paul's." or possibly: the people of spain think cervantes equal to half-a-dozen dantes, an opinion resented most bitterly by the people of italy. bentley was essentially a holiday as well as term-time companion and when they were not together a large correspondence between the two boys gives some idea of how and where gilbert spent his summer holidays. they are very much schoolboy letters and not worth quoting at full length, but it is interesting to compare both style and content with the later letters. all the letters begin "dear bentley." the first use of his christian name only occurs after both had left school. austria house pier street ventnor, isle of wight (undated, probably 1890) although you dropt some hints about paris when you were last in our humble abode, i presume that this letter, if addressed to your usual habitation, will reach you at some period. ventnor, where, as you will perceive we are, is, i will not say built upon hills, but emptied into the cracks and clefts of rocks so that the geography of the town is curious and involved. . . . my brother is intent upon "the three midshipmen" or "the three admirals" or the three coal-scuttles or some other distinguished trio by that interminable ass kingston. i looked at it today and wondered how i ever could have enjoyed his eternal slave schooners and african stations. i would not give a page of "mansfield park" or a verse of "in memoriam" for all the endless fighting of blacks and boarding of pirates through which the three hypocritical vagabonds ever went. i am getting old. how old it will shortly be necessary for me to state precisely, for, as you doubtless know there is going to be a census. . . . i have been trying to knock into shape a story, such as we spoke about the other day, about the first introduction of tea, and i should be glad of your assistance and suggestions. i think i shall lay the scene in holland where the merits of tea were first largely agitated, and fill the scene with the traditional dutch figures such as i sketch. i find in disraeli's "curiosities of literature" which i consulted before coming away that a french writer wrote an elaborate treatise to prove that tea merchants were always immoral members of society. it would be rather curious to apply the theory to the present day. . . . 11, warwick gardens, kensington. (undated.) i direct this letter to your ancient patrimonial estate unknowing whether it will reach you or where it will reach you if it does; whether you are shooting polar bears on the ice-fields of spitzbergen or cooking missionaries among the cannibals of the south pacific. but wherever you are i find some considerable relief in turning from the lofty correspondence of the secretary (with no disparagement of my much-esteemed friend, oldershaw) to another friend (ifelow-mecallimso as mr. verdant greene said) who can discourse on some other subjects besides the society, and who will not devote the whole of his correspondence to the questions of that excellent and valuable body. the society is a very good thing in its way (being the president i naturally think so) but like other good things, you may have too much of it, and i have had. . . . as i said before, i don't know where you are disporting yourself, beyond some hurried remark about paris which you dropped in our hurried interview in one of the "brilliant flashes of silence" between those imbecile screams and yells and stamping, which even the natural enthusiasm at the prospect of being "broken up" cannot excuse. 6, the quadrant, north berwick, haddington, scotland. (? 1891.) you will probably guess that as far as personal taste and instincts are concerned, i share all your antipathy to the noisy plebian excursionist. a visit to ramsgate during the season and the vision of the crowded, howling sands has left in me feelings which all my radicalism cannot allay. at the same time i think that the lower orders are seen unfavorably when enjoying themselves. in labour and trouble they are more dignified and less noisy. your suggestion as to a series of soliloquies is very flattering and has taken hold of me to the extent of writing a similar ballad on simon de montfort. the order in which they come is rather incongruous, particularly if i include the list i have in mind for the future thus--danton, william iii, simon de montfort, rousseau, david and russell. . . . i rejoice to say that this is a sequestered spot into which hi tiddly hi ti, etc. and all the ills in its train have not penetrated. in these last two letters there are sentences of a kind not to be found anywhere else in chesterton. the disparagement of lucian oldershaw's excessive enthusiasm for the junior debating club, the solemn reprobation of the "imbecile screams and yells and stamping" of the last day at school before the summer holidays, the antipathy expressed for the rowdy enjoyments of the lower orders--these things are not in the least like either the chesterton that was to be or the chesterton that then was. but they are very much like bentley. he was two years younger than chesterton, but far older than his years and seemed indeed to the other boys (and perhaps to himself) like an elderly gentleman smiling a remote amused smile at the enthusiasms of the young. i get the strongest feeling that at this stage chesterton not only admired him--as he was to do all his life--but wanted to be like him, to say the kind of thing he thought bentley would say. this phase did not last, as we shall see; it had gone by the time chesterton was at the slade school. 6, the quadrant, north berwick haddington, scotland. (undated, probably 1891.) dear bentley, we have been here three days and my brother loudly murmurs that we have not yet seen any of "the sights." for my part i abominate sights, and all people who want to look at them. a great deal more instruction, to say nothing of pleasure is to be got out of the nearest haystack or hedgerow taken quietly, than in trotting over two or three counties to see "the view" or "the site" or the extraordinary cliff or the unusual tower or the unreasonable hill or any other monstrosity deforming the face of nature. anybody can make sights but nobody has yet succeeded in making scenery. (excuse the unaccountable pencil drawing in the middle which was drawn unconsciously on the back of the unfinished letter.) . . . 9, south terrace, littlehampton, sussex. (undated.) . . . i agree with you in your admiration for paradise lost, but consider it on the whole too light and childish a book for persons of our age. it is all very well, as small children to read pretty stories about satan and belial, when we have only just mastered our "oedipus" and our herbert spencer, but when we grow older we get to like captain marryat and mr. kingston and when we are men we know that cinderella is much better than any of those babyish books. as regards one question which you asked, i may remark that the children of israel [presumably the solomons] have not gone unto horeb, neither unto sittim, but unto the land that is called shropshire they went, and abode therein. and they came unto a city, even unto the city that is called shrewsbury, and there they builded themselves an home, where they might abide. and their home was in the land that was called castle street and their home was the 25th tabernacle in that land. and they abode with certain of their own kin until their season be over and gone. and lo! they spake unto me by letter, saying, "heard ye aught of him that is called bentley? is he in the house of his fathers or has he come unto a strange land?" here endeth the 2nd lesson. hotel de lille & d'albion, 223, rue st. honorã©, paris. (undated, probably 1892.) . . . they showed us over the treasures of the cathedral, among which, as was explained by the guide, who spoke a little english, was a cross given by louis xiv to _"meess"_ lavalliã¨re. i thought that concession to the british system of titles was indeed touching. i also thought, when reflecting what the present was, and where it was and then to whom it was given, that this showed pretty well what the religion of the bourbon regime was and why it has become impossible since the revolution. grand hotel du chemin de fer, arromanches (calvados) (undated) . . . art is universal. this remark is not so irrelevant and horace greeley-like as it may appear. i have just had a demonstration of its truth on the coach coming down here. two very nice little french boys of cropped hair and restless movements were just in front of us and my pater having discovered that the book they had with them was a prize at a paris school, some slight conversation arose. not thinking my french altogether equal to a prolonged interview, i took out a scrap of paper and began, with a fine carelessness to draw a picture of napoleon i, hat, chin, attitude, all complete. this, of course, was gazed at rapturously by these two young inheritors of france's glory and it ended in my drawing them unlimited goblins to keep for the remainder of the interview. in may 1891, the chairman of the j.d.c. attained the maturity of seventeen. the secretary then rose and in a speech in which he extolled the merits of the chairman as a chairman, and mentioned the benefit which the junior debating club received on the day of which this was the anniversary, viz., the natal day of mr. chesterton, proposed that a vote wishing him many happy returns of the day and a long continuance in the chair of the club should be passed. this was carried with acclamations. the chairman replied after restoring order. . . . naturally this question of order among a crowd of boys loomed large. at the beginning a number of rules were passed giving great powers to the chairman, "which that gentleman," he says of himself, "lenient by temperament and republican by principles, certainly would never have put in force. . . . it was seldom enough," he continues: that a boy of fifteen* found himself in the position of the chairman, an attitude of command and responsibility over a body of his friends and equals, and it was not to be expected that they would easily take to the state of things. nor was the chairman himself, like the secretary, protected and armed by any personal aptitude for practical proceedings. but solely by the certain degree of respect entertained for his character and acquirements. this respect, sincere and even excessive as it frequently was, contrasted somewhat humorously with the common inattention to questions of order, nor could anything be more noisy than the loyalty of fordham and langdon davies, with the exception of their interruptions. it may then fairly be said that the troubles and discussions of the first months of the club's existence centred practically round the question of order, the first of the great difficulties of this most difficult enterprise. how boys who could scarcely be got to behave quietly under the strictest schoolmasters could ever be brought to obey the rebuke of their equal and schoolfellow: how a heterogeneous pack of average schoolboys could organise themselves into a self-governing republic, these were problems of real and stupendous difficulty. the fines of a penny and of twopence, which were instituted at the first meeting, were found hopelessly incompetent to cope with the bursts of oblivious hilarity. fordham in particular, whose constant breaches of order threatened to exhaust even the extensive treasury of that spoilt and opulent young gentleman, soon left calculation far behind, nor can the story be better or more brightly told than by himself. "mr. f.," he wrote, "at one time, after considerable calculation found that he was in debt to the extent of some 10 or 11 shillings; but as he felt that by refusing to pay the sum he would be striking a blow for the liberty of the subject, he manfully held out against what he considered an unjust punishment for such diminutive frivolities as he had indulged in." . . . at times incidents of a disturbing and playful nature have roused the wrath of the chairman and secretary to a pitch awful to behold. at one time mr. h. (a member who soon resigned) spent a considerable part of a meeting under the table, till he found himself used as a public footstool and a doormat combined. at another as mr. bentley was departing from the scene of chaos a penny bun of the sticky order caressingly stung his honoured cheek, sped upon its errand of mercy by the unerring aim of mr. f.** [* he was, in fact, sixteen when the j.d.c. began.] [** ms. _history of the j.d.c_.] mr. fordham well remembers how g.k. one day took him aside at the oldershaws' house and told him that he really must be less exuberant. this historic occasion was always alluded to later as "the day on which the chairman spoke seriously to mr. f." after various resignations order was restored, and a little later two of the chief recalcitrants asked to be received back into the club. "i feel so lonely without it," one of them had remarked; and g.k. comments, "this has always appeared to the present writer one of the most important speeches in the history of the club. . . . the junior debating club had come through its moments of difficulty and was a fact and an establishment." nor was the circulation of _the debater_ long confined to members of the club and their own circle of friends and relatives. some of the boys had no doubt a regular allowance, but probably a small one. gilbert himself says in his diary that he had no income "except errant sixpences." and printers' bills had to be paid. moreover in the first number the editor lucian oldershaw confessed frankly that one reason for the paper's existence was "that the society may not degenerate into the position of a mutual admiration society by totally lacking the admiration of outsiders." the staff were able immediately to note, "any apprehensions we may have felt on the morning of the publication of _the debater_ were speedily dispelled, when by nightfall we had disposed of all our copies." of a later issue the energetic editor sold sixty-five copies in the course of the summer holidays. masters, too, began to read it and at last a copy was hid on the table of the high master, mr. walker. cecil chesterton describes the high master as a gigantic man with a booming voice. some paulines believed he had given gilbert the first inspiration for the personality of "sunday" in _the man who was thursday_. another contemporary says that he was reputed to take no interest in anything except examination successes, and that the boys were amazed at the effect on him of reading _the debater_. reading in the light of his future, one sees qualities in gilbert's work not to be found in that of the other contributors, but it is worth noting that the j.d.c. members were in fact a quite unusually able group. almost every one of them took brilliant scholarships to oxford or cambridge; the high master had never boasted of so many scholarships from one set of boys. and in reading _the debater_ (an enjoyment i wish others could share) one has to bear in mind the relative ages of the contributors. it is, i think, striking that all these boys should have recognised gilbert's quality and accepted his leadership, for they were all a year or so younger than he was and yet were in the same form. they knew that this was only because g.k. would not bother to do his school work; still, i think that at that age they showed insight by knowing it. gilbert's work is to be found in every number of _the debater_--usually verse as well as prose. both fordham and oldershaw remember most vividly the effect of reading a fanciful essay on dragons in the first number. "the dragon," it began, "is the most cosmopolitan of impossibilities." and the boys, rolling the words on their tongues, murmured to one another, "this is literature." except for a very occasional flash the one element not yet visible in these _debater_ essays is humour. this is curious, because some of his most brilliant fooling belongs to the same period. in a collection made after his death, _the coloured lands_ is an illustrated jeu d'esprit of 1891, _half hours in hades:_ "an elementary handbook of demonology" which is as amusing a thing as he ever wrote. the drawings he made for it show specimens of the evolution of various types of devil into various types of humans: the devils themselves are carefully classified--the common or garden serpent (tentator hortensis), the red devil (diabolus mephistopheles) the blue devil (caeruleus lugubrius) etc. mr. j. milton's "specimen" is discussed and various methods of pursuing observations in supernatural history which "possesses an interest which will remain after health, youth and even life have departed." there is nothing of this kind in _the debater_. besides the historical soliloquies mentioned in the letter to bentley, there are poems in which he is beginning to feel after his religious philosophy. one of these in a very early number shows considerable power for a boy not yet seventeen. adveniat regnum tuum not that the widespread wings of wrong brood o'er a moaning earth, not from the clinging curse of gold, the random lot of birth; not from the misery of the weak, the madness of the strong, goes upward from our lips the cry, "how long, oh lord, how long?" not only from the huts of toil, the dens of sin and shame, from lordly halls and peaceful homes the cry goes up the same; deep in the heart of every man, where'er his life be spent, there is a noble weariness, a holy discontent. where'er to mortal eyes has come, in silence dark and lone, some glimmer of the far-off light the world has never known, some ghostly echoes from a dream of earth's triumphal song, then as the vision fades we cry, "how long, oh lord, how long?" long ages, from the dawn of time, men's toiling march has wound towards the world they ever sought, the world they never found; still far before their toiling path the glimmering promise lay, still hovered round the struggling race, a dream by night and day. mid darkening care and clinging sin they sought their unknown home, yet ne'er the perfect glory came--lord, will it ever come? the weeding of earth's garden broad from all its growths of wrong, when all man's soul shall be a prayer, and all his life a song. aye, though through many a starless night we guard the flaming oil, though we have watched a weary watch, and toiled a weary toil, though in the midnight wilderness, we wander still forlorn, yet bear we in our hearts the proof that god shall send the dawn. deep in the tablets of our hearts he writes that yearning still, the longing that his hand hath wrought shall not his hand fulfil? though death shall close upon us all before that hour we see, the goal of ages yet is there--the good time yet to be: therefore, tonight, from varied lips, in every house and home, goes up to god the common prayer, "father, thy kingdom come."* [* _the debater_, vol. i. march-april, 1891.] gilbert's prose work in _the debater_ must have been little less surprising to any master who had merely watched him slumbering at a desk. his historical romance "the white cockade" is immature and unimportant. but essays on spenser, milton, pope, gray, cowper, burns, wordsworth, "humour in fiction," "boys' literature," sir walter scott, browning, the english dramatists, showed a range and a quality of literary criticism alike surprising. perhaps most surprising, however, is the fact that all this does not seem to have made clear to either masters or parents the true nature of gilbert's vocation. he suffered at this date from having too many talents. for he still went on drawing and his drawings seemed to many the most remarkable thing about him, and were certainly the thing he most enjoyed doing. even now his school work had not brought him into the highest form--called not the sixth, as in most schools, but the eighth: the highest form he ever reached was 6b. but in the summer term of 1892 he entered a competition for a prize poem, and won it. the subject chosen was st. francis xavier. i give the poem in appendix a. it is not as notable as some other of his work at that time: what is interesting is that in it this schoolboy expresses with some power a view he was later to explode yet more powerfully. he might have claimed for himself what he said of earlier writers--it is not true that they did not see our modern difficulties: they saw through them. never before had this contest been won by any but an eighth form boy, and almost immediately afterwards gilbert was amazed to find a short notice posted on the board: "g. k. chesterton to rank with the eighth.--f. w. walker, high master." the high master at any rate had travelled far from the atmosphere of the form reports when mrs. chesterton visited him in 1894 to ask his advice about her son's future. for he said, "six foot of genius. cherish him, mrs. chesterton, cherish him." chapter iv art schools and university college when all gilbert's friends were at oxford or cambridge, he used to say how glad he was that his own choice had been a different one. he never sighed for oxford. he never regretted his rather curious experiences at an art school--two art schools really, although he only talks of one in the _autobiography_, for he was for a short time at a school of art in st. john's wood (calderon's, lawrence solomon thought), whence he passed to the slade school. he was there from 1892 to 1895 and during part of that time he attended lectures on english literature at university college. the chapter on the experiences of the next two years is called in the _autobiography_, "how to be a lunatic," and there is no doubt that these years were crucial and at times crucifying in gilbert's life. during a happily prolonged youth (he was now eighteen and a half) he had developed very slowly, but normally. surrounded by pleasant friendships and home influences he had never really become aware of evil. now it broke upon him suddenly--probably to a degree exaggerated by his strong imagination and distorted by the fact that he was undergoing physical changes usually belonging to an earlier age. towards the end of his school life gilbert's voice had not yet broken. his mother took him to a doctor to be overhauled and was told that his brain was the largest and most sensitive the doctor had ever seen. "a genius or an idiot" was his verdict on the probabilities. above all things she was told to avoid for him any sort of shock. physically, mentally, spiritually he was on a very large scale and probably for that reason of a slow rate of development. the most highly differentiated organisms are the slowest to mature, and without question gilbert did mature very late. he was now passing through the stage described by keats: "the imagination of a boy is healthy and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between"--a period unhealthy or at least ill-focussed. intellectually gilbert suffered at this time from an extreme scepticism. as he expressed it he "felt as if everything might be a dream" as if he had "projected the universe from within." the agnostic doubts the existence of god. gilbert at moments doubted the existence of the agnostic. morally his temptations seem to have been in some strange psychic region rather than merely physical. the whole period is best summarised in a passage from the _autobiography_, for looking back after forty years gilbert still saw it as deeply and darkly significant: as both a mental and moral extreme of danger. there is something truly menacing in the thought of how quickly i could imagine the maddest, when i had never committed the mildest crime . . . there was a time when i had reached that condition of moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of wilde, that "atys with the blood-stained knife were better than the thing i am." i have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of wilde, but i could at this time imagine the worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more normal passion; the point is that the whole mood was overpowered and oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination. as bunyan, in his morbid period, described himself as prompted to utter blasphemies, i had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images; lunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide.* [* pp. 88-9.] two of his intimate friends, finding at this time a notebook full of these horrible drawings, asked one another, "is chesterton going mad?" he dabbled too in spiritualism until he realised that he had reached the verge of forbidden and dangerous ground: i would not altogether rule out the suggestion of some that we were playing with fire; or even with hell-fire. in the words that were written for us there was nothing ostensibly degrading, but any amount that was deceiving. i saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify with complete certainty, that something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will. whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers, good, bad, or indifferent, which are external to humanity, i would not myself attempt to decide. the only thing i will say with complete confidence, about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies. the lies may be larks or they may be lures to the imperilled soul or they may be a thousand other things; but whatever they are, they are not truths about the other world; or for that matter about this world.* [*_autobiography_, p. 77.] he told father o'connor some years later* that "he had used the planchette freely at one time, but had to give it up on account of headaches ensuing . . . 'after the headaches came a horrid feeling as if one were trying to get over a bad spree, with what i can best describe as a bad smell in the mind.'" [*_father brown on chesterton,_ p. 74.] idling at his work he fell in with other idlers and has left a vivid description in a _daily news_ article called, "the diabolist," of one of his fellow students. . . . it was strange, perhaps, that i liked his dirty, drunken society; it was stranger still, perhaps, that he liked my society. for hours of the day he would talk with me about milton or gothic architecture; for hours of the night he would go where i have no wish to follow him, even in speculation. he was a man with a long, ironical face, and close red hair; he was by class a gentleman, and could walk like one, but preferred, for some reason, to walk like a groom carrying two pails. he looked like a sort of super-jockey; as if some archangel had gone on the turf. and i shall never forget the half-hour in which he and i argued about real things for the first and last time. . . . he had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of his soul. a common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion produced humility or humility a simple joy; but he admitted both. he only said, "but shall i not find in evil a life of its own? granted that for every woman i ruin one of those red sparks will go out; will not the expanding pleasure of ruin . . ." "do you see that fire?" i asked. "if we had a real fighting democracy, some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are." "perhaps," he said, in his tired, fair way. "only what you call evil i call good." he went down the great steps alone, and i felt as if i wanted the steps swept and cleaned. i followed later, and as i went to find my hat in the low, dark passage where it hung, i suddenly heard his voice again, but the words were inaudible. i stopped, startled; but then i heard the voice of one of the vilest of his associates saying, "nobody can possibly know." and then i heard those two or three words which i remember in every syllable and cannot forget. i heard the diabolist say, "i tell you i have done everything else. if i do that i shan't know the difference between right and wrong." i rushed out without daring to pause; and as i passed the fire i did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of god. i have since heard that he died; it may be said, i think, that he committed suicide; though he did it with tools of pleasure, not with tools of pain. god help him, i know the road he went; but i have never known or even dared to think what was that place at which he stopped and refrained.* [* quoted in _g. k. chesterton: a criticism_. alston rivers ltd. 1908, pp. 20-22.] revulsion from the atmosphere of evil took gilbert to no new thing but to a strengthening of old ties and a mystic renewal of them. the j.d.c. was idealised into a mystical city of friends: a list i know a friend, very strong and good. he is the best friend in the world, i know another friend, subtle and sensitive. he is certainly the best friend on earth. i know another friend: very quiet and shrewd, there is no friend so good as he. i know another friend, who is enigmatical and reluctant, he is the best of all. i know yet another: who is polished and eager, he is far better than the rest. i know another, who is young and very quick, he is the most beloved of all friends, i know a lot more and they are all like that. amen. the cosmic factories what are little boys made of? bentley is made of hard wood with a knot in it, a complete set of browning and a strong spring; oldershaw of a box of lucifer matches and a stylographic pen; lawrence of a barrister's wig: files of punch and salt, maurice of watch-wheels, three riders and a clean collar. vernã¨de is made of moonlight and tobacco, bertram is mostly a handsome black walking-stick. waldo is a nice cabbage, with a vanishing odour of cigarettes, salter is made of sand and fire and an university extension ticket. but the strongest element in all can not be expressed; i think it is a sort of star.* [* from _the notebook_.] there are fragments of a morality play entitled "the junior debating club," of a modern novel in which everyone of the debaters makes his appearance, of a mediaeval story called "the legend of sir edmund of the brotherhood of the jongleurs de dieu." notes, fragments, letters, all show an intense individual interest that covered the life of each of his friends. if one of them is worried, he worries too; if one rejoices, he rejoices exceedingly. they write to him about their ideas and views, their relations with one another, their reactions in the world of oxford life, their love affairs. "i am in need of some literary tonic or blood-letting," says vernã¨de, "which you alone can supply." "i only hope," writes bertram, "you may be as much use in the world in future as you have been in the past to your friends." "most of the absent club," writes salter separated from the others, "lie together in my pocket at this moment." and gilbert writes in _the notebook:_ an idyll tea is made; the red fogs shut round the house but the gas burns. i wish i had at this moment round the table a company of fine people. two of them are at oxford and one in scotland and two at other places. but i wish they would all walk in now, for the tea is made. gilbert was devoted to them all. but as we have seen, bentley's was the supreme friendship of his youth. it was a friendship in foolery as we are told by the dedication of _greybeards at play:_ he was through boyhood's storm and shower my best my nearest friend, we wore one hat, smoked one cigar one standing at each end. it was a deeply serious friendship as we are told in the dedication of _the man who was thursday_. with bentley alone he shared the doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain, and day had broken on the streets ere it broke upon the brain. most young men write or at least begin novels of which they are themselves the heroes. gilbert wrote and illustrated a fairy story about a boyish romance of lucian oldershaw's while two unfinished novels have bentley for hero. he is, too, in the mediaeval story, sir edmund of the brotherhood of the jongleurs de dieu. gilbert sings, like all young poets, of first love--but it is bentley's not his own: he was as much excited about a girl bentley had fallen in love with as if he had fallen in love with her himself. and where a london street has a special significance one discovers it is because of a memory of bentley's. to bentley then, with whom all was shared, gilbert wrote, when through friendship and the goodness of things he had come out again into the daylight. the second thought that had saved him had largely grown out of the first. the j.d.c. meant friendship. friendship meant the highest of all good things and all good things called for gratitude. as he gave thanks he drew near to god. dunedin lodge forth street north berwick. (undated, but probably long vac., 1894.) your letter was most welcome: in which, however, it does not differ widely from most of your letters. i read somewhere in some fatuous complete letter-writer or something, that it is correct to imitate the order of subjects, etc. observed by your correspondent. in obedience to this rule of breeding i will hurriedly remark that my holiday has been nice enough in itself; we walk about; lie on the sand; go and swim in the sea when it generally rains; and the combination gets in our mouths and we say the name of the professor in the "water babies." inwardly speaking, i have had a funny time. a meaningless fit of depression, taking the form of certain absurd psychological worries came upon me, and instead of dismissing it and talking to people, i had it out and went very far into the abysses, indeed. the result was that i found that things when examined, necessarily _spelt_ such a mystically satisfactory state of things, that without getting back to earth, i saw lots that made me certain it is all right. the vision is fading into common day now, and i am glad. the frame of mind was the reverse of gloomy, but it would not do for long. it is embarrassing, talking with god face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend. and in another letter: a cosmos one day being rebuked by a pessimist replied, "how can you who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter." moral. you should not look a gift universe in the mouth. another powerful influence in the direction of mental health was the discovery of walt whitman's poetry. "i shall never forget," lucian oldershaw writes, "reading to him from the canterbury walt whitman in my bedroom at west kensington. the sã©ance lasted from two to three hours, and we were intoxicated with the excitement of the discovery." for some time now we shall find gilbert dismissing belief in any positive existence of evil and treating the universe on the whitman principle of jubilant and universal acceptance. he writes, too, in the whitman style. by far the most important of his notebooks is one which, by amazing good fortune, can be dated, beginning in 1894 and continuing for several years. in its attitude to man it is whitmanesque to a high degree, yet it is also most characteristically chestertonian. whitman is content with a shouting, roaring optimism about life and humanity. chesterton had to find for it a philosophical basis. heartily as he disliked the literary pessimism of the hour, he was not content simply to exchange one mood for another. for whether he was conscious of it at the time or not, he did later see walt whitman's outlook as a mood and not a philosophy. it was a mood, however, that chesterton himself never really lost, solely because he did discover the philosophy needed to sustain it. and thereby, even in this early notebook, he goes far beyond whitman. even so early he knew that a philosophy of man could not be a philosophy of man only. he already _feels_ a presence in the universe: it is evening and into the room enters again a large indiscernable presence. is it a man or a woman? is it one long dead or yet to come? that sits with me in the evening. this again might have been only a mood--had he not found the philosophy to sustain it too. it is remarkable how much of this philosophy he had arrived at in the notebook, before he had come to know catholics. indeed the notebook seems to me so important that it needs a chapter to itself with abundant quotation. meanwhile, what was gilbert doing about his work at university college? professor fred brown told lawrence solomon that when he was at the slade school he always seemed to be writing and while listening to lectures he was always drawing. it is probably true that, as cecil chesterton says, he shrank from the technical toils of the artist as he never did later from those of authorship; and none of the professors regarded him as a serious art student. they pointed later to his illustrations of _biography for beginners_ as proof that he never learnt to draw. yet how many of the men who did learn seriously could have drawn those sketches, full of crazy energy and vitality? i know nothing about drawing, but anyone may know how brilliant are the illustrations to _greybeards at play_ or _biography for beginners_, and later to mr. belloc's novels. and anyone can see the power of line with which he drew in his notebooks unfinished suggestions of humanity or divinity. anyone, too, can recognise a portrait of a man, and faces full of character continue to adorn g.k.'s exercise books. of living models he affected chiefly gladstone, balfour, and joe chamberlin. in hours of thought he made drawings of our lord with a crown of thorns or nailed to a cross--these suddenly appear in any of his books between fantastic drawings or lecture notes. as the mind wandered and lingered the fingers followed it, and as gilbert listened to lectures, he would even draw on the top of his own notes. he had always had facility and that facility increased, so that in later years he often completed in a couple of hours the illustrations to a novel of belloc's. nor were these drawings merely illustrations of an already completed text, for mr. belloc has told me that the characters were often half suggested to him by his friend's drawings. on one, at any rate, of his vacations, gilbert went to italy, and two letters to bentley show much of the way his thoughts were going: hotel new york florence. (undated, probably 1894.) dear bentley, i turn to write my second letter to you and my first to grey [maurice solomon], just after having a very interesting conversation with an elderly american like colonel newcome, though much better informed, with whom i compared notes on botticelli, ruskin, carlyle, emerson and the world in general. i asked him what he thought of whitman. he answered frankly that in america they were "hardly up to him." "we have one town, boston," he said precisely, "that has got up to browning." he then added that there was one thing everyone in america remembered: whitman himself. the old gentleman quite kindled on this topic, "whitman was a real man. a man who was so pure and strong that we could not imagine him doing an unmanly thing anywhere." it was odd words to hear at a table d'hã´te, from your next door neighbour: it made me quite excited over my salad. you see that this humanitarianism in which we are entangled asserts itself where, by all guidebook laws, it should not. when i take up my pen to write to you, i am thinking more of a white-moustached old yankee at an hotel than about the things i have seen within the same 24 hours: the frescoes of santa croce, the illuminations of st. marco; the white marbles of the tower of giotto; the very madonnas of raphael, the very david of michael angelo. throughout this tour, in pursuance of our theory of travelling, we have avoided the guide: he is the death-knell of individual liberty. once only we broke through our rule and that was in favour of an extremely intelligent, nay impulsive young italian in santa maria novella, a church where we saw some of the most interesting pieces of mediaeval painting i have ever seen, interesting not so much from an artistic as from a moral and historical point of view. particularly noticeable was the great fresco expressive of the grandest mediaeval conception of the communion of saints, a figure of christ surmounting a crowd of all ages and stations, among whom were not only dante, petrarca, giotto, etc., etc., but plato, cicero, and best of all, arius. i said to the guide, in a tone of expostulation, "heretico!" (a word of impromptu manufacture). whereupon he nodded, smiled and was positively radiant with the latitudinarianism of the old italian painter. it was interesting for it was a fresh proof that even the early church united had a period of thought and tolerance before the dark ages closed around it. there is one thing that i must tell you more of when we meet, the tower of giotto. it was built in a square of florence, near the cathedral, by a self-made young painter and architect who had kept sheep as a boy on the tuscan hills. it is still called "the shepherd's tower." what i want to tell you about is the series of bas-reliefs, which giotto traced on it, representing the creation and progress of man, his discovery of navigation, astronomy, law, music and so on. it is religious in the grandest sense, but there is not a shred of doctrine (even the fall is omitted) about this history in stone. if walt whitman had been an architect, he would have built such a tower, with such a story on it. as i want to go out and have a good look at it before we start for venice tomorrow, i must cut this short. i hope you are enjoying yourself as much as i am, and thinking about me half as much as i am about you. your very sincere friend, gilbert k. chesterton. no one would have enjoyed more than gilbert rereading this letter in after years and noting the suggestion that the fifteenth century belonged to the early church and preceded the dark ages. and i think, too, that even in giotto's tower, he might later have discovered some roots of doctrine. grand hotel de milan (undated) dear bentley, i write you a third letter before coming back, while venice and verona are fresh in my mind. of the former i can really only discourse viva voce. imagine a city, whose very slums are full of palaces, whose every other house wall has a battered fresco, or a gothic bas-relief; imagine a sky fretted with every kind of pinnacle from the great dome of the salute to the gothic spires of the ducal palace and the downright arabesque orientalism of the minarets of st. mark's; and then imagine the whole flooded with a sea that seems only intended to reflect sunsets, and you still have no idea of the place i stopped in for more than 48 hours. thence we went to verona, where romeo and juliet languished and dante wrote most of "hell." the principal products (1) tombs: particularly those of the scala, a very good old family with an excellent taste in fratricide. their three tombs (one to each man i mean: one man, one grave) are really glorious examples of three stages of gothic: of which more when we meet. (2) balconies: with young ladies hanging over them; really quite a preponderating feature. whether this was done in obedience to local associations and in expectation of a romeo, i can't say. i can only remark that if such was the object, the supply of juliets seemed very much in excess of the demand. (3) roman remains: on which, however, i did not pronounce a soliloquy beginning, "wonderful people . . ." which is the correct thing to do. just as i get to this i receive your letter and resolve to begin another sheet of paper. i did read rosebery's speech and was more than interested; i was stirred. the old order (of parliamentary forms, peerages, whiggism and right honourable friends) has changed, yielding place to the new (of industrialism, county council sanitation, education and the kingdom of heaven at hand) and, whatever the archbishop of canterbury may say, god fulfils himself in many ways, even by local government. . . . several things in your letter require notice. first the accusation levelled against me of being prejudiced against professor huxley, i repel with indignation and scorn. you are not prejudiced against cheese because you like oranges; and though the professor is not isaiah or st. francis or whitman or richard le gallienne (to name some of those whom i happen to affect) i should be the last person in the world to say a word against an earnest, able, kind-hearted and most refreshingly rational man: by far the best man of his type i know. as to what you say on education generally, i am entirely with you, but it will take a good interview to say how much. as for the little solomons, i am prepared to [be] fond of all of them, as i am of all children, even the grubby little mendicants that run these italian streets. i am glad you and grey have pottered. potter again. i have had such a nice letter from lawrence. it makes me think it is all going "to be the fair beginning of a time." had the months of art study only developed in gilbert chesterton his power of drawing, they might still have been worthwhile. but they gave him, too, a time to dream and to think which working for a university degree would never have allowed. his views and his mind were developing fast, and he was also developing a power to which we owe some of his best work--depth of vision. most art criticism is the work of those who never could have been artists--which is possibly why it tends to be so critical. gilbert, who could perhaps have been an artist, preferred to appreciate what the artist was trying to say and to put into words what he read on the canvas. hence both in his _watts_ and his _blake_ we get what some of us ask of an art critic--the enlargement of our own powers of vision. this is what made ruskin so great an art critic, a fact once realised, today forgotten. he may have made a thousand mistakes, he had a multitude of foolish prejudices, but he opened the eyes of a whole generation to see and understand great art. g.k. was to begin his published writings with poetry and art criticism--in other words with vision. and this vision he partly owed to the slade school. here is a letter (undated) to bentley containing a hint of what eight years later became a book on watts: on saturday i saw two exhibitions of pictures. the first was the royal academy, where i went with salter. there was one picture there, though the walls were decorated with frames very prettily. as to the one picture, if you look at an academy catalogue you will see "jonah": by g. f. watts, and you will imagine a big silly picture of a whale. but if you go to burlington house you will see something terrible. a spare, wild figure, clad in a strange sort of green with his head flung so far back that his upper part is a miracle of foreshortening, his hands thrust out, his face ghastly with ecstasy, his dry lips yelling aloud, a figure of everlasting protest and defiance. and as a background (perfect in harmony of colour) you have the tracery of the assyrian bas-reliefs, such as survive in wrecks in the british museum, a row of those processions of numberless captives bowing before smiling kings: a cruel sort of art. and the passionate energy of that lonely screaming figure in front, makes you think of a great many things besides assyrians: among others of some words of renan: i quote from memory: "but the trace of israel will be eternal. she it was who alone among the tyrannies of antiquity, raised her voice for the helpless, the oppressed, the forgotten." but this only expresses a fraction of it. the only thing to do is to come and look at this excited gentleman with bronze skin and hair that approaches green, his eyes simply white with madness. and jonah said, "yea, i do well to be angry: even unto death." he had learnt to look at colour, to look at line, to describe pictures. but far more important than this, he could now create in the imagination gardens and sunsets and sheer colour, so as to give to his novels and stories pictorial value, to his fantasies glow, and to his poetry vision of the realities of things. in his very first volume of essays, _the defendant_, were to be passages that could be written only by one who had learnt to draw. for instance, in "a defence of skeletons": the actual sight of the little wood, with its grey and silver sea of life is entirely a winter vision. so dim and delicate is the heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders' webs. in the year 1895, in which g.k. left art for publishing, he came of age "with a loud report." he writes to bentley: being twenty-one years old is really rather good fun. it is one of those occasions when you remember the existence of all sorts of miscellaneous people. a cousin of mine, alice chesterton, daughter of my uncle arthur, writes me a delightfully cordial letter from berlin, where she is a governess; and better still, my mother has received a most amusing letter from an old nurse of mine, an exceptionally nice and intelligent nurse, who writes on hearing that it is my twenty-first birthday. billy (an epithet is suppressed) gave me a little notebook and a little photograph frame. the first thing i did with the notebook was to make a note of his birthday. the first thing i shall do with the frame will be to get grey to give me a photograph of him to put into it. yes, it is not bad, being twenty-one, in a world so full of kind people. . . . i have just been out and got soaking and dripping wet; one of my favourite dissipations. i never enjoy weather so much as when it is driving, drenching, rattling, washing rain. as mr. meredith says in the book you gave me, "rain, o the glad refresher of the grain, and welcome waterspouts of blessed rain." (it is in a poem called "earth and a wedded woman," which is fat.) seldom have i enjoyed a walk so much. my sister water was all there and most affectionate. everything i passed was lovely, a little boy pickabacking another little boy home, two little girls taking shelter with a gigantic umbrella, the gutters boiling like rivers and the hedges glittering with rain. and when i came to our corner the shower was over, and there was a great watery sunset right over no. 80, what mr. ruskin calls an "opening into eternity." eternity is pink and gold. this may seem a very strange rant, but it is one of my "specimen days." i suppose you would really prefer me to write as i feel, and i am so constituted that these daily incidents get me that way. yes, i like rain. it means something, i am not sure what; something freshening, cleaning, washing out, taking in hand, not caring-a-damn-what-you-think, doing-its-duty, robust, noisy, moral, wet. it is the baptism of the church of the future. yesterday afternoon (sunday) lawrence and maurice came here. we were merely infants at play, had skipping races round the garden and otherwise raced. ("runner, run thy race," said confucius, "and in the running find strength and reward.") after that we tried talking about magnus, and came to some hopeful conclusions. magnus is all right. as for lawrence and grey, if there is anything righter than all right, they are that. . . . there is an expression in meredith's book which struck me immensely: "the largeness of the evening earth." the sensation that the cosmos has all its windows open is very characteristic of evening, just as it is at this moment. i feel very good. everything out of the window looks very, very flat and yellow: i do not know how else to describe it. it is like the benediction at the end of the service. chapter v the notebook i am writing this chapter at a table facing notre dame de paris in front of a cafã© filled with arguing french workmen--in the presence of god and of man; and i feel as if i understood the one hatred of g.k.'s life: his loathing of pessimism. "is a man proud of losing his hearing, eyesight or sense of smell? what shall we say of him who prides himself on beginning as an intellectual cripple and ending as an intellectual corpse?"* [* from _the notebook_.] some prophecies woe unto them that keep a god like a silk hat, that believe not in god, but in a god. woe unto them that are pompous for they will sooner or later be ridiculous. woe unto them that are tired of everything, for everything will certainly be tired of them. woe unto them that cast out everything, for out of everything they will be cast out. woe unto them that cast out anything, for out of that thing they will be cast out. woe unto the flippant, for they shall receive flippancy. woe unto them that are scornful for they shall receive scorn. woe unto him that considereth his hair foolishly, for his hair will be made the type of him. woe unto him that is smart, for men will hold him smart always, even when he is serious.* [* ibid.] a pessimist is a man who has never lived, never suffered: "show me a person who has plenty of worries and troubles and i will show you a person who, whatever he is, is not a pessimist." this idea g.k. developed later in the _dickens_, dealing with the alleged over-optimism of dickens--dickens who if he had learnt to whitewash the universe had learnt it in a blacking factory, dickens who had learnt through hardship and suffering to accept and love the universe. but that he wrote later. the quotations given here come from the notebook begun in 1894 and used at intervals for the next four or five years, in which gilbert wrote down his philosophy step by step as he came to discover it. the handwriting is the work of art that he must have learnt and practised, so different is it from his boyhood's scrawl. each idea is set down as it comes into his mind. there is no sequence. in this book and in _the coloured lands_ may be seen the creation of the chesterton view of life--and it all took place in his early twenties. from the seed-thoughts here, _orthodoxy_ and the rest were to grow--here they are only seeds but seeds containing unmistakably the flower of the future: they should not hear from me a word of selfishness or scorn if only i could find the door if only i were born. he makes the unborn babe say this in his first volume of poems. and in the notebook we see how the babe coming into the world must keep this promise by accepting life with its puzzles, its beauty, its fleetingness: "are we all dust? what a beautiful thing dust is though." "this round earth may be a soap-bubble, but it must be admitted that there are some pretty colours on it." "what is the good of life, it is fleeting; what is the good of a cup of coffee, it is fleeting. ha ha ha." the birthday present of birth, as he was later to call it in _orthodoxy_, involved not bare existence only but a wealth of other gifts. "a grievance," he heads this thought: give me a little time, i shall not be able to appreciate them all; if you open so many doors and give me so many presents, o lord god. he is almost overwhelmed with all that he has and with all that is, but accepts it ardently in its completeness. if the arms of a man could be a fiery circle embracing the round world, i think i should be that man. yet in the face of all this splendour the pessimist dares to find flaws: the mountains praise thee, o lord! but what if a mountain said, "i praise thee; but put a pine-tree halfway up on the left it would be much more effective, believe me." it is time that the religion of prayer gave place to the religion of praise. if the mountains must praise god, if the religion of praise expresses the truth of things, how much more does it express the truth of humanity--or rather of men, for he saw humanity not as an abstraction but as the sum of human and intensely individual beings: once i found a friend "dear me," i said "he was made for me." but now i find more and more friends who seem to have been made for me and more and yet more made for me, is it possible we were all made for each other all over the world? and on another page comes perhaps the most significant phrase in the book: "i wonder whether there will ever come a time when i shall be tired of any one person." hence a fantastic thought of a way of making the discovery of more people to know and to like: the human circulating library notes get out a gentleman for a fortnight, then change him for a lady, or your ticket. no person to be kept out after a fortnight, except with the payment of a penny a day. any person morally or physically damaging a man will be held responsible. the library omnibus calls once a week leaving two or three each visit. man of the season--old standard man. or better still: my great ambition is to give a party at which everybody should meet everybody else and like them very much. an invitation mr. gilbert chesterton requests the pleasure of humanity's company to tea on dec. 25th 1896. humanity esq., the earth, cosmos e. g.k. liked everybody very much, and everything very much. he liked even the things most of us dislike. he liked to get wet. he liked to be tired. after that one short period of struggle he liked to call himself "always perfectly happy." and therefore he wanted to say, "thank you." you say grace before meals all right. but i say grace before the play and the opera, and grace before the concert and pantomime, and grace before i open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing; and grace before i dip the pen in the ink. each day seemed a special gift; something that might not have been: evening here dies another day during which i have had eyes, ears, hands and the great world round me; and with tomorrow begins another. why am i allowed two? the prayer of a man walking i thank thee, o lord, for the stones in the street i thank thee for the hay-carts yonder and for the houses built and half-built that fly past me as i stride. but most of all for the great wind in my nostrils as if thine own nostrils were close. the prayer of a man resting the twilight closes round me my head is bowed before the universe i thank thee, o lord, for a child i knew seven years ago and whom i have never seen since. praised be god for all sides of life, for friends, lovers, art, literature, knowledge, humour, politics, and for the little red cloud away there in the west-for, if he was to be grateful, to whom did he owe gratitude? here is the chief question he asked and answered at this time. at school he was looking for god, but at the age of 16 he was, he tells us in _orthodoxy_, an agnostic in the sense of one who is not sure one way or the other. largely it was this need for gratitude for what seemed personal gifts that brought him to belief in a personal god. life was personal, it was not a mere drift; it had will in it, it was more like a story. a story is the highest mark for the world is a story and every part of it and there is nothing that can touch the world or any part of it that is not a story. and again, with the heading, "a social situation." we must certainly be in a novel; what i like about this novelist is that he takes such trouble about his minor characters. the story shapes from man's birth and it is as he meets the other characters that he finds he is in the right story. a man born on the earth perhaps there has been some mistake how does he know he has come to the right place? but when he finds friends he knows he has come to the right place. you say it is a love affair hush: it is a new garden of eden and a new progeny will people a new earth god is always making these experiments. life is a story: who tells it? life is a problem: who sets it? the world is a problem, not a theorem and the word of the last day will be q.e.f. god sets the problem, god tells the story, but can those know him who are characters in his story, who are working out his problem? have you ever known what it is to walk along a road in such a frame of mind that you thought you might meet god at any turn of the path? for this a man must be ready, against this he must never shut the door. there is one kind of infidelity blacker than all infidelities, worse than any blow of secularist, pessimist, atheist, it is that of those persons who regard god as an old institution. voices the axe falls on the wood in thuds, "god, god." the cry of the rook, "god," answers it the crack of the fire on the hearth, the voice of the brook, say the same name; all things, dog, cat, fiddle, baby, wind, breaker, sea, thunderclap repeat in a thousand languages- god. next in his thought comes a point where he hesitates as to the meeting place between god and man. how and where can these two incommensurates find a meeting place? what is incarnation? the greatness and the littleness of man obsessed chesterton as it did pascal; it is the eternal riddle: two strands man is a spark flying upwards. god is everlasting. who are we, to whom this cup of human life has been given, to ask for more? let us love mercy and walk humbly. what is man, that thou regardest him? man is a star unquenchable. god is in him incarnate. his life is planned upon a scale colossal, of which he sees glimpses. let him dare all things, claim all things: he is the son of man, who shall come in the clouds of glory. [i] saw these two strands mingling to make the religion of man. "a scale colossal, of which he sees glimpses." this, i think, is the first hint of the path that led gilbert to full faith in our lord. in places in these notes he regards him certainly only as man--but even then as _the_ man, the _only_ man in whom the colossal scale, the immense possibilities, of human nature could be dreamed of as fulfilled. two notes on marcus aurelius are significant of the way his mind was moving. marcus aurelius a large-minded, delicate-witted, strong man, following the better thing like a thread between his hands. him we cannot fancy choosing the lower even by mistake; we cannot think of him as wanting for a moment in any virtue, sincerity, mercy, purity, self-respect, good manners. only one thing is wanting in him. he does not command me to perform the impossible. the carpenter the meditations of marcus aurelius. yes: he was soliloquising, not making something. do not the words of jesus ring like nails knocked into a board in his father's workshop? on two consecutive pages are notes showing how his mind is wrestling with the question, the answer to which would complete his philosophy: xmas day good news: but if you ask me what it is, i know not; it is a track of feet in the snow, it is a lantern showing a path, it is a door set open. the grace of our lord jesus christ i live in an age of varied powers and knowledge, of steam, science, democracy, journalism, art: but when my love rises like a sea, i have to go back to an obscure tribe and a slain man to formulate a blessing. julian "vicisti galilã¦e," he said, and sank conquered after wrestling with the most gigantic of powers, a dead man. the crucified on a naked slope of a poor province a roman soldier stood staring at a gibbet, then he said, "surely this was a righteous man," and a new chapter of history opened, having that for its motto. parables there was a man who dwelt in the east centuries ago, and now i cannot look at a sheep or a sparrow, a lily or a cornfield, a raven or a sunset, a vineyard or a mountain, without thinking of him; if this be not to be divine, what is it? cecil chesterton tells us gilbert read the gospels partly because he was not forced to read them: i suppose this really means that he read them with a mature mind which had not been dulled to their reception by a childhood task of routine lessons. but i do not think at this date it had occurred to him to question the assumption of the period: that official christianity, its priesthood especially, had travestied the original intention of christ. this idea is in the _wild knight_ volume (published in 1900) and more briefly in a suggestion in the notebook for a proposed drama: gabriel is hammering up a little theatre and the child looks at his hands, and finds them torn with nails. _clergyman_. the church should stand by the powers that be. _gabriel_. yes? . . . that is a handsome crucifix you have there at your chain. that the clergy, that the christian people, should have settled down to an acceptance of a faulty established order, should not be alert to all that our lord's life signified, was one of the problems. it was, too, a matter of that cosmic loyalty which he analyses more fully in _orthodoxy_. here he simply writes: it is not a question of theology, it is a question of whether, placed as a sentinel of an unknown watch, you will whistle or not. sentinels do go to sleep and he was coming to feel that this want of vigilance ran through the whole of humanity. in "white wynd," a sketch written at this time,* he adumbrates an idea to which he was to return again in _manalive_ especially, and in _orthodoxy_--that we can by custom so lose our sense of reality that the only way to enjoy and be grateful for our possessions is to lose them for a while. the shortest way home is to go round the world. in this story of "white wynd" he applies the parable only to each man's life and the world he lives in. but in _orthodoxy_ he applies it to the human race who have lost revealed truth by getting so accustomed to it that they no longer look at it. and already in the notebook he is calling the attention of a careless multitude to "that great empire upon which the sun never sets. i allude to the universe." [* it is published in _the coloured lands_.] most of the quotations about our lord come in the later part of the book: in the earlier pages he dreams that "to this age it is given to write the great new song, and to compile the new bible, and to found the new church, and preach the new religion." and in one rather obscure passage he seems to hint at the thought that christ might come again to shape this new religion. going round the world, gilbert was finding his way home; the explorer was rediscovering his native country. he himself has given us all the metaphors for what was happening now in his mind. without a single catholic friend he had discovered this wealth of catholic truth and he was still travelling. "all this i felt," he later summed it up in _orthodoxy_, "and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. and all this time i had not even thought of catholic theology." chapter vi towards a career a curious little incident comes towards the end of gilbert's time at the slade school. in a letter he wrote to e. c. bentley we see him, on the eve of his 21st birthday, being invited to write for the _academy_: mr. cotton is a little bristly, bohemian man, as fidgetty as a kitten, who runs round the table while he talks to you. when he agrees with you he shuts his eyes tight and shakes his head. when he means anything rather seriously he ends up with a loud nervous laugh. he talks incessantly and is mad on the history of oxford. i sent him my review of ruskin and he read it before me (note. hell) and delivered himself with astonishing rapidity to the following effect: "this is very good: you've got something to say: oh, yes: this is worth saying: i agree with you about ruskin and about the century: this is good: you've no idea: if you saw some stuff: some reviews i get: the fellows are practised but of all the damned fools: you've no idea: they know the trade in a way: but such infernal asses: as send things up: but this is very good: that sentence does run _nicely:_ but i like your point: make it a little longer and then send it in: i've got another book for you to review: you know robert bridges? oh very good, very good: here it is: about two columns you know: by the way: keep the ruskin for yourself: you deserve that anyhow." here i got a word in: one of protest and thanks. but mr. cotton insisted on my accepting the ruskin. so i am really to serve laban. laban proves on analysis to be of the consistency of brick. it is such men as this that have made our cosmos what it is. at one point he said, literally dancing with glee: "oh, the other day i stuck some pins into andrew lang." i said, "dear me, that must be a very good game." it was something about an edition of scott, but i was told that andrew "took" the painful operation "very well." we sat up horribly late together talking about browning, afghans, notes, the yellow book, the french revolution, william morris, norsemen and mr. richard le gallienne. "i don't despair for anyone," he said suddenly. "hang it all, that's what you mean by humanity." this appears to be a rather good editor of the _academy_. and my joy in having begun my life is very great. "i am tired," i said to mr. brodribb, "of writing only what i like." "oh well," he said heartily, "you'll have no reason to make that complaint in journalism." but here is a mystery. nowhere in the _academy_ columns for 1895 or 1896 are to be seen the initials g.k.c., yet at that date all the reviews are signed. mr. eccles, who was writing for it at the time, told me that he had no recollection of g.k. among the contributors--and later he came to know him well when both were together on the _speaker_. in any case, the idea of reviewing for no reward except the book reviewed would scarcely appeal to a more practical man than gilbert as a hopeful beginning. perhaps the mystery is solved by the fact that soon after the date of this letter mr. cotton got an appointment in india. to mr. eccles it appeared somewhat ironical that the unpaid contributors to the _academy_ were circularised with a suggestion of contributions of money towards a parting present for their late editor. the actual beginning of g.k.'s journalism was in _the bookman_; and in the _autobiography_ he insists that it was a matter of mere luck: "these opportunities were merely things that happened to me." while still at the slade school, he was, as we have seen, attending english lectures at university college. there he met a fellow-student, ernest hodder williams, of the family which controlled the publishing house of hodder & stoughton. he gave chesterton some books on art to review for _the bookman_, a monthly paper published by the firm. "i need not say," g.k. comments, "that having entirely failed to learn how to draw or paint, i tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the weaker points of rubens or the misdirected talents of tintoretto. i had discovered the easiest of all professions, which i have pursued ever since." but neither in the art criticism he wrote for _the bookman_ nor in the poems he was to publish in _the outlook_ and _the speaker_ was there a living. he left the slade school and went to work for a publisher. mr. redway, in whose office gilbert now found himself, was a publisher largely of spiritualist literature. gilbert has described in his _autobiography_ his rather curious experience of ghostly authorship, but he relates nothing of his office experience, which is described in another undated letter to mr. bentley: i am writing this letter just when i like most to write one, late at night, after a beastly lot of midnight oil over a contribution for a _slade magazine_, intended as a public venture. i am sending them a recast of that "picture of tuesday." like you, i am beastly busy, but there is something exciting about it. if i must be busy (as i certainly must, being an approximately honest man) i had much rather be busy in a varied, mixed up way, with half a hundred things to attend to, than with one blank day of monotonous "study" before me. to give you some idea of what i mean. i have been engaged in 3 different tiring occupations and enjoyed them all. (1) redway says, "we've got too many mss; read through them, will you, and send back those that are too bad at once." i go slap through a room full of mss, criticising deuced conscientiously, with the result that i post back some years of mss to addresses, which i should imagine, must be private asylums. but one feels worried, somehow. . . . (2) redway says, "i'm going to give you entire charge of the press department, sending copies to reviews, etc." consequence is, one has to keep an elaborate book and make it tally with other elaborate books, and one has to remember all the magazines that exist and what sort of books they'd crack up. i used to think i hated responsibility: i am positively getting to enjoy it. (3) there is that confounded "picture of tuesday" which i have been scribbling at the whole evening, and have at last got it presentable. this sounds like mere amusement, but, now that i have tried other kinds of hurry and bustle, i solemnly pledge myself to the opinion that there is no work so tiring as writing, that is, not for fun, but for publication. other work has a repetition, a machinery, a reflex action about it somewhere, but to be on the stretch inventing fillings, making them out of nothing, making them as good as you can for a matter of four hours leaves me more inclined to lie down and read dickens than i ever feel after nine hours ramp at redway's. the worst of it is that you always think the thing so bad too when you're in that state. i can't imagine anything more idiotic than what i've just finished. well, enough of work and all its works. by all means come on monday evening, but don't be frightened if by any chance i'm not in till about 6.30, as monday is a busy day. of course you'll stop to dinner . . . what an idiotically long time 8 weeks is. . . . this letter does not seem to bear out the suggestion in cecil's book* of gilbert's probable uselessness to the publishers for whom he worked. after all, literacy is more needful to most publishers than automatic practicality, because it is so very much rarer. probably g.k. would have been absolutely invaluable had he been a little less kind-hearted. his dislike of sending back a manuscript and making an author unhappy would have been a bar to his utility as a reader. but there are lots of other things to do besides rejecting manuscripts, and two later letters show how capable gilbert was felt to be in doing most of them. [* _g. k. chesterton: a criticism_, see p. 23.] the exact date at which he left redway's for the publishing firm of fisher unwin (of 11 paternoster buildings) i cannot discover, but it was fairly early and he was several years with fisher unwin, only gradually beginning to move over into journalism. "he did nothing for himself," says lucian oldershaw, "till we [bentley and oldershaw] came down from oxford and pushed him." the following letters belong to 1898, being written to frances when they were already engaged, but i put them here as they give some notion of the work he did for his employer. . . . the book i have to deal with for unwin is an exhaustive and i am told interesting work on "rome and the empire" a kind of realistic, modern account of the life of the ancient world. i have got to fix it up, choose illustrations, introductions, notes, etc., and all because i am the only person who knows a little latin and precious little roman history and no more archaeology than a blind cat. it is entertaining, and just like our firm's casual way. the work ought to be done by an authority on roman antiquities. if i hadn't been there they would have given it to the office boy. however, i shall get through it all right: the more i see of the publishing world, the more i come to the conclusion that i know next to nothing, but that the vast mass of literary people know less. this is sometimes called having "a public-school education."* [* extract from undated letter (postmarked, aug. 11, 1898).] * * * i have a lot of work to do, as unwin has given the production of an important book entirely into my hands, as a kind of invisible editor. it is complimentary, but very worrying, and will mean a lot of time at the british museum.* [* extract from undated letter (postmarked, aug. 29, 1898).] 11 paternoster bldgs. (postmark, december 1898) . . . for fear that you should really suppose that my observations about being busy are the subterfuges of a habitual liar, i may give you briefly some idea of the irons at present in the fire. as far as i can make out there are at least seven things that i have undertaken to do and everyone of them i ought to do before any of the others. 1st. there is the book about ancient rome which i have to do for t.f.u.--arrange and get illustrations etc. this all comes of showing off. it is a story with a moral (greedy gilbert: or little boys should be seen and not heard). a short time ago i had to read a treatise by dean stubbs on "the ideal woman of the poets" in which the dean remarked that "all the women admired by horace were wantons." this struck me as a downright slander, slight as is my classical knowledge, and in my report i asked loftily what dean stubbs made of those noble lines on the wife who hid her husband from his foes. _splendide mendax et in omne virgo nobilis aevum_ one of the purest and stateliest tributes ever made to a woman. (the lines might be roughly rendered "a magnificent liar and a noble lady for all eternity"; but no translation can convey the organ-voice of the verse, in which the two strong and lonely words "noble" and "eternity" stand solitary for the last line.) in consequence of my taking up the cudgels against a live dean for the manly moral sense of the dear old epicurean, the office became impressed with a vague idea that i know something about latin literature--whereas, as a matter of fact i have forgotten even the line before the one i quoted. however, in the most confidential and pathetic manner i was entrusted with doing with "rome et l'empire" work which ought to be done by a scholar. . . . 2nd. then there is captain webster. you ask (in gruff, rumbling tones) "who is captain webster?" i will tell you. captain webster is a small man with a carefully waxed moustache and a very bond street get up, living at the grosvenor hotel. talking to him you would say: he is an ass, but an agreeable ass, a humble, transparent honourable ass. he is an innocent and idiotic butterfly. the interesting finishing touch is that he has been to new guinea for four years or so, and had some of the most hideous and extravagant adventures that could befall a modern man. his yacht was surrounded by shoals of canoes full of myriads of cannibals of a race who file their teeth to look like the teeth of dogs, and hang weights in their ears till the ears hang like dogs' ears, on the shoulder. he held his yacht at the point of the revolver and got away, leaving some of his men dead on the shore. all night long he heard the horrible noise of the banqueting gongs and saw the huge fires that told his friends were being eaten. now he lives in the grosvenor hotel. captain webster finds the pen, not only mightier than the sword, but also much more difficult. he has written his adventures and we are to publish them and i am translating the honest captain into english grammar, a thing which appals him much more than papuan savages. this means going through it carefully of course and rewriting many parts of it, where relatives and dependent sentences have been lost past recovery. i went to see him, and his childlike dependence on me was quite pathetic. his general attitude was, "you see i'm such a damned fool." and so he is. but when i compare him with the balzacian hauteur and the preposterous posing of many of our fleet street decadent geniuses, i feel a movement of the blood which declares that perhaps there are worse things than war. (between ourselves, i have a sneaking sympathy with fighting: i fought horribly at school. it is well you should know my illogicalities.) 3rd. there is the selection of illustrations for the history of china we are producing. i know no more of china than the man in the moon (less, for he has seen it, at any rate), except what i got from reading the book, but of course i shall make the most of what i do know and airily talk of la-o-tsee and wu-sank-wei, criticise chung-tang and fu-tche, compare tchieu lung with his great successor, whose name i have forgotten, and the napoleonic vigour of li with the weak opportunism of woo. before i have done i hope people will be looking behind for my pig-tail. the name i shall adopt will be tches-ter-ton. 4th. a ms to read translated from the norwegian: a history of the kiss, ceremonial, amicable, amatory, etc.--in the worst french sentimental style. god alone knows how angry i am with the author of that book. i am not sure that i shall not send up the brief report. "a snivelling hound." 5th. the book for nutt [_greybeards at play_], which has reached its worst stage, that of polishing up for the eye of nutt, instead of merely rejoicing in the eye of god. do you know this is the only one of the lot about which i am at all worried. i do not feel as if things like the fish poem are really worth publishing. i know they are better than many books that are published, but heaven knows that is not saying much. in support of some of my work i would fight to the last. but with regard to this occasional verse i feel a humbug. to publish a book of my nonsense verses seems to me exactly like summoning the whole of the people of kensington to see me smoke cigarettes. macgregor told me that i should do much better in the business of literature if i found the work more difficult. my facility, he said, led me to undervalue my work. i wonder whether this is true, and those silly rhymes are any good after all. 6th. the collection of more serious poems of which i spoke to you. you shall have a hand in the selection of these when you get back. 7th. the novel--which though i have put it aside for the present, yet has become too much a part of me not to be constantly having chapters written--or rather growing out of the others. and all these things, with the exception of the last one, are supposed to be really urgent, and to be done immediately. . . . now i hope i have sickened you forever of wanting to know the details of my dull affairs. but i hope it may give you some notion of how hard it really is to get time for writing just now. for you see they are none of them even mechanical things: they all require some thinking about. i am afraid . . . that if you really want to know what i do, you must forgive me for seeming egoistic. that is the tragedy of the literary person: his very existence is an assertion of his own mental vanity: he must pretend to be conceited even if he isn't. . . . beginning to publish, beginning to write, and still developing mentally at a frantic rate--this is a summary of the years 1895-8. as the notebook shows, gilbert was reflecting deeply at this time on the relations both between god and man and between man and his fellow man. the realisation that their relations had gone very far wrong was necessarily followed--for gilbert's _mind_ was an immensely practical one--by the question of what the proposed remedies were worth. he has told us that he became a socialist at this time only because it was intolerable not to be a socialist. the socialists seemed the only people who were looking at conditions as they were and finding them unendurable. christian socialism seemed at first sight, for anyone who admired christ, to be the obvious form of socialism, and, in a fragment of this period, g.k. traces the resemblance of modern collectivism to early christianity. the points in which christian and socialistic collectivism are at one are simple and fundamental. as, however, we must proceed carefully in this matter, we may state these points of resemblance under three heads. (1) both rise from the deeps of an emotion, the emotion of compassion for misfortune, as such. this is really a very important point. collectivism is not an intellectual fad, even if erroneous, but a passionate protest and aspiration: it arises as a secret of the heart, a dream of the injured feeling, long before it shapes itself as a definite propaganda at all. the intellectual philosophies ally themselves with success and preach competition, but the human heart allies itself with misfortune and suggests communism. (2) both trace the evil state of society to "covetousness," the competitive desire to accumulate riches. thus, both in one case and the other, the mere possession of wealth is in itself an offence against moral order, the absence of it in itself a recommendation and training for the higher life. (3) both propose to remedy the evil of competition by a system of "bearing each other's burdens" in the literal sense, that is to say, of levelling, silencing and reducing one's own chances, for the chance of your weaker brethren. the desirability, they say, of a great or clever man acquiring fame is small compared with the desirability of a weak and broken man acquiring bread. the strong man is a man, and should modify or adapt himself to the hopes of his mates. he that would be first among you, let him be the servant of all. these are the three fountains of collectivist passion. i have not considered it necessary to enter into elaborate proof of the presence of these three in the gospels. that the main trend of jesus' character was compassion for human ills, that he denounced not merely covetousness but riches again and again, and with an almost impatient emphasis, and that he insisted on his followers throwing up personal aims and sharing funds and fortune entirely, these are plain matters of evidence presented again and again, and, in fact, of common admission. yet that uncanny thing in gilbert which always forced him to see facts, mutinied again at this point and produced another fragment in which he has moved closer to christianity and thereby further away from modern socialism. the world he lived in contained a certain number of christians who were, he found, highly doubtful about the christian impulse of socialism. and most of his socialist friends had about them a tone of bitterness and an atmosphere of hopelessness utterly unlike the tone and the atmosphere of christianity. just as atheists were the first people to turn gilbert from atheism towards dogmatic christianity, so the socialists were now turning him from socialism. the next fragment is rather long, but it was never published and i think it so important, as showing how his mind was moving, that it cannot well be shortened. it is a document of capital importance for the biography of chesterton. now, for my own part, i cannot in the least agree with those who see no difference between christian and modern socialism, nor do i for a moment join in some christian socialists' denunciations of those worthy middle-class people who cannot see the connection. for i cannot help thinking that in a way these latter people are right. no reasonable man can read the sermon on the mount and think that its tone is not very different from that of most collectivist speculation of the present day, and the philistines feel this, though they cannot distinctly express it. there is a difference between christ's socialist program and that of our own time, a difference deep, genuine and all important, and it is this which i wish to point out. let us take two types side by side, or rather the same type in the two different atmospheres. let us take the "rich young man" of the gospels and place beside him the rich young man of the present day, on the threshold of socialism. if we were to follow the difficulties, theories, doubts, resolves, and conclusions of each of these characters, we should find two very distinct threads of self-examination running through the two lives. and the essence of the difference was this: the modern socialist is saying, "what will society do?" while his prototype, as we read, said, "what shall i do?" properly considered, this latter sentence contains the whole essence of the older communism. the modern socialist regards his theory of regeneration as a duty which society owes to him, the early christian regarded it as a duty which he owed to society; the modern socialist is busy framing schemes for its fulfilment, the early christian was busy considering whether he would himself fulfil it there and then; the ideal of modern socialism is an elaborate utopia to which he hopes the world may be tending, the ideal of the early christian was an actual nucleus "living the new life" to whom he might join himself if he liked. hence the constant note running through the whole gospel, of the importance, difficulty and excitement of the "call," the individual and practical request made by christ to every rich man, "sell all thou hast and give to the poor." to us socialism comes speculatively as a noble and optimistic theory of what may [be] the crown of progress, to peter and james and john it came practically as a crisis of their own daily life, a stirring question of conduct and renunciation. we do not therefore in the least agree with those who hold that modern socialism is an exact counterpart or fulfilment of the socialism of christianity. we find the difference important and profound, despite the common ground of anti-selfish collectivism. the modern socialist regards communism as a distant panacea for society, the early christian regarded it as an immediate and difficult regeneration of himself: the modern socialist reviles, or at any rate reproaches, society for not adopting it, the early christian concentrated his thoughts on the problem of his own fitness and unfitness to adopt it: to the modern socialist it is a theory, to the early christian it was a call; modern socialism says, "elaborate a broad, noble and workable system and submit it to the progressive intellect of society." early christianity said, "sell all thou hast and give to the poor." this distinction between the social and personal way of regarding the change has two sides, a spiritual and a practical which we propose to notice. the spiritual side of it, though of less direct and revolutionary importance than the practical, has still a very profound philosophic significance. to us it appears something extraordinary that this christian side of socialism, the side of the difficulty of the personal sacrifice, and the patience, cheerfulness, and good temper necessary for the protracted personal surrender is so constantly overlooked. the literary world is flooded with old men seeing visions and young men dreaming dreams, with various stages of anti-competitive enthusiasm, with economic apocalypses, elaborate utopias and mushroom destinies of mankind. and, as far as we have seen, in all this whirlwind of theoretic excitement there is not a word spoken of the intense practical difficulty of the summons to the individual, the heavy, unrewarding cross borne by him who gives up the world. for it will not surely be denied that not only will socialism be impossible without some effort on the part of individuals, but that socialism if once established would be rapidly dissolved, or worse still, diseased, if the individual members of the community did not make a constant effort to do that which in the present state of human nature must mean an effort, to live the higher life. mere state systems could not bring about and still less sustain a reign of unselfishness, without a cheerful decision on the part of the members to forget selfishness even in little things, and for that most difficult and at the same time most important personal decision christ made provision and the modern theorists make no provision at all. some modern socialists do indeed see that something more is necessary for the golden age than fixed incomes and universal stores tickets, and that the fountain heads of all real improvement are to be found in human temper and character. mr. william morris, for instance, in his "news from nowhere" gives a beautiful picture of a land ruled by love, and rightly grounds the give-and-take camaraderie of his ideal state upon an assumed improvement in human nature. but he does not tell us how such an improvement is to be effected, and christ did. of christ's actual method in this matter i shall speak afterwards when dealing with the practical aspect, my object just now is to compare the spiritual and emotional effects of the call of christ, as compared to those of the vision of mr. william morris. when we compare the spiritual attitudes of two thinkers, one of whom is considering whether social history has been sufficiently a course of improvement to warrant him in believing that it will culminate in universal altruism, while the other is considering whether he loves other people enough to walk down tomorrow to the market-place and distribute everything but his staff and his scrip, it will not be denied that the latter is likely to undergo certain deep and acute emotional experiences, which will be quite unknown to the former. and these emotional experiences are what we understand as the spiritual aspect of the distinction. for three characteristics at least the galilean programme makes more provision; humility, activity, cheerfulness, the real triad of christian virtues. humility is a grand, a stirring thing, the exalting paradox of christianity, and the sad want of it in our own time is, we believe, what really makes us think life dull, like a cynic, instead of marvellous, like a child. with this, however, we have at present nothing to do. what we have to do with is the unfortunate fact that among no persons is it more wanting than among socialists, christian and other. the isolated or scattered protest for a complete change in social order, the continual harping on one string, the necessarily jaundiced contemplation of a system already condemned, and above all, the haunting pessimistic whisper of a possible hopelessness of overcoming the giant forces of success, all these impart undeniably to the modern socialist a tone excessively imperious and bitter. nor can we reasonably blame the average money-getting public for their impatience with the monotonous virulence of men who are constantly reviling them for not living communistically, and who after all, are not doing it themselves. willingly do we allow that these latter enthusiasts think it impossible in the present state of society to practise their ideal, but this fact, while vindicating their indisputable sincerity, throws an unfortunate vagueness and inconclusiveness over their denunciations of other people in the same position. let us compare with this arrogant and angry tone among the modern utopians who can only dream "the life," the tone of the early christian who was busy living it. as far as we know, the early christians never regarded it as astonishing that the world as they found it was competitive and unregenerate; they seem to have felt that it could not in its pre-christian ignorance have been anything else, and their whole interest was bent on their own standard of conduct and exhortation which was necessary to convert it. they felt that it was by no merit of theirs that they had been enabled to enter into the life before the romans, but simply as a result of the fact that christ had appeared in galilee and not in rome. lastly, they never seem to have entertained a doubt that the message would itself convert the world with a rapidity and ease which left no room for severe condemnation of the heathen societies. with regard to the second merit, that of activity, there can be little doubt as to where it lies between the planner of the utopia and the convert of the brotherhood. the modern socialist is a visionary, but in this he is on the same ground as half the great men of the world, and to some extent of the early christian himself, who rushed towards a personal ideal very difficult to sustain. the visionary who yearns toward an ideal which is practically impossible is not useless or mischievous, but often the opposite; but the person who is often useless, and always mischievous, is the visionary who dreams with the knowledge or the half-knowledge that his ideal is impossible. the early christian might be wrong in believing that by entering the brotherhood men could in a few years become perfect even as their father in heaven was perfect, but he believed it and acted flatly and fearlessly on the belief: this is the type of the higher visionary. but all the insidious dangers of the vision; the idleness, the procrastination, the mere mental aestheticism, come in when the vision is indulged, as half our socialistic conceptions are, as a mere humour or fairy-tale, with a consciousness, half-confessed, that it is beyond practical politics, and that we need not be troubled with its immediate fulfilment. the visionary who believes in his own most frantic vision is always noble and useful. it is the visionary who does not believe in his vision who is the dreamer, the idler, the utopian. this then is the second moral virtue of the older school, an immense direct sincerity of action, a cleansing away, by the sweats of hard work, of all those subtle and perilous instincts of mere ethical castle-building which have been woven like the spells of an enchantress, round so many of the strong men of our own time. the third merit, which i have called cheerfulness, is really the most important of all. we may perhaps put the comparison in this way. it might strike many persons as strange that in a time on the whole so optimistic in its intellectual beliefs as this is, in an age when only a small minority disbelieve in social progress, and a large majority believe in an ultimate social perfection, there should be such a tired and blasã© feeling among numbers of young men. this, we think, is due, not to the want of an ultimate ideal, but to that of any immediate way of making for it: not of something to hope but of something to do. a human being is not satisfied and never will be satisfied with being told that it is all right: what he wants is not a prediction of what other people will be hundreds of years hence, to make him cheerful, but a new and stirring test and task for himself, which will assuredly make him cheerful. a knight is not contented with the statement that his commander has hid his plans so as to insure victory: what the knight wants is a sword. this demand for a task is not mere bravado, it is an eternal and natural part of the higher optimism, as deep-rooted as the foreshadowing of perfection. i do not know whether gilbert would yet have actually called himself a christian. he was certainly tending towards the more christian elements in his surroundings. it seems pretty clear from all he wrote and said later that he did not hold that transformation to have been fully effected until after his meeting with frances, to whom he wrote many years later: therefore i bring these rhymes to you who brought the cross to me. these papers are undated and are arranged in no sequence. it is possible this last one was written after their first meeting. certain it is that in it he had begun feeling after a more christian arrangement of society than socialism offered--and particularly after an arrangement better suited to the nature of man. this thought of man's nature as primary was to remain the basis of his social thinking to the end of his life. chapter vii incipit vita nova in the notebook may be seen gilbert's occasional thoughts about his own future love story. suddenly in the midst suddenly in the midst of friends, of brothers known to me more and more, and their secrets, histories, tastes, hero-worships, schemes, love-affairs, known to me suddenly i felt lonely. felt like a child in a field with no more games to play because i have not a lady to whom to send my thought at that hour that she might crown my peace. madonna mia about her whom i have not yet met i wonder what she is doing now, at this sunset hour, working perhaps, or playing, worrying or laughing, is she making tea, or singing a song, or writing, or praying, or reading is she thoughtful, as i am thoughtful is she looking now out of the window as i am looking out of the window? but a few pages later comes the entry: f.b. you are a very stupid person. i don't believe you have the least idea how nice you are. f.b. was frances, daughter of a diamond merchant some time dead. the family was of french descent, the name de blogue having been somewhat unfortunately anglicised into blogg. they had fallen from considerable wealth into a degree of poverty that made it necessary for the three daughters to earn a living. frances was never strong and gilbert has told how utterly exhausted she was at the end of each day's toil--"she worked very hard as secretary of an educational society in london."* the family lived in bedford park, a suburb of london that went in for artistic housing and a kind of garden-city atmosphere long before this was at all general. judging by their photographs the three girls must all have been remarkably pretty, and young men frequented the house in great numbers, among them brimley johnson who was engaged to gertrude, and lucian oldershaw who later married ethel. some time in 1896, oldershaw took gilbert to call and gilbert, literally at first sight, fell in love with frances. [* _autobiography_, p. 153.] to my lady god made you very carefully he set a star apart for it he stained it green and gold with fields and aureoled it with sunshine he peopled it with kings, peoples, republics and so made you, very carefully. all nature is god's book, filled with his rough sketches for you.* [* _the notebook_.] when almost forty years later gilbert was writing his _autobiography_, frances asked him to keep her out of it. the liking they both had for keeping private life private made him call it "this very victorian narrative." nevertheless he tells us something of the early days of their acquaintance. gilbert had mentioned the moon: she told me in the most normal and unpretentious tone that she hated the moon. i talked to the same lady several times afterwards; and found that this was a perfectly honest statement of the fact. her attitude on this and other things might be called a prejudice; but it could not possibly be called a fad, still less an affectation. she really had an obstinate objection to all those natural forces that seemed to be sterile or aimless; she disliked loud winds that seemed to be going nowhere; she did not care much for the sea, a spectacle of which i was very fond; and by the same instinct she was up against the moon, which she said looked like an imbecile. on the other hand, she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about which she was quite practical. she practised gardening; in that curious cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a religion. this was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible. she had been, by an accident, brought up in the school of an anglo-catholic convent; and to all that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more puzzling than professing it. she was a queer card. she wore a green velvet dress barred with grey fur, which i should have called artistic, but that she hated all the talk about art; and she had an attractive face, which i should have called elvish, but that she hated all the talk about elves. but what was arresting and almost blood-curdling about her, in that social atmosphere, was not so much that she hated it, as that she was entirely unaffected by it. she never knew what was meant by being "under the influence" of yeats or shaw or tolstoy or anybody else. she was intelligent, with a great love of literature, and especially of stevenson. but if stevenson had walked into the room and explained his personal doubts about personal immortality, she would have regretted that he should be wrong upon the point; but would otherwise have been utterly unaffected. she was not at all like robespierre, except in a taste for neatness in dress; and yet it is only in mr. belloc's book on robespierre that i have ever found any words that describe the unique quality that cut her off from the current culture and saved her from it. "god had given him in his mind a stone tabernacle in which certain great truths were preserved imperishable."* [* _autobiography_, pp. 151-3.] a letter to a friend, mildred wain, who was now engaged to waldo d'avigdor, makes the future tolerably easy to foresee. . . . my brother wishes me to thank you with ferocious gratitude for the music, which he is enjoying tremendously. it reminds me rather of what miss frances blogg--but that is another story. in your last letter you enquired whether i saw anything of the bloggs now. if you went and put that question to them there would be a scene. mrs. blogg would probably fall among the fire-irons, knollys would foam in convulsions on the carpet, ethel would scream and take refuge on the mantelpiece and gertrude faint and break off her engagement. frances would--but no intelligent person can affect an interest in what she does. lawrence solomon told me that mrs. edward chesterton did not approve of the rather arty-crafty atmosphere of bedford park--that earliest of garden cities, so conventionally unconventional--where frances lived. she did not like her son's friendship with the bloggs and she had chosen for him a girl who she felt would make him an ideal wife: "very open air," mr. solomon said. "not booky, but good at games and practical." he was not sure whether gilbert realised this, but personally i believe that gilbert realised everything. "of course you know," annie firmin wrote to me, "that aunt marie never liked frances? or bentley?" annie was the girl chosen by gilbert's mother. she was very much a member of the family. "did gilbert ever speak to you," she wrote to me recently, "of the old saturday night parties at barnes, at the home of the grandparents--every saturday night the family, or as many of it as could, used to go down to barnes to supper, and the 'boys' and tom gilbert, alice chesterton's husband, used to sing round the supper table. many a one i went to when i was staying at warwick gardens. we used to go on a red hammersmith bus, before the days of motor cars." on a longer trip they stayed at berck in belgium, and cecil had a strange idea, apparently regarded by him as humorous, which measures the family absence of a christian sense at this date. "cecil urged me to sit at the foot of the big crucifix in the village street and let him photograph me as mary magdalen! i _didn't_, and i don't know how he thought he'd get away with the modern clothing." whatever gilbert's mother may have planned for them, neither she nor gilbert had any romantic feeling for each other. indeed cecil was definitely her favourite and she believed him the favourite of both parents also. "he had more heart," she says, "than the more brilliant gilbert." anyhow, his heart was shown more openly to her. "cecil was not much given to versifying," she wrote in another letter, "he sent me the enclosed when my son was born. i value it so much." headed "to annie" the poem is a long one. it begins with the "ancient comradeship, loyal and unbroken" in which they had "first seen life together." shining nights, tumultuous days, joy swift caught in sudden ways, all the laughter, love and praise, all the joys of living these we shared together dear, plot and jest and story, this is hid, shut off, unknown, seeing that to you alone is the wondrous kingdom shown and the power and glory! annie's thoughts, then, and cecil's were not greatly on the elder brother, who was pursuing his own romance with a heart that seems to have been fairly adequate in its energies. most mothers have watched their sons through one or more experiences of calf love: gilbert indicates in the _autobiography_--and i knew it, too, from some jokes he and frances used to make--that he had had one or two fancies before the coming of reality. he must then convince his mother that reality had come: he must overcome a prejudice avowed by neither: he must call on the deeps of a mother's feelings so effectively that it would never now be avowed, that it might indeed be swept away. and so, sitting at a table in a seaside lodging, as his mother sat in the same room or moved about making cocoa for the family, gilbert tried to express what even for him was the inexpressible. 1 rosebery villas granville road felixstowe. my dearest mother, you may possibly think this a somewhat eccentric proceeding. you are sitting opposite and talking--about mrs. berline. but i take this method of addressing you because it occurs to me that you might possibly wish to turn the matter over in your mind before writing or speaking to me about it. i am going to tell you the whole of a situation in which i believe i have acted rightly, though i am not absolutely certain, and to ask for your advice on it. it was a somewhat complicated one, and i repeat that i do not think i could rightly have acted otherwise, but if i were the greatest fool in the three kingdoms and had made nothing but a mess of it, there is one person i should always turn to and trust. mothers know more of their son's idiocies than other people can, and this has been peculiarly true in your case. i have always rejoiced at this, and not been ashamed of it: this has always been true and always will be. these things are easier written than said, but you know it is true, don't you? i am inexpressibly anxious that you should give me credit for having done my best, and for having constantly had in mind the way in which you would be affected by the letter i am now writing. i do hope you will be pleased. almost eight years ago, you made a remark--this may show you that if we "jeer" at your remarks, we remember them. the remark applied to the hypothetical young lady with whom i should fall in love and took the form of saying "if she is good, i shan't mind who she is." i don't know how many times i have said that over to myself in the last two or three days in which i have decided on this letter. do not be frightened; or suppose that anything sensational or final has occurred. i am not married, my dear mother, neither am i engaged. you are called to the council of chiefs very early in its deliberations. if you don't mind i will tell you, briefly, the whole story. you are, i think, the shrewdest person for seeing things whom i ever knew: consequently i imagine that you do not think that i go down to bedford park every sunday for the sake of the scenery. i should not wonder if you know nearly as much about the matter as i can tell in a letter. suffice it to say however briefly (for neither of us care much for gushing: this letter is not on mrs. ratcliffe lines) that the first half of my time of acquaintance with the bloggs was spent in enjoying a very intimate, but quite breezy and platonic friendship with frances blogg, reading, talking and enjoying life together, having great sympathies on all subjects; and the second half in making the thrilling, but painfully responsible discovery that platonism, on my side, had not the field by any means to itself. that is how we stand now. no one knows, except her family and yourself. my dearest mother, i am sure you are at least not unsympathetic. indeed we love each other more than we shall either of us ever be able to say. i have refrained from sentiment in this letter--for i don't think you like it much. but love is a very different thing from sentiment and you will never laugh at that. i will not say that you are sure to like frances, for all young men say that to their mothers, quite naturally, and their mothers never believe them, also, quite naturally. besides, i am so confident, i should like you to find her out for yourself. she is, in reality, very much the sort of woman you like, what is called, i believe, "a woman's woman," very humorous, inconsequent and sympathetic and defiled with no offensive exuberance of good health. i have nothing more to say, except that you and she have occupied my mind for the last week to the exclusion of everything else, which must account for my abstraction, and that in her letter she sent the following message: "please tell your mother soon. tell her i am not so silly as to expect her to think me good enough, but really i will try to be." an aspiration which, considered from my point of view, naturally provokes a smile. here you give me a cup of cocoa. thank you. believe me, my dearest mother, always your very affectionate son gilbert. what exactly gilbert meant by saying they were "not engaged" it is hard to surmise, in view of frances's message to her future mother-in-law. of his sensations when proposing gilbert gives some idea in the _autobiography:_ it was fortunate, however, that our next most important meeting was not under the sign of the moon but of the sun. she has often affirmed, during our later acquaintance, that if the sun had not been shining to her complete satisfaction on that day, the issue might have been quite different. it happened in st. james's park; where they keep the ducks and the little bridge, which has been mentioned in no less authoritative a work than mr. belloc's essay on bridges, since i find myself quoting that author once more. i think he deals in some detail, in his best topographical manner, with various historic sites on the continent; but later relapses into a larger manner, somewhat thus: "the time has now come to talk at large about bridges. the longest bridge in the world is the forth bridge, and the shortest bridge in the world is a plank over a ditch in the village of loudwater. the bridge that frightens you most is the brooklyn bridge, and the bridge that frightens you least is the bridge in st. james's park." i admit that i crossed that bridge in undeserved safety; and perhaps i was affected by my early romantic vision of the bridge leading to the princess's tower. but i can assure my friend the author that the bridge in st. james's park can frighten you a good deal.* [* _autobiography_, pp. 154-5.] now, with frances promised to him, gilbert could enjoy everything properly, could execute, verbally at least, a wild fantasia. among the first of his friends to be written to was mildred wain, because, as he says in a later letter, he felt towards her deep gratitude "for forming a topic of conversation on my first visit to a family with which i have since formed a dark and shameful connection." dear mildred, on rising this morning, i carefully washed my boots in hot water and blacked my face. then assuming my coat with graceful ease and with the tails in front, i descended to breakfast, where i gaily poured the coffee on the sardines and put my hat on the fire to boil. these activities will give you some idea of my frame of mind. my family, observing me leave the house by way of the chimney, and take the fender with me under one arm, thought i must have something on my mind. so i had. my friend, i am engaged. i am only telling it at present to my real friends: but there is no doubt about it. the next question that arises is--whom am i engaged to? i have investigated this problem with some care, and, as far as i can make out, the best authorities point to frances blogg. there can i think be no reasonable doubt that she is the lady. it is as well to have these minor matters clear in one's mind. i am very much too happy to write much; but i thought you might remember my existence sufficiently to be interested in the incident. waldo has been of so much help to me in this and in everything, and i am so much interested in you for his sake and your own, that i am encouraged to hope our friendship may subsist. if ever i have done anything rude or silly, it was quite inadvertent. i have always wished to please you. to annie firmin he wrote: i can only think of the day, one of the earliest i can recall of my life, when you came in and helped me to build a house with bricks. i am building another one now, and it would not have been complete without your going over it. to others he wrote such sentences as he could put together in the whirlwind of his happiness. for himself he stammered in a verse that grew with the years into his great love poetry. god made thee mightily, my love, he stretched his hands out of his rest and lit the star of east and west brooding o'er darkness like a dove. god made thee mightily, my love. god made thee patiently, my sweet, out of all stars he chose a star he made it red with sunset bar and green with greeting for thy feet. god made thee mightily, my sweet. chapter viii to frances this chapter can be written only by gilbert himself. it might seem that he had no words left for an emotion heightened beyond the love of his friends and the joyous acceptance of existence. but in these letters he shows the truth of his own theory, that to love each thing separately strengthens the power of loving, to have tried to love everyone is, as he tells frances, no bad preparation for loving her. the emotion of falling in love had both intensified his appreciation of all things and cast for him a vivid light on past, present and future, so that in the last of these letters he sketches his life down to the moment when a new life begins. ". . . i am looking over the sea and endeavouring to reckon up the estate i have to offer you. as far as i can make out my equipment for starting on a journey to fairyland consists of the following items. "1st. a straw hat. the oldest part of this admirable relic shows traces of pure norman work. the vandalism of cromwell's soldiers has left us little of the original hat-band. "2nd. a walking stick, very knobby and heavy: admirably fitted to break the head of any denizen of suffolk who denies that you are the noblest of ladies, but of no other manifest use. "3rd. a copy of walt whitman's poems, once nearly given to salter, but quite forgotten. it has his name in it still with an affectionate inscription from his sincere friend gilbert chesterton. i wonder if he will ever have it. "4th. a number of letters from a young lady, containing everything good and generous and loyal and holy and wise that isn't in walt whitman's poems. "5th. an unwieldy sort of a pocket knife, the blades mostly having an edge of a more varied and picturesque outline than is provided by the prosaic cutter. the chief element however is a thing 'to take stones out of a horse's hoof.' what a beautiful sensation of security it gives one to reflect that if one should ever have money enough to buy a horse and should happen to buy one and the horse should happen to have a stone in his hoof--that one is ready; one stands prepared, with a defiant smile! "6th. passing from the last miracle of practical foresight, we come to a box of matches. every now and then i strike one of these, because fire is beautiful and burns your fingers. some people think this waste of matches: the same people who object to the building of cathedrals. "7th. about three pounds in gold and silver, the remains of one of mr. unwin's bursts of affection: those explosions of spontaneous love for myself, which, such is the perfect order and harmony of his mind, occur at startlingly exact intervals of time. "8th. a book of children's rhymes, in manuscript, called the 'weather book' about â¾ finished, and destined for mr. nutt.* i have been working at it fairly steadily, which i think jolly creditable under the circumstances. one can't put anything interesting in it. they'll understand those things when they grow up. [* _greybeards at play_.] "9th. a tennis racket--nay, start not. it is a part of the new rã©gime, and the only new and neat-looking thing in the museum. we'll soon mellow it--like the straw hat. my brother and i are teaching each other lawn tennis. "10th. a soul, hitherto idle and omnivorous but now happy enough to be ashamed of itself. "11th. a body, equally idle and quite equally omnivorous, absorbing tea, coffee, claret, sea-water and oxygen to its own perfect satisfaction. it is happiest swimming, i think, the sea being about a convenient size. "12th. a heart--mislaid somewhere. and that is about all the property of which an inventory can be made at present. after all, my tastes are stoically simple. a straw hat, a stick, a box of matches and some of his own poetry. what more does man require? . . ." ". . . the city of felixstowe, as seen by the local prophet from the neighbouring mountain-peak, does not strike the eye as having anything uncanny about it. at least i imagine that it requires rather careful scrutiny before the eerie curl of a chimney pot, or the elfin wink of a lonely lamp-post brings home to the startled soul that it is really the city of a fearful folk. that the inhabitants are not human in the ordinary sense is quite clear, yet it has only just begun to dawn on me after staying a week in the town of unreason with its monstrous landscape and grave, unmeaning customs. do i seem to be raving? let me give my experiences. "i am bound to admit that i do not think i am good at shopping. i generally succeed in getting rid of money, but other observances, such as bringing away the goods that i've paid for, and knowing what i've bought, i often pass over as secondary. but to shop in a town of ordinary tradesmen is one thing: to shop in a town of raving lunatics is another. i set out one morning, happy and hopeful with the intention of buying (a) a tennis racket (b) some tennis balls (c) some tennis shoes (d) a ticket for a tennis ground. i went to the shop pointed out by some villager (probably mad) and went in and said i believed they kept tennis rackets. the young man smiled and assented. i suggested that he might show me some. the young man looked positively alarmed. 'oh,' he said, 'we haven't got any--not got any here.' i asked 'where?' 'oh, they're out you know. all round,' he explained wildly, with a graphic gesture in the direction of the sea and the sky. 'all out round. we've left them all round at places.' to this day i don't know what he meant, but i merely asked when they would quit these weird retreats. he said in an hour: in an hour i called again. were they in now? 'well not in--not in, just yet,' he said with a sort of feverish confidentialness, as if he wasn't quite well. 'are they still--all out at places?' i asked with restrained humour. 'oh no!' he said with a burst of reassuring pride. 'they are only out there--out behind, you know.' i hope my face expressed my beaming comprehension of the spot alluded to. eventually, at a third visit, the rackets were produced. none of them, i was told by my brother, were of any first-class maker, so that was outside the question. the choice was between some good, neat first-hand instruments which suited me, and some seedy-looking second-hand objects with plain deal handles, which would have done at a pinch. i thought that perhaps it would be better to get a good-class racket in london and content myself for the present with economising on one of these second-hand monuments of depression. so i asked the price. '10/6' was the price of the second-hand article. i thought this large for the tool, and wondered if the first-hand rackets were much dearer. what price the first-hand? '7/6' said the creature, cheery as a bird. i did not faint. i am strong. "i rejected the article which was dearer because it had been hallowed by human possession, and accepted the cheap, new crude racket. except the newness there was no difference between them whatever. i then asked the smiling maniac for balls. he brought me a selection of large red globes nearly as big as dutch cheeses. i said, 'are these tennis-balls?' he said, 'oh did you want tennis-balls?' i said yes--they often came in handy at tennis. the goblin was however quite impervious to satire, and i left him endeavouring to draw my attention to his wares in general, particularly to some zinc baths which he seemed to think should form part of the equipment of a tennis-player. "never before or since have i met a being of that order and degree of creepiness. he was a nightmare of unmeaning idiocy. but some mention ought to be made of the old man at the entrance to the tennis ground who opened his mouth in parables on the subject of the fee for playing there. he seemed to have been wound up to make only one remark, 'it's sixpence.' under these circumstances the attempt to discover whether the sixpence covered a day's tennis or a week or fifty years was rather baffling. at last i put down the sixpence. this seemed to galvanise him into life. he looked at the clock, which was indicating five past eleven and said, 'it's sixpence an hour--so you'll be all right till two.' i fled screaming. "since then i have examined the town more carefully and feel the presence of something nameless. there is a claw-curl in the sea-bent trees, an eye-gleam in the dark flints in the wall that is not of this world. "when we set up a house, darling (honeysuckle porch, yew clipt hedge, bees, poetry and eight shillings a week), i think you will have to do the shopping. particularly at felixstowe. there was a great and glorious man who said, 'give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with the necessities.' that i think would be a splendid motto to write (in letters of brown gold) over the porch of our hypothetical home. there will be a sofa for you, for example, but no chairs, for i prefer the floor. there will be a select store of chocolate-creams (to make you do the carp with) and the rest will be bread and water. we will each retain a suit of evening dress for great occasions, and at other times clothe ourselves in the skins of wild beasts (how pretty you would look) which would fit your taste in furs and be economical. "i have sometimes thought it would be very fine to take an ordinary house, a very poor, commonplace house in west kensington, say, and make it symbolic. not artistic--heaven--o heaven forbid. my blood boils when i think of the affronts put by knock-kneed pictorial epicures on the strong, honest, ugly, patient shapes of necessary things: the brave old bones of life. there are aesthetic pottering prigs who can look on a saucepan without one tear of joy or sadness: mongrel decadents that can see no dignity in the honourable scars of a kettle. so they concentrate all their house decoration on coloured windows that nobody looks out of, and vases of lilies that everybody wishes out of the way. no: my idea (which is much cheaper) is to make a house really allegoric: really explain its own essential meaning. mystical or ancient sayings should be inscribed on every object, the more prosaic the object the better; and the more coarsely and rudely the inscription was traced the better. 'hast thou sent the rain upon the earth?' should be inscribed on the umbrella-stand: perhaps on the umbrella. 'even the hairs of your head are all numbered' would give a tremendous significance to one's hairbrushes: the words about 'living water' would reveal the music and sanctity of the sink: while 'our god is a consuming fire' might be written over the kitchen-grate, to assist the mystic musings of the cook--shall we ever try that experiment, dearest. perhaps not, for no words would be golden enough for the tools you had to touch: you would be beauty enough for one house. . . ." ". . . by all means let us have bad things in our dwelling and make them good things. i shall offer no objection to your having an occasional dragon to dinner, or a penitent griffin to sleep in the spare bed. the image of you taking a sunday school of little devils is pleasing. they will look up, first in savage wonder, then in vague respect; they will see the most glorious and noble lady that ever lived since their prince tempted eve, with a halo of hair and great heavenly eyes that seem to make the good at the heart of things almost too terribly simple and naked for the sons of flesh: and as they gaze, their tails will drop off, and their wings will sprout: and they will become angels in six lessons. . . . "i cannot profess to offer any elaborate explanation of your mother's disquiet but i admit it does not wholly surprise me. you see i happen to know one factor in the case, and one only, of which you are wholly ignorant. i know you . . . i know one thing which has made me feel strange before your mother--i know the value of what i take away. i feel (in a weird moment) like the angel of death. "you say you want to talk to me about death: my views about death are bright, brisk and entertaining. when azrael takes a soul it may be to other and brighter worlds: like those whither you and i go together. the transformation called death may be something as beautiful and dazzling as the transformation called love. it may make the dead man 'happy,' just as your mother knows that you are happy. but none the less it is a transformation, and sad sometimes for those left behind. a mother whose child is dying can hardly believe that in the inscrutable unknown there is anyone who can look to it as well as she. and if a mother cannot trust her child easily to god almighty, shall i be so mean as to be angry because she cannot trust it easily to me? i tell you i have stood before your mother and felt like a thief. i know you are not going to part: neither physically, mentally, morally nor spiritually. but she sees a new element in your life, wholly from outside--is it not natural, given her temperament, that you should find her perturbed? oh, dearest, dearest frances, let us always be very gentle to older people. indeed, darling, it is not they who are the tyrants, but we. they may interrupt our building in the scaffolding stages: we turn their house upside down when it is their final home and rest. your mother would certainly have worried if you had been engaged to the archangel michael (who, indeed, is bearing his disappointment very well): how much more when you are engaged to an aimless, tactless, reckless, unbrushed, strange-hatted, opinionated scarecrow who has suddenly walked into the vacant place. i could have prophesied her unrest: wait and she will calm down all right, dear. god comfort her: i dare not. . . ." ". . . gilbert keith chesterton was born of comfortable but honest parents on the top of campden hill, kensington. he was christened at st. george's church which stands just under that more imposing building, the waterworks tower. this place was chosen, apparently, in order that the whole available water supply might be used in the intrepid attempt to make him a member of christ, a child of god and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. "of the early years of this remarkable man few traces remain. one of his earliest recorded observations was the simple exclamation, full of heart-felt delight, 'look at baby. funny baby.' here we see the first hint of that ineffable conversational modesty, that shy social self-effacement, which has ever hidden his light under a bushel. his mother also recounts with apparent amusement an incident connected with his imperious demand for his father's top-hat. 'give me that hat, please.' 'no, dear, you mustn't have that.' 'give me that hat.' 'no, dear--' 'if you don't give it me, i'll say 'at.' an exquisite selection in the matter of hats has indeed always been one of the great man's hobbies. "when he had drawn pictures on all the blinds and tablecloths and towels and walls and windowpanes it was felt that he required a larger sphere. consequently he was sent to mr. bewsher who gave him desks and copy-books and latin grammars and atlases to draw pictures on. he was far too innately conscientious not to use these materials to draw on. to other uses, asserted by some to belong to these objects, he paid little heed. the only really curious thing about his school life was that he had a weird and quite involuntary habit of getting french prizes. they were the only ones he ever got and he never tried to get them. but though the thing was quite mysterious to him, and though he made every effort to avoid it, it went on, being evidently a part of some occult natural law. "for the first half of his time at school he was very solitary and futile. he never regretted the time, for it gave him two things, complete mental self-sufficiency and a comprehension of the psychology of outcasts. "but one day, as he was roaming about a great naked building land which he haunted in play hours, rather like an outlaw in the woods, he met a curious agile youth with hair brushed up off his head. seeing each other, they promptly hit each other simultaneously and had a fight. next day they met again and fought again. these homeric conflicts went on for many days, till one morning in the crisis of some insane grapple, the subject of this biography quoted, like a war-chant, something out of macaulay's _lays_. the other started and relaxed his hold. they gazed at each other. then the foe quoted the following line. in this land of savages they knew each other. for the next two hours they talked books. they have talked books ever since. the boy was edmund clerihew bentley. the incident just narrated is the true and real account of the first and deepest of our hero's male connections. but another was to ensue, probably equally profound and far more pregnant with awful and dazzling consequences. bentley always had a habit of trying to do things well: twelve years of the other's friendship has not cured him of this. being seized with a peculiar desire to learn conjuring, he had made the acquaintance of an eerie and supernatural young man, who instructed him in the black art: a gaunt mephistophelian sort of individual, who our subject half thought was a changeling. our subject has not quite got over the idea yet, though for practical social purposes he calls him lucian oldershaw. our subject met lucian oldershaw. 'that night,' as shakespeare says, 'there was a star.' "these three persons soon became known through the length and breadth of st. paul's school as the founders of a singular brotherhood. it was called the j.d.c. no one, we believe, could ever have had better friends than did the hero of this narrative. we wish that we could bring before the reader the personality of all the knights of that eccentric round table. most of them are known already to the reader. even the subject himself is possibly known to the reader. bertram, who seemed somehow to have been painted by vandyck, a sombre and stately young man, a blend of cavalier and puritan, with the physique of a military father and the views of an ethical mother and a soul of his own which for sheer simplicity is something staggering. vernã¨de with an oriental and inscrutable placidity varied every now and then with dazzling agility and meredithian humour. waldo d'avigdor who masks with complete fashionable triviality a hebraic immutability of passion tried in a more ironical and bitter service than his father jacob. lawrence and maurice solomon, who show another side of the same people, the love of home, the love of children, the meek and malicious humour, the tranquil service of a law. salter who shows how beautiful and ridiculous a combination can be made of the most elaborate mental cultivation and artistic sensibility and omniscience with a receptiveness and a humility extraordinary in any man. these were his friends. may he be forgiven for speaking of them at length and with pride? some day we hope the reader may know them all. he knew these people; he knew their friends. he heard mildred wain say 'blogg' and he thought it was a funny name. had he been told that he would ever pronounce it with the accents of tears and passion he would have said, in his pride, that the name was not suitable for that purpose. but there are _oukh eph' emin_ [greek characters in original]. . . . "he went for a time to an art school. there he met a great many curious people. many of the men were horrible blackguards: he was not exactly that: so they naturally found each other interesting. he went through some rather appalling discoveries about human life and the final discovery was that there is no devil--no, not even such a thing as a bad man. "one pleasant saturday afternoon lucian said to him, 'i am going to take you to see the bloggs.' 'the what?' said the unhappy man. 'the bloggs,' said the other, darkly. naturally assuming that it was the name of a public-house he reluctantly followed his friend. he came to a small front-garden; if it was a public-house it was not a businesslike one. they raised the latch--they rang the bell (if the bell was not in the close time just then). no flower in the pots winked. no brick grinned. no sign in heaven or earth warned him. the birds sang on in the trees. he went in. "the first time he spent an evening at the bloggs there was no one there. that is to say there was a worn but fiery little lady in a grey dress who didn't approve of 'catastrophic solutions of social problems.' that, he understood, was mrs. blogg. there was a long, blonde, smiling young person who seemed to think him quite off his head and who was addressed as ethel. there were two people whose meaning and status he couldn't imagine, one of whom had a big nose and the other hadn't. . . . lastly, there was a juno-like creature in a tremendous hat who eyed him all the time half wildly, like a shying horse, because he said he was quite happy. . . . "but the second time he went there he was plumped down on a sofa beside a being of whom he had a vague impression that brown hair grew at intervals all down her like a caterpillar. once in the course of conversation she looked straight at him and he said to himself as plainly as if he had read it in a book: 'if i had anything to do with this girl i should go on my knees to her: if i spoke with her she would never deceive me: if i depended on her she would never deny me: if i loved her she would never play with me: if i trusted her she would never go back on me: if i remembered her she would never forget me. i may never see her again. goodbye.' it was all said in a flash: but it was all said. . . . "two years, as they say in the playbills, is supposed to elapse. and here is the subject of this memoir sitting on a balcony above the sea. the time, evening. he is thinking of the whole bewildering record of which the foregoing is a brief outline: he sees how far he has gone wrong and how idle and wasteful and wicked he has often been: how miserably unfitted he is for what he is called upon to be. let him now declare it and hereafter for ever hold his peace. "but there are four lamps of thanksgiving always before him. the first is for his creation out of the same earth with such a woman as you. the second is that he has not, with all his faults, 'gone after strange women.' you cannot think how a man's self-restraint is rewarded in this. the third is that he has tried to love everything alive: a dim preparation for loving you. and the fourth is--but no words can express that. here ends my previous existence. take it: it led me to you." chapter ix a long engagement gilbert sympathized with his future mother-in-law's anxiety at frances's engagement to "a self-opinionated scarecrow," but i doubt if it at all quickly occurred to him that the basis of that anxiety was the fact that he was earning only twenty-five shillings a week! frances herself, lucian oldershaw, and the rest of his friends believed he was a genius with a great future and this belief they tried to communicate to frances's family. but even if they succeeded, faith in the future did not pay dividends in a present income on which to set up house. a widow, considering her daughter's future, might well feel a little anxiety. but one can see wheels within wheels of family conclaves and matters to perplex the simple which drew another letter from gilbert to frances: . . . it is a mystic and refreshing thought that i shall never understand bloggs. that is the truth of it . . . that this remarkable family atmosphere . . . this temperament with its changing moods and its everlasting will, its divine trust in one's soul and its tremulous speculations as to one's "future," its sensitiveness like a tempered sword, vibrating but never broken: its patience that can wait for eternity and its impatience that cannot wait for tea: its power of bearing huge calamities, and its queer little moods that even those calamities can never overshadow or wipe out: its brusqueness that always pleases and its over-tactfulness that sometimes wounds: its terrific intensity of feeling, that sometimes paralyses the outsider with conversational responsibility: its untranslatable humour of courage and poverty and its unfathomed epics of past tragedy and triumph--all this glorious confusion of family traits, which, in no exaggerative sense, make the gentiles come to your light and the folk of the nations to the brightness of your house--is a thing so utterly outside my own temperament that i was formed by nature to admire and not understand it. god made me very simply--as he made a tree or a pig or an oyster: to perform certain functions. the best thing he gave me was a perfect and unshakable trust in those i love. . . . gilbert's sympathy with his future mother-in-law may have been put to some slight strain by an incident related by lucian oldershaw. mrs. blogg begged him to talk to gilbert about his personal appearance--clothes and such matters--and to entreat him to make an effort to improve it. one can imagine how much he must have disliked the commission! anyhow, he decided it would be better to do it away from home and he suggested to gilbert a trip to the seaside. arrived there he broached the subject. gilbert, he says, was not the least angry, but answered quite seriously that frances loved him as he was and that it would be absurd for him to try to alter. it was only out of a later and deeper experience of women that he was able to write "a man's friends like him but they leave him as he is. a man's wife loves him and is always trying to change him." a good many things happened in the course of this long engagement. frances and gilbert were both young and long engagements were normal at that period, when the idea of a wife continuing to earn after marriage was unheard of. there were obvious disadvantages in the long delay before marriage but also certain advantages. the two got to know each other with a close intimacy: they were comrades as well as lovers and carried both these relationships into married life. for the biographer the advantage has been immense, since every separation between the pair meant a batch of letters. the discerning will have noted that there are in these letters considerable excisions: parts frances would not show even to the biographer. . but they are the richest quarry from which to dig for the most important period of any man's life; the period richest in mental development and the shaping of character. it is, too, the only period of his adult life when gilbert wrote letters at all, unless they were absolutely unavoidable. even in a small family two members will tend to draw together more closely than the rest, and this was so with frances and her sister gertrude. they adored one another and frances offered her to gilbert as a sister, with especially confident pride. he had never had a sister since babyhood and he enjoyed it. the happiness of the engagement was terribly broken into by the sudden death of gertrude in a street accident. frances was absolutely shattered. the next group of letters belongs to the months after gertrude's death, when gilbert was still trying to be a publisher, but, urged on by frances, beginning also to be a writer. during part of this time she had gone abroad for rest and recovery after the shock. gilbert pictures her reading his letters "under the shadow of an alien cathedral." none of these letters are dated but most of them have kept their postmarks. 11, paternoster buildings (postmarked july 8, 1899) . . . i am black but comely at this moment: because the cyclostyle has blacked me. fear not. i shall wash myself. but i think it my duty to render an accurate account of my physical appearance every time i write: and shall be glad of any advice and assistance. . . . i have been reading lewis carroll's remains, mostly logic, and have much pleasure in enlivening you with the following hilarious query: "can a hypothetical, whose protasis is false, be legitimate? are two hypotheticals of the forms, _if a, then b_, and _if a then not b_ compatible?" i should think a hypothetical could be, if it tried hard. . . . to return to the cyclostyle. i like the cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. i do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as i do. the startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. it is just the same with people. when we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy. i will not ask you to forgive this rambling levity. i, for one have sworn, i do not hesitate to say it, by the sword of god that has struck us, and before the beautiful face of the dead, that the first joke that occurred to me i would make, the first nonsense poem i thought of i would write, that i would begin again at once with a heavy heart at times, as to other duties, to the duty of being perfectly silly, perfectly extravagant, perfectly trivial, and as far as possible, amusing. i have sworn that gertrude should not feel, wherever she is, that the comedy has gone out of our theatre. this, i am well aware, will be misunderstood. but i have long grasped that whatever we do we are misunderstood--small blame to other people; for, we know ourselves, our best motives are things we could neither explain nor defend. and i would rather hurt those who can shout than her who is silent. you might tell me what you feel about this: but i am myself absolutely convinced that gaiety that is the bubble of love, does not annoy me: the old round of stories, laughter, family ceremonies, seems to me far less really inappropriate than a single moment of forced silence or unmanly shame. . . . i have always imagined frances did not know of her mother's efforts to tidy gilbert, but very early in their engagement she began her own abortive attempts to make him brush his hair, tie his tie straight and avoid made-up ones, attend to the buttons on his coat, and all the rest. it would seem that for a time at any rate he made some efforts, but evidently simply regarded the whole thing as one huge joke. 11 warwick gardens (postmarked july 9th, 1899) . . . i am clean. i am wearing a frockcoat, which from a superficial survey seems to have no end of buttons. it must be admitted that i am wearing a bow-tie: but on careful research i find that these were constantly worn by vikings. a distinct allusion to them is made in that fine fragment, the tryggvhessa saga, where the poet says, in the short alliterative lines of early norse poetry: frockcoat folding then hakon hardrada bow-tie buckled waited for war (brit. mus. mss. ccclxix lines 99981-99985) i resume. my appearance, as i have suggested, is singularly exemplary. my boots are placed, after the fastidious london fashion, on the feet: the laces are done up, the watch is going, the hair is brushed, the sleeve-links are inserted, for of such is the kingdom of heaven. as for my straw hat, i put it on eighteen times consecutively, taking a run and a jump to each try, till at last i hit the right angle. i have not taken it off for three days and nights lest i should disturb that exquisite pose. ladies, princes, queens, ecclesiastical processions go by in vain: i do not remove it. that angle of the hat is something to mount guard over. as swinburne says--"not twice on earth do the gods do this." it is at present what is, i believe, called a lovely summer's night. to say that it is hot would be as feeble a platitude as the same remark would be in the small talk of satan and beelzebub. if there were such a thing as _blue_-hot iron, it would describe the sky tonight. i cannot help dreaming of some wild fairy-tale in which the whole round cosmos should be a boiling pot, with the flames of purgatory under it, and that soon i shall have the satisfaction of seeing such a thing as boiled mountains, boiled cities, and a boiled moon and stars. a tremendous picture. yet i am perfectly happy as usual. after all, why should we object to be boiled? potatoes, for example, are better boiled than raw--why should we fear to be boiled into new shapes in the cauldron? these things are an allegory. . . . i am so glad to hear you say . . . that, in your own words "it is good for us to be here"--where you are at present. the same remark, if i remember right, was made on the mountain of the transfiguration. it has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long vision we call life--other things superficially, but this always in our depths. "it is good for us to be here--it is good for us to be here," repeating itself eternally. and if, after many joys and festivals and frivolities, it should be our fate to have to look on while one of us is, in a most awful sense of the words, "transfigured before our eyes": shining with the whiteness of death--at least, i think, we cannot easily fancy ourselves wishing not to be at our post. not i, certainly. it was good for me to be there. * * * * 11 warwick gardens (postmarked july 11, 1899.) . . . the novel, after which you so kindly enquire, is proceeding headlong. it received another indirect stimulus today, when mr. garnett insisted on taking me out to lunch, gave me a gorgeous repast at a restaurant, succeeded in plucking the secret of my private employment from my bosom, and made me promise to send him some chapters of it. i certainly cannot complain of not being sympathetically treated by the literary men i know. i wonder where the jealous, spiteful, depreciating man of letters we read of in books has got to. it's about time he turned up, i think. excuse me for talking about these trivialities. . . . i have made a discovery: or i should say seen a vision. i saw it between two cups of black coffee in a gallic restaurant in soho: but i could not express it if i tried. but this was one thing that it said--that all good things are one thing. there is no conflict between the gravestone of gertrude and a comic-opera tune played by mildred wain. but there is everlasting conflict between the gravestone of gertrude and the obscene pomposity of the hired mute: and there is everlasting conflict between the comic-opera tune and any mean or vulgar words to which it may be set. these, which man hath joined together, god shall most surely sunder. that is what i am feeling . . . now every hour of the day. all good things are one thing. sunsets, schools of philosophy, babies, constellations, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems--all these are merely disguises. one thing is always walking among us in fancy-dress, in the grey cloak of a church or the green cloak of a meadow. he is always behind, his form makes the folds fall so superbly. and that is what the savage old hebrews, alone among the nations, guessed, and why their rude tribal god has been erected on the ruins of all polytheistic civilisations. for the greeks and norsemen and romans saw the superficial wars of nature and made the sun one god, the sea another, the wind a third. they were not thrilled, as some rude israelite was, one night in the wastes, alone, by the sudden blazing idea of all being the same god: an idea worthy of a detective story. 11, paternoster buildings (postmarked july 14, 1899.) . . . costume slightly improved. the truth is that a mystical and fantastic development has taken place. my clothes have rebelled against me. weary of scorn and neglect, they have all suddenly come to life and they dress me by force every morning. my frockcoat leaps upon me like a lion and hangs on, dragging me down. as i struggle my boots trip me up--and the laces climb up my feet (never missing a hole) like snakes or creepers. at the same moment the celebrated grey tie springs at my throat like a wild cat. i am told that the general effects produced by this remarkable psychical development are superb. really the clothes must know best. still it is awkward when a mackintosh pursues one down the street. . . . . . . there is nothing in god's earth that really expresses the bottom of the nature of a man in love except burns' songs. to the man not in love they must seem inexplicably simple. when he says, "my love is like the melody that's sweetly played in tune," it seems almost a crude way of referring to music. but a man in love with a woman feels a nerve move suddenly that dante groped for and shakespeare hardly touched. what made me think of burns, however, was that one of his simple and sudden things, hitting the right nail so that it rings, occurs in the song of "o a' the airts the wind can blaw," where he merely says that there is nothing beautiful anywhere but it makes him think of the woman. that is not really a mere aesthetic fancy, a chain of sentimental association--it is an actual instinctive elemental movement of the mind, performed automatically and instantly. . . . felixstowe (undated) . . . i have as you see, arrived here. i have done other daring things, such as having my hair shampooed, as you commanded, and also cut. the effect of this is so singularly horrible that i have found further existence in london impossible. public opinion is too strong for me. . . . there are many other reasons i could give for being pleased to come: such as that i have some time for writing the novel; that i can make up stories i don't intend to write . . . that there are phosphorescent colours on the sea and a box of cigarettes on the mantelpiece. some fragments of what i felt [about gertrude's death] have struggled out in the form of some verses which i am writing out for you. but for real strength (i don't like the word "comfort") for real peace, no human words are much good except perhaps some of the unfathomable, unintelligible, unconquerable epigrams of the bible. i remember when bentley had a burning boyish admiration for professor huxley, and when that scientist died some foolish friend asked him quite flippantly in a letter what he felt about it. bentley replied with the chapter and verse reference to one of the psalms, alone on a postcard. the text was, "precious in the sight of the lord is the death of one of his saints." the friend, i remember, thought it "a curious remark about huxley." it strikes me as a miraculous remark about anybody. it is one of those magic sayings where every word hits a chain of association, god knows how. "precious"--we could not say that gertrude's death is happy or providential or sweet or even perhaps good. but it is something. "beautiful" is a good word--but "precious" is the only right word. it is this passionate sense of the _value_ of things: of the richness of the cosmic treasure: the world where every star is a diamond, every leaf an emerald, every drop of blood a ruby, it is this sense of preciousness that is really awakened by the death of his saints. somehow we feel that even their death is a thing of incalculable value and mysterious sweetness: it is awful, tragic, desolating, desperately hard to bear--but still "precious." . . . forgive the verbosity of one whose trade it is to express the inexpressible. the verses he speaks of in this letter, frances treasured greatly. she showed them to me, in a book which opens with a very touching prayer in her own writing. in a later chapter i quote the lines in which gilbert writes of his own tone-deafness, and of how he saw what music meant as he watched his wife's face. something of the same effect is produced on me by these verses. gilbert was not of course tone-deaf to this tragedy, yet it was chiefly in its effect on frances that it affected him. the sudden sorrow smote my love that often falls twixt kiss and kiss and looking forth awhile she said can no man tell me where she is. and again stricken they sat: and through them moved my own dear lady, pale and sweet. this soul whose clearness makes afraid our souls: this wholly guiltless one- no cobweb doubts--no passion smoke have veiled this mirror from thy sun. in letters to frances he could enter so deeply into her grief as to make it his own. but when he wrote verse and spoke as it were to himself or to god, the reflected emotion was not enough. these verses could never rank with his real poetry. it was not possible in fact for a man so happily in love to dwell lastingly on any sorrow. and i cannot avoid the feeling that, quite apart from any theory, cheerfulness was constantly "breaking in." for gilbert was a very happy man. across the top of one of his letters is written: "you can always tell the real love from the slight by the fact that the latter weakens at the moment of success; the former is quadrupled." the next of his letters is a mingling of the comic and the fantastic, very special to g.k.c. 11, paternoster buildings (postmarked sept. 29, 1899.) . . . i fear, as you say, that my letters do not contain many practical details about myself: the letters are not very long to begin with, as i think it better to write something every day than a long letter when i have leisure: and when i have a little time to think in, i always think of the kosmos first and the ego afterwards. i admit, however, that you are not engaged to the kosmos: dear me! what a time the kosmos would have! all its comets would have their hair brushed every morning. the whirlwind would be adjured not to walk about when it was talking. the oceans would be warmed with hot-water pipes. not even the lowest forms of life would escape the crusade of tidiness: you would walk round and round the jellyfish, looking for a place to put in shirt-links. under these circumstances, then, i cannot but regard it as fortunate that you are only engaged to your obedient microcosm: a biped inheriting some of the traits of his mother, the kosmos, its untidiness, its largeness, its irritating imperfection and its profound and hearty intention to go on existing as long as it possibly can. i can understand what you mean about wanting details about me, for i want just the same about you. you need only tell me "i went down the street to a pillar-box," i shall know that you did it in a manner, blindingly, staggeringly, crazily beautiful. it is quite true, as you say, that i am a person wearing _certain_ clothes with a _certain_ kind of hair. i cannot get rid of the impression that there is something scorchingly sarcastic about the underlining in this passage. . . . . . . as to what i do every day: it depends on which way you want it narrated: what we all say it is, or what it really is. what we all say happens every day is this: i wake up: dress myself, eat bacon and bread and coffee for breakfast: walk up to high st. station, take a fourpenny ticket for blackfriars, read the chronicle in the train, arrive at 11, paternoster buildings: read a ms called "the lepers" (light comedy reading) and another called "the preparation of ryerson embury"--you know the style--till 2 o'clock. go out to lunch, have--(but here perhaps it would be safer to become vague), come back, work till six, take my hat and walking-stick and come home: have dinner at home, write the novel till 11, then write to you and go to bed. that is what, we in our dreamy, deluded way, really imagine is the thing that happens. what really happens (but hist! are we observed?) is as follows. out of the starless night of the uncreated, that was before the stars, a soul begins to grope back to light. it gropes its way through strange, half-lighted chambers of dreams, where in a brown and gold twilight, it sees many things that are dimly significant, true stories twisted into new and amazing shapes, human beings whom it knew long ago, sitting at the windows by dark sunsets, or talking in dim meadows. but the awful invading light grows stronger in the dreams, till the soul in one last struggle, plunges into a body, as into a house and wakes up within it. then he rises and finds himself in a wonderful vast world of white light and clear, frankly coloured shapes, an inheritor of a million stars. on enquiry he is informed that his name is gilbert keith chesterton. this amuses him. he goes through a number of extraordinary and fantastic rituals; which the pompous elfland he has entered demands. the first is that he shall get inside a house of clothing, a tower of wool and flax; that he shall put on this foolish armour solemnly, one piece after another and each in its right place. the things called sleevelinks he attends to minutely. his hair he beats angrily with a bristly tool. for this is the law. downstairs a more monstrous ceremony attends him. he has to put things inside himself. he does so, being naturally polite. nor can it be denied that a weird satisfaction follows. he takes a sword in his hand (for what may not befall him in so strange a country!) and goes forth: he finds a hole in the wall, a little cave wherein sits one who can give him the charm that rules the horse of water and fire. he finds an opening and descends into the bowels of the earth. down, among the roots of the eternal hills, he finds a sunless temple wherein he prays. and in the centre of it he finds a lighted temple in which he enters. then there are noises as of an earthquake and smoke and fire in the darkness: and when he opens the door again he is in another temple, out of which he climbs into another world, leagues and leagues away. and when he asks the meaning of the vision, they talk gibberish and say, "it is a train." so the day goes, full of eerie publishers and elfin clerks, till he returns and again puts things inside him, and then sits down and makes men in his own head and writes down all that they said and did. and last of all comes the real life itself. for half-an-hour he writes words upon a scrap of paper, words that are not picked and chosen like those that he has used to parry the strange talk of the folk all day, but words in which the soul's blood pours out, like the body's blood from a wound. he writes secretly this mad diary, all his passion and longing, all his queer religion, his dark and dreadful gratitude to god, his idle allegories, the tales that tell themselves in his head; the joy that comes on him sometimes (he cannot help it!) at the sacred intoxication of existence: the million faults of idleness and recklessness and the one virtue of the unconquered adoration of goodness, that dark virtue that every man has, and hides deeper than all his vices--he writes all this down as he is writing it now. and he knows that if he sticks it down and puts a stamp on it and drops it into the mouth of a little red goblin at the corner of the street--he knows that all this wild soliloquy will be poured into the soul of one wise and beautiful lady sitting far away beyond seas and rivers and cities, under the shadow of an alien cathedral. . . . this is not all so irrelevant as you may think. it was this line of feeling that taught me, an utter rationalist as far as dogma goes, the lesson of the entire spirituality of things--an opinion that nothing has ever shattered since. i can't express myself on the point, nobody can. but it is _only_ the spirituality of things that we are sure of. that the eyes in your face are eyes i do not know: they may have other names and uses. i know that they are _good_ or beautiful, or rather spiritual. i do not know on what principle the universe is run, i know or feel that it is _good_ or spiritual. i do not know what gertrude's death was--i know that it was beautiful, for i saw it. we do not feel that it is so beautiful now--why? because we do not see it now. what we see now is her absence: but her death is not her absence, but her presence somewhere else. that is what we _knew_ was beautiful, as long as we could see it. do not be frightened, dearest, by the slow inevitable laws of human nature, we shall climb back into the mountain of vision: we shall be able to use the word, with the accent of whitman. "disembodied, triumphant, dead." in the _notebook_ he was writing: there is a heart within a distant town who loves me more than treasure or renown think you it strange and wear it as a crown. is not the marvel here; that since the kiss and dizzy glories of that blinding bliss one grief has ever touched me after this. we see gilbert in the next two letters more concerned about a grand dinner of the j.d.c. than about his future fame and fortune. in the second he mentions almost casually that he is leaving fisher unwin. from now on he was to live by his pen. 11 warwick gardens, w. tuesday night. 3rd oct. 1899. . . . nothing very astonishing has happened yet, though many astonishing things will happen soon. the final perfection of humanity i expect shortly. the _speaker_ for this week--the first of the _new speaker_, is coming out soon, and may contain something of mine though i cannot be quite sure. a rush of the boers on natal, strategically quite possibly successful, is anticipated by politicians. the rising of the sun tomorrow morning is predicted by astronomers. my father again is engaged in the crucial correspondence with fisher unwin, at least it has begun by t.f.u. stating his proposed terms--a rise of 5/--from october, another rise possible but undefined in january, 10 per cent royalty for the paris book and expenses for a fortnight in paris. these, as i got my father to heartily agree, are vitiated to the bone as terms by the absence of any assurance that i shall not have to write "paris," for which i am really paid nothing, _outside_ the hours of work for which i am paid 25/--. in short, the net result would be that instead of gaining more liberty to rise in the literary world, i should be selling the small liberty of rising that i have now for five more shillings. this my father is declining and asking for a better settlement. the diplomacy is worrying, yet i enjoy it: i feel like mr. chamberlain on the eve of war. i would stop with t.f.u. for â£100 a year--but not for less. which means, i think, that i shall not stop at all. but all these revolutions, literary, financial and political fade into insignificance compared with the one really tremendous event of this week. it will take place on saturday next. the sun will stand still upon leicester square and the moon on the valley of wardour st. for then will assemble the grand commemorative meeting of the junior debating club. the secretary, mr. l.r.f. oldershaw, will select a restaurant, make arrangements and issue the proclamations, or, to use the venerable old club phrase "the writs." when this gorgeous function is over, you must expect a colossal letter. everyone of the old brotherhood, scattered over many cities and callings, has hailed the invitation, and is coming, with the exception of bentley, who will send a sensational telegram from paris. the fun is expected to be fast and furious, the undercurrent of emotion (twelve years old) is not likely to be much disguised. as i say, i will write you a sumptuous description of it; it is somewhat your due, for the thing is, and always will be, one of the main strands of my life. . . . none can say what will occur. it is one of those occasions when englishmen are not much like the pictures of them in continental satires . . . there is more in this old affair of ours than possibly meets the eye. it is a thing that has left its roots deep in the hearts of twelve strangely different men. . . . and now that seven of us have found the new life that can only be found in woman, it would be mean indeed not to turn back and thank the old. . . . 11, warwick gardens, w. . . . this is the colossal letter. i trust you will excuse me if the paper is conceived on a similar scale of babylonian immensity. i cannot make out exactly whether i did or did not post a letter i wrote to you on saturday. if i did not, i apologise for missing the day. if i did, you will know by this time one or two facts that may interest you, the chief of which is that i am certainly leaving fisher unwin, with much mutual courtesy and goodwill. this fact may interest you, i repeat: at this moment i am not sure whether it interests me. for my head, to say nothing of another organ, is filled with the thundering cheers and songs of the dinner on saturday night. it was, i may say without hesitation, a breathless success. cholmeley, who must be experienced being both a schoolmaster, a diner out and a clever man, told me he had never in his life heard eleven better speeches. i quite agree with him, merely adding his own. everyone was amusing and what is much better, singularly characteristic. will you forgive me, dearest, if i reel off to the only soul that can be trusted to enjoy my enjoyment, a kind of report of the meeting? it will revivify my own memories. and one thing at least that i said in my speech i thoroughly believed in--"if there is any prayer i should be inclined to make it is that i should forget nothing in my life." the proceedings opened with dinner. the illustrated menus were wildly appreciated: every person got all the rest to sign on the menu and then took it away as a memento. then the telegrams from kruger, chamberlain, dreyfus and george meredith were read. then i proposed the toast of the queen. i merely said that nothing could ever be alleged against the queen, except the fact that she is not a member of the j.d.c. and that i thought it spoke well for the chivalry of englishmen that with this fact she had never been publicly taunted. i said i knew that the virtues of queen victoria had become somewhat platitudinous, but i thought it was a fortunate country in which the virtues of its powerful ones are platitudes. the toast was then drunk. . . . after a pause and a little conversation, i called upon lawrence solomon to propose the toast of "the school." he was very amusing indeed. most of his speech would not be very comprehensible to an outsider for it largely consisted of an ingenious dove-tailing of the sentences in the latin and greek arnold. i shall never forget the lucid and precise enunciation with which he delivered the idiotic sentences in those works, more especially where he said, "such a course would be more agreeable to mr. cholmeley and i would rather gratify such a man as he than see the king of the persians." cholmeley, amid roars of welcome, rose to respond. i think i must have told you in a former letter that cholmeley is a former classmaster of ours, a former house-master of bentley's, and one of the nicest men at st. paul's. we invited him as the only visitor. he said a great deal that was very amusing, mostly a commentary on solomon's remarks about the latin arnold. one remark he made was that he possessed one particular latin arnold, formerly the property of the president, which he had withdrawn from him "with every expression of contumely"--because it was drawn all over with devils. he made some very sound remarks about the club as an answer to the common charge against st. paul's school that it was aridly scholastic, without spontaneous growth in culture or sentiment. then fordham proposed "the ladies." he was killing. fordham is a personality whom i think you do not know. he is one of the most profoundly humourous men i ever knew, but his humour is more thickly coated on him, so to speak, than bentley or oldershaw, i.e., it is much more difficult to make him serious. he is one of the most fascinating "typical englishmen" i ever knew: strong, generous, flippant on principle, rowdy by physical inspiration, successful, popular, married--a man to discharge all the normal functions of life well. but his most entertaining gift which he displayed truly sumptuously on this occasion is a wonderful gift of burlesque and stereotyped rhetoric. with melodramatic gestures he drew attention to the torrents of the president's blood pouring "from the wound of the tiny god." amid sympathetic demonstration he protested against the pathos of the toast, "the conquered on the field of battle toasting the conquerors." as the only married member of the club he ventured to give us some advice on (a) food, (b) education, (c) intercourse. he sat down in a pure whirlwind of folly, without saying a word about the feelings that were in all hearts, including his own, just then. but i was delighted to find that marriage had not taken away an inch of his incurable silliness. nothing could be a greater contrast than the few graceful and dignified but very restrained words in which bertram responded to the toast. he is not a man who cares to make fun of women, however genially. then came langdon-davies, whom i called upon to propose "the club." his was perhaps the most interesting case of all. when i knew langdon-davies in the junior debating club, he was one of the most frivolous young men i ever knew. . . . but knowing that he was a good speaker in a light style, and had been president of the cambridge union, i put him down to propose the club, thinking that we should have enough serious speaking and would be well to err on the side of entertainment. langdon-davies got up and proceeded to deliver a speech that made me jump. it was, i thought, the best speech of the evening: but i am sure it was the most serious, the most sympathetic and a long way the most frankly emotional. he said that the club was not now a club in the strict sense. it was two things preeminently and everlastingly--a memory and an influence. he spoke with a singular sort of subdued vividness of the influence the club had had on him in boyhood. he then turned to the history of the club. and here, my dearest lady, i am pained to have to report that he launched suddenly and dramatically into a most extraordinary, and apparently quite sincere eulogium upon myself and the influence i had on my schoolfellows. i will not repeat his words--i did not believe them, but they took me by surprise and shook me somewhat. mr. b. n. langdon-davies, i may remark, and yourself, are the only persons who have ever employed the word "genius" in connection with me. i trust it will not occur again. i replied. my speech was a medley, but it appeared very successful. i discussed largely the absence of any successor to the j.d.c. i described how i watched the boys leaving school today--a solitary figure, clad in the latest fashion, moodily pacing the hammersmith road--and asked myself "where among these is the girlish gush of a bentley--the passionate volubility of a vernã¨de, the half-ethereal shyness of a fordham?!!" i admitted that we had had misfortunes, one of us had a serious illness, another had had a very good story in the strand magazine: but i thought that a debating club of 12 members that had given three presidents to the university unions, had not done badly. the rest was sentimental. then began a most extraordinary game of battledore and shuttlecock. vernã¨de proposed the secretary, mr. oldershaw. mr. oldershaw, instead of replying properly, proposed mr. bentley and the absent members. waldo responded for these or rather instead of responding proposed mr. maurice solomon. mr. maurice solomon instead of responding proposed mr. salter. the latter was the only one who had not spoken and on rising he explained his reasons for refusing. he had not been in the same room with mr. cholmeley, he said, since he had sat five years ago in the lower fourth and mr. cholmeley had told him that he talked too much. he had no desire on his first reappearance to create in mr. cholmeley's mind the idea that he had been at it ever since. after this we passed on to singing and nearly brought down the roof of pinoli's restaurant. cholmeley, the awful being of whose classic taste in greek iambics i once stood in awe, sang with great feeling a fragment of lyric literature of which the following was, as far as i remember, the refrain: "singing chooral-i-chooral-i-tiddity also--chooral-i-chooral-i-tay and chanting chooral-i-chooral-i-dititty not forgetting--chooral-i-chooral-i-day--" vernã¨de sang a sussex pothouse chorus in an indolent and refined way which was exquisitely incongruous: waldo and langdon-davies also sang. i recited an ode which i had written for the occasion and lucian recited one of bentley's poems that came out in an oxford magazine. then we sang the anthem* of the j.d.c., of which the words are, "i am a member--i'm a member--member of the j.d.c. i belong to it forever--don't you wish that you were me." [* it was sung to the tune of "clementine."] then we paid the bill. then we borrowed each other's arms and legs in an inextricable tangle and sang "auld lang syne." then we broke up. there now. five mortal pages of writing and nothing about you in it. how relieved you must be, wearied out with allusions to your hair and your soul and your clothes and your eyes. and yet it has been every word of it about you really. i like to make my past vivid to you, especially this past, not only because it was on the whole, a fine, healthy, foolish, manly, enthusiastic, idiotic past, with the very soul of youth in it. not only because i am a victim of the prejudice, common i trust to all mankind, that no one ever had such friends as i had. . . . readers of the _autobiography_ will remember that many many years later, at the celebration of hilaire belloc's sixtieth birthday, the guests threw the ball to one another in just this same fashion. chesterton had by then so far forgotten this earlier occasion that he spoke of the belloc birthday party as the only dinner in his life at which every diner made a speech. two more extracts from his letters must be given, showing the efforts made by frances to look after gilbert, and his reactions. one of his friends remarked that gilbert's life was unique in that, never having left home for a boarding school or university, he passed from the care of his mother to the care of his wife. i think too that the degree of his physical helplessness affected all who came near him with the feeling that while he might lead them where he would intellectually, it was their task to look after a body that would otherwise be wholly neglected. the old religionists used to talk about a man being "a fool for christ's sake"--certainly i have been a blithering fool for your sake. i went to see the doctor, as you requested. he asked me what he could do for me. i told him i hadn't the least idea, but people thought my cold had been going on long enough. he said, "i've no doubt it has." he then, to afford some relief to the idiotic futility of the situation, wrote me a prescription, which i read on my way up to business, weeping over the pathetic parts and laughing heartily at the funny ones. i have since had some of it. it tastes pretty aimless. i cannot remember for certain whether i mentioned in my letter that i had had an invitation including yourself, from my aunt kate for this friday. as you do not refer to it, i expect i didn't--so i wrote to her giving both our thanks and explaining the state of affairs. "all is over," i said, "between that lady and myself. do not name her to me, lest the hideous word 'woman' should blind me to the seraphic word 'aunt.' my life is a howling waste--but what matter? ha! ha! ha!" i cannot remember my exact words, of course. . . . . . . i am a revolting object. my hair is a matted chaos spread all over the floor, my beard is like a hard broom. my necktie is on the wrong way up: my bootlaces trail half-way down fleet st. why not? when one's attempts at reformation are "not much believed in" what other course is open but a contemptuous relapse into liberty? your last letter makes me much happier. i put great faith in the healing power of the great winds and the sun. "nature," as walt whitman says, "and her primal sanities." mrs. s . . . , also, is a primal sanity. it is not, i believe, considered complimentary, in a common way, to approach an attractive lady and say pleasantly, "you are thousands of years old." or, "you seem to me as old as the mountains." therefore i do not say it. but i always feel that anyone beautiful and strong is really old--for the really old things are not decrepit: decrepit things are dying early. the roman empire was decrepit. a sunrise cloud is old. so i think there are some people, who even in their youth, seem to have existed always: they bear the mark of the elemental things: the things that recur; they are as old as springtime, as old as daybreak--as old as youth. chapter x who is g.k.c.? the boer war--and the whole country enthusiastically behind it. the liberal party as a whole went with the conservatives. the leading fabians--bernard shaw, mr. and mrs. sidney webb, hubert bland, cecil chesterton and the "semi-detached fabian" h. g. wells--were likewise for the war. only a tiny minority remained in opposition, most of whom were pacifists or cranks of one kind or another. to the sane minority of this minority gilbert found himself belonging. it is something of a tribute to the national feeling at such a moment of tension that (as an american has noted) "chesterton was the one british writer, utterly unknown before, who built up a great reputation, and it was gained, not through nationalistic support, but through determined and persistent opposition to british policy."* [* _chesterton_, by cyril clemens, p. 20.] in his _daily news_ column a correspondent later asked him to define his position. chesterton replied, "the unreasonable patriot is one who sees the faults of his fatherland with an eye which is clearer and more merciless than any eye of hatred, the eye of an irrational and irrevocable love." his attitude sprang, he claimed, not from defect but from excess of patriotism. it is hard to imagine anything that would clarify better the ideas of a strong mind than finding itself in opposition. this opposition began at home, in argument with cecil. later the two brothers would agree about most main issues, but now cecil was a tory democrat, gilbert a pro-boer, and what was known as a little englander. the tie between the two brothers was very close. as the "innocent child" developed into the combative companion, there is no doubt that he proportionately affected gilbert. all their friends talk of the endless amicable arguments through which both grew. conrad noel remembers parties at warwick gardens during the boer war at which the two brothers "would walk up and down like the two pistons of an engine" to the disorganisation of the company and the dismay of their parents. it was at this time that frances, engaged to a deeply devoted gilbert, found even that devotion insufficient to pry him and cecil apart when an argument had got well under way. "i must go home, gilbert. i shall miss my train." usually he would have sprung to accompany her, but now she must miss many trains before the brothers could be separated. frances told me that when they were at the seaside the landlady would sometimes clear away breakfast, leaving the brothers arguing, come to set lunch and later set dinner while still they argued. they had come to the seaside but they never saw the sea. once frances was staying with them at a house they had taken by the sea. her room was next to cecil's and she could not sleep for the noise of the discussion that went on hour after hour. about one in the morning she rapped on the wall and said, "o cecil, do send gilbert to bed." a brief silence followed, and then the remark, in a rather abashed voice, "there's no one here." cecil had been arguing with himself. gilbert too argued with himself for the stand he was taking was a hard one. mr. belloc has told me that he felt gilbert suffered at any word against england, that his patriotism was passionate. and now he had himself to say that he believed his country to be in the wrong. to admit it to himself, to state it to others. this autumn of 1899 g.k. began to write for the _speaker_. the weekly of this title had long been in a languishing condition when it was taken over by a group of young liberals of very marked views. hammond became editor and philip comyns carr sub-editor. sir john simon was among the group for a short while, but he soon told one of them that he feared close association with the _speaker_ might injure his career. f. y. eccles was in charge of the review department. he is able to date the start of what was known as the "new" _speaker_ with great exactitude, for when the first number was going to press the ultimatum had been sent to kruger and the editors hesitated as to whether they should take the risk of announcing that it was war in south africa. they decided against, but before their second number appeared war had been declared. my difficulty in getting a picture of the first meeting of belloc and chesterton illustrates the problem of human testimony and the limits of that problem. for i imagine a scripture critic, old style, would end by concluding that the men never met at all. f. y. eccles, e. c. bentley and lucian oldershaw all claim to have made the momentous introduction, mr. eccles adding that it took place at the office of the _speaker_, while gilbert himself has described the meeting twice: once in the street, once in a restaurant. belloc remembers the introduction as made in the year 1900 by lucian oldershaw, who was living at the time with hammond. mr. oldershaw usually has the accuracy of the hero-worshipper and upon this matter he adds several amusing details. for some time he had been trying to get the group on the _speaker_ to read chesterton and had in vain taken several articles to the office. mr. eccles declared the handwriting was that of a jew and he prejudiced belloc, says oldershaw, against reading "anything written by my jew friend." but when at last they did meet, belloc "opened the conversation by saying in his most pontifical manner, 'chesterton, you wr-r-ite very well.'" chesterton was then 26, belloc four years older. it was at the mont blanc, a restaurant in gerrard st., soho, and the meeting was celebrated with a bottle of moulin au vent. the first description given by gilbert himself is at once earlier and more vivid than the better known one in the _autobiography_. when i first met belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us that he was in low spirits. his low spirits were and are much more uproarious and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. he talked into the night, and left behind in it a glowing track of good things. when i have said that i mean things that are good, and certainly not merely _bons mots_, i have said all that can be said in the most serious aspect about the man who has made the greatest fight for good things of all the men of my time. we met between a little soho paper shop and a little soho restaurant; his arms and pockets were stuffed with french nationalist and french atheist newspapers. he wore a straw hat shading his eyes, which are like a sailor's, and emphasizing his napoleonic chin. . . . the little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt for three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about the south african war, which was then in its earliest prestige. most of us were writing on the _speaker_. . . . . . . what he brought into our dream was this roman appetite for reality and for reason in action, and when he came into the door there entered with him the smell of danger.* [* introduction to: _hilaire belloc: the man and his work_ by c. c. mandell and e. shanks, 1916.] "it was from that dingy little soho cafã©," chesterton writes in the _autobiography_, "that there emerged the quadruped, the twiformed monster mr. shaw has nicknamed the chesterbelloc." listening to belloc is intoxicating. i have heard many brilliant talkers, but none to whom that word can so justly be applied. he goes to your head, he takes you off your feet, he leaves you breathless, he can convince you of anything. my mother and brother both counted it as one of the great experiences of their lives to have dined with belloc in a small paris restaurant (aux vendanges de bourgogne) and then to have walked with him the streets of that glorious city while he discoursed of its past. imagination staggers before the picture of a belloc in his full youth and vigour in a group fitted to strike from him his brightest fire at a moment big with issues for the world's future. in chesterton's _autobiography_ a chapter is devoted to the "portrait of a friend," while belloc in turn has said something of chesterton in obituary notices and also in a brief study of his position in english literature. none of these documents give much notion of the intellectual flame struck out by one mind against the other. it has often been asked how much belloc influenced chesterton. the best test of an influence in a writer's life is to compare what he wrote before with what he wrote after he was first subjected to it. it is easy to apply this test to belloc's influence on g.k.c. because of the mass we still have of his boyhood writings. in pure literature, in philosophy and theology he remains untouched by the faintest change. pages from the notebook could be woven into _orthodoxy_, essays from _the debater_ introduced into _the victorian age in literature_, and it would look simply like buds and flowers on the same bush. belloc has characterized himself as ignorant of english literature and says he learnt from chesterton most of what he knows of it, while there is no doubt chesterton was by far the greater philosopher. with politics, sociology, and history (and the relation of religion to all three) it is different. belloc himself told me he thought the chief thing he had done for chesterton when they first met was to open his eyes to reality--chesterton had been unusually young for his twenty-six years and unusually simple in regard to the political scene. he was in fact the young man he himself was later to describe as knowing all about politics and nothing about politicians. the four years between the two men seemed greater than it was, partly because of belloc's more varied experience of life--french military training, life at oxford, wide travel and an early marriage. belloc, then, could teach chesterton a certain realism about politics--which meant a certain cynicism about politicians. far more valuable, however, was what belloc had to give him in sociology. we have seen that g.k. was already dissatisfied with socialism before he met belloc; it may be that by his consideration of the nature of man he would later have reached the positions so individually set out in _what's wrong with the world_--but this can only remain a theoretical question. for belloc did actually at this date answer the sociological question that chesterton at this date was putting: answered it brilliantly and answered it truly. every test that g.k. could later apply--of profound human reality, of truth divinely revealed--convinced him that the answer was true. he had, he has told us, been a socialist because it was so horrible not to be one, but he now learned of the historical christian alternative--equally opposed to socialism and to capitalism-well-distributed property. this had worked in the past, was still working in many european countries, could be made to work again in england. the present trend appeared to belloc to be towards the servile state, and in the book with this title and a second book _the restoration of property_ he later developed his sociology. after this first meeting, two powerful and very different minds would reciprocally influence one another. an admirer of both told me that he thought chesterton got the idea of small property from belloc but gave belloc a fuller realization of the position of the family. one difference between them is that belloc writes sociology as a textbook while chesterton writes it as a human document. all the wealth of imagination that belloc pours into _the path to rome_ or _the four men_ he sternly excludes from the servile state. the poet, traveller, essayist is one man, the sociologist another. the third field of influence was history. here belloc did chesterton two great services--he restored the proportion of english history, and he put england back into its context. since the reformation, english history had been written with all the stress on the protestant period. lingard had written earlier but had not been popularized and certainly would not be used at st. paul's school. and even lingard had laid little stress on the social effects of the reformation. mr. hammond's contemporary work on english social history fitted into belloc's more vivid if less documented vision--none of this could be disregarded by later writers. belloc, too, restored that earlier england to the christendom to which it belonged. the england of macaulay or of green had, like mr. mantalini's dowager, either no outline or a "demned outline" for it was cut out of a larger map. and chesterton was always seeking an outline of history. to get england back into the context of christendom is a great thing: just how great must depend upon how rightly christendom is conceived. one cannot always escape the feeling that belloc conceives it too narrowly. his famous phrase "the faith is europe and europe is the faith" omits too much--the east out of which christianity came; the new worlds into which europe has flowed. belloc of course knows these things and has often said them. it is rather a question of emphasis, of how things loom in the mind when judgments have to be made. in that sense he does tend to narrow the faith to europe: in exactly the same sense he does tend to narrow europe to france. born in france of a french father, educated in england, belloc chose his mother's nationality, chose to be english; but his creator had chosen differently, and there is not much a man can do in competition with his creator. i do not for a moment suggest that belloc, having chosen to be english, is conscious of anything but loyalty to the country of his adoption. the thing lies far below the mind's conscious movements. belloc thinks of himself as an englishman with a patriotic duty to criticise his country, but his feelings are not really those of an englishman. once at least he recognised this when he wrote the verse: england to me that never have malingered, nor spoken falsely, nor your flattery used, _nor even in my rightful garden lingered_--: * what have you not refused? [* italics mine.] and just as france was belloc's rightful garden so england was chesterton's. when first they talked of the church he told belloc that he wanted the example of "someone entirely english who should none the less have come in." when criticising his country his voice has the note of pain that only love can give. belloc saw him as intensely national "english of the english . . . a mirror of england . . . he writes with an english accent." it is of some interest that after meeting belloc gilbert added notes to two early poems, each note reflecting a judgment of belloc's--on the dreyfus case which belloc saw as all french catholics saw it: on anglo-american relations which belloc saw as most latin europeans would see it. (1) the first was the poem entitled "to a certain nation"--addressed to france in commentary on the dreyfus case of 1899 which must be briefly explained for those who are too young to remember the excitement it caused. captain dreyfus, a jewish officer in the french army, had been found guilty of treachery and sent to devil's island. all france was divided into two camps on the question of his guilt or innocence. in general, catholics and what we should call the right were all for his guilt; atheists, anti-clericals and believers in the republic were for his innocence. passions were roused to fury on both sides. english opinion was almost entirely for his innocence. i was a small girl at the time and i remember that my brother and i amused ourselves by crying _vive dreyfus_, on all possible and impossible occasions, for the annoyance of our pious french governess. i remember also that our parents were startled by the vehemence of the french catholic paper _la croix_ from which our governess imbibed her views. ultimately the case was reopened, and dreyfus, after years of horror on devil's island, found not guilty and restored to his rank in the army. but there are, i know, catholic frenchmen alive today who refuse to believe in his innocence and hold that the whole thing was a jewish-masonic plot that hampered the french espionage service and nearly lost us the war of 1914. in the first edition of _the wild knight_, written before the meeting with belloc, gilbert, like any other english liberal, had assumed dreyfus' innocence and in the poem "to a certain nation" had reproached the france of the revolution, the france he had loved, as unworthy of herself. . . . and we who knew thee once, we have a right to weep. the note in the second edition shows him as now undecided about dreyfus' guilt and concludes: "there may have been a fog of injustice in the french courts; i know that there was a fog of injustice in the english newspapers." (2) in "an alliance" chesterton had gloried in "the blood of hengist" and hymned an anglo-american alliance with the enthusiasm of a young republican who took for granted the links of language and of origin that might draw together two great countries into something significant: in change, eclipse, and peril under the whole world's scorn, by blood and death and darkness the saxon peace is sworn; that all our fruit be gathered and all our race take hands, and the sea be a saxon river that runs through saxon lands. but in the note to the second edition, he says: in the matter of the "anglo-american alliance" i have come to see that our hopes of brotherhood with america are the same in kind as our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent nations of christendom. and a very small study of history was sufficient to show me that the american nation, which is a hundred years old, is at least fifty years older than the anglo-saxon race.* [* collected poems, p. 318.] the poem was of course only a boyish expression of a boyish dream; like all dreams, like all boyhood dreams especially, it omitted too much; yet it contained a thought that might well have borne rich fruit in gilbert's catholic life. my mother told me once that when after three years' study of queen elizabeth's character she came to a different conclusion from belloc, she found it almost impossible to resist his power and hold on to her own view. it must be realised that chesterton actually preferred the attitude of a disciple. a mutual friend has told me that chesterton listened to belloc all the time and said very little himself. in matters historical where he felt his own ignorance, gilbert's tendency was simply to make an act of faith in belloc. on nothing were the two men more healthily in accord than on the boer war. in an interesting study of belloc, prefixed to a french translation of _contemporary england_, f. y. eccles explains how he and most of the _speaker_ group differed from the pacifist pro-boers, who hated the south african war because they hated all wars. the young liberals on the _speaker_ were not pacifists. they hated the war because they thought it would harm england--harm her morally--to be fighting for an unjust cause, and even materially to be shedding the blood of her sons and pouring out her wealth at the bidding of a handful of alien financiers. thus far gilbert was among one group with whom he was in fullest sympathy. but i think he went further. mr. eccles told me that most of the _speaker_ group had no sympathy with the boers. gilbert had. he thought of them as human beings who might well have been farmers of sussex or of kent, something of an older civilization, resisting money power and imperialism and perishing thereby. few, indeed, of the liberal party held chesterton's ideal--an england territorially small, spiritually great. the _speaker_ was struggling against odds: it was the voice of a tiny group. to gilbert it seemed that this mattered nothing so long as that little group held to their great ideas, so long as the paper represented not merely a group or a party but the liberal idea. in an unfinished letter to hammond is to be found this idea as he saw it and his dawning disappointment even with the paper that most nearly stood for it: i am just about to commit a serious impertinence. i believe however that you will excuse it because it is about the paper and i know there is not another paper dead or alive for which i would take the trouble or run the risk of offence. i am hearing on all sides the _speaker_ complained of by the very people who should be and would be (if they could) its enthusiastic supporters and i cannot altogether deny the truth of their objections, though i am glad to notice both in them and in myself the fact that those objections are tacitly based on the assumption of the _speaker_ having an aim and standard higher than other papers. if the _speaker_ were a mere party rag like "judy" or "the times," it would be only remarkable for moderation, but to us who have built hopes on it as the pioneer of a younger and larger political spirit it is difficult to be silent when we find it, as it seems to us, poisoned with that spirit of ferocious triviality which is the spirit of birmingham eloquence, and with that evil instinct which has disintegrated the irish party, the instinct for hating the man who differs from you slightly, more than the man who differs from you altogether. of two successive numbers during the stress of the fight (a fight in which we had first to unite our army and then to use it) a considerable portion was devoted, first to sneering at "the daily news" and then to sneering at "the westminster gazette." . . . there is a sentence in the book of proverbs which expresses the whole of my politics. "for the liberal man deviseth liberal things and by his liberality he shall stand." now what i object to is sneering at "the westminster" as a supporter of chamberlain when everyone knows that it hardly lets a day pass without an ugly caricature of him. what i object to in this is that it is talking brummagem--it is not "devising liberal things" but spiteful, superficial, illiberal things. it is claptrap and temporary deception of the "patriotism before politics" order. . . . to all this you will say there is an obvious answer. the _speaker_ is a party paper and does not profess to be otherwise. but here i am sure we are mistaking our mission. what the _speaker_ is (i hope and believe) destined to do, is to renovate liberalism, and though liberalism (like every other party) is often conducted by claptrap, it has never been renovated by claptrap, but by great command of temper and the persistent exposition of persuasive and unanswerable truths. it is while we are in the desert that we have the vision: we being a minority, must be all philosophers: we must think for both parties in the state. it is no good our devoting ourselves to the flowers of mob oratory with no mob to address them to. we must, like the free traders, for instance, have discoveries, definite truths and endless patience in explaining them. we must be more than a political party or we shall cease to be one. time and again in history victory has come to a little party with big ideas: but can anyone conceive anything with the mark of death more on its brow than a little party with little ideas?* [* undated, handwritten letter in a notebook.] such liberalism was not perhaps of this world. it certainly was not of the liberal party! gilbert argued much with himself during these years. he had come out of his time of trial with firm faith in god and in man. but his philosophy was still in the making, and he made it largely out of the material supplied by ordinary london suburban society and by the rather less usual society of cranks and enthusiasts so plentiful at the end of the nineteenth century. he has written in the _autobiography_ of the artistic and dilettante groups where everyone discussed religion and no one practised it, of the christian socialists and other societies into which he and cecil found their way, and of some of the friendships they formed. among these one of the closest was with conrad noel who wrote in answer to my request for his recollections: we met g.k.c. for the first time at the stapleys' in bloomsbury square, at a series of meetings of the christo-theosophic society. he was like a very big fish out of water; he was comparatively thin, however, in those days, nearly forty years ago. we had been much intrigued by the weekly contribution of an unknown writer to "the speaker" and "the nation"--brilliant work, and my wife and i, independently, came to the conclusion when we heard this young man speak that it must be he. the style was unmistakable. i thought of writing to him to congratulate him on his speech, but before i could do so, i got a letter from him, saying that he was coming to hear me in the same series in a week or so; it was thus we first became acquainted, and the acquaintance ripened into a warm friendship with us both. he and his brother cecil were in and out of our flat in paddington green, where i was assistant curate. he was genial, bubbling over with jokes, at which he roared with laughter. the question was becoming insistent: when would there be enough money for frances and gilbert to get married? in one letter frances asks him what he thinks of omar khayyam. he replies at great length, and concludes: you see the result of asking me for an opinion. i have written it very hurriedly: if i had paused i might make an essay of it. (commercial pig!) never mind, sweetheart, that essay might be a sauce-pan some day--or at any rate a cheap toast-rack. of his belief in god, in man, in goodness, as against the pessimist outlook of the day, gilbert, as we have seen, felt profound certitude. that his outlook was one that held him back from many fields of opportunity he was already partly conscious. a fragment of a letter to frances expresses this feeling. . . . i find i cannot possibly come tonight as my canadian uncle keeps his last night in england in a sort of family party. and i abide by my father's house--said our lady of the snows. i have just had a note from rex, asking me, with characteristic precision, if i can produce a play in the style of maeterlinck by 6.50 this afternoon, or words to that effect. the idea is full of humour. he remarks, as a matter of fact that there is just a remote chance of his getting the stage society to act my play of the wild knight. this opens to me a vista of quite new ambition. why only at the stage society?--i see a visionary programme. the wild knight . . . . . . . . . . . . mr. charles hawtree captain redfeather . . . . . . . . . . mr. penley olive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . miss katie seymour priest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . sir henry irving lord orm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . mr. arthur roberts i am working and must get on with my work. i do not feel any despondency about it because i know it is good and worth doing. it is extraordinary how much more moral one is than one imagines. at school i never minded getting into a row if it were _really_ not my fault. similarly, i have never cared a rap for rejections or criticisms, since i had got a point of view to express which i was certain held water. some people think it holds water--on the brain. but i don't mind. bless them. i am afraid, darling, that this doctrine of patience is hard on you. but really it's a grand thing to think oneself right. it's what this whole age is starving for. something to suffer for and go mad and miserable over--that is the only luxury of the mind. i wish i were a convinced pro-boer and could stare down a howling mob. but i _am_ right about the cosmos, and schopenhauer and co. are wrong. . . . two interesting points in this letter are the remark about wishing to be a convinced pro-boer--which he certainly became--and the suggestion of a possible performance of _the wild knight_. perhaps the letter was written before he had finally taken his stand (it has no dating postmark), or perhaps it merely means that his convictions on the cosmos are more absolute than on the war. as to _the wild knight:_ it was never acted and its publication was made possible only by the generosity of gilbert's father. for a volume of comic verse, _greybeards at play_, which appeared earlier in the same year (1900), he could find a publisher, but serious poetry has never been easy to launch. the letter that follows has a more immediate bearing on their own future: 11, warwick gardens, good friday. 1900. . . . as you have tabulated your questions with such alarming precision i must really endeavour to answer them categorically. (1) how am i? i am in excellent health. i have an opaque cold in my head, cough tempestuously and am very deaf. but these things i count as mere specks showing up the general blaze of salubrity. i am getting steadily better and i don't mind how slowly. as for my spirits a cold never affects them: for i have plenty to do and think about indoors. one or two little literary schemes--trifles doubtless--claim my attention. (2) am i going away at easter? the sarcastic might think it a characteristic answer, but i can only reply that i had banished the matter from my mind, a vague problem of the remote future until you asked it: but since this is easter and we are not gone away i suppose we are not going away. (3) i will meet you at euston on tuesday evening though hell itself should gape and bid me stop at home. (4) i am not sure whether a review on crivelli's art is out this week: i am going to look. (5) alas! i have not been to nutt. there are good excuses, but they are not the real ones. i will write to him now. yes: now. (6) does my hair want cutting? my hair seems pretty happy. you are the only person who seems to have any fixed theory on this. for all i know it may be at that fugitive perfection which has moved you to enthusiasm. three minutes after this perfection, i understand, a horrible degeneration sets in: the hair becomes too long, the figure disreputable and profligate: and the individual is unrecognised by all his friends. it is he that wants cutting then, not his hair. (7) as to shirt-links, studs and laces, i glitter from head to foot with them. (8) i have had a few skirmishes with knollys but not the general engagement. when this comes off, you shall have news from our correspondent. (knollys was frances's brother.) (9) i have got a really important job in reviewing--the life of ruskin for the _speaker_. as i have precisely 73 theories about ruskin it will be brilliant and condensed. i am also reviewing the life of the kendals, a book on the renascence and one on correggio for "the bookman." (10) how far is it to babylon? babylon i am firmly convinced is just round the corner: if one could be only certain which corner. this conviction is the salt of my life. (11) really and truly i see no reason why we should not be married in april if not before. i have been making some money calculations with the kind assistance of rex, and as far as i can see we could live in the country on quite a small amount of regular literary work. . . p.s. forgot the last question. (12) oddly enough, i was writing a poem. will send it to you. gilbert's engagement had given him the impetus to earn more but he was always entirely unpractical. his salary at fisher unwin's had been negligible and he was not making much yet by the journalism which was now his only source of income. the repeated promise to "write to nutt" is very characteristic. for nutt was the manager of the solitary publisher who was at the moment prepared to put a book of gilbert's on the market at his own risk! although they did not manage to get married this year, by the end of it he was becoming well known. the articles, in the _speaker_ especially, were attracting attention and _greybeards at play_ had a considerable success. this, the first of gilbert's books to be published, is a curiosity. it is made up of three incredibly witty satirical poems--"the oneness of the philosopher with nature," "the dangers attending altruism on the high seas" and "the disastrous spread of aestheticism in all classes." the illustrations drawn by himself are as witty as the verses. by the beginning of 1901 his work was being sought for by other liberal periodicals and he was writing regularly for the _daily news_. the following letter to frances bears the postmark feb. 8, 1901. somewhere in the arabian nights or some such place there is a story of a man who was emperor of the indies for one day. i am rather in the position of that person: for i am editor of the _speaker_ for one day. hammond is unwell and hirst has gone to dine with john morley, so the latter asked me to see the paper through for this number. hence this notepaper and the great hurry and brevity which i fear must characterise this letter. there are a few minor amusing things, however, that i have a moment to mention. (1) the "daily news" have sent me a huge mass of books to review, which block up the front hall. a study of swinburne--a book on kipling--the last richard le gallienne--all very interesting. see if i don't do some whacking articles, all about the stars and the moon and the creation of adam and that sort of thing. i really think i could work a revolution in daily paper--writing by the introduction of poetical prose. (2) among other books that i have to review came, all unsolicited, a book by your old friend schofield. ha! ha! ha! it's about the formation of character, or some of those low and beastly amusements. i think of introducing parts of my comic opera of the p.n.e.u. into the articles. (3) another rather funny thing is the way in which my name is being spread about. belloc declares that everyone says to him "who discovered chesterton?" and that he always replies "the genius oldershaw." this may be a trifle gallic, but hammond has shown me more than one letter from cambridge dons and such people demanding the identity of g.k.c. in a quite violent tone. they excuse themselves by offensive phrases in which the word "brilliant" occurs, but i shouldn't wonder if there was a thick stick somewhere at the back of it. belloc, by the way, has revealed another side of his extraordinary mind. he seems to have taken our marriage much to heart, for he talks to me, no longer about french jacobins and mediaeval saints, but entirely about the cheapest flats and furniture, on which, as on the others, he is a mine of information, assuring me paternally that "it's the carpet that does you." i should think this fatherly tone would amuse you. now i must leave off: for the pages have come up to be seen through the press. . . . _greybeards at play_ its author never took very seriously. it was not included in his collected poems and he does not even mention it in his _autobiography_. he attached a great deal more importance to _the wild knight and other poems_. it was a volume of some fifty poems, many of which had already appeared in _the outlook_ and _the speaker_. it was published late in 1900 and produced a crop of enthusiastic reviews and more and more people began to ask one another, "who is g. k. chesterton?" one reviewer wrote: "if it were not for the haunting fear of losing a humourist we should welcome the author of _the wild knight_ to a high place among the poets." another spoke of the "curious intensity" of the volume. among those who were less pleased was john davidson, on whom the book had been fathered by one reviewer, and who denied responsibility for such "frantic rubbish," and also a "reverent" reviewer who complained, "it is scattered all over with the name of god." to frances, gilbert wrote: i have been taken to see mrs. meynell, poet and essayist, who is enthusiastic about the wild knight and is lending it to all her friends. last night i went to mrs. cox's book party. my costume was a great success, everyone wrestled with it, only one person guessed it, and the rest admitted that it was quite fair and simple. it consisted of wearing on the lapel of my dress coat the following letters. u.u.n.s.i.j. perhaps you would like to work this out all by yourself--but no, i will have mercy and not sacrifice. the book i represented was "the letters of junius." mrs. meynell never came to know gilbert well and her daughter says in the biography that her mother realised his "critical approval" (admiration would be a better word) of her own work only by reading his essays. but he once wrote an introduction for a book of hers and her admiration of him would break out frequently in amusing exclamations: "i hope the papers are nice to my chesterton. he is mine much more, really, than belloc's."* "if i had been a man, and large, i should have been chesterton."** [* _alice meynell_, p. 259.] [** _ibid._, p. 260.] brimley johnson, who was to have been gilbert's brother-in-law, sent _the wild knight_ to rudyard kipling. his reply is amusing and also touching, for mr. johnson was clearly pouring out, in interest in gilbert's career and in forwarding his marriage with frances, the affections that might merely have been frozen by gertrude's death. the elms, rottingdean, nov. 28th. dear mr. johnson, many thanks for _the wild knight_. of course i knew some of the poems before, notably _the donkey_ which stuck in my mind at the time i read it. i agree with you that there is any amount of promise in the work--and i think marriage will teach him a good deal too. it will be curious to see how he'll develop in a few years. we all begin with arrainging [sic] and elaborating all the heavens and hells and stars and tragedies we can lay our poetic hands on--later we see folk--just common people under the heavens- meantime i wish him all the happiness that there can be and for yourself such comfort as men say time brings after loss. it's apt to be a weary while coming but one goes the right way to get it if one interests oneself in the happiness of other folk. even though the sight of this happiness is like a knife turning in a wound. yours sincerely, rudyard kipling. p.s. merely as a matter of loathsome detail, chesterton has a bad attack of "aureoles." they are spotted all over the book. i think every one is bound in each book to employ unconsciously some pet word but that was rossetti's. likewise i notice "wan waste" and many "wans" and things that "catch and cling." he is too good not to be jolted out of that. what do you say to a severe course of walt whitman--or will marriage make him see people? gilbert had already taken both prescriptions--walt whitman and "folk, just common people under the heavens." (many years later james agate wrote in _thursdays and fridays_: "unlike some other serious thinkers, chesterton understood his fellow men; the woes of a jockey were as familiar to him as the worries of a judge.") perhaps some slight echoes of swinburne did remain in this collection. many earlier poems exist in the swinburne manner, not of thought but of expression: gilbert left an absolute command that these should never be published. all englishmen were stricken by the death of queen victoria. mr. somers cocks, who had come to know gilbert through his intimacy with belloc, remembers that he wept when he heard of it. the tears may almost be heard in a letter to frances. today the queen was buried. i did not see the procession, first because i had an appointment with hammond (of which more anon) and secondly because i think i felt the matter too genuinely. i like a crowd when i am triumphant or excited: for a crowd is the only thing that can cheer, as much as a cock is the only thing that can crow. can anything be more absurd than the idea of a man cheering alone in his back bedroom? but i think that reverence is better expressed by one man than a million. there is something unnatural and impossible, even grotesque, in the idea of a vast crowd of human beings all assuming an air of delicacy. all the same, my dear, this is a great and serious hour and it is felt so completely by all england that i cannot deny the enduring wish i have, quite apart from certain more private sentiments, that the noblest englishwoman i have ever known was here with me to renew, as i do, private vows of a very real character to do my best for this country of mine which i love with a love passing the love of jingoes. it is sometimes easy to give one's country blood and easier to give her money. sometimes the hardest thing of all is to give her truth. i am writing an article on the good friend who is dead: i hope particularly that you will like it. the one i really like so far is belloc's in the "speaker." i had, as i said, many things to say, but owing to the hour and a certain fatigue and idiocy in myself, i have only space for the most important. hammond sent for me today and asked me seriously if i would help him in writing a book on fox, sharing work, fame and profits. i told him that i had no special talent for research: he replied that he had no talent for literary form. i then said that i would be delighted to give him such assistance as i honestly thought valuable enough for him to split his profits for, that i thought i could give him such assistance in the matter of picturesqueness and plan of idea, more especially as fox was a great hero of mine and the philosophy of his life involves the whole philosophy of the revolution and of the love of mankind. we arranged that we would make a preliminary examination of the fox record and then decide. . . .* [* this book was never written nor even, i think, begun.] three more letters, two to frances, one to his mother, complete the outline of this eventful period. he was now determined to get married quickly. for the first time and entirely without rancour, he realised the inevitable competition in the world of journalism. the struggle for success meant men fighting one another. other journalists were fighting him; but truly enough, though with a rare dispassionateness, he realised that this meant a need for daily bread in others similar to his own. 11, warwick gardens, w. (postmark: feb. 19, 1901) . . . i hope that in your own beautiful kindness you will be indulgent just at this time if i only write rough letters or postcards. i am for the first time in my life, thoroughly _worried_, and i find it a rather exciting and not entirely unpleasant sensation. but everything depends just now, not only on my sticking hard to work and doing a lot of my very best, but on my thinking about it, keeping wide awake to the turn of the market, being ready to do things not in half a week, but in half an hour; getting the feelings and tendencies of other men and generally living in work. i am going to see lehmann tomorrow and many things may come of it. i cannot express to you what it is to feel the grip of the great wheel of real life on you for the first time. for the first time i know what is meant by the word "enemies"--men who deliberately dislike you and oppose your career--and the funny thing is that i don't dislike them at all myself. poor devils--very likely they want to be married in june too. i am a socialist, but i love this fierce old world and am beginning to find a beauty in making money (in moderation) as in making statues. always through my head one tune and words of kipling set to it. "they passed one resolution, your sub-committee believe you can lighten the curse of adam when you've lightened the curse of eve. and till we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen we'll work for ourselves and a woman, for ever and ever--amen." 11, warwick gardens, w. (postmark: march 4, 1901) . . . i have delayed this letter in a scandalous manner because i hoped i might have the arrangements with the _daily news_ to tell you; as that is again put off, i must tell you later. the following, however, are grounds on which i believe everything will turn out right this year. it is arithmetic. "the speaker" has hitherto paid me â£70 a year, that is â£6 a month. it has now raised it to â£10 a month, which makes â£120 a year. moreover they encourage me to write as much as i like in the paper, so that assuming that i do something extra (poem, note, leader) twice a month or every other number, which i can easily do, that brings us to nearly â£150 a year. so much for "the speaker." now for the "daily news," both certainties and probabilities. hammond (to whom you will favour me by being eternally grateful) pushed me so strongly with lehmann for the post of manager of the literary page that it is most probable that i shall get it. . . . if i do, hammond thinks they couldn't give me less than â£200 a year. so that if this turns out right, we have â£350, say, without any aid from "bookman," books, magazine articles or stories. let us however, put this chance entirely on one side and suppose that they can give me nothing but regular work on the "daily news." i have just started a set of popular fighting articles on literature in the "daily news" called "the wars of literature." they will appear at least twice a week, often three times. for each of these i am paid about a guinea and a half. this makes about â£3 a week which is â£144 a year. thus with only the present certainties of "speaker" and "daily news" we have â£264 a year, or very likely (with extra "speaker" items) â£288, close on â£300. this again may be reinforced by all sorts of miscellaneous work which i shall get now my name is getting known, magazine articles, helping editors or publishers, reading mss. and so on. in all these calculations i have kept deliberately under the figures, not over them: so that i don't think i have failed altogether to bring my promise within reasonable distance of fact already. belloc suggested that i should write for the "pilot" and as he is on it, he will probably get me some work. hammond has become leader-writer on the "echo" and will probably get me some reviewing on that. and between ourselves, to turn with intense relief, from all this egotism, hammond and i have a little scheme on hand for getting oldershaw a kind of editorial place on the "echo" where they want a brisk but cultivated man of the world. i think we can bring it off: it is a good place for an ambitious young man. it would give me more happiness than i can say, while i am building my own house of peace, to do something for the man who did so much in giving me my reason for it. for well thou knowest, o god most wise how good on earth was his gift to me shall this be a little thing in thine eyes that is greater in mine than the whole great sea? i am afraid . . . that this is a very dull letter. but you know what i am. i can be practical, but only deliberately, by fixing my mind on a thing. in this letter, i sum up my last month's thinking about money resources. i haven't given a thought yet to the application and distribution of them in rent, furniture, etc. when i have done thinking about that you will get another dull letter. i can keep ten poems and twenty theories in my head at once. but i can only think of one practical thing at a time. the only conclusion of this letter is that on any calculation whatever, we ought to have â£300 a year, and be on the road to four in a little while. with this before you i daresay you (who are more practical than i) could speculate and suggest a little as to the form of living and expenditure. . . . gilbert's mother perhaps needed more convincing. the letter to her has no postmark but the â£300 a year has grown to almost â£500 and a careful economy is promised. mrs. barnes the orchards burley. hants. my dearest mother, thank you very much for your two letters. if you get back to kensington before me (i shall return on thursday night: i find i work here very well) would you mind sending on any letters. you might send on the cheque: though that is not necessary. there is a subject we have touched on once or twice that i want to talk to you about, for i am very much worried in my mind as to whether you will disapprove of a decision i have been coming to with a very earnest belief that i am seeking to do the right thing. i have just had information that my screw from "the speaker" will be yet further increased from â£120 a year to â£150, or, if i do the full amount i can, â£190 a year. i have also had a request from the "daily news" to do two columns a week regularly, which [is] rather over â£100 a year, besides other book reviews. my other sources of income which should bring the amount up to nearly â£150 more, at any rate, i will speak of in a moment. there is something, as i say, that is distressing me a great deal. i believe i said about a year ago that i hoped to get married in a year, if i had money enough. i fancy you took it rather as a joke: i was not so certain about it myself then. i have however been coming very seriously to the conclusion that if i pull off one more affair--a favourable arrangement with reynolds' newspaper, whose editor wants to see me at the end of this week, i shall, unless you disapprove, make a dash for it this year. when i mentioned the matter a short time ago, you said (if i remember right) that you did not think i ought to marry under â£400 or â£500 a year. i was moved to go into the matter thoroughly then and there, but as it happened i knew i had one or two bargains just coming of which would bring me nearer to the standard you named, so i thought i would let it stand over till i could actually quote them. believe me, my dearest mother, i am not considering this affair wildly or ignorantly: i have been doing nothing but sums in my head for the last months. this is how matters stand. the _speaker_ editor says they will take as much as i like to write. if i write my maximum i get â£192 a year from them. from the _daily news_, even if i do not get the post on the staff which was half promised me, i shall get at least â£100 a year with a good deal over for reviews outside "the wars of literature." that makes nearly â£300. with the manchester sunday chronicle i have just made a bargain by which i shall get â£72 a year. this makes â£370 a year altogether. the matter now, i think, largely depends on reynolds' newspaper. if i do, as is contemplated, weekly articles and thumbnail sketches, they cannot give me less than ⣠100 a year. this would bring the whole to â£470 a year, or within â£30 of your standard. of course i know quite well that this is not like talking of an income from a business or a certain investment. but we should live a long way within this income, if we took a very cheap flat, even a workman's flat if necessary, had a woman in to do the laborious daily work and for the rest waited on ourselves, as many people i know do in cheap flats. moreover, journalism has its ups as well as downs, and i, i can fairly say, am on the upward wave. without vanity and in a purely businesslike spirit i may say that my work is talked about a great deal. it is at least a remarkable fact that every one of the papers i write for (as detailed above) came to me and asked me to do work for them: from the _daily news_ down to the manchester sunday chronicle. i have, as i say, what seems to me a sufficient income for a start. that i shall have as good and better i am as certain as that i sit here. i know the clockwork of these papers and among one set of them i might almost say that i am becoming the fashion. do not, please, think that i am entertaining this idea without realising that i shall have to start in a very serious and economical spirit. i have worked it out and i am sure we could live well within the above calculations and leave a good margin. i make all these prosaic statements because i want you to understand that i know the risks i think of running. but it is not any practical question that is distressing me: on that i think i see my way. but i am terribly worried for fear you should be angry or sorry about all this. i am only kept in hope by the remembrance that i had the same fear when i told you of my engagement and that you dispelled it with a directness and generosity that i shall not forget. i think, my dear mother, that we have always understood each other really. we are neither of us very demonstrative: we come of some queer stock that can always say least when it means most. but i do think you can trust me when i say that i think a thing really right, and equally honestly admit that i can hardly explain why. to explain why i know it is right would be to communicate the incommunicable, and speak of delicate and sacred things in bald words. the most i can say is that i know frances like the back of my hand and can tell without a word from her that she has never recovered from a wound* and that there is only one kind of peace that will heal it. [* gertrude's death.] i have tried to explain myself in this letter: i can do it better in a letter, somehow, but i do not think i have done it very successfully. however, with you it does not matter and it never will matter, how my thoughts come tumbling out. you at least have always understood what i meant. always your loving son, gilbert. chapter xi married life in london _the suburbs are commonly referred to as prosaic. that is a matter of taste. personally i find them intoxicating_. introduction to _literary london_. the wedding day drew near and the presents were pouring in. "i feel like the young man in the gospel," said gilbert to annie firmin, "sorrowful, because i have great possessions." conrad noel married gilbert and frances at kensington parish church on june 28, 1901. as gilbert knelt down the price ticket on the sole of one of his new shoes became plainly visible. annie caught mrs. chesterton's eye and they began to laugh helplessly. annie thinks, too, that for once in their lives gilbert and cecil did not argue at the reception. lucian oldershaw drove ahead to the station with the heavy luggage, put it on the train and waited feverishly. that train went off (with the luggage), then another, and at last the happy couple appeared. gilbert had felt it necessary to stop on the way "in order to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another." the milk he drank because in childhood his mother used to give him a glass in that shop. the revolver was for the defense of his bride against possible dangers. they followed the luggage by a slow train. this love of weapons, his revolver, his favourite sword-stick, remained with him all his life. it suggested the adventures that he always bestowed on the heroes of his stories and would himself have loved to experience. he noted in _twelve types_ scott's love of armour and of weapons for their own sakes--the texture, the power, the beauty of a sword-hilt or a jewelled dagger. as a child would play with these things gilbert played with them, but they stood also in his mind for freedom, adventure, personal responsibility, and much else that the modern world had lost. the honeymoon was spent on the norfolk broads. on the way they stopped at ipswich "and it was like meeting a friend in a fairy-tale to find myself under the sign of the white horse on the first day of my honeymoon." annie firmin was staying in warwick gardens for the wedding and afterwards. gilbert's first letter, from the norfolk broads, began "i have a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife: what more can any man want on a honeymoon." asked on his return what wallpapers he would prefer in the house they had chosen, he asked for brown paper so that he could draw pictures everywhere. he had by no means abandoned this old habit, and annie remembers an illness during which he asked for a long enough pencil to draw on the ceiling. their quaint little house in edwardes square, kensington, lent to them by mr. boore, an old friend of frances, was close to warwick gardens. "i remember the house well," wrote e. c. bentley later, "with its garden of old trees and its general air of georgian peace. i remember too the splendid flaming frescoes, done in vivid crayons, of knights and heroes and divinities with which g.k.c. embellished the outside wall at the back, beneath a sheltering portico. i have often wondered whether the landlord charged for them as dilapidations at the end of the tenancy." they were only in edwardes square for a few months and then moved to overstrand mansions, battersea, where the rest of their london life was spent. it was here i came to know them a few years later. as soon as they could afford it they threw drawing-room and dining-room together to make one big room. at one end hung an engagement board with what father o'connor has described as a _"loud_ inscription"-lest we forget. beside the engagements was pinned a poem by hilaire belloc: frances and gilbert have a little flat at eighty pounds a year and cheap at that where frances who is gilbert's only wife leads an unhappy and complaining life: while gilbert who is frances' only man puts up with it as gamely as he can. the bellocs chose life in the country much earlier than the chestertons, and an undated letter to battersea threatens due reprisals in an exclusion from their country home, if the chestertons are not prepared to receive him in town at a late hour. kings land, shipley, horsham it will annoy you a good deal to hear that i am in town tomorrow wednesday evening and that i shall appear at your apartment at 10.45 or 10.30 at earliest. p.m.! you are only just returned. you are hardly settled down. it is an intolerable nuisance. you heartily wish i had not mentioned it. well, you see that [arrow pointing to "telegrams, coolham, sussex"], if you wire there before _one_ you can put me off, but if you do i shall melt your keys, both the exterior one which forms the body or form of the matter and the interior one which is the mystical content thereof. also if you put me off i shall not have you down here ever to see the _oak room_, the _tapestry room_, the _green room_ etc. yrs, h.b. early in his battersea life gilbert received a note from max beerbohm, the great humourist, introducing himself and suggesting a luncheon together. i am quite different from my writings (and so, i daresay, are you from yours)--so that we should not necessarily fail to hit it off. i, in the flesh, am modest, full of commonsense, very genial, and rather dull. what you are remains to be seen--or not to be seen--by me, according to your decision. gilbert's decision was for the meeting and an instant liking grew into a warm friendship. as in j.d.c. days gilbert had written verse about his friends, so now did he try to sum up an impression, perhaps after some special talk: and max's queer crystalline sense lit, like a sea beneath a sea, shines through a shameless impudence as shameless a humility. or belloc somewhat rudely roared but all above him when he spoke the immortal battle trumpets broke and europe was a single sword.* [* unpublished fragment.] somewhere about this time must have occurred the incident mentioned by george bernard shaw in a note which appeared in the _mark twain quarterly_ (spring, 1937): i cannot remember when i first met chesterton. i was so much struck by a review of scott's _ivanhoe_ which he wrote for the _daily news_ in the course of his earliest notable job as feuilletonist to that paper that i wrote to him asking who he was and where he came from, as he was evidently a new star in literature. he was either too shy or too lazy to answer. the next thing i remember is his lunching with us on quite intimate terms, accompanied by belloc. the actual first meeting, forgotten by shaw, is remembered by gilbert's brother-in-law, lucian oldershaw. he and gilbert had gone together to paris where they visited rodin, then making a bust of bernard shaw. mr. oldershaw introduced gilbert to g.b.s., who, rodin's secretary told them, had been endeavouring to explain at some length the nature of the salvation army, leading up (one imagines) to an account of major barbara. at the end of the explanation, rodin's secretary remarked--to a rather apologetic shaw--"the master says you have not much french but you impose yourself." "shaw talked gilbert down," mr. oldershaw complained. that the famous man should talk more than the beginner is hardly surprising, but all through gilbert's life the complaint recurs on the lips of his admirers, just as a similar complaint is made by lockhart about sir walter scott. chesterton, like scott, abounded in cordial admiration of other men and women and had a simple enjoyment in meeting them. and chesterton was one of the few great conversationalists--perhaps the only one--who would really rather listen than talk. in 1901 appeared his first book of collected essays, _the defendant_. the essays in it had already appeared in _the speaker_. like all his later work it had the mixed reception of enthusiasts who saw what he meant, and puzzled reviewers who took refuge in that blessed word "paradox." "paradox ought to be used," said one of these, "like onions to season the salad. mr. chesterton's salad is all onions. paradox has been defined as 'truth standing on her head to attract attention.' mr. chesterton makes truth cut her throat to attract attention." without denying that his love of a joke led him into indefensible puns and suchlike fooleries (though mgr. ronald knox tells me he is prepared to defend all of g.k.'s puns), i think nearly all his paradoxes were either the startling expression of an entirely neglected truth, or the startling re-emphasis of the neglected side of a truth. once, he said: "it is a paradox, but it is god, and not i, who should have the credit of it." he proved his case a few years later in the chapter of _orthodoxy_ called "the paradoxes of christianity." what it amounted to was roughly this: paradox must be of the nature of things because of god's infinity and the limitations of the world and of man's mind. to us limited beings god can express his idea only in fragments. we can bring together apparent contradictions in those fragments whereby a greater truth is suggested. if we do this in a sudden or incongruous manner we startle the unprepared and arouse the cry of paradox. but if we will not do it we shall miss a great deal of truth. chesterton also saw many proverbs and old sayings as containing a truth which the people who constantly repeated them had forgotten. the world was asleep and must be awakened. the world had gone placidly mad and must be violently restored to sanity. that the methods he used annoyed some is undeniable, but he did force people to think, even if they raged at him as the unaccustomed muscles came into play. "i believe," he said in a speech at this date, "in getting into hot water. i think it keeps you clean." and he believed intensely in keeping out of a narrow stream of merely literary life. to those who exalted the poet above the journalist he gave this answer: the poet writing his name upon a score of little pages in the silence of his study, may or may not have an intellectual right to despise the journalist: but i greatly doubt whether he would not morally be the better if he saw the great lights burning on through darkness into dawn, and heard the roar of the printing wheels weaving the destinies of another day. here at least is a school of labour and of some rough humility, the largest work ever published anonymously since the great christian cathedrals.* [* "a word for the mere journalist." _darlington north star:_ february 3, 1902.] he plunged then into the life of fleet street and held it his proudest boast to be a journalist. but he had his own way of being a journalist: on the whole, i think i owe my success (as the millionaires say) to having listened respectfully and rather bashfully to the very best advice, given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best sort of success in journalism; and then going away and doing the exact opposite. for what they all told me was that the secret of success in journalism was to study the particular journal and write what was suitable to it. and, partly by accident and ignorance and partly through the real rabid certainties of youth, i cannot remember that i ever wrote any article that was at all suitable to any paper. . . . i wrote on a nonconformist organ like the old _daily news_ and told them all about french cafã©s and catholic cathedrals; and they loved it, because they had never heard of them before. i wrote on a robust labour organ like the old _clarion_ and defended mediaeval theology and all the things their readers had never heard of; and their readers did not mind me a bit.* [* _autobiography_, pp. 185-6.] mr. titterton, who worked also on the _daily news_ and came at this time to know g.k. in the pharos club, says that at first he was rather shy of the other men on the staff but after a dinner at which he was asked to speak he came to know and like them and to be at home in fleet street. he liked to work amid human contact and would write his articles in a public-house or in the club or even in the street, resting the paper against a wall. frank swinnerton records* a description given him by charles masterman of how chesterton used to sit writing his articles in a fleet st. cafã©, sampling and mixing a terrible conjunction of drinks, while many waiters hovered about him, partly in awe, and partly in case he should leave the restaurant without paying for what he had had. one day . . . the headwaiter approached masterman. "your friend," he whispered, admiringly, "he very clever man. he sit and laugh. and then he write. and then he laugh at what he write." [* _georgian scene_, p. 94.] he loved fleet street and did a good deal of drinking there. but not only there. when (in the _autobiography_) he writes of wine and song it is not fleet street and its taverns that come back to his mind but "the moonstruck banquets given by mr. maurice baring," the garden in westminster where he fenced with real swords against one more intoxicated than himself, songs shouted in auberon herbert's rooms near buckingham palace. after marriage frances seems to have given up the struggle, so ardently pursued during their engagement, to make him tidy. by a stroke of genius she decided instead to make him picturesque. the conventional frock-coat worn so unconventionally, the silk hat crowning a mat of hair, disappeared, and a wide-brimmed slouch hat and flowing cloak more appropriately garbed him. this was especially good as he got fatter. he was a tall man, six foot two. as a boy he had been thin, but now he was rapidly putting on weight. neither he nor cecil played games (the tennis did not last!) but they used to go for long walks, sometimes going off together for a couple of days at a time. gilbert still liked to do this with frances, but the sedentary daily life and the consumption of a good deal of beer did not help towards a graceful figure. by 1903 g.k. was called a fat humourist and he was fast getting ready to be dr. johnson in various pageants. by 1906--he was then thirty-two--he had become famous enough to be one of the celebrities painted or photographed for exhibitions; and bernard shaw described a photo of him by coburn: chesterton is "our quinbus flestrin," the young man mountain, a large abounding gigantically cherubic person who is not only large in body and mind beyond all decency, but seems to be growing larger as you look at him--"swellin' wisibly," as tony weller puts it. mr. coburn has represented him as flowing off the plate in the very act of being photographed and blurring his own outlines in the process. also he has caught the chestertonian resemblance to balzac and unconsciously handled his subject as rodin handled balzac. you may call the placing of the head on the plate wrong, the focussing wrong, the exposure wrong if you like, but chesterton is right and a right impression of chesterton is what mr. coburn was driving at. the change in his appearance g.k. celebrated in a stanza of his "ballade of the grotesque": i was light as a penny to spend, i was thin as an arrow to cleave, i could stand on a fishing-rod's end with composure, though on the _qui vive_; but from time, all a-flying to thieve, the suns and the moons of the year, a different shape i receive; the shape is decidedly queer. "london," said a recently arrived american, "is the most marvellously fulfilling experience. i went to see fleet street this morning, and met g. k. chesterton face to face. wrapped in a cloak and standing in the doorway of a pie-shop, he was composing a poem reciting it aloud as he wrote. the most striking thing about the incident was that no one took the slightest notice." i doubt if any writer, except dickens, has so quickly become an institution as chesterton. nor, of course, would his picturesqueness in fleet street or his swift success as a journalist have accomplished this but for the vast output of books on every conceivable subject. but before i come to the books written during those years at battersea, a word must be said of another element besides his journalistic contacts that was linking g.k. with a wider world than the solely literary. we have seen that even when his religion was at its lowest point, in the difficult art school days, he never lost it entirely--"i hung on to religion by one thin thread of thanks." in the years of the notebook, he advanced very far in his pondering on and acceptance of the great religious truths. but this did not as yet mean attachment to a church. then he met frances. "she actually practised a religion. this was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived." now that they were married, frances, as a convinced anglo-catholic, was bringing more clergy and other anglican friends into gilbert's circle. moreover, he was lecturing all over england, and this brought him into contact with all sorts of strange religious beliefs. "amid all this scattered thinking . . . i began to piece together fragments of the old religious scheme; mainly by the various gaps that denoted its disappearance. and the more i saw of real human nature, the more i came to suspect that it was really rather bad for all these people that it had disappeared."* [* _autobiography_, p. 177.] in 1903-04 he had a tremendous battle (the detail of which will be treated in the next chapter) in the _clarion_ with robert blatchford. in it he adumbrated many of the ideas that were later developed in _orthodoxy_. of the arguments used by blatchford and his atheist friends, g.k. wrote that the effect on his own mind was: "almost thou persuadest me to be a christian." in a diary kept by frances spasmodically during the years 1904-05, she notes that gilbert has been asked to preach as the first of a series of lay preachers in a city church. she writes: _march 16th_. one of the proudest days of my life. gilbert preached at st. paul's, covent garden for the c.s.u. [christian social union] _vox populi vox dei_. a crammed church--he was very eloquent and restrained. sermons will be published afterwards. published they were: under the title, _preachers from the pew_. _march 30th_. the second sermon: "the citizen, the gentleman and the savage." even better than last week. "where there is no vision the people perisheth." when it is remembered that the _browning_, the _watts_, _twelve types_ and the _napoleon of notting hill_ had all been published and received with acclaim, it is touching that frances should speak thus of the "proudest day" of her life. that gilbert should himself have vision and show it to others remained her strongest aspiration. not thus felt all his admirers. the blatchford controversy on matters religious became more than many of them could bear. a plaintive correspondent (says the _daily news_), who seems to have had enough of the eternal verities and the eternal other things, sends us the following "lines written on reading mr. g. k. chesterton's forty-seventh reply to a secularist opponent": what ails our wondrous "g.k.c." who late, on youth's glad wings, flew fairylike, and gossip'd free of translunary things, that thus, in dull didactic mood, he quits the realms of dream, and like some pulpit-preacher rude, drones on one dreary theme? stern blatchford, _thou_ hast dashed the glee of our omniscient babe; thy name alone now murmurs he, or that of dark mccabe. all vain his cloudy fancies swell, his paradox all vain, obsessed by that malignant spell of blatchford on the brain. h.s.s.* [* _daily news_, 12 january, 1904.] mr. noel has a livelier memory of gilbert's religious and social activities. on one occasion he went to the battersea flat for a meeting at which he was to speak and gilbert take the chair, to establish a local branch of the christian social union. the two men got into talk over their wine in the dining-room (then still a separate room) and frances came in much agitated. "gilbert you must dress. the people will be arriving any moment. "yes, yes, i'll go." the argument was resumed and went on with animation. frances came back. "gilbert, the drawing-room is half full and people are still arriving." at last in despair she brought gilbert's dress-clothes into the dining-room and made him change there, still arguing. next he had to be urged into the drawing-room. established at a small table he began to draw comic bishops, quite oblivious of the fact that he was to take the chair at the now assembled meeting. finally frances managed to attract his attention, he leaped up overthrowing the small table and scattering the comic bishops. "surely this story," said a friend to whom i told it, "proves what some people said about chesterton's affectation. he must have been posing." i do not think so, and those who knew gilbert best believed him incapable of posing. but he was perfectly capable of wilfulness and of sulking like a schoolboy. it amused him to argue with mr. noel, it did not amuse him at all to take the chair at a meeting. so, as he was not allowed to go on arguing, he drew comic bishops. there was, too, more than a touch of this wilfulness in the second shock he administered to respectable battersea later in the evening. an earnest young lady asked the company for counsel as to the best way of arranging her solitary maid's evening out. "i'm so afraid," ended the appeal, "of her going to the red lion." "best place she could go," said gilbert. and occasionally he would add example to precept, for society and fleet street were not the only places for human intercourse. "at present," commented a journalist, "he is cultivating the local politics of battersea; in secluded ale houses he drinks with the frequenters and learns their opinions on municipal milk and on mr. john burns." "good friends and very gay companions," gilbert calls the christian social union group of whom, beside conrad noel, were charles masterman, bishop gore, percy dearmer, and above all canon scott holland. known as "scotty" and adored by many generations of young men, he was "a man with a natural surge of laughter within him, so that his broad mouth seemed always to be shut down on it in a grimace of restraint."* like gilbert, he suffered from the effect of urging his most serious views with apparent flippancy and fantastic illustrations. in the course of a speech to a respectable nottingham audience he remarked, "i dare say several of you here have never been in prison." [* _autobiography_, p. 169.] "a ghastly stare," says gilbert, describing this speech, "was fixed on all the faces of the audience; and i have ever since seen it in my own dreams; for it has constituted a considerable part of my own problem." gilbert's verses, summarizing the meeting as it must have sounded to a worthy nottingham tradesman, are quoted in the _autobiography_ and completed in _father brown on chesterton_. i have put them together here for they show how merrily these men were working to change the world. the christian social union here was very much annoyed; it seems there is some duty which we never should avoid, and so they sang a lot of hymns to help the unemployed. upon a platform at the end the speakers were displayed and bishop hoskins stood in front and hit a bell and said that mr. carter was to pray, and mr. carter prayed. then bishop gore of birmingham he stood upon one leg and said he would be happier if beggars didn't beg, and that if they pinched his palace it would take him down a peg. he said that unemployment was a horror and a blight, he said that charities produced servility and spite, and stood upon the other leg and said it wasn't right. and then a man named chesterton got up and played with water, he seemed to say that principles were nice and led to slaughter and how we always compromised and how we didn't orter. then canon holland fired ahead like fifty cannons firing, we tried to find out what he meant with infinite enquiring, but the way he made the windows jump we couldn't help admiring. i understood him to remark (it seemed a little odd.) that half a dozen of his friends had never been in quod. he said he was a socialist himself, and so was god. he said the human soul should be ashamed of every sham, he said a man should constantly ejaculate "i am" when he had done, i went outside and got into a tram. partly perhaps to console himself for the loss of his son's daily company, chiefly, i imagine, out of sheer pride and joy in his success, edward chesterton started after the publication of _the wild knight_ pasting all gilbert's press-cuttings into volumes. later i learnt that it had long been gilbert's weekly penance to read these cuttings on sunday afternoon at his father's house. traces of his passage are visible wherever a space admits of a caricature, and occasionally, where it does not, the caricature is superimposed on the text. his growing fame may be seen by the growing size of these volumes and the increased space given to each of his books. _twelve types_ in 1902 had a good press for a young man's work and was taken seriously in some important papers, but its success was as nothing compared with that of the _browning_ a year later. the bulk of _twelve types_, as of _the defendant_, had appeared in periodicals, but never in his life did gilbert prepare a volume of his essays for the press without improving, changing and unifying. it was never merely a collection, always a book. still, the _browning_ was another matter. it was a compliment for a comparatively new author to be given the commission for the english men of letters series. stephen gwynn describes the experience of the publishers: on my advice the macmillans had asked him to do browning in the "english men of letters," when he was still not quite arrived. old mr. craik, the senior partner, sent for me and i found him in white fury, with chesterton's proofs corrected in pencil; or rather not corrected; there were still thirteen errors uncorrected on one page; mostly in quotations from browning. a selection from a scotch ballad had been quoted from memory and three of the four lines were wrong, i wrote to chesterton saying that the firm thought the book was going to "disgrace" them. his reply was like the trumpeting of a crushed elephant. but the book was a huge success.* [* quoted in _chesterton_, by cyril clemens, p. 14.] in fact, it created a sensation and established g.k. in the front rank. not all the reviewers liked it, and one angry writer in the _athenaeum_ pointed out that, not content with innumerable inaccuracies about browning's descent and the events of his life, g.k. had even invented a line in "mr. sludge the medium." but every important paper had not only a review but a long review, and the vast majority were enthusiastic. chesterton claimed browning as a poet not for experts but for every man. his treatment of the browning love affair, of the poet's obscurity, of "the ring and the book," all receive this same praise of an originality which casts a true and revealing light for his readers. as with all his literary criticism, the most famous critics admitted that he had opened fresh windows on the subject for themselves. this attack on his inaccuracy and admiration for his insight constantly recurs with chesterton's literary work. readers noted that in the _ballad of the white horse_ he made alfred's left wing face guthrum's left wing. he was amused when it was pointed out, but never bothered to alter it. his memory was prodigious. all his friends testify to his knowing by heart pages of his favourite authors (and these were not few). ten years after his time with fisher unwin, frances told father o'connor that he remembered all the plots and most of the characters of the "thousands" of novels he had read for the firm. but he trusted his memory too much and never verified. indeed, when it was a question merely of verbal quotation he said it was pedantic to bother, and when latterly dorothy collins looked up his references he barely tolerated it. again while he constantly declared that he was no scholar, he said things illuminating even to scholars. thus, much later, when chesterton's _st. thomas aquinas_ appeared, the master-general of the dominican order, pã¨re gillet, o.p., lectured on and from it to large meetings of dominicans. mr. eccles told me that talking of virgil, g.k. said things immensely illuminating for experts on latin poetry. in a very different field, mr. oldershaw noted after their trip to paris that though he could set gilbert right on many a detail yet his generalisations were marvellous. he had, said mr. eccles, an intuitive mind. he had, too, read more than was realised, partly because his carelessness and contempt for scholarship misled. where the pedant would have referred and quoted and cross-referred, he went dashing on, throwing out ideas from his abundance and caring little if among his wealth were a few faults of fact or interpretation. "abundance" was a word much used of his work just now, and in the field of literary criticism he was placed high, and had an enthusiastic following. we may assume that the _browning_ had something to do with sir oliver lodge's asking him in the next year (1904) to become a candidate for the chair of literature at birmingham university. but he had no desire to be a professor. frances, in her diary, notes some of their widening contacts and engagements. the mixture of shrewdness and simplicity in her comments will be familiar to those who knew her intimately. meeting her for the first time i think the main impression was that of the "single eye." she abounded in gilbert's sense, as my mother commented after an early meeting, and ministered to his genius. yet she never lost an individual, markedly feminine point of view, which helped him greatly, as anyone can see who will read all he wrote on marriage. he shows an insight almost uncanny in the section called, "the mistake about women" in _what's wrong with the world_. "some people," he said in a speech of 1905, "when married gain each other. some only lose themselves." the chestertons gained each other. and by the sort of paradox he loved, frances did so by throwing the stream of her own life unreservedly into the greater river of her husband's. she writes in her diary, for 1904: gilbert and i meet all sorts of queer, well-known, attractive, unattractive people and i expect this book will be mostly about them. . . . feb. 17th. we went together to mr. and mrs. sidney colvin's "at home." it was rather jolly but too many clever people there to be really nice. the clever people were mr. joseph conrad, mr. henry james, mr. laurence binyon, mr. maurice hewlett, and a great many more. mr. and mrs. colvin looked so happy. feb. 23rd. gilbert went as mr. lane's guest to a dinner of the "odd volumes" at the imperial restaurant. the other guest was baden powell. he and gilbert made speeches. . . . march 8th. gilbert was to speak on "education" at a c.s.u. meeting at sion college, but a debate on the chinese labour in south africa was introduced instead and went excitingly. there is to be a big meeting of the c.s.u. to protest. though i suppose it's all no good now. when the meeting was over we adjourned to a tea-shop and had immense fun. gilbert, percy dearmer and conrad noel walked together down fleet street, and never was there a funnier sight. gilbert's costume consisted of a frock coat, huge felt hat and walking stick brandished in the face of the passers-by, to their exceeding great danger. conrad was dressed in an old lounge suit of sober grey with a clerical hat jauntily stuck on the back of his head (which led someone to remark, "are you here in the capacity of a private gentleman, poor curate, or low-class actor?"). mr. dearmer was clad in wonderful clerical garments of which he alone possesses the pattern, which made him look like a chaucer canterbury pilgrim or a figure out of a noah's ark. they swaggered down the roadway talking energetically. at tea we talked of many things, the future of the "commonwealth" chiefly . . . march 22nd. meeting of christian theosophical society at which gilbert lectured on "how theosophy appears to a christian." he was very good. herbert burrows vigorously attacked him in debate afterwards . . . _napoleon of notting hill_ was published. april 27th. the bellocs and the noels came here to dinner. hilaire in great form recited his own poetry with great enthusiasm the whole evening . . . may 9th. the literary fund dinner. about the greatest treat i ever had in my life. j. m. barrie presided. he was so splendid and so complimentary. mrs. j. m. barrie is very pretty, but the most beautiful woman there was mrs. anthony hope--copper coloured hair, masses, with a wreath of gardenias--green eyes--and a long neck, very beautiful figure. the speakers were barrie, lord tennyson, comyns carr, a. e. w. mason, mrs. craigie (who acquitted herself wonderfully) and mrs. flora annie steel. after the formal dinner was a reception at which everyone was very friendly. it is wonderful the way in which they all accept gilbert, and one well-known man told me he was the biggest man present. anyhow there was the feeling of brotherhood and fellowship in the wielding of "the lovely and loathely pen" (j. m. barrie's speech). may 12th. went to see max beerbohm's caricature of gilbert at the carfax gallery. "g.k.c.--humanist--kissing the world." it's more like thackeray, very funny though. june 9th. a political "at home" at mrs. sidney webb's--saw winston churchill and lloyd george. politics and nothing but politics is dull work though, and an intriguer's life must be a pretty poor affair. mrs. sidney webb looked very handsome and moved among her guests as one to the manner born. i like mrs. leonard courtenay who is always kind to me. charlie masterman and i had a long talk on the iniquities of the "daily news" and goodness knows they are serious enough. june 22nd. an "at home" at mrs. ----'s proved rather a dull affair save for a nice little conversation with watts dunton. his walrusy appearance which makes the bottom of his face look fierce, is counteracted by the kindness of his little eyes. he told us the inner story of whistler's "peacock room" which scarcely redounds to whistler's credit. the duchess of sutherland was there and many notabilities. between ourselves mr. ---is a good-hearted snob. his wife nice, intelligent, but affected (i suppose unconsciously). i don't really like the "precious people." they worry me. june 30th. graham robertson's "at home" was exceedingly select. i felt rather too uncultivated to talk much. mr. lane tucked his arm into mine and requested to know the news which means, "tell me all your husband is doing, or going to do, how much is he getting, who will publish for him, has he sold his american rights, etc." cobden's three daughters looked out of place, so solid and sincere are they. it was all too grand. no man ought to have so much wealth. july 5th. gilbert went today to see swinburne--i think he found it rather hard to reconcile the idea with the man, but he was interested, though i could not gather much about the visit. he was amused at the compliments which watts dunton and swinburne pay to each other unceasingly. december 8th. george alexander has an idea that he wants gilbert to write a play for him, and sent for him to come and see him. he was apparently taken with the notion of a play on the crusades, and although there is at present no love incident in gilbert's mind, alexander introduced and acted the supposed love scene with great spirit. it may come off some day perhaps. december 31st. h. belloc's been very ill but is better, thank god. 1905 feb. 1st. gilbert, a guest at the "eighty club" dinner. rhoda and i went to after dinner speeches. g. w. e. russell (chair). augustine birrell guest and sir henry fowler. it amused me hugely. russell so imprudent and reckless, birrell so prudent and incapable of giving himself away, sir henry fowler so commonplace and trite. he looked so wicked. i thought of mr. haldane's story of fowler's fur coat and his single remark on examining it: "skunk." feb. 11th. rather an interesting lunch at mrs. j. r. green's. jack yeats and mrs. thursby were there. the atmosphere is too political and i imagine mrs. green to be a bit of a wire-puller, though i believe a nice woman. feb. 24th. mr. halliwell sutcliffe came over. he is amusing and nice. very puzzled at gilbert's conduct, which on this particular occasion was peculiarly eccentric. march 9th. i had an amusing lunch at the hotel cecil with miss bisland (representative of mcclure). evidently thinks a lot of gilbert and wants his work for mcclure. o ye gods and little fishes! the diplomatic service ought to be all conducted by women. i offered her margaret's poems in exchange for a short interview with meredith which she wishes gilbert to undertake. march 14th. gilbert dined at the buxtons, met asquith. march 19th. lienie is in town and we have been with her to call on the duchess of sutherland. when i had got used to the splendour it was jolly enough. her grace is a pretty, sweet woman who was very nervous, but got better under the fire of gilbert's chaff. she made him write in her album which he did, a most ridiculous poem of which he should be ashamed. it must be truly awful to live in the sort of way the duchess does and endeavour to keep sane. may 20th. words fail me when i try to recall the sensation aroused by a j.d.c. dinner. it seems so odd to think of these men as boys, to realize what their school life was and what a powerful element the j.d.c. was in the lives of all. and there were husbands and wives, and the tie so strong, and the long, long thoughts of schoolboys and schoolgirls fell on us, as if the battle were still to come instead of raging round us. may 24th. we went together to see george meredith. i suppose many people have seen him in his little surrey cottage; flint cottage, boxhill. he has a wonderful face and a frail old body. he talks without stopping except to drink ginger-beer. he told us many stories, mostly about society scandals of some time back. i remember he asked gilbert, "do you like babies?" and when gilbert said, "yes," he said "so do i, especially in the comet stage." june 5th. granville barker came to see gilbert, touching the possibility of a play. june 29th. a garden party at the bishop's house, kennington. the bishop told me that a. j. balfour was very impressed with "heretics." guild of st. matthew service and rowdy supper. gilbert made an excellent speech. july 5th. gilbert dined at the asquiths; met rosebery. i think he hated it. july 16th. gilbert went to see mrs. grenfell at taplow. he met balfour, austen chamberlain and george wyndham. had an amusing time, no doubt. says balfour is most interesting to talk to but appears bored. george wyndham is delightful. one felt always with both frances and gilbert that this society life stayed on the surface--amusing, distracting, sometimes welcome, sometimes boring--but never infringing the deeper reality of their relationships with old friends, with their own families, with each other. frances wrote endless business and other letters for them both: in just a handful, mainly to father o'connor, does she show her deeper life of thought and feeling. gilbert had little time now for writing anything but books and articles. never a very good correspondent he had become an exceedingly bad one. annie firmin's engagement to robert kidd produced one of the few letters that exist. it is handwritten and undated. a restaurant somewhere. my dear annie, i have thought of you, i am quite certain, more often than i have of any human being for a long time past--except my wife who recalls herself continually to me by virtues, splendours, agreeable memories, screams, pokers, brickbats and other things. and yet, though whenever my mind was for an instant emptied of theology and journalism and patriotism and such rot, it has been immediately filled with you, i have never written you a line. i am not going to explain this and for a good reason. it is a part of the mystery of the male, and you will soon, even if you do not already, get the hang of it, by the society of an individual who while being unmistakably a much better man than i am, is nevertheless male. i can only say that when men want a thing they act quite differently to women. we put off everything we want to do, in the ordinary way. if the archangel michael wrote me a complimentary letter tomorrow (as perhaps he may) i should put it in my pocket, saying, "how admirable a reply shall i write to that in a week or a month or so." i put off writing to you because i wanted to write something that had in it all that you have been, to me, to all of us. and now instead i am scrawling this nonsense in a tavern after lunch. my very dear old friend, i am of a sex that very seldom takes real trouble, that forgets the little necessities of time, that is by nature lazy. i never wanted really but one thing in my life and that i got. any person inspecting 60 overstrand mansions may see that somewhat excitable thing--free of charge. in another person, whom with maddening jealousy i suspect of being some inches taller than i am, i believe i notice the same tendency towards monomania. he also, being as i have so keenly pointed out, male, he also--i think has only wanted one thing seriously in his life. he also has got it: another male weakness which i recognize with sympathy. all my reviewers call me frivolous. do you think all this kind of thing frivolous? damn it all (excuse me) what can one be but frivolous about serious things? without frivolity they are simply too tremendous. that you, who, with your hair down your back, played at bricks with me in a house of which i have no memory except you and the bricks, that you should be taken by someone of my miserable sex--as you ought to be--what is one to say? i am not going to wish you happiness, because i am quite placidly certain that your happiness is inevitable. i know it because my wife is happy with me and the wild, weird, extravagant, singular origin of this is a certain enduring fact in my psychology which you will find paralleled elsewhere. god bless you, my dear girl. yours ever, gilbert chesterton. married in 1903, annie and her husband took another flat in overstrand mansions. "gilbert never cared what he wore," she writes. "i remember one night when my husband and i were living in the same block of flats he came in to ask me to go and sit with frances who wasn't very well, while he went down to the house to dine with hugh law--gilbert was very correctly dressed except for the fact that he had on one boot and one slipper! i pointed it out to him, and he said: 'do you think it matters?' i told him i was sure frances would not like him to go out like that--the only argument to affect him! when he was staying with me here in vancouver, dorothy collins had to give him the once-over before he went lecturing--they had left frances in palos verdes as she wasn't well." in 1904, were published a monograph on watts, _the napoleon of notting hill_, and an important chapter in a composite book, _england a nation_. the _watts_ is among the results of gilbert's art studies. its reviewers admired it somewhat in the degree of their admiration for the painter. but for a young man at that date to have seen the principles of art he lays down meant rare vision. the portrait-painter, he says, is trying to express the reality of the man himself but "he is not above taking hints from the book of life with its quaint old woodcuts." g.k. makes us see all the painter could have thought or imagined as he sets us before "mammon" or "jonah" or "hope" and bids us read their legend and note the texture and lines of the painting. his distinction between the irish mysticism of yeats and the english mysticism of watts is especially valuable, and the book, perhaps even more than the _browning_ or the _dickens_, manifests gilbert's insight into the mind of the last generation. the depths and limitations of the victorian outlook may be read in _g. f. watts_. the story of the writing of _the napoleon_ was told me in part by frances, while part appeared in an interview* given by gilbert, in which he called it his first important book: [* quoted in _chesterton_, by cyril clemens, pp. 16-17.] i was "broke"--only ten shillings in my pocket. leaving my worried wife, i went down fleet street, got a shave, and then ordered for myself, at the cheshire cheese, an enormous luncheon of my favourite dishes and a bottle of wine. it took my all, but i could then go to my publishers fortified. i told them i wanted to write a book and outlined the story of "napoleon of notting hill." but i must have twenty pounds, i said, before i begin. "we will send it to you on monday." "if you want the book," i replied, "you will have to give it to me today as i am disappearing to write it." they gave it. frances meanwhile sat at home thinking, as she told me, hard thoughts of his disappearance with their only remaining coin. and then dramatically he appeared with twenty golden sovereigns and poured them into her lap. referring to this incident later, gilbert said, "what a fool a man is, when he comes to the last ditch, not to spend the last farthing to satisfy the inner man before he goes out to fight a battle with wits." but it was his way to let the money shortage become acute and then deal with it abruptly. frank swinnerton relates that when, as a small boy, he was working for j. m. dent, gilbert appeared after office hours with a dickens preface but refused to leave it because swinnerton, the only soul left in the place, could not give him the agreed remuneration. the _napoleon_ is the story of a war between the london suburbs, and grew largely from his meditations on the boer war. besides being the best of his fantastic stories, it contains the most picturesque account of chesterton's social philosophy that he ever gave. but it certainly puzzled some of the critics. one american reviewer feels that he might have understood the book if he "had an intimate knowledge of the history of the various boroughs of london and of their present-day characteristics." others treat the story as a mere joke, and many feel that it is a bad descent after the _browning_. "too infernally clever for anything," says one. auberon quin, king of england, chosen by lot (as are all kings and all other officials by the date of this story, which is a romance of the future), is one of the two heroes of this book. he is simply a sense of humour incarnate. his little elfish face and figure was recognised by old paulines as suggested by a form master of their youth; but by the entire reviewing world as max beerbohm. the illustrations by graham robertson were held to be unmistakably max. frances notes in her diary: a delightful dinner party at the lanes. . . . the talk was mostly about _napoleon_. max took me in to dinner and was really nice. he is a good fellow. his costume was extraordinary. why should an evening waistcoat have four large white pearl buttons and why should he look that peculiar shape? he seems only pleased at the way he has been identified with king auberon. "all right, my dear chap," he said to g., who was trying to apologize. "mr. lane and i settled it all at a lunch." i think he was a little put out at finding no red carpet put down for his royal feet and we had quite a discussion as to whether he ought to precede me into the dining room. graham robertson was on my left. he was jolly too, kept on producing wonderful rings and stones out of his pockets. he said he wished he could go about covered in the pieces of a chandelier. the other guests were lady seton, mrs. w. k. clifford, mr. w. w. howells and his daughter (too burne-jonesy to be really attractive), mr. taylor (police magistrate), and mrs. eichholz (mrs. lane's mother) who is more beautiful than anything except a wee baby. in fact, she looks exactly like one, so dainty and small. she can never at any time have been as pretty as she is now. gilbert and max and i drove to his house (max's), where he basely enticed us in. he gave me fearful preserved fruits which ruined my dress--but he made himself very entertaining. home 1.30. caring for nothing in the world but a joke, king auberon decrees that the dull and respectable london boroughs shall be given city guards in resplendent armour, each borough to have its own coat of arms, its city walls, tocsin, and the like. the idea is taken seriously by the second hero, adam wayne of notting hill, an enthusiast utterly lacking any sense of humour, who goes to war with the other boroughs of london to protect a small street which they have designed to pull down in the interests of commercial development. pimlico, kensington and the rest attack notting hill. men bleed and die in the contest and by the magic of the sword the old ideas of local patriotism and beauty in civic life return to england. the conventional politician, barker, who begins the story in a frock-coat and irreproachable silk hat, ends it clad in purple and gold. when notting hill, become imperial minded, goes down to destruction in a sea of blood, auberon quin confesses to wayne that this whole story, so full of human tragedy and hopes and fears, had been merely the outcome of a joke. to him all life was a joke, to wayne an epic; and this antagonism between the humorist and the fanatic has created the whole wild story. wayne has the last word: "i know of something that will alter that antagonism, something that is outside us, something that you and i have all our lives perhaps taken too little account of. the equal and eternal human being will alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god. when dark and dreary days come, you and i are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. we have between us remedied a great wrong. we have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. but in healthy people there is no war between us. we are but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. laughter and love are everywhere. the cathedrals, built in the ages that loved god, are full of blasphemous grotesques. the mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend. auberon quin, we have been too long separated; let us go out together. you have a halberd and i a sword, let us start our wanderings over the world. for we are its two essentials. come, it is already day." in the blank white light auberon hesitated a moment. then he made the formal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into the unknown world. this is very important to the understanding of chesterton. with him, profound gravity and exuberant fooling were always intermingled and some of his deepest thoughts are conveyed by a pun. he always claimed to be intensely serious while hating to be solemn and it was a mixture apt to be misunderstood. if gravity and humour are the two lobes of the average man's brain, the average man does not bring them into play simultaneously to anything like the extent that chesterton did. auberon quin and adam wayne are the most living individuals in any of his novels--just because they are the two lobes of his brain individualised. all his stories abound in adventure, are admirable in their vivid descriptions of london or the countryside of france or england seen in fantastic visions. they are living in the portrayal of ideas by the road of argument. but the characters are chiefly energies through whose lips gilbert argues with gilbert until some conclusion shall be reached. in 1905 came _the club of queer trades_--least good of the fantasia--and even admirers have begun to wonder if too many fields are being tried; in 1906, _dickens_ and _heretics_. it will remain a moot point whether the _browning_ or the _dickens_ is chesterton's best work of literary criticism. the _dickens_ is the more popular, largely because dickens is the more popular author. most dickens idolators read anything about their idol if only for the pleasure of the quotations. and no dickens idolator could fail to realise that here was one even more rapt in worship than himself. after the publication of _charles dickens_, chesterton undertook a series of prefaces to the novels. in one of them he took the trouble to answer one only of the criticisms the book had produced: the comment that he was reading into the work of dickens something that dickens did not mean. criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they knew themselves. it exists to say the things about them which they did not know themselves. if a critic says that the _iliad_ has a pagan rather than a christian pity, or that it is full of pictures made by one epithet, of course he does not mean that homer could have said that. if homer could have said that the critic would leave homer to say it. the function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only be one function--that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author's mind which only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the author's mind, which the author himself can express. either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.* [* introduction to "old curiosity shop." reprinted in _criticisms and appreciations of the works of charles dickens_, 1933 ed. pp. 51-2.] he attended not at all to the crop of comments on his inaccuracies. one reviewer pointed out that chesterton had said that every postcard dickens wrote was a work of art; but dickens died on june 9th, 1870 and the first british postcard was issued on october 1st, 1870. "a wonderful instance of dickens's never-varying propensity to keep ahead of his age." after all, what did such things matter? bernard shaw, however, felt that they did. he wrote a letter from which i think gilbert got an important hint, utilized later in his introduction to _david copperfield:_ 6th september, 1906. dear g.k.c. as i am a supersaturated dickensite, i pounced on your book and read it, as wegg read gibbon and other authors, right slap through. in view of a second edition, let me hastily note for you one or two matters. first and chiefly, a fantastic and colossal howler in the best manner of mrs. nickleby and flora finching. there is an association in your mind (well founded) between the quarrel over dickens's determination to explain his matrimonial difficulty to the public, and the firm of bradbury and evans. there is also an association (equally well founded) between b. & e. and punch. they were the publishers of punch. but to gravely tell the xx century that dickens wanted to publish his explanation in punch is gas and gaiters carried to an incredible pitch of absurdity. the facts are: b. & e. were the publishers of household words. they objected to dickens explaining in h.w. he insisted. they said that in that case they must take h.w. out of his hands. dickens, like a lion threatened with ostracism by a louse in his tail, published his explanation, which stands to this day, and informed his readers that they were to ask in future, not for household words, but for all the year round. household words, left dickensless, gasped for a few weeks and died. all the year round, in exactly the same format, flourished and entered largely into the diet of my youth. * * * * * there is a curious contrast between dickens's sentimental indiscretions concerning his marriage and his sorrows and quarrels, and his impenetrable reserve about himself as displayed in his published correspondence. he writes to his family about waiters, about hotels, about screeching tumblers of hot brandy and water, and about the seasick man in the next berth, but never one really intimate word, never a real confession of his soul. david copperfield is a failure as an autobiography because when he comes to deal with the grown-up david, you find that he has not the slightest intention of telling you the truth--or indeed anything--about himself. even the child david is more remarkable for the reserves than for the revelations: he falls back on fiction at every turn. clennam and pip are the real autobiographies. i find that dickens is at his greatest after the social awakening which produced _hard times_. little dorrit is an enormous work. the change is partly the disillusion produced by the unveiling of capitalist civilization, but partly also dickens's discovery of the gulf between himself as a man of genius and the public. that he did not realize this early is shown by the fact that he found out his wife _before he married her_ as much too small for the job, and yet plumbed the difference so inadequately that he married her thinking he could go through with it. when the situation became intolerable, he must have faced the fact that there was something more than "incompatibilities" between him and the average man and woman. little dorrit is written, like all the later books, frankly and somewhat sadly, _de haut en bas_. in them dickens recognizes that quite everyday men are as grotesque as bunsby. sparkler, one of the most extravagant of all his gargoyles, is an untouched photograph almost. wegg and riderhood are sinister and terrifying because they are simply real, which squeers and sikes are not. and please remark that whilst squeers and sikes have their speeches written with anxious verisimilitude (comparatively) wegg says, "man shrouds and grapple, mr. venus, or she dies," and riderhood describes lightwood's sherry (when retracting his confession) as, "i will not say a hocussed wine, but a wine as was far from 'elthy for the mind." dickens doesn't care what he makes wegg or riderhood or sparkler or mr. f's aunt say, because he knows them and has got them, and knows what matters and what doesn't. fledgeby, lammle, jerry cruncher, trabbs's boy, wopsle, etc. etc. are human beings as seen by a master. swiveller and mantalini are human beings as seen by trabbs's boy. sometimes trabbs's boy has the happier touch. when i am told that young john chivery (whose epitaphs you ignore whilst quoting mrs. sapsea's) would have gone barefoot through the prison against rules for little dorrit had it been paved with red hot ploughshares, i am not so affected by his chivalry as by swiveller's exclamation when he gets the legacy--"for she (the marchioness) shall walk in silk attire and siller hae to spare." edwin drood is no good, in spite of the stone throwing boy, buzzard and honeythunder. dickens was a dead man before he began it. collins corrupted him with plots. and oh! the philistinism; the utter detachment from the great human heritage of art and philosophy! why not a sermon on that? g.b.s. note in the introduction to _david copperfield_ what g.k. says as to the break between the two halves of the book. he calls it an instance of weariness in dickens--a solitary instance. is not shaw's explanation at once fascinating and probable? kate perugini, the daughter of dickens, wrote two letters of immense enthusiasm about the book saying it was the best thing written about her father since forster's biography. but she shatters the theory put forth by chesterton that dickens thrown into intimacy with a large family of girls fell in love with them all and happened unluckily to marry the wrong sister. at the time of the marriage her mother, the eldest of the sisters, was only eighteen, mary between fourteen and fifteen "very young and childish in appearance," georgina eight and helen three! nothing could better illustrate the clash between enthusiasm and despair that fills a chestertonian while reading any of his literary biographies. for so much is built on this theory which the slightest investigation would have shown to be baseless. _heretics_ aroused animosity in many minds. dealing with browning or dickens a man may encounter literary prejudices or enthusiasms, but there is not the intensity of feeling that he finds when he gets into the field with his own contemporaries. reviewers who had been extending a friendly welcome to a beginner found that beginner attacking landmarks in the world of letters, venturing to detest ibsen and to ask william archer whether he hung up his stocking on ibsen's birthday, accusing kipling of lack of patriotism. it is, said one angrily, "unbecoming to spend most of his time criticising his contemporaries." "his sense of mental perspective is an extremely deficient one." "the manufacture of paradoxes is really one of the simplest processes conceivable." "mr. chesterton's sententious wisdom." in fact it was like the scene in _the napoleon of notting hill_ when most people present were purple with anger but an intellectual few were purple with laughter. and even now most of the reviewers seemed not to understand where g.k. stood or what was his philosophy. "bernard shaw," says one, "whom _as a disciple_* he naturally exalts." this, after a series of books in which g.k. had exposed, with perfect lucidity and a wealth of examples, a view of life differing from shaw's in almost every particular. one reviewer clearly discerned the influence of shaw in _the napoleon of notting hill_, "but without a trace of shaw's wonderful humour and perspicacity." [* italics mine.] belloc's approval was hearty. he wrote: i am delighted with what i have read in the _daily mail_. hit them again. hurt them. continue to binge and accept my blessing. give them hell. it is the only book of yours i have read right through. which shows that i don't read anything. which is true enough. this letter is written in the style of herbert paul. continue to bang them about. you did wrong not to come to the south coast. margate is a fraud. what looks like sea in front of it is really a bank with hardly any water over it. i stuck on it once in the year 1904 so i know all about it. moreover the harbour at margate is not a real harbour. ramsgate round the corner has a real harbour on the true sea. in both towns are citizens not averse to bribes. do not fail to go out in a boat on the last of the ebb as far as the long nose. there you will see the astonishing phenomenon of the tide racing down the north foreland three hours before it has turned in the estuary of the thames, which you at margate foolishly believe to be the sea. item no one in margate can cook. gilbert was not really concerned in this book to bang his contemporaries about so much as to study their mistakes and so discover what was wrong with modern thought. shaw, george moore, ibsen, wells, the mildness of the yellow press, omar and the sacred vine, rudyard kipling, smart novelists and the smart set, joseph mccabe and a divine frivolity--the collection was a heterogeneous one. and in the introduction the author tells us he is not concerned with any of these men as a brilliant artist or a vivid personality, but "as a heretic--that is to say a man whose view of things has the hardihood to differ from mine . . . as a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent and quite wrong. i revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting something done." in _england a nation_ and even more in the study of kipling in this book there is one touch of inconsistency which we shall meet with again in his later work. he hated imperialism yet he glorified napoleon; himself ardently patriotic he accused kipling of lack of patriotism on the ground that a man could not at once love england and love the empire. for there was a curious note in the anti-imperialism of the chesterbelloc that has not always been recognised. the ordinary anti-imperialist holds that england has no right to govern an empire and that her leadership is bad for the other dominions. but the chesterbelloc view was that the dominions were inferior and unworthy of a european england. the phrase "suburbs of england" (quoted in a later chapter) was typical. but kipling was thrilled by those suburbs and chesterton, who had as a boy admired kipling, attacks him in _heretics_ for lack of patriotism. _puck of pook's hill_ was not yet written, but like kipling's poem on sussex it expressed a patriotism much akin to gilbert's own. remember the man who returned from the south african veldt to be the squire's gardener--"me that have done what i've done, me that have seen what i've seen"--that man, with eyes opened to a sense of his own tragedy, was speaking for chesterton's people of england who "have not spoken yet." yes, they have spoken through the mouth of english genius: as langland's piers plowman, as dickens's sam weller, but not least as kipling's tommy atkins. it was a pity chesterton was deaf to this last voice. with a better understanding of kipling he might in turn have made kipling understand what was needed to make england "merrie england" once again, have given him the philosophy that should make his genius fruitful. for the huge distinction between chesterton and most of his contemporaries lay not in the wish to get something done but in the conviction that the right philosophy alone could produce fruitful action. a parable in the introduction shows the point at which his thinking had arrived. suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. a grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the middle ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the schoolmen, "let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of light. if light be in itself good." at this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. all the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. but as things go on they do not work out so easily. some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. and there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. so, gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, that all depends on what is the philosophy of light. only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.* [* _heretics_, pp. 22-3.] every year during this time at battersea, the press books reveal an increasing flood of engagements. gilbert lectures for the new reform club on "political watchwords," for the midland institute on "modern journalism," for the men's meeting of the south london central mission on "brass bands," for the london association of correctors of the press at the trocadero, for the c.s.u. at church kirk, accrington, at the men's service in the colchester moot hall. he debates at the st. german's literary society, maintaining "that the most justifiable wars are the religious wars"; opens the anti-puritan league at the shaftesbury club, speaks for the richmond and kew branch of the p.n.e.u. on "the romantic element in morality," for the ilkley p.s.a., on "christianity and materialism," and so on without end. all these are on a few pages of his father's collection, interspersed with clippings recording articles in reviews innumerable, introductions to books, interviews and controversies. there was almost no element of choice in these engagements. g.k. was intensely good-natured and hated saying no. he was the lion of the moment and they all wanted him to roar for them. in spite of the large heading, "lest we forget," that met his eye daily in the drawing-room, he did forget a great deal--in fact, friends say he forgot any engagement made when frances was not present to write it down directly it was made. she had to do memory and all the practical side of life for him. there might have been one slight chance of making gilbert responsible in these matters--that chance was given to his parents and by them thrown away. how far it is even possible to groom and train a genius is doubtful: anyhow no attempt was made. waited on hand and foot by his mother, never made to wash or brush himself as a child, personally conducted to the tailor as he grew older, given by his parents no money for which to feel responsible, not made to keep hours--how could frances take a man of twenty-seven, and make him over again? but there is, of course, a most genuine difficulty in all this, which gilbert once touched on when he denied the accusation of absence of mind. it was, he claimed, presence of mind--on his thoughts--that made him unaware of much else. and indeed no man can be using his mind furiously in every direction at once. anyone who has done even a little creative work, anyone even who has lived with people who do creative work, knows the sense of bewilderment with which the mind comes out of the world of remoter but greater reality and tries to adjust with that daily world in which meals are to be ordered, letters answered, and engagements kept. what must this pain of adjustment not have been to a mind almost continuously creative? for i have never known anyone work such long hours with a mind at such tension as gilbert's. there was no particular reason why he should have written his article for the _daily news_ as the reporter writes his--at top speed at a late hour--but he usually did. the writing of it was left till the last minute and, if at home, he would need frances to get it off for him before the deadline was reached. but he often wrote by preference in fleet street--at the cheshire cheese or some little pub where journalists gathered--and then he would hire a cab to take the article a hundred yards or so to the _daily news_ office. the cab in those days was the hansom with its two huge wheels over which one perilously ascended, while the driver sat above, only to be communicated with by opening a sort of trap door in the roof. gilbert once said that the imaginative englishman in paris would spend his days in a cafã©, the imaginative frenchman in london would spend his driving in a hansom. in the _napoleon_, the thought of the cab moves him to write: poet whose cunning carved this amorous cell where twain may dwell. e. v. lucas, his daughter tells us, used to say that if one were invited to drive with gilbert in a hansom cab it would have to be two cabs: but this is not strictly true. for in those days i drove with gilbert and frances too in a hansom--he and i side by side, she on his knee. we must have given to the populace the impression he says any hansom would give on first view to an ancient roman or a simple barbarian--that the driver riding on high and flourishing his whip was a conqueror carrying off his helpless victims. like the "buffers" at the veneering election, he spent much of his time "taking cabs and getting about"--or not even getting about in them, but leaving them standing at the door for hours on end. calling on one publisher he placed in his hands a letter that gave excellent reasons why he could not keep the engagement! the memory so admirable in literary quotations was not merely unreliable for engagements but even for such matters as street numbers and addresses. edward macdonald, who worked with him later, on _g.k.'s weekly_, relates how some months after the paper had changed its address he failed one day to turn up at a board meeting. finally he appeared with an explanation. on calling a taxi at marylebone he realized that he could not give the address, so he told the driver to take him to fleet street. there as his memory still refused to help, he stopped the taxi outside a tea-shop, left it there while he was inside, and ordering a cup of tea began to turn out all his pockets in the hope of finding a letter or a proof bearing the address. then as no clue could be found, he told the driver to take him to a bookstall that stocked the paper. at the first and second he drew blanks but at the third bought a copy of his own paper and thus discovered the address. i am not sure at what date he began to hate writing anything by hand. my mother treasured two handwritten letters. i have none after a friendship of close on thirty years. but i remember on his first visit to my parents' home in surrey his calling frances that he might dictate an article to her. his writing was pictorial and rather elaborate. "he drew his signature rather than writing it," says edward macdonald, who remembers him saying as he signed a cheque: "'with many a curve my banks i fret.' i wonder if tennyson fretted his." at one of our earliest meetings i asked him to write in my autograph book. it was at least five years before the _ballad of the white horse_ appeared, but the lines may be found almost unchanged in the ballad: verses made up in a dream (which you won't believe) people, if you have any prayers say prayers for me. and bury me underneath a stone in the stones of battersea. bury me underneath a stone, with the sword that was my own; to wait till the holy horn is blown and all poor men are free. the dream went on, he said, for pages and pages. and i think frances was anxious, for the mind must find rest in sleep. the little flat at battersea was a vortex of requests and engagements, broken promises and promises fulfilled, author's ink and printer's ink, speeches in prospect and speeches in memory, meetings and social occasions. a sincere admirer wrote during this period of his fears of too great a strain on his hero--and from 1904 to 1908 the only change was an increase of pressure: i see that chesterton has just issued a volume on the art of g. f. watts. his novel was published yesterday. soon his monograph on kingsley should be ready. i believe he has a book on some modern aspects of religious belief in the press. he is part-editor of the illustrated booklets on great authors issued by the bookman. he is contributing prefaces and introductions to odd volumes in several series of reprints. he is a constant contributor to the _daily news_ and the _speaker_; he is conducting a public controversy with blatchford of the _clarion_ on atheism and free-thinking; he is constantly lecturing and debating and dining out; it is almost impossible to open a paper that does not contain either an article or review or poem or drawing of his, and his name is better known now to compositors than bernard shaw. now, both physically and mentally chesterton is a hercules, and from what i hear of his methods of work he is capable of a great output without much physical strain; nevertheless, it is clear, i think to anyone that at his present rate of production he must either wear or tear. no man born can keep so many irons in the fire and not himself come between the hammer and the anvil. it is a pitiable thing to have a good man spend himself so recklessly; and i repeat once more that if he and his friends have not the will or power to restrain him, then there should be a conspiracy of editors and publishers in his favour. not often is a man like chesterton born. he should have his full chance. and that can only come by study and meditation, and by slow, steady accumulation of knowledge and wisdom.* [* shan f. bullock in the _chicago evening post_, 9th april, 1906.] in a volume made up of introductions written at this time to individual novels of dickens, we find a passage that might well be gilbert's summary of his own life: the calls upon him at this time were insistent and overwhelming; this necessarily happens at a certain stage of a successful writer's career. he was just successful enough to invite others and not successful enough to reject them . . . there was almost too much work for his imagination, and yet not quite enough work for his housekeeping. . . . and it is a curious tribute to the quite curious greatness of dickens that in this period of youthful strain we do not feel the strain but feel only the youth. his own amazing wish to write equalled or outstripped even his readers' amazing wish to read. working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work. unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once; but he wanted to write twenty novels at once. thus too with gilbert. the first eight years of his married life saw in swift succession the publication of ten books comprising literary and art criticism and biography, poetry, fiction (or rather fantasy), light essays and religious philosophy. all these were so full at once of the profound seriousness of youth, and of the bubbling wine of its high spirits, as to recall another thing gilbert said: that dickens was "accused of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there is foam upon deep seas." that was the matter in dispute about himself, and very furiously disputed it was during these years. was g.k. serious or merely posing, was he a great man or a mountebank, was he clear or obscure, was he a genius or a charlatan? "audacious reconciliation," he pleaded--or rather asserted, for his tone could seldom be called a plea, "is a mark not of frivolity but of extreme seriousness." a man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels, or lambs with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous; for he is taking one mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. but a man who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious view of the universe. the man who should write a dialogue between two early christians might be a mere writer of dialogues. but a man who should write a dialogue between an early christian and the missing link would have to be a philosopher. the more widely different the types talked of, the more serious and universal must be the philosophy which talks of them. the mark of the light and thoughtless writer is the harmony of his subject matter; the mark of the thoughtful writer is its apparent diversity. the most flippant lyric poet might write a pretty poem about lambs; but it requires something bolder and graver than a poet, it requires an ecstatic prophet, to talk about the lion lylng down with the lamb.* * g. k. chesterton. _criticisms and appreciations of the world of charles dickens_. dent. 1933 pp. 68-9. a man starting to write a thesis on chesterton's sociology once complained bitterly that almost none of his books were indexed, so he had to submit to the disgusting necessity of reading them all through, for some striking view on sociology might well be embedded in a volume of art criticism or be the very centre of a fantastic romance. chesterton's was a philosophy universal and unified and it was at this time growing fast and finding exceedingly varied techniques of expression. but the whole of it was in a sense in each of them--in each book, almost in each poem. as he himself says of the universe of charles dickens, "there was something in it--there is in all great creative writers--like the account in genesis of the light being created before the sun, moon and stars, the idea before the machinery that made it manifest. pickwick is in dickens's career the mere mass of light before the creation of sun or moon. it is the splendid, shapeless substance of which all his stars are ultimately made." and again, "he said what he had to say and yet not all he had to say. wild pictures, possible stories, tantalising and attractive trains of thought, perspectives of adventure, crowded so continually upon his mind that at the end there was a vast mass of them left over, ideas that he literally had not the opportunity to develop, tales that he literally had not the time to tell." chapter xii clearing the ground for orthodoxy g. k. chesterton: a criticism (published anonymously in 1908) was a challenge thrown to the world of letters, for it demanded the recognition of chesterton as a force to be reckoned with in the modern world. as its title implied, the book was by no means a tribute of sheer admiration and agreement. gilbert was rebuked for that love of a pun or an effective phrase that sometimes led him into indefensible positions. it was hotly asked of him that he should abandon his unjust attitude toward ibsen. he was accused of calling himself a liberal and being in fact a tory. but even in differing from him the book showed him as of real importance, not least in the sketch given of his life and of the influences that had contributed to the formation of his mind. it did too another thing: it clarified his philosophical position for the world at large. for some time now many had been demanding such a clarification. when g.k. attacked the utopia of wells and of shaw, both wells and shaw had been urgent in their demands that he should play fair by setting forth his own utopia. when he attacked the fundamental philosophy of g. s. street, mr. street retorted that it would be time for him to worry about his philosophy when g.k.'s had been unfolded. (g.k.'s retort to this was _orthodoxy_!) _g. k. chesterton: a criticism_--far the best book that has ever been written about chesterton--showed at last a mind that had really grasped his philosophy and could even have outlined his utopia. perhaps this was the less surprising as it ultimately turned out to have been written by his brother cecil. i do not know at what stage cecil revealed his authorship, but i remember that at first frances told me only that they suspected cecil because it was from the angle of his opinions that the book criticised many of gilbert's. however, i was at that date only an acquaintance and the truth may still have been a family secret. at any rate cecil it was, and it is small wonder if after all those years of arguing he understood something of the man with whom he had been measuring forces. but he did better than that--for he explained him to others without ever having resort to these arguments, which after all were more or less private property. he explained g.k.'s general philosophy from the _napoleon_, his ideas of cosmic good from _the wild knight_ and _the man who was thursday_, which had just been published that same year, 1908. in this last fantastic story the group of anarchists (distinguished by being called after the days of the week) turn out, through a series of incredible adventures to be, all save one, detectives in disguise. the gigantic figure of sunday before whom they all tremble turns from the chief of the anarchists, chief of the destructive forces, into--what? the sub-title, "a nightmare," is needed, for sunday would seem to be some wild vision, seen in dreams, not merely of forces of good, of sanity, of creation, but even of god himself. when, almost twenty years later, _the man who was thursday_ was adapted for the stage,* chesterton said in an interview: [* by ralph neale and mrs. cecil chesterton.] in an ordinary detective tale the investigator discovers that some amiable-looking fellow who subscribes to all the charities, and is fond of animals, has murdered his grandmother, or is a trigamist. i thought it would be fun to make the tearing away of menacing masks reveal benevolence. associated with that merely fantastic notion was the one that there is actually a lot of good to be discovered in unlikely places, and that we who are fighting each other may be all fighting on the right side. i think it is quite true that it is just as well we do not, while the fight is on, know all about each other; the soul must be solitary; or there would be no place for courage. a rather amusing thing was said by father knox on this point. he said that he should have regarded the book as entirely pantheist and as preaching that there was good in everything if it had not been for the introduction of the one real anarchist and pessimist. but he was prepared to wager that if the book survives for a hundred years--which it won't--they will say that the real anarchist was put in afterwards by the priests. but, though i was more foggy about ethical and theological matters than i am now, i was quite clear on that issue; that there was a final adversary, and that you might find a man resolutely turned away from goodness. people have asked me whom i mean by sunday. well, i think, on the whole, and allowing for the fact that he is a person in a tale--i think you can take him to stand for nature as distinguished from god. huge, boisterous, full of vitality, dancing with a hundred legs, bright with the glare of the sun, and at first sight, somewhat regardless of us and our desires. there is a phrase used at the end, spoken by sunday: "can ye drink from the cup that i drink of?" which seems to mean that sunday is god. that is the only serious note in the book, the face of sunday changes, you tear off the mask of nature and you find god. monsignor knox* has called _the man who was thursday_ "an extraordinary book, written as if the publisher had commissioned him to write something rather like the pilgrim's progress in the style of the pickwick papers"--which explains perhaps why some reviewers called it irreverent. the very wildness of it conveys a sense of thoughts seething and straining in an effort to express the inexpressible. later in his more definitely philosophical books g.k. could say calmly much that here he splashes "on a ten leagued canvas with brushes of comet's hair"--with all the violent directness of a vision. [* in the panegyric preached at westminster cathedral, june 27, 1936.] of that vision his brother began the interpretation in his challenging book. reactions were interesting, for even those who wanted most ardently to say that cecil's book should not have been written found that it was necessary to say it loudly and to say it at great length. their very violence showed their sense of chesterton as a peril even when they abused anyone who felt him to be a portent. it was not the kind of contempt that is really bestowed on the contemptible. the _academy_ expended more than two columns saying; we propose to deal with the quack and leave his sycophants and lickspittles to themselves . . . one skips him in his numerous corners of third and fourth rate journals [e.g. _the illustrated london news_, _the bookman_, _daily news_!] and one avoids his books because they are always and inevitably a bore. lancelot bathurst had also dared to write of g.k. in his daily life as a journalist, so the article goes on: let us kneel with the hon. lancelot at his greasy burgundy-stained shrine, what time the jingling hansom waits us with its rolling occupant and his sword-stick and his revolver and his pockets stacked with penny dreadfuls. . . . the fact is we have in mr. chesterton the true product of the deboshed hapenny press. . . . if the hapenny papers ceased to notice him forthwith it seems to us more than probable that he would cease at once to be of the highest importance in literary circles and the bishops and members of parliament who have honoured him with their kind notice would be compelled to drop him. . . . most of the reviews were very different from this one, which is certainly great fun (although some few other reviewers suggested that gilbert himself wrote the _criticism_). i have wondered whether the _academy_ notices of his own books, all much like this, were written by a personal enemy or merely by one of the "jolly people" as he often called them who were maddened by his views. for some years now gilbert had been gathering in his mind the material for _orthodoxy_. some of the ideas we have seen faintly traced in the notebook and _the coloured lands_, but they all grew to maturity in the atmosphere of constant controversy. in a controversy with the rev. r. j. campbell we see, for instance, his convictions about the reality of sin shaping under our eyes. discussing modernism in the _nation_, he analyses the difference between the true development of an idea and the mere changing from one idea to another. modernism claiming to be a development was actually an abandonment of the christian idea. for the catholic, this is among the most interesting of his controversies. in the course of it he refers to "the earlier works of newman and the literature of the oxford movement" to support his view of the anglican position. i have already said that chesterton read far more than was usually supposed, because he read so quickly and with so little parade of learning, and it has been too lightly assumed that the statement in _orthodoxy_ that he avoided works of christian apologetic meant that he had not read any of the great christian writers of the past. true, he was not then or at any time reading books of apologetic. he must, however, have been reading something more life-giving, as we learn from a single hint. asked to draw up a scheme of reading for 1908 in _g.k.'s weekly_, he suggests butler's _analogy_, coleridge's _confessions of an enquiring spirit_, newman's _apologia_, st. augustine's _confessions_ and the _summa_ of st. thomas aquinas. it was absurd, he said in this article, to suppose that the ancients did not see our modern problems. the truth was that the great ancients not only saw them, but saw through them. butler had sketched the "real line along which christianity must ultimately be defended." these great writers all remained modern, while the "new theology" takes one back to the time of crinolines. "i almost expect to see mr. r. j. campbell in peg-top trousers, with very long side-whiskers." in this controversy, although not yet a catholic, he showed the gulf between the modernist theory of development and the newman doctrine, with a clarity greater than any catholic writer of the time. a man who is always going back and picking to pieces his own first principles may be having an amusing time but he is not developing as newman understood development. newman meant that if you wanted a tree to grow you must plant it finally in some definite spot. it may be (i do not know and i do not care) that catholic christianity is just now passing through one of its numberless periods of undue repression and silence. but i do know this, that when the great powers break forth again, the new epics and the new arts, they will break out on the ancient and living tree. they cannot break out upon the little shrubs that you are always pulling up by the roots to see if they are growing. against r. j. campbell he showed in a lecture on "christianity and social reform" how belief in sin as well as in goodness was more favourable to social reform than was the rather woolly optimism that refused to recognize evil. "the nigger-driver will be delighted to hear that god is immanent in him. . . . the sweater that . . . he has not in any way become divided from the supreme perfection of the universe." if the new theology would not lead to social reform, the social utopia to which the philosophy of wells and of shaw was pointing seemed to chesterton not a heaven on earth to be desired, but a kind of final hell to be avoided, since it banished all freedom and human responsibility. arguing with them was again highly fruitful, and two subjects he chose for speeches are suggestive--"the terror of tendencies" and "shall we abolish the inevitable?" in the _new age_ shaw wrote about belloc and chesterton and so did wells, while chesterton wrote about wells and shaw, till the philistines grew angry, called it self-advertisement and log-rolling and urged that a bill for the abolition of shaw and chesterton should be introduced into parliament. but g.k. had no need for advertisement of himself or his ideas just then: he had a platform, he had an eager audience. every week he wrote in the _illustrated london news_, beginning in 1905 to do "our notebook" (this continued till his death in 1936). he was still writing every saturday in the _daily news_. publishers were disputing for each of his books. yet he rushed into every religious controversy that was going on, because thereby he could clarify and develop his ideas. the most important of all these was the controversy with blatchford, editor of the _clarion_, who had written a rationalist credo, entitled _god and my neighbour_. in 1903-4, he had the generosity and the wisdom to throw open the _clarion_ to the freest possible discussion of his views. the christian attack was made by a group of which chesterton was the outstanding figure, and was afterwards gathered into a paper volume called _the doubts of democracy_. one essay in this volume, written in 1903, is of primary importance in any study of the sources of _orthodoxy_, for it gives a brilliant outline of one of the main contentions of the book and shows even better than _orthodoxy_ itself what he meant by saying that he had first learnt christianity from its opponents. it is clear that by now he believed in the divinity of christ. the pamphlet itself has fallen into oblivion and chesterton's share of it was only three short essays. i think it well to quote a good deal from the first of these, because in it he has put in concentrated form and with different illustrations what he developed five years later. there is nothing more packed with thought in the whole of his writings than these essays. the first of all the difficulties that i have in controverting mr. blatchford is simply this, that i shall be very largely going over his own ground. my favourite text-book of theology is _god and my neighbour_, but i cannot repeat it in detail. if i gave each of my reasons for being a christian, a vast number of them would be mr. blatchford's reasons for not being one. for instance, mr. blatchford and his school point out that there are many myths parallel to the christian story; that there were pagan christs, and red indian incarnations, and patagonian crucifixions, for all i know or care. but does not mr. blatchford see the other side of the fact? if the christian god really made the human race, would not the human race tend to rumours and perversions of the christian god? if the centre of our life is a certain fact, would not people far from the centre have a muddled version of that fact? if we are so made that a son of god must deliver us, is it odd that patagonians should dream of a son of god? the blatchfordian position really amounts to this--that because a certain thing has impressed millions of different people as likely or necessary, therefore it cannot be true. and then this bashful being, veiling his own talents, convicts the wretched g.k.c. of paradox . . . the story of a christ is very common in legend and literature. so is the story of two lovers parted by fate. so is the story of two friends killing each other for a woman. but will it seriously be maintained that, because these two stories are common as legends, therefore no two friends were ever separated by love or no two lovers by circumstances? it is tolerably plain, surely, that these two stories are common because the situation is an intensely probable and human one, because our nature is so built as to make them almost inevitable . . . thus, in this first instance, when learned sceptics come to me and say, "are you aware that the kaffirs have a sort of incarnation?" i should reply: "speaking as an unlearned person, i don't know. but speaking as a christian, i should be very much astonished if they hadn't." take a second instance. the secularist says that christianity has been a gloomy and ascetic thing, and points to the procession of austere or ferocious saints who have given up home and happiness and macerated health and sex. but it never seems to occur to him that the very oddity and completeness of these men's surrender make it look very much as if there were really something actual and solid in the thing for which they sold themselves. they gave up all pleasures for one pleasure of spiritual ecstasy. they may have been mad; but it looks as if there really were such a pleasure. they gave up all human experiences for the sake of one superhuman experience. they may have been wicked, but it looks as if there were such an experience. it is perfectly tenable that this experience is as dangerous and selfish a thing as drink. a man who goes ragged and homeless in order to see visions may be as repellant and immoral as a man who goes ragged and homeless in order to drink brandy. that is a quite reasonable position. but what is manifestly not a reasonable position, what would be, in fact, not far from being an insane position, would be to say that the raggedness of the man, and the stupefied degradation of the man, proved that there was no such thing as brandy. that is precisely what the secularist tries to say. he tries to prove that there is no such thing as supernatural experience by pointing at the people who have given up everything for it. he tries to prove that there is no such thing by proving that there are people who live on nothing else. again i may submissively ask: "whose is the paradox?" . . . take a third instance. the secularist says that christianity produced tumult and cruelty. he seems to suppose that this proves it to be bad. but it might prove it to be very good. for men commit crimes not only for bad things, far more often for good things. for no bad things can be desired quite so passionately and persistently as good things can be desired, and only very exceptional men desire very bad and unnatural things. most crime is committed because, owing to some peculiar complication, very beautiful or necessary things are in some danger . . . . . . and when something is set before mankind that is not only enormously valuable, but also quite new, the sudden vision, the chance of winning it, the chance of losing it, drive them mad. it has the same effect in the moral world that the finding of gold has in the economic world. it upsets values, and creates a kind of cruel rush. we need not go far for instances quite apart from the instances of religion. when the modern doctrines of brotherhood and liberality were preached in france in the eighteenth century the time was ripe for them, the educated classes everywhere had been growing towards them, the world to a very considerable extent welcomed them. and yet all that preparation and openness were unable to prevent the burst of anger and agony which greets anything good. and if the slow and polite preaching of rational fraternity in a rational age ended in the massacres of september, what an _a fortiori_ is here! what would be likely to be the effect of the sudden dropping into a dreadfully evil century of a dreadfully perfect truth? what would happen if a world baser than the world of sade were confronted with a gospel purer than the gospel of rousseau? the mere flinging of the polished pebble of republican idealism into the artificial lake of eighteenth century europe produced a splash that seemed to splash the heavens, and a storm that drowned ten thousand men. what would happen if a star from heaven really fell into the slimy and bloody pool of a hopeless and decaying humanity? men swept a city with the guillotine, a continent with a sabre, because liberty, equality, and fraternity were too precious to be lost. how if christianity was yet more maddening because it was yet more precious? but why should we labour the point when one who knew human nature as it can really be learnt, from fishermen and women and natural people, saw from his quiet village the track of this truth across history, and, in saying that he came to bring not peace but a sword, set up eternally his colossal realism against the eternal sentimentality of the secularist? thus, then, in the third instance, when the learned sceptic says: "christianity produced wars and persecutions," we shall reply: "naturally." and, lastly, let me take an example which leads me on directly to the general matter i wish to discuss for the remaining space of the articles at my command. the secularist constantly points out that the hebrew and christian religions began as local things; that their god was a tribal god; that they gave him material form, and attached him to particular places. this is an excellent example of one of the things that if i were conducting a detailed campaign i should use as an argument for the validity of biblical experience. for if there really are some other and higher beings than ourselves, and if they in some strange way, at some emotional crisis, really revealed themselves to rude poets or dreamers in very simple times, that these rude people should regard the revelation as local, and connect it with the particular hill or river where it happened, seems to me exactly what any reasonable human being would expect. it has a far more credible look than if they had talked cosmic philosophy from the beginning. if they had, i should have suspected "priestcraft" and forgeries and third-century gnosticism. if there be such a being as god, and he can speak to a child, and if god spoke to a child in the garden, the child would, of course, say that god lived in the garden. i should not think it any less likely to be true for that. if the child said: "god is everywhere; an impalpable essence pervading and supporting all constituents of the cosmos alike"--if, i say, the infant addressed me in the above terms, i should think he was much more likely to have been with the governess than with god. so if moses had said god was an infinite energy, i should be certain he had seen nothing extraordinary. as he said he was a burning bush, i think it very likely that he did see something extraordinary. for whatever be the divine secret, and whether or no it has (as all people have believed) sometimes broken bounds and surged into our world, at least it lies on the side furthest away from pedants and their definitions, and nearest to the silver souls of quiet people, to the beauty of bushes, and the love of one's native place. thus, then, in our last instance (out of hundreds that might be taken), we conclude in the same way. when the learned sceptic says: "the visions of the old testament were local, and rustic, and grotesque," we shall answer: "of course. they were genuine." thus, as i said at the beginning, i find myself, to start with, face to face with the difficulty that to mention the reasons that i have for believing in christianity is, in very many cases, simply to repeat those arguments which mr. blatchford, in some strange way, seems to regard as arguments against it. his book is really rich and powerful. he has undoubtedly set up these four great guns of which i have spoken. i have nothing to say against the size and ammunition of the guns. i only say that by some strange accident of arrangement he has set up those four pieces of artillery pointing at himself. if i were not so humane, i should say: "gentlemen of the secularist guard, fire first." he goes on in the next essay to talk of the positive arguments for christianity, of "this religious philosophy which was, and will be again, the study of the highest intellects and the foundation of the strongest nations, but which our little civilisation has for a while forgotten." very briefly he then deals with determinism and freewill, the need for the supernatural and the question of the fall. dealing with the fall he uses one of his most brilliant illustrations. we speak, he says, of a manly man, but not of a whaley whale. "if you wanted to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky, you would slap him on the back and say, 'be a man.' no one who wished to dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth explorer would slap it on the back and say, 'be a crocodile.' for we have no notion of a perfect crocodile; no allegory of a whale expelled from his whaley eden." continuing the swift sketch of some elements of christian theology, chesterton next deals with miracles. while the development in _orthodoxy_ makes this section look very slight, there are passages that make one realize the mental wealth of a man who could afford to leave them behind and rush on. blatchford had said that no english judge would accept the evidence for the resurrection and g.k. answers that possibly christians have not all got "such an extravagant reverence for english judges as is felt by mr. blatchford himself. the experiences of the founder of christianity have perhaps left us in a vague doubt of the infallibility of courts of law." in reference to the many rationalists whose refusal to accept any miracle is based on the fact that "experience is against it," he says: "there was a great irish rationalist of this school who when he was told that a witness had seen him commit a murder said that he could bring a hundred witnesses who had not seen him commit it." the final essay on "the eternal heroism of the slums" has two main points. it begins with an acknowledgment of the crimes of christians, only pointing out that while mr. blatchford outlaws the church for this reason, he is prepared to invoke the state whose crimes are far worse. but the most vigorous part of the essay is a furious attack on determinism. blatchford apparently held that bad surroundings inevitably produced bad men. chesterton had seen the heroism of the poor in the most evil surroundings and was furious at "this association of vice with poverty, the vilest and the oldest and the dirtiest of all the stories that insolence has ever flung against the poor." men can and do lead heroic lives in the worst of circumstances because there is in humanity a power of responsibility, there is freewill. blatchford, in the name of humanity, is attacking the greatest of human attributes. more numerous than can be counted, in all the wars and persecutions of the world, men have looked out of their little grated windows and said, "at least my thoughts are free." "no, no," says the face of mr. blatchford, suddenly appearing at the window, "your thoughts are the inevitable result of heredity and environment. your thoughts are as material as your dungeons. your thoughts are as mechanical as the guillotine." so pants this strange comforter, from cell to cell. i suppose mr. blatchford would say that in his utopia nobody would be in prison. what do i care whether i am in prison or no, if i have to drag chains everywhere. a man in his utopia may have, for all i know, free food, free meadows, his own estate, his own palace. what does it matter? he may not have his own soul. an architect once discoursed to me on the need of humility in face of the material; the stone and marble of his building. thus chesterton was humble before the reality he was seeking to interpret. pride, he once defined as "the falsification of fact by the introduction of self." to learn, a man must "subtract himself from the study of any solid and objective thing." this humility he had in a high degree and also that rarer humility which saw his friends and his opponents alike as his intellectual equals. "almost anybody," monsignor knox once said, "was an ordinary person compared with him." but this was an idea that certainly never occurred to him. the philosophy shaping into _orthodoxy_ was stimulated by newspaper controversy, and also by the talk in which gilbert always delighted. as i have noted he loved to listen and he was a little slow in getting off the mark with his own contribution. many years later an american interviewer described him, when he did get going, as answering questions in brief essays. frank swinnerton has admirably described the manner of speech so well remembered by his friends: his speech is prefaced and accompanied by a curious sort of humming, such as one may hear when glee singers give each other the note before starting to sing. he pronounces the word "i" (without egotism) as if it were "ayee," and drawls, not in the highly gentlemanly manner which americans believe to be the english accent, and which many english call the oxford accent, but in a manner peculiar to himself, either attractive or the reverse according to one's taste (to me attractive).* [* _georgian scene_, p. 94.] even more attractive to most of us was his fashion of making us feel that we had contributed something very worthwhile. he would take something one had said and develop it till it shone and glowed, not from its own worth but from what he had made of it. almost anything could thus become a starting point for a train of his best thought. and the style disliked by some in his writings was so completely the man himself that it was the same in conversation as in his books. he would approach a topic from every side throwing light on those contradictory elements that made a paradox. he himself had what he attributes to st. thomas--"that instantaneous presence of mind which alone really deserves the name of wit." asked once the traditional question what single book he would choose if cast on a desert island, he replied thomas's _guide to practical shipbuilding_. in talk, as in his books, g.k. loved to play upon words, and sometimes of course this was merely a matter of words and the puns were bad ones. once, for instance, after translating the french phrase for playing truant as "he goes to the bushy school--or the school among the bushes," he adds "not lightly to be confounded with the art school at bushey." this is indefensible, but rare. christopher morley has noted how "his play upon words often led to a genuine play upon thoughts. . . . one of chesterton's best pleasantries was his remark on the so-called emancipation of women. 'twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry _we will not be dictated to:_ and proceeded to become stenographers.'" he complained in a review of a novel "every modern man is an atlas carrying the world; and we are introduced to a new cosmos with every new character. . . . each man has to be introduced accompanied by his cosmos, like a jealous wife or on the principle of 'love me love my dogma.'" each of chesterton's readers can think of a hundred instances of this inspired fooling: many have been given in this book and many will yet be given. but the thing went far deeper than fooling: it has been compared by mr. belloc to the gospel parables as a method of teaching and of illumination. "he made men see what they had not seen before. he made them _know_. he was an architect of certitude, whenever he practiced the art in which he excelled." belloc's analysis of this special element in chesterton's style, alike written and spoken, is of first rate importance to an understanding of the man whose mind at this date was still rapidly developing while his method of expression had become what it remained to the end of his life. his unique, his capital, genius for illustration by parallel, by example, is his peculiar mark. the word "peculiar" is here the operative word. . . . no one whatsoever that i can recall in the whole course of english letters had his amazing--i would almost say superhuman--capacity for parallelism. now parallelism is a gift or method of vast effect in the conveyance of truth. parallelism consists in the illustration of some unperceived truth by its exact consonance with the reflection of a truth already known and perceived . . . whenever chesterton begins a sentence with, "it is as though" (in exploding a false bit of reasoning), you may expect a stroke of parallelism as vivid as a lightning flash. . . . always, in whatever manner he launched the parallelism, he produced the shock of illumination. he _taught_. parallelism was so native to his mind; it was so naturally a fruit of his mental character that he had difficulty in understanding why others did not use it with the same lavish facility as himself. i can speak here with experience, for in these conversations with him or listening to his conversation with others i was always astonished at an ability in illustration which i not only have never seen equalled, but cannot remember to have seen attempted. he never sought such things; they poured out from him as easily as though they were not the hard forged products of intense vision, but spontaneous remarks.* [* _on the place of gilbert chesterton in english letters_, pp. 36-41.] to return to the blatchford controversy: a final point of interest is a psychological one. g.k. admits his difficulty in using in his arguments the reverent solemnity of the agnostic. he realizes that he is thought flippant because he is amusing on a subject where he is more certain than "of the existence of the moon. . . . christianity is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessor of it with a certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-minded rationalists might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery." but if this is his own psychology he faces too the special difficulty of theirs--the main and towering barrier that he wished but hardly hoped to surmount. he was the first person, i think, to see that free thought was no longer a young movement, but old and even fossilized. it had formed minds which were now too set to be altered. it had its own dogmas and its own most rigid orthodoxy. "you are armed to the teeth," he told the readers of the _clarion_, "and buttoned up to the chin with the great agnostic orthodoxy, perhaps the most placid and perfect of all the orthodoxies of men. . . . i approach you with the reverence and the courage due to a bench of bishops." the _clarion_ controversy was, as we have seen, in 1903 and 1904, when chesterton was approaching thirty. others of those i have mentioned came later. but i don't think any or even all of them fully explain the depth and richness of _orthodoxy_. chapter xiii orthodoxy _philosophy is either eternal or it is not philosophy. . . . a cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. a man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon_. _introduction to the book of job_. because _orthodoxy_ is supremely chesterton's own history of his mind more must be said of it than of his other published works. for "this book is the life of a man. and a man is his mind." the notebook shows him thinking and feeling in his youth exactly on the lines that he recalls--but they were only lines--in fact an outline. the richness of life was needed, the richness of thought, to turn the outline into the masterpiece. no man, not even chesterton, could have written _orthodoxy_ at the age of twenty. it was sufficiently remarkable that he should have written it at thirty-five: but only a man who had been thinking along those lines at twenty and much earlier could have written it at all. for the book is as he says "a sort of slovenly autobiography." it is not so much an argument for orthodoxy as the story of how one man discovered orthodoxy as the only answer to the riddle of the universe. in an interview, given shortly after its publication, gilbert told of a temptation that had once been his and which he had overcome almost before he realized he had been tempted. that temptation was to become a prophet like all the men in _heretics_, by emphasizing one aspect of truth and ignoring the others. to do this would, he knew, bring him a great crowd of disciples. he had a vision--which constantly grew wider and deeper--of the many-sided unity of truth, but he saw that all the prophets of the age, from walt whitman and schopenhauer to wells and shaw, had become so by taking one side of truth and making it all of truth. it is so much easier to see and magnify a part than laboriously to strive to embrace the whole: . . . a sage feels too small for life, and a fool too large for it. not that he condemned as fools the able men of his generation. for wells he had a great esteem, for shaw a greater. whitman he had in his youth almost idolized. but increasingly he recognized even whitman as representing an idea that was too narrow because it was only an aspect. there was not room in whitman's philosophy for some of the facts he had already discovered and he felt he had not yet completed his journey. he must not, for the sake of being a prophet and of having a following, sacrifice--i will not say a truth already found, but a truth that might still be lurking somewhere. he could not be the architect of his own intellectual universe any more than he had been the creator of sun, moon and earth. "god and humanity made it," he said of the philosophy he discovered, "and it made me." he had begun in boyhood, as we have seen, by realizing that the world as depicted in fairy tales was saner and more sensible than the world as seen by the intellectuals of his own day. these men had lost the sense of life's value. they spoke of the world as a vast place governed by iron laws of necessity. chesterton felt in it the presence of will, while the mere thought of vastness was to him about as cheerful a conception as that of a jail that should with its cold empty passages cover half the county. "these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that was divine." these people professed that the universe was one coherent thing; but they were not fond of the universe. but i was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. i often did so; and it never seemed to mind. actually and in truth i did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it large. for about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which i felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life. they showed only a dreary waste; but i felt a sort of sacred thrift. for economy is far more romantic than extravagance. to them stars were an unending income of halfpence; but i felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling. these subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour and tone of certain tales. thus i have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. i may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, "robinson crusoe," which i read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. the greatest of poems is an inventory. . . i really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of crusoe's ship. that there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe. it was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. the trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when i saw the matterhorn i was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion. i felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are called so in milton's eden): i hoarded the hills. for the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true. this cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another one.* [* _orthodoxy_, chapter iv, pp. 112-5.] a fragment of an essay on hans anderson that cannot be later than the age of seventeen shows gilbert trying to shape part of what he calls here, "the ethics of elfland," but a large part was, as he says, "subconscious." in this chapter he sums up the results of musings about the universe begun so long ago--small wonder that he had seemed to sleep over his lessons while he was seeing these visions and dreaming these dreams which after every effort to tell them he still knows remains half untold: . . . the attempt to utter the unutterable things. these are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine. these in some dark way i thought before i could write, and felt before i could think; that we may proceed more easily afterwards, i will roughly recapitulate them now. i felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. it may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. but the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations i have heard. the thing is magic, true or false. second, i came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. there was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. third, i thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank god for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them. we owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. and last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. man had saved his good as crusoe saved his goods; he had saved them from a wreck. all this i felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. and all the time i had not even thought of christian theology.* [* ibid., pp. 155-6.] this theology came with the answers to all the tremendous questions asked by life. here the convert has one great advantage over the catholic brought up in the faith. most of us hear the answers before we have asked the questions: hence intellectually we lack what g.k. calls "the soils for the seeds of doctrine." it is nearly impossible to understand an answer to a question you have not formulated. and without the sense of urgency that an insistent question brings, many people do not even try. all the years of his boyhood and early manhood chesterton was facing the fundamental questions and hammering out his answers. at first he had no thought of christianity as even a possible answer. growing up in a world called christian, he fancied it a philosophy that had been tried and found wanting. it was only as he realized that the answers he was finding for himself always fitted into, were always confirmed by, the christian view of things that he began to turn towards it. he sees a good deal of humour in the way he strained his voice in a painfully juvenile attempt to utter his new truths, only to find that they were not his and were not new, but were part of an eternal philosophy. in the chapter called "the flag of the world" he tells of the moment when he discovered the confirmation and reinforcing of his own speculations by the christian theology. the point at which this came concerned his feelings about the men of his youth who labelled themselves optimist and pessimist. both, he felt, were wrong. it must be possible at once to love and to hate the world, to love it more than enough to get on with it, to hate it enough to get it on. and the church solved this difficulty by her doctrine of creation and of original sin. "god had written not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers who had since made a great mess of it." as to that mess the christian could be as pessimist as he liked, as to the original design he must be optimist, for it was his work to restore it. "st. george could still fight the dragon . . . if he were as big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world." and then followed an experience impossible to describe. it was as if i had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection--the world and the christian tradition. i had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. i found this projecting feature of christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that god was personal, and had made a world separate from himself. the spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world--it had evidently been meant to go there--and then the strange thing began to happen. when once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. i could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. or, to vary the metaphor, i was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress. and when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me. the whole land was lit up, as it were, back to the first fields of my childhood. all those blind fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter i have tried in vain to trace on the darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane. i was right when i felt that i would almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour than say that it must by necessity have been that colour: it might verily have been any other. my sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it meant the whole doctrine of the fall. even those dim and shapeless monsters of notions which i have not been able to describe, much less defend, stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatides of the creed. the fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void, but small and cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist; to god the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds. and my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from crusoe's ship--even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.* [* _orthodoxy_, chapter v, pp. 142-4.] in a chapter called "the paradoxes of christianity," the richness of his mind is most manifest; and in that chapter can best be seen what mr. belloc meant when he told me chesterton's style reminded him of st. augustine's. talking over with an old schoolfellow of his the list of books he had, as we have seen, drawn up for _t.p.'s weekly_, i discovered deep doubt as to whether gilbert would really have read these books, as most of us understand reading, combined with a conviction that he would have got out of them at a glance more than most of us by prolonged study. i have certainly never known anyone his equal at what the schoolboy calls "degutting" a book. he did not seem to study an author, yet he certainly knew him. but it remained that his own mind, reflecting and experiencing, made of his own life his greatest storehouse, so that in all this book there was, as my father pointed out in the _dublin review_ at the time, an intensely original new light cast on the eternal philosophy about which so much had already been written. the discovery specially needed, perhaps, for his own age was that christianity represented a new balance that constituted a liberation. the ancient greek or roman had aimed at equilibrium by enforcing moderation and getting rid of extremes. christianity "made moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions." it "got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious." "the more i considered christianity, the more i felt that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild." thus inside christianity the pacifist could become a monk, and the warrior a crusader, st. francis could praise good more loudly than walt whitman, and st. jerome denounce evil more darkly than schopenhauer--but both emotions must be kept in their place. i remember how george wyndham laughed as he recited to us the paragraph where this idea reached its climax. and sometimes this pure gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture; the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, in the soul of st. louis, the lion lay down with the lamb. but remember that this text is too lightly interpreted. it is constantly assumed, especially in our tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. but that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. that is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. the real problem is--can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? _that_ is the problem the church attempted; _that_ is the miracle she achieved.* [* _orthodoxy_, chapter vi, pp. 178-9.] all this applied not only to the release of the emotions, the development of all the elements that go to make up humanity, but even more to the truths of revelation. a heresy always means lopping off a part of the truth and, therefore, ultimately a loss of liberty. orthodoxy, in keeping the whole truth, safeguarded freedom and prevented any one of the great and devouring ideas she was teaching from swallowing any other truth. this was the justification of councils, of definitions, even of persecutions and wars of religion: that they had stood for the defence of reason as well as of faith. they had stood to prevent the suicide of thought which must result if the exciting but difficult balance were lost that had replaced the classical moderation. the church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. it was no flock of sheep the christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. remember that the church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. the idea of birth through a holy spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. . . . a sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in europe. a slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the christmas trees or break all the easter eggs. doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. the church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless. this is the thrilling romance of orthodoxy. people have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. there never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. it was sanity; and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. it was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. the church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. she swerved to left and right, so as exactly to avoid enormous obstacles. she left on one hand the huge bulk of arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make christianity too worldly. the next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. the orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox church was never respectable. it would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the arians. it would have been easy, in the calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. it is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. it is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. it is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. to have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of christendom--that would indeed have been simple. it is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. to have fallen into any one of the fads from gnosticism to christian science would indeed have been obvious and tame. but to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.* [* _orthodoxy_, chapter vi, pp. 182-5.] no quotation can adequately convey the wealth of thought in the book. yet amazingly, the _times_ reviewer rebuked g.k. for substituting emotion for intellect, partly on the strength of a sentence in the chapter called "the maniac." "the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." the reviews, when one reads them as a whole, exactly confirm what wilfrid ward said in the _dublin review:_ that whereas he had regarded _orthodoxy_ as a triumphant vindication of his own view that g.k. was a really profound thinker, he found to his amazement that those who had thought him superficial, hailed it as a proof of theirs. obviously with a man so much concerned with ultimates the place accorded him in letters will depend upon whether one agrees or disagrees with his conclusions. in a country that is not catholic this consideration must affect the standing of any catholic thinker. thus newman was considered by carlyle to have "the brain of a moderate sized rabbit," yet by others his is counted the greatest mind of the century. similarly arnold bennett could credit chesterton with only a second-class intellectual apparatus--because he was a dogmatist. to this chesterton replied (in _fancies versus facts_): "in truth there are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it and those who accept dogmas and don't know it. my only advantage over the gifted novelist lies in my belonging to the former class." if one grasps the catholic view of dogma the answer is satisfying; if not the objector is left with his original objection--as against chesterton, as against newman. and chesterton had the extra disadvantage of being a journalist famous for his jokes now moving in newman's unquestioned field of philosophy and theology. it was in part the difficulty of convincing a man against his will. these critics, as wilfrid ward pointed out, read superficially and looked only at the fooling, the fantastic puns and comparisons, ignoring the underlying deep seriousness and lines of thought that made him, as it then seemed boldly, rank chesterton with such writers as butler, coleridge and newman. taking as his text the saying, "truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth," wilfrid ward called his article, "mr. chesterton among the prophets." he showed especially the curious confusion made in such comments as the one i have quoted from the _times_, and made clearer what chesterton was really saying by a comparison with the "illative sense" of cardinal newman. it is the usual difficulty of trying to express a partly new idea. newman had coined an expression, but it did not express all he meant, still less all that chesterton meant. yet it was difficult to use the word "reason" in this particular discussion, without giving to it two different meanings. for in two chapters, "the maniac" and "the suicide of thought," chesterton was concerned to show that authority was needed for the defence of reason (in the larger sense) against its own power of self-destruction. yet the maniac commits this suicide by an excessive use of reason (in the narrower sense). "he is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. he is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. . . . he is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point." to chesterton it seemed that most of the modern religions and philosophies were like the argument by which a madman suffering from persecution mania proves that he is in a world of enemies: it is complete, it is unanswerable, yet it is false. the madman's mind "moves in a perfect but narrow circle. . . . the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, only it is not so large. . . . there is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions." philosophies such as materialism, idealism, monism, all have in their explanations of the universe this quality of the madman's argument of "covering everything and leaving everything out." the materialist, like the madman is "unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; he is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers or first love or fear upon the sea. the earth is so very large and the cosmos is so very small." people sometimes say, "life is larger than logic," when they want to dismiss logic, but that was not chesterton's way. he wanted logic, he needed logic, as part of the abundance of the mind's life, as part of a much larger whole. what was the word--we are looking for it still--for a use of the mind that included all these things; logic and imagination, mysticism and ecstasy and poetry and joy; a use of the mind that could embrace the universe and reach upwards to god without losing its balance. the mind must work in time, yet it can reach out into eternity: it is conditioned by space but it can glimpse infinity. the modern world had imprisoned the mind. far more than the body it needed great open spaces. and chesterton, breaking violently out of prison, looked around and saw how the church had given health to the mind by giving it space to move in and great ideas to move among. chesterton, the poet, saw too that man is a poet and must therefore, "get his head into the heavens." he needs mysticism and among her great ideas, the church gives him mysteries. chapter xiv bernard shaw _this chapter was read by g.b.s. his remarks are printed in footnotes. [a facsimile of the] one page altered substantially by him is [omitted in this plain-text electronic edition]_. when anyone in the early years of the century made a list of the english writers most in the public eye, such a list always included the names of bernard shaw and g. k. chesterton. but a good many people in writing down these names did so with unconcealed irritation and i think it is important at this stage to see why. these men were constantly arguing with each other; but the literary public felt all the same that they represented something in common, and the literary public was by no means sure that it liked that something. it could not quite resist bernard shaw's plays; it loved chesterton whenever it could rebuke him affectionately for paradox and levity. what that public succumbed to in these men was their art: it was by no means so certain that it liked their meaning. and so the literary public elected to say that shaw and chesterton were having a cheap success by standing on their heads and declaring that black was white. the audience watched a shaw v. chesterton debate as a sham fight or a display of fireworks, as indeed it always partly was; for each of them would have died rather than really hurt the other. but shaw and chesterton were operating on their minds all the time. they were allowed to sit in the stalls and applaud. but they were themselves being challenged; and that spoilt their comfort. chesterton in his _autobiography_ complains of the falsity of most of the pictures of england during the victorian era. the languishing, fainting females, who were in fact far stronger-minded than their grand-daughters today, the tyrannical pious fathers, the dull conventional lives: it all rings false to anyone who grew up in an average victorian middle-class home and was happy enough there. there was, however, one thing fundamentally wrong in such homes; and it was on this fundamental sin that he agreed with shaw in waging a relentless war. the middle classes of england were thoroughly and smugly satisfied with social conditions that were intolerable for the great mass of their fellow countrymen. they had erected between the classes artificial barriers and now did not even look over the top of them. i remember how when my mother started a settlement in south london the head worker told us she often saw women groping in the dirt under the fish barrows for the heads and tails of fishes to boil for their children. the settlement began to give the children dinners of dumplings or rice pudding and treacle, and many well-to-do friends would give my mother a pound or so to help this work. but the suggestion that government should intervene was socialism: the idea that here was a symptom of a widespread evil, was scouted utterly. people might have learnt much from their own servants of how the rest of humanity were living, but while, said chesterton, they laughed at the idea of the mediaeval baron whose vassals ate below the salt, their own vassals ate and lived below the floor. at no time in the christian past had there been such a deep and wide cleavage in humanity. the first thing that g.k.c. and g.b.s., wells too, and belloc, were all agreed upon was that the upper and middle classes of england must be reminded, if need were by a series of earthquakes, that they were living in an unreal world. they had forgotten the human race to which they belonged. they, a tiny section, spoke of the mass of mankind as "the poor" or "the lower orders" almost as they might speak of the beasts of the forest, as beings of a different race. chesterton had a profound and noble respect for the poor: shaw declared that they were "useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished." but for both men, the handful of quarrelsome cliques called the literary world was far too small, because it was so tiny a section of the human race. shaw and chesterton had, in fact, discovered the social problem. today, whether people intend to do anything about it or not, it is impossible to avoid knowing something about it. but at that date the idea was general that all was as well as could be expected in an imperfect world. the trades unionists were telling a different story, but they could not hope to reach intellectually the classes they were attacking. here were men who could not be ignored, and i cannot but think that it was sometimes the mere utterance of unwelcome truth in brilliant speech that aroused the cry of "paradox." i hear many people [wrote chesterton], complain that bernard shaw deliberately mystifies them. i cannot imagine what they mean; it seems to me that he deliberately insults them. his language, especially on moral questions, is generally as straight and solid as that of a bargee and far less ornate and symbolic than that of a hansom-cabman. the prosperous english philistine complains that mr. shaw is making a fool of him. whereas mr. shaw is not in the least making a fool of him; mr. shaw is, with laborious lucidity, calling him a fool. g.b.s. calls a landlord a thief; and the landlord, instead of denying or resenting it, says, "ah, that fellow hides his meaning so cleverly that one can never make out what he means, it is all so fine-spun and fantastical." g.b.s. calls a statesman a liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of ecstasy, "ah, what quaint, intricate and half-tangled trains of thought! ah, what elusive and many-coloured mysteries of half-meaning!" i think it is always quite plain what mr. shaw means, even when he is joking, and it generally means that the people he is talking to ought to howl aloud for their sins. but the average representative of them undoubtedly treats the shavian meaning as tricky and complex, when it is really direct and offensive. he always accuses shaw of pulling his leg, at the exact moment when shaw is pulling his nose.* [* _george bernard shaw_, pp. 82-3.] chesterton was, however, in agreement with the ordinary citizen and in disagreement with shaw as to much of shaw's essential teaching. and here we touch a matter so involved that even today it is hard to disentangle it completely. i suppose it will always be possible for two observers to look at human beings acting, to hear them talking, and to arrive at two entirely different interpretations of what they mean. this is certainly the case with any very recent period, and perhaps especially with our own recent history. we have within living memory ended a period and begun an exceedingly different period, and we tend to judge the former by the light--or the darkness--of the latter. the victorian age, even in its extreme old age, was still tacitly assuming and legally enforcing as axioms the christian moral system, especially in regard to marriage and all sex questions, and the sacred nature of property. to read many disquisitions on that period today one would suppose that no one living really believed in these things: that humbug explained the first and greed the second. this is surely a false perspective. the age was an enormously conventional one: these fundamental ideas had become fossilized and meaningless for an increasing number of younger people. but when bernard shaw called himself an atheist out of a kind of insane generosity towards bradlaugh (see his letter to g.k. later in this chapter) or described all property as theft, it was a real moral indignation that was roused in many minds. real, but exceedingly confused. it testified to the need of the ordinary man to live by a creed that he need not question. shaw and chesterton were philosophers, and philosophers love asking questions as well as answering them. but the average man wants to live by his creed, not question it, and the elder victorians had still some kind of creed. there were many who believed in god. there were others who believed that the christian moral system must remain, because it had commended itself to man's nature as the highest and best and was the true fruit of evolutionary progress. there were certainly some who were angry because they thought chaos must follow any tampering with the existing social order. but if you take the mass of those who tried to laugh bernard shaw aside and grew angry when they could not do so, you find at the root of the anger an intense dislike of having any part of a system questioned which was to them unquestionable, which they had erected into a creed. they thought shaw's ideas dangerous and wanted to keep them from the young. they did not want anyone to ask how a civilisation had laid its principles open to this brilliant and effective siege. they hated shaw's questions before they began to hate his answers. and that is probably why so many linked chesterton with shaw--he gave different answers, but he was asking many of the same questions. he questioned everything as shaw did--only he pushed his questions further: they were deeper and more searching. shaw would not accept the old scriptural orthodoxy; g.k. refused to accept the new agnostic orthodoxy; neither man would accept the orthodoxy of the scientists; both were prepared to attack what butler had called "the science ridden, art ridden, culture ridden, afternoon-tea ridden cliffs of old england." they attacked first by the mere process of asking questions; and the world thus questioned grew uneasy and seemed to care curiously little for the fact that the two questioners were answering their own questions in an opposite fashion. where shaw said: "give up pretending you believe in god, for you don't," chesterton said: "rediscover the reasons for believing or else our race is lost." where shaw said: "abolish private property which has produced this ghastly poverty," chesterton said: "abolish ghastly poverty by restoring property." and the audience said: "these two men in strange paradoxes seem to us to be saying the same thing, if indeed they are saying anything at all." chesterton wrote later of a young man whose aunt "had disinherited him for socialism because of a lecture he had delivered against that economic theory"; and i well remember how often after my own energetic attempts to explain why a distributist was not a socialist, i was met with a weary, "well, it's just the same." it was just the same question; it was an entirely different answer, but the audience, annoyed by the question, never seemed to listen to the answer. one man was saying: "sweep away the old beliefs of humanity and start fresh"; the other was saying: "rediscover your reasons for these profound beliefs, make them once more effective, for they are of the very nature of man." shaw and chesterton were themselves deeply concerned about the answers. both sincere, both dealing with realities, they were prepared to accept each other's sincerity and to fight the matter out, if need were, endlessly. being writers they conducted their discussions in writing: being journalists they did so mainly in the newspapers, to the delight or fury of other journalists. a jealous few were enraged at what they called publicity hunting, but most realised that it was not a private fight. anyone might join in and a good many did. belloc was in the fight as early as chesterton, and of course, on the same side. g.b.s. who had invented "the chesterbelloc" declared that chesterton felt obliged to embrace the dogmas of catholicism lest belloc's soul should be damned. h. g. wells agreed in the main with shaw: both were fabians and both were ready with a fabian utopia for humanity, which belloc and chesterton felt would be little better than a prison. cecil chesterton, coming in at an angle of his own, wrote some effective articles. he was a fabian--actually an official fabian--but his outlook already embraced many of the chesterbelloc human and genial ideals, although he still ridiculed their utopia of the peasant state, small ownership and all that came later to be called distributism. like the _clarion_, the _new age_ (itself a socialist paper) saw the wisdom of giving a platform to both sides, and in this paper appeared the best articles that the controversy produced. meanwhile the private friendship between g.b.s. and g.k.c. was growing apace. very early on, shaw had begun to urge g.k. to write a play. g.k. was, perhaps, beginning to feel that newspaper controversy did not give him space to say all he wanted about shaw (or perhaps it was merely that messrs. lane had persuaded him to promise them a book on shaw for a series they were producing!). anyhow, in a letter of 1908, shaw again urges the play and gives interesting information for the book. ayot st. lawrence, welwyn, herts. 1st march 1908. my dear g.k.c. what about that play? it is no use trying to answer me in the new age: the real answer to my article is the play. i have tried fair means: the new age article was the inauguration of an assault below the belt. i shall deliberately destroy your credit as an essayist, as a journalist, as a critic, as a liberal, as everything that offers your laziness a refuge, until starvation and shame drive you to serious dramatic parturition. i shall repeat my public challenge to you; vaunt my superiority; insult your corpulence; torture belloc; if necessary, call on you and steal your wife's affections by intellectual and athletic displays, until you contribute something to the british drama. you are played out as an essayist: your ardor is soddened, your intellectual substance crumbled, by the attempt to keep up the work of your twenties in your thirties. another five years of this; and you will be the apologist of every infamy that wears a liberal or catholic mask. you, too, will speak of the portraits of vecelli and the assumption of allegri, and declare that democracy refuses to lackey-label these honest citizens as titian and correggio. even that colossal fragment of your ruined honesty that still stupendously dismisses beethoven as "some rubbish about a piano" will give way to remarks about "a graceful second subject in the relative minor." nothing can save you now except a rebirth as a dramatist. i have done my turn; and i now call on you to take yours and do a man's work. it is my solemn belief that it was my quintessence of ibsenism that rescued you and all your ungrateful generation from materialism and rationalism.* you were all tired young atheists turning to kipling and ruskinian anglicanism whilst i, with the angel's wings beating in my ears from beethoven's 9th symphony (oh blasphemous walker in deafness), gave you in 1880 and 1881 two novels in which you had your rationalist-secularist hero immediately followed by my beethovenian hero. true, nobody read them; but was that my fault? they are read now, it seems, mostly in pirated reprints, in spite of their appalling puerility and classical perfection of style (you are right as to my being a born pedant, like all great artists); and are at least useful as documentary evidence that i was no more a materialist when i wrote _love among the artists_ at 24 than when i wrote _candida_ at 39. [* cecil avowed this as far as he was concerned. g.b.s.] my appearances on the platform of the hall of science were three in number. once for a few minutes in a discussion, in opposition to bradlaugh, who was defending property against socialism. bradlaugh died after that, though i do not claim to have killed him. the socialist league challenged him to debate with me at st. james's hall; but we could not or would not agree as to the proposition to be debated, he insisting on my being bound by all the publications of the democratic federation (to which i did not belong) and i refusing to be bound by anything on earth or in heaven except the proposition that socialism would benefit the english people. and so the debate never came off. now in those days they were throwing bradlaugh out of the house of commons with bodily violence; and all one could do was to call oneself an atheist all over the place, which i accordingly did. at the first public meeting of the shelley society at university college, addressed by stopford brooke, i made my then famous (among 100 people) declaration "i am a socialist, an atheist and a vegetarian" (ergo, a true shelleyan) whereupon two ladies who had been palpitating with enthusiasm for shelley under the impression that he was a devout anglican, resigned on the spot. my second hall of science appearance was after the last of the bradlaugh-hyndman debates at st. james's hall, where the two champions never touched the ostensible subject of their difference--the eight hours day--at all, but simply talked socialism or anti-socialism with a hearty dislike and contempt for one another. g. v. foote was then in his prime as the successor of bradlaugh; and as neither the secularists nor the socialists were satisfied with the result of the debate, it was renewed for two nights at the hall of science between me and foote. a verbatim report was published for sixpence and is now a treasure of collectors. having the last word on the second night, i had to make a handsome wind-up; and the secularists were much pleased by my declaring that i was altogether on foote's side in his struggle with the established religion of the country. when bradlaugh died, the secularists wanted a new leader, because b.'s enormous and magnetic personality left a void that nobody was big enough to fill--it was really like the death of napoleon in that world. there was j. m. robertson, foote, and charles watts. but bradlaugh liked foote as little as most autocrats like their successors; and when he, before his death surrendered the gavel (the hammer for thumping the table to secure order at a meeting) which was the presidential sceptre of the national secular society, he did so with an ill will which he did not attempt to conceal; and so though foote was the nearest size to bradlaugh's shoes then available, he succeeded him at the disadvantage of inheriting the distrust of the old chief. j. m. robertson you know: he was not a mob orator. watts was not sufficient: he had neither foote's weight (being old) nor robertson's scholarship. so whilst the survivors of bradlaugh were trying to keep up the hall of science and to establish a memorial library, etc. there, they cast round for new blood. what more natural than that they should think of me as a man not afraid to call himself an atheist and able to hold his own on the platform? accordingly, they invited me to address them; and one memorable night i held forth on progress in freethought. i was received with affectionate hope; and when the chairman announced that i was giving my share of the gate to the memorial library (i have never taken money for lecturing) the enthusiasm was quite touching. the anti-climax was super-shavian. i proceeded to smash materialism, rationalism, and all the philosophy of tyndall, helmholtz, darwin and the rest of the 1860 people into smithereens. i ridiculed and exposed every inference of science, and justified every dogma of religion, especially showing that the trinity and the immaculate conception were the merest common sense. that finished me up as a possible leader of the n.s.s. robertson came on the platform, white with honest scotch rationalist rage, and denounced me with a fury of conviction that startled his own followers. never did i grace that platform again. i repeated the address once to a branch of the n.s.s. on the south side of the thames--kensington, i think--and was interrupted by yells of rage from the veterans of the society. the leicester secularists, a pious folk, rich and independent of the n.s.s., were kinder to me; but they were no more real atheists than the congregation of st. paul's is made wholly of real christians. foote is still bewildered about me, imagining that i am a pervert. but anybody who reads my stuff from the beginning (a shelleyan beginning, as far as it could be labelled at all) will find implicit, and sometimes explicit, the views which, in their more matured form, will appear in that remarkable forthcoming masterpiece, "shavianism: a religion." by the way, i have omitted one more appearance at the hall of science. at a four nights' debate on socialism between foote and mrs. besant, i took the chair on one of the nights. i take advantage of a snowy sunday afternoon to scribble all this down for you because you are in the same difficulty that beset me formerly: namely, the absolute blank in the history of the immediate past that confronts every man when he first takes to public life. written history stops several decades back; and the bridge of personal recollection on which older men stand does not exist for the recruit. nothing is more natural than that you should reconstruct me as the last of the rationalists (his real name is blatchford); and nothing could be more erroneous. it would be much nearer the truth to call me, in that world, the first of the mystics. if you can imagine the result of trying to write your spiritual history in complete ignorance of painting, you will get a notion of trying to write mine in ignorance of music. bradlaugh was a tremendous platform heavyweight; but he had never in his life, as far as i could make out, seen anything, heard anything or read anything in the artistic sense. he was almost beyond belief incapable of intercourse in private conversation. he could tell you his adventures provided you didn't interrupt him (which you were mostly afraid to do, as the man was a mesmeric terror); but as to exchanging ideas, or expressing the universal part of his soul, you might as well have been reading the letters of charles dickens to his family--those tragic monuments of dumbness of soul and noisiness of pen. lord help you if you ever lose your gift of speech, g.k.c.! don't forget that the race is only struggling out of its dumbness, and that it is only in moments of inspiration that we get out a sentence. all the rest is padding. yours ever g. bernard shaw. in the book on shaw which appeared in august 1909, g.k. did as he had done with his other literary studies: gave (inaccurately) only as much biography as seemed absolutely necessary, and mainly discussed ideas. he saw shaw as an irishman, yet lacking the roots of nationality since he belonged to a mainly alien governing class. he saw him as a puritan yet without the religious basis of puritanism. and thirdly, he saw him as so swift a progressive as to be ahead of his own thought and ready to slay it in the name of progress. all these elements in shaw made for strength but also created limitations, "shaw is like the venus of milo; all that there is of him is admirable." where he fails is in being unable to see and embrace the full complexity of life. "his only paradox is to pull out one thread or cord of truth longer and longer into waste and fantastic places. he does not allow for that deeper sort of paradox by which two opposite cords of truth become entangled in an inextricable knot. still less can he be made to realise that it is often this knot which ties safely together the whole bundle of human life . . . here lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling mind; he cannot quite understand life, because he will not accept its contradictions." humanity is built of these contradictions, therefore shaw pities humanity more than he loves it. "it was his glory that he pitied animals like men; it was his defect that he pitied men almost too much like animals. foulon said of the democracy, 'let them eat grass.' shaw said, 'let them eat greens.' he had more benevolence but almost as much disdain." as a vegetarian and a water drinker shaw himself lacked, in chesterton's eyes, something of complete humanity. and in discussing social problems he was more economist than man. "shaw (one might almost say) dislikes murder, not so much because it wastes the life of the corpse as because it wastes the time of the murderer." this lack of the full human touch is felt, even in the plays, because shaw cannot be irrational where humanity always is irrational. in _candida_ "it is completely and disastrously false to the whole nature of falling in love to make the young eugene complain of the cruelty which makes candida defile her fair hands with domestic duties. no boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel disgusted when she peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. he would like her to be domestic. he would simply feel that the potatoes had become poetical and the lamps gained an extra light. this may be irrational; but we are not talking of rationality, but of the psychology of first love.* it may be very unfair to women that the toil and triviality of potato-peeling should be seen through a glamour of romance; but the glamour is quite as certain a fact as the potatoes. it may be a bad thing in sociology that men should deify domesticity in girls as something dainty and magical; but all men do. personally i do not think it a bad thing at all; but that is another argument."** [* no two love affairs are the same. this sentence assumed that they are all the same. to eugene, the poet living in a world of imagination and abhorring reality, candida was what dulcinea was to don quixote. g.b.s.] [** _george bernard shaw_, pp. 120-1.] yet shaw's limitations are those of a great man and a genius. in an age of narrow specialism he has "stood up for the fact that philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through divinity and greats, but of those who pass through birth and death." in an age that has almost chosen death, "shaw follows the banner of life; but austerely, not joyously." nowhere, in dealing with shaw's philosophy, does chesterton note his debt to butler. shaw has himself mentioned it, and no reader of butler could miss it, especially in this matter of the life force. it is the special paradox of our age, chesterton notes, that the life force should thus need assertion and can thus be followed without joy. to every man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a love-call to be eagerly followed. to bernard shaw it is merely a military bugle to be obeyed. in short, he fails to feel that the command of nature (if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of nature instead of the philosophic term god) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. he paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in the dark. that is heroic; and to my instinct at least schopenhauer looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. but it is the heroism of a morbid and almost asphyxiated age. it is awful to think that this world which so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a man-trap into which we may just have the manhood to jump. think of all those ages through which men have talked of having the courage to die. and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking of having the courage to live.* [* _george bernard shaw_. week-end library, p. 190.] here comes the great parting of the two men's thought. g.k. believed in god and in joy. but he saw that shaw had much of value for this strange diseased world. his primary value was not merely (as some said) that he woke it up. the literary world might not be awake to the social evil, but it was painfully awake to the ills, real or imaginary, inherent in human life. we do not need waking up; rather we suffer from insomnia, with all its results of fear and exaggeration and frightful waking dreams. the modern mind is not a donkey which wants kicking to make it go on. the modern mind is more like a motor-car on a lonely road which two amateur motorists have been just clever enough to take to pieces but are not quite clever enough to put together again.* [ibid., pp. 245-6.] shaw had not merely asked questions of the age: that would have been worse than useless. what he had done was at moments to rise above his own thoughts and give, through his characters, inspired answers: g.k. instances _candida_, with its revelation of the meaning of marriage when the woman stays with the strong man because he is so weak and needs her. and shaw had brought back philosophy into drama--that is, he had recreated the atmosphere, lost since shakespeare,* in which men were thinking, and might, therefore, find the answers that the age needed. and here again we come back to the world which these men were shaking and to the respective philosophies with which they looked at it. it was a world of conventions and these conventions had become empty of meaning. throw them away, said shaw and wells; no, said chesterton; keep them and look for their meaning; revolution does not mean destruction: it means restoration. [* hard on goethe and ibsen, to say nothing of mozart's magic flute and beethoven's 9th symphony. g.b.s.] the same sort of discussion buzzed around this book as around the controversies of which it might be called a prolongation. shaw himself reviewed it in an article in the _nation_, in which he called it, "the best work of literary art i have yet provoked. . . . everything about me which mr. chesterton had to divine he has divined miraculously. but everything that he could have ascertained easily by reading my own plain directions on the bottle, as it were, remains for him a muddled and painful problem." from an interchange of private letters it would seem that the move to beaconsfield took place later in this year than i had supposed. bernard shaw's letter is probably not written many days after an undated one to him from g.k.: 48, overstrand mansions, battersea park. s.w. dear bernard shaw, i trust our recent tournaments have not rendered it contrary to the laws of romantic chivalry (which you reverence so much) for me to introduce to you my friend mr. pepler, who is a very nice man indeed though a social idealist, and who has, i believe, something of a practical sort to ask of you. please excuse abruptness in this letter of introduction; we are moving into the country and every piece of furniture i begin to write at is taken away and put into a van. always yours sincerely, g. k. chesterton. 10, adelphi terrace, w.c. 30th october 1909. chesterton. shaw speaks. attention! i saw your man and consoled him spiritually; but that is not the subject of this letter. i still think that you could write a useful sort of play if you were started. when i was in kerry last month i had occasionally a few moments to spare; and it seemed to me quite unendurable that you should be wasting your time writing books about me. i liked the book very much, especially as it was so completely free from my own influence, being evidently founded on a very hazy recollection of a five-year-old perusal of man and superman; but a lot of it was fearful nonsense. there was one good thing about the scientific superstition which you came a little too late for. it taught a man to respect facts. you have no conscience in this respect; and your punishment is that you substitute such dull inferences as my "narrow puritan home" for delightful and fantastic realities which you might very easily have ascertained if you had taken greater advantage of what is really the only thing to be said in favour of battersea; namely, that it is within easy reach of adelphi terrace. however, i have no doubt that when wilkins micawber junior grew up and became eminent in australia, references were made to his narrow puritan home; so i do not complain. if you had told the truth, nobody would have believed it. now to business. when one breathes irish air, one becomes a practical man. in england i used to say what a pity it was you did not write a play. in ireland i sat down and began writing a scenario for you. but before i could finish it i had come back to london; and now it is all up with the scenario: in england i can do nothing but talk. i therefore now send you the thing as far as i scribbled it; and i leave you to invent what escapades you please for the hero, and to devise some sensational means of getting him back to heaven again, unless you prefer to end with the millennium in full swing.* [* the scenario dealt with the return of st. augustine to the england he remembered converting.] but experience has made me very doubtful of the efficacy of help as the means of getting work out of the right sort of man. when i was young i struck out one invaluable rule for myself, which was, whenever you meet an important man, contradict him. if possible, insult him. but such a rule is one of the privileges of youth. i no longer live by rules. yet there is one way in which you may possibly be insultable. it can be plausibly held that you are a venal ruffian, pouring forth great quantities of immediately saleable stuff, but altogether declining to lay up for yourself treasures in heaven. it may be that you cannot afford to do otherwise. therefore i am quite ready to make a deal with you. a full length play should contain about 18,000 words (mine frequently contain two or three times that number). i do not know what your price per thousand is. i used to be considered grossly extortionate by massingham and others for insisting on â£3. 18,000 words at â£3 per thousand is â£54. i need make no extra allowance for the republication in book form, because even if the play aborted as far as the theatre is concerned, you could make a book of it all the same. let us assume that your work is worth twice as much as mine; this would make â£108. i have had two shockingly bad years of it pecuniarily speaking, and am therefore in that phase of extravagance which straitened means have always produced in me. knock off 8% as a sort of agent's commission to me for starting you on the job and finding you a theme. this leaves â£100. i will pay you â£100 down on your contracting to supply me within three months with a mechanically possible, i.e., stageable drama dealing with the experiences of st. augustine after re-visiting england. the literary copyright to be yours, except that you are not to prevent me making as many copies as i may require for stage use. the stage right to be mine; but you are to have the right to buy it back from me for â£250 whenever you like.* the play, if performed, to be announced as your work and not as a collaboration. all rights which i may have in the scenario to go with the stage right and literary copyright as prescribed as far as you may make use of it. what do you say? there is a lot of spending in â£100. [* i could not very well offer him â£100 as a present. g.b.s.] one condition more. if it should prove impossible to achieve a performance otherwise than through the stage society (which does not pay anything), a resort to that body is not to be deemed a breach of the spirit of our agreement. do you think it would be possible to make belloc write a comedy? if he could only be induced to believe in some sort of god instead of in that wretched little conspiracy against religion which the pious romans have locked up in the vatican, one could get some drive into him. as it is, he is wasting prodigious gifts in the service of king leopold and the pope and other ghastly scarecrows. if he must have a pope, there is quite a possible one at adelphi terrace. for the next few days i shall be at my country quarters, ayot st. lawrence, welwyn, herts. i have a motor car which could carry me on sufficient provocation as far as beaconsfield; but i do not know how much time you spend there and how much in fleet street. are you only a week-ender; or has your wise wife taken you properly in hand and committed you to a pastoral life. yours ever, g. bernard shaw. p.s. remember that the play is to be practical (in the common managerial sense) only in respect of its being mechanically possible as a stage representation. it is to be neither a likely-to-be-successful play nor a literary lark: it is to be written for the good of all souls. among the reviewers of the book, our old friend, the _academy_, surprised me by hating shaw so much more than chesterton that the latter came off quite lightly. there was a good deal of the usual misunderstanding and lists were made of self-contradictions on the author's part. still in the main the press was sympathetic and even enthusiastic. but when shaw reviewed chesterton on shaw, more than one paper waxed sarcastic on the point of royalties and remuneration gained by these means. the funniest of the more critical comments on the way these men wrote of one another was a suggestion made in the _bystander_ that shaw and chesterton were really the same person: . . . shaw, it is said, tired of socialism, weary of wearing jaegers, and broken down by teetotalism and vegetarianism, sought, some years ago, an escape from them. his adoption, however, of these attitudes had a decided commercial value, which he did not think it advisable to prejudice by wholesale surrender. therefore he, in order to taste the forbidden joys of individualistic philosophy, meat, food and strong drink, created "chesterton." this mammoth myth, he decided, should enjoy all the forms of fame which shaw had to deny himself. outwardly, he should be shaw's antithesis. he should be beardless, large in girth, smiling of countenance, and he should be licensed to sell paradoxes only in essay and novel form, all stage and platform rights being reserved by shaw. to enable the imposition to be safely carried out, shaw hit on the idea of residence close to the tunnel which connects adelphi with the strand. emerging from his house plain, jaeger-clad, bearded and saturnine shaw, he entered the tunnel, in a cleft in which was a cellar. here he donned the chesterton properties, the immense padding of chest, and so on, the chesterton sombrero hat and cloak and pince-nez, and there he left the shaw beard and the shaw clothes, the shaw expression of countenance, and all the shaw theories. he emerged into the strand "g.k.c.," in whose identity he visited all the cafã©s, ate all the meats, rode in all the cabs, and smiled on all the sinners. the day's work done, the chesterton manuscripts delivered, the proofs read, the bargains driven, the giant figure returned to the tunnel, and once again was back in adelphi, the shaw he was when he left it--back to the jaegers, the beard, the socialism, the statistics, and the sardonic letters to the _times_.* [* from _the bystander_. 1 september, 1909.] bernard shaw is a man of unusual generosity, but i think from his letters he must also be quite a good man of business. g.k. was so greatly the opposite that g.b.s. urged him again and again to do the most ordinary things to protect the literary rights of himself and others. thus, in the only undated letter in the whole packet, he begs gilbert to back up the authors' society: my dear g.k.c., i am one of the unhappy slaves who, on the two big committees of your trade union (the society of authors) drudge at the heartbreaking work of defending our miserable profession against being devoured, body and soul, by the publishers--themselves a pitiful gang of literature-struck impostors who are crumpled up by the booksellers, who, though small folk, are at least in contact with reality in the shape of the book buyer. it is a ghastly and infuriating business, because the authors _will_ go to lunch with their publishers and sell them anything for â£20 over the cigarettes, but it has to be done; and i, with half a dozen others, have to do it. now i missed the last committee meeting (electioneering: i am here doing two colossal meetings of miners every night for keir hardie); but the harassed secretary writes that it was decided to take proceedings in the case of a book of yours which you (oh esau, esau!) sold to john--(john is a--well--no matter: when you take your turn on the committee you will find him out) and that though the german lawyer has had â£7 and is going ahead (â£7 worth of law in germany takes you to the house of lords) everything is hung up because you will not answer thring's* letters. thring, in desperation, appeals to me, concluding with characteristic simplicity that we must be friends because you have written a book about me. as the conclusion is accidentally and improbably true, i now urge you to give him whatever satisfaction he requires. i have no notion what it is, or what the case is about; but at least answer his letters, however infuriating they may be. remember: you pay thring only â£500, for which you get integrity, incorruptibility, implacability, and a disposition greatly to find quarrel in a straw on your behalf (even with yourself) and don't complain if you don't get â£20,000 worth of tact into the bargain. and your obligations to us wretched committee men are simply incalculable. we get nothing but abuse and denigration: authors weep with indignation when we put our foot on some blood-sucking, widow-cheating, orphan starving scoundrel and ruthlessly force him to keep to his mite of obligation under an agreement which would have revolted shylock: unless the best men, the good professionals, help us, we are lost. we get nothing and spend our time like water for you. [* herbert thring was the barrister employed by the society of authors.] all we ask you to do is to answer thring and let us get along with your work. look here: will you write to thring. _please_ write to thring. i say: have you written to thring yet? g.b.s. i doubt whether he had. those chance sums he poured from time to time into frances' lap were usually not what they should have been, an advance on a royalty. _orthodoxy_ he sold outright for â£100. no man ever worked so hard to earn so little. when later gilbert employed messrs. a. p. watt as his literary agents a letter to them (undated, of course, and written on the old notepaper of his first battersea flat) shows a mingling of gratitude to his agents with entire absence of resentment towards his publishers, which might be called essence of chesterton: the prices you have got me for books, compared with what i used weakly to demand, seem to me to come out of fairyland. it seems to me that there is a genuine business problem which creates a permanent need for a literary agent. it consists in this--that our work, even when it has become entirely a duty and a worry, still remains in some vague way a pleasure. and how can we put a fair price on what is at once a worry and a pleasure? suppose someone comes to me and says, "i offer you sixpence for your _history of the gnostic heresy_." why, after all, should i charge more than sixpence for a work it was so exuberant to write? you, on the other hand, seeing it from the outside, would say that it was worth--so and so. and you would get it. shaw continued his attempts to stimulate the reluctant playwright. two years after drafting the scenario, he writes: 10 adelphi terrace, w.c. 5th april 1912. dear mrs. chesterton, i have promised to drive somebody to beaconsfield on sunday morning; and i shall be in that district more or less for the rest of the day. if you are spending easter at overroads, and have no visitors who couldn't stand us, we should like to call on you at any time that would be convenient. the convenience of time depends on a design of my own which i wish to impart to you first. i want to read a play to gilbert. it began by way of being a music-hall sketch; so it is not 3â½ hours long as usual: i can get through it in an hour and a half. i want to insult and taunt and stimulate gilbert with it. it is the sort of thing he could write and ought to write: a religious harlequinade.* in fact, he could do it better if a sufficient number of pins were stuck into him. my proposal is that i read the play to him on sunday (or at the next convenient date), and that you fall into transports of admiration of it; declare that you can never love a man who cannot write things like that; and definitely announce that if gilbert has not finished a worthy successor to it before the end of the third week next ensuing, you will go out like the lady in a doll's house, and live your own life--whatever that dark threat may mean. [* androcles and the lion evidently. g.b.s.] if you are at home, i count on your ready complicity; but the difficulty is that you may have visitors; and if they are pious gilbert will be under a tacit obligation not to blaspheme, or let me blaspheme, whilst they are beneath his roof (my play is about christian martyrs, and perfectly awful in parts); and if they are journalists, it will be necessary to administer an oath of secrecy. i don't object to the oath; and nothing would please gilbert more than to make them drink blood from a skull: the difficulty is, they wouldn't keep it. in short, they must be the right sort of people, of whom the more the merrier. forgive this long rigmarole: it is only to put you in possession of what _may_ happen if you approve, and your invitations and domestic circumstances are propitious. yours sincerely, g. bernard shaw. chesterton at last did write _magic_--but that belongs to another chapter. like the demand for a play, the theme of finance recurs with great frequency in shaw's letters, and after _magic_ appeared he wrote to frances telling her that "in sweden, where the marriage laws are comparatively enlightened, i believe you could obtain a divorce on the ground that your husband threw away an important part of the provision for your old age for twenty pieces of silver. . . . in future, the moment he has finished a play and the question of disposing of it arises, lock him up and bring the agreement to me. explanations would be thrown away on him." chapter xv from battersea to beaconsfield (1909-1911) in 1909, with _orthodoxy_ well behind him, and _george bernard shaw_ just published, gilbert and his wife left london for the small country town that was to be their home for the rest of their lives. it was an odd coincidence that they should leave overstrand mansions, battersea, and come to overroads, beaconsfield, for they did not name their new home but found it ready christened. it will be remembered that in one of the letters during the engagement gilbert had suggested a country home. the reason for the choice of beaconsfield he gives in the _autobiography:_ after we were married, my wife and i lived for about a year in kensington, the place of my childhood; but i think we both knew that it was not to be the real place for our abode. i remember that we strolled out one day, for a sort of second honeymoon, and went upon a journey into the void, a voyage deliberately objectless. i saw a passing omnibus labelled "hanwell" and, feeling this to be an appropriate omen,* we boarded it and left it somewhere at a stray station, which i entered and asked the man in the ticket-office where the next train went to. he uttered the pedantic reply, "where do you want to go to?" and i uttered the profound and philosophical rejoinder, "wherever the next train goes to." it seemed that it went to slough; which may seem to be singular taste, even in a train. however, we went to slough, and from there set out walking with even less notion of where we were going. and in that fashion we passed through the large and quiet cross-roads of a sort of village, and stayed at an inn called the white hart. we asked the name of the place and were told that it was called beaconsfield (i mean of course that it was called beconsfield and not beaconsfield), and we said to each other, "this is the sort of place where some day we will make our home."** [* at hanwell is london's most famous lunatic asylum.] [** _autobiography_, p. 219.] they both wanted a home. they both deeply desired a family. the wish is normal to both man and woman, normal in a happy marriage, and theirs was unusually happy; it was almost abnormally keen in both frances and gilbert. few men have so greatly loved children. as a schoolboy his letters are full of it--making friends with scottish children on the sands, with french children by the medium of pictures. later he was writing "in defence of baby worship" and welcoming with enthusiasm the arrival of his friends' children into the world. in the notebook he had written: sunlight in a child's hair. it is like the kiss of christ upon all children. i blessed the child: and hoped the blessing would go with him and never leave him; and turn first into a toy, and then into a game and then into a friend, and as he grew up, into friends and then into a woman. grass and children grass and children there seems no end to them. but if there were but one blade of grass men would see that it is fairer than lilies, and if we saw the first child we should worship it as the god come on earth. rounds i find that most round things are nice, particularly eternity and a baby. frances cared no less deeply both for eternity and for babies and for many years went on hoping for the family that would complete their lives. at last it was decided to have an operation to enable her to have children. her doctor writes: i well remember an incident which occurred during her convalescence from that operation. i received a telephone call from the matron of the nursing home in which mrs. chesterton was staying, suggesting that i should come round and remonstrate with mr. chesterton. on my arrival i found him sitting on the stairs, where he had been for two hours, greatly incommoding passers up and down and deaf to all requests to move on. it appeared that he had written a sonnet to his wife on her recovery from the operation and was bringing it to give her. he was not however satisfied with the last line, but was determined to perfect it before entering her room to take tea with her. by the time they left london she must, i think, have given up the hope she had so long cherished. still if there could not be children there might be perhaps something of a home. in the conditions of their life, there was danger that any house of bricks and mortar should be rather a headquarters than a home, and it was lucky that he was able to feel she took home with her wherever they went- your face that is a wandering home a flying home for me. the years before them were to be filled with the vast activities that not only took gilbert to london and all over england incessantly, but were to take him increasingly over europe and america. beaconsfield gave a degree of quiet that made it possible, when they were able to be at home, not to be swamped by engagements and to lead a life of their own. gilbert could go to london when he liked, but he need not always be on tap, so to say, for all the world. frances could have a garden and indulge her hungry appetite for all that was fruitful. g.k., later, under the title "the homelessness of jones"* showed his love for a house rather than a flat, and they gave even to their first little house "overroads" the stamp of a real home. [* a chapter in _what's wrong with the world_.] for a man and his wife to leave london for the country might seem to be their own affair. not so, however, with the chestertons. after a lapse of over thirty years i find the matter still a subject of furious controversy and indeed passion. frances, says one school of opinion, committed a crime against the public good by removing gilbert from fleet street. no, says the other school, she had to move him or he would have died of working too hard and drinking too much. the suggestion, which i believe to be a fact, that gilbert himself wanted to move, is seldom entertained. there is in all this the legitimate feeling of distress among any group at losing its chief figure, its pride and joy. "i lost gilbert," lucian oldershaw once said, "first when i introduced him to belloc, next when he married frances, and finally when he joined the catholic church. . . . i rejoiced, though perhaps with a maternal sadness, at all these fulfillments." cecil wanted his brother always on hand. belloc was already in the country--a far more remote country--but even he, coming up to london, mourned to my mother, "she has taken my chesterton from me." talking it over however after the lapse of years, he agreed that in all probability the move was a wise one. what may be called the smaller fry of fleet street are less reasonable. one cannot avoid the feeling that in all this masculine life so sure of its manhood, there lingered something of the "schwã¤rmerei" of the junior debating club furiously desiring each to be first with gilbert. and in his love of fleet street he so identified himself with them all that they felt he was one of them and did not recognise the horizons wider than theirs that were opening before him. my husband and i are experts in changing residences and we listened with the amusement of experts to the talk of theorists. for it was so constantly assumed that on one side of a choice is disaster, on the other perfection. actually perfection does not belong to this earthly state: if you go to rome, as gilbert himself once said, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life at wimbledon. newman writing of a far greater and more irrevocable choice called his story _loss and gain_--but he had no doubt that the gain outweighed the loss. there were in gilbert's adult life three other big decisions--decisions of the scale that altered its course. the first was his marriage. the second was his reception into the church. the third was his continued dedication to the paper that his brother and belloc had founded. in deciding to marry frances he was acting against his mother's wishes, to which he was extremely sensitive. his decision to become a catholic had to be made alone: he had the sympathy of his wife but not her companionship. in the decision to edit the paper he had not even fully her sympathy: she always felt his creative work to be so much more important and to be imperilled by the overwork the paper brought. gilbert was a man slow in action but it would be exceedingly difficult to find instances of his doing anything that he did not want to do. the theorists about marriage are like the theorists about moving house, if they do not know that decisions made by one party alone are rare indeed and stick out like spikes in the life of a normal and happy couple. of the vast majority of decisions it is hard to say who makes them. they make themselves: after endless talk: on the tops of omnibuses going to hanwell or elsewhere: out walking: breakfasting--especially breakfasting in bed. they make themselves--above all in the matter of a move--in fine weather: during a holiday: on a hot london sunday: when a flat is stuffy: when the telephone rings all day: when a book is on the stocks. other writers have left london that they might create at leisure and choose their own times for social intercourse. why does no one say their wives dragged them away? simply, i think, that being less kind and considerate than gilbert, they do not mind telling their friends that they are not always wanted. this gilbert could not do. if people said how they would miss him, how they hated his going, he would murmur vague and friendly sounds, from which they deduced all they wanted to deduce. was it more weakness or strength, that tenderness of heart that could never faintly suggest to his friends that they would miss him more than he would miss them? "i never wanted but one thing in my life," he had written to annie firmin. and that "one thing" he was taking with him. anyhow, the move accomplished, he enjoyed defending it in every detail, and did so especially in his _daily news_ articles. the rush to the country was not uncommon in the literary world of the moment, and his journalist friends had urged the point that beaconsfield was not true country, was suburban, was being built over. his friends, g.k. replied, were suffering from a weak-minded swing from one extreme to the other. men who had praised london as the only place to live in were now vying with one another to live furthest from a station, to have no chimneys visible on the most distant horizon, to depend on tradesmen who only called once a week from cities so distant that fresh-baked loaves grew stale before delivery. "rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the other friend had thoughtlessly overlooked." gilbert, on the contrary, noted soon after his arrival that beaconsfield was beginning to be built over and he noted it with satisfaction. "within a stone's throw of my house they are building another house. i am glad they are building it and i am glad it is within a stone's throw." he did not want a desert, he did not want a large landed estate, he wanted what he had got--a house and a garden. he adventurously explored that garden, finding a kitchen-garden that had "somehow got attached" to the premises, and wondering why he liked it; speaking to the gardener, "an enterprise of no little valour," and asking him the name "of a strange dark red rose, at once theatrical and sulky," which turned out to be called victor hugo; "watching (with regret) a lot of little black pigs being turned out of my garden." watching the neighbouring house grow up from its foundation he noted in an article called, "the wings of stone," what was the reality of a staircase. we pad them with carpets and rail them with banisters, yet every "staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up into the infinite to a deadly height." (a correspondent pointed out in a letter to the _daily news_ that here he had touched a reality keenly felt by primitive peoples. when cetewayo, king of zululand, visited london, he would go upstairs only on hands and knees and that with manifest terror.) the paddings of civilisation may be useful, yet gilbert held more valuable a realisation of the realities of things. vision is not fancy, but the sight of truth. in the notebook he had written there are three things that make me think; things beyond all poetry: a yellow space or rift in evening sky: a chimney or pinnacle high in the air; and a path over a hill. chesterton had always the power of conveying in words a painter's vision of some unforgettable scene with the poet's words for what the artist not only sees but imagines. such flashes became more frequent as he looked through the doorway of his little house. go through _the ball and the cross_ with this in mind and you will see what i mean. "the crimson seas of the sunset seemed to him like a bursting out of some sacred blood, as if the heart of the world had broken." "there is nothing more beautiful than thus to look as it were through the archway of a house; as if the open sky were an interior chamber, and the sun a secret lamp of the place." best of all to illustrate this special quality is a longer passage from the _poet and the lunatics_. for the most part he was contented to see the green semicircles of lawn repeat themselves like a pattern of green moons; for he was not one to whom repetition was merely monotony. only in looking over a particular gate at a particular lawn, he became pleasantly conscious, or half conscious, of a new note of colour in the greenness; a much bluer green, which seemed to change to vivid blue, as the object at which he was gazing moved sharply, turning a small head on a long neck. it was a peacock. but he had thought of a thousand things before he thought of the obvious thing. the burning blue of the plumage on the neck had reminded him of blue fire, and blue fire had reminded him of some dark fantasy about blue devils, before he had fully realised even that it was a peacock he was staring at. and the tail, that trailing tapestry of eyes, had led his wandering wits away to those dark but divine monsters of the apocalypse whose eyes were multiplied like their wings, before he had remembered that a peacock, even in a more practical sense, was an odd thing to see in so ordinary a setting. yet always to chesterton the beauty of nature was enhanced by the work of men, and if in london men had swarmed too closely, it was not to get away from them but to appreciate them more individually that he chose the country. yes, his literary friends would say: in the real country that is true; the farmer, the labourer, even the village barber and the village tradesmen are worth knowing, but not suburban neighbours. against such discrimination the whole democracy of chesterton stood in revolt. all men were valuable, all men were interesting, the doctor as much as the barber, the clergyman as much as the farmer. all men were children of god and citizens of the world. if he had a choice in the matter it was discrimination against the literary world itself with all the fads that tended to smother its essential humanity. nothing would have induced him to discriminate against the suburban. in the last year of his life he wrote in the _autobiography:_ "i have lived in beaconsfield from the time when it was almost a village, to the time when, as the enemy profanely says, it is a suburb." for the author of _the napoleon of notting hill_ this would hardly be a conclusive argument against any place. we should, he once said, "regard the important suburbs as ancient cities embedded in a sort of boiling lava spouted up by that volcano, the speculative builder." that "lava" itself he found interesting, but beneath or beside it a little town like beaconsfield had its share in the great sweep of english history. something of the "seven sunken englands" could be found in the old town which custom marked off pretty sharply from the "new town." burke had lived in beaconsfield and was buried there; and gilbert once suggested to mr. garvin that they should appear at a local festival, respectively as fox ("a part for which i have no claim except in circumference") and burke ("i admire burke in many things while disagreeing with him in nearly everything. but mr. garvin strikes me as being rather like burke"). at the barber's he was often seen sitting at the end of a line patiently awaiting his turn, for he could never shave himself and it was only years later that dorothy collins conceived and put into execution the bold project of bringing the barber to the house. probably an article would be shaping while he waited and the barber's conversation might put the finishing touches to it. there were in fact two barbers, one of the old town, one of the new. "i once planned," he says, "a massive and exhaustive sociological work, in several volumes, which was to be called 'the two barbers of beaconsfield' and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent citizens to whom i went to get shaved. for those two shops do indeed belong to two different civilisations." despite his love for london, gilbert had always felt that life in a country town held one point of special superiority--in it you discovered the community. in london you chose your friends--which meant that you narrowed your life to people of one kind. he had noted in the family itself a valuable widening: 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 dreamed before. our father and mother do lie in 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.* [* _heretics_, pp. 191-2.] here in beaconsfield the chestertons grew into the community: the clergyman, the doctor, the inn-keeper, the barber, the gardener. and like the relatives who spring upon you at birth these worthy citizens seemed to gilbert potentials of vast excitement and varied interest. discussing an event of much later date--a meeting to decide whether a crucifix might be erected as a local war memorial--he thus describes the immense forces he found in that small place: those who debated the matter were a little group of the inhabitants of a little country town; the rector and the doctor and the bank manager and the respectable tradesmen of the place, with a few hangers-on like myself, of the more disreputable professions of journalism or the arts. but the powers that were present there in the spirit came out of all the ages and all the battlefields of history; mahomet was there and the iconoclasts, who came riding out of the east to ruin the statues of italy, and calvin and rousseau and the russian anarchs and all the older england that is buried under puritanism; and henry the third ordering the little images for westminster and henry the fifth, after agincourt, on his knees before the shrines of paris. if one could really write that little story of that little place, it would be the greatest of historical monographs.* [* _autobiography_, p. 244.] a keen observer often added to the beaconsfield community in those days was father (now monsignor) john o'connor, close friend of both gilbert and frances and inspirer of "father brown" of detective fame. they had first become friends in 1904 when they met at the house of a friend in keighley, yorkshire, and walked back over the moors together to visit francis steinthal at ilkley. this jew, of frankfort descent, was a great friend of the chestertons and on their many visits to him the friendship with father o'connor ripened. with both frances and gilbert it was among the closest of their lives. their letters to him show it: the long talks, and companionable walks over the moors, have an atmosphere of intimacy that is all the more convincing because so little stressed in his book. father o'connor has a pardonable pride in the idea that their talks suggested ideas to gilbert, he takes pleasure in his character of "father brown," but he reveals the atmosphere of unique confidence and intimacy by the very absence of all parade of it. both he and gilbert have told the story of how the idea of the detective priest first dawned. on their second meeting father o'connor had startled, indeed almost shattered gilbert, with certain rather lurid knowledge of human depravity which he had acquired in the course of his priestly experience. at the house to which they were going, two cambridge undergraduates spoke disparagingly of the "cloistered" habits of the catholic clergy, saying that to them it seemed that to know and meet evil was a far better thing than the innocence of such ignorance. to gilbert, still under the shock of a knowledge compared with which "these two cambridge gentlemen knew about as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator," the exquisite irony of this remark suggested a thought. why not a whole comedy of cross purposes based on the notion of a priest with a knowledge of evil deeper than that of the criminal he is converting? he carried out this idea in the story of "the blue cross," the first father brown detective story. father o'connor's account adds the details that he had himself once boasted of buying five sapphires for five shillings, and that he always carried a large umbrella and many brown paper parcels. at the steinthal dining table, an artist friend of the family made a sketch of father o'connor which later appeared on the wrapper of _the innocence of father brown_. beyond one or two touches of this sort the idea had been a suggestion for a character, not a portrait, and in the _autobiography_ and in the _dickens_ gilbert has a good deal to say of interest to the novelist about how such suggestions come and are used. he never believed that dickens drew a portrait, as it were, in the round. nature just gives hints to the creative artist. and it used to amuse "father brown" to find that such touches of observation as noting where an ash-tray had got hidden behind a book seemed to gilbert quasi miraculous. left to himself he merely dropped ashes on the floor from his cigar. "he did not smoke a pipe and cigarettes were prone to set him on fire in one place or another." a frequent visitor, father o'connor noted his fashion of work and reading, and the abstracted way he often moved and spoke. "call it mooning, but he never mooned. he was always working out something in his mind, and when he drifted from his study to the garden and was seen making deadly passes with his sword-stick at the dahlias, we knew that he had got to a dead end in his composition and was getting his thoughts into order." he played often, too, with a huge knife which he had for twenty-four years. he took it abroad with him, took it to bed: frances had to retrieve it often from under his pillow in some hotel. once at a lecture in dublin he drew it absent-mindedly to sharpen a pencil: as it was seven and a half inches long shut, and fourteen open, the amusement of the audience may be imagined. in origin it was, father o'connor relates, a texan or mexican general utility implement. it was with this knife that he won my daughter's heart many years later when she, aged three, had not seen him for some time and had grown shy of him. a little scared of his enormousness she stood far off. he did not look in her direction but began to open and shut the vast blade. next she was on his knee. a little later we heard her remark, "uncle gilbert, you make jokes just like my daddy." and from him came, "i do my best." the prototype of father brown tells of the easy job in detection when gilbert had been reading a book: he had just been reading a shilling pamphlet by dr. horton on the roman menace or some such fearful wild fowl. i knew he had read it, because no one else could when he had done. most of his books, as and when read, had gone through every indignity a book may suffer and live. he turned it inside out, dog-eared it, pencilled it, sat on it, took it to bed and rolled on it, and got up again and spilled tea on it--if he were sufficiently interested. so dr. horton's pamphlet had a refuted look when i saw it. father o'connor was not the only friend who was added to the beaconsfield group with some frequency. it was easy enough to run down from london or over from welwyn (home of g.b.s.) or from oxford or cambridge. it was most conveniently central. gilbert's brethren of the pen were especially apt to appear at all seasons and always found friendly welcome. for he continued to call himself neither poet nor philosopher but journalist. father o'connor had tried to persuade him, as he neatly puts it, to "begin to print on handmade paper with gilt edges." but frances begged him to drop the idea: "you will not change gilbert, you will only fidget him. he is bent on being a jolly journalist, to paint the town red, and he does not need style to do that. all he wants is buckets and buckets of red paint." journalists coming down from london describe the "jolly" welcome, beer poured, the sword-stick flourished, conversation flowing as freely as the beer. it meant a pleasant afternoon and it meant good copy. they visited him in the country, they observed him in town. one interviewer returned with a photo which showed chesterton "in a somewhat nã©gligã© condition," the result as he admitted of reading w. w. jacobs "rolling about on the floor waving his legs in the air." he was seen working a swan boat at the white city: "he collapsed it and the placid lake became a raging sea." he was seen thinking and even reading under the strangest weather conditions: one man saw him under a gas lamp in the street in pouring rain with an open book in his hand. reading in fleet street one day gilbert discovered suddenly that the lord mayor's show was passing. he began to reflect on the show so deeply that he forgot to look at it. overroads i remember as a little triangular house, much too small for the sort of fun the chestertons enjoyed. frances bought a field opposite to it and there built a studio. the night the studio was opened father o'connor remembers a large party at which charades were acted. he himself as canon cross-keys gave away the word so that "belfry" was loudly shouted by the opposition group. the rival company acting torture got away with it successfully, especially, complains our yorkshire priest "as 'ure' was pronounced 'yaw' in the best southern manner." on that night, returning to the house, father o'connor offered his arm to gilbert who "refused it with a finality foreign to our friendship." father o'connor went on ahead and gilbert following in the dark stumbled over a flowerpot and broke his arm. perhaps because his size made him self-consciously aware of awkwardness gilbert hated being helped. father ignatius rice, another close friend, says the only time he ever saw gilbert annoyed was when he offered him an arm going upstairs. gilbert and frances would both visit father o'connor in his yorkshire parish of heckmondwike. one year they took rooms at ilkley and he remembers gilbert adorning with huge frescoes the walls of the attic and frances sitting in the window singing, "o swallow, swallow flying south" while gilbert "did a blazon of some fantastic coat of arms." the closeness of the intimacy is seen in a letter quoted by father o'connor* in which gilbert explained why frances and he were unable to come to heckmondwike for a promised visit. [* _father brown on chesterton_, p. 123.] (july 3rd, 1909) i would not write this to anyone else, but you combine so unusually in your own single personality the characters of (1) priest, (2) human being, (3) man of the world, (4) man of the other world, (5) man of science, (6) old friend, (7) new friend, not to mention irishman and picture dealer, that i don't mind suggesting the truth to you. frances has just come out of what looked bad enough to be an illness, and is just going to plunge into one of her recurrent problems of pain and depression. the two may be just a bit too much for her and i want to be with her every night for a few days--there's an irish bull for you! one of the mysteries of marriage (which must be a sacrament and an extraordinary one too) is that a man evidently useless like me can yet become at certain instants indispensable. and the further oddity (which i invite you to explain on mystical grounds) is that he never feels so small as when he knows that he is necessary. but sometimes she would send him off whether she was well or ill, and on father o'connor would rest the heavy responsibility of getting him on to his next destination or safe back home. he tells of one such experience. he was most dutiful and obedient to orders, but they had to be written ones and backed by the spoken word. he brought his dress-suit, oh! with what loving care, to bradford on sunday for sheffield for monday, but a careful host found it under the bed in bradford just as his train left for sheffield. sent at once it was to beaconsfield, where it landed at 5 p.m. on thursday, just allowing him ten minutes to change and entrain for london. scene at beaconsfield: "what on earth have you done with your dress-suit, gilbert?" "i must have left it behind, darling, but i brought back the ties, didn't i?"* [* ibid., p. 43.] another time he came back without his pyjamas. they had been lost early in the journey. "why didn't you buy some more?" his wife asked. "i didn't know pyjamas were things you could buy," he said, surprised. probably if one were gilbert one couldn't! father o'connor arriving at overroads without baggage found that gilbert's pyjamas went around him exactly twice. lecturing engagements had of course not come to an end with the move although they had (mercifully) somewhat lessened. what increased with the distance from london was the problem--never fully solved--of getting gilbert to the right place at the right time and in clothes not too wildly wrong. when he lectured in lancashire they stayed at crosby with francis blundell (my brother-in-law), and my sister remembers frances as incessantly looking through her bag for letters and sending telegrams to confirm engagements that had come unstuck or to refuse others that were in debate. the celebrated and now almost legendary telegram from gilbert to frances told as from a hundred different cities was really sent: "am in market harborough. where ought i to be?" desperate, she wired, "home," because, as she told me later, it was easier to get him home and start him off again. that day's engagement was lost past recall. charles rowley of the ancoats brotherhood received a wire, reply paid, from snow hill station, birmingham: "am i coming to you tonight or what?" reply: "not this tuesday but next wednesday." so home he came again to overroads. the chestertons made a host of friends in beaconsfield but the children always held pride of place. the doctor's little boy, running along the top of the wall, looked down at gilbert and remarked to his delight, "i think you're an ogre." but when the nurse was heard threatening punishment if he did not get down "that minute," the child was told by the ogre, "this wall is meant for little boys to run along." one child, asked after a party if mr. chesterton had been very clever, said, "you should see him catch buns in his mouf." what was unusual both with gilbert and frances was the fact that they never allowed their disappointment in the matter of children to make them sour or jealous of others who had the joy that they had not. all through their lives they played with other people's children: they chose on a train a compartment full of children: they planned amusements, they gave presents to the children of their friends. over my son's bed hangs a silver crucifix chosen with loving care by frances after gilbert had stood godfather to him. and he was one of very many. gilbert was however a complete realist as to the ways and manners of the species he so loved. playing with children [he wrote at this time] is a glorious thing: but the journalist in question has never understood why it was considered a soothing or idyllic one. it reminds him, not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils. moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly. he has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother's bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister's picture-book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lit match. just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highest morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his saturday article; and that there is only about an hour to do it in. he wildly calls to somebody (probably the gardener) to telephone to somewhere for a messenger; he barricades himself in another room and tears his hair, wondering what on earth he shall write about. a drumming of fists on the door outside and a cheerful bellowing encourage and clarify his thoughts. . . . he sits down desperately; the messenger rings at the bell; the children drum on the door; the servants run up from time to time to say the messenger is getting bored; and the pencil staggers along, making the world a present of fifteen hundred unimportant words, and making shakespeare a present of a portion of gray's _elegy_; putting "fantastic roots wreathed high" instead of "antique roots peep out."* then the journalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma of whether a brother should commandeer a sister's necklace because the sister pinched him at littlehampton. [* chesterton had actually made this slip, and the present quotation is from the article he wrote in apology.] in the notebook he had written: north berwick on the sands i romped with children do you blame me that i did not improve myself by bottling anemones? but i say that these children will be men and women and i say that the anemones will not be men and women (not just yet, at least, let us say). and i say that the greatest men of the world might romp with children and that i should like to see shakespeare romping with children and browning and darwin romping with children and mr. gladstone romping with children and professor huxley romping with children and all the bishops romping with children; and i say that if a man had climbed to the stars and found the secrets of the angels, the best thing and the most useful thing he could do would be to come back and romp with children. m. v. an almost elvish little girl with loose brown hair, doing needlework. i have spoken to her once or twice. i think i must get another book of the same size as this to make notes about her. from the christmas party at overroads all adults were excluded--no nurses, no parents. the children would hang on gilbert's neck in an ecstasy of affection and he and frances schemed out endless games for them. gilbert had started a toy theatre before he left london, cutting out and painting figures and scenery, and devising plots for plays. two of the favourites were "st. george and the dragon" and "the seven champions of christendom." the atmosphere of overroads is perhaps best conveyed through gilbert's theories concerning his toy theatre and the other theatricals such as charades sometimes played there. when it came to the toy theatre set up to amuse the children, he frankly felt that he was himself child no. 1 and got the most amusement out of it. he felt too that the whole thing was good enough to be worth analysing in its rules and its effects. and so he drew up a paper of rules and suggestions for its use. i will not say positively that a toy-theatre is the best of theatres; though i have had more fun out of it than out of any other. but i will say positively that the toy-theatre is the best of all toys. it sometimes fails; but generally because people are mistaken in the matter of what it is meant to do, and what it can or cannot be expected to do; as if people should use a toy balloon as a football or a skipping rope as a hammock. . . . now the first rule may seem rather contradictory; but it is quite true and really quite simple. in a small theatre, because it is a small theatre, you cannot deal with small things. because it is a small theatre it must only deal with large things. you can introduce a dragon; but you cannot really introduce an earwig; it is too small for a small theatre. and this is true not only of small creatures, but of small actions, small gestures and small details of any kind. . . . all your effects must be made to depend on things like scenery and background. the sky and the clouds and the castles and the mountains and so on must be the exciting things; along with other things that move all of a piece, such as regiments and processions; great and glorious things can be done with processions. . . . in a real comedy the whole excitement may consist in the nervous curate dropping his tea-cup; though i do not recommend this incident for the drama of the drawing-room. but if he were nervous, let us say, about a thunderstorm, the toy-theatre could hardly represent the nervousness but it might manage the thunder-storm. it might be quite sensational and yet entirely simple; for it would largely consist of darkening the stage and making horrible noises behind the scenes. . . . the second and smaller rule, that really follows from this, is that everything dramatic should depend not on a character's action, but simply on his appearance. shakespeare said of actors that they have their exits and their entrances; but these actors ought really to have nothing else except exits and entrances. the trick is to so arrange the tale that the mere appearance of a person tells the important truth about him. thus, supposing the drama to be about st. george let us say, the mere abrupt appearance of the dragon's head (if of a proper ferocity) will be enough to explain that he intends to eat people; and it will not be necessary for the dragon to explain at length, with animated gestures and playful conversation, that his nature is carnivorous and that he has not merely dropped in to tea. there is some further discussion on colour effects ("i like very gay and glaring colours, and i like to give them a good chance to glare"). the paper concludes on a more serious note: it is an old story, and for some a sad one, that in a sense these childish toys are more to us than they can ever be to children. we never know how much of our after imaginations began with such a peep-show into paradise. i sometimes think that houses are interesting because they are so like doll houses and i am sure the best thing that can be said for many large theatres is that they may remind us of little theatres. . . . i do not look back, i look forward to this kind of puppet play; i look forward to the day when i shall have time to play with it. some day when i am too lazy to write anything, or even to read anything, i shall retire into this box of marvels; and i shall be found still striving hopefully to get inside a toy-theatre. adults as well as children enjoyed this toy and it was often described by interviewers. like the sword-stick, the great cloak and flapping hat, it was felt by some to be gilbert's way of attracting attention. but it was just one of gilbert's ways of amusing himself. a small nephew of frances was living with them at the time and it was funny to watch him fencing with his huge uncle who was obviously enjoying himself rather the more of the two. on my first visit to overroads, i noticed how as we talked my host's pencil never ceased. one evening i collected and kept an imposing red indian and a caricature of chesterton himself in a wheelbarrow being carried off to the bonfire. i came in too for one of the grown-up parties in which guessing games were a feature. lines from the poets were illustrated and we had to guess them. at another party, dr. pocock told me, g.k. did the inns of beaconsfield, of which the most successful drawing was that of a sadly dilapidated dragon being turned away from the inn door: "dragon discovers with disgust that he cannot put up at the george." sometimes these drawings were the prize of whoever guessed the line of verse they illustrated, sometimes they were sold for a local charity. the babies' convalescent home was a favourite object and one admirable picture (reproduced in _the coloured lands_) shows the "despair of king herod at discovering children convalescing from the massacre." the two closest friendships of early beaconsfield life were with the rector, mr. comerline and his wife, who are now dead, and dr. and mrs. pocock. dr. pocock was the chestertons' doctor as well as their friend, and he tells me that his great difficulty in treating gilbert lay in his detachment from his own physical circumstances. if there was anything wrong with him he usually didn't notice it. "he was the most uncomplaining person. you had to hunt him all over" to find out if anything was wrong. this detachment from circumstances still extended to his appearance and frances one day begged dr. pocock to take him to a good tailor. it was a huge success: he had never looked so well as he did now--for a few weeks. and then the tailor said to dr. pocock, "mr. chesterton has broken my heart. it took twice the material and twice the time to make for him, but i _was_ proud of it." his tailor like his doctor was apt to become a friend. mrs. pocock recalls how he would go to a dinner of the tradesmen of beaconsfield and come back intensely interested and wanting to tell her all about it. "you always went away," dr. pocock said, "chuckling over something," and he summed up the years of their friendship, saying, "you never saw him without getting delight from his presence." sometimes he would grow abstracted in the train of his own thought, and father ignatius rice remembers an occasion when he was one of a group discussing really bad lines of poetry. gilbert broke into something frances was saying with the words, "that irritating person milton"--then, realising he had interrupted her, he broke off and apologised profusely. when she had finished he went on "that irritating person milton--i can't find a single bad line in him." frances one day came in rather suddenly when dr. pocock was there, and gilbert exclaimed, "oh you've broken it." she looked round thinking she must have knocked something over. "no," he said, "it was an idea." "it will come back," said frances. "no," he said, "it got broken." more usually he was indifferent to interruptions: sometimes he welcomed them as grist for his mind's mill. daily life went on around him and often in his articles one can find traces of frances's daily activities as well as his own. attending him for his broken arm, dr. pocock told him at a certain stage to write something--anything--to see if he could use a pen again. after an instant's thought, gilbert headed his paper with the name of a prominent jew and wrote: i am fond of jews jews are fond of money never mind of whose i am fond of jews oh, but when they lose damn it all, it's funny. the name at the head (which wild horses would not drag from me) is the key to this impromptu. it was really true that gilbert was fond of very many jews. in his original group of j.d.c. friends, four jews had been included and with three of these his friendship continued through life. lawrence solomon and his wife were among the beaconsfield neighbours and he saw them often. there was another kind of jew he very heartily disliked but he was at great pains to draw this distinction himself. speaking at the jewish west end literary society in 1911 he put the question of what the real jewish problem was. the jews, he said, were a race, born civilised. you never met a jewish clod or yokel. they represented one of the highest of civilised types. but while all other races had local attachments, the jews were universal and scattered. they could not be expected to have patriotism for the countries in which they made their homes: their patriotism could be only for their race. in principle, he believed in the solution of zionism. and then the reporter in large letters made a headline: "mr. chesterton said that speaking generally, as with most other communities, 'the poor jews were nice and the rich were nasty.'" many years later in palestine he was to be driven around the country, as he has described in _the new jerusalem_, by one of these less wealthy jews who had sacrificed his career in england to his national idealism. and later yet, after g.k.'s death, rabbi wise, a leader of american jewry, paid him tribute (in a letter to cyril clements dated september 8, 1937): indeed i was a warm admirer of gilbert chesterton. apart from his delightful art and his genius in many directions, he was, as you know, a great religionist. he as catholic, i as jew, could not have seen eye to eye with each other, and he might have added "particularly seeing that you are cross-eyed"; but i deeply respected him. when hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit. blessing to his memory! chapter xvi a circle of friends in the last chapter, this chapter and to a considerable extent those that follow, down to the break made by gilbert's illness and the war of 1914, it is unavoidable that the same years should be retraced to cover a variety of aspects. for their home was for both gilbert and frances the centre of a widening circle. although i visited overroads, it seems to me, looking back, i saw them just then much more frequently in london and elsewhere. several times they stayed at lotus, our surrey home. the first time it was a weekend of blazing summer weather. lady blennerhassett was there--formerly countess leyden and a favourite disciple of dã¶llinger. i remember she delighted gilbert by her comment on modernism. "i must," she said, "have the same religion as my washerwoman, and father tyrrell's is not the religion for my washerwoman." we sat on the terrace in the sunshine and lady blennerhassett asked suddenly whether the soles of our boots were, like hers, without hole or blemish. we all looked very odd as we stuck our feet out and tried to see the soles. gilbert, offered a wicker chair, preferred the grass because, he said, there was grave danger he might unduly "modify" the chair. after a meeting of the westminster dining society (the predecessor of the wiseman), he wrote my mother an unnecessary apology: dear mrs. wilfrid ward- i have wanted for some days past to write to you, but could not make up my mind whether i was making my position worse or better. but i do want to apologise to you for the way in which i threw out your delightful catholic dining society affair the other day. i behaved badly, dined badly, debated badly and left badly; yet the explanation is really simple. i was horribly worried, and i do not worry well; when i am worried i am like a baby. my wife was that night just ill enough to make a man nervous, a stupid man, and i had sworn to her that i would fulfill some affairs that night on which she was keen. as she is better now and only wants rest, i feel normal and realise what a rotter i must have looked that night. as belloc wrote in a beautiful epitaph- "he frequently would flush with fear when other people paled, he tried to do his duty . . . but how damnably he failed." this is the epitaph of yours sincerely, g. k. chesterton. my father and mother were hardly less excited than i at the discovery of the greatest man of the age, for so we all felt him to be. gilbert later described my father as "strongly co-operative" with another's mind, and this was perhaps his own chief characteristic in conversation. the two men did not agree on politics, but on religion their agreement was deep and constantly grew deeper as they co-operated in exploring it. our headquarters were in surrey but when we came up to london every spring my parents wanted to bring the chestertons into touch with all their friends. they tended to think of their luncheon table as chesterton "supported" by those most worthy of the honour. one of the first was of course george wyndham, already a friend and admirer of gilbert's. at this luncheon they discussed the modern press, 18th century lampoons, the ingredients of a good english style, the lawfulness of revolution, the causes of napoleon, scripture criticism, joan of arc, public executions, how to bring about reforms. it was absurd, g.k. said, to think that gaining half a reform led to the other half. supposing it was agreed that every man ought to have a cow, but you say, "we can't manage that just yet: give him half a cow." he doesn't care for it and he leaves it about, and he never asks for the other half. talking of the eastern and western races gilbert said it was curious that while the easterns were so logical and clear in their religion, they were so unpractical in every-day life; the religion of the westerns is mystical and full of paradoxes. yet they are far more practical. "the eastern says fate governs everything and he sits and looks pretty; we believe in free-will and predestination and we invent babbage's calculating machine." as the group grew into one another's thought the talk intensified and we got from considering east and west to considering our own countrymen. what makes a man essentially english? dickens had it. johnson had it. "you couldn't," said g.k., "imagine a scotch johnson, or an irish johnson, or a french or german johnson." george wyndham told us, as we got on to the topic of patriotism, that he had a fear he hardly liked to utter. as we urged him he said he feared a big war might come and we might be defeated. gilbert agreed that he too had felt that fear. "but," he said, "if you were to say that in the house or i to write it in a paper we should be denounced as unpatriotic." small wonder the talk had time to range, for these scrappy notes are all that remain of a meeting beginning about one o'clock and lasting until five. at that hour two little old sisters, the miss blounts, known in our family as "the little b's," happened to call on my mother. i shall never forget their faces as they looked at the huge man in the armchair, and the other guests all absorbed and animated, and realised that they were interrupting a luncheon party. a swift glance at the little old ladies, another at the clock, and the party broke up, to remain my most cherished memory for months: until my next visit to their home, when gilbert and i arrived at the use of each other's christian names, an agreement that he insisted on calling the pact of beaconsfield. how deep he saw when in his "defence of hermits" he analysed a chief joy of human intercourse: . . . the best things that happen to us are those we get out of what has already happened. if men were honest with themselves, they would agree that actual social engagements, even with those they love, often seem strangely brief, breathless, thwarted or inconclusive. mere society is a way of turning friends into acquaintances. the real profit is not in meeting our friends, but in having met them. now when people merely plunge from crush to crush, and from crowd to crowd, they never discover the positive joy of life. they are like men always hungry, because their food never digests; also, like those men, they are cross.* [* _the well and the shallows_, pp. 104-5.] there was time in the country for the food of social intercourse to digest. i notice too that in the list of gilbert's friends quiet-voiced men stood high: max beerbohm, jack phillimore, monsignor o'connor, monsignor knox, his own father, maurice baring: all these represent a certain spaciousness and leisureliness which was what he asked of friendship. even if they were in a hurry, they never seemed so. jack phillimore both he and we saw on and off at this time but had often to enjoy in anticipation or in retrospect. professor, at one time of greek at another of latin, at glasgow university, he was the kind of man gilbert specially appreciated: he wrote of phillimore after his death something curiously like what he wrote of his own father--"he was a supreme example of unadvertised greatness, and the thing which is larger inside than outside." at oxford phillimore had been known as "one of belloc's lambs." he was very much one of the group who were to run the _eye-witness_ and _new witness_ but though he always adored belloc, no one who knew him in the fulness of his powers could think of him as anyone's lamb. he was a quiet, humorous, deeply intelligent man: a scholar of european repute, whose knowledge of mediaeval latin verse equalled his classical scholarship. gilbert's keen observation of his friends is never shown better than in what he wrote of phillimore: like a needle pricking a drum, his quietude seemed to kill all the noise of our loud plutocracy and publicity. in all this he was supremely the scholar, with not a little of the satirist. and yet there was never any man alive who was so unlike a don. his religion purged him of intellectual pride, and certainly of that intellectual vanity which so often makes a sort of seething fuss underneath the acid sociability of academic centres. he had none of the tired omniscience which comes of intellectual breeding in and in. he seemed to be not so much a professor as a practiser of learning. he practised it quietly but heartily and humorously, exactly as if it had been any other business. if he had been a sailor, like his father the admiral, he would have minded his own business with exactly the same smile and imperceptible gesture. indeed, he looked much more like a sailor than a professor; his dark square face and clear eyes and compact figure were of a type often seen among sailors; and in whatever academic enclave he stood, he always seemed to have walked in from outside, bringing with him some of the winds of the world and some light from the ends of the earth.* [* _g.k.'s weekly_, nov. 27, 1926.] to return to my own notes. it is horribly characteristic that i wrote them in an undated notebook, but i think that luncheon which lasted so long must have been in 1911. the same year my father persuaded both the synthetic society to elect chesterton and chesterton to attend the synthetic. of his first meeting my father wrote to george wyndham: had you been at the synthetic last night you would have witnessed a memorable scene. place: westminster palace hotel. time: 9.40. a. j. b. [arthur balfour, leader of the conservative party] is speaking persuasively and in carefully modulated tones to an attentive audience. suddenly a crash as though the door were blown open. a. j. b. brought to a halt. the whole company look round and in rushes a figure exactly like the pictures of mr. wind when he blows open the door and forces an entrance in the german child's story "mr. wind and madame rain"--a figure enormous and distended, a kind of walking mountain but with large rounded corners. it was g. k. c. who, enveloped in a huge inverness cape of light colour, thus made his debut at the synthetic. he rushed (not walked) to a chair, and was dragged chair and all by waggett and me as near as might be to the table, where with a fresh crash he deposited his stick, and then his hat. and there he sat, eager and attentive, forgetting all about his stick and hat and coat, filling up the whole space at the bottom of the table, drawing caricatures of the company on a sheet of foolscap, a memorable figure, very welcome to me, but arousing the fury of the conventional and the "dreary and well-informed" well represented by bailey saunders who has been at me here half the morning trying to convince me that he will ruin the society and ought never to have been elected. some of the reactions of this new recruit have been touched on in his _autobiography:_ there i met old haldane, yawning with all his hegelian abysses, who appeared to me as i must have appeared to a neighbour in a local debating club when he dismissed metaphysical depths and pointed at me saying: "there is that leviathan whom thou hast made to take his sport therein." . . . there also i met balfour, obviously preferring any philosophers with any philosophies to his loyal followers of the tory party. perhaps religion is not the opium of the people, but philosophy is the opium of the politicians. my father belonged to another group besides the synthetic society for which it seemed to him that gilbert was even more ideally fitted. _the_ club was founded by dr. johnson, the home of the best talk in the land, where garrick and goldsmith were at times shouted down by the great lexicographer--a sign, said chesterton, of his modesty and his essential democracy: johnson was too democratic to reign as king of his company: he preferred to contend with them as an equal. the old formula still in use had informed my father "you have had the honour to be elected," but wilfrid ward felt that the election of the modern dr. johnson would be an honour to the club. to his intense disgust he found that only george wyndham could be relied upon for whole-hearted support. what may be called the "social" element in the club had become too strong to welcome a man who boasted in all directions of belonging to the middle classes and whose friends merely urged the claim that he was one of the few today who could talk as well as johnson. gilbert met many politicians in other ways but only with one of them did he feel a really close harmony. of george wyndham's opinions he said in the _autobiography_ that they were "of the same general colour as my own," and he went on to stress the word "colour" as significant of the whole man. to depict him in political cartoons as "st. george" had not in it the sort of absurdity of the pictures of the more frigid and philosophic balfour as "prince arthur." george really did suggest the ages of chivalry. "he had huge sympathy with gypsies and tramps." there was about him "an inward generosity that gave a gusto or relish to all he did." the chestertons' appreciation of george wyndham was deepened for them both by an affection, indeed almost a reverence, for "the deep mysticism of his wife; a woman not to be forgotten by anyone who ever knew her, and still less to be merely praised by anyone who adequately appreciated her." for a period at any rate gilbert and frances were much in contact with the extreme anglo-catholic group in the church of england. in the best of that group--and many of them are very very good--there is a sense of taking part in a crusade to restore catholicism to the whole country. canon scott holland led a campaign for social justice and many of the same group mixed this with devotion to our lady, belief in the real presence, and a profound love of the catholic past of england. george wyndham's wife, lady grosvenor, was one of this group and also her friend father philip waggett of the cowley fathers. father waggett, a member of the synthetic society and intimate with my parents, became also intimate with the chestertons. ralph adams cram described his own meeting with chesterton, arranged by father waggett. father waggett asked my wife and myself once when we were staying in london, whom we would like best to meet--"anyone from the king downward." we chose chesterton who was a very particular friend of father waggett. at that time we put on a dinner at the buckingham palace hotel (in those days the haunt of all the county families) and in defiance of fate, had this dinner in the public dining room. we had as guests father waggett, g. k. c. and mrs. chesterton. the entrance into the dining room of the short processional created something of a sensation amongst the aforesaid county families there assembled. father waggett, thin, cropheaded monk in cassock and rope; g. k. c., vast and practically globular; little mrs. chesterton, very south kensington in moss green velvet; my wife and myself. the dinner was a riot. i have the clearest recollection of g. k. c. seated ponderously at the table, drinking champagne by magnums, continually feeding his face with food which, as he was constantly employed in the most dazzling and epigrammatic conversation, was apt to fall from his fork and rebound from his corporosity, until the fragments disappeared under the table. he and father waggett egged each other on to the most preposterous amusements. each would write a triolet for the other to illustrate. they were both as clever with the pencil as with the pen, and they covered the backs of menus with most astonishing literary and artistic productions. i particularly remember g. k. c. suddenly looking out of the dining room window towards buckingham palace and announcing that he was now prepared "to write a disloyal triolet!" this was during the reign of king edward vii, and the result was convincing. i have somewhere the whole collection of these literary productions with their illustrations, but where they are i do not know.* [* _chesterton_ by cyril clemens, pp. 36-37.] on a second visit of the chestertons to lotus, george wyndham was there. he had told us of his habit of "shouting the ballad of the white horse to submissive listeners" and we had hoped for the same treat. but gilbert got the book and kicked it under his chair defying us to recover it. we had at that time a vast german cook--of a girth almost equal to his own and possessed of unbounded curiosity in the matter of our guests. gilbert declared that as he sat peacefully in the drawing room she approached him holding out a paper which he supposed to be a laundry list, and then started back exclaiming that she had thought him to be mrs. ward. it was on this visit that he remarked to a lady who happened to be the granddaughter of a duke: "you and i who belong to the jolly old upper middle classes." had he been told about her ancestry he would, i imagine, have felt that he had paid her an implied compliment by not being aware of it. for into the world of the aristocracy he and frances had been received in london, and he viewed it with the same calm humour and potential friendliness as he had for all the rest of mankind. when frances in her diary pitied the duchess of sutherland and felt that a single day of such a life as the duchess lived would drive her crazy, she was expressing gilbert's taste as well as her own for a certain simplicity of life. social position neither excited nor irritated him. he liked or disliked an aristocrat exactly as he liked or disliked a postman. gilbert and cecil chesterton really were, as conrad noel said, personally unconcerned about class. they had, however, a principle against the position of the english aristocracy which will be better understood in the light of their general social and historical outlook. what might be called the social side of it was often expressed by g.k. when lecturing on dickens. thus, speaking at manchester for the dickens centenary, he was reported as saying: the objection to aristocracy was quite simple. it was not that aristocrats were all blackguards. it was that in an aristocratic state, people sat in a huge darkened theatre and only the stage was lighted. they saw five or six people walking about and they said, "that man looks very heroic striding about with a sword." plenty of people outside in the street looked more heroic striding about with an umbrella; but they did not see these things, all the lights being turned out. that was the really philosophic objection to an aristocratic society. it was not that the lord was a fool. he was about as clever as one's own brother or cousin. it was because one's attention was confined to a few people that one judged them as one judged actors on the stage, forgetting everybody else. chesterton thought everybody should be remembered whether suburban, proletarian, aristocrat or pauper. shortly after the removal to beaconsfield he was summoned to give evidence before a parliamentary commission on the question of censorship of the theatre. keep it, he said, to the surprise of many of his friends, but change the manner of its exercise. let it be no longer censorship by an expert but by a jury--by twelve ordinary men. these will be the best judges of what really makes for morality and sound sense. he had come to give evidence, he said, not as a writer but as the representative of the gallery, and he was concerned only with "the good and happiness of the english people." one bewildered commissioner was understood to murmur that their terms of reference were not quite so wide as that. the chapter in the _autobiography_ called "friendships and foolery" ends suddenly with a reference to the war but, like the whole book, it leaps wildly about. one point in it is interesting and links up with the introduction to titterton's _drinking songs_ that gilbert later wrote. to shout a chorus is natural to mankind and g.k. claims that he had done it long before he heard of community singing. he sang when out driving, or walking over the moors with father o'connor; he sang in fleet street with titterton and his journalist friends; he sang the _red flag_ on trade union platforms and _england awake_ in revolutionary groups. there was, he claims, a legend that in auberon herbert's rooms not far from buckingham palace "we sang drake's drum with such passionate patriotism that king edward the seventh sent in a request for the noise to stop." yet it was all but impossible to teach gilbert a tune, and bernard shaw felt this (as we have seen) a real drawback to his friend's understanding of his own life and career. music was to shaw what line and color were to chesterton; but to chesterton singing was just making a noise to show he felt happy. once he wrote a poem called "music"--but only as one more flower in the wreath he was always weaving for frances--who was, says monsignor knox, the heroine of all his novels.* [* _the listener_, june 19, 1941.] sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, he that made me sealed my ears, and the pomp of gorgeous noises, waves of triumph, waves of tears, thundered empty round and past me, shattered, lost for evermore, ancient gold of pride and passion, wrecked like treasure on a shore. but i saw her cheek and forehead change, as at a spoken word, and i saw her head uplifted like a lily to the lord. nought is lost, but all transmuted, ears are sealed, yet eyes have seen; saw her smiles (0 soul be worthy!), saw her tears (0 heart be clean!)* [* _collected poems_, p. 129.] against the background of all these activities the books went on pouring out as fast from overroads as they had from overstrand. a town full of friends forty minutes' journey from london was not exactly the desert into which admirers had advised gilbert to flee, but he would never have been happy in a desert: he needed human company. he also needed to produce. "artistic paternity," he once said, "is as wholesome as physical paternity." and certainly he never ceased to bring forth the children of his mind. within two years of the move seven books were published: the ball and the cross, february 1910, what's wrong with the world, june 1910, alarms and discursions, november 1910, blake, november 1910, criticisms and appreciations of dickens, january 1911, innocence of father brown, august 1911, ballad of the white horse, august 1911. of these books, _alarms and discursions_ and the dickens criticisms are collections and arrangements of already published essays. meanwhile other essays were being written to become in turn other books at a later date. the _blake_ is a brilliant short study of art and mysticism. after reading it you feel you understand blake in quite a new way. and then you wonder--is this illumination light on blake or simply light on chesterton? it must never be forgotten that the writer was himself a "spoilt" artist--which means a man with almost enough art in him to have been in the ranks of men consecrated for life to art's service. "father brown" had first made his appearance in magazines and these detective stories became the most purely popular of gilbert's books. it was a new genre: detection in which the mind of a man means more than his footprints or cigar ash, even to the detective. the one reproduced in most anthologies--"the invisible man"--depends for its solution on the fact that certain people are _morally_ invisible. to the question "has anyone been here" the answer "no" does not include the milkman or the postman: thus the postman is the morally invisible man who has committed the crime. a thread of this sort runs through all the stories, but they are, like all his romances, full too of escape and peril and wild adventure. life on several occasions imitated gilbert's fancies. thus the azeff revelations followed his fantastic idea in _the man who was thursday_ of the anarchists who turn out to be detectives in disguise. the technique of father brown himself was imitated by a man in detroit who recovered a stolen car by putting himself imaginatively in the thief's place and driving an exactly similar car around likely corners till he came suddenly upon his own, left in a lonely road. he wrote to tell gilbert of this adventure. from chicago came an even odder example. "it is extremely difficult," wrote the _tribune_, "to determine the proper relationship of the chiesa-prudente-di cossato duels to mr. gilbert k. chesterton's book, _the ball and the cross"_ . . . the flight in search of a duelling ground; the pursuit by the police; the friendly intervention of the anarchist wineshop-keeper, volpi; the offer of his backyard for fighting purposes; the unfriendly intervention of the police; the friendly intervention of the reporters; the renewed and insistently unfriendly intervention of the police commissioner; the disgust of the duellists; the extreme disgust of the anarchist; the renewed flight of the fighters, seconds, physicians, reporters, and the anarchist over the back fences--all these and other incidents are essentially chestertonian. the di cossato affair was carried off with fully as much spirit and dash; with fully as many automobiles, seconds, physicians, reporters and police, all scampering over the country roads until the artistic deputy and the aged veteran of the war of 1859, outdistancing their pursuers, could find opportunity in comparative peace to cut the glorious gashes of satisfied honour in each other's faces.* [* _chicago tribune_, 12 march 1910.] two months after this an interviewer from the _daily news_ visited beaconsfield and splashed headlines in the paper to the effect that the spirit of chesterton was inspiring a fight between the leaseholders in edwardes square and a firm which had bought up their garden to erect a super-garage. barricades were erected by day and destroyed in the night: a wild-eyed beadle held the fort with a garden roller, and said g.k. "the creatures of my napoleon [of notting hill] have entered into the bodies of the staid burghers of kensington." in none of these cases was there any likelihood, as the _chicago tribune_ noted, of the actors in life having read the books they were spiritedly staging. "ideas have a life of their own," the _daily news_ interviewer tentatively ventured, but he may have been puzzled as g.k. "agreed heartily" in the words, "i am no dirty nominalist." chesterton kept the reviewers busy as well as the interviewers and in all his stories they noted one curiosity: "if time and space--or any circumstances--interfere with the cutting of his gordian knots, he commands time and space to make themselves scarce, and circumstances to be no more heard of." about time and space this is true in a unique degree. for him time seems to have had no existence, or perhaps rather to have been like a telescope elongating and shortening at will. as a young man, it may be remembered, he gave in the course of one letter two quite irreconcilable statements of the length of time since events in his school days. he had indeed the same difficulty about time as about money--he mentions in the _autobiography_ that after his watch was stolen during a pro-boer demonstration he never bothered to possess another. in his stories this oddity became more marked. in _the ball and the cross_ he relates adventures performed in leaping on and off an omnibus in such fashion that the bus must have covered several miles of ground: and then we are suddenly told it had gone the few score yards from the bottom of ludgate hill to the top. still stranger are the records in _the man who was thursday_ and _manalive_ of the happenings of a single day, while in _the return of don quixote_ a new organisation of society is described as though many years old and then suddenly announced as having been on foot some weeks. but to return for one moment to the more serious aspects of the work of these years. while _what's wrong with the world_ (discussed in some detail in the next chapter) is the first sketch of his social views--a kind of blueprint for a sane and human sort of world--the other books with all their foolery hold a serious purpose. they should be read as illustrations of the philosophy of _orthodoxy_-both the book he had written and the thing of which he had said "god and humanity made it and it made me." "this row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which i now set before the reader," he says of his essays (in the "introduction on gargoyles" in _alarms and discursions_), "does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. these monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. i have to carve the gargoyles, because i can carve nothing else; i leave to others the angels and the arches and the spires. but i am very sure of the style of the architecture and of the consecration of the church." the story of _the ball and the cross_, already indicated to the reader by the american-italian duel which seemed like a parody of it, has the double interest of its bearing on the world of chesterton's day and its glimpses at a stranger world to come. a young highlander, coming to london, sees in an atheist bookshop an insult to our lady. he smashes the window and challenges the owner to a duel. turnbull, the atheist, is more than ready to fight; but the world, caring nothing for religious opinions, regards anyone ready to fight for them as a madman and is mainly concerned with keeping the peace. pursued by all the resources of modern civilisation, the two men spend the rest of the book starting to fight, being interrupted and arrested by the police, escaping, arguing and fighting again. they end up in an asylum with a garden where again they talk endlessly and where the power of lucifer the prince of this world has enclosed everyone who has been concerned in their wild flight, so that no memory of it may live on the earth. the two sides of chesterton's brain are engaged in the duel of minds in this book, and some of his best writing is in it, both in the description of the wild rush across sea and land and in the discussions between the two men. g.k.'s affection for the sincere atheist is noteworthy and his hatred is reserved for the shuffler and the compromiser. it was grand to have such a man as turnbull to convert--"one of those men in whom a continuous appetite and industry of the intellect leave the emotions very simple and steady. his heart was in the right place but he was quite content to leave it there. his head was his hobby." this might be chesterton himself--in fact, it is chesterton himself--and the climax belongs to a later world than that of 1911. for pointing to the ball bereft of the cross, the highlander calls out: "it staggers, turnbull. it cannot stand by itself; you know it cannot. it has been the sorrow of your life. turnbull, this garden is not a dream, but an apocalyptic fulfillment. this garden is the world gone mad." about the time this book appeared gilbert was asked by an anglican society to lecture at coventry. he said "what shall i lecture on?" they answered "anything from an elephant to an umbrella." "very well," he said, "i will lecture on an umbrella." he treated the umbrella as a symbol of increasing artificiality. we wear hair to protect the head, a hat to protect the hair, an umbrella to protect the hat. gilbert said once he was willing to start anywhere and develop from anything the whole of his philosophy. in the notebook he had written: bootlaces once i looked down at my bootlaces who gave me my bootlaces? the bootmaker? bah! who gave the bootmaker himself? what did i ever do that i should be given bootlaces? after the lecture on the umbrella two priests saw him at the railway bookstall and asked him if the rumour was true that he was thinking of joining the church. he answered, "it's a matter that is giving me a great deal of agony of mind, and i'd be very grateful if you would pray for me." the following year he broached the subject to father o'connor when they were alone in a railway carriage. he said he had made up his mind, but he wanted to wait for frances "as she had led him into the anglican church out of unitarianism." frances told father o'connor when he came to overroads later, at the beginning of gilbert's illness, that she "could not make head or tail" of some of her husband's remarks, especially one about being buried at kendal green. when father o'connor told her what had been on gilbert's mind she was half amused at the hints he had been dropping: she recognised his reluctance to move without her, but i think she probably realised too that even to himself his conviction seemed in those years at times more absolute, at times less. we shall see in a later chapter his own analysis of his very slow progress. meanwhile in his books he was at once deepening and widening his vision of the faith. fragments of verse used in _the ballad of the white horse_ had come to gilbert in his sleep; a great white horse had been the romance of his childhood; the beginning of his honeymoon under the sign of the white horse at ipswich had been "a trip to fairyland." but it is hard to say when the motif of the white horse, the verses ringing in his head, and the ideas that make the poem, came together into what many think the greatest work of his life. in _father brown on chesterton_ we are told of the long time the poem took in the making. they talked of it on the yorkshire moors in 1906 and father o'connor noted how frances "cherished it. . . . i could see she was more in love with it than with anything else he had in hand." father o'connor also gives some interesting illustrations of the way talk ministers to a work of genius. he had begun one day "by saying lightly that none of us could become great men without leaning on the little ones: could not well begin our day but for those who started theirs first for our sake, lighting the fire and cooking the breakfast." this was said just before the dressing bell rang and between the bell and dinner gilbert had written about nine verses beginning with king alfred's meditation: and well may god with the serving folk cast in his dreadful lot is not he too a servant and is not he forgot? in 1907, gilbert published in the _albany review_ a "fragment from a ballad epic of alfred" which evoked the comment "mr. chesterton certainly has in each eye a special rã¶ntgen ray attachment." he wrote _the white horse_ guided by his favourite theory that to realise history we should not delve into the details of research but try only to see the big things--for it is those that we generally overlook. people talk about features of interest; but the features never make up a face. . . . they will toil wearily off to the tiniest inscription or darkest picture that is mentioned in a guide book as having some reference to alfred the great or william the conqueror; but they care nothing for the sky that alfred saw or the hills on which william hunted. in the king alfred country especially can be found "the far-flung titanic figure of the giant albion whom blake saw in visions, spreading to our encircling seas."* [* _g.k.'s weekly_, apr. 16, 1927.] gilbert wrote a sketch for the _daily news_ about this time, telling how an old woman in a donkey cart whom they had left far behind on the road went driving triumphantly past when the car they were in broke down. for this expedition, as so often later, he made full use of the modern invention he derided. in an open touring car hired for the occasion, gilbert in inverness cape and shapeless hat, frances beside him snugly wrapped up, they saw the smoke-hued hamlets quaint with westland king and westland saint, and watched the western glory faint along the road to frome. the note struck in the dedication and recurring throughout the poem is that of the christian idea which had made england great and which he had learnt from frances: wherefore i bring these rhymes to you who brought the cross to me, since on you flaming without flaw i saw the sign that guthrum saw when he let break his ships of awe and laid peace on the sea. in the poem christian men, whether they be saxon or roman or briton or celt, are banded together to fight the heathen danes in defence of the sacred things of faith, in defence of the human things of daily life, in defence even of the old traditions of pagan england . . . because it is only christian men guard even heathen things. gilbert constantly disclaimed the idea that he took trouble over anything: "taking trouble has never been a weakness of mine": but in what might be termed a large and loose way he really did take immense trouble over what interested him. king alfred is not an almost mythical figure like king arthur and an outline of his story with legendary fringes can be traced in the wessex country and confirmed by literature. gilbert wanted this general story: he did not want antiquarian exactness of detail. into the mouths of guthrum and of king alfred, he put the expression of the pagan and the christian outlook. nor did he hesitate to let king alfred prophesy at large concerning the days of g. k. chesterton. the poem is a ballad in the sense of the old ballads that were stirring stories: it is also an expression of the threefold love of gilbert's life: his wife, his country and his faith. and as in all great poetry, there is a quality of eternity in this poem that has made it serve as an expression of the eternal spirit of man. during the first world war many soldiers had it with them in the trenches: "i want to tell you," the widow of a sailor wrote, "that a copy of the ballad of the white horse went down into the humber with the r.38. my husband loved it as his own soul--never went anywhere without it." almost thirty years have passed and today the poem still speaks. greeting jacques maritain on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, dorothy thompson quoted king alfred's assertion of christian freedom against "the pagan nazi conquerors of his day." after crete the _times_ had the shortest first leader in its history. under the heading _sursum corda_ was a brief statement of the disaster, followed by the words of our lady to king alfred: i tell you naught for your comfort, yea, naught for your desire, save that the sky grows darker yet and the sea rises higher. night shall be thrice night over you, and heaven an iron cope. do you have joy without a cause, yea, faith without a hope? the unbreakable strength of that apparently faint and tenuous thread of faith appeared in the sequel. many had the ballad in hand in those dark days; many others wrote to the _times_ asking the source of the quotation. months later when winston churchill spoke of "the end of the beginning," the _times_ returned to _the white horse_ and gave the opening of alfred's speech at ethandune: "the high tide!" king alfred cried. "the high tide and the turn!" chapter xvii the disillusioned liberal _the english were not wrong in loving liberty. they were only wrong in losing it_. _g.k.'s weekly_, june 1, 1933. one main difficulty in writing biography lies in the various strands that run through every human life. it is as i have already said impossible to keep a perfect chronological order with anyone whose occupations and interests were so multifarious. in the present chapter and the two that follow we shall consider the movement of chesterton's mind upon politics and sociology. this will involve going back to the general election of 1906 and forward to the marconi trial of 1913. for those who are interested in his poetry or his humour or his philosophy or his theology but not at all in his sociological and political outlook, i fear that these three chapters may loom a little uninvitingly. if they are tempted to skip them altogether, i shall not blame them; yet they will miss a great deal that is vital to the understanding of his whole mind and the course his life was to take. these are not the most entertaining chapters in the book, but if we are really to know chesterton the events they cover must be considered most carefully. as a boy gilbert chesterton spoke of politics as absorbing "for every ardent intellect"; and during these years he was himself deeply concerned with the politics of england. the ideal liberalism sketched in his letter to hammond during the boer war [chapter x] had appeared to him, if not perfectly realised, at least capable of realisation, in the existing liberal party. the tory party was in power and all its acts, to say nothing of its general ineptitude, appeared to liberals as positive arguments for their own party. at this date so convinced a tory as lord hugh cecil could describe his own party as "to mix metaphors, an eviscerated ruin."* several letters and postcards from mr. belloc announcing his own election as liberal member for south salford show the high hope with which young liberalism was viewing the world in 1906: [* in a letter to wilfrid ward.] (undated) i have, as you will have seen, pulled it off by 852. it is huge fun. i am now out against all vermin: notably south african jews. the devil is let loose: let all men beware. h. b. (written across top of letter) tomorrow monday meet the manchester train arriving euston 6.10 and oblige your little friend hb _st. hilary's day_. don't fail to meet that train. stamps are cheap! hb i beg you. i implore you. _meet that 6.10 train_. hb stamps are a drug in the market. 852 meet that train! stamps are _given away_ now in _salford_. from 1902, when the general election left the conservatives still in power, until 1906 the liberal party had been, as chesterton described it, "in the desert." and the younger members of the party were deeply concerned with hammering out a positive philosophy which might inspire a true programme for their own party. a group of them wrote a book called _england a nation_ with the sub-title _papers of a patriot's club_. the patriot's club had no real existence, but i imagine that lucian oldershaw who edited the book believed that its publication might create the club. belloc was not one of the contributors, but hugh law wrote ably on ireland, j. l. hammond on south africa, and conrad noel, henry nevinson and c. f. g. masterman on other aspects of the political scene. the whole book is on a fairly high level but chesterton's essay was the only one much noticed by reviewers. it was the introductory chapter, far longer than any of the others, and gave the key to the whole book. entitled "the idea of patriotism" it was, like _the napoleon of notting hill_, which it does much to illumine, a plea for patriotism that was really for england and not for the british empire. such a patriotism recognizes the limitations proper to nationality and admits, nay admires, other patriotisms for other nations. thus, in chesterton's eyes a true english patriot should also be an ardent home ruler for ireland since ireland too was a nation. he stressed the danger that the nationhood of england should be absorbed and lost in the imperial idea. the claim that in an empire the various races could learn much from one another he considered a bit of special pleading on the part of imperialists. england had learned much from france and germany but, although ireland had much to teach, we had not learned from ireland. the real patriotism of the englishman had been dimmed both by the emphasis on the imperial idea and by the absence of roots in his own land. the governing classes had destroyed those roots and had almost forgotten the existence of the people. from the dregs and off-scourings of the population a vast empire had been created, but the people of england were not allowed to colonize england. the education bill of 1902, brought in by the conservatives and giving financial support to church schools, saw gilbert in general agreement with the liberal attacks. he did not yet appreciate the catholic idea that education must be of one piece and he did not think it fair that the country should support specifically catholic schools. parents could give at home the religious instruction they wanted their children to have. but with that fairness of mind which made it so hard for him to be a party man he saw why the liberal "compromise" of simple bible teaching for all in the state schools could not be expected to satisfy catholics. he wrote to the _daily news:_ the bible compromise is certainly in favour of the protestant view of the bible. the thing, properly stated, is as plain as the nose on your face. protestant christianity believes that there is a divine record in a book; that everyone ought to have free access to that book; that everyone who gets hold of it can save his soul by it, whether he finds it in a library or picks it off a dustcart. catholic christianity believes that there is a divine army or league upon earth called the church; that all men should be induced to join it; that any man who joins it can save his soul by it without ever opening any of the old books of the church at all. the bible is only one of the institutions of catholicism, like its rites or its priesthood; it thinks the bible only efficient when taken as part of the church. . . . this being so, a child could see that if you have the bible taught alone, anyhow, by anybody, you do definitely decide in favour of the first view of the bible and against the second. discussing a few years later whether it was possible or satisfactory to teach the bible simply as literature he put his finger on the catholic objection. "i should not mind," he said, "children being told about mohammed because i am not a mohammedan. if i were a mohammedan i should very much want to know what they were told about him." while as for the unfortunate teacher: in case a child should ask if the things in the bible happened, "either the teacher must answer him insincerely and that is immorality, or he must answer him sincerely, and that is sectarian education, or he must refuse to answer him at all, and that is first of all bad manners and a sort of timid tyranny . . ." chesterton's liberalism received a further shock from the fact that liberals, in attacking the bill, were attacking also the catholic faith and raising the cry of no popery. in a correspondence with dr. clifford he reminded him of how they had stood together against popular fanaticism during the boer war. there are two cries always capable of raising the english in their madness--one that the union jack is being pulled down, and one that the pope is being set up. and upon the man who raises one of them responsibility will lie heavy till the last day. for when they are raised, the best are mixed with the worst, every rational compromise is dashed to pieces, every opponent is given credit for the worst that the worst of his allies has by his worst enemy been said to have said. that horror of darkness swept across us when the war began. . . . beyond all question this is true--that if we choose to fight on the "no popery" cry, we may win. but i can imagine something of which i should be prouder than of any victory--the memory that we had shown our difference from mr. chamberlain simply and finally in this--that to our hand had lain (as it once laid to his) an old, an effectual, an infallible, and a filthy weapon, and that we let it lie.* [* letter to the _daily news_, october 1902.] yet it was fairly easy to be a liberal in opposition. at the elections of 1902 (which the liberals lost) and 1906 (which they won) chesterton canvassed for the liberal party. charles masterman used to tell a story of canvassing a street in his company. both started at the same end on opposite sides of the road. masterman completed his side and came back on the other to find chesterton still earnestly arguing at the first house. for he was passionately serious in his belief that the liberal party stood for a real renewal, even revolution, in the life of england. "at the present moment of victory," says the report of a speech by gilbert following the great swing of the liberal party into power in 1906, he called for "that magnanimity towards the defeated that characterized all great conquerors. it was important that all should develop--even the tory." it needed the experience of seeing the liberal party in power to shake his faith. in the new house of commons the conservatives were in a minority: against them were the two old parties--the liberals and the irish members who were in general allied to them, and a small group forming a new party known as labour. the labour members who got into parliament in 1906 and 1909 were regarded by conservatives as being a kind of left-wing extension of the liberal party. such a liberal as chesterton saw them there with delight, and, although he would still have called himself a liberal, he at first hoped in the labour men as something more truly expressive of the people's wishes. in an introduction to _from workhouse to westminster_, a life of will crooks, gilbert expressed a good deal of his own political philosophy. as a democrat he believed in the ideal of direct government by the people. but obviously this was only possible in a world that was also his ideal--a world consisting of small and even of very small states. the democrat's usual alternative, representative government, was, gilbert said, symbolic in character. just as religious symbolism "may for a time represent a real emotion and then for a time cease to represent anything, so representative government may for a time represent the people, and for a time cease to represent anything." further, the very idea of representation itself involved two perfectly distinct notions: a man throws a shadow or he throws a stone. "in the first sense, it is supposed that the representative is like the thing he represents. in the second case, it is only supposed that the representative is useful to the thing he represents." workmen, like conservatives, sent men to parliament not to show what they themselves were like, but to attack the other party in their name. "the labour members as a class are not representatives but missiles. . . . working men are not at all like mr. keir hardie. if it comes to likeness, working men are more like the duke of devonshire. but they throw mr. keir hardie at the duke of devonshire, knowing that he is so curiously shaped as to hurt anything at which he is thrown."* in the same way mr. balfour was entirely unlike the tory squires who used him as a weapon. to this rule, that men do not choose to be represented by their like, chesterton took will crooks as the one exception: [* introduction to _from workhouse to westminster_, p. xv.] you have not yet seen the english people in politics. it has not yet entered politics. liberals do not represent it; tories do not represent it; labour members, on the whole, represent it rather less than tories or liberals. when it enters politics it will bring with it a trail of all the things that politicians detest; prejudices (as against hospitals), superstitions (as about funerals), a thirst for respectability passing that of the middle classes, a faith in the family which will knock to pieces half the socialism of europe. if ever that people enters politics it will sweep away most of our revolutionists as mere pedants. it will be able to point only to one figure, powerful, pathetic, humorous and very humble, who bore in any way upon his face the sign and star of its authority.* [* ibid., p. xx.] it was sad enough after this to see will crooks fathering one of those very bills for the interference with family life which chesterton most hated. but, indeed, the years that followed the 1906 election are a story of a steadily growing disillusionment with the realities of representative government in england. chesterton wrote regularly for the _daily news_ and was regarded as one of their most valuable contributors. but when, following an attack in the house of commons on the liberal leader campbell-bannerman over the sale of peerages, he sent in an article on the subject, the editor a. g. gardiner wrote (july 12, 1907): i have left your article out tonight not because i do not entirely agree with its point of view but because just at this moment it would look like backing lea's unmannerly attack on c. b. i am keeping the article in type for a later occasion when the general question is not complicated with a particularly offensive incident. it was a test case, and it seemed to chesterton not a question of good manners, but of something far more fundamental. the assertion had been made in the house of commons that peerages were being sold, and that the price of such sales was the chief support of the secret party funds. but the _daily news_ was a liberal paper and this was an attack on the liberal party. chesterton replied (july 11, 1907): i am sure you know by this time that i never resent the exclusion of my articles as such. i should always trust your literary judgment, if it were a matter of literature only: and i daresay you have often saved me from an indiscretion and your readers from a bore. unfortunately this matter of the party funds is not one of that sort. my conscience does not often bother you, but just now the animal is awake and roaring. your paper has always championed the rights of conscience, so mine naturally goes to you. if you disagreed with me, it would be another matter. but since you agree with me (as i was sure you would) it becomes simply a question of which is the more important, politeness or political morality. i agree that lea did go to the point of being unmannerly. so did plimsoll, so did bradlaugh: so did the irish members. but surely it would be a very terrible thing if anyone could say "the _daily news_ suppressed all demand for the plimsoll line," or "the _daily news_ did not join in asking for bradlaugh's political rights." i am sure that this is not your idea. you think that this matter can be better raised later on. i am convinced of its urgency. i am so passionately convinced of its urgency that if you will not help me to raise it now, i must try some other channel. they are going on monday to raise a "breach of privilege" (which is simply an aristocratic censorship of the press) in order to crush this question through the man who raised it: and to crush it forever. i have said that i think lea's questions violent and needless. but they are not attacking his questions. they are attacking his letter, which contains nothing that i do not think, probably nothing that you do not think. lea is to be humiliated and broken because he said that titles are bought; as they are: because he said that poor members are reminded of their dependence on the party funds; as they are: because he said that all this was hypocrisy of public life; as it is. . . . one thing is quite certain. unless some liberal journalists speak on monday or tuesday, the secret funds and the secret powers are safe. these parliamentary votes mark eras: they are meant to. and that vote will not mark a defence of c. b. the letter had nothing to do with c. b. it will mark the final decision that any repetition of what lea said in his letter is an insult to the house. that is, any protest against bought titles will be an insult to the house. any protest against secret funds will be an insult to the house. i would willingly burn my article if i were only sure you would publish one yourself tomorrow on the same lines. but if not, here is at least one thing you can do. an article, even signed, may perhaps commit the paper too much. but your paper cannot be committed by publishing a letter from me stating my opinions. it might publish a letter from joe chamberlain, stating his opinions. i therefore send you a short letter, pointing out the evil, and disassociating it as far as possible from the indiscretions of lea. i am sure you will publish this, for it is the mere statement of a private opinion and as i am not an m. p. i can say what i like about parliament. you will not mind my confessing to you my conviction and determination in this matter. i do not think we could quarrel, even if we had to separate. the letter was published, and was quoted in the house of commons by lord robert cecil amid general applause. but it was twenty years before a bill was passed that forbade this particular unpleasantness. while political corruption stirred chesterton deeply, i think his outlook was even more affected by the progressive socialism of liberal legislation. he had honestly believed that the liberal party stood, on the whole, for liberty. he found that it stood increasingly for daily and hourly interference with the lives of the people. he found too that the liberal papers, which he held should have been foremost in criticism of these measures, were as determined to uphold measures brought in by a liberal government as they had been to attack anything that the tories brought forward. it has been well said by mr. belloc that chesterton could never write as a party man. but to the ordinary party newspaper such an attitude was utterly incomprehensible. i think that we can also see at this point how alien his fundamental outlook was from that even of the best members of his own party. a great admirer said to me the other day that it had taken her a long time to appreciate chesterton's sociology. "you see, i was brought up to think that it was quite right for the poor to have their teeth brushed by officials." this is undoubtedly the normal socialistic outlook and the outlook most abhorrent to chesterton. "the philanthropist," he once said, "is not a brother; he is a supercilious aunt." the five years of liberal government had been disillusioning to many others besides belloc and the chesterton brothers. probably many men in newspaper offices and elsewhere continued vaguely to support the party to which their own paper belonged. but there were others who were in those days going through a struggle between principles and party which became increasingly acute. gilbert has described his own feelings in a review of galsworthy's play _loyalties_, written several years later during the first world war. . . . the author of _loyalty_ suffers one simple and amazing delusion. he imagines that in those pre-war politics liberalism was on the side of labour. on this point at least i can correct him from the most concrete experience. in the newspaper office where his hero lingered, wondering how much longer he could stand its pacifism, i was lingering and wondering how much longer i could stand its complete and fundamental capitalism, its invariable alliance with the employer, its invariable hostility to the striker. no such scene as that in which the liberal editor paced the room raving about his hopes of a revolution ever occurred in the liberal newspaper office that i knew; the least hint of a revolution would have caused quite as much horror there as in the offices of the _morning post_. on nothing was the pacifist more pacifist than upon that point. no workman so genuine as the workman who figures in _loyalty_ ever figured among such liberals. the fact is that such liberalism was in no way whatever on the side of labour; on the contrary, it was on the side of the labour party. . . . both chesterton and belloc had begun to point out that a free press had almost disappeared from england. the revenue of most of the newspapers depended not on subscriptions but on advertisement. therefore nothing could be said in them which was displeasing to their wealthy advertisers. nor was this the worst of it. very rich men were often owners of half a dozen papers or more and dictated their policy. an outstanding example was alfred harmsworth--lord northcliffe--whose newspapers ranged from the _times_ through the _daily mail_ to _answers_. thus to every section of the english people, harmsworth was able to convey day by day such news as he thought best together with his own outlook and philosophy of life such as it was. still worse, the _times_ had not lost in the eyes of europe, to say nothing of america, that reputation it had held so long of being _the_ official expression of english opinion. it was still the _jupiter_ of trollope's day, the maker of ministries or their undoing. in the days of a free press a paper held such a position in virtue of the talents of its staff. editors were then powerful individuals and would brook little interference. but today the editor was commonly only the mouthpiece of the owner. it is surprising that gilbert and the official liberal press so long tolerated one another. the _daily news_ and other papers owned by mr. cadbury (of cadbury's cocoa) were often referred to as "the cocoa press" and it happened that it was not in the end political disagreement alone that brought the chesterton-cadbury alliance to an end. in one of gilbert's poems in praise of wine are the lines: cocoa is a cad and coward, cocoa is a vulgar beast. in the _autobiography_ he tells us that after he had published the poem he felt he could write no longer for the _daily news_. he went from the _daily news_ to the _daily herald_, to the editor of which he wrote that the _news_ "had come to stand for almost everything i disagree with; and i thought i had better resign before the next great measure of social reform made it illegal to go on strike." g.k. was a considerable asset to any paper and had recently been referred to by shaw (in a debate with belloc) as "a flourishing property of mr. cadbury's." politically the break was bound to come, for even when _dickens_ was published gilbert chesterton had reached the stage of saying "as much as ever i did, more than ever i did, i believe in liberalism. but there was a rosy time of innocence when i believed in liberals." at this time too he infuriated an orthodox liberal journalist by saying of the party leaders "some of them are very nice old gentlemen, some of them are very nasty old gentlemen, and some of them are old without being gentlemen at all." an orthodox church journalist in a periodical charmingly entitled _church bells_ got angrier yet. "a certain mr. g. k. chesterton," he wrote, had, when speaking for the c.s.u. in st. paul's chapter house, remarked "the best of his majesty's ministers are agnostics, and the worst devil worshippers." _church bells_ cries out: "we only mention this vulgar falsehood because we regret that an association, with which the names of many of our respected ecclesiastics are connected, should have allowed the bad taste and want of all gentlemanly feeling displayed by the words quoted, to have passed unchallenged." "vulgar falsehood" is surely charming. but perhaps even deeper than his disillusionment with any party was his growing sense of the unreality of the political scene. he has described it in the _autobiography:_ i was finding it difficult to believe in politics; because the reality seemed almost unreal, as compared with the reputation or the report. i could give twenty instances to indicate what i mean, but they would be no more than indications, because the doubt itself was doubtful. i remember going to a great liberal club, and walking about in a large crowded room, somewhere at the end of which a bald gentleman with a beard was reading something from a manuscript in a low voice. it was hardly unreasonable that we did not listen to him, because we could not in any case have heard; but i think a very large number of us did not even see him . . . it is possible, though not certain, that one or other of us asked carelessly what was supposed to be happening in the other corner of the large hall. . . . next morning i saw across the front of my liberal paper in gigantic headlines the phrase: "lord spencer unfurls the banner." under this were other remarks, also in large letters, about how he had blown the trumpet for free trade and how the blast would ring through england and rally all the free-traders. it did appear, on careful examination, that the inaudible remarks which the old gentleman had read from the manuscript were concerned with economic arguments for free trade; and very excellent arguments too, for all i know. but the contrast between what that orator was to the people who heard him, and what he was to the thousands of newspaper-readers who did not hear him, was so huge a hiatus and disproportion that i do not think i ever quite got over it. i knew henceforward what was meant, or what might be meant, by a scene in the house, or a challenge from the platform, or any of those sensational events which take place in the newspapers and nowhere else.* [* pp. 201-2.] as in _orthodoxy_ chesterton had formulated his religious beliefs, so in _what's wrong with the world_ he laid the foundations of his sociology. it will be remembered that, giving evidence before the commission on the censorship, chesterton declared himself to be concerned only with the good and happiness of the english people. where he differed from nearly every other social reformer was that he believed that they should themselves decide what was for their own good and happiness. "the body of ideas," says monsignor knox of gilbert's sociology, "which he labelled, rather carelessly, 'distributism' is a body of ideas which still lasts, and i think will last, but it is not exactly a doctrine, or a philosophy; it is simply chesterton's reaction to life."* [* _the listener_, june 19, 1941.] it may be said that a man's philosophy is in the main a formulation of his reaction to life. anyhow life seems to be the operative word--for it is the word that best conveys the richness of this first book of chesterton's sociology. all the wealth of life's joys, life's experiences, is poured into his view of man and man's destiny. already developing manhood to its fullest potential he found in this book a new form of expression. to quote monsignor knox again, "i call that man intellectually great who is an artist in thought . . . i call that man intellectually great who can work equally well in any medium." the poet-philosopher worked surprisingly well in the medium of sociology. he had intended to call the book, "what's wrong?" and it begins on this note of interrogation. the chapter called "the medical mistake" is a brilliant attack on the idea that we must begin social reform by diagnosing the disease. "it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease." the thing that is most terribly wrong with our modern civilisation is that it has lost not only health but the clear picture of health. the doctor called in to diagnose a bodily illness does not say: we have had too much scarlet fever, let us try a little measles for a change. but the sociological doctor does offer to the dispossessed proletarian a cure which, says chesterton, is only another kind of disease. we cannot work towards a social ideal until we are certain what that ideal should be. we must, therefore, begin with principles and we are to find those principles in the nature of man, largely through a study of his history. man has had historically--and man needs for his fulfilment--the family, the home and the possession of property. the notion of property has, for the modern age, been defiled by the corruptions of capitalism; but modern capitalism is really a negation of property because it is a denial of its limitations. he summarises this idea with one of his most brilliant illustrations: "it is the negation of property that the duke of sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem." but property in its real meaning is almost the condition for the survival of the family. it is its protection, it is the opportunity of its development. god has the joy of unlimited creation--he can make something out of nothing; but he has given to man the joy of limited creation--man can make something out of anything. "fruitful strife with limitations," self-expression "with limits that are strict and even small,"--all this belongs to the artist, but also to the average man. "property is merely the art of the democracy." the family, protected by the possession of some degree of property, will grow by its own laws. what are these laws? clearly there are two sets of problems, one concerned with life within the family, the other with the relation of the family to the state. these two sets of problems provide the subject-matter of the book. on both chesterton felt that there had been insufficient thinking. thus he says of the first: "there is no brain-work in the thing at all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that." and of the second: "it is quite unfair to say that socialists believe in the state but do not believe in the family. but it is true to say that socialists are especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the state; and they are not especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the family. they are not doing anything to define the functions of father, mother and child, as such--they have no firm instinctive sense of one thing being in its nature private and another public." it is precisely this kind of root-thinking that the book does. in the free family there will be a division of the two sides of life, between the man and the woman. the man must be, to a certain extent, a specialist; he must do one thing well enough to earn the daily bread. the woman is the universalist; she must do a hundred things for the safeguarding and development of the home. the modern fad of talking of the narrowness of domesticity especially provoked chesterton. "i cannot," he said with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. when domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. if drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, i admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the cathedral of amiens or drudge behind a gun at trafalgar. but if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colourless and of small import to the soul, then as i say, i give it up; i do not know what the words mean. to be queen elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours and holidays; to be whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; i can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but i cannot imagine how it could narrow it. how can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the rule of three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? how can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? no; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. i will pity mrs. jones for the hugeness of her task; i will never pity her for its smallness.* [* _what's wrong with the world_, chapter 3, "the emancipation of domesticity."] while he was writing these pages and after their appearance in print, g.k. was constantly asked to debate the question of women's suffrage. he was an anti-suffragist, partly because he was a democrat. the suffrage agitation in england was conducted by a handful of women, mainly of the upper classes; and it gave cecil chesterton immense pleasure to head articles on the movement with the words, "votes for ladies." g.k. too felt that the suffrage agitation was really doing harm by dragging a red herring across the path of necessary social reform. if the vast majority of women did not want votes it was undemocratic to force votes upon them. also, if rich men had oppressed poor men all through the course of history, it was exceedingly probable that rich women would also oppress poor women. both in _what's wrong with the world_ and in debating on the subject, chesterton brushed aside as absurd and irrelevant the suggestion that women were inferior to men and what was called the physical force argument. but he did maintain that if the vote meant anything at all (which it probably did not in the england he was living in), it meant that side of life which belongs to masculinity and which the normal woman dislikes and rather despises. all we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. and now comes miss pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right. . . . we told our wives that parliament had sat late on most essential business; but it never crossed our minds that our wives would believe it. we said that everyone must have a vote in the country; similarly our wives said that no one must have a pipe in the drawing-room. in both cases the idea was the same. "it does not matter much, but if you let those things slide there is chaos." we said that lord huggins or mr. buggins was absolutely necessary to the country. we knew quite well that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men should be men and the women women. we knew this; we thought the women knew it even more clearly; and we thought the women would say it. suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it. . . .* [* from chapter vii, _the modern surrender_.] all the agitated reformers who were running about and offering their various nostrums were prepared to confess that something had gone very wrong with modern civilisation. but they suggested that what was wrong with the present generation of adults could be set right for the coming generation by means of education. in the last part of the book, "education or the mistake about the child," he put the unanswerable question: how are we to give what we have not got? "to hear people talk one would think [education] was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hotch-potch of hygienic meals, baths, breathing-exercises, fresh-air and freehand drawing, we can produce something splendid by accident; we can create what we cannot conceive." the social reformers who were talking about education seem not to have seen very clearly what they meant by the word. they argued about whether it meant putting ideas into the child or drawing ideas out of the child. in any case, as chesterton pointed out, you must choose which kind of ideas you are going to put in or even which kind you are going to draw out. "there is indeed in each living creature a collection of forces and functions; but education means producing these in particular shapes and training them for particular purposes, or it means nothing at all." but to decide what they were trying to produce was altogether too much for the men who were directing education in our board schools. the public schools of england were often the target of chesterton's attacks; but they had, he declared, one immense superiority over the board schools. the men who directed them knew exactly what they wanted and were on the whole successful in producing it. those responsible for the board schools seemed to have no idea excepting that of feebly imitating the public schools. one disadvantage of this was that, at its worst and at its best, the public school idea could only be applicable to a small governing class. the other disadvantage was that whereas in the public schools the masters were working with the parents and trying to give the boys the same general shape as their homes would give them, the board schools were doing nothing of the kind. the schoolmaster of the poor never worked with the parents; often he ignored them; sometimes he positively worked against them. such education was, chesterton held, the very reverse of that which would prevail in a true democracy. "we have had enough education for the people; we want education by the people." chesterton felt keenly that while the faddists were perfectly prepared to take the children out of the hands of any parents who happened to be poor, they had not really the courage of their own convictions. they would expatiate upon methods; they could not define their aims; they would take refuge in such meaningless terms as progress or efficiency or success. they were not prepared to say what they wanted to succeed in producing, towards what goal they were progressing or what was the test of efficiency. and part of this inability arose from their curious fear of the past. most movements of reform have looked to the past for great part of their inspiration. to reform means to shape anew, and he pointed out that every revolution involves the idea of a return. on this point, g.k. attacked two popular sayings. one was "you can't put the clock back"; but, he said, you can and you do constantly. the clock is a piece of mechanism which can be adjusted by the human finger. "there is another proverb: 'as you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. if i have made my bed uncomfortable, please god, i will make it again." it is easy to understand that this sort of philosophy should be out of tune with the socialist who looked with contempt on the wisdom of his forefathers. it is less easy to understand why it was unacceptable also to most of the tories. one reviewer asked whether mr. chesterton was the hoariest of conservatives or the wildest of radicals. and with none of his books are the reviews so bewildered as they are with this one. "the universe is ill-regulated," said the _liverpool daily post_, "according to the fancy of mr. chesterton; but we are inclined to think that if the deity were to talk over matters with him, he would soon come to see that a chestertonian cosmos would be no improvement on things as they are." on the other hand, the _toronto globe_ remarks, "his boisterous optimism will not admit that there is anything to sorrow over in this best of all possible worlds." the _observer_ suggested that chesterton would find no disciples because "his converts would never know from one week to another what they had been converted to"; while the _yorkshire post_ felt that the chief disadvantage of the book was that "a shrewd reader can pretty accurately anticipate mr. chesterton's point of view on any subject whatsoever." it seems almost incredible that so definite a line of thought, so abundantly illustrated, should not have been clear to all his readers. some reviewers, one supposes, had not read the book; but surely the _daily telegraph_ was deliberately refusing to face a challenge when it wrote: "his whole book is an absurdity, but to be absurd for three hundred pages on end is itself a work of genius." that particular reviewer was shirking a serious issue. he was the official tory. but those whom i might call the unofficial tories, such men for instance as my own father, received much of this book with delight and yet declined to take chesterton's sociology seriously. and i think it is worth trying to see why this was the case. in a letter to the _clarion_, g.k. outlines his own position: "if you want praise or blame for socialists i have enormous quantities of both. roughly speaking (1) i praise them to infinity because they want to smash modern society. (2) i blame them to infinity because of what they want to put in its place. as the smashing must, i suppose, come first, my practical sympathies are mainly with them."* [* letter to the _clarion_, february 8, 1910.] such a confession of faith seemed shocking to the honest old-fashioned tory. and because it shocked him, he made the mistake of calling it irresponsible. chesterton frequently urged revolution as the only possible means of changing an intolerable state of things. but the word "revolution" suggested streets running with blood. and, on the other hand, they had not the very faintest conception of how intolerable the state of things was against which chesterton proposed to revolt. i think it must be said too that he was a little hazy as to the exact nature of the revolution he proposed. he certainly hoped to avoid the guillotine! and even when urging the restoration of the common lands to the people of england, he appended a note in which he talked of a land purchase scheme similar to that which george wyndham had introduced in ireland. but besides this tinge of vagueness in what he proposed, there was another weakness in his presentment of his sociology which i think was his chief weakness as a writer. it would be hard to find anyone who got so much out of words, proverbs, popular sayings. he wrung every ounce of meaning out of them; he stood them on their heads; he turned them inside out. and everything he said he illustrated with an extraordinary wealth of fancy; but when you come to illustration by way of concrete facts there is a curious change. in his sociology, he did the same thing that his best critics blamed in his literary biographies. he would take some one fact and appear to build upon it an enormous superstructure and then, very often, it would turn out that the fact itself was inaccurately set down; and the average reader, discovering the inaccuracy, felt that the entire superstructure was on a rotten foundation and had fallen with it to the ground. yet the ordinary reader was wrong. the "fact" had not been the foundation of his thought, but only the thing that had started him thinking. if the "fact" had not been there at all, his thinking would have been neither more nor less valid. but most readers could not see the distinction. it is a little difficult to make the point clear; but anyone who has read the _browning_ and the _dickens_ and then read the reviews of them will recognise what i mean. it was universally acknowledged that chesterton might commit a hundred inaccuracies and yet get at the heart of his subject in a way that the most painstaking biographer and critic could not emulate. the more deeply one reads dickens or browning, the more even one studies their lives, the more one is confirmed as to the profound truth of the chesterton estimate and the genius of his insight. a superficial glance sees only the errors; a deeper gaze discovers the truth. it is exactly the same with his sociology. but here we are in a field where there is far more prejudice. when chesterton talked of state interference and used again and again the same illustration--that of children whose hair was forcibly cut short in a board school--two questions were asked by socialists: was this a solitary incident? was it accurately reported? when a pained doctor wrote to the papers saying the incident had been merely one of a request to parents who had gladly complied for fear their children should catch things from other and dirtier children, it appeared as though g.k. had built far too much on this one point. it was not the case. he was not building on the incident, he was illustrating by the incident. but it must be admitted that he was incredibly careless in investigating such incidents; and quite indifferent as to his own accuracy. and this was foolish, for he could have found in police court records, in the pages of _john bull_ and later of the _eye witness_ itself, abundance of well verified illustrations of his thesis. in the same way, when he talked of the robbery of the people of england by the great landlords, he did not take the slightest trouble to prove his case to the many who knew nothing of the matter. it must be remembered that the sociological side of english history was only just beginning to be explored to any serious extent. in the _village labourer_, mr. and mrs. hammond point out to what an extent they had had to depend on the home office papers and contemporary documents for the mass of facts which this book and the _town labourer_ brought for the first time to the knowledge of the general public. chesterton had worked with hammond on the _speaker_ for some years. just as with his book about shaw so too with the background of his sociology he could have gone round the corner and got the required information. he knew the thing in general terms; he would not be bothered to make that knowledge convincing to his readers. if to his genius for expounding ideas had been added an awareness of the necessity of marshalling and presenting facts, he must surely have convinced all men of goodwill. for in this matter the facts were there to marshal. it was less than a hundred years since the last struggle of the english yeomen against a wholesale robbery and confiscation that catastrophically altered the whole shape of our country. and it seems to have left no trace in the memory of the english poor. in _northanger abbey_, jane austen describes catherine morland finding the traces of an imaginary crime. but chesterton comments that the crime she failed to discover was the very real one that the owner of northanger abbey was not an abbot. the ordinary englishman, however, thinks little of a crime that consisted in robbing "a lot of lazy monks." that they had possessed so much of the land of england merely seemed to make the act a more desirable one: yet it was a confiscation, not so much of monks' land as of the people's land administered by the monasteries. what is even less realised is how much of the structure of the mediaeval village remained after the reformation and how widespread was small ownership nearly to the end of the eighteenth century, when enclosures began estimated by the hammonds at five million acres. this land ceased in effect to be the common property of the poor and became the private property of the rich. this business of the enclosures must be treated at some little length because it had the same key position in chesterton's sociological thinking as the marconi case (shortly to be discussed) had in his political. in every village of england had been small freeholders, copyholders and cottagers, all of whom had varying degrees of possession in the common lands which were administered by a manorial court of the village. these common lands were not mere stretches of heath and gorse but consisted partly of arable cultivated in strips with strict rules of rotation, partly of grazing land and partly of wood and heath. most people in the village had a right to a strip of arable, to cut firing of brushwood and turf, and rushes for thatch, and to pasture one or more cows, their pigs and their geese. a village cowherd looked after all the animals and brought them back at night. cobbett in his _cottage economy_ (to a new edition of which chesterton wrote a preface) reckoned that a cottager with a quarter-acre of garden could well keep a cow on his own cabbages plus commonland grazing, could fatten his own pig and have to buy very little food for his family except grain and hops for home-baking and brewing. he puts a cottager's earnings, working part-time for a farmer, at about 10 sh. a week. this figure would vary, but the possession of property in stock and common rights would tide over bad times. a man with fire and food could be quasi-independent; and indeed some of the larger farmers, witnessing before enclosure enquiry committees, complained of this very spirit of independence as producing idleness and "sauciness." the case for the enclosures was that improved agricultural methods could not be used in the open fields: more food was grown for increasing town populations: much waste land ploughed: livestock immeasurably improved. only later was the cost counted when cheap imported food for these same towns had slain english agriculture. the "compensation" in small plots or sums of money could not for the smaller commoners replace what they had lost--even when they succeeded in getting it. claims had to be made in writing--and few cottagers could write. how difficult too to reduce to its money value a claim for cutting turf or pasturing pigs and geese. a commissioner, who had administered twenty enclosure acts, lamented to arthur young that he had been the means of ruining two thousand poor people. but the gulf was so great between rich and poor that all that the commons had meant to the poor was not glimpsed by the rich. arthur young had thought the benefits of common "perfectly contemptible," but by 1801 he was deeply repentant and trying in vain to arrest the movement he had helped to start. before enclosure, the english cottager had had milk, butter and cheese in plenty, home-grown pork and bacon, home-brewed beer and home-baked bread, his own vegetables (although cobbett scorned green rubbish for human food and advised it to be fed to cattle only), his own eggs and poultry. after enclosure, he could get no milk, for the farmers would not sell it; no meat, for his wages could not buy it; and he no longer had a pig to provide the fat bacon commended by cobbett. working long hours he lived on bread, potatoes and tea, and insufficient even of these. lord winchelsea, one of the very few landowners who resisted the trend of the time, mentioned in the house of lords the discovery of four labourers, starved to death under a hedge, and said this was a typical occurrence. at the beginning of the enclosure period the industrial revolution was barely in its infancy. a large part of the spinning, weaving and other manufactures was carried on in the cottages of men who had gardens they could dig in and cows and pigs of their own. the invention of power machines, the discovery of coal wherewith those machines could be worked, led to the concentration of factories in the huge cities. but it was the drift from the villages of dispossessed men, together with the cheap child labour provided by poor law guardians, that made possible the starvation wages and the tyranny of the factory system. and here the tyrants were largely of a different class. there were some landowners who also had factories, and more who possessed coal-mines, but many of the manufacturers had themselves come from the class of the dispossessed. successful manufacturers made money--a great deal of money. many of the men's appeals gave the figures at which the goods were sold in contrast with their rate of wages, and the contrast is startling. so, as the towns grew, the masters left the smoke they were creating and bought country places and became country gentlemen, preserved their own game and judged their own tenants. and thus disappeared yet another section of the ancient country folk. for the large landowners would seldom sell and the land bought by the new men was mostly the land of small farmers and yeomen. this was the age of new country houses with a hundred rooms and vast offices that housed an army of servants. "labour was cheap," the descendants of those who built just then will tell you, as they gaze disconsolate at their unwieldy heritage. old and new families alike built or rebuilt, added and improved. cobbett rode rurally and angrily through the ruins of a better england (described a century earlier by another horseman, daniel defoe). goldsmith mourned an early example in his "deserted village," but they are the only voices in an abundant literature. jane austen is, indeed, the perfect example of what chesterton always realised--the ignorance that was almost innocence with which the wealthy had done their work of destruction. he did not account them as evil as they would seem by a mere summary of events. and what he saw at the root of those events was in his eyes still present: england was still possessed and still governed by a minority. the conservatives were "a minority that was rich," the liberals "a minority that was mad." and those two minorities tended to join together and rob and oppress the ordinary man, in the name of some theory of progress and perfection. thus the protestant reformation had closed the monasteries, which were the poor man's inns, in the name of a purer religion; the economists had taken away his land and driven him into the factories with a promise of future wealth and prosperity. these had been the experts of their day. now the new experts were telling him with equal eagerness that hygienic flats and communal kitchens would bring about for him the new jerusalem. but never did the expert think of asking jones, the ordinary man, what he himself wanted. jones just wanted the "divinely ordinary things"--a house of his own and a family life. and that was still denied him as is related in the chapter called "the homelessness of jones." in a debate in the oxford union, g.k. maintained that the house of lords was a menace to the state, because it failed precisely in what was supposed to be its main function, that of conservation. it had not saved, it had destroyed the church lands and the common lands; it was ready to pass any bill that affected only the lower classes. "we are all socialists now," sir william harcourt had lately said, and chesterton saw that socialism would mean merely further restriction of liberty and continued coercion of the poor by the experts and the rich. so, looking at the past, chesterton desired a restoration which he often called a revolution. there were two forms of government that might succeed--a real monarchy, in which one ordinary man governed many ordinary men--or a real democracy, in which many ordinary men governed themselves. aristocracy may have begun well in england when it was an army protecting england: when the duke was a dux. now it was merely plutocracy and it had become "an army without an enemy billeted on the people." all this and more formed the background of chesterton's mind. but what he wrote was a comment on the scene, not a picture of it. he wrote of the terrible irony whereby "the commons were enclosing the commons." he spoke of the english revolution of the eighteenth century, "a revolution of the rich against the poor." he mourned with goldsmith the destruction of england's peasantry. he cried aloud like cobbett, for he too had discovered the murder of england his mother. but his cry was unintelligible and his hopes of a resurrection unmeaning to those who knew not what had been done to death. chapter xviii the eye witness the publication of _what's wrong with the world_ brings us to 1910. gilbert had, as we have seen, originally intended to call the book _what's wrong?_ laying some emphasis on the note of interrogation. it amused him to perplex the casual visitor by going off to his study with the muttered remark: "i must get on with what's wrong." the change of name and the omission of the note of interrogation (both changes the act of his publishers) represented a certain loss, for indeed gilbert was still asking himself what was wrong when he was writing this book, although he was very certain what was right--his ideals were really a clear picture of health. his doubts about the achievement of those ideals in the present world and with his present political allegiance were, as he suggests in the _autobiography_, vague but becoming more definite. did this mean that he ever looked hopefully towards the other big division of the english political scene--the tory or conservative party to which his brother had once declared he belonged without knowing it? that would be a simpler story than what really happened in his mind--and i confess that i am myself sufficiently vague and doubtful about part of what the chesterbelloc believed they were discovering, to find it a little difficult to describe it clearly. cecil chesterton and belloc set down their views in a book called _the party system_. gilbert made his clear in letters to the liberal press. the english party system had often enough been attacked for its obvious defects and indeed the _new witness's_ even livelier contemporary _john bull_ was shouting for its abolition. but belloc and cecil chesterton had their own line. their general thesis was that not only did the people of england not govern, parliament did not govern either. the cabinet governed and it was chosen by the real rulers of the party. for each party was run by an oligarchy, and run roughly on the same lines. lists were given of families whose brothers-in-law and cousins (though not yet their sisters and their aunts) found place in the ministry of one or other political party. moreover, the governing families on both sides were in many cases connected by birth or marriage and all belonged to the same social set. but money too was useful: men could buy their way in. each party had a fund, and those who could contribute largely had of necessity an influence on party policy. the existent liberal government had brought to a totally new peak the art of swelling its fund by the sale of titles: which in many instances meant the sale of hereditary governing powers, since those higher titles which carry with them a seat in the house of lords were sold like the others, at a higher rate naturally. for the rank and file member, a political career no longer meant the chance for talents and courage to win recognition in an open field. a man who believed that his first duty was to represent his constituents stood no chance of advancement. certainly a private member could not introduce a bill as his own and get it debated on its merits. none of this was new, though the book did it rather exceptionally well. what was new was the theory that the two party oligarchies were secretly one, that the fights between the parties were little more than sham fights. the ordinary party member was unaware of this secret conspiracy between the leaders and would obey the call of the party whip and accept a sort of military discipline with the genuine belief that the defeat of his party would mean disaster to his country. belloc had discovered for himself the impotence of the private member. he had, as we have seen, been elected to parliament by south salford in 1906 as a liberal. in parliament he proposed a measure for the publication of the names of subscribers to the party funds. naturally enough the proposal got nowhere. also naturally enough the party funds were not forthcoming to support him at the next election. he fought and won the seat as an independent. at the second election of 1910 he declined to stand, having lucidly explained to the house of commons in a final speech that a seat there was of no value under the existing system. thus belloc's own experience, and a thousand other things, went to prove the stranglehold the rulers of the party had on the party. but did it prove, or did the book establish, the theory of a behind-scenes conspiracy between the small groups who controlled each of the great historical parties, which was the theme not only of _the party system_ but also of belloc's brilliant political novels-notably _mr. clutterbuck's election_ and _pongo and the bull?_ of the stranglehold there was no doubt and gilbert soon found it too much for his own allegiance to the liberal party or any other. at the election of 1910, he addressed a liberal meeting at beaconsfield and dealt vigorously with constant tory questions and interjections from the back of the hall. he obviously enjoyed the fight and a little later he spoke for the "league of young liberals" and was photographed standing at the back of their van. but although he went to london to vote for john burns in battersea and would probably have continued to vote liberal or labour, he showed at a women's suffrage meeting in 1911 a growing scepticism about the value of the vote. he was reported as saying, "if i voted for john burns now, i should not be voting for anything at all (laughter)." it must have been irritating that this interpolation "laughter" was liable to occur when chesterton was most serious; he did not change quickly but in the alteration of his outlook towards his party, his growing doubt whether it stood for any real values, he was very serious. in the years that followed the coming into power of liberalism there were a multitude of acts described as of little importance and passed into law after little or no discussion. at the same time, private members complained that they could get no attention for really urgent matters of social reform. the _nation_, as a party paper, defended the state of things and talked of official business and of want of time. their attitude was vigorously attacked by gilbert, whose first letter (jan. 17, 1911) ended with this paragraph: who ever dreamed of getting "perfect freedom and fulness of discussion" except in heaven? the case urged against cabinets is that we have no freedom and no discussion, except that laid down despotically by a few men on front benches. your assurance that parliament is very busy is utterly vain. it is busy on things the dictators direct. that small men and small questions get squeezed out among big ones, that is a normal disaster. with us, on the contrary, it is the big questions that get squeezed out. the party was not allowed really to attack the south african war, for fear it should alienate mr. asquith. it was not allowed to object to mr. herbert gladstone (or is it lord gladstone? this blaze of democracy blinds one) when he sought to abolish the habeas corpus act, and leave the poorer sort of pickpockets permanently at the caprice of their jailers. parliament is busy on the aristocratic fads; and mankind must mark time with a million stamping feet, while mr. herbert samuel searches a gutter-boy for cigarettes. that is what you call the congestion of parliament. the editor of the _nation_ was so rash as to append to this letter the words, "we must be stupid for we have no idea what mr. chesterton means." this was too good an opening to be lost. g.k. returned to the charge and i feel that this correspondence is so important in various ways that the next two letters should be given in full. sir, in a note to my last week's letter you remark, "we must be stupid; but we have no idea what mr. chesterton means." as an old friend i can assure you that you are by no means stupid; some other explanation of this unnatural darkness must be found; and i find it in the effect of that official party phraseology which i attack, and which i am by no means alone in attacking. if i had talked about "true imperialism," or "our loyalty to our gallant leader," you might have thought you knew what i meant; because i meant nothing. but i do mean something; and i do want you to understand what i mean. i will, therefore, state it with total dullness, in separate paragraphs; and i will number them. (1) i say a democracy means a state where the citizens first desire something and then get it. that is surely simple. (2) i say that where this is deflected by the disadvantage of representation, it means that the citizens desire a thing and tell the representatives to get it. i trust i make myself clear. (3) the representatives, in order to get it at all, must have some control over detail; but the design must come from popular desire. have we got that down? (4) you, i understand, hold that english m. p.s today do thus obey the public in design, varying only in detail. that is a quite clear contention. (5) i say they don't. tell me if i am getting too abstruse. (6) i say our representatives accept designs and desires almost entirely from the cabinet class above them; and practically not at all from the constituents below them. i say the people does not wield a parliament which wields a cabinet. i say the cabinet bullies a timid parliament which bullies a bewildered people. is that plain? (7) if you ask why the people endure and play this game, i say they play it as they would play the official games of any despotism or aristocracy. the average englishman puts his cross on a ballot-paper as he takes off his hat to the king--and would take it off if there were no ballot-papers. there is no democracy in the business. is that definite? (8) if you ask why we have thus lost democracy, i say from two causes; (a) the omnipotence of an unelected body, the cabinet; (b) the party system, which turns all politics into a game like the boat race. is that all right? (9) if you want examples i could give you scores. i say the people did not cry out that all children whose parents lunch on cheese and beer in an inn should be left out in the rain. i say the people did not demand that a man's sentence should be settled by his jailers instead of by his judges. i say these things came from a rich group, not only without any evidence, but really without any pretence, that they were popular. i say the people hardly heard of them at the polls. but here i do not need to give examples, but merely to say what i mean. surely i have said it now. yours, g. k. chesterton. january 26th, 1911. _editor's note_. mr. chesterton is precise enough now, but he is precisely wrong. there are grains of truth in his premises, a bushel of exaggeration in his conclusions. we have not "lost democracy"; the two instances which he alleges, both of which we dislike, are too small to prove so large a case. to this g. k. replied: sir, i want to thank you for printing my letters, and especially for your last important comment, in which you say that the crimes and children's acts were bad, but are "too small" to support a charge of undemocracy. and i want to ask you one last question, which is the question. why do you think of these things as small? they are really enormous. one alters the daily habits of millions of people; the other destroys the public law of thousands of years. what can be more fundamental than food, drink, and children? what can be more catastrophic than putting us back in the primal anarchy, in which a man was flung into a dungeon and left there "till he listened to reason?" there has been no such overturn in european ethics since constantine proclaimed the cross. why do you think of these things as small? i will tell you. unconsciously, no doubt, but simply and solely because the front benches did not announce them as big. they were not "first-class measures"; they were not "full-dress debates." the governing class got them through in the quick, quiet, secondary way in which they pass things that the people positively detests; not in the pompous, lengthy, oratorical way in which they present measures that the people merely bets on, as it might on a new horse. a "first-class measure" means, for instance, tinkering for months at some tottery compromise about a religious education that doesn't exist. the reason is simple. "sound church teaching" and "dogmatic christianity" both happen to be hobbies in the class from which cabinets come. but going to public-houses and going to prison are both habits with which that class is, unfortunately, quite unfamiliar. it is ready, therefore, at a stroke of the pen, to bring all folly into the taverns and all injustice into the jails. yours, g. k. chesterton. february 2nd, 1911. it was not only in the _nation_ that such letters as these appeared. "we can't write in every paper at once," runs a letter in the _new age_. "we do our best." ("we" meant gilbert, cecil and hilaire belloc.) and g.k. goes on to answer four questions which have been put by a correspondent signing himself, "political journalist." first, in whose eyes but ours has the party system lost credit? i say in nearly everybody's. if this were a free country, i could mention offhand a score of men within a stone's throw; an innkeeper, a doctor, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a civil servant. as it is, i may put it this way. in a large debating society i proposed to attack the party system, and for a long time i could not get an opposer. at last, i got one. he defended the party system on the ground that people must be bamboozled more or less. second, he asks if the party system does not govern the country to the content of most citizens. i answer that englishmen are happy under the party system solely and exactly as romans were happy under nero. that is, not because government was good, but because life is good, even without good government. nero's slaves enjoyed italy, not nero. modern englishmen enjoy england but certainly not the british constitution. the legislation is detested, wherever it is even felt. the other day a cambridge don complained that, when out bicycling with his boys, he had to leave them in the rain while he drank a glass of cider. count the whole series of human souls between a costermonger and a cambridge don, and you will see a nation in mutiny. third, "what substitute, etc., etc." here again, the answer is simple and indeed traditional. i suggest we should do what was always suggested in the riddles and revolutions of the recent centuries. in the seventeenth century phrase, i suggest that we should "call a free parliament!" fourth, "is democracy compatible with parliamentary government?" god forbid. is god compatible with church government? why should he be? it is the other things that have to be compatible with god. a church can only be a humble effort to utter god. a parliament can only be a humble effort to express man. but for all that, there is a deal of commonsense left in the world, and people do know when priests or politicians are honestly trying to express a mystery--and when they are only taking advantage of an ambiguity. g. k. chesterton. encouraged by the excitement that had attended the publication of _the party system_ its authors decided to attempt a newspaper of their own. this paper is still in existence but it has in the course of its history appeared under four different titles. to avoid later confusion i had better set these down at the outset. the eye witness, june 1911-october 1912 the new witness, november 1912-may 1923 g. k.'s weekly, 1925-1936 the weekly review, 1936 till today during the first year of its existence the _eye witness_ was edited by belloc. cecil chesterton took over the editorship after a short interregnum during which he was assistant editor. charles granville had financed it. when he went bankrupt the title was altered to _the new witness_. when cecil joined the army in 1916, g.k. became editor. in 1923 the paper died, but two years later rose again under the title, _g.k.'s weekly_. after gilbert's own death belloc took it back. today, as _the weekly review_, it is edited by reginald jebb, belloc's son-in-law. with all these changes of name, the continuity of the paper is unmistakable. its main aim may be roughly defined under two headings. 1. to fight for the liberty of englishmen against increasing enslavement to a plutocracy. 2. to expose and combat corruption in public life. the fight for liberty appears in the letters quoted above in the form of an attack on certain bills: belloc unified and defined it with real genius in the articles which became two of his most important books: _the servile state_ and _the restoration of property_. if these two books be set beside chesterton's _what's wrong with the world_ and _the outline of sanity_ the chesterbelloc sociology stands complete. in his _cobbett_, g.k. was later to emphasise the genius with which cobbett saw the england of today a hundred years before it was there to be seen. belloc in the same way saw both what was coming and the way in which it was coming. especially far-sighted was his attitude to lloyd george's compulsory health insurance act. it was the first act of the kind in england and the scheme in outline was: every week every employed person must have a stamp stuck on a card by his employer, of which he paid slightly less and the employer slightly more than half the cost. the money thus saved gave the insured person free medical treatment and a certain weekly sum during the period of illness. agricultural labourers were omitted from the act and a ferment raged on the question of domestic servants, who were eventually included in its operation. it was practically acknowledged that this was done to make the act more workable financially. for domestic servants were an especially healthy class and, moreover, in most upper and middle-class households they were already attended by the family doctor without cost to themselves. the company in which the _eye witness_ found itself in opposing this act was indeed a case of "strange bedfellows." for the opposition was led by the conservatives (on the ground that the act was socialism). many a mistress and many a maid did i hear in those days in good conservative homes declaring they would rather go to prison than "lick lloyd george's stamps." most liberals, on the other hand, regarded the act as an example of enlightened legislation for the benefit of the poor. the _eye witness_ saw in it the arrival of the servile state. their main objections cut deep. as with compulsory education, but in much more far-reaching fashion, this act took away the liberty and the personal responsibilities of the poor--and in doing so put them into a category--forever ticketed and labelled, separated from the other part of the nation. as people for whom everything had to be done, they were increasingly at the mercy of their employers, of government inspectors, of philanthropic societies, increasingly slaves. what was meant by the servile state? it was, said belloc, an "arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labour." it was, quite simply, the return of slavery as the condition of the poor: and the chesterbelloc did not think, then or ever, that any increase of comfort or security was a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty. in a section of the paper called "lex versus the poor" the editor made a point of collecting instances of oppression. a series of articles attacked the mentally deficient bill whereby poor parents could have their children taken from them--those children who most needed them and whom they often loved and clung to above the others, and a jewish contributor to the paper, dr. eder, pointed out in admirable letters how divided was the medical profession itself on what constituted mental deficiency and whether family life was not far more likely to develop the mind than segregation with other deficients in an institution. to the official harriers of the poor were added further inspectors sent by such societies as the national society for the prevention of cruelty to children. cruelty to children, as gilbert often pointed out, is a horrible thing, but very seldom proved of parents against their own children. the word was stretched to cover anything that these inspectors called neglect. lately we have read of a case, and many like it were reported in the _new witness_, where failure to wash children adequately was called cruelty. and what was the remedy? to take away the father, the breadwinner, to prison. for insufficient food and clothes to substitute destitution, for insufficient care to remove the only one the children had to care for them at all: always to break up the family. worst of all was the question of school attendance: while a child of three was dying of starvation, the mother was at the police court where she was fined for not sending an older child to school. as she could not pay the fine her husband was sent to prison for a week. a child died of consumption. the parents said at the inquest they had not dared to keep her at home when she got sick, for fear of the school inspector. as he had in _what's wrong with the world_ been fired by the thought of the landless poor of england, so now these stories stirred gilbert deeply. he saw the philanthropists like the pharisees, unheeding the wisdom learned by the wise men at bethlehem: saw them with their busy pencils peering at the mother's omissions while the vast crimes of the state went unchallenged. he wrote a poem called "the neglected child" and "dedicated in a glow of christian charity to a philanthropic society." the teachers in the temple they did not lift their eyes for the blazing star on bethlehem or the wise men grown wise. they heeded jot and tittle, they heeded not a jot the rending voice in ramah and the children that were not. or how the panic of the poor choked all the fields with flight, or how the red sword of the rich ran ravening through the night. they made their notes; while naked and monstrous and obscene a tyrant bathed in all the blood of men that might have been. but they did chide our lady and tax her for this thing, that she had lost him for a time and sought him sorrowing. to most of the _eye witness_ group the fight for freedom was so bound up with the fight against corruption that all was but one fight. i think that when they looked back they were too much inclined to see the shadow of lloyd george behind them as well as around them: that in fact the liberal party of those years had brought with it a new descent in political decency--a descent which would have startled both gladstone and the more cynical disraeli. of this more when we come to marconi. meanwhile there was certainly a whole lot to fight about and the group responsible for the _witness_, not content with the pen, formed a society entitled "the league for clean government," with mr. john scurr as secretary. this league specialised in promoting the candidature of independent members of parliament for such vacancies as occurred between general elections, and in attacking party "place men." doubtless other elements were present at some of these by-elections but the league boasted its success on several occasions, notably in the three defeats sustained by c. f. g. masterman. charles masterman had been with gilbert and cecil chesterton a member of the group of young christian socialists that drew its inspiration in great part from canon scott holland. he had gone further than most of them in his practical sympathy and understanding for the destitute. with a friend he had taken a workman's flat in the slums and he had written a somewhat florid but very moving book recording conditions experienced as well as observed. he was one of the young liberals who entered parliament full of ardour to fight the battles of the poor. the sequel as they saw it may best be told by belloc and cecil chesterton themselves. in _the party system_ they wrote: . . . mr. masterman entered parliament as a liberal of independent views. during his first two years in the house he distinguished himself as a critic of the liberal ministry. he criticised their education bill. he criticised with especial force the policy of mr. john burns at the local government board. his conduct attracted the notice of the leaders of the party. he was offered office, accepted it, and since then has been silent, except for an occasional rhetorical exercise in defence of the government. one fact will be sufficient to emphasise the change. on march 13th, 1908, mr. masterman voted for the right to work bill of the labour party. in may of the same year he accepted a place with a salary of â£1200 a year--it has since risen to â£1500. on april 20th, 1909, he voted, at the bidding of the party whips, against the same bill which he had voted for in the previous year. yet this remarkable example of the "peril of change"* does not apparently create any indignation or even astonishment in the political world which mr. masterman adorns. on the contrary, he seems to be generally regarded as a politician of exceptionally high ideals. no better instance need be recorded of the peculiar atmosphere it is the business of these pages to describe. [* the title of one of masterman's books was _in peril of change_.] at the succeeding general election, masterman was not re-elected. and he failed again in a couple of by-elections. in all these elections, the league for clean government campaigned fiercely against him. there was certainly in the feeling of belloc and cecil chesterton towards masterman a great deal of the bitterness that moved browning to write, "just for a handful of silver he left us," and i do not think there is anything in the history of the paper that created so strong a feeling against it in certain minds. there seemed something peculiarly ungenerous in the continued attacks after a series of defeats, in the insistence with which masterman's name was dragged in, always accompanied by sneers. replying to a remonstrance to this effect, cecil chesterton, then editor of the _new witness_, stated that in his considered opinion it was a duty to make a successful career impossible to any man convicted of selling his principles for success. i dwell on this matter of masterman for two reasons. the first is that it was one of the rare occasions on which gilbert chesterton disagreed with his brother and belloc. gilbert was a very faithful friend: it would be hard to find a broken friendship in his life. he had moreover much of the power that aroused his enthusiasm in browning of going into the depths of a character and discovering the virtue concealed there. and as with browning his explanation took account of elements that really existed but could find no place in a more narrowly adverse view. "many of my own best friends," he wrote of masterman, "entirely misunderstood and underrated him. it is true that as he rose higher in politics, the veil of the politician began to descend a little on him also; but he became a politician from the noblest bitterness on behalf of the poor; and what was blamed in him was the fault of much more ignoble men. . . . but he was also an organiser and liked governing; only his pessimism made him think that government had always been bad, and was now no worse than usual. therefore, to men on fire for reform, he came to seem an obstacle and an official apologist." after g.k. became editor of the _new witness_ the attacks on masterman ceased, but he did not differ from the two earlier editors in his views on the ethics of political action or the principles of social reform. the second reason for which the masterman matter must be dwelt on is because it affords the best illustration of one curious fact in connection with the _eye_ and _new witness_ campaign. when the _life of masterman_ recently appeared i seized it eagerly that i might read an authoritative defence of his position. i searched the index under _eye witness, new witness, cecil chesterton_ and _league for clean government_. no one of them was mentioned. at last i discovered under _belloc_ and _scurr_ a faint allusion to their activities at a by-election in which belloc was coupled with the protestant alliance leader kensit as part of a contemptible opposition, and the unnamed league for clean government described as "those working with mr. scurr"! clearly where it is possible to use against something powerful the weapon of ignoring it as though it were something obscure, that weapon is itself a powerful one. against the _new witness_ it was used perpetually. a paper which included among its contributors hilaire belloc, g. k. chesterton, j. s. phillimore, e. c. bentley, wells, shaw, katharine tynan, desmond mccarthy, f. y. eccles, g. s. street--to name only those who come first to mind--obviously stood high. cecil chesterton's own editorials, hugh o'donnell's picturesque series _twenty years after_, the high level of the reviewing and (oddly enough, considering the paper's outlook) the financial articles of raymond radclyffe, were all outstanding. the sales (at sixpence) were never enormous but the readers were on a high cultural level. the correspondence pages are always interesting. the _eye witness_ group, besides courage, had high spirits and they had wit. "capulet's" rhymes; the series of ballades written by baring, bentley, phillimore, belloc and g.k.c.; "mrs. markham's history" written by belloc; there was little of this quality in the other weeklies. side by side with the serious attacks was a line of satire and of sheer fooling. the silver deal in india was being attacked in the editorials, while mrs. markham explained to tommy how good, kind lord swaythling, really a samuel, had lent money to his brother mr. montague (another samuel) for the benefit of the poor people of india. the next week tommy and rachel grew enthusiastic about the kindness of lord swaythling in _borrowing_ money that the indian government could not use. mrs. markham too made rachel take a pencil and write out a list of samuels including the postmaster-general, now so busy over the marconi case. the next lesson was about titles. then came one about policemen, and finally about company promoters and investments. how a promoter guesses there is oil somewhere, how money is lent to dig for it ("but, mamma! how can money dig?"), how the company promoter may find no oil, how if they think he has cheated them the rich men who lent their money can have him tried by twelve good men and true--(_tommy:_ "how do they know the men are good and true, mamma?" _mrs. m.:_ "they do this by taking them in alphabetical order out of a list."). perhaps the combination of irony thinly veiling intensity of purpose, with humour sometimes degenerating into wild fooling, damned them in the eyes of many. but there was a more serious obstacle to the real effectiveness they might otherwise have had. when it was unavoidable to name the _new witness_ its opponents referred to it as though to a "rag." why was this possible? principally i think because of the violence of its language. most parliamentary matters to which it made reference were spoken of as instances of "foul" corruption or "dirty" business. transactions by ministers were said to "stink," while the ministers themselves were described as carrying off or distributing "swag" and "boodle." in vol. ii of the _eye witness_, for instance, we find the "game of boodle," "dirty trick," "keep your eye on the railway bill: you are going to be fleeced," and "stunt" and "ramp" _passim_. mr. lloyd george and sir rufus isaacs are always called "george" and "isaacs." the general of the salvation army is invariably "old booth," while in the headlines the word "scandal" constantly recurs. even admirers were at times like fox's followers who groaned "what a passion he was in tonight! men in a passion must be in the wrong and heavens how dangerous when they're built so strong." thus the great whig amid immense applause scared off his clients and bawled down his cause, undid reform by lauding revolution till cobblers cried "god save the constitution." chapter xix marconi in his _autobiography_ gilbert chesterton has set down his belief that the marconi scandal will be seen by historians as a landmark in english history. to him personally the revelations produced by it were a great shock and gave the death-blow to all that still lingered of his belief in the liberal party. for the rest of his life it may almost be called an obsession with him. in his eyes it was so great a landmark that as others spoke of events as preor post-war, he divided the political history of england into preand post-marconi. it meant as much for his political outlook as the enclosures for his social. it is necessary to know what happened in the marconi case if we are to understand a most important element in chesterton's mental history. the difficulty is to know what did happen. the main lines of a very complicated bit of history have never, so far as i know, been disentangled by anyone whose only interest was to disentangle them: and the partisans have naturally tangled them more. i wrote a draft chapter after reading the two thousand page report of the parliamentary committee, the six hundred page report of cecil chesterton's trial, and masses of contemporary journalism. then, in the circumstances i have related in the introduction, i called in my husband's aid. the rest of this chapter is mainly his. i. what the ministers did the imperial conference of 1911 had approved the plan of a chain of state-owned wireless stations to be erected throughout the british empire. the post office--mr. herbert samuel being the postmaster-general--was instructed to put the matter in hand. after consideration of competing systems, the marconi was chosen. the marconi wireless telegraph co. of london--of which mr. godfrey isaacs was managing director--was asked to tender for the work. its tender was accepted on march 7, 1912. the main terms of the tender were as follows: the company was to erect stations in various parts of the empire at a cost to the government of â£60,000 per station; these were then to be operated by the governments of the united kingdom and the dominions and colonies concerned; and the marconi company was to receive 10% of the gross receipts. the agreement was for 28 years, though the postmaster-general might terminate it at the end of eighteen years. but there was one further clause (clause 10) allowing for termination _at any time_ if the government should find it advantageous to use a different system. the acceptance of this tender was only the first stage. a contract had to be drawn up, and nothing would be finalised till this contract had been accepted by parliament. in fact the contract was not completed till july 19. on that day it was placed on the table of the house of commons. for the understanding of the marconi case, the vital period is the four months of 1912 between march 7, when the tender was accepted, and july 19 when the contract was tabled. let us concentrate upon that four-month period. the postmaster-general issued no statement whatever on the matter but on march 8 the company sent out a circular to its shareholders telling them the good news--but making the news look even better than it was by omitting all reference to clause 10, which entitled the government to substitute some rival system at any time it pleased. the postmaster-general issued no correction because, as he said later, he had not been aware of the omission. immediately after, godfrey isaacs left for america to consider the affairs of the american marconi company, capitalised at $1,600,000, of which he was a director. more than half its shares were owned by the english company. on behalf of the english company he bought up the rights of the american company's principal rival, and then sold these rights (at a profit not stated but apparently very considerable) to the american company for $1,400,000. to handle all this and allow for vast developments hoped for from this purchase and from a very favourable agreement godfrey isaacs had negotiated with western union, the american company was to be re-organized as a $10,000,000 company--two million shares at $5 each. the american company--whose own repute in america was too low for any hope of raising money on that scale from the american public--seems to have agreed to the godfrey isaacs plan only on condition that the english company should guarantee the subscription; and godfrey isaacs made himself personally responsible for placing 500,000 shares. (it should be remembered that the pound was then worth just under five dollars: a $5 share was worth â£1.1.3, or â£1 1/16 in english money.) godfrey isaacs returned to england. on april 9 he lunched with his brothers harry and rufus--rufus being attorney-general in the british government. he told them of the arrangements he had made--arrangements which were not yet made known to the public--and of the new stock about to be issued, and offered them 100,000 shares, out of the 500,000 for which he had made himself responsible, at the face value of â£1.1.3. rufus refused--one reason for his refusal being that the shares were not a good "buy," as the prospects of the company did not warrant so large a new issue of capital. harry took 50,000. we now come to the transactions which the public was later to lump together rather crudely as "ministers gambling in marconis." a. on april 17--roughly a week after the luncheon--rufus isaacs bought 10,000 of harry's shares at â£2. he made the point later that buying from godfrey would have been improper as godfrey was director of a company with which the government was negotiating, but that it was all right to buy from harry who had bought from godfrey. (harry having paid only â£1.1.3 was willing to let rufus have them for the same price. but rufus thought it only fair to pay the higher price. this is all the more remarkable because only a week earlier he had thought these same shares bad value at roughly half the price he was now prepared to pay.) of his 10,000 shares, rufus immediately sold 1000 to the chancellor of the exchequer, david lloyd george, and 1000 to the master of elibank, who was chief whip of the liberal party then in office. it is to be noted that no money passed at this time in any of those transactions: rufus did not pay harry, lloyd george and elibank did not pay rufus. nor did the shares pass. indeed the shares did not as yet exist, as it was not till the next day, april 18, that the american marconi company authorised the issue of the new capital. on the day after that, april 19, the shares were put on the market at â£3.5.0. that same day they rose to â£4. in the course of the day rufus isaacs sold 700 shares at an average price of â£3.6.6, which on the face of it looks like clearing â£3000 more than he had paid for all his shares and still having 3000 shares left. but he explained later that there had been pooling arrangements between himself and his brother, and himself and his two friends: so that the upshot of his day's transactions was that he had sold 2856 of his own shares, and 357 each for lloyd george and elibank.* the triumvirate therefore still had 6430 shares of which 1286 belonged to lloyd george and elibank. [* rufus' explanation boils down to this: he and harry had arranged that whatever either sold in the course of the day should be totalled and divided in the proportion of their holdings. rufus sold 7000 shares, harry 10,850: a total of 17,850. rufus had taken 1/5 of harry's 50,000 shares, so one-fifth of the shares sold were allotted as his--i.e. 3570. lloyd george and elibank had each taken 1/10 of rufus', therefore each was considered to have sold 357.] on april 20 these two sold a further 1000 of their 1286 shares at â£3.5/32. b. on may 22 lloyd george and elibank bought 3000 more shares at â£2.5/32. as they were not due to deliver the shares previously sold by them at â£3.6.6 and â£3.5/32 till june 20, this new purchase had something of the look of a "bear" transaction. c. in april and may the master of elibank bought 3000 shares for the account of the liberal party, of whose funds he had charge. these three transactions are all that the three politicians ever admitted, and nothing more was ever proved against them. as we have seen there was no documentary evidence of the principal transaction (the one i have called a), except that rufus sold 7000 shares on april 19. in his acquiring of the shares, no broker was employed. rufus did not pay harry for the shares until january 6, 1913, some nine months later, when the enquiry was already on. there was no evidence other than his own word that 10,000 was the number he had agreed to take or â£2 the price that he had agreed to pay, or that he had bought from harry and not from godfrey, or that of the 7000 shares he had certainly sold at a huge profit on april 19 half were sold for harry. there was, indeed, no evidence that the shares were not a gift. even on what they admitted, they had obviously acted improperly. the contract with the english marconi company was not yet completed, parliament had not been informed of its terms, parliament therefore had yet to decide whether it would accept or reject it. three members of parliament had committed two grave improprieties: (1) they had purchased shares--directly or at one remove--from the managing director of a company seeking a contract from parliament, in circumstances that were practically equivalent to receiving a gift of money from him. they received shares which the general public could not have bought till two days later and then only at over 50% more than the politicians paid.* (on this count, the fact that the shares were american marconis made no difference: the point is that they were valuable shares sold to ministers at a special low price. this need not have been bribery, but it is a fact that one way of bribing a man is to buy something from him at more than it is worth, or sell something to him at less than it is worth.) [* h. t. campbell of bullett, campbell & grenfell, the english marconi company's official brokers, gave evidence before the parliamentary committee that it would have been impossible for the general public to buy the shares before april 19. and as we have seen, they opened on that day at â£3.5.0.] (2) they--and through the chief whip's action the whole liberal party, though it did not know it--were financially interested in the acceptance by parliament of the contract. for though they had not bought shares in the english company (with which the contract was being made) but with the american company (which had no direct interest in the contract), none the less it would have lowered the value of the american shares if the british parliament had rejected the marconi system and chosen some other in preference. i may say at once that i feel no certainty that the transaction was a sinister effort to bribe ministers. but had it been, exactly the right ministers were chosen. they were the chancellor of the exchequer, who has charge of the nation's purse; the attorney-general, who advises upon the legality of actions proposed; the chief whip, who takes the party forces into the voting lobby. it was this same chief whip, the master of elibank, that had carried the sale of honours to a new height in his devotion to the increase of his party's funds. ii. the parliamentary enquiry on july 19, 1912, the contract was put on the table of the house of commons. in the ordinary course it would have come up for a vote some time before the end of the parliamentary session. but criticism of the contract was growing on the ground that it was too favourable to the marconi company. and rumours were flying that members of the government had been gambling in marconi shares (which, as we have seen, they had, though not in english marconis). even before the tabling of the contract, members of parliament, notably major archer-shee, a conservative, had been harrying mr. herbert samuel, the postmaster-general. on july 20, and in weekly articles following, it was attacked as a thoroughly bad contract by a writer in the _outlook_, mr. w. r. lawson. on august 1, a labour member asked a question in the house about the rising price of marconis. the feeling that enquiry was needed was so strong that on august 6, the last day but one of the session, the prime minister (who knew something of his colleagues' purchase of marconis but never mentioned it) promised the house that the marconi agreement would not be rushed through without full discussion. in spite of this herbert samuel* and elibank both tried hard to get the contract approved that day or the next. when it was quite clear that parliament would not allow this, herbert samuel insisted on making a general statement on the contract. he too knew of the ministers' dealings in american marconis, but did not mention them. there was no debate or division. the question of ratification or rejection was postponed till the house should meet again in october. [* the argument he put to major archer-shee, m.p. was that the stations were urgently needed for imperial defence.] on august 8, cecil chesterton's paper the _new witness_ launched its first attack on the whole deal (though without reference to ministerial gambling in marconis) under the headline "the marconi scandal": isaacs' brother is chairman of the marconi company. it has therefore been secretly arranged between isaacs and samuel that the british people shall give the marconi company a very large sum of money through the agency of the said samuel, and for the benefit of the said isaacs. incidentally, the monopoly that is about to be granted to isaacs no. 2, through the ardent charity of isaacs no. 1 and his colleague the postmaster-general, is a monopoly involving antiquated methods, the refusal of competing tenders far cheaper and far more efficient, and the saddling of this country with corruptly purchased goods, which happen to be inferior goods. the article went on to say that these "swindles" were apt to occur in any country, but that england alone lacked the will to punish them: "it is the lack of even a minimum standard of honour urging even honest men to protest against such villainy that has brought us where we are." in september l. j. maxse's _national review_ had a criticism of the contract by major archer-shee, m.p., with editorial comment as well. in the same month the _morning post_ and the _spectator_ pressed for further enquiry. the october number of the _national review_ contained a searching criticism of the whole business and called special attention to the stock exchange gamble in american marconis. a few days later--on october 11--the re-assembled house of commons held the promised debate. in the light of what we know, it is fascinating to read how nobody told a lie exactly and the truth was concealed all the same. here is sir rufus isaacs. he begins by formulating the rumours against mr. herbert samuel and mr. lloyd george and himself. but he is careful to formulate them in such a way that he can truthfully deny them. the rumours, he says, were that the ministers had dealt in the shares of a company with which the government was negotiating a contract: "never from the beginning . . . have i had one single transaction with the shares of that company." literally true, as you see. the contract was with the english company, the shares he had bought were in the american company. he made no allusion to that purchase. mr. herbert samuel--who is not accused of having purchased shares himself but who knew of what his colleagues had done--treads the same careful line: "i say that these stories that members of the cabinet, knowing the contract was in contemplation, and feeling that possibly the price of shares might rise, themselves, directly or indirectly bought any of those shares, or took any interest in this company through any other party whatever, have not one syllable of truth in them. neither i myself nor any of my colleagues have at any time held one shilling's worth of shares in this company, directly or indirectly, or have derived one penny profit from the fluctuations in their prices." however, he promised a parliamentary committee to enquire into the whole affair. isaacs had denied any transactions with "that company," samuel with "this company." neither had ventured to say "the english company"--for that would instantly have raised the question of the american company. it is an odd truth that has to be phrased so delicately. lloyd george, the first of the ministers to speak, managed better. he flew into a rage with an interjector: "the hon. member said something about the government, and he has talked about 'rumours.' i want to know what these rumours are. if the hon. gentleman has any charge to make against the government as a whole, or against individual members of it, i think it ought to be stated openly. the reason why the government wanted _a frank discussion before going to committee_* was because we wanted to bring here these rumours, these sinister rumours, that have been passing from one foul lip to another behind the backs of the house." he sat down, still in a white heat, without having denied anything. [* italics mine.] the master of elibank did not deny anything either. he was not there. he was, indeed, no longer in the house of commons. he had inherited the title of lord murray of elibank. he had left england in august and did not return till the enquiry was over: nor did he send any communication of any sort. as we have seen, no literal lie was told. but parliament and the country assumed that the ministers had denied any gambling in marconis of any sort. and the ministers must have known that this was what their denials had been taken to mean.* [* rufus isaacs' son mentions a theory held by some (though he thinks there are strong arguments against it) that rufus' silence was due to instructions from the prime minister, mr. asquith, who was not anxious to have the connection of lloyd george with the matter disclosed, "fearing that his personal unpopularity would lead to such an exacerbation of the attacks that the prestige of the whole government might be seriously impaired." (_rufus isaacs, first marquess of reading_, pp. 248-9.)] on october 29 the names were announced of the members appointed to the promised committee of enquiry. as usual they represented the various parties in proportion to their numbers in the house. the liberals were in office, supported by irish nationalists and labour members: 9 members of the committee (including the chairman) were from these parties; 6 were conservatives. one might have expected that the careful evasions in the house would have meant only a brief respite for the ministers who had been so economical of the truth. they would appear before the committee and then the whole thing would emerge. but though the committee was appointed at the end of october and met three times most weeks thereafter, five months went by and no minister was called. the plain fact is that mr. samuel's department, the post office, slanted the enquiry in a different direction right at the start by putting in evidence a confidential blue book and suggesting that sir alexander king, secretary to the post office, be heard first. on the question of the goodness or badness of the contract itself, the committee uncovered much that was interesting. it emerged that the poulsen system had offered to erect stations at a cost of about â£36,000 less per station than the marconi, and that the admiralty itself had estimated a cost, if they were undertaking the work, about the same as the poulsen offer. but, by a confusion as to whether their figure did or did not include freight charges, the admiralty estimate had been put down at â£10,000 higher than it was! nor was this the only confusion. when sir alexander king spoke of "concessions" made to the government by the marconi company, he admitted under cross-questioning that there was no written record of these concessions. he spoke of various vitally important conversations and was not able to produce a minute. letters referred to were found to have been lost from the post office files. further, it appeared that while most rigid tests were to be required of the other systems, the marconi people had been constantly taken almost on their own word alone. "mr. isaacs and mr. marconi both told us," said sir alexander king at one point, when asked whether he had had technical advice on a point of working. "you will excuse me," said mr. harold smith, "if for the moment i ignore the opinion of mr. marconi and mr. isaacs. i ask you who was the expert who gave you this information." then too as to the terms. the government had proposed 3% on the gross takings. godfrey isaacs had held out for 10%, and got it. moreover, the royalty was to be paid as long as a single marconi patent was in use at the stations. considering that by the patents act the government had the legal right to take over _any_ invention while paying reasonable compensation, the provision which gave so high a royalty to the marconi company was severely criticised. again the right was given to the marconi company to advise on any fresh invention that should be offered to the post office--which meant that any invention made by their rivals was entirely at their mercy. naturally enough the question was pressed home whether the post office had really sought the advice of its own technical experts. it transpired that a technical sub-committee had been called once, and had recommended a further investigation of the poulsen system. the report of this sub-committee had been shelved, and the members never summoned for a second meeting. early in january 1913, the parliamentary committee (against the advice of herbert samuel) asked for a special sub-committee of experts to go into the merits of the various wireless systems and report within three months at latest. it is not surprising that the _new witness_ commented on this as "a surrender of the most decided type, for it proposes to do what samuel himself clearly ought to have done before he entered into the contract." the report of this technical sub-committee showed that there had been a good deal of exaggeration in the first attack by the _new witness_ on the worth of the marconi system. if one single system was to be used, it was the only one capable of carrying out the government's requirements. but the sub-committee held that as wireless was in a state of rapid development, it would be better not to be tied to any one system. and they added that while the nature of the contract itself was not within their terms of reference, they must not be held to approve it. from its examination of the contract, the committee passed on to examine journalists and others as to the rumours against ministers. and still the ministers were not called. on february 12, 1913, l. j. maxse, editor of _the national review_, was being examined by the committee. suddenly he put his finger on the precise spot. having expressed surprise at the non-appearance of ministers, he went on: "one might have conceived that they would have appeared at its first sitting clamoring to state in the most categorical and emphatic manner that neither directly nor indirectly, in their own names or in other people's names, have they had any transactions whatsoever, either in london, dublin, new york, brussels, amsterdam, paris, or any other financial centre, in any shares in any marconi company throughout the negotiations with the government. . . ." "any shares in any marconi company": the direct question was at last put. on february 14, just two days later, something very curious happened. _le matin_, a paris daily paper, published a story to the effect that mr. maxse had charged that samuel, rufus isaacs and godfrey isaacs had bought shares in the english marconi company at 50 francs (about â£2 in those days) before the negotiations with the government were started and had resold them at 200 francs (about â£8) when the public learnt that the contract was going through. it was an extraordinary piece of clumsiness for any paper to have printed such a story: certainly mr. maxse had made no such charge. it was an extraordinary stroke of luck, if the ministers wanted to tell their story in court, that they should have this kind of clumsy libel to deny. and it is at least a coincidence that rufus isaacs happened, as his son tells us, to be in paris when _le matin_ printed the story. samuel and rufus isaacs announced that they would prosecute and that sir edward carson and f. e. smith were their counsel. this decision to prosecute a not very important french newspaper, while taking no such step against papers in their own country, caused gilbert chesterton to write a "song of cosmopolitan courage":* [* _new witness_, vol. i, p. 655.] i am so swift to seize affronts, my spirit is so high, whoever has insulted me some foreigner must die. i brought a libel action, for the times had called me "thief," against a paper in bordeaux, a paper called _le juif_. _the nation_ called me "cannibal" i could not let it pass- i got a retractation from a journal in alsace. and when _the morning post_ raked up some murders i'd devised, a polish organ of finance at once apologised. i know the charges varied much; at times, i am afraid _the frankfurt frank_ withdrew a charge the _outlook_ had not made. and what the true injustice of the _standard's_ words had been, was not correctly altered in the _young turk's magazine_. i know it sounds confusing- but as mr. lammle said, the anger of a gentleman is boiling in my head. the hearing of the case against _le matin_ came on march 19. as that paper had withdrawn and apologised only three days after printing the story, there was no actual necessity for statements by rufus isaacs and samuel. but they had decided to answer maxse's question, to admit the dealings in american marconis which they had not mentioned to the house of commons: or rather to get their lawyer to tell the story and then answer his questions on the matter in a court case where there could be no cross-examination because the defendants were not contesting the case. sir edward carson mentioned the american purchase at the end of a long speech and almost as an afterthought-"really the matter is so removed from the charges made in the libel that i only go into it at all . . . because of the position of the attorney-general and because he wishes in the fullest way to state this deal, so that it may not be said that he keeps anything whatsoever back." as _the times_ remarked (9 june, 1913): "the fact was stated casually, as though it had been a matter at once trifling and irrelevant. only persons of the most scrupulous honour, who desired that nothing whatsoever should remain hid would, it was suggested, have thought necessary to mention it at all." the statement was not really as full as carson's phrasing would seem to suggest. the court was told that rufus isaacs had bought 10,000 shares--but not from whom he had bought them: that he had paid market price, but not what the price was, nor that the shares were not on the market: that he had sold 1000 shares each to lloyd george and elibank, and had sold some on their behalf, but not that these two had had further buyings and sellings on their own. it was stated for sir rufus and reiterated by him that he had lost money on the deal--the reason being that while he had gained on the shares sold, the shares he still held had slumped. (it is difficult to see why rufus isaacs and later lloyd george made such a point of the loss on their marconi transactions. they can hardly have bought the shares in order to lose money on them, and their initial sellings showed a very large profit. indeed rufus isaacs' loss depended on his having paid his brother â£2 for the shares, and again upon the 7000 shares he sold on the opening day being only partly on his own behalf, and there is only his own word for these two statements. if rufus lost, he lost to his brother, who had been willing to sell at cost price, with whom he had a pooling arrangement, and who made an enormous profit. if rufus lost, the loss remained in the family.) a week after the hearing of the _matin_ case, rufus isaacs appeared for the first time before the parliamentary committee, almost five months after its formation. his problem was not so much to explain his dealings in american marconis, as to account for his silence in the house of commons. his one desire that day in parliament, it seems, had been to answer the "foul lies" being uttered against him, which he was "quite unable to find any foundation for, quite unable to trace the source of, quite unable to understand how they were started": obviously his dealings in american marconis could have no possible bearing on these rumours, so he did not mention them: "i confined my speech entirely . . . to dealing with the four specific charges _which i formulated."_* [* italics mine.] the chairman, sir albert spicer, suggested that one way to scotch the rumours would have been to mention his investment in american marconis, "because both being marconis you could easily understand one might get confused with the other." this question always drove rufus isaacs into a rage and indeed he met all difficult questions with rages which to this day, across the gulf of thirty years, seem simulated, and not convincingly. why had he not earlier asked the committee to hear the story of the american shares? "i took the view . . . that i had no right to claim any preferential position . . . and it seemed to me that it might almost savour of presumption if i had asked the committee to take my evidence or any minister's evidence, out of the ordinary turn in which the committee desired it." all the same he had once written a letter to the committee asking to be heard but "on consideration did not send it." during his examination the element of strain between the two parties on the committee, which had been evident throughout the enquiry, was very much intensified--lord robert cecil and the conservatives courteously but tenaciously trying to get at the truth, the ministerialists determined to shield their man. there is a most unpleasing contrast between the earlier bullying of the journalists (who after all were not on trial) and the deference the majority now showed to ministers (who were). rufus isaacs twisted and turned incredibly. but he did admit to lord robert cecil that he had obtained the shares before they were available to the general public and at a price lower than that at which they were afterwards introduced to them. he tried later to modify this admission by saying that he had been told of dealings by others before april 17, but he could give no details: and the evidence of the marconi company's broker (quoted above) is decisive. two points of special interest emerged from his evidence. the first was that he had not told the whole story in the _matin_ case. he now mentioned that lloyd george and elibank had sold a further 1000 of the shares he held for them on the second day, july 20; and went on to tell of the purchase of 3000 shares by the same pair, the so-called "bear" transaction of may 22. the second was more unpleasing still. he admitted that he had told the story of the american marconis privately to two friends _on the committee_-messrs. falconer and booth--who had kept the matter to themselves and had--or at least appeared to have--continually steered the committee away from this dangerous ground. rufus isaacs' son actually says that his father "had informed mr. falconer and mr. handel booth privately of these transactions, in order that they might be forearmed when the journalists came to give evidence."* [* _rufus isaacs, first marquess of reading_, p. 256.] on march 28 lloyd george appeared before the committee. mrs. charles masterman gives an account of rufus isaacs grooming lloyd george for the event: there was a really very comic, though somewhat alarming, scene between rufus and george on the following sunday. george had to give evidence on the monday--the following day--and rufus discovered that george was still in a perfect fog as to what his transaction really had been, and began talking about "buying a bear." i have never seen rufus so nearly lose his temper, and george got extremely sulky, while rufus patiently reminded him what he had paid, what he still owed, when he had paid it, who to, and what for. it was on that occasion also that charlie and rufus tried to impress upon him with all the force in their power to avoid technical terms and to stick as closely as possible to the plainest and most ordinary language. _as is well known, george made a great success of his evidence_.* (italics mine.) [* _c. f. g. masterman_, p. 255.] i cannot imagine why she thought so. hugh o'donnell's description in the _new witness_ of isaacs and lloyd george as they appeared before the committee accords perfectly with the impression produced by a reading of the evidence: . . . while the simile of a panther at bay, anxious to escape, but ready with tooth and claw, might be applied to sir rufus isaacs, something more like "a rat in a corner" might be suggested by the restless, snapping, furious little figure which succeeded. let us compromise by saying that mr. lloyd george was singularly like a spitting, angry cat, which had got, perhaps, out of serious danger from her pursuers, but which caterwauled and spat and swore with vigour and venomousness quite surprising in that diminutive bulk. "dastardly," "dishonourable," "disgraceful," "disreputable," "skulking," "cowardly!" asked why he had not mentioned his marconi purchases in the house of commons, lloyd george gave two answers: (1) "there was no time on a friday afternoon" (2) "i could not get up and take time when two ministers had already spoken." why had he not asked to be heard sooner by the committee? he understood that sir rufus had expressed the willingness of all the accused ministers to be heard. like sir rufus, lloyd george mentioned that he had lost money on his marconi transactions. the obstruction within the committee continued to the end. the question had arisen whether godfrey had had the right to sell the shares at his own price or for his own profit. he had sold a considerable number of shares to relations and friends at â£1.1.3, whereas shares were sold to the general public at â£3.5.0. others of his shares he sold on the stock exchange at varying prices, all high. but were the shares his? or did they belong to the english company? if they were his he was entitled to sacrifice vast profits on some by selling at cost to his relations, and to take solid profits on others by selling at what he could get in the open market. but if he was simply selling as an agent of the company, he had no right to make so fantastic a present of one lot of shares and was bound to hand over to the company profits made on the others. he told the committee that the 500,000 shares had been sold to him outright but that he had passed on â£46,000 of profits to the company. he said that a record of this sale of 500,000 shares to him would be found in the minutes of the english company. the books of the company were inspected and it was found that no such minute existed. lord robert cecil naturally wished to recall godfrey isaacs to explain the discrepancy between his statements and the records. the usual 8 to 6 majority decided that there was no need to recall godfrey. it looked rather as if the shares godfrey had sold to harry and harry to rufus at such favourable prices belonged to--and should have been sold for the profit of--the company. on may 7 the committee concluded its hearings and its members were marshalling their ideas for the report. but there was one fact for them and the public still to learn. early in june they were re-called to hear about it. a london stockbroker had absconded: a trustee was appointed to handle his affairs and it was discovered that the fleeing stockbroker had acted for the still absent elibank, had indeed bought american marconis for him--a total of 3000: and as it later appeared, these had been bought for the funds of the liberal party. the comment of _the times_ (june 9, 1913) on "the totally unnecessary difficulty which has been placed in the way of getting at the truth" seems moderate enough. iii. the trial of cecil chesterton meanwhile the _new witness_ had not been neglecting its self-appointed task of striking at every point that looked vulnerable. on january 9, 1913, an article appeared attacking the city record of mr. godfrey isaacs and listing the bankrupt companies--there were some twenty of them--of which he had been promoter or director. some more ardent spirit in the _new witness_ office sent sandwichmen to parade up and down in front of godfrey isaacs' own office bearing a placard announcing his "ghastly failures." cecil chesterton said later that he had not ordered this to be done, but he refused to disclaim responsibility. the placard was the last straw. godfrey's solicitors wrote to cecil saying that godfrey would prosecute unless cecil promised to make no further statement reflecting on his honour till both had given evidence before the parliamentary committee. cecil replied: "i am pleased to hear that your client, mr. godfrey isaacs, proposes to bring an action against me." and in the _new witness_ (february 27, 1913) he wrote: "we are up against a very big thing. . . . you cannot have the honour (and the fun) of attacking wealthy and powerfully entrenched interests without the cost. we have counted the cost; we counted it long ago. we think it good enough--much more than good enough." the case came on at the old bailey on may 27. it is worth recalling the exact position at this time. the parliamentary committee had concluded its hearings three weeks earlier and was now preparing its report. (cecil chesterton had not given evidence before it, for though he had frequently demanded to be summoned, when at last the summons came he excused himself on the plea of ill-health and the further plea that he wished to reserve his evidence for his own trial.) the _matin_ case had been heard a couple of months earlier. everything that was ever to be known about ministerial dealings in marconis was by now known, except for elibank's separate purchase on behalf of the party funds, which was made public just at the end of the trial. sir edward carson and f. e. smith were again teamed, as in the _matin_ case. the charge was criminal libel. cecil insisted on facing the charge alone. his various contributors had joined in the attack but cecil would not give the names of the authors of unsigned articles and took full responsibility as editor. carson's opening speech for the prosecution divided the six alleged libels under two main heads: one set, said carson, charged godfrey isaacs with being a corrupt man who induced his corrupt brother to use his influence with the corrupt samuel to get a corrupt contract entered into. the opening attack under this head has already been quoted. later attacks did not diminish in violence: "the swindle or rather theft--impudent and barefaced as it is": "when samuel was caught with his hand in the till (or isaacs if you prefer to put it that way)." the second set charged that godfrey isaacs had had transactions with various companies which, had the attorney-general not been his brother, would have got him prosecuted. there is the same violence here: "this is not the first time in the marconi affair that we find these two gentlemen [godfrey and rufus] swindling": and again: "the files at somerset house of the isaacs companies cry out for vengeance on the man who created them, who manipulated them, who filled them with his own creatures, who worked them solely for his own ends, and who sought to get rid of some of them when they had served his purpose by casting the expense of burial on to the public purse." there is no need to describe the case in detail. on the charges concerned with the contract and ministerial corruption, the same witnesses (with the notable exception of lloyd george) gave much the same evidence as before the parliamentary committee. very little that was new emerged. the contract looked worse than ever after cecil chesterton's counsel, ernest wild, had examined witnesses, but mr. justice phillimore insisted that it had nothing to do with the case "whether the contract was badly drawn or improvident." but indeed all this discussion of the contract was given an air of unreality by the extraordinary line the chesterton defence took. it distinguished between the two sets of charges, offering to justify the second (concerning godfrey isaacs' business record) but claiming that the first set brought accusation of corruption not against godfrey but against rufus and herbert samuel--who were not the prosecutors. it was an impossible position to say that ministers were fraudulently giving a fraudulent contract to godfrey isaacs but that this did not mean that he was in the fraud. cecil showed up unhappily under cross-examination on this matter, but from the point of view of his whole campaign worse was to follow: for cecil withdrew the charges of corruption he had levelled at the ministers! here are extracts from the relevant sections of the cross-examination by sir edward carson: carson: and do you now accuse him [godfrey isaacs] of any abominable business--i mean in relation to obtaining the contract? cecil chesterton: yes, certainly; i now accuse mr. isaacs of very abominable conduct between march 7 and july 19. carson: do you accuse the postmaster general of dishonesty or corruption? c. chesterton: what i accused the postmaster general of was of having given a contract which was a byword for laxity and thereby laying himself open reasonably to the suspicion that he was conferring a favour on mr. godfrey isaacs because he was the attorney-general's brother. carson: i must repeat my question, do you accuse the postmaster-general of anything dishonest or dishonourable? c. chesterton: after the postmaster-general's denials on oath i must leave the question; i will not accuse him of perjury. carson: and therefore you do not accuse him of anything dishonest or dishonourable? after some further questioning judge: that is evasion. do you or do you not accuse him? c. chesterton: i have said "no." later c. chesterton: my idea at that time was that sir rufus isaacs had influenced mr. samuel to benefit godfrey isaacs. carson: you have not that opinion now? c. chesterton: sir rufus has denied it on oath and i accepted his denial. cecil still insisted that though the ministers had not been corrupted, what had come to light about godfrey's offer of american marconi shares to his brother showed that godfrey had tried to corrupt them. godfrey could not have enjoyed the case very much. there was much emphasis on his concealment of clause 10 (allowing the government to terminate at any time): and sir alexander king, secretary to the post office, admitted that godfrey isaacs had asked that it be kept quiet: but this was not among the accusations cecil had levelled at him. in his summing up, mr. justice phillimore indicated the possibility that the shares godfrey had so gaily sold belonged not to himself but to the english marconi company--merely adding that this question was not relevant to the present case. further the record of his company failures _was_ rather ghastly. here is a section of his cross-examination as to the companies he had been connected with before the marconi company--remember that there were twenty of them! wild: i am trying to discover a success. judge: it is not an imputation against a man that he has been a failure. wild: here are cases after cases of failure. isaacs: that is my misfortune. judge: you might as well cross-examine any speculative widow. wild: a speculative widow would not be concerned in the management. * * * wild: can you point to one success except marconi in the whole of your career? isaacs: in companies? wild: yes. isaacs: a complete success, no; i should not call any one of them a complete success, but i may say that each of them was an endeavour to develop something new. but carson had made the point in his opening speech that though godfrey isaacs had been connected with so many failures, he had not been accused by the shareholders of anything dishonourable: in his closing speech he pointed out that "not one single city man had been brought forward to say that he had been deceived to the extent of one sixpence by the representations of mr. isaacs." and indeed the evidence called by the defence in this present case, however suspicious it may have made some of his actions appear, did not establish beyond doubt any actual illegality. the trial ended on june 9. the judge summed up heavily against cecil chesterton. the jury was out only forty minutes. the verdict was "guilty." cecil chesterton, says the _times_, "smiled and waved his hand to friends and relations who sat beside the dock." the judge preached him a solemn little homily and then imposed a fine of â£100 and costs. the chestertons and all who stood with them held that so mild a fine instead of a prison sentence for one who had been found guilty of criminal libel on so large a scale was in itself a moral victory. "it is a great relief to us," ran the first editorial in the _new witness_ after the conclusion of the trial, "to have our hands free. we have long desired to re-state our whole case about the marconi disgrace, in view of the facts that are now before us and the english people. . . . when we began our attack . . . we were striking at something very powerful and very dangerous . . . we were striking at it in the dark. the politicians saw to that. our defence is that if we had not ventured to strike in the dark, we and the people of england should be in the dark still." there can be no question of cecil chesterton's courage. but he may have exaggerated a little in saying that if the _new witness_ had not struck in the dark the nation would still be in the dark: parliament had already refused to approve the contract without proper discussion and the _outlook_ was attacking vigorously, _before_ the first _new witness_ attack. and there are grave drawbacks to the making of charges in the dark which later have to be withdrawn. cecil's withdrawal of his charges against the ministers and his failure to substantiate his charges against godfrey's company record may have done more to hinder than help the cause of clean government. but his courage remains: and, if one has to choose, one prefers the immoderate man who said more than he knew to the careful men who said so much less. gilbert giving evidence at the trial had said that he envied his brother the dignity of his present position. and with the isaacs brothers in mind, one sees the point. iv. after thoughts four days after the verdict against cecil chesterton, the parliamentary committee produced its report. there had been a draft report somewhat critical of the marconi-buying ministers by the chairman, sir albert spicer; and another considerably more critical by lord robert cecil. lord robert's report said that rufus isaacs had committed "grave impropriety in making an advantageous purchase of shares . . . upon advice and information not yet fully available to the public. . . . by doing so he placed himself, however unwittingly, in a position in which his private interests or sense of obligation might easily have been in conflict with his public duty. . . ." of his silence in the house, lord robert said: "we regard that reticence as a grave error of judgment and as wanting in frankness and in respect for the house of commons." upon this rufus isaacs' son comments: "the vehemence of this language was not calculated to commend the draft to the majority of the committee." vehemence seems hardly the word; but at any rate the committee did not adopt either lord robert's report or sir albert spicer's. by the usual party vote of 8 to 6, it adopted a report prepared by mr. falconer (one of the two whom rufus isaacs had approached privately) which simply took the line that the ministers had acted in good faith and refrained from criticising them. parliament debated the matter a few days later on a conservative motion: "that this house regrets the transactions of certain of its ministers in the shares of the marconi company of america, and the want of frankness displayed by ministers in their communications on the subject to the house." rufus isaacs' son speaks of the certain ruin of his father's career if "by some unpredictable misadventure" the motion had been carried. it would indeed have had to be an "unpredictable misadventure" for the voting was on the strictest party lines: which means that the house did not express its real opinion at all: the motion was defeated by 346 to 268. lloyd george and rufus isaacs expressed regret for any indiscretion there might have been in their actions: rufus explained that he would not have bought the shares--"if i had thought that men could be so suspicious of any action of mine." in the debate the leader of the opposition, arthur balfour, somewhat disdainfully refused to make political capital out of the business. lloyd george and isaacs were loudly cheered by their own party--though whether they were cheered for having bought american marconis or for having concealed the purchase from the house there is now no means of discovering. at any rate their careers were not damaged: the one went on to become lord chief justice of england and later viceroy of india: the other became prime minister during the war of 1914-1918. one question arising from the episode is whether it meant what cecil chesterton and belloc thought it meant in the world of party politics, or something entirely different. they seem throughout to have assumed that their thesis of collusion between the party leaders was proved by this scandal: it seems to me quite as easy to make the case that it was _disproved_. a conservative first raises the matter by inconvenient questions in the house. a group of young conservatives pay the costs of cecil chesterton's defence. when a parliamentary committee is appointed to enquire into the alleged corruption, the story of every session becomes one of a conservative minority trying hard to ferret out the truth and a ministerial majority determined to prevent their succeeding. finally the leading conservative commissioner, lord robert cecil, issues a restrained but most damning report which is, as a matter of course, rejected by the liberal majority. a conservative m.p. told me he thought the great mistake made was that it had all been made "too much of a party question." unless you already disbelieved quite violently in the existence of the two parties this would certainly be the effect upon you of reading the report of the commission sessions, and all that can be set against it is the fact that mr. balfour did, in the house of commons, utter a conventional form of words which, as has been said, really amounted to a refusal to make political capital out of the affair. i do not say, for i do not pretend to know, if this is the correct interpretation: it is certainly the obvious one. douglas jerrold in a brilliant article on belloc,* treats his theory of the party system as a false one, and maintains that he mistook for collusion that degree of co-operation that alone could enable a country to be governed at all under a party system. a certain continuity must be preserved if, in the old phrase, "the king's government is to be carried on"--but such continuity did not spell a corrupt collusion. if at this distance of time such a view can be held by a man of mr. jerrold's ability it could certainly be held at the time by the majority--and it may be that the continual assumption of an unproved fact got in the way in the fight against more obvious evil. [* "hilaire belloc and the counter revolution" in _for hilaire belloc_.] for bound up with this question is another: _the eye witness_ seemed so near success and yet never quite succeeded. might it have done so had it been founded with a single eye to creative opportunity--to the attack on the servile state and the building of some small beginning of an alternative? _g.k.'s weekly_ was a slight improvement from that point of view--for it did create the distributist league; but both papers, i think, had from their inception a divided purpose that made failure almost inevitable. the fight against corruption which had been placed equal with the fight for property and liberty at the start of the _eye witness_ is a noble aim. but, like the other, it is a life work. to do it a man must have time to spend verifying rumours or exploding them, following up clues, patiently waiting on events. i began to read the files with an assumption of the accuracy of the claims of the _eye_ and _new witness_ as to its own achievement in all this, but when the dates and facts in the marconi case had been tabulated for me chronologically i began to wonder. again and again the editor stated that _the new witness_ had been first to unearth the marconi matter. but it hadn't. as we have seen, questions in the house and attacks in other papers had _preceded_ their first mention of the subject. so too the statement that the marconi affair had proved how little englishmen cared about corruption seemed almost absurd when one read not only the conservative but also the liberal comment of the time. "political corruption is the achilles heel of liberalism," said an outstanding liberal editor; while hugh o'donnell in the _new witness_ paraphrased the wail of the "cadbury" papers: 'tis the voice of the cocoa i hear it exclaim o geordie, dear geordie don't do it again. just how scandalous _was_ the marconi scandal? at this distance of time it is difficult to arrive at any clear view. there are two main problems--the contract and the purchase of american marconis. the contract seems very definitely to have been unduly favourable to the company; clauses were so badly drawn that they had to be supplemented by letters which had no legal effect; documents were lost, other tenders misinterpreted, other systems perhaps not fully examined, the report of a sub-committee shelved, godfrey isaacs allowed to issue a misleading report without correction from the post office. it all may spell corruption: but it need not. no one familiar with the workings of a government department is likely to be surprised at any amount of muddle and incompetence. matters are forgotten and then in the effort to make up for lost time important steps are simply omitted. officials are pig-headed and unreasonable. and as to lost documents-what of the ministers' dealings in shares? godfrey may have been using rufus to purchase ministerial favour. if so, he could hardly have done so on the comparatively small scale of the dealings known to us. the few thousand involved could not have meant an enormous amount to rufus. he had, it is true, begun his career on the stock exchange, found himself insolvent and been "hammered." but he had gone on to make large sums at the bar--up to thirty thousand pounds a year; and his salary as attorney-general was twenty thousand a year. there may, of course, have been far heavier purchases than we know about: the piece-by-piece emergence of what we do know gives us no confidence that all the pieces ever emerged. we have only the word of the two brothers for most of the story and one comes to feel that their word has no great meaning. but, allowing for all that, it is possible that godfrey may have wanted rufus to have the american shares out of family affection; of the shares godfrey personally disposed of, a very large number went to relations and close friends--mother, sisters, his wife's relations--who certainly could not help to get his contract through parliament. if this, the most charitable interpretation, is also the true one, rufus and his political friends acted with considerable impropriety in snatching at this opportunity of quick and easy money. the rest of the story is of their efforts to prevent this impropriety being discovered. had they mentioned it openly in parliament on october 11, the matter might have ended there. but they lacked the nerve: the occasion passed: and nothing remained, especially for rufus, but evasion, shiftiness, half-truth passing as whole truth, the farce of indignant virtue--a performance which left him not a shred of dignity and ought to have made it unthinkable that he should ever again be given public office. the perfect word on the whole episode was uttered, not by either gilbert or cecil chesterton or by any of their friends, but by rudyard kipling. the case had meant a great deal to him. on june 15, a conservative neighbour of kipling wrote to gilbert: i cannot let the days pass without writing to congratulate you and your brother on the result of the isaacs trial. . . . i do feel, as many thousands of english people must feel, that the _new witness_ is fighting on the side of english nationalism and that is our common battle. my neighbour, rudyard kipling, has followed every phase of the fight with interest of such a kind that it almost precluded his thinking of anything else at all and when he gets hold of the _new witness_ (my copy) i never can get it back again. you see, however much we have all disagreed--do disagree--we are all in the same boat about a lot of things of the first rank. . . . we can't afford to differ just now if we do agree--it's all too serious. when isaacs was appointed viceroy of india, kipling wrote the poem: gehazi whence comest thou, gehazi so reverend to behold in scarlet and in ermine and chain of england's gold? from following after naaman to tell him all is well; whereby my zeal has made me a judge in israel. well done, well done, gehazi, stretch forth thy ready hand, thou barely 'scaped from judgment, take oath to judge the land. unswayed by gift of money or privy bribe more base, or knowledge which is profit in any market place. search out and probe, gehazi, as thou of all canst try the truthful, well-weighed answer that tells the blacker lie: the loud, uneasy virtue, the anger feigned at will, to overbear a witness and make the court keep still. take order now, gehazi, that no man talk aside in secret with the judges the while his case is tried, lest he should show them reason, to keep the matter hid, and subtly lead the questions away from what he did. thou mirror of uprightness, what ails thee at thy vows, what means the risen whiteness of skin between thy brows? the boils that shine and burrow, the sores that slough and bleed- the leprosy of naaman on thee and all thy seed? stand up, stand up, gehazi, draw close thy robe and go gehazi, judge in israel. a leper white as snow! as the _times_ leading article of june 19, 1913, put it: "a man is not blamed for being splashed with mud. he is commiserated. but if he has stepped into a puddle which he might easily have avoided, we say that it is his own fault. if he protests that he did not know it was a puddle, we say that he ought to know better; but if he says that it was after all quite a clean puddle, then we judge him deficient in the sense of cleanliness. and the british public like their public men to have a very nice sense of cleanliness." that, fundamentally, was what troubled gilbert chesterton then and for the rest of his life. he was not himself an investigator of political scandals--in that field he trusted his brother and belloc, and on this particular matter cecil had certainly said more than he knew and possibly more than was true. but it did not take an expert to know that some of the men involved in the marconi case had no very nice sense of cleanliness: and these men were going to be dominant in the councils of england, and to represent england in the face of the world, for a long time to come. chapter xx the eve of the war (1911-1915) during the earlier years of the _new witness_ gilbert had nothing to do with the editing, and his contributions to it were only part of the continuing volume of his weekly journalism. it would be almost impossible to trace all the articles in papers and magazines that were never republished: the volumes of essays appearing year by year probably contained the best among them. he was still in 1911 writing for the _daily news_ and every week until his death he continued to do "our notebook" for the _illustrated london news_. i have found an unpublished ballade he wrote on the subject: ballade of a periodical in icy circles by the behring strait, in moony jungles where the tigers roar, in tropic isles where civil servants wait, and wonder what the deuce they're waiting for, in lonely lighthouses beyond the nore, in english country houses crammed with jews, men still will study, spell, perpend and pore and read the illustrated london news. our fathers read it at the earlier date and twirled the funny whiskers that they wore ere little levy got his first estate or madame patti got her first encore. while yet the cannon of the christian tore the lords of delhi in their golden shoes men asked for all the news from singapore and read the illustrated london news. but i, whose copy is extremely late and ought to have been sent an hour before i still sit here and trifle with my fate and idly write another ballad more. i know it is too late; and all is o'er, and all my writings they will now refuse i shall be sacked next monday. so be sure and read the illustrated london news. envoy prince, if in church the sermon seems a bore put up your feet upon the other pews, light a fabrica de tabagos flor and read the illustrated london news. debating and lecturing went on, and an amusing letter from bernard shaw shows the preparations for a three star show--shaw against chesterton with belloc in the chair--in 1911. an exactly similar debate years later was published in a slender volume entitled _do we agree?_ on both occasions the crowd was enormous and many had to be turned away. all three men were immensely popular figures and all three were at their best debating in a hall of moderate size where swift repartee could be followed by the whole audience. gilbert always shone on these occasions. the challenge of a debate brought forth all his powers of wit and humour. his opponent furnished material on which he could work. and how he enjoyed himself! frank swinnerton once heard him laugh so much that he gave himself hiccups for the rest of the evening. i heard him against miss cicely hamilton and against mr. selfridge and felt the only drawback to be that the fight was so very unequal. the selfridge debate in particular was sheer cruelty, so utterly unaware was the business man that he was being intellectually massacred by a man who regarded all that selfridge's stores stood for as the ruin of england. occasionally mr. selfridge looked bewildered when the audience rocked with laughter at some phrase that clearly conveyed no meaning to him at all. but so complete was his failure to understand what it was all about that when the meeting was over he asked if chesterton would not write his name with a diamond on a window of his store already graced with many great names. for once chesterton was at a loss for words. "oh, how jolly!" he murmured feebly. very different was it when he debated with bernard shaw with belloc as third performer. ayot st. lawrence, welwyn, herts. 27th oct. 1911. don't be dismayed: this doesn't need a reply. my dear g.k.c. with reference to this silly debate of ours, what you have to bear in mind is this. i am prepared to accept any conditions. if they seem unfair to me from the front of the house, all the better for me; therefore do not give me that advantage unless you wish to, or are--as you probably are--as indifferent to the rules as i am. the old hyndman-bradlaugh & shaw-foote debates (s-f. was a two-nighter) were arranged thus. each debater made 3 speeches: 1 of 30 minutes, 1 of 15 and 1 of 10. strict time was kept (the audiences were intensely jealous of the least departure from the rules); and the chairman simply explained the conditions and called time without touching the subject of debate. the advantages of this were, (a) that the opponent or the opener could introduce fresh matter up to the end of his second speech, and was tied up in that respect for the last 10 minutes only, and (b) that the debate was one against one, and not one against two (and with less time allowed for him at that), as it must have been had the chairman dealt with the subject. the disadvantages for us are that we both want belloc to let himself go (i simply thirst for the blood of his servile state--i'll servile him); and nobody wants to tie you down to matter previously introduced when you make your final reply. we shall all three talk all over the shop--possibly never reaching the socialism department--and belloc will not trouble himself about the rules of public meeting and debate, even if there were any reason to suppose that he is acquainted with them. (do you recollect how parnell and biggar floored the house in the palmy days of obstruction by meanly getting up the subject of public order, which no one else suspected the existence of?) i therefore conclude that we had better make it to some extent a clowns' cricket match, and go ahead as in the debates with sanders & macdonald & cicely hamilton, which were all wrong technically. in a really hostile debate it is better to be as strict as possible; but as this is going to be a performance in which three macs who are on the friendliest terms in private will belabor each other recklessly on wooden scalps and pillowed waistcoats and trouser seats, we need not be particular. still, you had better know exactly what you are doing: hence this wildly hurried scrawl. did you see my letter in tuesday's _times?_ magnificent! my love to mrs. chesterton, and my most distinguished consideration to winkle.* to hell with the pope! [* the chestertons' dog who preceded quoodle of the poem.] ever g.b.s. p.s. i told sanders to explain to you that you would be entitled to half the gate (or a third if belloc shares) and that you were likely to overlook this if you were not warned. i take it that you have settled this somehow. at the second of these debates belloc opened the proceedings by announcing to the audience "you are about to listen, i am about to sneer." his only contribution to the debate was to recite a poem: our civilisation is built upon coal let us chant in rotation our civilisation that lump of damnation without any soul our civilisation is built upon coal. bernard shaw was on the friendliest terms with the others and admired their genius but thought it ill directed. belloc, he had told chesterton, was "wasting prodigious gifts" in the service of the pope. "i have not met g.k.c.: shaw always calls him a man of colossal genius" writes lawrence of arabia to a friend. as a lecturer chesterton's success was less certain than as a debater. many of his greatest admirers say they have heard him give very poor lectures. he was often nervous and worried beforehand. "as a lecture," wrote the _yorkshire weekly post_ after a performance in this year (1911), "it was a fiasco, but as an exhibition of chesterton it was pleasing." although his writing appeared almost effortless he did in fact take far more pains about it than he did in preparing for a lecture. he seemed quite incapable of remembering the time or place of appointment, or of getting there on time, if at all. stories are told of his non-appearance on various platforms. my husband remembers a meeting in a london theatre at which chesterton had been billed as one of the speakers. the meeting, arranged by the knights of the blessed sacrament, was well under way before he arrived, panting but unperturbed. his apology ran something like this: "as knights you will understand my not being here at the beginning, for the whole point of knighthood was that the knight should arrive late but not too late. had st. george not been late there would have been no story. had he been too late, there would have been no princess." even more annoying was his habit of beginning his lecture by saying he had not prepared it. such a remark is not likely to please any audience, least of all an audience that has paid for admission and knows that the lecturer is receiving a large fee. but money, whether he was receiving it or giving it away, meant nothing to him. he had not a strong voice, and i have seen him, when a microphone was provided, holding a paper of notes between himself and it. an ardent admirer of his writing told me he made far too many jokes about his size. yet how pleasing they sometimes were: when his chairman for instance, after a long wait, said he had feared a traffic accident: "had i met a tram-car," chesterton replied, "it would have been a great, and if i may say so, an equal encounter." he thought badly of his own lecturing and began once by saying: "i might call myself a lecturer; but then again i fear some of you may have attended my lectures." actually, in spite of the jokes, his thoughts were centred entirely on his subject, not on himself. an anonymous society diarist quoted by cosmo hamilton writes of an occasion when: "he was given, rather foolishly, a little gold period chair and as he made his points it slowly collapsed under him. he rose just in time and sinking into another chair that someone put behind him began at the word he had last spoken. no acting could have secured such an effect of complete indifference. it was evident that he had barely noticed the incident." ellis roberts completes the picture. he knew gilbert already as a brilliant talker and came to hear him from a platform: "i remember the manner of his lecture. it seemed to be written on a hundred pieces of variously shaped paper, written in ink and pencil (of all colours) and in chalk. all the pages were in a splendid and startling disorder and i remember being at first a little disappointed. then the papers were abandoned and g.k.c. talked."* [* _reading for pleasure_, p. 96.] at this time bernard shaw scored a victory over his friend. for beside lecturing, journalism and the publication of three considerable and two minor books, chesterton between 1911 and the war wrote the play that shaw had been so insistently demanding. the books were: _manalive_ 1911, _a miscellany of men_ (essays) 1912, _the victorian age in literature_ february 1913, _the wisdom of father brown_ 1914, _the flying inn_ 1914. the play was _magic_ produced at the little theatre in october 1913. one who admired it was george moore. he wrote to forster bovill (november 24, 1913): i followed the comedy of _magic_ from the first line to the last with interest and appreciation, and i am not exaggerating when i say that i think of all modern plays i like it the best. mr. chesterton wished to express an idea and his construction and his dialogue are the best that he could have chosen for the expression of that idea: therefore, i look upon the play as practically perfect. the prologue seems unnecessary, likewise the magician's love for the young lady. that she should love the magician is well enough, but it materialises him a little too much if he returns that love. i would have preferred her to love him more and he to love her less. but this spot, if it be a spot, is a very small one on a spotless surface of excellence. i hope i can rely upon you to tell mr. chesterton how much i appreciated his play as i should like him to know my artistic sympathies. "artistic sympathies" is not ungenerous considering how chesterton had written of george moore in _heretics_. it is rather comic that all the reviews hailing from germany where the play was very soon produced compare chesterton with shaw and many of them say that he is the better playwright. "he means more to it," a munich paper was translated as saying, "than the good old shaw." chesterton's superiority can hardly be entertained in the matter of technique. actually what the critic meant was that he preferred the ideas of chesterton to the ideas of shaw. both men were chiefly concerned with ideas. but while shaw excelled chiefly in presenting them through brilliant dialogue, g.k.'s deeper thoughts were conveyed in another fashion. the duke might almost, it is true, have been a shaw character, but the fun the audience got out of him was the least thing they received. chesterton once said that he suspected shaw of being the only man who had never written any poetry. many of us suspect that chesterton never wrote anything else. this play is a poem and the greatest character in it is atmosphere. chesterton believed in the love of god and man, he believed in the devil: love conquers diabolical evil and the atmosphere of this struggle is felt even in the written page and was felt more vividly in the theatre. after a passage of many years those who saw it remember the moment when the red lamp turned blue as a felt experience. but as to popularity, in england at least, it would be absurd to compare g.k. with g.b.s. the play's run was a brief one and it was years before he attempted another. chesterton was fighting corruption, fighting the servile state. above all things he was fighting sterility, fighting it in the name of life--life with its richness, its variety, its sins and its virtues, with its positively outrageous sanity. "thank you for being alive," wrote an admirer to him. _manalive_ is above all things a hymn to life. it is the acid test of a chestertonian. reviewers became wildly enthusiastic or bitterly scornful. borrowing from his own phrase about pickwick i am inclined to say that men not in love with life will not appreciate _manalive_-nor, i should imagine, heaven. the ideas that make up the book had been long in his head. the story of white wynd written while he was at the slade school tells one half of the story, an unpublished fragment of the same period entitled "the burden of balham" the other half. the great wind that blows innocent smith to beacon house is the wind of life and it blows through the whole story. before an improvised court of law smith is tried on three charges: housebreaking--but it was his own house that he broke into to renew the vividness of ownership; bigamy--but it was his own wife with whom he repeatedly eloped to renew the ecstasy of first love; murder with a large and terrifying revolver--but he dealt life not death from its barrel. for he used it only to threaten those who said they were tired of life or that life was not worth living, and he forced them through fear of death to hymn the praises of life. the explanation given by smith to dr. eames, the master of brakespeare college, of his ideas and his purpose gives the note of fooling and profundity filling the whole book. "i want both my gifts to come virgin and violent, the death and the life after death. i am going to hold a pistol to the head of the modern man. but i shall not use it to kill him--only to bring him to life. i begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the feast." "you can scarcely be called a skeleton," said dr. eames smiling. "that comes of being so much at the feast," answered the massive youth. "no skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining out. but that is not quite what i meant: what i mean is that i caught a kind of glimpse of the meaning of death and all that--the skull and the crossbones, the _memento mori_. it isn't only meant to remind us of a future life, but to remind us of a present life too. with our weak spirits we should grow old in eternity if we were not kept young by death. providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers." _manalive_ appeared in 1911. next year came what is perhaps his best-known single piece of writing, the _battle of lepanto_. in the spring of 1912 he had taken part in a debate at leeds, affirming that all wars were religious wars. father o'connor supported him with a magnificent description of the battle of lepanto. obviously it seized gilbert's mind powerfully, for while he was still staying with father o'connor, he had begun to jot down lines and by october of that year the poem was published. one might fill a book with the tributes it has received from that day to this. perhaps none pleased him more than a note from john buchan (june 21, 1915): "the other day in the trenches we shouted your lepanto." _the victorian age in literature_ made many of his admirers again express the wish that he would stay in the field of pure literature. his characterisations of some of the victorian writers were sheer delight. ruskin had a strong right hand that wrote of the great mediaeval minsters in tall harmonies and traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen away--and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners . . . it is not quite unfair to say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the cathedral except the altar. tennyson was a provincial virgil . . . he tried to have the universal balance of all the ideas at which the great roman had aimed: but he hadn't got hold of all the ideas to balance. hence his work was not a balance of truths, like the universe. it was a balance of whims; like the british constitution . . . he could not think up to the height of his own towering style. . . . while emily bronte was as unsociable as a storm at midnight and while charlotte bronte was at best like that warmer and more domestic thing a house on fire--they do connect themselves with the calm of george eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments of the feminine advance. many forerunners (if it comes to that) would have felt rather ill if they had seen the things they foreran. the best and most profound part of the book was however the working out of certain generalisations--the effect on the literature of the period of the victorian compromise between religion and rationalism ("macaulay, it is said, never talked about his religion: but huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn't got"): the break-up of the compromise when victorian protestantism and victorian rationalism simultaneously destroyed one another; the uniqueness of the nonsense-writing of the later victorian period. in one illuminating passage chesterton defends what seems at first sight merely his own habit of getting dates and events in their wrong order. the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by fixed dates, or completed processes. action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead . . . thus wordsworth shrank back into toryism, as it were, from a shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. thus newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of darwin. for this reason no one can understand tradition or even history who has not some tenderness for anachronism. this was not merely special pleading: it contains a profound truth. wilfrid ward proved it of newman in the biography that g.k. had probably just been reading. chesterton noted it himself in his book on cobbett who, as he said, saw what was not yet there. it is almost the definition of genius. already at this date chesterton and belloc were fighting much that to the rest of us only became fully apparent long afterwards. "i think you would make a very good god," wrote e. v. lucas to chesterton. there is indeed something divine in an almost ceaseless outpouring of creative energy. but only god can create tirelessly and chesterton was at this time beginning to be tired. you can see it in _the flying inn_. the book is still full of vitality and the lyrics in it, later published separately under the title _wine, water and song_, are as good in that kind as any that he ever wrote. but with all its vigour the book is a less joyful one than _manalive_ and it is a much more angry one. _manalive_ was a paean of joy to life. _the flying inn_ is fighting for something necessary to its fulness--freedom. it must have been just while he was writing it that there were threatenings of a case against him by lever brothers on account of a lecture given at the city temple on "the snob as socialist." in answering a question he spoke of port sunlight as "corresponding to a slave compound." others besides lever brothers were shocked and some clarification was certainly called for. belloc and chesterton meant by slavery not that the poor were being bullied or ill treated but that they had lost their liberty. gilbert went so far as to point out how much there was to be said in defence of a slave state. under slavery the poor were usually fed, clothed and housed adequately. slaves had often been much more comfortable in the past than were free men in the world of today. a model employer might by his regulations greatly increase the comfort of his workers and yet enslave them. a letter from bernard shaw advising him to get up certain details asks the question of whether the workman at port sunlight would forfeit his benefits and savings should he leave. "if this is so," wrote shaw, "then, though lever may treat him as well as pickwick would no doubt have treated old weller, if he had consented to take charge of his savings, lever is master of his employee's fate, and captain of his employee's soul, which is slavery." he went on to offer financial help in fighting the case. the "christian commonweal" had reported chesterton's speech and was also threatened with the law. to the editor g. k. wrote: only a hasty line to elongate the telephone. i am sorry about this business for one reason only; and that is that you should be even indirectly mixed up in it. lever can sue me till he bursts: i'm not afraid of him. but it does seem a shame when i've often attacked you (always in good faith and what was meant for good humour), and when you've heaped coals of fire by printing my most provocative words, that your chivalry should get you even bothered about it. i am truly sorry and ask pardon--of you, but not of old sun and soapsuds, i can tell you. another very hasty line about the way i shall, if necessary, answer; about which i feel pretty confident. i should say it is absurd to have libel actions about controversies, instead of about quarrels. it would mean every capitalist being prosecuted for saying that socialism is robbery and every socialist for saying property is theft. by great luck, the example lies at the threshold of the passage quoted. the worst i said of port sunlight was that it was a slave-compound. why, that was the very phrase about which half the governing class argued with the other half a few years ago! are all who called the chinese slaves to be sued by all who didn't? am i prosecuted for a terminology . . . enough, you know the rest. go on with the passage and you will see the luck continues. abrupt, brief, and perhaps abbreviated as my platform answer was, it really does contain all the safeguards against imputing cruelty or human crime to poor lever. it defines slavery as the imposition of the master's private morality; as in the matter of the pubs. it expressly suggests it does not imply cruelty: for it goes out of its way to say that such slaves may be better off under such slavery. so they were, physically, both in athens and carolina. it then says that a merely mystical thing, which i think is christianity, makes me think this slavery damnable, even if it is comfortable. i would defend all this, as a lawful sociological comment, in any court in civilisation. i tell you my line of defence, to use discreetly and at your discretion. if the other side are bent on fighting, i should reserve the defence. if they seem open to reason, i should point out that it is on our side. his old schoolfellow salter was also his solicitor and a letter to wells shows in part the advice salter gave. dear wells, i am asked to make a suggestion to you that looks like, and indeed is, infernal impudence: but which a further examination will rob of most of its terrors. let not these terrors be redoubled when i say that the request comes from my solicitor. it is a great lark; i am writing for him when he ought to be writing for me. in the forthcoming case of lever v. chesterton & another, the defendant chesterton will conduct his own case; as his heart is not, like that of the lady in the song, another's. he wants to fight it purely as a point of the liberty of letters and public speech; and to show that the phrase "slavery" (wherein i am brought in question) is current in the educated controversy about the tendency of capitalism today. the solicitor, rather to my surprise, approves this general sociological line of defence; and says that i may be allowed one or two witnesses of weight and sociological standing--not (of course) to say my words are defensible, still less that my view is right--but simply to say that the servile state, and servile terms in connection with it, are known to them as parts of a current and quite unmalicious controversy. he has suggested your name: and when i have written this i have done my duty to him. you could not, by the laws of evidence, be asked to mix yourself up with my remarks on lever: you could only be asked, if at all, whether there was or was not a disinterested school of sociology holding that capitalism is close to slavery--quite apart from anybody. do you care to come and see the fun? yours always, g. k. chesterton. the suggested line was so successful that wells's testimony was not called for. the case was withdrawn. no apology was even asked from gilbert, whose solicitor tells me that messrs. lever "behaved very reasonably when once it was made clear to them that gilbert was not a scurrilous person making a vulgar and slanderous attack upon their business." with h. g. wells as with shaw, gilbert's relations were exceedingly cordial, but with a cordiality occasionally threatened by explosions from wells. gilbert's soft answer however invariably turned away wrath and all was well again. "no one," wells said to me, "ever had enmity for him except some literary men who did not know him." they met first, wells thinks, at the hubert blands, and then gilbert stayed with wells at easton. there they played at the non-existent game of gype and invented elaborate rules for it. cecil came too and they played the war game wells had invented. "cecil," says wells, comparing him with gilbert, "seemed condensed: not quite big enough for a real chesterton." they built too a toy theatre at easton and among other things dramatized the minority report of the poor law commission. the play began by the commissioners taking to pieces bumble the beadle, putting him into a huge cauldron and stewing him. then out from the cauldron leaped a renewed rejuvenated bumble several sizes larger than when he went in. in the early days of their acquaintance wells remembers meeting the whole chesterton family in the street of a french town and inviting them to lunch. his own youngest son, a small boy, had left the room for a moment when wells exclaimed: "where's frank? good god, gilbert, you're sitting on him." the anxious way in which gilbert got up and turned apologetically towards his own chair was unforgettable. an absent-minded man who in a gesture of politeness once gave his seat to three ladies in a bus might well be alarmed over the fate of a small boy found under him. in his memoirs wells relates another pleasing story of a chestertonian encounter: i once saw [henry] james quarrelling with his brother william james, the psychologist. he had lost his calm; he was terribly unnerved. he appealed to me, to me of all people, to adjudicate on what was and what was not permissible in england. william was arguing about it in an indisputably american accent, with an indecently naked reasonableness. i had come to rye with a car to fetch william james and his daughter to my home at sandgate. william had none of henry's passionate regard for the polish upon the surface of life and he was immensely excited by the fact that in the little rye inn, which had its garden just over the high brick wall of the garden of lamb house, g. k. chesterton was staying. william james had corresponded with our vast contemporary and he sorely wanted to see him. so with a scandalous directness he had put the gardener's ladder against that ripe red wall and clambered up and peeped over! henry had caught him at it. it was the sort of thing that isn't done. it was most emphatically the sort of thing that isn't done. . . . henry instructed the gardener to put away that ladder and william was looking thoroughly naughty about it. to henry's manifest relief, i carried william off and in the road just outside the town we ran against the chestertons who had been for a drive in romney marsh; chesterton was heated and i think rather swollen by the sunshine; he seemed to overhang his one-horse fly; he descended slowly but firmly; he was moist and steamy but cordial; we chatted in the road and william got his coveted impression. the two must have suited each other a good deal better than chesterton and the more conventional brother. of henry's reactions there was a comment from the other side of the atlantic. the _louisville post_ reported that henry james, being asked on a visit to his native country, "what do you think of chesterton in england?" replied "in england we do not think of chesterton." the _post_ commented rather neatly "this 'we' of our compatriot must be considered as either mythical or editorial--unless indeed it refers to that small and exquisite circle which immediately surrounds and envelopes him." in his _autobiography_ gilbert is appreciative but amusing, describing henry james's reactions to the arrival of belloc from a walking tour unbrushed, unwashed and unshaven. after reading _dickens_, william wrote from cambridge, mass.: o, chesterton, but you're a darling! i've just read your dickens--it's as good as rabelais. thanks! wells, asked to debate with gilbert, wrote to frances: spade house, sandgate. (undated) dear mrs. chesterton god forbid that i should seem a pig [here a small pig is drawn] and indeed i am not and of all the joys in life nothing would delight me more than a controversy with g.k.c., whom indeed i adore. [here is drawn a tiny wells adoring a vast chesterton.] but--i have been recklessly promising all and everyone who asks me to lecture or debate; "if ever i do so again it will be for you," and if once i break the vow i took last year- also we are really quite in agreement. it's a mere difference in fundamental theory which doesn't really matter a rap--except for after dinner purposes. yours ever, h. g. wells. frances thought wells was good for gilbert, he tells me, because he took him out walking, but when the two men were alone gilbert would say supplicatingly "we won't go for a walk today, will we?" "he thought it terrifying," said wells, "the way my wife tidied up." frances, too, tidied up, but cautiously. "she prevented g.k.," says wells, "from becoming too physically gross. he ought not to have been allowed to use the word 'jolly' more than forty times a day." he could not, wells thought, have gone on living in a london which was that of ordinary social life, whether mayfair or bloomsbury. "either the country or dr. johnson's london." and of the relation seen by chesterton between liberty and conviviality he said, "every time he lifted a glass of wine he lifted it against cadbury." in spite of growing restrictions as to sales and hours the inn still remained for chesterton a symbol of freedom in a world increasingly enslaved. it was pointed out to him how great a peril lay in drink, how homes were broken up and families destroyed through drunkenness. after the war began, a letter from one of his readers stressed a real danger: now i do beg you, mr. chesterton, much as you love writing in praise of drink, to give it a rest during the war. . . . you may have the degradation of any number of silly boys to your account without knowing it. . . . i have written with a freedom--you will say perhaps rudeness--which a casual meeting with you, and a great admiration for your work by no means justifies, but which other things perhaps do. i beg you to forgive me. it seems to me that this charge he never quite answered. to claim liberty is one thing, to hymn the glories of wine is quite another. and when he was attacked for the latter he always defended the former, saying that he did not deny the peril but that all freedom meant peril--peril must be preferred to slavery. there were things in which a man must be free to choose even if his choice be evil. this was a part of chesterton's whole philosophy about drink--a subject on which he wrote constantly. it is interesting to note the stages of its development in his mind. the chesterton family had not a puritan tradition in the sense of being teetotal. but lucian oldershaw tells me that in their boyhood he always felt g.k. himself to be a bit of a puritan and i have come upon a boyish poem that seems to confirm this in the matter of wine. the tea pot raised high on tripod, flashing bright, the holy silver urn within whose inmost cavern dark, the secret waters burn before the temple's gateway the subject tea-cups bow and pass it steaming with thy gift, thy brown autumnal glow. within thy silver fortress, the tea-leaf treasure piled o'er which the fiery fountain pours its waters undefiled till the witch-water steals away the essence they enfold and dashes from the yawning spout a torrent-arch of gold. then fill an honest cup my lads and quaff the draught amain and lay the earthen goblet down, and fill it yet again nor heed the curses on the cup that rise from folly's school the sneering of the drunkard and the warning of the fool. * * * leave to the stuart's cavalier the revel's blood-red wine to hiccup out a tyrant's health and swear his right divine mine, cromwell's* cup to stir within, the spirit cool and sure to face another star chamber, a second marston moor. leave to the genius-scorner, the sot's soul-slaying urns that stained the fame of addison, and wrecked the life of burns for etty's hand his private pot, that for no waiter waits** for cowper's lips his "cup that cheers but not inebriates." goal of infantine hope, unknown, mystic felicity sangrael of childish quest much sought, aethereal "real tea" thy faintest tint of yellow on the milk and water pale like midas' stain on pactolus, gives joy that cannot fail. [* cromwell's teapot was among the first used in england.] [** etty, the artist made his own tea in all hotels in a private pot.] childhood's "may i have _real_ tea" had grown into the tea-table of the junior debating club, and lucian oldershaw remembers gilbert as a young man still lunching at tea shops. i found recently two versions of a fragment of a story called "the human club," written when he was at the slade school. the second version opens: a meal was spread on the table, for the members of the human club were, as their name implies, human, however glorified and transformed: the meal, however, consisted principally of tea and coffee, for the humans were total abstainers, not with the virulent assertion of a negative formula, but as an enlightened ratification of a profound social effort (hear, hear), not as the meaningless idolatry (cheers) of an isolated nostrum (renewed cheers), but as a chivalrous sacrifice for the triumph of a civic morality (prolonged cheers and uproar). the aims of the human club were many but among the more practical and immediate was the entire perfection of everything. "perfection is impossible," said the host, eric peterson, bowing his colossal proportions over the coffee-pot. he was in the habit of showing these abrupt rifts of his train of thought, like gigantic fragments of a frieze. but he said then quite simply, with no change in his bleak blue eyes, "perfection is impossible, thank god. the impossible is the eternal." we are a long way from tea the "oriental," cocoa the "vulgar beast," and wine the true festivity of man that we find in _wine, water and song_. chesterton had meanwhile discovered the wine-drinking peasants of france and italy: he had discovered what were left of the old-fashioned inns of england where cider or beer are drunk by the sort of englishmen he had come to love best--the poor. in his revolt against that dreary and pretentious element that he most hated in the middle classes he had come to feel that the life of the poor, as they themselves had shaped it when they were free men, was the ideal. and that ideal included moderate drinking, drinking to express joy in life and to increase it. already in _heretics_ (1904) he had in the essay called "omar and the sacred vine" attacked the evil of pessimistic drinking. a man should never drink because he is miserable, he will be wise to avoid drink as a medicine for, health being a normal thing, he will tend in search of it to drink too much. but no man expects pleasure all the time, so if he drinks for pleasure the danger of excess is less. the sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other rules--a paradox. drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasants of italy. never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. but drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.* [* _heretics_. john lane, chapter vii, p. 103.] but the human will must be brought into action and the gifts of god must be taken with the thanksgiving that is restraint. "we must thank god for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them." the topic seemed to fascinate him; he returned to it again and again. in one essay he described himself opening all the windows in a private bar to get rid of the air of secrecy that he hated. wine should be taken, not secretly but frankly and in fellowship as men in inns do dine. cocktails he abominated--and in fact strong spirits were almost as evil as wine and beer were good. in an essay "the cowardice of cocktails"* he is especially scathing in his comment on those who urge "that they give a man an appetite for his meals." [* from _sidelights on new london & newer york,_ p. 45.] this is unworthy of a generation that is always claiming to be candid and courageous. in the second aspect, it is utterly unworthy of a generation that claims to keep itself fit by tennis and golf and all sorts of athletics. what are these athletes worth if, after all their athletics, they cannot scratch up such a thing as a natural appetite? most of my own work is, i will not venture to say, literary, but at least sedentary. i never do anything except walk about and throw clubs and javelins in the garden. but i never require anything to give me an appetite for a meal. i never yet needed a tot of rum to help me to go over the top and face the mortal perils of luncheon. quite rationally considered, there has been a decline and degradation in these things. first came the old drinking days which are always described as much more healthy. in those days men worked or played, hunted or herded or ploughed or fished, or even, in their rude way, wrote or spoke, if only expressing the simple minds of socrates or shakespeare, and _then_ got reasonably drunk in the evening when their work was done. we find the first step of the degradation, when men do not drink when their work is done, but drink in order to do their work. workmen used to wait in queues outside the factories of forty years ago, to drink nips of neat whisky to enable them to face life in the progressive and scientific factory. but at least it may be admitted that life in the factory was something that it took some courage to face. these men felt they had to take an anaesthetic before they could face pain. what are we to say of those who have to take an anaesthetic before they can face pleasure? what of those, who when faced with the terrors of mayonnaise eggs or sardines, can only utter a faint cry for brandy? what of those who have to be drugged, maddened, inspired and intoxicated to the point of partaking of meals, like the assassins to the point of committing murders? if, as they say, the use of the drug means the increase of the dose, where will it stop, and at what precise point of frenzy and delusion will a healthy grown-up man be ready to rush headlong upon a cutlet or make a dash for death or glory at a ham-sandwich? this is obviously the most abject stage of all; worse than that of the man who drinks for the sake of work, and much worse than that of the man who drinks for the sake of play. wine, chesterton maintained, should not be drunk as an aid to creative production, yet one may find that increased power of creation sometimes follows in its wake. and here of course was a danger to a man who worked as hard as chesterton. he sometimes spoke of himself as "idle," but i think it would be hard to match either his output or his hours of creative work. i remember one visit that i paid to beaconsfield when he was writing one of his major books. he was in his study by 10 in the morning, emerged for lunch at 1 and went back from about 2:30 to 4:30. after tea he worked again until a 7:30 dinner. his wife and i went to bed about 10:30 leaving him preparing his material for the next day. towards 1 a.m. a ponderous tread as he passed my door on his way to bed woke me to a general impression of an earthquake. in a passage in _magic_ g.k. makes his hero say, "i happen to have what is called a strong head and i have never been really drunk." it was true of himself, but in these years just before the great war, before his own severe illness, intimate friends have told me that they had seen him unlike himself, that they felt he had come to depend, "almost absent-mindedly" one said, on the stimulus of wine for the sheer physical power to pour forth so much. besides overwork g.k. was in these years mentally oppressed by the strain of the marconi case, and then almost overwhelmed by the horror of the world war. a man very tender of heart, sensitive and intensely imaginative, he could not react as calmly as cecil himself did to what both believed the probability of the latter's imprisonment. and when that strain was removed there remained the stain on national honour, the opening gulf into which he saw his country falling. to him the marconi case was a heavier burden than the war. for, as he saw it, in the marconi case the nation was wrong in enduring corruption and in the war the nation was magnificently right in resisting tyranny. so chesterton felt, yet the outbreak of the war with all its human suffering to mind and body weighed heavily upon him too. he wrote _the barbarism of berlin_ of which i will say something in the next chapter--for it belongs to those writings of the war period the series of which is so consistent that in his _autobiography_ he was able to claim that he had no sympathy "with the rather weak-minded reaction that is going on round us. at the first outbreak of the war i attended the conference of all the english men of letters, called together to compose a reply to the manifesto of the german professors. i at least among all those writers can say, 'what i have written i have written.'" then his illness came upon him. dr. pocock, coming for a first visit, found the bed partly broken under the weight of the patient who was lying in a grotesquely awkward position, his hips higher than his head. "you must be horribly uncomfortable," he said. "why, now you mention it," said g.k., like a man receiving a new idea, "i suppose i am." the doctor ordered a water-bed, and almost the last words he heard before the patient sank into coma were, "i wonder if this bally ship will ever get to shore." the illness lasted several months. we can follow its progress (and his) in extracts from letters* written to father o'connor by frances: nov. 25th, 1914. you must pray for him. he is seriously ill and i have two nurses. it is mostly heart-trouble, but there are complications. he is quite his normal self, as to head and brain, and he even dictates and reads a great deal. dec. 29th, 1914. gilbert had a bad relapse on christmas eve, and now is being desperately ill. he is not often conscious, and is so weak--i feel he might ask for you--if so i shall wire. dr. is still hopeful, but i feel in despair. jan. 3rd, 1915. if you came he would not know you, and this condition may last some time. the brain is dormant, and must be kept so. if he is sufficiently conscious at any moment to understand, i will ask him to let you come--or will send on my own responsibility. pray for his soul and mine. jan. 7th, 1915. gilbert seemed decidedly clearer yesterday, and though not quite so well today the doctor says he has reason to hope the mental trouble is working off. his heart is stronger, and he is able to take plenty of nourishment. under the circumstances therefore i am hoping and praying he may soon be sufficiently himself to tell us what he wants done. i am dreadfully unhappy at not knowing how he would wish me to act. his parents would never forgive me if i acted only on my own authority. i do pray to god he will restore him to himself that we may know. i feel in his mercy he will, even if death is the end of it--or the beginning shall i say? jan. 12th, 1915. he is really better i believe and by the mercy of god i dare hope he is to be restored to us. physically he is stronger, and the brain is beginning to work normally, and soon i trust we shall be able to ask him his wishes with regard to the church. i am so thankful to think that we can get at his desire. in january 1915 frances wrote to my mother: "gilbert remains much the same in a semi-conscious condition--sleeping a great deal. i feel absolutely hopeless; it seems impossible it can go on like this. the impossibility of reaching him is too terrible an experience and i don't know how to go through with it. i pray for strength and you must pray for me." "dearest josephine," she wrote in a later undated letter, "gilbert is today a little better, after being practically at a standstill for the past week. he asked for me today, which is a great advance, and hugged me. i feel like elijah (wasn't it?) and shall go in the strength of that hug forty days. the recovery will be very slow, the doctors tell me, and we have to prevent his using his brain at all." in this letter she begged to see my mother, and i remember when they met she told her that one day she had tried to test whether gilbert was conscious by asking him, "who is looking after you?" "he answered very gravely, 'god' and i felt so small," she said. presently frances told my mother that gilbert had talked to her about coming into the catholic church. it was just at this time that she wrote to tell father o'connor that gilbert said to her "did you think i was going to die?" and followed this with the question, "does father o'connor know?" after her conversation with my mother frances wrote to her: march 21 i think i would rather you did not tell anyone just yet of what i told you regarding my husband and the catholic church. not that i doubt for a moment that he meant it and knew what he was saying and was relieved at saying it, but i don't want the world at large to be able to say that he came to this decision, when he was weak and unlike himself. he will ratify it no doubt when his complete manhood is restored. i know it was not weakness that made him say it, but you will understand my scruples. i know in god's good time he will make his confession of faith--and if death comes near him again i shall know how to act. thanks for all your sympathy. i _did_ enjoy seeing you. on easter eve frances wrote two letters, one to father o'connor, one to my mother. to father o'connor she said: all goes well here, though still very very slowly--g's mind is gradually clearing, but it is still difficult to him to distinguish between the real and the unreal. i am quite sure he will soon be able to think and act for himself, but i dare not hurry matters at all. i have told him i am writing to you often and he said, "that is right--i'll see him soon. i want to talk to him." he wanders at times, but the clear intervals are longer. he repeated the creed last night, this time in english. to my mother: i feel the enormous significance of the resurrection of the body when i think of my dear husband, just consciously laying hold of life again. indeed, i will pray that your dear ones may be kept in safety. god bless you for all your sympathy. i am so glad that gilbert's decision (for i am sure it was a decision) has made you so happy. i dare not hurry anything, the least little excitement upsets him--last night he said the creed and asked me to read parts of myers' "st. paul." he still wanders a good deal when tired but is certainly a little stronger. love and easter blessings to you all. we ourselves were passing then through the shadow of death. almost as gilbert rose again to this life my father passed into life eternal. one of the very few letters i possess in gilbert's own handwriting was also one of the first he wrote on recovery. it was to my mother: i fear i have delayed writing to you, and partly with a vague feeling that i might so find some way of saying what i feel on your behalf and others'; and of course it has not come. somewhat of what the world and a wider circle of friends have lost i shall try to say in the _dublin review_, by the kindness of monsignor barnes, who has invited me to contribute to it; but of all i feel, and frances feels, and of the happy times we have had in your house, i despair of saying anything at all. i can only hope you and yours will be able to read between the lines of what i write either here or there; and understand that the simultaneous losses of a good friend and a fine intellect have a way of stunning rather than helping the expression of either. i would say i am glad he lived to see what i feel to be a rebirth of england, if his mere presence in an older generation did not prove to me that england never died. this sense of the rebirth of england gave to gilbert's restored life a special quality of triumph that abode down to the end of the war. chapter xxi the war years gilbert was taking up life again and with it the old friendships and the old debates, in the new atmosphere created by the war. to bernard shaw he wrote: june 12th, 1915 my dear bernard shaw, i ought to have written to you a long time ago, to thank you for your kind letter which i received when i had recovered and still more for many other kindnesses that seem to have come from you during the time before the recovery. i am not a vegetarian; and i am only in a very comparative sense a skeleton. indeed i am afraid you must reconcile yourself to the dismal prospect of my being more or less like what i was before; and any resumption of my ordinary habits must necessarily include the habit of disagreeing with you. what and where and when is "uncommon sense about the war?" how can i get hold of it? i do not merely ask as one hungry for hostilities, but also as one unusually hungry for good literature. "il me faut des gã©ants," as cyrano says; so i naturally wish to hear the last about you. you probably know that i do not agree with you about the war; i do not think it is going on of its own momentum; i think it is going on in accordance with that logical paradox whereby the thing that is most difficult to do is also the thing that must be done. if it were an easy war to end it would have been a wicked war to begin. if a cat has nine lives one must kill it nine times, saving your humanitarian feelings, and always supposing it is a witch's cat and really draws its powers from hell. i have always thought that there was in prussia an evil will; i would not have made it a ground for going to war, but i was quite sure of it long before there was any war at all. but i suppose we shall some day have an opportunity of arguing about all that. meanwhile my thanks and good wishes are as sincere as my opinions; and i do not think those are insincere. yours always sincerely, g. k. chesterton. bernard shaw replied: 22nd june 1915 my dear chesterton i am delighted to learn under your own hand that you have recovered all your health and powers with an unimpaired figure. you have also the gratification of knowing that you have carried out a theory of mine that every man of genius has a critical illness at 40, nature's object being to make him go to bed for several months. sometimes nature overdoes it: schiller and mozart died. goethe survived, though he very nearly followed schiller into the shades. i did the thing myself quite handsomely by spending eighteen months on crutches, having two surgical operations, and breaking my arm. i distinctly noticed that instead of my recuperation beginning when my breakdown ended, it began before that. the ascending curve cut through the tail of the descending one; and i was consummating my collapse and rising for my next flight simultaneously. it is perfectly useless for you to try to differ with me about the war. nobody can differ with me about the war: you might as well differ from the almighty about the orbit of the sun. i have got the war right; and to that complexion, you too must come at last, your nature not being a fundamentally erroneous one. at the same time, it is a great pity you were not born in ireland. you would have had the advantage of hearing the burning patriotism of your native land expressing itself by saying exactly the same things about england that english patriotism now says about prussia, and of recognizing that though they were entirely true, they were also a very great nuisance, as they prevented people from building the future by conscientious thought. also, cecil would have seen what the catholic church is really like when the apostolic succession falls to the farmer's son who is cleverer with school books than with agricultural implements. in fact you would have learned a devil of a lot of things for lack of which you often drive me to exclaim "gilbert, gilbert, why persecutest thou me." as to the evil will, of course there is an evil will in prussia. prussia isn't paradise. i have been fighting that evil will, in myself and others, all my life. it is the will of the brave barabbas, and of the militant nationalists who admired him and crucified the pro-gentile. but the prussians must save their own souls. they also have their shaws and chestertons and a divine spark in them for these to work on. . . . what we have to do is to make ridiculous the cry of "vengeance is mine, saith podsnap," and, whenever anyone tells an englishman a lie, to explain to the poor devil that it is a lie, and that he must stop cheering it as a splendid speech. for an englishman never compares speeches either with facts or with previous speeches: to him a speech is art for art's sake, the disciples of our favoured politicians being really, if they only knew it, disciples of whistler. also, and equally important, we have to bear in mind that the english genius does not, like the german, lie in disciplined idealism. the englishman is an anarchist and a grumbler: he has no such word as fatherland, and the idea which he supposes corresponds to it is nothing but the swing of a roaring chorus to a patriotic song. also he is a muddler and a slacker, because tense and continuous work means thought; and he is lazy and fat in the head. but as long as he is himself, and grumbles, it does not matter. given a furious opposition screaming for the disgrace of tyrannical and corrupt ministers, and a press on the very verge of inviting napoleon to enter london in triumph and deliver a groaning land from the intolerable burden of its native rulers' incapacity and rapacity and obsolescence, and the departments will work as well as the enemy's departments (perhaps better), and the government will have to keep its wits at full pressure. but once let england try what she is trying now: that is, to combine the devoted silence and obedience of the german system with the slack and muddle of coodle and doodle, and we are lost. unless you keep up as hot a fire from your ink-bottle on the government as the soldier keeps up from the trenches you are betraying that soldier. of course they will call you a pro-german. what of that? they call me a pro-german. we also must stand fire. as peer gynt said of hell, if the torture is only moral, it cannot be so very bad. i grieve to say that some fool has stolen my title, and issued a two page pamphlet called uncommon sense about the war. so i shall have to call mine more common sense about the war. it is not yet in type: i haven't yet quite settled its destination. any chance of seeing you both if we drive over from ayot to beaconsfield some sunday or other afternoon. yours ever, g.b.s. wells too was rejoicing over his recovery- dear old g.k.c., i'm so delighted to get a letter from you again. as soon as i can i will come to beaconsfield and see you. i'm absurdly busy in bringing together the rulers of the country and the scientific people of whom they are totally ignorant. lloyd george has never heard of ramsey--and so on, and the hash and muddle and quackery on our technical side is appalling. it all means boys' lives in flanders and horrible waste and suffering. well, anyhow if we've got only obscure and cramped and underpaid scientific men we have a bench of fine fat bishops and no end of tremendous lawyers. one of the best ideas for the ypres position came from robert mond but the execution was too difficult for our officers to attempt. so we've got a row of wounded and mangled men that would reach from beaconsfield to great marlow--just to show we don't take stock in these damned scientific people. yours ever, h.g. no one however mad could have called gilbert a pro-german: it was perhaps the only accusation the _new witness_ escaped. but while he largely agreed with shaw's analysis of the englishman as a natural anarchist and grumbler, while he believed in the voluntary principle and disliked conscription, his general outlook was as different from shaw's as were the pamphlets they both wrote. in a book addressed to a german professor g.k. frankly confessed the real _crimes of england_, for which she was now making reparation. to any englishman living in the native atmosphere the suggestion that england had been preparing an aggression against germany seemed more than faintly ludicrous. we were not engaged in plotting in europe--on the contrary we were far too careless of europe. and the funds of the liberal party (which was in power) actually depended chiefly on quaker millionaires who were noted pacifists and at whose bidding national honour was jeopardised by our delay in declaring our support of france. we were not prepared for war and probably only the shock of the invasion of belgium made certain our stand with france. . . . it may seem an idle contradiction to say that our strength in this war came from not being prepared. but there is a truth that cannot be otherwise expressed. the strongest thing in sane anger is surprise. if we had time to think we might have thought better--that is worse. everything that could be instinctive managed to be strong; the instant fury of contempt with which the better spirit in our rulers flung back the prussian bribe; the instant solidarity of all parties; above all, the brilliant instinct by which the irish leader cast into the scale of a free europe the ancient sword of ireland.* [* _the uses of diversity_.] our crimes were in the past, not the present. the first had been when we gave aid to prussia against austria, austria which was "not a nation" but "a kind of empire, a holy roman empire that never came," which "still retained something of the old catholic comfort for the soul." we had helped to put prussia instead of austria at the head of the germanies--prussia which in the person of frederick the great "hated everything german and everything good." francophile as chesterton was, he yet had a certain tenderness for those old germanies which "preserved the good things that go with small interests and strict boundaries, music, etiquette, a dreamy philosophy and so on." our next crimes had been in calling prussia to our aid against napoleon and in failing to assist denmark against her. and by far our worst had been the using of prussian mercenaries with their ghastly tradition of cruelty in ireland in the '98. there is in this little book one drawback from the historian's point of view: its view of the past is so oddly selective. doubtless it is lawful to examine your own nation's conscience as you do your own--and not your neighbour's. yet history should be rather an examination of facts than an examination of conscience. and historically richelieu's policies had had quite something to say in the creation of prussia; the conscript armies of the french revolution had first made europe into an armed camp. it was an undue simplification to insist exclusively on the crimes of england. but even while he did so chesterton rejoiced that now at long last england was on the right side, on the side of europe and of sanity. the _new witness_ group had always seen the issue as their countrymen were now suddenly beginning to see it. they had no sympathy with the "liberal" thinking, made in germany, that had in the name of biblical and historical criticism been undermining the bases of christianity. their love of logic and of clarity had made german philosophy intolerable to them--it was wind, and it was fog. finally their love of france had always made them conceive of europe as centering in that country. for them there was one profound satisfaction even amid the horrors of war: that the issues were so clear. but were they as clear to the whole world? if not they must be made so. there were two main problems to be overcome in this matter, one of which was less pronounced at the time than it became later--the economic interpretation of history. started by karl marx the idea that all history can be interpreted solely by economic causes has come since to have an extraordinary popularity even among those whose own philosophy and sociology are most widely removed from marx. it is a view which chesterton would always have dismissed with the contempt it deserves. both he and belloc saw as the determining factor in history, because it is the determining factor in human life, the free will of man. this does not mean that they would deny that the economic factor has often been powerful in conquering man's liberty, or a motive in its exercise. but chesterton regarded the present age as a diseased one precisely because the money motive held so disproportionate a place in it. he looked back to the past and saw the world of today as almost unique in that respect. he looked forward to the future and hoped for a release from it. and as he looked back into the past he saw something in the history of mankind far stronger than the economic motive--whether that mean the strife for wealth or the mere struggle for subsistence. he saw the all-pervading power of religion, which in bygone ages had presided over man's activities and turned the exercise of that most noble faculty free-will to the building of a civilization today undreamed of. but in 1914 it was easier to get away from the economic interpretation of history than it was to overcome another difficulty in the minds of those who had not the chesterton vision of europe, and to whom it seemed that in a war between nations it was extremely likely that all parties were more or less equally to blame. "history," said chesterton, "tends to be a faã§ade of faded picturesqueness for most of those who have not specially studied it: a more or less monochrome background for the drama of their own day." but the nature of that background and the vision of today's drama will vary with the varying angle of historic vision. there were two possible meanings for the statement that all nations were to blame for the world war. all nations had gone away from god. motives of personal and national greed had ousted the old ideal of christendom. it might roughly be said that no nation was seriously trying to seek the kingdom of god and his justice. international finance had become a shadow resting on all the earth, and it could not have got this power if governments had been governing solely for the good of their peoples. "bow down your heads before god," is the invocation constantly used in the missal during the penitential season of lent and the government of every nation needed this call to repentance. with this interpretation chesterton would have agreed. all nations were to blame for the predisposing causes that made a world-war possible. but when we come to the question of actual responsibility for making this particular war, the statement means something very different and something with which chesterton was prepared to join issue. against him those who disliked france or england, and saw the history of those two countries as a history of imperialism, were saying: if germany had not attacked france, france would have attacked germany; or: england would have been equally treacherous if it had paid her--look at the treaty of limerick. chesterton kept imploring people simply to look at the facts. germany had in fact broken her word to france and attacked her. france had not attacked germany. germany had invaded belgium. england had not invaded holland "to seize a naval and commercial advantage; and whether they say that we wished to do it in our greed or feared to do it in our cowardice, the fact remains that we did not do it. unless this common-sense principle be kept in view, i cannot conceive how any quarrel can possibly be judged. a contract may be made between two persons solely for material advantage on each side: but the moral advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the person who keeps the contract."* [* _the barbarism of berlin_, 15-16.] the promise and the vow were fundamental to chesterton's view of human life. discussing divorce he claims as essential to manhood the right to bind oneself and to be taken at one's word. the marriage vow was almost the only vow that remained out of the whole mediaeval conception of chivalry and he could not endure to see it set at nought. but even in the modern world there still remained some notion of the sacredness of a solemn promise. "it is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility through time, is what chiefly distinguishes us, i will not say from savages, but from brutes and reptiles. this was noted by the shrewdness of the old testament, when it summed up the dark, irresponsible enormity of leviathan in the words, 'will he make a pact with thee?' . . . the vow is to the man what the song is to the bird, or the bark to the dog; his voice whereby he is known."* there were two chief marks whereby it seemed to chesterton that the prussian invasion of belgium was fundamentally an attack on civilization. contempt for a promise was the first. he called it the war on the word. [* ibid., 32-33.] the other mark of barbarism he called the refusal of reciprocity. "the prussians," he wrote, "had been told by their literary men that everything depends upon mood: and by their politicians that all arrangements dissolve before 'necessity.'"* this was not merely a contempt for the word but also an assumption that german necessity was like no other necessity because the german "cannot get outside the idea that he, because he is he and not you, is free to break the law; and also to appeal to the law." thus the kaiser at once violated the hague convention openly himself and wrote to the president of the united states to complain that the allies were violating it. "for this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and worst of the refusals of reciprocity."** [* ibid., 37.] [* ibid., p. 60.] if these two ideas were allowed to prevail they must destroy civilization and so to chesterton the war was a crusade and, to his profound joy, was understood as such by the people of england. the democratic spirit of our country "is rather unusually sluggish and far below the surface. and the most genuine and purely popular movement that we have had since the chartists has been the enlistment for this war." chesterton loved the heroic humour of the trenches: the cry of "early doors" from the boys rushing on death; the term blighty for england and congratulations on a severe wound as a "good blighty one"; the song under showers of bullets, "when it's raining keep your umbrella up." the english, he once said, had no religion left except their sense of humour but i think he meant that they hung out humour somewhat defiantly as a smoke-screen for other things. anyhow he doubted neither that the war was worth winning nor that it could be won by our soldiers and sailors. and with the soldiers and sailors stood the munition workers and the trades unions which had sacrificed their cherished rights for the war period. if the only danger to england was on the home front it was not, in his eyes, to be found in the mass of the nation. nor was he at first too apprehensive of the actions of the government. asquith and sir edward grey might have been slow in declaring war but both were patriotic englishmen and with them stood with equal patriotism the mass of the governing classes. if as has later been said the war had really been brought about by english political and financial interests, it is strange that lord desborough, head of the london house of j. p. morgan and a leading financier of england, should have lost his two elder sons and the prime minister his eldest. but the _new witness_ did see two dangers at home which might jeopardise the success of our armies in the field and bring about a premature and dishonourable peace. these were international finance, and the press magnates. nothing so reminds me of how we were all feeling about the daily papers just then as finding this letter to e. c. bentley (dated july 20, 1915): i was delighted to hear from you though very sorry to hear you have been bad. i mean physically bad; morally and intellectually you have evidently been very good. seriously, i think you have done something to save this country; for the _telegraph_ continues to be almost the only paper that the crisis has sobered and not tipsified. i take it in myself and know many others who do so. part of the fun about 'armsworth is that quite a lot of old ladies of both sexes go about distinguishing elaborately between the _daily mail_ and the _times_.* it is a stagnant state of mind created in people who have never been forced by revolution or other public peril to distinguish between the things they are used to and the thoughts for which the things are supposed to stand. if you printed the whole of ally sloper's half holiday and called it the athenaeum, they would read it with unmoved faces. so long as st. paul's cathedral stood in the usual place they would not mind if there was a crescent on top of it instead of a cross. by the way, i see the germans have actually done what i described as a wild fancy in the flying inn; combined the cross and the crescent in one ornamental symbol. . . . [* both these papers were then owned by the same man--alfred harmsworth, who had become lord northcliffe.] i am inclined to think that the attack upon harmsworth which the _new witness_ developed attributed too much to purposed malice and did not allow enough for the journalistic craving for news and for "scoops." probably some of the posters and articles to which they objected were not the work of lord northcliffe but of some young journalist anxious to sell his paper. nevertheless the _new witness_ attack was not only largely justified but was also remarkably courageous. the staff of the _new witness_ were themselves journalists and men of letters. in both capacities as powerful a newspaper owner as lord northcliffe could damage them severely--and did. never henceforward would any of them be able to write in one of his numerous papers, never would one of their books receive a favourable review. for belloc did not hesitate to call lord northcliffe a traitor for the way in which he had attacked kitchener, while cecil amused himself by reviewing and pointing out the illiteracy of that strange peer's own writing. later too when the harmsworth papers were in full cry for the fall of asquith and the substitution of lloyd george, the _new witness_ took a strong stand. they pointed out too the way in which censorship was exercised against the smaller newspapers while the northcliffe press seemed immune. here was the fundamental danger. whatever the motive, some of the attacks and articles printed were undoubtedly calculated, in military language, to cause alarm and despondency. it was appalling that in time of war this should be permitted; and, as they saw it, permitted because the harmsworth millions had been used to secure a hold on certain politicians. to the _new witness_ "george" was simply harmsworth's man. meanwhile at easter, 1916, came the awful tragedy of the irish rising. chesterton had fallen into the sleep of his long illness soon after the splendid gesture in which redmond had offered the sword of ireland to the allied cause. and there seems little doubt that in making this offer redmond had with him, for the last time, the people of ireland. recruiting began well but that awful fate of stupidity that seems to overtake every englishman dealing with ireland even now was overwhelming the two countries. sir francis vane, an irish officer in the british army, described in a series of articles in the _new witness_ the blunders made in the recruiting campaign: such things as prominent protestant unionists being brought to the fore, national sentiment discouraged, waving of union jacks, appeals to patriotism not for ireland but for england. vane himself found his attempt at recruiting on national lines unpopular with authority and in the midst of his successful effort was recalled to england. still, though recruiting slackened, the cause of the allies remained in ireland the popular cause and the easter rising was the work only of a handful of men. its immediate cause was the fact that although the home rule bill had been passed and was on the statute book its operation was again deferred. all irishmen saw this as a breach of faith yet the majority were not at that time behind the rising. the severity of its repression turned it almost overnight into a national cause and erected yet another barrier against friendship between england and ireland. for this friendship chesterton longed ardently and worked passionately, nor did he believe the barriers insurmountable. he even held that there was between the people of the two countries a natural amity. "there is something common to all the britons, which even acts of union have not torn asunder. the nearest name for it is insecurity, something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge of things. adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without wit, perplex their critics and perplex themselves. their souls are fretted like their coasts."* the irish and the english had suffered oppression at the same hands--those of the rulers of england. if prussian soldiers had been used against irish peasants, so too had they been used against english chartists. a typical englishman, william cobbett, had suffered fine and long imprisonment because of his protest against the flogging of an english soldier by a german mercenary. [* _a short history of england_, p. 7.] "telling the truth about ireland," wrote chesterton, "is not very pleasant to a patriotic englishman; but it is very patriotic."* for the lack of the essential patriotism of admitting past sin the rulers of england were perpetuating an evil that many of them sincerely desired to end. for this was a case where the right road could only be found by retracing the steps of a long road of wrong. [* _the crimes of england_, p. 57.] before the end of the war g.k. visited ireland and in the book that he wrote after this visit may be found his best analysis of all this matter. ireland, he believed, was making a mistake in not throwing herself into the cause of the defeat of germany, not because she owed anything to england but because of what prussia was and of what europe meant. ireland had been the friend of france and the enemy of prussia long before england had been either; she would do well to hold to her ancient allegiance. it was true that ireland had been betrayed by the liberal promise of home rule--but the men who betrayed her were the marconi men! redmond had made the great mistake of his career when from motives of patriotism for ireland he had helped the party hacks of the government committee to whitewash these men, who had gone on to betray ireland as they were then betraying england. england too needed home rule. england too needed deliverance from her "degenerate and unworthy governing class." there are a few pages in _irish impressions_--now out of print-which find their place here in illustration of what he meant by his championship of nationality: a brilliant writer . . . once propounded to me his highly personal and even perverse type of internationalism by saying, as a sort of unanswerable challenge, "wouldn't you rather be ruled by goethe than by walter long?" i replied that words could not express the wild love and loyalty i should feel for mr. walter long, if the only alternative were goethe. i could not have put my own national case in a clearer or more compact form. i might occasionally feel inclined to kill mr. long; but under the approaching shadow of goethe, i should feel more inclined to kill myself. that is the deathly element in denationalisation; that it poisons life itself, the most real of all realities. . . . some people felt it an affectation that the irish should put up their street signs in gaelic but g.k. defended it. "it is well to remember that these things, which we also walk past every day, are exactly the sort of things that always have, in the nameless fashion, the national note." it is this sensation of stemming a stream, of ten thousand things all pouring one way, labels, titles, monuments, metaphors, modes of address, assumptions in controversy, that make an englishman in ireland know that he is in a strange land. nor is he merely bewildered, as among a medley of strange things. on the contrary, if he has any sense, he soon finds them united and simplified to a single impression, as if he were talking to a strange person. he cannot define it, because nobody can define a person, and nobody can define a nation. he can only see it, smell it, hear it, handle it, bump into it, fall over it, kill it, be killed for it, or be damned for doing it wrong. he must be content with these mere hints of its existence; but he cannot define it, because it is like a person, and no book of logic will undertake to define aunt jane or uncle william. we can only say, with more or less mournful conviction, that if aunt jane is not a person, there is no such thing as a person. and i say with equal conviction that if ireland is not a nation, there is no such thing as a nation. . . . * * * * in september 1916 cecil chesterton bade farewell to the _new witness_. he was in the army as a private in the east in the east surreys, and g.k. took over the editorship. i like chesterton's paper, the _new witness_ [wrote an american journalist in the _new york tribune_ (no, _not_ yet herald-tribune)], since g.k.c. has taken it over. . . . gilbert chesterton seems to me the best thing england has produced since dickens. . . . i like the things he believes in, and i hate sociological experts and prohibitionists and uhlan officers, which are the things he hates. i feel in him that a very honest man is speaking. . . . i like his impudence to northcliffe. . . . as a journalist chesterton gets only about a quarter of himself into action. but even a quarter of chesterton is good measure. . . . he works very hard at his journalism. that is why he doesn't do it as well as his careless things, which give him fun. but for all that there is no other editorial page in england or the united states written with the snap, wit and honest humanity of his paragraphs. i hope he won't blunt himself by overwork. it would be an international loss if that sane, jolly mind is bent to routine. england has need of him. the overwork and the high quality of it were alike undeniable, but after the long repose of his illness g.k. seemed like a giant refreshed and ready to run his course. each week's _new witness_ had an editorial, besides the paragraphs of which the _new york tribune_ speaks (not all of these however written by himself), and a signed article under the suggestive general heading "at the sign of the world's end." the difference between articles and a real book, and the degree of work needed to turn the one into the other, may be seen if the essays on marriage in the paper be compared with _the superstition of divorce_ for which they furnished material, and those on ireland with _irish impressions_. there were besides very many articles in other papers english and american and he was also writing his _history of england_. if all englishmen had kept the same unwavering gaze at reality as chesterton much of what he called "the rather feeble-minded reaction" that followed the war might have been avoided and with it the advent of hitler. particularly he opposed the tendency to call "kaiserism" what is now called "hitlerism" and should always be called prussianism. while agreeing that care should be taken not to write of german atrocities that could not be substantiated he insisted that there was no ground for forgetting or ignoring the findings of the american enquiry in belgium which had established more than enough. these horrors, the bombing of civilians, shelling of open towns and sinking of passenger ships culminating with the lusitania, were in the main what brought america into the war. here, as with england, chesterton did not admit as primary what has since been so exclusively stressed--the economic motive. here as with england he took the volunteer army as one great proof of the will of a nation. and those of us who remember can testify that in america as in england the will of the people was ahead of the decision of the politicians. on one point chesterton's articles have a special interest: the question of reprisals. when the germans broke yet another of the promises of the hague convention and initiated the use of poison gas there was much discussion as to the ethics of reprisals and g.k. used against reprisals two arguments one of which was a rare example of a fallacy in his arguments. if a wasp stings you, he said, you do not sting back. no, we might reply, but you squash it--you have as a man an advantage over a wasp and so do not need to use its own weapons to defeat it. his other argument is far more powerful--is indeed overwhelming. if you use, even as reprisals, unlawful weapons, it is harder to prove you did not initiate them. and i remember well another feeling at the time expressed by g.k. which was i believe that of the majority of english people--if we use these things, if we accept the prussian gospel of "frightfulness" then spiritually we have lost the war. spiritually prussia has conquered: as she has engulfed the old germanies and, first imposing her rule, then gained acceptance of her ideas, so it may be with us. ideas are everything and the barbarians destroy more with ideas even than by material weapons, horrible as these may be. inclined at first to hope for the fruits of democracy from the russian revolution chesterton was soon being reproached by h. g. wells for "dirty" suspiciousness about the bolshevik leaders and their motives. but the collapse of russia and the defeat of rumania alike only strengthened the necessity of the fight to a finish with prussia that became as the months passed the absorbing aim of the _new witness_. in the treaties respectively of brest-litovsk and bukarest germany imposed upon these two countries incredibly harsh terms. thus wrote the _new witness_ after the treaty of bukarest: we should like to ask the pacifists and semi-pacifists, who are fond of official documents, if they have read the white paper dealing with the plain facts about the peace with roumania. if they have a single word to say on the subject, we should be much interested to hear what it is. it makes absolutely plain two facts, both of which have a sort of frightful humour after all the humanitarian talk about no annexations and no indemnities. the first is that the conquerors have annexed in a direct and personal sense beyond what is commonly meant by annexation; the second is that they have indemnified themselves by an immediate coercion and extortion, which is generally veiled by the forms of a recognised indemnity. in annexing some nine thousand square miles, they have been particular to attach whole forests to the hunting-grounds of hungarian nobles and the timber of hungarian wood merchants; not merely annexing as a conqueror annexes, but rather stealing as an individual steals. further, the fun growing fast and furious, they have taken country containing a hundred and thirty thousand roumanians, merely because it is uninhabited land. for the second point, we often speak figuratively of tyrants enslaving a country; but teutons do literally enslave. all the males of the occupied land, which happens to be two-thirds of roumania, are driven to work on pain of death or prison. all this is clear and satisfactory enough; but the white paper keeps the best to the last. it is this sentence we would commend to our peaceful friends: "the german delegates informed the roumanian delegates, who were appalled at being required to accept such conditions, that they would appreciate their moderation when they knew those which would be imposed on the western powers after the victory of the central empires." the reminder was needed. far less than most people was chesterton subject to that weakness of the human spirit that brings weariness in sustained effort and premature relaxation. prussia had not, he said, shown any evidence of repentance--merely of regret for lack of success. the kaiser said he had not wanted this war. no, said chesterton, he wanted a very different war. chesterton might and did say later that he himself had wanted a very different peace--the destruction of prussia, the reconstruction of the old german states--but at present he wanted only to fight on until this became possible. i do not think he ever hated anybody--but he did hate prussianism as the "wickedness that hindered loving," and he had no liking for "the patronizing pacifism of the gentleman [it was romain rolland] who took a holiday in the alps and said he was above the struggle; as if there were any alp from which the soul can look down on calvary. there is, indeed, one mountain among them that might be very appropriate to so detached an observer--the mountain named after pilate, the man who washed his hands."* [* _uses of diversity_, p. 40 (fountain library)] his keen imagination could visualize the sufferings caused by war. vicariously he knew something of the life of the trenches, for cecil like many another c. man* had managed to get to france. a delightful article on comradeship shows, what letters from soldiers confirm, how perfectly at home was private chesterton among his fellows and how much loved by them. [* english soldiers are classed a, b, or c, according to their degree of physical fitness, and cecil was in class c.] i can understand a pagan, but not a christian, who simply dismisses the suffering of our soldiers as useless. he is like dr. hyde scorning father damien or like those who cried at the foot of the cross: he saved others, himself he cannot save. they saved others these men, their suffering was that of the human race whose head is christ. with him they bore, even if they knew it not, that mysterious burden of humanity that makes some men question god's existence but draws others into conscious membership of his mystical body. many were so drawn in those days and there seemed a new lifting up of the cross. the _new witness_ does, i think, lack one note a little. they were too busy hating prussianism to give thought to the christian command to love prussians, whose sufferings too were those of humanity. into the opposite error there was no risk that they would fall. never for them would heroism be belittled in the name of the very horrors it was encountering. in one article belloc touched on this strange perversion and reminded his readers that the power to ravage and destroy was not really a new result of modern machinery. attila and his huns had inflicted even greater devastation and had left a desert behind them. barbarism in its nature was destructive and we were encountering barbarism. in so doing we were acting the part of christian men. but the old fights still had to be waged on the home front: against the money power and against what the _new witness_ called prussianism at home. unceasingly they battled for fair treatment for soldiers' wives and children, for freedom from unmeaning and unnecessary regulations, against the profiteering by big firms and the consequent crushing of small. about two thousand small butchers' shops for instance had to close at the very beginning of the war owing to a cornering of supplies by the large firms. against this and all the ramifications of the meat "scandal" the _new witness_ struggled, publishing, they claimed, facts unpublished elsewhere and inspiring questions in the house of commons. belloc's irony, chesterton's wit, point these articles and make them worth reading as literature; and there is some of the old fooling. a further series on the servile state is attacked by shaw who thinks that belloc, since he is not a socialist, must be a follower of herbert spencer! g.k. accounts for this by saying that shaw had not read belloc. "how do you know," retorts shaw, "it is not herbert spencer i have not read? suppose you had your choice of not reading a book by belloc and not reading one by spencer which would you choose? hang it all, be reasonable." the economic front was never abandoned and the paper continued to attack all forms of socialism including the recreation of bumble by mrs. sidney webb, with all the regimentation of the poor "for their own good" that bumble represented. the inner secrets of the fabian office are unfolded by shaw in a letter to gilbert (dated aug. 6, 1917). my dear g.k.c. if you want to expose a scandalous orgy in the _new witness_, you may depend on the following as being a correct account by an eye witness. you know that there is a body called the fabian research department, of which i have the hollow honour to be perpetual grand, the real moving spirit being mrs. sidney webb. a large number of innocent young men and women are attracted to this body by promises of employment by the said mrs. s.w. in works of unlimited and inspiring uplift, such as are unceasingly denounced, along with marconi and other matters, in your well-written organ. well, mrs. sidney webb summoned all these young things to an uplifting at home at the fabian office lately. they came in crowds and sat at her feet whilst she prophesied unto them, with occasional comic relief from the unfortunate perpetual grand. at the decent hour of ten o'clock, she bade them good night and withdrew to her own residence and to bed. for some accidental reason or other i lingered until, as i thought, all the young things had gone home. i should explain that i was in the two pair back. at last i started to go home myself. as i descended the stairs i was stunned by the most infernal din i have ever heard, even at the front, coming from the fabian hall, which would otherwise be the back yard. on rushing to this temple i found the young enthusiasts sprawling over tables, over radiators, over everything except chairs, in a state of scandalous abandonment, roaring at the tops of their voices and in a quite unintelligible manner a string of presumably obscene songs, accompanied on the piano with frantic gestures and astonishing musical skill by a man whom i had always regarded as a respectable fabian researcher, but who now turned out to be a demon pianist out-heroding (my secretary put in two rs, and explains that she was thinking of harrods) svengali. a horribly sacrilegious character was given to the proceedings by the fact that the tune they were singing when i entered was luther's hymn _eine feste burg ist unser gott_. as they went on (for i regret to say that my presence exercised no restraint whatever) they sang their extraordinary and incomprehensible litany to every tune, however august its associations, which happened to fit it. these, if you please, are the solemn and sour neophytes whose puritanical influence has kept you in dread for so many years. but i have not told you the worst. before i fled from the building i did at last discover what words it was they were singing. when it first flashed on me, i really could not believe it. but at the end of the next verse no doubt or error was possible. the young maenad nearest me was concluding every strophe by shrieking that she didn't care where the water went if it didn't get into the wine.* now you know. [* the refrain of a poem in _the flying inn_.] i have since ascertained that a breviary of this black mass can be obtained at the fabian office, with notes of the numbers of the hymns ancient and modern, and all the airs sacred and profane, to which your poems have been set. this letter needs no answer--indeed, admits of none. i leave you to your reflections. ever g.b.s. "the shaw worm turns on wells" was a headline in the _new witness_ over a vigorous and light-hearted attack. the others were apt to score off wells in these exchanges because he lost light-heartedness and became irritable. even with gilbert he sometimes broke out, although in a calmer moment he told shaw that to get angry with chesterton was an impossibility. with cecil chesterton it was only too easy to get angry at any rate as he appeared in the _new witness_. but i think when he heard cecil was in france wells must have regretted one of the letters he wrote to gilbert, just before the change of editorship. it was curious, the contrast between the genial personality so loved by his friends and the waspishness so often shown by cecil and his staff in the columns of the paper. "his extraordinary personality," writes e. s. p. haynes, "wonderfully penetrated the eccentricity of his appearance. his features were slightly fantastic and his voice was as loudly discordant as his laughter; but the real charm and generosity of his character were so transparent that one never seemed to be conscious of the physical medium." yet with all my sympathy for many of the _new witness_ ideas my nerves jangle when i read the volumes of cecil's editorship, and i think jangled nerves explain if they do not excuse this outburst by wells: my dear g.k.c. haven't i on the whole behaved decently to you? haven't i always shown a reasonable civility to you and your brother and belloc? haven't i betrayed at times a certain affection for you? very well, then you will understand that i don't start out to pick a needless quarrel with the _new witness_ crowd. but this business of the hueffer book in the _new witness_ makes me sick. some disgusting little greaser named ---has been allowed to insult old f.m.h. in a series of letters that make me ashamed of my species. hueffer has many faults no doubt but firstly he's poor, secondly he's notoriously unhappy and in a most miserable position, thirdly he's a better writer than any of your little crowd and fourthly, instead of pleading his age and his fat and taking refuge from service in a greasy obesity as your brother has done, he is serving his country. his book is a great book and ---just lies about it--i guess he's a dirty minded priest or some such unclean thing--when he says it is the story of a stallion and so forth. the whole outbreak is so envious, so base, so cat-in-the-gutter-spitting-at-the-passer-by, that i will never let the _new witness_ into the house again. regretfully yours, h. g. wells. gilbert replied: 11 warwick gardens, kensington w. my dear wells, as you will see by the above address i have been away from home; and must apologise for delay; i am returning almost at once, however. most certainly you have always been a good friend to me, and i have always tried to express my pride in the fact. i know enough of your good qualities in other ways to put down everything in your last letter to an emotion of loyalty to another friend. any quarrel between us will not come from me; and i confess i am puzzled as to why it should come from you, merely because somebody else who is not i dislikes a book by somebody else who is not you, and says so in an article for which neither of us is even remotely responsible. i very often disagree with the criticisms of ----; i do not know anything about the book or the circumstances of hueffer. i cannot help being entertained by your vision of ----, who is not a priest, but a poor journalist, and i believe a free-thinker. but whoever he may be (and i hardly think the problem worth a row between you and me) he has a right to justice: and you must surely see that even if it were my paper, i could not either tell a man to find a book good when he found it bad, or sack him for a point of taste which has nothing in the world to do with the principles of the paper. for the rest, haynes represents the _new witness_ much more than a reviewer does, being both on the board and the staff; and he has put your view in the paper--i cannot help thinking with a more convincing logic. don't you sometimes find it convenient, even in my case, that your friends are less touchy than you are? by all means drop any paper you dislike, though if you do it for every book review you think unfair, i fear your admirable range of modern knowledge will be narrowed. of the paper in question i will merely say this. my brother and in some degree the few who have worked with him have undertaken a task of public criticism for the sake of which they stand in permanent danger of imprisonment and personal ruin. we are incessantly reminded of this danger; and no one has ever dared to suggest that we have any motive but the best. if you should ever think it right to undertake such a venture, you will find that the number of those who will commit their journalistic fortunes to it is singularly small: and includes some who have more courage and honesty than acquaintance with the hierarchy of art. it is even likely that you will come to think the latter less important. yours, sans rancune, g. k. chesterton. p.s. on re-reading your letter in order to be as fair as i am trying to be, i observe you specially mention ----'s letters. you will see, of course, that this does not make any difference; to stop letters would be to stop haynes' letter and others on your side; and these could not be printed without permitting a rejoinder. i post this from beaconsfield, where anything further will find me. it ended as all quarrels did that anyone started with gilbert: dear g.k.c. also i can't quarrel with you. but the hueffer business aroused my long dormant moral indignation and i let fly at the most sensitive part of the _new witness_ constellation, the only part about whose soul i care. i hate these attacks on rather miserable exceptional people like hueffer and masterman. i know these aren't perfect men but their defects make quite sufficient hells for them without these public peltings. i suppose i ought to have written to c.c. instead of to you. one of these days i will go and have a heart to heart talk to him. only i always get so amiable when i meet a man. he, c.c., needs it--i mean the talking to. yours ever h.g. through the war's progress wells appeared to chesterton to be expressing with a powerful and individual genius not his own considered views but the reactions of public opinion. as mr. britling he saw the war through, and even called it "a war to end war." as mr. clissold he asked of what use it had all been. chesterton speaks of him as a "rather unstable genius," and the genius and instability alike can be seen in his meteor appearances in the _new witness_ and in his books. several of these he sent to gilbert, who wrote (sept. 12, 1917): i have been trying for a long time, though perpetually baulked with business and journalism, to write and thank you for sending me, in so generous a manner, your ever interesting and delightful books; especially as divisions touching the things we care most about, drive me, every time i review them, to deal more in controversy and less in compliment than i intend. the truth and the trouble, is that both of us are only too conscious that there is a great war going on all the time on the purely mental plane; and i cannot help thinking your view is often a heresy; and i know only too well that when you lead it, it is likely to be a large heresy. i fear that being didactic means being disproportionate; and that the temptation to attack something i think i can correct leads to missing (in my writing, not in my reading) a thousand fine things that i could never imitate. it is lucky for me that you are not very often a book-reviewer, when i bring out my own shapeless and amateurish books. in the _autobiography_ g.k. calls wells a sportive but spiritual child of huxley. he delighted in his wit and swiftness of mind, but he summarized in the same book the quality which runs through all his work. i have always thought that he re-acted too swiftly to everything; possibly as a part of the swiftness of his natural genius. i have never ceased to admire and sympathise; but i think he has always been too much in a state of reaction. to use the name which would probably annoy him most, i think he is a permanent reactionary. whenever i met him, he seemed to be coming from somewhere, rather than going anywhere. . . . and he was so often nearly right, that his movements irritated me like the sight of somebody's hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore. but i think he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. whereas i am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. no change of mood in the public meant any change in the _new witness_ group. in a powerful article in reply to an old friend who asked for peace because the war was destroying freedom, belloc told him that freedom had gone long since for the mass of englishmen. "how many," wrote g.k., "pacifists or semi-pacifists . . . resisted the detailed destruction of all liberty for the populace _before the war?_ it is a bitter choice between freedom and patriotism, but how many fought for freedom before it gave them the chance of fighting against patriotism?"* [* _new witness_, may 31, 1917.] again and again they touched the spot on the question of trading with the enemy. in this as in all their attacks they made one point of enormous importance. do not, they said, look for traitors and spies among waiters and small traders--look up, not down. you will find them in high places if you will dare to look. they dared. and here came in once more what was commonly regarded as a strange crank peculiar to the chesterbelloc--their outlook towards jews. usually those who referred to it spoke of a religious prejudice. again and again the _new witness_, not always patiently but with unvarying clarity, explained. they had no religious prejudice against jews, they had not even a racial prejudice against jews (though this i think was true only of some of the staff). their only prejudice was against the pretence that a jew was an englishman. it was undeniable that there were (for example) rothschilds in paris, london and berlin, all related and conducting an international family banking business. there were d'erlangers in london and paris (pronounced in the french style) whose cousins were erlangers (pronounced in the german style) in berlin. how, the _new witness_ asked, could members of such families feel the same about the war as an englishman? they could not, to put it at its lowest, have the same primary loyalty to england or to germany either. their primary loyalty must be, indeed it ought to be, to their own race and kindred. yet this was surely an excessive simplification. we have only to remember that lately a son of the d'erlanger house died gallantly as an english airman: we have only to remember the thousands of jews who fought in our ranks in this war and the last. very many jews _are_ patriotic for england and for america: many were patriotic for germany. this, no doubt, makes the problem more acute, but any discussion is nonsense that omits this certain fact. there are jews patriotic first for the country they live in, the country that gave them home and citizenship, of which often their wives and mothers are descended; there are others who feel that jewry is their _patria_. this was the fact the _new witness_ could never forget. a jew might not be specially pro-german in feeling, yet his actions might help germany by being pro-jewish. international jewish trading _was_ trading with the enemy and was to a very large extent continuing in spite of assurances to the contrary. moreover international finance was getting nervous over the continuance of the war as a menace to its own future: it wanted peace, a peace that should still leave it in possession in this country--and in germany. gilbert chesterton was passionately determined to cast it out. he was a zionist. he wished for the jewish people the peaceful possession of a country of their own, but he demanded urgently that they should no longer be allowed to govern his country. marconi still obsessed him, and the surrender of english politics to the money power seemed to him to represent as great a danger for the future as prussianism. for a moment the two dangers were the one danger, and against them was set the people of england. it was at this moment that chesterton published his epic of the english people which he called a history. frank swinnerton has told* how this book came to be written. chatto & windus (for whom swinnerton worked) had asked g.k. to write a history of england: he refused "on the ground that he was no historian." later he signed a contract with the same publishers for a book of essays, then discovered that he was already under contract to give this book to another firm. he asked chatto & windus to cancel their contract and offered to write something else for them. swinnerton's account continues: [* _georgian scene_, p. 93.] the publishers, concealing jubilation, sternly recalled their original proposal for a short history of england. shrieks and groans were distinctly heard all the way from beaconsfield, but the promise was kept. the _short history of england_ was what chesterton must have called a wild and awful success. it probably has been the most generally read of all his books. but while the credit for it is his, he must not be blamed for impudence in essaying history, when the inspiration arose in another's head (not mine) and when in fact no man ever went to the writing of a literary work with less confidence. you can find no dates in this history and a minimum of facts, but you can find vision. the history professors at london university said to lawrence solomon that it was full of inaccuracies, yet "he's got something we hadn't got." g.k. might well have borrowed from newman and called it an essay in aid of a history of england. he showed "something of the great moral change which turned the roman empire into christendom, by which each great thing, to which it afterwards gave birth, was baptised into a promise or at least into a hope of permanence. it may be that each of its ideas was, as it were, mixed with immortality." the english people had been free and happy as a part of this great thing, cultivating their own land, establishing by their guilds a social scheme based upon "pity and a craving for equality," building cathedrals and worshipping god, with the "holy land much nearer to a plain man's house than westminster, and immeasurably nearer than runnymede." all life was made lovely by "this prodigious presence of a religious transfiguration in common life" and only began to darken with the successful "rebellion of the rich" under henry viii. probably too big a proportion is given by chesterton to the great crime that overshadowed for him the rest of english history. yet he does justice in brilliant phrasing to the eighteenth century whigs: still more to chatham and burke and to dr. johnson whom he so loved and to whom he was often compared. but supremely he loved nelson "who dies with his stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve." for nelson was the type and chief exemplar of the ordinary englishman. . . . the very hour of his death, the very name of his ship, are touched with that epic completeness which critics call the long arm of coincidence and prophets the hand of god. his very faults and failures were heroic, not in a loose but in a classic sense; in that he fell only like the legendary heroes, weakened by a woman, not foiled by any foe among men. and he remains the incarnation of a spirit in the english that is purely poetic; so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things, and sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. at a recent date, in an age of reason, in a country already calling itself dull and business-like, with top-hats and factory chimneys already beginning to rise like towers of funereal efficiency, this country clergyman's son moved to the last in a luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. he shall remain as a lesson to those who do not understand england, and a mystery to those who think they do. in outward action he led his ships to victory and died upon a foreign sea; but symbolically he established something indescribable and intimate, something that sounds like a native proverb; he was the man who burnt his ships, and who for ever set the thames on fire. the _ballad of the white horse_ had been a poem about english legends and origins. the _history_ too was called a poem by the reviewers. and it was. it was a poem about falstaff and sam weller and even the artful dodger who in so many british colonies had turned into robinson crusoe. his rulers had tried to educate him, they had tried to germanize him and to teach him "to embrace a saxon because he was the other half of an anglo-saxon." all english culture had been based for a century and more on ardent admiration for german _kultur_. and then- . . . the day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had other things to learn. and he was quicker than his educated countrymen, for he had nothing to unlearn. he in whose honour all had been said and sung, stirred, and stepped across the border of belgium. then were spread out before men's eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his organization; then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light we had followed and after what image we had laboured to refashion ourselves. nor in any story of mankind has the irony of god chosen the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise. for the common crowd of poor and ignorant englishmen, because they only knew that they were englishmen, burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they knew that they were christian men. the english poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies of the world. and when the critic of politics and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but a mob. chapter xxii after the armistice the months that followed the signing of the armistice were the darkest in gilbert chesterton's life. nothing but the immense natural high spirits of the _new witness_ group could have carried them through the many years in which they cried their unheeded warnings to england. but now as the war drew to an end a new note of optimism had become audible. the prussian menace was almost conquered. our soldiers would return and would bring with them the courage and confidence of victors. they might overthrow the governing plutocracy and build again an england of freedom and sanity. but one soldier did not return--the one to whom this group looked for comradeship and inspiration. on december 6, 1918, cecil chesterton died in hospital in france. "his courage was heroic, native, positive and equal," wrote belloc, "always at the highest potentiality of courage. . . ." gilbert wrote: he lived long enough to march to the victory which was for him a supreme vision of liberty and the light. the work which he put first he did before he died. the work which he put second, but very near to the other, he left for us to do. there are many of us who will abandon many other things, and recognize no greater duty than to do it. this second work was the fight at home against corruption and for freedom for the english people. it is impossible to remember gilbert chesterton vividly and to write the word bitterness. it was rather with a profound and burning indignation that he thought of his fellow englishmen who had fought and died--and then looked up and saw "marconi george" and "marconi isaacs," still rulers of the fate of his country. thus meditating he wrote an "elegy in a country churchyard." the men that worked for england they have their graves at home: and bees and birds of england about the cross can roam. but they that fought for england, following a falling star, alas, alas for england they have their graves afar. and they that rule in england, in stately conclave met, alas, alas for england they have no graves as yet.* [* _collected poems_, p. 65.] strange irony of cecil chesterton's last weeks: his old enemy godfrey isaacs brought an action for perjury against sir charles hobhouse. both men's counsel agreed and the judge stressed that perjury lay on one side or the other. the case was given against isaacs. he appealed and his appeal was dismissed. perjury had lain on one side or the other! meanwhile news came that rufus isaacs, now lord reading, had gone with lloyd george to paris to attend the peace conference. all that this might mean: the peril to poland: the danger of a prussia kept at the head of the germanies for the sake of international finance: an abasement of england before those countries that had not forgotten marconi: all this was vivid to gilbert chesterton. in the same number of the _new witness_ in which he mourned his brother (dec. 13, 1918), he wrote under "the sign of the world's end" an open letter to lord reading: my lord--i address to you a public letter as it is upon a public question: it is unlikely that i should ever trouble you with any private letter on any private question; and least of all on the private question that now fills my mind. it would be impossible altogether to ignore the irony that has in the last few days brought to an end the great marconi duel in which you and i in some sense played the part of seconds; that personal part of the matter ended when cecil chesterton found death in the trenches to which he had freely gone; and godfrey isaacs found dismissal in those very courts to which he once successfully appealed. but believe me i do not write on any personal matter; nor do i write, strangely enough perhaps, with any personal acrimony. on the contrary, there is something in these tragedies that almost unnaturally clarifies and enlarges the mind; and i think i write partly because i may never feel so magnanimous again. it would be irrational to ask you for sympathy; but i am sincerely moved to offer it. you are far more unhappy; for your brother is still alive. if i turn my mind to you and your type of politics it is not wholly and solely through that trick of abstraction by which in moments of sorrow a man finds himself staring at a blot on the tablecloth or an insect on the ground. i do, of course, realise, with that sort of dull clarity, that you are in practise a blot on the english landscape, and that the political men who made you are the creeping things of the earth. but i am, in all sincerity, less in a mood to mock at the sham virtues they parade than to try to imagine the more real virtues which they successfully conceal. in your own case there is the less difficulty, at least in one matter. i am very willing to believe that it was the mutual dependence of the members of your family that has necessitated the sacrifice of the dignity and independence of my country; and that if it be decreed that the english nation is to lose its public honour, it will be partly because certain men of the tribe of isaacs kept their own strange private loyalty. i am willing to count this to you for a virtue as your own code may interpret virtue; but the fact would alone be enough to make me protest against any man professing your code and administering our law. and it is upon this point of your public position, and not upon any private feelings, that i address you today. not only is there no question of disliking any race, but there is not here even a question of disliking any individual. it does not raise the question of hating you; rather it would raise, in some strange fashion, the question of loving you. has it ever occurred to you how much a good citizen would have to love you in order to tolerate you? have you ever considered how warm, indeed how wild, must be our affection for the particular stray stock-broker who has somehow turned into a lord chief justice, to be strong enough to make us accept him as lord chief justice? it is not a question of how much we dislike you, but of how much we like you; of whether we like you more than england, more than europe, more than poland the pillar of europe, more than honour, more than freedom, more than facts. it is not, in short, a question of how much we dislike you, but of how far we can be expected to adore you, to die for you, to decay and degenerate for you; for your sake to be despised, for your sake to be despicable. have you ever considered, in a moment of meditation, how curiously valuable you would really have to be, that englishmen should in comparison be careless of all the things you have corrupted, and indifferent to all the things that you may yet destroy? are we to lose the war which we have already won? that and nothing else is involved in losing the full satisfaction of the national claim of poland. is there any man who doubts that the jewish international is unsympathetic with that full national demand? and is there any man who doubts that you will be sympathetic with the jewish international? no man who knows anything of the interior facts of modern europe has the faintest doubt on either point. no man doubts when he knows, whether or no he cares. do you seriously imagine that those who know, that those who care, are so idolatrously infatuated with rufus daniel isaacs as to tolerate such risk, let alone such ruin? are we to set up as the standing representative of england a man who is a standing joke against england? that and nothing else is involved in setting up the chief marconi minister as our chief foreign minister. it is precisely in those foreign countries with which such a minister would have to deal, that his name would be, and has been, a sort of pantomime proverb like panama or the south sea bubble. foreigners were not threatened with fine and imprisonment for calling a spade a spade and a speculation a speculation; foreigners were not punished with a perfectly lawless law of libel for saying about public men what those very men had afterwards to admit in public. foreigners were lookers-on who were really allowed to see most of the game, when our public saw nothing of the game; and they made not a little game of it. are they henceforth to make game of everything that is said and done in the name of england in the affairs of europe? have you the serious impudence to call us anti-semites because we are not so extravagantly fond of one particular jew as to endure this for him alone? no, my lord; the beauties of your character shall not so blind us to all elements of reason and self-preservation; we can still control our affections; if we are fond of you, we are not quite so fond of you as that. if we are anything but anti-semite, we are not pro-semite in that peculiar and personal fashion; if we are lovers, we will not kill ourselves for love. after weighing and valuing all your virtues, the qualities of our own country take their due and proportional part in our esteem. because of you she shall not die. we cannot tell in what fashion you yourself feel your strange position, and how much you know it is a false position. i have sometimes thought i saw in the faces of such men as you that you felt the whole experience as unreal, a mere masquerade; as i myself might feel it if, by some fantastic luck in the old fantastic civilisation of china, i were raised from the yellow button to the coral button, or from the coral button to the peacock's feather. precisely because these things would be grotesque, i might hardly feel them as incongruous. precisely because they meant nothing to me i might be satisfied with them, i might enjoy them without any shame at my own impudence as an alien, adventurer. precisely because i could not feel them as dignified, i should not know what i had degraded. my fancy may be quite wrong; it is but one of many attempts i have made to imagine and allow for an alien psychology in this matter; and if you, and jews far worthier than you, are wise they will not dismiss as anti-semitism what may well prove the last serious attempt to sympathise with semitism. i allow for your position more than most men allow for it; more, most assuredly, than most men will allow for it in the darker days that yet may come. it is utterly false to suggest that either i or a better man than i, whose work i now inherit, desired this disaster for you and yours, i wish you no such ghastly retribution. daniel son of isaac. go in peace; but go. yours, g. k. chesterton. in those last sentences the spirit of prophecy was upon chesterton after a truly dark and deep fashion. yet even he did not guess that the retribution he feared would fall, not upon that "tribe of isaacs" thus established in english government, but upon the unfortunate jewish people as a whole, from the german nation that isaacs had gone to paris to protect. for there was no doubt in chesterton's mind that it was his work at the peace conference to strive for the survival of prussia, no matter how europe and the rest of the germanies suffered. the _new witness_ hated the treaty of versailles in its eventual form as much as hitler hates it, but for a very different reason. all human judgments are limited and no doubt there was a mixture of truth and error in chesterton's view of the years that followed. but in the universal reaction from the war-spirit to pacifism the truths he was urging received scant attention, his really amazing prophecies fell on deaf ears. "he will almost certainly," monsignor knox has said,* "be remembered as a prophet, in an age of false prophets." and it is not insignificant that today it has become the fashion to say, as he said twenty-five years ago and steadily reiterated, that the peace of 1918 was only an armistice. [* in the panegyric preached in westminster cathedral, june 27, 1936.] just before leaving england for the front, cecil had married miss ada jones, who had long worked with him on the paper, and who continued to write both for it and later for _g.k.'s weekly_, doing especially the dramatic criticism under the pen-name of j. k. prothero. later on she was to become famous for her exploit in spending a fortnight investigating in the guise of a tramp the london of down-and-out women. she wrote _in darkest london_ and founded the cecil houses to improve the very bad conditions she had discovered and in memory of her husband. at this date mrs. cecil chesterton visited poland and wrote a series of articles describing the polish struggle for life and freedom. several poles also contributed articles to the paper. there was not i imagine on the staff one single writer with the kind of ignorance that enabled lloyd george to confess in paris that he did not know where teschen was. here was the first tragedy of versailles. the representatives of both america and england were ignorant of the reality of europe: wilson was (as chesterton often said) a much better man than lloyd george, but he knew as little of the world which he had come to reconstruct. he was, too, a political doctrinaire preferring "what was not there" in the shape of a league of nations to the real nations of poland or italy. and with the american as with the welshman international finance stood beside the politicians and whispered in their ears. an interesting article appeared in the _new witness_ by an american who said that no leading journal in his own country would print it any more than any english one. he described the opposition of masses of ordinary americans to the league of nations and how a chicago banker, who however had no international interests, had heartily agreed with this opposition. but the same banker had written to him next day eating his own words. in the interim he had met the other bankers. this american correspondent held with the _new witness_ that the league of nations was mainly a device of international finance so framed as to enlist also the support of pacifist idealists who really believed it would make for peace. only one thing, said the _new witness_, would make for a stable peace: remove prussia from her position at the head of germany: make her regaining of it impossible. make a strong poland, and a strong italy, as well as a strong france. later on they said they had disapproved of the weakening of austria, but though i do not doubt that this is true in principle i cannot find much mention of austria in the paper: poland, italy and ireland fill their columns--and the freeing of england. they claimed that theirs was in the main the policy of clemenceau--but both chesterton and belloc admitted that clemenceau, even if he desired a strong poland as a barrier between germany and russia, shared with his colleagues an equal responsibility in the destruction of austria which proved so fatal. he was too much a freemason to desire many catholic states. the interests of france were not those of italy, which certainly went to the wall and was turned thereby from friend and ally into enemy. and the _new witness_ summed up the fate of ireland in the suggestion that lloyd george had said to wilson: "if you won't look at ireland, i won't look at mexico." both lloyd george and wilson were too anti-catholic to do other than dislike (in lloyd george's case _hate_ is the word) catholic poland. it is certain that lloyd george in particular worked savagely against the poland that should have been. a commission appointed by the peace conference reported in favour of poland owning the port of danzig and territory approximating to her age-long historic boundaries and in particular including east prussia in which there was still a majority of poles: lloyd george sent back the report for revision: they made it again on the same lines. it was a strange anomaly that this man should have sat at the council table representing a great country. in the past men had sat there who not only knew much of europe themselves but who had as their advisers the foreign office with all its experience and tradition. belloc pointed out in an article on versailles that the english tradition had been to hold a balance between conflicting extremes and thus to bring about a peace that at least ensured stability for a long period. but here was a man too ignorant to realize the dangers of his own ignorance and therefore seek help from experience. this peace would be, belloc foretold, the parent of many wars. the czechs got much of what they wanted just as d'annunzio got fiume for italy--by seizing it. poland waited for versallles and enlisted her allies, yet while the peace conference was actually in session germans were persecuting poles in east prussia so that many thousands of them fled into poland proper and thus diminished the polish population of east prussia before any plebiscite could be taken there. lloyd george and churchill sent a british expeditionary force to archangel to assist the "white" russians but when the bolsheviks invaded poland she was not supported. nor did the allies send her the raw material they had promised, to rebuild her commercial life. again and again our papers reported pogroms in poland. yet close investigation by writers for the _new witness_ failed to discover any pogroms in the cities in which they were reported as occurring. powerful are the words in which, in april 1919, chesterton foretells the future that will result if power and her historic port are refused to poland. . . . we know that a flood threatens the west from the meeting of two streams, the revenge of germany and the anarchy of russia; and we know that the west has only one possible dyke against such a flood, which is not the mere existence, but the might and majesty of poland. we know that without some such christian and chivalric shield on that side, we shall have half europe and perhaps half asia on our backs. we know exactly what the germans think about our nationalities in the west, and exactly what the bolshevists think about any nationalities anywhere. we know that if the poles have a port and a powerful line of communication with the west, they will be eager to help the west. we know that if they have no port they will have no reason to help the west and no power to help anybody. we know that if they lose their port it will not be by any act of english public opinion or any public opinion, but by the most secret of all secret diplomacy; that it will not even be given up by the english to the germans, but by german jews to other german jews. we know that such international adventurers would still find themselves floating on the top of any tide that drowned the nations, and that they do not care what nations they drown. we know that out of the whole world the polish port is the one place that should have been held, and the one place that is being surrendered. in short, we know what everybody knows and scarcely anybody says. there is one word to be added for those detached persons who see no particular objection to england ceasing to be english, who do not care about the national names of the west, which have been the greatest words in the poetry of the world. so far as we know there is only one ideal they do care about, and they will not get it. whatever else this betrayal means it does not mean peace. the poles have raised revolution after revolution, when three colossal empires prevented them from being a nation at all. it is not in the realm of sanity to suppose that, if we make them half a nation, they will not some day attempt to be a whole nation. but we shall come back to the place where we started, after another cycle of terror and torment and abominable butchery--and to a place where we might, in peace and perfect safety, stand firm today. "not by any act of english public opinion" would poland be weakened, not by any act of english opinion prussia strengthened or ireland oppressed. it was the horror of the situation that no act of english public opinion seemed possible, for the organs of action were stultified. when they _could_ act by fighting and by dying englishmen had done it grandly. not all that they had done had, chesterton believed, been lost. because of them the cross once more had replaced the crescent over the holy city of jerusalem, because of them alsace and lorraine were french once more and poland lived again. but their sufferings and their death had not availed yet to save england. and what is theirs, though banners blow on warsaw risen again, or ancient laughter walks in gold through the vineyards of lorraine, their dead are marked on english stones, their loves on english trees, how little is the prize they win, how mean a coin for these- how small a shrivelled laurel-leaf lies crumpled here and curled; they died to save their country and they only saved the world.* [* _collected poems_, pp. 79-80, "the english graves."] in the _new witness_ he wrote (july 25, 1919): on peace day i set up outside my house two torches, and twined them with laurel; because i thought at least there was nothing pacifist about laurel. but that night, after the bonfire and the fireworks had faded, a wind grew and blew with gathering violence, blowing away the rain. and in the morning i found one of the laurelled posts torn off and lying at random on the rainy ground; while the other still stood erect, green and glittering in the sun. i thought that the pagans would certainly have called it an omen; and it was one that strangely fitted my own sense of some great work half fulfilled and half frustrated. and i thought vaguely of that man in virgil, who prayed that he might slay his foe and return to his country; and the gods heard half the prayer, and the other half was scattered to the winds. for i knew we were right to rejoice; since the tyrant was indeed slain and his tyranny fallen for ever; but i know not when we shall find our way back to our own land. english soldiers in ireland felt, as we all remember, a strong sympathy with the irish people: most of them, said the _new witness_, became sinn feiners. this was an exaggeration, but certainly their opposition to acting as terrorists led to the employment in their stead of the jail-birds known as black and tans. and in england itself the feeling was stirring that grew stronger as the years passed. the soldiers, who were the nation, had won the victory, the politicians had thrown it away. a rushed election before most of the men were demobilized had brought back the same old politicians by turning, so g.k. put it, "collusion" into "coalition." a coalition government had been in wartime "comprehensible and defensible; precisely because it is not concerned with construction or reconstruction but only with the warding off of destruction." a peace-time coalition could do nothing but show up the absurdity of the old party labels. for if these meant anything they meant that their wearers wanted an entirely different kind of construction, at which therefore they could not collaborate. how could a real tory co-operate in construction with a genuine radical? it was the culmination of unreality. the idea that it succeeded (for the moment) because the country really believed that lloyd george had won the war seemed to chesterton the crowning absurdity. it succeeded because the party machines combined to finance their candidates and offered them to a rather dazed country whose men were still in great numbers under arms. "there is naturally no dissentient when hardly anybody seems to be sentient. indifference is called unanimity." how then could this indifference be thrown off: how could the returning manhood of the nation be given a true democracy: was there still hope? if there was, never had the _new witness_ been more needed than now. it had told the truth about political corruption, today it had to fight it: "we are not divided now into those who know and those who do not know. we are divided now into those who care and those who do not care." thus wrote chesterton in an article about his own continued editorship of the paper. politics would never have been my province, either in the highest or the lowest sense. . . . i have hitherto known myself to be merely a stop-gap; but my action, or rather inaction, as a stop-gap, has come terribly to an end. that gap will never be filled now, till god restores all the noble ruin that we name the world; and the wisest know best that the gap will yawn as hopelessly in the history of england as in the story of our private lives. i must now either accept this duty entirely or abandon it entirely. i will not abandon it; for every instinct and nerve of intelligence i have tells me that this is a time when it must not be abandoned. i must accept a comparison that must be a contrast, and a crushing contrast; but though i can never be so good as my brother, i will see if i can be better than myself. the same attacks on financiers and others constantly reiterated might well have put gilbert in the dock where his brother had stood. but i think the upshot of the case against cecil had not been entirely encouraging to the winners. then too, g.k.'s immense popularity made such an attack a still more doubtful move. cecil had been less well-known than gilbert: but far better known than a mr. fraser and a mr. beamish, a pair of cranks against whom sir alfred mond brought a libel action in 1919 for having--in a placard shown in a window in a back street--called him a traitor and accused him of having traded with the enemy. in this case sir alfred mond (of the mond nickel company) giving evidence: "said that he always disregarded charges made by irresponsible persons. charges had been made against him in the _new witness_ which was edited by mr. gilbert chesterton. all the world regarded mr. chesterton as 'irresponsible,' but he was certainly amusing, and he (the witness) had read most of his books. he had once procured with some difficulty a copy of the _new witness."_ his lordship--did mr. chesterton charge the witness with being a traitor? mr. smith (counsel for the defence)--yes, in the _new witness."_ "irresponsible" was not quite the _mot juste_. the unfortunate fraser and beamish were not of the metal to win that or any case in that or any court. there was a kind of solemn buffoonery in choosing these two as responsible opponents in preference to the irresponsible g.k. chesterton. at any rate damages of â£5000 were given against them--which gives some measure of the risk g.k. took in making exactly the same attacks. gilbert had not so much natural buoyancy as cecil: he got far less fun out of making these attacks. still less had he the recklessness that made cecil indifferent even to the charge of inaccuracy. that charge was in fact the only one that gilbert feared. writing to a contributor whose article he had held back in order to verify an accusation made in it, gilbert remarked that he had no fear of a lawsuit when he was certain of his facts: he did not fear fine or imprisonment:--he had one fear only, "i am afraid of being answered." there was another thing he feared: hurting or distressing his friends. this was especially a danger for one, so many of whose friends were also his opponents in politics or religion: and who was now editing a paper of so controversial a character. with h. g. wells he had a real bond of affection, and an interesting correspondence with and about him illustrates all gilbert's qualities; consideration for his subordinates: for his friendships; concern for the integrity of his paper: sense of responsibility to cecil's memory. during an editorial absence the assistant editor, mr. titterton, had accepted a series of articles called "big little h. g. wells" from edwin pugh, which seemed to be turning into an attack on wells instead of an appreciation. chesterton wrote to mr. titterton and simultaneously to wells himself- dear wells, the sudden demands of other duties, which i really could not see how to avoid, has prevented my attending to the _new witness_ lately: and i have only just heard, on the telephone, that you have written a letter to the paper touching an unfortunate difference between you and edwin pugh. i don't yet know the contents of your letter but of course i have told my _locum tenens_ that it is to be printed whatever it is, this week or next. i am really exceedingly distressed to have been out of the business at the time; but if you knew the circumstances i think you would see the difficulty; and my editorial absence has not been a holiday. as it is, i agreed to the general idea of a study of your work by pugh; and i confess it never even crossed my mind that anybody would write such a thing except as a tribute to your genius and the intellectual interest of the subject; nor can i believe it now. it may strike you as so ironical as to be incredible; but it is really one of those ironies that are also facts, that i rather welcomed the idea of a criticism in the paper (which so often differs from you) from a modernist and collectivist standpoint more like your own. i should imagine pugh would agree with you more than i do, and not less. i will not prejudge the quarrel till i understand more of it; but i now write at once to tell you that i would not dream of tolerating anything meant to be a mere personal attack on you, even if i resigned my post on the point; and i had already written to the office to say so. but i do not believe for a moment that pugh means any such thing; i regarded him as a strong wellsian and even more of an admirer than myself; though he might be so modern as to use a familiar and mixed method of portraiture, which is too modern for my tastes, but which many use besides he. for the moment i suggest a possible misunderstanding, which he may well correct by a further explanation. i had said something myself in my weekly article, demurring to a possible undervaluing of you, long before i heard of your own letter. even when i am in closer touch with things, of course, many things appear in the paper with which i wholly disagree; but the notion of a mere campaign against you would always have seemed to me as abominable and absurd as it does now; i do not believe any one can entertain it; and certainly i do not. i am perfectly willing to do you anything that can fairly be shown to be justice, whether it were explanation or apology or anything else. this is all i can say without your letter and pugh's side of the case; but i feel i should say this at once. yours sincerely, g. k. chesterton. p.s. i have arranged for your letter to appear in next week's number; but i may have more light on pugh's attitude by then. to titterton he wrote: . . . i do hope this work will not turn into anything that looks like a mere attack on wells, especially in the rather realistic and personal modern manner, which i am perhaps too victorian myself to care very much about. i do not merely feel this because i have managed to keep wells as a friend on the whole. i feel it much more (and i know you are a man to understand such sentiments) because i have a sort of sense of honour about him as an enemy, or at least a potential enemy. we are so certain to collide in controversial warfare, that i have a horror of his thinking i would attack him with anything but fair controversial weapons. my feeling is so entirely consistent with a faith in pugh's motives, as well as an admiration of his talents, that i honestly believe i could explain this to him without offence. . . . i am honestly in a very difficult position on the _new witness_, because it is physically impossible for me really to edit it, and also do enough outside work to be able to edit it unpaid, as well as having a little over to give it from time to time. what we should have done without the loyalty and capacity of you and a few others i can't imagine. i cannot oversee everything that goes into the paper; . . . i cannot resign, without dropping as you truly said, the work of a great man who is gone; and who, i feel, would wish me to continue it. it is like what stevenson said about marriage and its duties: "there is no refuge for you; not even suicide." but i should have to consider even resignation, if i felt that the acceptance of pugh's generosity really gave him the right to print something that i really felt bound to disapprove. it may be that i am needlessly alarmed over a slip or two of the pen, in vivid descriptions of a very odd character, and that pugh really admires his big little h. g. as much as i thought he did at the beginning of the business. . . . if the general impression on the reader's mind is of the big wells and not the little wells, i think the doubt i mean would really be met. somehow the letter to titterton got into the hands of a mr. hennessy who, after gilbert's death, sent it to wells. wells wrote, "thank you very much for that letter of g.k.c.'s. it is exactly like him. from first to last he and i were very close friends and never for a moment did i consider him responsible for pugh's pathetic and silly little outbreak. i never knew anyone so steadily true to form as g.k.c." besides the cleansing of public life two other things were seen as vital by the _new witness_, the restoration of well-distributed property and the restoration of liberty. under the heading "reconstruction of property" belloc set out a series of proposals, highly practical and very far from what is usually called revolutionary: that savings for instance made on a small scale should be helped by a very high rate of interest; that the purchase by small men of small parcels of land or businesses or houses should be freed from legal charges while these should be made heavier for those who purchased on a large scale thus encouraging small property and checking huge accumulation. he pointed out how vast sums could be found for such subsidies out of the money spent today on an education which the poor detested for their children and which most of the wealthy admitted to be an abject failure. most of those, he noted, who oppose distributism do so on the ground that the proposals are unpractical or revolutionary, which generally means that they have not examined the proposals. his own were certainly practical and would by many be called reactionary. but he admitted one doubt--besides the overwhelming difficulty of turning the current of modern socialism--the doubt whether englishmen from long disuse had not lost the appetite for property. chesterton's own line of approach to the double problem was also twofold. in a volume of essays published near the end of the war and called _the utopia of usurers_ he remarked: "that anarchic future which the more timid tories professed to fear has already fallen upon us. we are ruled by ignorant people." the old aristocracy of england, in his view, had made many mistakes but certain things they had understood very well. the modern governing class "cannot face a fact, or follow an argument, or feel a tradition; but least of all can they, upon any persuasion read through a plain impartial book, english or foreign, that is not specially written to soothe their panic or to please their pride." there had been reality in the claim of the old aristocracy to understand matters not known to the people. they had read history; they were familiar with other languages and other lands. they had a great tradition of foreign diplomacy. even the study of philosophy and theology, today confined to a handful of experts, was not alien to them. on all this had rested what right they had to govern. but today "they rule them by the smiling terror of an ancient secret. they smile and smile but they have forgotten the secret." on the other hand the ordinary workman had the advantage over his probably millionaire master by the necessity of knowing something. he must be able to use his tools, he must know "enough arithmetic to know when prices have risen." the hard business of living taught him something. give him a chance of more through property and liberty and see what he will build on that foundation. the war had already shown not only the courage of our men but their contrivance: their trench newspapers, songs and jests: their initiative as sailors and as airmen: at home the same thing was happening. allotments had sprung up everywhere and solved the problem of potato shortage. men were doing for themselves a rough kind of building. the inclination to get away from the machine and do things oneself was on the increase. armistice and the men's return were heralded by outdoor tea-parties with ropes stretched across the streets for safety. the outburst of pageants was spontaneous and national. "it is time," said chesterton, "for an army of amateurs; for england is perishing of the professionals." vitality seemed to be flowing back into national life, but bureaucracy does not love vitality. agitated town councils met and stopped the tea-parties; fought against street markets through which allotment holders could sell their produce cheaply; put heavy rates on land reclaimed and buildings erected by hard work. town families living in single rooms had secured plots on building estates and run up shacks for themselves and their families. they were forbidden to live in these dwellings--only intended as temporary, but far more healthy than living eight people to a room in a slum. the _new witness_ suspected that the real objection in the eyes of councillors was a lowering of the value of neighbouring plots for wealthier purchasers. worst of all, the allotments were taken: fields sold for speculative building, land dug in public parks taken away in the name of "amenities." the little spark that could have been fanned into a flame was crushed out. an episode of a few years later best illustrates the spirit chesterton was fighting. in 1926 a threat arose to the traffic monopoly from soldiers who put their war gratuities into the purchase of omnibuses which they drove themselves. the london general omnibus company decided to crush them and with the aid of a government commission succeeded. chesterton's paper followed the struggle with passionate interest. just as he believed that the small shop actually served the public better than the large, so too he believed that these owner-drivers would serve it better than the combine. but if it could have been proved that the combine was more efficient gilbert would still have championed the independents. it was better for the community that men should take responsibility and initiative for themselves even if the work could be done more efficiently by wage slaves. to his dismay he found that the trade unions did not dream of applying this test and that they were aligned against the pirates--as the independent owners were usually called. he had always been an ardent supporter of the trade unions. to him it had seemed they were trying to do the work of the ancient guilds under far more difficult conditions. but after the war for the first time a little note of doubt creeps into his voice when he is speaking of them. they were still vocal for the rights of labour, but they had begun to lay stress exclusively on the less important of those rights. writing of the loss of the allotments he suggested in one article that the trades unions might well use some part of their funds in purchasing land to be held in perpetuity by their members. but i doubt if he much expected that they would do so. many trade unionists were working for the bus company and were more concerned about their conditions of work than about the handful of drivers who were their own masters. but the unions had begun to stress almost solely the question of hours and of wages; to fight for good conditions but no longer for control or ownership: to demand security but to agree to abandon many of their rights in return. it was a chill fear and for long he resisted it, but in these terrible years it had begun to shake him. were the people of england losing the appetite for freedom and for property? were the trades unions, from lack of leadership and confusion of thought, beginning to accept the servile state? chapter xxiii rome via jerusalem shortly after the war gilbert and frances set out on their travels, going in 1919 to palestine, home through italy early in 1920, and starting out again the following year for a lecture tour in the united states. to his friendship with maurice baring gilbert owed their being able to make the first of these journeys as well as much else. the picture entitled "conversation piece" of chesterton, belloc and baring is well known. was it chesterton himself who christened it "baring, overbearing and past bearing?" many elements united the three in a close friendship: love of literature, love of europe, a common view of the philosophy of history and of life. frances chesterton often said that of all her husband's friends she thought there was none he loved better than maurice baring. they often wrote ballades together--a french form which they, with phillimore and others, had re-popularised in english. a telegram from gilbert refusing a celebration runs like a refrain: prince, yorkshire holds me now by yorkshire hams i'm fed i can't assist your row i send ballades instead. these "ballades urbane" were a feature in the _new witness_--but many of those the three friends composed were strictly not for publication but recited to friends behind closed doors. gilbert's memory was useful: he knew all his own and the others: once belloc forgot the envoi to one of his own ballades and gilbert finished it for him. even to maurice baring, g.k. wrote less often than he intended and one apologetic ballade carries the refrain: i write no letters to the men i love. i have always fancied that maurice baring gave gilbert the idea for his story _the man who knew too much_. first in the diplomatic service, then doing splendidly as an airman in the war, a member of the great banking family, related to most of the aristocracy and intimate with most of the rest, he is like the hero of the book in a sort of detachment, a slight irony about a world that he has not cared to conquer. impossible for a mere acquaintance to say whether he views that world with all the disillusionment of chesterton's hero--but anyhow such a suggestion from life is never more than a hint for creative art. another side is seen in the _autobiography_- in the stories of maurice baring plunging into the sea in evening dress on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, and of the smashing by gilbert of a wine-glass that became in retrospect a priceless goblet (which had "stood by charlemagne's great chair and served st. peter at high mass") and now inspired the refrain: i like the sound of breaking glass. a good deal of glass was broken by the stones of this group of men whose own house was made of tolerably strong materials. there is quite a bundle of mr. baring's letters to gilbert, and, in spite of the apologetic ballade, a fair number of answers. two of these last are written early in 1919, the second of which opens the question of the jerusalem visit: may 23, 1919 my dear maurice, i am the prince of unremembered towers destroyed before the birth of babylon; i am also the (writer) of unremembered letters, and to a much greater extent the designer and imaginer of unwritten letters: and i cannot remember whether i ever acknowledged properly your communications about claudel, especially your interesting remarks about the comparative coolness of henri de regnier about him. it struck me because i think it is part of something i have noticed myself; a curious and almost premature conservatism in the older generation of revolutionaries, particularly when they were pagan revolutionaries. not that i suppose de regnier is particularly old or in the stock sense a revolutionist; but i think you will know the break between the generations to which i refer. i remember having exactly the same experience the only time i ever talked to swinburne. i had regarded (and resisted) him in my boyhood as a sort of antichrist in purple, like nero holding his lyre, and i found him more like a very well-read victorian old maid, almost entirely a _laudator temporis acti_ disposed to say that none of the young men would ever come up to tennyson--which may be quite true for all i know. i fancy it has something to do with the very fact that their revolt was pagan, and being temporal was also temporary. when that particular fashion in caps of liberty has gone out, they have nothing to fall back on but the feeling which swinburne himself puts into the mouth of the pagan on the day when constantine issued the proclamation. "but to me their new device is barren, the days are bare things long gone over suffice, and men forgotten that were." i only tell you all this because you might find it amusing to keep an eye on the _new statesman_ as well as the _new witness_, where there is a small repetition of the same thing. bernard shaw has written an article which is supposed to be about his view of me and socialism; but which may be said more truly to be about his blindness to hilary and his servile state. it is quite startling to me to find how wholly he misses hilary's point; and how wildly he falls back on a sort of elderly impatience with our juvenile paradox and fantasticality. i shall answer him as abusively as my great personal liking for him will allow and i think hilary is going to do the same; so if you ever see such papers, you might enjoy the fun. yours always, g. k. chesterton. dear maurice, thank you ever so much for your interesting letter. i think you are right every time about gosse and claudel; or rather about claudel and gosse. for though i think gosse a very valuable old victorian in his way, i do not think he is on the same scale as the things that have lately been happening in the world; and claudel is one of them. he has happened like a great gun going off; and i think i saw a line of his on the subject of such a discharge of artillery in the war. it ran, "and that which goes forth is france; terrible as the holy ghost." i doubt if gosse has ever seen that france even in a flash and a bang; i don't see how he could. remember the religion in which he grew up, by his own very graphic account of it; a man is not entirely emancipated from such very positive puritanism by anything so negative as agnosticism. nothing but a religion can cast out a religion. being so sensitive on behalf of renan is simply not understanding the great historical passions about a heresiarch. it means that famous intellectuals must not hate each other; because they all belong to the saville club. please do not think i mean merely that gosse is a snob; i think he is a jolly old gentleman and a good critic of french poetry; but not of _gesta dei per francos_. your points against him are quite logical; i suppose the controversy will not be conducted in public, or i should feel inclined to join in it. anyhow, i wish it could be continued between us as a conversation in private, for i have long wanted to talk to you about serious things. meanwhile, as not wholly unconnected with the serious things, could you possibly do me a great favour? it is very far from being the first great favour you have done me; and i should fear that anyone less magnanimous would fancy i only wrote to you about such things. but the situation is this. an excellent offer has been made to me to write a book about jerusalem, not political but romantic and religious, so to speak; i conceive it as mostly about pilgrimages and crusades, in poetical prose, and working up to allenby's great entrance. the offer includes money to go to jerusalem but cannot include all the political or military permissions necessary to go there. i have another motive for wanting to go there, which is much stronger than the desire to write the book though i do think i could do it in the right way and, what matters more, on the right side. frances is to come with me, and all the doctors in creation tell her she can only get rid of her neuritis if she goes to some such place and misses part of an english winter. i would do anything to bring it off, for that reason alone. you are a man who knows everybody; do you know anybody on allenby's staff; or know anybody who knows anybody on allenby's staff; or know anybody who would know anybody who would know anything about it? i am told that it cannot be done as yet in the ordinary way by cook's; and that the oracle must be worked in some such fashion. if you should be so kind as to refer to any worried soldier or official, i should like it understood that i am not nosing about touching any diplomatic or military matter; france in syria, or any copy for the _new witness_. i only want to write semi-historical rhetoric on the spot. if you could possibly help in this matter, i really think you would be helping things you yourself care about; and one person, not myself, who deserves it. i will not say it would be killing two birds with one stone, which might seem a tragic metaphor; but bringing one bird at least to life; and allowing the other bird, who is a goose, to go on a wild goose-chase. yours always, g. k. chesterton. it was much needed change and refreshment for both gilbert and frances. her diary shows a vivid enjoyment of all the scenes and happenings: going into the church of the nativity with a door "so low you can hardly get in--this done to prevent the cattle from straying in"; seeing camels on the roof of a convent; standing godmother to an armenian carpenter's baby: the officiator in a cape of white silk embroidered in gold and a wonderful crown supposed to represent the temple. the godfather (a young man) was in a red velvet gown. after a good many prayers and much chanting the babe, beautifully dressed, was taken to the font (which was in the side of the wall) and there were more prayers and chanting. then cushions were laid on the floor and the child undressed, all of us assisting. at this point i was asked to stand godmother and gladly consented. the baby, by this time quite naked, was handed to the priest who immersed him completely under the water three times--giving him the name of pedros (peter). before being re-clothed he was anointed with oil--the forebead, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, heart, hands and feet all being signed with the cross. the child was by this time crying lustily and it was some business to get him dressed, especially as he was swaddled in bands very completely. when ready he was handed to me and he lay stiff in my arms whilst i held two large lighted candles. i followed the priest from the font to the little altar, where a chain and a little gold cross were bound round his head (signifying that he was now a christian). then the priest touched his lips with the sacramental wafer, and touched his nose with myrrh. after the blessing, we left the church in a procession, the godfather carrying the baby. at the threshold of the house the priest took it and delivered it to the mother who sat waiting for it, also holding the two candles. again the priests muttered a few prayers and blessed mother, child and godparents. the father is an armenian carpenter by trade--very nice people. mother very pretty. the parents insisted that we should stay for refreshments and we were handed a very nice liquor in lovely little glasses and a very beautiful sort of pastry. afterwards cups of weak tea and cakes. the various rites and ceremonies in jerusalem interested frances deeply but the diary shows no awareness of the differences that separated the various kinds of christians. the diary ends with the return through rome where she and i met, to the surprise of both of us, in the street, while a friend travelling with them met my mother. "both meetings were miraculous," frances comments. since the letters to my mother during gilbert's illness in 1915 we had heard no more about his spiritual pilgrimage. there was much eager talk at this meeting but no opportunity occurred and certainly none was sought for any confidences. as we waved goodbye after their departing train my mother said thoughtfully: "frances did rather play off jerusalem against rome, didn't she?" in fact, as we learned later, this visit to jerusalem had been a determining factor in gilbert's conversion. many people both in and outside the church had been wondering what had so long delayed him. the mental progress from the vague liberalism of the _wild knight_ to the splendid edifice of _orthodoxy_ had been a swift one. for the book was written in 1908 and already several years earlier in _heretics_ and in his newspaper contests with blatchford, gilbert chesterton had shown his firm belief in the godhead of our lord, in sacraments, in priesthood and in the authority of the church. but it was not yet the catholic and roman church. there is a revealing passage in the _autobiography:_ "and then i happened to meet lord hugh cecil. i met him at the house of wilfrid ward, that great clearing house of philosophies and theologies. . . . i listened to lord hugh's very lucid statements of his position. . . . the strongest impression i received was that he was a protestant. i was myself still a thousand miles from being a catholic; but i think it was the perfect and solid protestantism of lord hugh that fully revealed to me that i was no longer a protestant." the time that thousand miles took is a real problem--the years before the illness during which he talked of joining the church, the seven further years before he joined it. cecil chesterton had been received before the war--just at the beginning of the marconi case, in fact--and the entire outlook of both brothers had seemed to make this inevitable, not only theologically but sociologically and historically. alike in their outlook on europe today or on the great ages of the past, it was a catholic civilisation based on catholic theology that seemed to them the only true one for a full and rich human development. i think in this matter a special quality and its defect could be seen in gilbert. for most people intensity of thought is much more difficult than action. with him it was the opposite. he used his mind unceasingly, his body as little as possible. i remember one day going to see them when he had a sprained ankle and learning from frances how happy it made him because nobody could bother him to take exercise. the whole of practical life he left to her. but joining the church was not only something to be thought about, it was something really practical that had to be done, and here frances could not help him. "he will need frances," said father o'connor to my mother, "to take him to church, to find his place in his prayer-book, to examine his conscience for him when he goes to confession. he will never take all those hurdles unaided." frances never lifted a finger to prevent gilbert from joining the catholic church. but obviously before she was convinced herself she could not help him. the absence of help was in this case a very positive hindrance. i remember one day on a picnic gilbert coming up to me with a very disconsolate expression and asking where frances was. i said, "i don't know but i can easily find her. do you want her?" he answered, "i don't want her now but i may want her at any minute." many men depend upon their wives but very few men admit it so frankly. and if he was unpractical to a point almost inconceivable, frances herself could be called practical only in comparison with him. the confused mass of papers through which she had to hunt to find some important document lingers in the memory. another element that made action lag behind conviction with chesterton was his perpetual state of overwork. physically inactive, his mind was never barren but issued in an immense output: several books every year besides editing and articles: there were even two years in which no fewer than six books were published. to focus his attention on the deepest matters, it was vital to escape from the net of work and worry. returning from jerusalem, gilbert wrote from alexandria to maurice baring: my dear maurice, to quote a poet we agree in thinking ridiculously underrated by recent fashions, my boat is on the shore and my bark is on the sea; but before i go, tom moore (if i may so by a flight of fancy describe you), i feel impelled to send you this hurried line to thank you, so far as this atrocious hotel pen will allow me, for the wonderful time i have had in palestine, which is so largely owing to you. there is also something even more important i want very much to discuss with you; because of certain things that have been touched on between us in former times. i will only say here that my train of thought, which really was one of thought and not fugitive emotion, came to an explosion in the church of the ecce homo in jerusalem; a church which the guidebooks call new and the newspapers call latin. i fear it may be at least a month before we meet; for the journey takes a fortnight and may be prolonged by a friend ill in paris; and i must work the moment i return to keep a contract. but if we could meet by about then i could thank you better for many things. yours illegibly, g. k. chesterton. the contract that had to be kept was in all probability the writing of _the new jerusalem_. it is a glorious book. until i read them more carefully i had always accepted g.k.'s own view that books of travel were a weak spot in his multifarious output. he said of himself that he always tended to see such enormous significance in every detail that he might just as well describe railway signals near beaconsfield as the light of sunset over the golden horn. but _the new jerusalem_ is no mere book of description. it is the book of a man seeing a vision. to understand how this vision broke upon him we have first to try to understand something jealously hidden by gilbert chesterton--his own suffering. even as a boy--in the days of the toothache and still more torturing earache--he had written though pain be stark and bitter and days in darkness creep not to that depth i sink me that asks the world to weep. so much did he acclaim himself enrolled under the banner of joy that i think most people miss the companion picture to the favourite one of the happy warrior. no warrior can fight untiringly through a long lifetime without wounds, without temptations to abandon the struggle and seek a less glorious peace. if in what are commonly called practical matters chesterton was weak, he was in this almost superhumanly strong. his fame did not rest upon success in the field of sociology and politics. he could have increased it by neglecting the good of england for which he fought, and living in literature, poetry and fantasy. here all acclaimed him great, whereas most tolerated or despised as a hobby or a weakness the work he was pouring into the fight for england. in this time after the armistice it was by a naked effort of the will that he held his ground. the loss of cecil with his light-hearted courage, his energy and buoyancy, was immeasurable. and i know--for we talked of it together--that frances had not the complete sympathy with gilbert over the paper that she had over his other work. it seemed to her too great a drain on his time and energy: it made the writing of his important books more difficult. she would not, she told me, try to stop it as she knew how much he cared, but she would have rejoiced if he had chosen to let it go. and the fight that he had almost enjoyed in cecil's company had become a harder one, not merely because he was alone but because the nature of the foe had changed. he was fighting now not individual abuses but the mood of pessimism that had overtaken our civilisation. in an article entitled _is it too late?_ he defined this pessimism as "a paralysis of the mind; an impotence intrinsically unworthy of a free man." he stated powerfully the case of those who held that our civilisation was dying and that it was too late to make any further efforts: the future belongs to those who can find a real answer to that real case. . . . the omens and the auguries are against us. there is no answer but one; that omens and auguries are heathen things; and that we are not heathens. . . . we are not lost unless we lose ourselves. . . . great alfred, in the darkness of the ninth century, when the danes were beating at the door, wrote down on his copy of boethius his denial of the doctrine of fate. we, who have been brought up to see all the signs of the times pointing to improvement, may live to see all the signs in heaven and earth pointing the other way. if we go on it must be in another name than that of the goddess of fortune. it was that other name, in which he had so long believed, that he realised with the freshness of novelty on this journey to jerusalem. he made in the holy city and in the fields of palestine a new discovery of christ and of the christian thing. as he looked over the dead sea and almost physically realised what evil meant, he heard the voice of the divine deliverer saying to the demons: "go forth and trouble him not any more." in the cave at bethlehem he realised the "little local infancy" whereby the creator of the world had chosen to redeem the world. all through the book there are glimpses of what he tells more fully in _the everlasting man_. between the two books all that he had seen and thought in palestine lay in his mind, and grew there, and fructified for our understanding. but he had seen it all in that first vision. jerusalem first impressed chesterton as a mediaeval city and from its turrets he could readily picture godfrey de bouillon, richard the lion-hearted and saint louis of france. through the crusades he views what was meant by christendom and sets over against it at once the greatness and the barrenness of islam: the moslem had one thought, and that a most vital one; the greatness of god which levels all men. but the moslem had not one thought to rub against another, because he really had not another. it is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. the creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts. today we of christendom have fallen below ourselves but yet we have something left of the power to create whether it be a theology or a civilisation. talking to an old arab in the desert, chesterton heard him say that in all these years of turkish rule the turks had never given to the people a cup of cold water. and as the old man spoke he heard the clank of pipes and he knew that it was the english soldiers who were bringing water through the desert to jerusalem. a chapter on zionism discusses with sympathy to both parties the difficulties of the jewish settlement in palestine. in palestine he found his jewish friend and co-worker on the _new witness_, dr. eder, who had gone there ardent in the cause of zionism; and chesterton himself remained convinced that some system akin to zionism was the only possible solution of this enormous problem--possibly a system of jewish cantons in various countries. but he was equally convinced that the english government was destroying the chances of success for zionism by sending jews as governors in england's name to that or any other eastern country. even in this book there is struck at times a note of the doom he feared was overhanging us. he heard "islam crying from the turret and israel wailing from the wall," and yet he seemed too to hear a voice from all the peoples of jerusalem "bidding us weep not for them, who have faith and clarity and a purpose, but weep for ourselves and for our children." in his fighting articles he had asserted the supremacy of the human will over fate: in this book he sees how that will must be renewed, purified and made once more mighty by the same power that built the ancient civilisation of christendom. jerusalem gave to chesterton the fuller realisation of two great facts. first he saw that the supernatural was needed not only to conquer the powers of evil but even to restore the good things that should be natural to man. as he put it in the later book, "nature may not have the name of isis; isis may not be really looking for osiris. but it is true that nature is really looking for something. nature is always looking for the supernatural." yet man, even strengthened by the supernatural, cannot suffice for the fight, without a leader who is more than man. in the land of christ's childhood, his teaching and his suffering, there came to gilbert chesterton "a vision more vivid than a man walking unveiled upon the mountains, seen of men and seeing; a visible god." all visions must fade into the light of common day, and the return home meant the resumption of hard labour. "for the moment," wrote gilbert to maurice baring, "as balzac said, i am labouring like a miner in a landslide. normally i would let it slide. but if i did in this case i should break two or three really important contracts, which i find i have returned from jerusalem just in time to save." (a few years later when sheed and ward started, gilbert wanted to write a number of books for us to publish. his secretary found that he had then thirty books contracted for with a variety of publishers!) he had got home in april 1920: and a lecture tour was planned for the united states at the beginning of the following year. the eight months between saw the completion and publication of _the uses of diversity_ (collected essays), _the new jerusalem_ and _the superstition of divorce_. and still went on the _new witness_, the _illustrated london news_, articles, introductions, lectures, conferences. two letters to maurice baring clearly belong to these months: my dear maurice, i am so awfully distressed to hear you are unwell again; i do not know whether i ought even to bother you with my sentiments; beyond my sympathy; but if it is not too late, or too early, i will call on you early next week; probably monday, but i will let you know for certain before then. i would have called on you long ago, let alone written, but for this load of belated work which really seems to bury me day after day. i never realised before that business can really block out much bigger things. as you may possibly guess, i want to consider my position about the biggest thing of all, whether i am to be inside it or outside it. i used to think one could be an anglo-catholic and really inside it; but if that was (to use an excellent phrase of your own) only a porch, i do not think i want a porch, and certainly not a porch standing some way from the building. a porch looks so silly, standing all by itself in a field. since then, unfortunately, there have sprung up round it real ties and complications and difficulties; difficulties that seemed almost duties. but i will not bother you with all that now; and i particularly do not want you to bother yourself, especially to answer this unless you want to. i know i have your sympathy; and please god, i shall get things straight. sometimes one suspects the real obstacles have been the weaknesses one knows to be wrong, and not the doubts that might be relatively right, or at least rational. i suppose all this is a common story; and i hope so; for wanting to be uncommon is really not one of my weaknesses. they are worse, probably, but they are not that. there are other and in the ordinary sense more cheerful things i would like to talk of; things i think we could both do for causes we certainly agree about. meanwhile, thank you for everything; and be sure i think of you very much. yours always, g. k. chesterton. my dear maurice, this is the shortest, hastiest and worst written letter in the world. it only tells you three things: (1) that i thank you a thousand times for the book; (2) that i have to leave for america for a month or two, earlier than i expected; but i am glad, for i shall see something of frances, without walls of work between us; and (3) that i have pretty well made up my mind about the thing we talked about. fortunately, the thing we talked about can be found all over the world. yours always, g. k. chesterton. i will not write here of the american scene but will talk of it in a later chapter along with the second tour gilbert made in the states. it seems best to complete now the story of his journey of the mind. a reserved man tells more of himself indirectly than directly. readers of the _autobiography_ complain that it is concerned with everything in the world except g. k. chesterton. you can certainly search its pages in vain for any account of the process of his conversion: for that you must look elsewhere: in the poems to our lady, in _the catholic church and conversion_, in _the well and the shallows_, and in the letters here to be quoted. in _the catholic church and conversion_ he sketches the three phases through which most converts pass, all of which he had himself experienced. he sums them up as "patronizing the church, discovering the church, and running away from the church." in the first phase a man is taking trouble ("and taking trouble has certainly never been a particular weakness of mine") to find out the fallacy in most anti-catholic ideas. in the second stage he is gradually discovering the great ideas enshrined in the church and hitherto hidden from him. "it is these numberless glimpses of great ideas, that have been hidden from the convert by the prejudices of his provincial culture, that constitute the adventurous and varied second stage of the conversion. it is, broadly speaking, the stage in which the man is unconsciously trying to be converted. and the third stage is perhaps the truest and most terrible. it is that in which the man is trying not to be converted. he has come too near to the truth, and has forgotten that truth is a magnet, with the powers of attraction and repulsion."* [* _the catholic church and conversion_, p. 61.] to a certain extent it is a fear which attaches to all sharp and irrevocable decisions; it is suggested in all the old jokes about the shakiness of the bridegroom at the wedding or the recruit who takes the shilling and gets drunk partly to celebrate, but partly also to forget it. but it is the fear of a fuller sacrament and a mightier army. . . . * [* ibid., p. 65.] the man has exactly the same sense of having committed or compromised himself; or having been in a sense entrapped, even if he is glad to be entrapped. but for a considerable time he is not so much glad as simply terrified. it may be that this real psychological experience has been misunderstood by stupider people and is responsible for all that remains of the legend that rome is a mere trap. but that legend misses the whole point of the psychology. it is not the pope who has set the trap or the priests who have baited it. the whole point of the position is that the trap is simply the truth. the whole point is that the man himself has made his way towards the trap of truth, and not the trap that has run after the man. all steps except the last step he has taken eagerly on his own account, out of interest in the truth; and even the last step, or the last stage, only alarms him because it is so very true. if i may refer once more to a personal experience, i may say that i for one was never less troubled by doubts than in the last phase, when i was troubled by fears. before that final delay i had been detached and ready to regard all sorts of doctrines with an open mind. since that delay has ended in decision, i have had all sorts of changes in mere mood; and i think i sympathise with doubts and difficulties more than i did before. but i had no doubts or difficulties just before. i had only fears; fears of something that had the finality and simplicity of suicide. but the more i thrust the thing into the back of my mind, the more certain i grew of what thing it was. and by a paradox that does not frighten me now in the least, it may be that i shall never again have such absolute assurance that the thing is true as i had when i made my last effort to deny it.* [* ibid., pp. 62-3.] the whole of catholic theology can be justified, says gilbert, if you are allowed to start with those two ideas that the church is popularly supposed to oppose: reason and liberty. "to become a catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think. it is so in exactly the same sense in which to recover from palsy is not to leave off moving but to learn how to move." the convert has learnt long before his conversion that the church will not force him to abandon his will. "but he is not unreasonably dismayed at the extent to which he may have to use his will." this was the crux for gilbert. "there is in the last second of time or hairbreadth of space, before the iron leaps to the magnet, an abyss full of all the unfathomable forces of the universe. the space between doing and not doing such a thing is so tiny and so vast." father maturin said after his conversion that for at least ten years before it the question had never been out of his mind for ten waking minutes. it was about ten years since gilbert had first talked to father o'connor of his intention to join the church, but in his case thought on the subject could not have been so continuous. still he had time for patronising, discovery, and running away, all in leisurely fashion. external efforts to help him had been worse than useless: as he indicates in _the catholic church and conversion_, they had always put him back. "gilbert could not be hustled," says maurice baring of his whole habit of mind and body. "you could fluster gilbert but not hustle him," says father o'connor. they were both too wise to try. in two letters gilbert said that the two people who helped him most at this time were maurice baring and father ronald knox, who had both gone through the same experience themselves. besides the positive mental processes of recognition, repulsion and attraction exercised by the church, gilbert was affected to some extent both by affection for the church of england and disappointment with it. the profound joy of his early conversion to christianity was linked with anglicanism and so too were many friendships and the continued attachment to it of frances. but what he said to maurice baring about a porch is representative. like father maturin he felt he owed so much to his anglican friends: he hated to stress overmuch the revulsion from anglicanism in the process of conversion. but it did at this date contribute to the converging arguments. he wrote to maurice baring: so many thanks for the sermons, which i will certainly return as you suggest. i had the other day a trying experience, and i think a hard case of casuistry; i am not sure that i was right; but also not by any means sure i was wrong. long ago, before my present crisis, i had promised somebody to take part in what i took to be a small debate on labour. too late, by my own carelessness, i found to my horror it had swelled into a huge anglo-catholic congress at the albert hall. i tried to get out of it, but i was held to my promise. then i reflected that i could only write (as i was already writing) to my anglo-catholic friends on the basis that i was one of them now in doubt about continuing such; and that their conference in some sense served the same purpose as their letters. what affected me most, however, was that by my own fault i had put them into a hole. otherwise, i would not just now speak from or for their platform, just as i could not (as yet at any rate) speak from or for yours. so i spoke very briefly, saying something of what i think about social ethics. whether or not my decision was right, my experience was curious and suggestive, though tragic; for i felt it like a farewell. there was no doubt about the enthusiasm of those thousands of anglo-catholics. but there was also no doubt, unless i am much mistaken, that many of them besides myself would be roman catholics rather than accept things they are quite likely to be asked to accept--for instance, by the lambeth conference. for though my own distress, as in most cases i suppose, has much deeper grounds than clerical decisions, yet if i cannot stay where i am, it will be a sort of useful symbol that the english church has done something decisively protestant or pagan. i mean that to those to whom i cannot give my spiritual biography, i can say that the insecurity i felt in anglicanism was typified in the lambeth conference. i am at least sure that much turns on that conference, if not for me, for large numbers of those people at the albert hall. a young anglo-catholic curate has just told me that the crowd there cheered all references to the pope, and laughed at every mention of the archbishop of canterbury. it's a queer state of things. i am concerned most, however, about somebody i value more than the archbishop of canterbury; frances, to whom i owe much of my own faith, and to whom therefore (as far as i can see my way) i also owe every decent chance for the controversial defence of her faith. if her side can convince me, they have a right to do so; if not, i shall go hot and strong to convince her. i put it clumsily, but there is a point in my mind. logically, therefore, i must await answers from waggett and gore as well as knox and mcnabb; and talk the whole thing over with her, and then act as i believe. this is a dusty political sort of letter, with nothing in it but what i think and nothing of what i feel. for that side of it, i can only express myself by asking for your prayers. the accident of his having to speak at this congress, where he was received with enormous enthusiasm, probably led to a fuller analysis of this element in his thought. i put here a letter he wrote to maurice baring soon after his conversion, because it sums up the anglican question as he finally saw it: feb. 14th, 1923 please forgive me for the delay; but i have been caught in a cataract of letters and work in connection with the new paper we are trying to start; and am now dictating this under conditions that make it impossible for it to resemble anything so personal and intimate as the great unwritten epistle to which you refer. but i will note down here very hurriedly and in a more impersonal way, some of the matters that have affected me in relation to the great problem. to begin with, i am shy of giving one of my deepest reasons because it is hard to put it without offence, and i am sure it is the wrong method to offend the wavering anglo-catholic. but i believe one of my strongest motives was mixed up with the idea of honour. i feel there is something mean about not making complete confession and restitution after a historic error and slander. it is not the same thing to withdraw the charges against rome one by one, or restore the traditions to canterbury one by one. suppose a young prig refuses to live with his father or his friend or his wife, because wine is drunk in the house or there are greek statues in the hall. suppose he goes off on his own and develops broader ideas. on the day he drinks his first glass of wine, i think it is essential to his honour that he should go back to his father or his friend and say, "you are right and i was wrong, and we will drink wine together." it is not consonant with his honour that he should set up a house of his own with wine and statues and every parallel particular, and still treat the other as if he were in the wrong. that is mean because it is making the best of both; it is combining the advantages of being right with the advantages of having been wrong. any analogy is imperfect; but i think you see what i mean. the larger version of this is that england has really got into so wrong a state, with its plutocracy and neglected populace and materialistic and servile morality, that it must take a sharp turn that will be a sensational turn. no _evolution_ into catholicism will have that moral effect. christianity is the religion of repentance; it stands against modern fatalism and pessimistic futurism mainly in saying that a man can go back. if we do decidedly go back it will show that religion is alive. for the rest, i do not say much about the details of continuity and succession, because the truth is they did not much affect me. what i see is that we cannot complain of england suffering from being protestant and at the same time claim that she has always been catholic. that there has always been a high church party is true; that there has always been an anglo-catholic party may be true, but i am not so sure of it. but there is one matter arising from that which i do think important. even the high church party, even the anglo-catholic party only confronts a particular heresy called protestantism upon particular points. it defends ritual rightly or even sacramentalism rightly, because these are the things the puritans attacked. if it is not the heresy of an age, at least it is only the anti-heresy of an age. but since i have been a catholic, i have become conscious of being in a much vaster arsenal, full of arms against countless other potential enemies. the church, as the church and not merely as ordinary opinion, has something to say to philosophies which the merely high church has never had occasion to think about. if the next movement is the very reverse of protestantism, the church will have something to say about it; or rather has already something to say about it. you might unite all high churchmen on the high church quarrel, but what authority is to unite them when the devil declares his next war on the world? another quality that impresses me is the power of being decisive first and being proved right afterwards. this is exactly the quality a supernatural power would have; and i know nothing else in modern religion that has it. for instance, there was a time when i should have thought psychical enquiry the most reasonable thing in the world, and rather favourable to religion. i was afterwards convinced, by experience and not merely faith, that spiritualism is a practical poison. don't people see that _when_ that is found in experience, a prodigious prestige accrues to the authority which, long before the experiment, did not pretend to enquire but simply said, "drop it." we feel that the authority did not discover; it knew. there are a hundred other things of which that story is true, in my own experience. but the high churchman has a perfect right to be a spiritualistic enquirer; only he has not a right to claim that his authority knew beforehand the truth about spiritualistic enquiry. of course there are a hundred things more to say; indeed the greatest argument for catholicism is exactly what makes it so hard to argue for it. it is the scale and multiplicity of the forms of truth and help that it has to offer. and perhaps, after all, the only thing that you and i can really say with profit is exactly what you yourself suggested; that we are men who have talked to a good many men about a good many things, and seen something of the world and the philosophies of the world and that we have not the shadow of a doubt about what was the wisest act of our lives. this letter, as we have seen, was written afterwards. meanwhile the story of the last slow but by no means uncertain steps is best told in a series of undated letters to father ronald knox: dear father knox, it is hard not to have a silly feeling that demons, in the form of circumstances, get in the way of what concerns one most, and i have been distracted with details for which i have to be responsible, in connection with the _new witness_, which is in a crisis about which shareholders etc. have to be consulted. i can't let my brother's paper, that stands for all he believed in, go without doing all i can; and i am trying to get it started again, with belloc to run it if possible. but the matter of our meeting has got into every chink of my thoughts, even the pauses of talk on practical things. i could not explain myself at that meeting; and i want to try again now. i could not explain what i mean about my wife without saying much more. i see in principle it is not on the same level as the true church; for nothing can be on the same level as god. but it is on quite a different level from social sentiments about friends and family. i have been a rottenly irresponsible person till i began to wear the iron ring of catholic responsibilities. but i really have felt a responsibility about her, more serious than affection, let alone passion. first, because she gave me my first respect for sacramental christianity; second, because she is one of the good who mysteriously suffer. . . . . i have, however, a more practical reason for returning to this point. so far as my own feelings go, i think i might rightly make application to be instructed as soon as possible; but i should not like to take so serious a step without reopening the matter with her, which i could do by the end of a week. i have had no opportunity before, because she has only just recovered from an illness, and is going away for a few days. but at about the end of next week, say, everything ought to be ready. meanwhile i will write to you again, as i ought to have done before, but this tangle of business ties me up terribly just now. perhaps you could tell me how i could arrange matters with some priest or religious in london, whose convenience it would suit if i came up once or twice a week, or whatever is required; or give me the address of someone to write to, if that is the correct way. there are priests at high wycombe which is nearer; but i imagine they are very busy parochial clergy. i had meant to write to you about the convictions involved in a more abstract way, but i fear i have filled my letter with one personal point. but, as i say, i will write to you again about the other matters; and as they are more intellectual and less emotional, i hope i may be a little more coherent. yours very sincerely, g. k. chesterton. p.s. this has been delayed even longer than i thought, for business bothers of my own and the paper's, plus finishing a book and all my journalism, are bewildering me terribly. dear father knox, please excuse this journalistic paper, but the letter-block seems undiscoverable at this time of night. i ought to have written before; but we have been in some family trouble; my father is very ill, and as he is an old man, my feelings are with him and my mother in a way more serious than anything except the matter of our correspondence. essentially, of course, it does not so much turn the current of my thoughts as deepen it; to see a man so many million times better than i am, in every way, and one to whom i owe everything, under such a shadow makes me feel, on top of all my particular feelings, the shadow that lies on us all. i can't tell you what i feel of course; but i hope i may ask for your prayers for my people and for me. my father is the very best man i ever knew of that generation that never understood the new need of a spiritual authority; and lives almost perfectly by the sort of religion men had when rationalism was rational. i think he was always subconsciously prepared for the next generation having less theology than he has; and is rather puzzled at its having more. but i think he understood my brother's conversion better than my mother did; she is more difficult, and of course i cannot bother her just now. however, my trouble has a practical side, for which i originally mentioned it. as this may bring me to london more than i thought, it seems possible i might go there after all, instead of wycombe, if i knew to whom to go. also i find i stupidly destroyed your letter with the names of the priests at wycombe to whom you referred me. would it bother you very much to send me the names again, and any alternative london ones that occur to you; and i will let you know my course of action then. please forgive the disorder of my writing--and feeling. yours sincerely, g. k. chesterton. dear father knox, i was just settling down three days ago to write a full reply to your last very kind letter, which i should have answered long before, when i received the wire that called me instantly to town. my father died on monday; and since then i have been doing the little i can for my mother; but even that little involves a great deal of business--the least valuable sort of help. i will not attempt to tell you now all that this involves in connection with my deeper feelings and intentions; for i only send you this interim scribble as an excuse for delaying the letter i had already begun; and which nothing less than this catastrophe would have prevented me finishing. i hope to finish it in a few days. i am not sure whether i shall then be back in beaconsfield; but if so it will be at a new address: top meadow beaconsfield. yours in haste, g. k. chesterton. dear father knox, i feel horribly guilty in not having written before, and i do most earnestly hope you have not allowed my delay to interfere with any of your own arrangements. i have had a serious and very moving talk with my wife; and she is only too delighted at the idea of your visit in itself; in fact she really wants to know you very much. unfortunately, it does not seem very workable at the time to which i suppose you referred. i imagine it more or less corresponds to next week; and we have only one spare bedroom yet, which is occupied by a nurse who is giving my wife a treatment that seems to be doing her good and which i don't want to stop if i can help it. i am sure you will believe that my regret about this difficulty is really not the conventional apology; though heaven knows all sorts of apologies are due to you. touching the other idea of lady lovat's most generous invitation i am not so sure, as that again depends at the moment on the treatment; but of course i shall let lady lovat know very soon in any case; and make other arrangements, as you suggested. in our conversation my wife was all that i hope you will some day know her to be; she is incapable of wanting me to do anything but what i think right; and admits the same possibility for herself: but it is much more of a wrench for her, for she has been able to practise her religion in complete good faith; which my own doubts have prevented me from doing. i will write again very soon. yours sincerely, g. k. chesterton. p.s. i am ashamed to say this has been finished fully forty-eight hours after i meant it to go, owing to executor business. nobody so unbusinesslike as i am ought to be busy. dear father knox, this is only a wild and hasty line to show i have not forgotten, and to ask you if it would be too late if i let you know in a day or two, touching your generous suggestion about your vacation. i shall know for certain, i think, at latest by the end of the week; but just at the moment it depends on things still uncertain, about a nurse who is staying here giving my wife a treatment of radiant heat--one would hardly think needed in this weather; but it seems to be doing her good, i am thankful to say. if this is pushing your great patience too far, please do not hesitate to make other arrangements if you wish to; and i shall no doubt be able to do the same. but i should love to accept your suggestion if possible. yours sincerely, g. k. chesterton. dear father knox, just as i am emerging from the hurricane of business i mentioned to you, i find myself under a promise a year old to go and lecture for a week in holland; and i write this almost stepping on to the boat. i don't in the least want to go; but i suppose the great question is there as elsewhere. indeed, i hear it is something of a reconquered territory; some say a third of this heroic calvinist state is now catholic. i have no time to write properly; but the truth is that even before so small a journey i have a queer and perhaps superstitious feeling that i should like to repeat to you my intention of following the example of the worthy calvinists, please god; so that you could even cite it if there were ever need in a good cause. i will write to you again and more fully about the business of instruction when i return, which should be in about ten days. yours always sincerely, g. k. chesterton. dear father knox, i ought to have written long ago to tell you what i have done about the most practical of business matters. i have again been torn in pieces by the wars of the _new witness_; but i have managed to have another talk with my wife, after which i have written to our old friend father o'connor and asked him to come here, as he probably can, from what i hear. i doubt whether i can possibly put in words why i feel sure this is the right thing, not so much for my sake as for hers. we talk about misunderstandings; but i think it is possible to understand too well for comfort; certainly too well for my powers of psychological description. frances is just at the point where rome acts both as the positive and the negative magnet; a touch would turn her either way; almost (against her will) to hatred, but with the right touch to a faith far beyond my reach. i know father o'connor's would be the touch that does not startle, because she knows him and is fond of him; and the only thing she asked of me was to send for him. if he cannot come, of course i shall take other action and let you know. i doubt if most people could make head or tail of this hasty scrawl: but i think you will understand. yours sincerely, g. k. chesterton. father knox wrote on july 17, 1922, "i'm awfully glad to hear that you've sent for father o'connor and that you think he's likely to be available. i must say that, in the story, father brown's powers of neglecting his parish always seemed to me even more admirable than dr. watson's powers of neglecting his practice; so i hope this trait was drawn from the life." father o'connor has described the two days before the reception: "on thursday morning, on one of our trips to the village, i told mrs. chesterton: 'there is only one thing troubling gilbert about the great step--the effect it is going to have on you.' 'oh! i shall be infinitely relieved. you cannot imagine how it fidgets gilbert to have anything on his mind. the last three months have been exceptionally trying. i should be only too glad to come with him, if god in his mercy would show the way clear, but up to now he has not made it clear enough to me to justify such a step.' so i was able to reassure gilbert that afternoon. we discussed at large such special points as he wished, and then i told him to read through the penny catechism to make sure there were no snags to a prosperous passage. it was a sight for men and angels all the friday to see him wandering in and out of the house with his fingers in the leaves of the little book, resting it on his forearm whilst he pondered with his head on one side." the ceremony took place in a kind of shed with corrugated iron roof and wooden walls--a part of the railway hotel, for at this time beaconsfield had no catholic church. father ignatius rice, o.s.b., another old and dear friend, came over from the abbey at douai, to join father o'connor at breakfast at the inn and they afterwards walked up together to top meadow. what follows is from notes made by my husband of a conversation with father rice. they found gilbert in an armchair reading the catechism "pulling faces and making noises as he used to do when reading." he got up and stuffed the catechism in his pocket. at lunch he drank water and poured wine for everyone else. about three they set out for the church. suddenly father o'connor asked g.k. if he had brought the ritual. g.k. plunged his hand in his pocket, pulled out a threepenny shocker with complete absence of embarrassment, and went on searching till at last he found the prayer book. while g.k. was making his confession to father o'connor, frances and father rice went out of the chapel and sat on the yokels' bench in the bar of the inn. she was weeping. after the baptism the two priests came out and left gilbert and frances inside. father rice went back for something he had forgotten and he saw them coming down the aisle. she was still weeping, and gilbert had his arm round her comforting her. . . . he wrote the sonnet on his conversion that day. he was in brilliant form for the rest of the day, quoting poetry and jesting in the highest spirits. . . . he joined the church "to restore his innocence." sin was almost the greatest reality to him. he became a catholic because of the church's practical power of dealing with sin. immediately, he wrote to his mother and to maurice baring, who had anxiously feared he had perhaps offended gilbert, so long was it since he had heard from him. my dearest mother, i write this (with the worst pen in south bucks) to tell you something before i write about it to anyone else; something about which we shall probably be in the position of the two bosom friends at oxford, who "never differed except in opinion." you have always been so wise in not judging people by their opinions, but rather the opinions by the people. it is in one sense a long story by this time; but i have come to the same conclusion that cecil did about needs of the modern world in religion and right dealing, and i am now a catholic in the same sense as he, having long claimed the name in its anglo-catholic sense. i am not going to make a foolish fuss of reassuring you about things i am sure you never doubted; these things do not hurt any relations between people as fond of each other as we are; any more than they ever made any difference to the love between cecil and ourselves. but there are two things i should like to tell you, in case you do not realise them through some other impression. i have thought about you, and all that i owe to you and my father, not only in the way of affection, but of the ideals of honour and freedom and charity and all other good things you always taught me: and i am not conscious of the smallest break or difference in those ideals; but only of a new and necessary way of fighting for them. i think, as cecil did, that the fight for the family and the free citizen and everything decent must now be waged by [the] one fighting form of christianity. the other is that i have thought this out for myself and not in a hurry of feeling. it is months since i saw my catholic friends and years since i talked to them about it. i believe it is the truth. i must end now, you know with how much love; for the post is going. always your loving son, gilbert. dear maurice, my abominable delay deserves every penalty conceivable, hanging, burning and boiling in oil; but really not so inconceivable an idea as that i should be offended with you at any time (let alone after all you have done in this matter) however thoroughly you might be justified in being offended with me. really and truly my delay, indefensible as it is, was due to a desire and hope of writing you a letter quite different from all those i have had to write to other people; a very long and intimate letter, trying to tell you all about this wonderful business, in which you have helped me so much more than anyone else. the only other person i meant to write to in the same style is father knox; and his has been delayed in the same topsy-turvy way. i am drowning in whirlpools of work and worry over the _new witness_ which nearly went bankrupt for good this week. but worry does not worry so much as it did before . . . unless it is adding insult to injury, i shall send the long letter after all. this i send off instantly on receipt of yours. please forgive me; you see i humiliate myself by using your stamped envelope. yours always, g. k. chesterton. this sense that the church was needed to fight for the world was very strong in gilbert when he hailed it to his mother as the "one fighting form of christianity." in the _new witness_ he answered near this time a newspaper suggestion that the church ought to "move with the times." the cities of the plain might have remarked that the heavens above them did not altogether fit in with their own high civilisation and social habits. they would be right. oddly enough, however, when symmetry was eventually restored, it was not the heavens that had been obliged to adapt themselves. . . . the church cannot move with the times; simply because the times are not moving. the church can only stick in the mud with the times, and rot and stink with the times. in the economic and social world, as such, there is no activity except that sort of automatic activity that is called decay; the withering of the high powers of freedom and their decomposition into the aboriginal soil of slavery. in that way the world stands much at the same stage as it did at the beginning of the dark ages. and the church has the same task as it had at the beginning of the dark ages; to save all the light and liberty that can be saved, to resist the downward drag of the world, and to wait for better days. so much a real church would certainly do; but a real church might be able to do more. it might make its dark ages something more than a seed-time; it might make them the very reverse of dark. it might present its more human ideal in such abrupt and attractive a contrast to the inhuman trend of the time, as to inspire men suddenly for one of the moral revolutions of history; so that men now living shall not taste of death until they have seen justice return. we do not want, as the newspapers say, a church that will move with the world. we want a church that will move the world. we want one that will move it away from many of the things towards which it is now moving; for instance, the servile state. it is by that test that history will really judge, of any church, whether it is the real church or no. chapter xxiv completion there is one part of this story that has not been told with the rest: our lady's share in gilbert's conversion. the chesterton family had been quite without the strange protestant prejudice that in the minds of many englishmen sets the mother of god against god the son. our lady was respected though of course not invoked. in a boyhood poem gilbert took the blasphemous lines of swinburne's "hymn to proserpine" and wrote a kind of parody in reverse turning the poem into a hymn to mary. he would, too, recite swinburne's own lines "deliberately directing them away from swinburne's intention and supposing them addressed to the new christian queen of life, rather than to the fallen pagan queen of death." but i turn to her still; having seen she shall surely abide in the end goddess and maiden and queen be near me now and befriend. nor was it only admiration for art that made him write--also in early youth: the nativity of botticelli do you blame me that i sit hours before this picture? but if i walked all over the world in this time i should hardly see anything worth seeing that is not in this picture. father o'connor sees in _the catholic church and conversion_ a hint that mr. belloc had been of those who tried to hustle gilbert in his younger days. but on this profound reality of mary's help they could meet many years before gilbert had finished the slow rumination of mind and the painful effort of will that had held him so long. here is an early letter belloc wrote to his friend: reform club, manchester. 11 dec. 1907. my dear gilbert, i am a man afraid of impulse in boats, horses and all action though driven to it. i have never written a letter such as i am writing now, though i have desired to write some six or seven since i became a grown man. in the matter we discussed at oxford i have a word to say which is easier to say on paper than by word of mouth, or rather, more valuable. all intellectual process is doubtful, all inconclusive, save pure deduction, which is a game if one's first certitudes are hypothetical and immensely valuable if one's first certitude is fixed, yet remains wholly dependent on that. now if we differed in all main points i would not write thus, but there are one or two on which we agree. one is "vere passus, immolatus in cruce pro homine." another is in a looking up to our dear lady, the blessed mother of god. i recommend to you this, that you suggest to her a comprehension for yourself, of what indeed is the permanent home of the soul. if it is here you will see it, if it is there you will see it. she never fails us. she has never failed me in any demand. i have never written thus--as i say--and i beg you to see nothing in it but what i say. there is no connection the reason can seize--but so it is. if you say "i want this" as in your case to know one way or the other--she will give it you: as she will give health or necessary money or success in a pure love. she is our blessed mother. i have not used my judgment in this letter. i am inclined to destroy it, but i shall send it. don't answer it. yours ever h. belloc. at top of letter: "my point is if it is right she knows. if it is not right she knows." gilbert believed it, and he knew that as he came to the church he was coming to our lady. now i can scarcely remember a time when the image of our lady did not stand up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the thought of all these things. i was quite distant from these things, and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the world for them, and with myself against them; for that is the condition before conversion. but whether the figure was distant, or was dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or was a challenge to myself--i never doubted that this figure was the figure of the faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this thing had to say to humanity. the instant i remembered the catholic church, i remembered her; when i tried to forget the catholic church, i tried to forget her! when i finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest of all my acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy little image of her in the port of brindisi, that i promised the thing that i would do, if i returned to my own land.* [* _the well and the shallows_, pp. 176-7.] in his _chaucer_, g.k. quoted with considerable amusement a learned critic who said it was "possible" that the poet had "passed through a period of intense devotion, more especially towards the virgin mary." "it is," he comments. "it does occur from time to time. i do not quite understand why chaucer must have 'passed through' this fit of devotion; as if he had mariolatry like the measles. even an amateur who has encountered this malady may be allowed to testify that it does not usually visit its victim for a brief 'period'; it is generally chronic and (in some sad cases i have known) quite incurable."* [* _chaucer_, p. 121.] _the queen of seven swords_ is the great expression of gilbert's "chronic" love of our lady: and men looked up at the woman made for the morning when the stars were young, for whom more rude than a beggar's rhyme in the gutter these songs were sung. "the return of eve" exemplified a favourite thought of his: when the journalist keeps repeating that the life of religion does not lie in dusty dogmas we should stop him with a great shout, for he is wrong at the very start. it is from the seed of dogma and from that seed alone that all the powers of art and poetry and devotion spring. in the days of his boyhood, when he thought of our lady with a vague and confused respect as _"the_ madonna" he could not have written "the return of eve." that flower came from the seed of the doctrine of the immaculate conception. our lady is the mother of god and our mother: this doctrine blossomed as he wrote: i found one hidden in every home a voice that sings about the house. a nurse that scares the nightmares off a mother nearer than a spouse whose picture once i saw; and there wild as of old and weird and sweet in sevenfold splendour blazed the moon not on her brow; beneath her feet. this poem, "the white witch" has in it a mingling of the old classical stories of his boyhood and the new light of christian reality. in _the everlasting man_ he saw the myths as hunger and the faith as bread. men's hearts today were withered because they had forgotten to eat their bread. the hunger of the pagans was a healthier thing than the jaded sterility of the modern world. our lady was ready to give that world the bread of life once more. and as he meditated on the mystery of the virgin birth he saw god making purity creative. she alone who overcame all heresies could overcome the hideous heresy of birth prevention. that christ from this creative purity came forth your sterile appetites to scorn. so: in her house life without lust was born, so in your house lust without life shall die. "gaude, virgo maria, cunctas haereses sola interemisti." was this phrase from our lady's office ringing in gilbert's mind as he sang of the seven champions of christendom disarmed and worsted in the fight, going back to our lady to find that she had hidden their swords where the gospels tell us she hid and pondered all things--in her heart? from her wounded heart, mary takes the seven swords to rearm the saints who have to reconquer the earth. certainly he must often have thought of the litany. so many verses are based on it. our lord as a baby climbs the ivory tower of his mother's body and kisses the mystic rose of her lips: a woman was his walking home foederis arca ora pro nobis. and he thinks of the sun, moon and stars as trinkets for her to play with: with the great heart a woman has and the love of little things. for she is a woman: regina angelorum, queen of powers and archangels, she yet belongs to the human race. our lady went into a strange country, our lady, for she was ours and had run on the little hills behind the houses and pulled small flowers; but she rose up and went into a strange country with strange thrones and powers. from a welter of comment and correspondence that followed his conversion--challenging, scorning, rejoicing, welcoming, i select two letters from the two closest of gilbert's catholic friends--hilaire belloc and maurice baring. i.viii.22. my dear gilbert, i write to you, from these strange surroundings, the first line upon the news you gave me. i must write to you again when i have collected myself: for my reactions are abominably slow. i have, however, something to say immediately: and that is why i write this very evening, just after seeing eleanor off at the station. the thing i have to say is this (i could not have said it before your step: i can say so now. before it would have been like a selected pleading.) the catholic church is the exponent of reality. it is true. its doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. this it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. this it is which the will deliberately confirms. and that is why faith though an act of the will is moral. if the ordnance map tells us that it is 11 miles to [a place] then, my mood of lassitude as i walk through the rain at night making it feel like 30, i use the will and say "no." my intelligence has been convinced and i compel myself to use it against my mood. it is 11 and though i feel in the depths of my being to have gone 30 miles and more, i _know_ it is not yet 11 i have gone. i am by all my nature of mind sceptical. . . . and as to the doubt of the soul i discover it to be false: a mood: not a conclusion. my conclusion--and that of all men who have ever once seen it--is the faith; corporate, organised, a personality, teaching. a thing, not a theory. it. to you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this statement may seem too desiccate. it is indeed not enthusiastic. it lacks meat. it is my misfortune. in youth i had it: even till lately. grief has drawn the juices from it. i am alone and unfed, the more do i affirm the sanctity, the unity, the infallibility of the catholic church. by my very isolation do i the more affirm it, as a man in a desert knows that water is right for man: or as a wounded dog not able to walk, yet knows the way home. the catholic church is the natural home of the human spirit. the odd perspective picture of life which looks like a meaningless puzzle at first, seen from that one standpoint takes a complete order and meaning, like the skull in the picture of the ambassadors. so much for my jejune contribution: not without value; because i know you regard my intelligence--a perilous tool god gave me for his own purposes; one bringing nothing to me. but beyond this there will come in time, if i save my soul, the flesh of these bones--which bones alone i can describe and teach. i know--without feeling (an odd thing in such a connection) the reality of beatitude: which is the goal of catholic living. in hac urbe lux solennis ver aeternum pax perennis et aeterna gaudia. yours, h. b. maurice baring wrote: august 25: 1922. my dear gilbert, when i wrote to you the other day i was still cramped by the possibility of the news not being true although i _knew_ it was true. i felt it was true at once. curiously enough i felt it had happened before i saw the news in the newspaper at all. i felt that your ship had arrived at its port. but the more i felt this, the more unwilling i was to say anything before i heard the news from a source other than the newspapers. i gave way to an excess, a foolish excess perhaps of scruple. but you will, i think, understand this. in writing to you the other day i expressed not a tenth part of what i felt and feel and that baldly and inadequately. nothing for years has given me so much joy. i have hardly ever entered a church without putting up a candle to our lady or to st. joseph or st. anthony for you. and both this year and last year in lent i made a novena for you. i know of many other people, better people far than i, who did the same. many masses were said for you and prayers all over england and scotland in centres of holiness. i will show you some day a letter from some nuns on the subject. a great friend of mine one of the greatest saints i have known, sister mary annunciation of the convent orphanage, upper norwood, used always to pray for you. she, alas, died last year. did i ever quote you a sentence of bernard holland on the subject of kenelm henry digby when the latter was received? "father scott . . . who, at last, guided him through the narrow door where one must bend one's head, into the internal space and freedom of the eternal and universal catholic church." _space_ and _freedom:_ that was what i experienced on being received; that is what i have been most conscious of ever since. it is the exact opposite of what the ordinary protestant conceives to be the case. to him and not only to him but to the ordinary english agnostic the convert to catholicism is abandoning his will and his independence, sometimes they think even his nationality; at the best they think he is sheltering himself in a walled garden; at the worst they think he has closed on himself an iron door: and shackled himself with foolish chains and sold his birthright for a crown of tinsel. and yet their own experience, the testimony of their eyes if they would only use them, ought to suggest to them that they might perhaps be mistaken. it would be difficult for anyone to make out a case for the unenglishness of manning or indeed of any prominent english catholic whether a born catholic or a convert. it would be difficult for them to prove that belloc was a writer wanting in independence. it would be difficult for them to convince any one that father vaughan and lord fitzalan were wearing foolscaps. and anybody who has thought about history or looked on at politics must have reflected that freedom resides where there is order and not where there is license: or no-order. it is true in politics; it is true in art. it is the basis of our whole social life in england. russia has just given us the most startling of object lessons. the english with their passion for committees, their club-rules and their well organised traffic are daily realising the fact, however little they may recognise the theory. only the law can give us freedom, said goethe talking of art. "und das gesetz kann nur die freiheit geben." well all i have to say, gilbert, is what i think i have already said to you, and what i have said not long ago in a printed book. that i was received into the church on the eve of candlemass 1909, and it is perhaps the only act in my life, which i am quite certain i have never regretted. every day i live, the church seems to me more and more wonderful; the sacraments more and more solemn and sustaining; the voice of the church, her liturgy, her rules, her discipline, her ritual, her decisions in matters of faith and morals more and more excellent and profoundly wise and true and right, and her children stamped with something that those outside her are without. there i have found truth and reality and everything outside her is to me compared with her as dust and shadow. once more god bless you and frances. please give her my love. in my prayers for you i have always added her name. yours, maurice. it was a bit of great good fortune, although at the time he did not feel it so, that the death of the _new witness_ in 1922 for lack of funds, left gilbert some months for uninterrupted creative thought before _g.k.'s weekly_ took its place. lawrence solomon, friend of his boyhood and at this time a near neighbour, has told me not only how happy his conversion had made gilbert but also how it had seemed to bring him increased strength of character. worry, he had told maurice baring, did not worry so much as of old because of a fundamental peace. in this atmosphere were written two of his most important books: _st. francis of assisi_ published 1923, _the everlasting man_ published 1925. in a poem he has expressed his sense of conversion as a new light that had transfigured life: indeed of a new life given to him: after one moment when i bowed my head and the whole world turned over and came upright, and i came out where the old road shone white, i walked the ways and heard what all men said. * * * * * they rattle reason out through many a sieve that stores the sand and lets the gold go free: and all these things are less than dust to me because my name is lazarus and i live.* [* _collected poems_, p. 387, "the convert."] both books shine with that light on the white road of man's endeavour, thrill with that life. gilbert felt now the clue to history in his fingers and he used it increasingly. _the everlasting man_ is the _orthodoxy_ of his later life and one difficulty in dealing with it adequately was expressed in a letter from william lyon phelps thanking the author for "a magnificent work of genius and never more needed than now. i took out my pencil to mark the most important passages, but i quickly put my pencil in my pocket for i found i had to mark every sentence." reading the book for perhaps the seventh time i can only say (i hope without irreverence) what g.k. himself says happens to those who can read the words of the gospels "simply enough." they "will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them. criticism is only words about words; and of what use are words about such words as these." "rocks rolled upon them." did he not feel crushed, overwhelmed at times by his own thought on these immensities, or can the philosopher carry his thoughts as lightly as gilbert so often seemed to carry his? i think not always. he must have needed superhuman strength to conceive and give birth to this mighty book. the thoughts sketched in _the new jerusalem_ had grown to their full fruition in an atmosphere of meditation. it would be much easier to give an outline of _the everlasting man_ than of _orthodoxy_, much harder to give an idea of it. for _orthodoxy_ consists of a hundred brilliant arguments while _the everlasting man_ really is a vision of history supported by a historical outline. comparing his own effort with that of h. g. wells, chesterton says, "i do not believe that the best way to produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines." he is like wells however in not being a specialist but claiming "the right of the amateur to do his best with the facts the specialists provide"--only their specialists are different specialists and their facts therefore largely different facts. chesterton, unlike most converts, wrote concerning his own conversion the least interesting of his later books: but in _the everlasting man_ he is not at all concerned with his own spiritual wayfaring, he merely wants to make everyone else look at what he has come to see at the end of the way. the book is an attempt to get outside man and thus see him as the strange being he really is: to get outside christianity and see for the first time its uniqueness among the religions of the world. why are not all men aware of the uniqueness of man among the animals and the uniqueness of the church among religions? because they do not really look at either. familiarity has dulled the edge of awareness. men must be made to see them as though for the first time; and it is the towering achievement of this book that reading it we do so see them. "i desire to help the reader to see christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole against the background of other historic things; just as i desire him to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things. and i say that in both cases when seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernatural things." this being his desire, he divides the book into two parts--"the first being the main adventure of the human race in so far as it remained heathen; and the second a summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming christian." notable as the first part is, it is only a preparation for the second, which shows the church not as one religion among many but as the only religion, for it is the only thing that binds into one both philosophy (or thought) and mythology (or poetry), giving us a logos who is also the hero of the strangest story in the world. he asks the man who talks of reading the gospels really to read them as he might read his daily paper and to feel the terrific shock of the words of christ to the pharisees or the behaviour of christ to the money-changers: to look at the uniqueness of the church that has died so often but like her founder risen again from the dead. two untrue things, he felt, were constantly reiterated about the gospel--one that the church had overlaid and made difficult a plain and simple story: the other that the hero of this story was merely human and taught a morality suitable to his own age, inapplicable in our more complicated society. to anyone who really read the gospels the instant impression would be rather that they were full of dark riddles which only historic christianity has clarified. the eunuchs of the heavenly kingdom would be an idea dark and terrible but for the historic beauty of catholic virginity. the ideal of man and woman "in one flesh" inseparable and sanctified by a sacrament became clear in the lives of the great married saints of christendom. the apparent idealisation of idleness above service in the story of mary and martha was lit up by the sight of catherine and clare and teresa shining above the little home at bethany. the meek inheriting the earth became the basis of a new social order when the mystical monks reclaimed the lands that the practical kings had lost. thus if the gospel was a riddle the church was the answer to the riddle because both were created by one who knew: who saw the ages in which his own creation was to find completion: whose morality was not one of another age but of another world. chesterton gathered history in his mind and saw together before the christmas crib the shepherds who had found their shepherd, the philosopher kings who "would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been confucius or pythagoras or plato. they were those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for god, they also have had their reward. but even in order to understand that reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion of the incomplete."* [* _the everlasting man_, p. 211.] g.k. too had needed the completion of incomplete human thought: he too had followed the star from a far country. it had been a fancy of his boyhood, caught from a fairytale, that evil lurked somewhere in a hidden room of the human house and the human heart. he saw in the history of the ancients a consciousness of the fall, in the sadness of their songs a sense of "the presence of the absence of god." but at bethlehem he saw the transformation that had come upon the whole race of man with that little local infancy concealing the mighty power of god who had put himself under the feet of the world. it is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. it is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. it is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass. it is all that is in us but a brief tenderness, that is there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity. [* ibid., p. 223.] it seems to me profoundly significant that gilbert studied first in the little poor man of assisi what christ could do in one man before he came on to the study of what he had done in mankind as a whole, of who he was who had done it. for the man thus chosen embodied the ideals that gilbert had seen dimly in his boyhood--ideals that most of us accept a little reluctantly from the church, but which had actually attracted him towards the church. st. francis "had found the secret of life in being the servant and the secondary figure". . . "he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking." "by nature he was the sort of man who has that vanity which is the opposite of pride, that vanity which is very near to humility. he never despised his fellow creatures and therefore he never despised the opinion of his fellow creatures, including the admiration of his fellow creatures." "he was above all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving. if another great man wrote a grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. he understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss." here, in st. francis, gilbert saw the apotheosis of his old boyish thought--that thanksgiving is a duty and a joy, that we should love not "humanity" but each human. things shadowed in the notebook are in _st. francis_, for the transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate god becomes one for whom god illustrates and illuminates all things. it is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him of his lady. a saint and a poet standing by the same flower might seem to say the same thing; but indeed though they would both be telling the truth, they would be telling different truths. for one the joy of life is a cause of faith, for the other rather a result of faith.* [* _st. francis of assisi_, p. 111.] _the everlasting man_ and the _st. francis_ seem to me the highest expression of gilbert's mysticism. i have hesitated to use the word for it is not one to be used lightly but i can find no other. like most catholics i have been wont to believe that to be a mystic a man must first be an ascetic and gilbert was not an ascetic in the ordinary sense. but is there not for the thinker an asceticism of the mind, very searching, very purifying? in his youth he had told bentley that creative writing was the hardest of hard labour. that sense of the pressure of thought that made newman call creative writing "getting rid of pain by pain"; the profound depression that often follows; the exhaustion that seems like a bottomless pit. st. theresa said the hardest penance was easier than mental prayer: was not much of gilbert's thought a contemplation? faith, thanksgiving, love, surely these far above bodily asceticism can so clear a man's eyesight that he may fittingly be called a mystic since he sees god everywhere. "the less a man thinks of himself, the more he thinks of his good luck and of all the gifts of god." only a poet who was more than a poet could see so clearly of what like st. francis was. when we say that a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. but this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the sense of the act of creation. he praises the passage or transition from nonentity to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that archetypal image of the bridge, which has given to the priest his archaic and mysterious name. the mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but god does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else. he not only appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything was made. in a fashion he endures and answers even the earthquake irony of the book of job; in some sense he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the mornings stars singing together and the sons of god shouting for joy.* [* _st. francis of assisi_, pp. 112-13.] but there was in all those years another element besides the giving of thanks and the joy of creation: an abiding grief for the sorrows of the sons of men and especially those of his own land. in this mood the _cobbett_ was written. nine years separate the publication of _william cobbett_ from that of the _history of england_. written at the time when englishmen were fighting so magnificently, that book had radiated g.k.'s own mood of hope, but to read _rural rides_, to meditate on cobbett's england, and then turn to the england of the hour was not cheerful. for cobbett "did not draw precise diagrams of things as they were. he only had frantic and fantastic nightmares of things as they are."* and these nightmares haunted cobbett's biographer. [* _cobbett_, p. 22.] what he saw was not an eden that cannot exist, but rather an inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. what he saw was the perishing of the whole english power of self-support, the growth of cities that drain and dry up the countryside, the growth of dense dependent populations incapable of finding their own food, the toppling triumph of machines over men, the sprawling omnipotence of financiers over patriots, the herding of humanity in nomadic masses whose very homes are homeless, the terrible necessity of peace and the terrible probability of war, all the loading up of our little island like a sinking ship; the wealth that may mean famine and the culture that may mean despair; the bread of midas and the sword of damocles. in a word, he saw what we see, but he saw it when it was not there. and some cannot see it--even when it is there.* [* ibid., pp. 14, 15.] two men had written of the reformation as the ultimate origin of these evils at a time when it was still the fashion to treat it as the dawn of all good. lingard, himself a catholic, had written cautiously, with careful documentation and moderate tone. cobbett, a protestant, had written hastily and furiously, but both men had drawn in essentials the same picture. chesterton suspected that cobbett was treated with contempt, lingard with respect, largely because of the difference in the tone of the two men. lingard spoke restrainedly but cobbett's voice was raised in a loud cry: he was simply a man who had discovered a crime: ancient like many crimes; concealed like all crimes. he was as one who had found in a dark wood the bones of his mother, and suddenly knew she had been murdered. he knew now that england had been secretly slain. some, he would say, might think it a matter of mild regret to be expressed in murmurs. but when he found a corpse he gave a shout; and if fools laughed at anyone shouting, he would shout the more, till the world should be shaken with that terrible cry in the night. it is that ringing and arresting cry of "murder!" wrung from him as he stumbled over those bones of the dead england, that distinguishes him from all his contemporaries.* [* ibid., pp. 176-77.] yet, for the christian, hope remains: no murder can be the end. "christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave." this quotation is from the chapter called "five deaths of the faith" in _the everlasting man_. several times in the book chesterton puts aside tempting lines of thought with the remark that he intends to develop them later--in one of the unwritten books that he always felt were so much better than those he actually wrote. would any human life have been long enough to develop them all? anyhow, even the whole of this life was not available. as i turn to the story of the weekly paper rising again from its ashes i ask myself the question i have often asked: was it worth while? i cannot answer the question. something of his manhood seemed to gilbert bound up with this struggle, and it may be he would have been a lesser man had he abandoned it. and yet at moments imagining the poetry, the philosophy that might have been ours--another _white horse_, another _everlasting man_--i am tempted to wish that these years had not thus been sacrificed to the paper which enshrined his brother's memory. chapter xxv the reluctant editor (1925-1930) _i tell you naught for your comfort yea naught for your desire save that the sky grows darker yet and the sea rises higher. ballad of the white horse_ could gilbert have divided his life between literary work, his home at top meadow, and those other elements called in the _autobiography_ "friendship and foolery," that life might well have been as he himself called it "indefensibly fortunate and happy." but he could not. part of his philosophy of joy was that thanks must be given--for sunsets, for dandelions, for beech trees, for home and friends. and this thanks could only be the taking of his part in the fight. he would never, he once said, have turned of his own accord to politics: it is arguable that it would have been better if he never had. but his brother had plunged into the fray with that very political paper the _new witness_ and his brother's death had left it in gilbert's hands. he felt the task to be a sacred legacy, and when the paper died for lack of funds his one thought was how to start it again. for many months he kept the office in being and paid salaries to a skeleton staff, consisting of mr. gander, the deaf old manager, miss dunham (now mrs. phillips) and an office boy. mr. titterton would stroll in and play cricket with the office boy with a paper ball and a walking-stick. endless discussions were held as to how to re-start the paper and whether under the old name or a new one. bernard shaw had his own view. he wrote: 11 feb.: 1923 my dear chesterton not presume to dictate (i have all jingle's delicacy); but if everybody else is advising you, why should not i? _t.p.'s weekly_ always had a weakly sound. but it established itself sufficiently to make that form of title the trade mark of a certain sort of paper. hence _jack o'london's weekly_. it also set the trade sheep running that way. you have the precedents of defoe and cobbett for using your own name; but _d.d.'s weekly_ is unthinkable, and w.c.'s weekly indecent. your initials are not euphonious: they recall that brainy song of my boyhood, u-pi-dee. jee kay see, kay see, kay see, jee kay see, jee kay see. jee kay see, kay see, kay see, jee kay see kay see. chesterton is a noble name; but chesterton is weakly spoils it. call it simply chesterton's that is how it will be asked for at the bookstalls. you may be obliged to call later ventures _chesterton's daily_ or _chesterton's annual_, but this one needs no impertinently superfluous definition: _chesterton's perennial_ is amusing enough to be excusable; but a joke repeated every week is no joke. a picture cover like that of punch might stand even that test if it were good enough; but where are you to find your doyle? week is a detestable snivelling word: nothing can redeem it, not even the sermon on the mount. seven days is better, but reminds one of the police court as well as of the creation. every seven days would sound well. but _chesterton's_ leaves no room for anything else. i am more than usually sure that i am right. frances quite agrees with me. how would you like it if she were to publish a magazine and call it fanny's first paper? ever g.b.s. if gilbert answered this letter his answer has disappeared. he seems to have asked permission to publish it--probably with a view to collecting further opinions. 10 adelphi terrace, london, w.c.2. february 16th 1923. my dear g.k.c. of course you may publish any letter of mine that you care to, at your discretion. . . . but not only will the publication of a letter from me not add one to your circulation (nothing but a permanent feature will do that), but it may lead you to disregard the advice i give to all the people who start labour papers (about two a week or so), which always is, "don't open with an article to say that your paper supplies a want; don't blight your columns with 'messages'; don't bewilder your readers with the family jokes of your clique; else there will be no second number." ponder this: it is sound. your main difficulty is that the class whose champion you have made yourself reads either lloyd's or nothing. to the rural proprietor, no longer a peasant, art, including _belles lettres_, is immorality, and people who idealize peasants, unpractical fools. also the roman catholic church, embarrassed by recruits of your type and born scoffers like belloc, who cling to the church because its desecration would take all the salt out of blasphemy, will quietly put you on the unofficial index. the irish will not support an english journal because it occasionally waves a green flag far better than they can wave it themselves. and the number of jews who will buy you just to see what you say about them is not large enough to keep you going. thus there is absolutely no public for your policy; and though there is a select one for yourself one and indivisible, it is largely composed of people to whom your oddly assorted antipathies and pseudo-racial feuds are uncongenial. besides, on these fancies of yours you have by this time said all you have to say so many thousand times over, that your most faithful admirers finally (and always suddenly) discover they are fed up with the _new witness_ and cannot go on with it. this last danger becomes greater as you become older, because when we are young we can tell ourselves a new story every night between our prayers and our sleep; but later on we find ourselves repeating the same story with intensifications and improvements night after night until we are tired of it; and in the end (which you have not yet reached) a story revived from the old repertory has to last for months, and is more and more shaky as a protection against thinking of business, or lying there a prey to unwelcome reminiscences. and what happens to the story of the imaginative child happens also to the sermon or the feuilleton of the adult. it is inevitably happening to you. that is the case against the success of chesterton's. your only chance finally is either to broaden your basis, or to have no basis at all, like dickens in "household words" and "all the year round," and say, "give me something with imagination in it, and i can do without politics or theoretic sociology of any kind." this is perhaps the only true catholicism in literature; but it will hardly serve your turn; because all the articles and stories that dickens got are now mopped up by the popular press, which in his day stuck to politics and news and nothing else. so i am afraid you will have to stand for a policy, or at least a recognisable attitude, unless you are prepared to write a detective story every week and make belloc write a satirical story as well. you could broaden your basis if you had money enough to try the experiment of giving ten poor but honest men in beaconsfield and ten more in london capital enough to start for themselves as independent farmers and shopkeepers. the result would be to ruin 18 out of the twenty, and possibly to ruin the lot. you would then learn from your feelings what you would never learn from me, that what men need is not property but honorable service. confronted either with 20 men ruined by your act, or 18 ruined and one fascination fledgby owning half a street in london, and the other half a parish in bucks, you would--well, perhaps join the fabian society. the pseudo race feuds you should drop, simply because you cannot compete with the _morning post_, which gives the real thing in its succulent savagery whilst you can give only a "wouldn't hurt a fly" affectation of it. in religion too you are up against the fact that an editor, like an emperor, must not belong to a sect. wells is on the right tack: my tack. see my prefaces to androcles and methuselah. we want the real catholic church above the manufactured one. the manufactured one is useful as the salvation army is useful, or the formulas of the church of christ scientist; but they do not strike on the knowledge box of the modern intellectual; and it is on the modern intellectual that you are depending. i am an irishman, and know how far the official catholic church can go. your ideal church does not exist and never can exist within the official organization, in which father dempsey will always be efficient and father keegan futile if not actually silenced; and i know that an officially catholic chesterton is an impossibility. however, you must find out all this for yourself as i found it out for myself. mere controversy is waste of time; and faith is a curious thing. i believe that you would not have become a professed official catholic if you did not believe that you believe in transubstantiation; but i find it quite impossible to believe that you believe in transubstantiation any more than, say, dr. saleeby does. you will have to go to confession next easter; and i find the spectacle--the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil inside wishing you had become a fireworshipper instead of coming there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and yours--all incredible, monstrous, comic, though of course i can put a perfect literary complexion on it in a brace of shakes. now, however, i am becoming personal (how else can i be sincere?). besides i am going on too long and the lunch bell is ringing. so forgive me, and don't bother to answer unless you cannot help it. ever, g. bernard shaw. meanwhile, shaw as usual responded cordially to gilbert's wish to make him an early attraction in the paper--but also as usual urged him towards the theatre: 10th dec. 1924. by all means send me a screed about joan [of arc] for the cockpit. but i protest i have no views about her. i am only the first man modest enough to know his place _auprã¨s d'elle_ as a simple reporter and old stage hand. you should write plays instead of editing papers. why not do george fox, who was released from the prisons in which protestant england was doing its best to murder him, by the catholic charles ii? george and joan were as like as two peas in pluck and obstinacy. g.b.s. the specimen advance number was published before the end of 1924. in the leading article g.k. gave his reasons for agreeing finally to use his own name--although in the form attacked by shaw. he had first viewed the proposal with a "horror which has since softened into loathing." he had looked for a title that should indicate the paper's policy. but while that policy was in fact a support of human normality: well-distributed property, freedom and the family--yet the surrounding atmosphere was so abnormal that "any title defining our doctrine makes it look doctrinaire." a name like _the distributive review_ would suggest that a distributist was like a socialist, a crank or a pedant with a new theory of human nature. "it is so old that it has become new. at the same time i want a title that does suggest that the paper is controversial and that this is the general trend of its controversy. i want something that will be recognised as a flag, however fantastic and ridiculous, that will be in some sense a challenge, even if the challenge be received only with genial derision. i do not want a colourless name; and the nearest i can get to something like a symbol is merely to fly my own colours." although the paper was never exclusively catholic, that flag was for g.k. as it had been for cecil of a very definite pattern and very clear colours: religiously the paper stood for catholic christianity, socially for the theory of small ownership, personal responsibility and property. it was in strong opposition especially to socialism and even more to communism. bernard shaw, gilbert once said, wanted to distribute money among the poor--"we want to distribute power." during the last part of cecil's editorship his wife had been assistant editor of the _new witness_ and she had so continued when gilbert first became editor. but she was neither a catholic nor a distributist. religion seems not to have interested her, and her political outlook was entirely different from gilbert's. in _the chestertons_ she dismissed distributism as "quite without first principles" and "a pious hope and no more."* obviously it was impossible for gilbert to start his new paper with an assistant editor in entire disagreement with his views. i have sometimes wondered whether his intense dislike of having to tell mrs. cecil this was not almost as strong a factor in the delay as the money problem. [* i have learnt, as this book goes to press, that mrs. cecil became a catholic in 1941.] there was no break in their relations: she went on writing for the paper, doing chiefly the dramatic criticism. but it is clear from her own account of the incident that she wholly misconstrued gilbert's attitude and did not realise how far she herself had drifted from cecil's views as well as from gilbert's. shaw wrote again: reid's palace hotel funchal, madeira. 16th january, 1925. my dear g.k.c. the sample number has followed me out here. what a collector's treasure! considering that i had cecil's own assurance that my quintessence of ibsenism rescued him from rationalism, and that it was written in 1889 (i abandoned rationalism consciously and explicitly in 1881) i consider john prothero's introduction of me to your readers as a recently converted materialist rationalist to be a most unnatural act; and it would serve her right if i never spoke to her again. rationalism is the bane of the church. a roman priest always wants to argue with you. a church of england parson flies in terror from an argument, a fundamentally sensible course. george fox simply knocked arguers out with his "i have experimental knowledge of god." st. thomas aquinas was like me: he knew the worthlessness of ratiocination because he could do it so well, and yet despaired of the inspirationists in practical life because they did it so badly. j.k.p. doesn't know her way about in this controversy; and i cannot take up her challenge. what makes me uneasy about the prospectus is that you drag in anti-prohibition. you might as well have declared for brighter london at once, or said that the paper would be printed at the office of the _morning advertiser_. you run the risk of the money coming from the trade. however, _non olet_. only, remember the fate of all the editors--gardiner, donald, massingham, etc., etc.--who have written without regard to their proprietors. the strength of your position is that they can hardly carry on with your name in the title without you. but they can kill the paper by stopping supplies if it does not pay; and the chances are that it will not. i have never had a farthing of interest on my shares in the new statesman, and don't expect i ever shall. therefore keep your list of shareholders as various and as uncommercial as you can: get catholic money rather than beer money. as i am the real patentee of the distributive state, and the d.s. is socialism; and as, furthermore, the church must remain at least neutral on prohibition, as in the united states, where a catholic priest has just set a praiseworthy example of neutrality by bringing about a record cop of bootleggers, and as the success of prohibition is so overwhelming that it is bound to become a commonplace of civilization, you must regard it as at least possible that you will some day make the paper socialist and dry (with a capital). therefore do not undertake to oppose anything: stand for what you propose to advocate, whether as to property or drink or anything else, but don't state your solutions as antitheses. by the way, don't propose equal distribution of land. it is like equal distribution of metal, rough on those who get the lead and rather too jolly for those who get the gold. your equal distribution must come to equal distribution of the national income in terms of money. the â£500 a year is absurd. do you realize that it is â£250 at pre-war rates, and subject to heavy taxation: net â£375--pre-war 182-10-0? you have sold yourself into slavery for ten years for â£3-10-2 a week. are you quite mad? make it at least â£1500, plus payment for copy. ever g.b.s. of course it was not merely a question of inadequate payment for his work: as time went on, a large part of the financial burden of the paper had to be carried by him. lord howard de walden helped generously and so did mr. chivers. other donations came in but mostly very small ones. no proper accounts were kept: no watch on how the money went. and from time to time gilbert would pay off a printing bill of â£500 or so and go ahead hoping for better times. the money aspect did not worry him, i think, at first. there was always more to be made by a little extra effort: though a time was to come when every extra effort wearied him cruelly. but there was one thing he could not bear--quarrels on the board or on the staff and above all the suggestion that he should adjudicate. "he was a bad judge of men," one of his staff told me. "he never shirked an intellectual issue, but in a practical crisis he was inclined to slide out." "he could never," said another, "stand up to accusations from one man against another." the first start was made with the existing staff of three. miss dunham was sub-editor and was usually left to see the paper through the press. g.k. would come up once or twice a week and dictate his own articles. "you never knew when he was coming," she says, "but you always knew when he was there by the smell of his cigar." he was practically a chain smoker and he always used the same brand. he left drawings on the blotter and everything else. he had no idea of time and when he said, "i think i'll go out now," he might stay out an hour or so, or he might not return at all. lighting a cigar or cigarette he would make a sign in the air with the match. he never omitted this ritual, and miss dunham thinks it became like tapping the railings was to dr. johnson. "he used to come in and swing about on his little feet," she said. and it is true that his feet like his voice seemed too small to belong to the rest of him. her great difficulty was that she could not get him to read and select among the contributions: too often this was left to her and she felt painfully inadequate to the task. for the first year all the notes of the week were written by g.k. then he got mr. titterton as assistant editor: and after that, said the assistant editor with simplicity, "you couldn't always tell good titterton from bad chesterton." everyone who worked at the office adored g.k.: especially the "little" people, typists, secretaries, office boys. "he was so kind," miss dunham said. "he never got angry. he never minded being interrupted. if his papers blew away he never got impatient. his patience hurt one." she had never seen him angry. that the paper was ever got out seems wonderful as the staff recall those days. yet i think that all the stories about gilbert's inefficiency as editor have contributed towards an impression that i shared myself until quite lately--that _g.k.'s weekly_ was immeasurably inferior to the _new witness_. going more carefully through the files i have begun to question that impression. the paper was produced under certain obvious disadvantages. even spending some days a week in london and telephoning freely it is not easy to edit a paper from the country. gilbert thought of himself as a bad editor, and was not in fact a very good one. the contributions he accepted were uneven in quality: both leaders and notes of the week when not written by him tended to be weak imitations of either himself or belloc--tinged at times with an air of omniscience tolerable in belloc but quite intolerable in his imitators. just occasionally the equally unedited notes and leader were in contradiction of each other. yet the paper remains an exceedingly interesting one. analysing my earlier and late impressions i concluded that my earlier feeling of boredom sprang from the inevitable effect of the _new witness_ coming first and therefore having been read first. it is a disadvantage of consistency that, as bernard shaw remarked, you have said the same thing, you have told the same story, so often as the years go by. taking a rest of a year and returning fresh to _g.k.'s weekly_ i was surprised at finding how much i enjoyed reading it and also at finding that it had been of more practical use than i remembered to the cause it served. the trend of the whole world is to make the state powerful and the family powerless. it was something that in these years _g.k.'s weekly_ should have helped to smash two bills of this nature-the mental deficiency and the canal children's bills. both these aimed at taking children from their parents, the first in the cause of health, the second of education. against both gilbert wrote brilliantly and successfully. _g.k.'s weekly_ has much more g.k. in it and quite as much belloc as in the earlier years of the _new witness_. eric gill, too, long a friend of the chestertons, became the chief contributor on art. in 1925 he spent a night at top meadow to discuss the policy of the paper, especially with reference to industrialism and art. a little later the gills moved from wales much nearer to beaconsfield and the two men met fairly often. gill's letters are interesting. they are mostly before the visit to beaconsfield and probably led to it. he begins by attacking gilbert for "(1) supporting orpenism as against byzantinism and (2) thinking that the art of painting _began_ with giotto, whereas giotto was really much more the end." in june 1925, g.k. was asking him to write about epstein. gill agreed to do so but insisted that chesterton and belloc must not disagree with him but "accept my doctrine as the doctrine of _g.k.'s weekly_ in matters of art--just as i accept yours in other matters." "i don't intend to write for you as an outsider (have i not put almost my last quid into your blooming company?--7% or not). . . . god forbid that you should have an art critic who'll go round the picture shows for you and write bilge about this painter and that--this 'art movement' and that." in the first state of effervescence the labour he delighted in quite deadened the pain of the editor's chair. gilbert was prepared if necessary to write the whole paper and to treat it as a variant on the toy theatre or the sword stick: it was said that the chicago pork machine used every part of a pig except the squeal. it might be said that the fleet street press machine uses only the squeal. . . . in short, nobody reading the newspapers could form the faintest notion of how intelligent we newspaper people are. the whole machine is made to chop up each mind into meaningless fragments and waste the vast mass even of those. such a thing as one complete human being appearing in the press is almost unknown; and when an attempt is made at it, it necessarily has a certain air of eccentric egotism. that is a risk which i am obliged to run everywhere in this paper and especially on this page. as i have said, the whole business of actually putting a paper together is a new game for me to play, to amuse my second childhood; and it combines some of the characters of a jigsaw and a crossword puzzle. but at least i am called upon to do a great many different sorts of things; and am not tied down to that trivial specialism of the proletarian press.* [* march 28, 1925.] and again this paper exists to insist on the rights of man; on possessions that are of much more political importance than the principle of one man one vote. i am in favour of one man one house, one man one field; nay i have even advanced the paradox of one man one wife. but i am almost tempted to add the more ideal fancy of one man one magazine . . . to say that every citizen ought to have a weekly paper of this sort to splash about in . . . this kind of scrap book to keep him quiet.* [* april 4, 1925.] g.k. goes on to talk of an old idea of his: that a young journalist should write one article for the _church times_ and another for the _pink 'un_ and then put them into the wrong envelopes. it is that sort of contrast and that sort of combination that i am going to aim at in this paper . . . i cannot see why convictions should look dull or why jokes should be insincere. i should like a man to pick up this paper for amusement and find himself involved in an argument. i should like him to pursue it purely for the sake of argument and find himself pulled up short by a joke . . . i never can see why a thing should not be both popular and serious; that is, in the sense of being both popular and sincere. for the paper had a most serious purpose. he acknowledged its defects of bad printing (which the printers indignantly denied), bad proof-reading, bad editing, and claimed "to raise against the banner of advertisement the noble banner of apology." because a creative revolution was what he wanted, words and forms were hard to find. it was easy to dress up stale ideas in a new dress but the terminology for something outside the old hack party programmes had to be fresh minted. he proposed various changes after a few months' running and introduced them thus: we should be only too glad if for this week only our readers would have the tact to retire and leave us alone. we are in a hegelian condition, a condition not so much of being as of becoming. and no generous person should spy on an unfortunate fellow creature who is going through the horrible and degrading experience of being a hegelian. it is even more embarrassing than being caught in the very act of evolution, which every clear headed person would desire to avoid.* [* december 12, 1925.] in this number he began _the return of don quixote_ and also a sort of scrapbook. he invited contributions dealing with every sort of approach to distributism and promised "more than one series of constructive proposals and definite schemes of legislation. we do not promise that all these schemes will exactly agree with each other or that we shall agree with all of them. some will be more conservative, some more drastic than our own view." this article ends on an ambitious note. very varying schemes will be admitted, but the idea of the paper will thereby be strengthened not destroyed- for what we desire is not a paltry party programme but a renaissance. it was not the first time he had demanded a revolution but, as the depression hit our country and big business seemed less and less capable of coping with it, the demand became more understandable and the fight against monopoly more urgent. a thinking man should always attack the strongest thing in his own time. for the strongest thing of the time is always too strong. . . . the great outstanding fact and feature of our time is monopoly.* [* april 25, 1925.] i have already referred to a debate on monopoly between chesterton and mr. gordon selfridge, in which selfridge, with the familiar unreality of the millionaire, maintained that there was no such thing. anyone was free to open a store in rivalry of selfridge's or to start a paper that should eclipse the _daily mail!_ the only real monopoly, he added gracefully, was that of a genius like chesterton whose work the ordinary man could not emulate. the graceful compliment chesterton answered by offering to share his last epigram with mr. selfridge: but as to the main contention, what could he say? it was at once too easy and absolutely impossible to answer such a speech--or more truly such a speaker: only in a country of the blind could he have won a hearing. but chesterton persevered. even in 1924 the shadow of large scale unemployment had begun. and at this singularly inappropriate time came the empire exhibition at wembley. in the failure of its appeal chesterton saw hope: for he believed that from a frank facing of truth his country might yet conquer the coming perils. that was the real weakness of wembley; that it so completely mistook the english temperament as to appeal to a stale mood. it appealed to a stale mood of success; when we need to appeal to a new and more noble mood of failure, or at least of peril. the english . . . no longer care to be told of an empire on which the sun never sets. tell them the sun is setting, and they will fight though the battle go against them to the going down of the sun: if they do not stay it, like joshua. . . . we seriously propose that england should take her stand among the unhappy nations; it is too dismal a fate to go on being one of the happy ones. we must be as proud as spain and poland and serbia; nations made more dear to their lovers by their disasters. our disasters have begun; but they do not seem to have endeared us to anybody in particular. our sorrow has come; but we gain no extra loyalty by it. the time has come to claim our crown of thorns; or at least not to cover it any longer with such exceedingly faded flowers.* [* march 21, 1925.] always chesterton was haunted by the present war. he had seen the prussian peril conquered: he saw it rising again. even before the advent of hitler he knew that the tribe which had stolen from austria and denmark, had invaded france and crushed poland was without repentance, and he feared that again the stupidity (or the greed) behind english and american policy was giving it another opportunity-"those sturdy teutons," he wrote ironically, "from whom we were descended up to the outbreak of the great war, and from whom we are now showing signs of being descended again." the misfortune was that englishmen had ceased to try to get free from "a secret government; conducted by we know not whom, and achieving we know not what. the real national life of our country is unconscious of its own national policy. the right hand of the englishman, that holds the plough or the sword, knows not what his left hand doth with the pen and the cheque-book. man is man; and mond is master of his fate." for our government he apologised to france. he saw it as one and the same fight--against a heathenish money power and heathen prussia. and the beating of the dark wings of enemy aeroplanes sounded in his dreams. as early as 1925 he wrote a christmas play of st. george and the dragon in which the turkish knight embodied his vision of prussia and st. george spoke prophetically for england. saint george: i know that this is sure whatever man can do, man can endure, though you shall loose all laws of fight, and fashion a torture chamber from a tilting yard, though iron hard as doom grow hot as passion, man shall be hotter, man shall be more hard, and when an army in your hell fire faints, you shall find martyrs who were never saints. _(they wound each other and the doctor comes to the help of the turkish knight.)_ princess: why should we patch this pirate up again? why should you always win and win in vain? bid him not cut the leg but cut the loss. saint george: i will not fire upon my own red cross. princess: if you lay there, would he let you escape? saint george: i am his conqueror and not his ape. doctor: be not so sure of conquering. he shall rise on lighter feet, on feet that vault the skies. science shall make a mighty foot and new, light as the feather feet of perseus flew, long as the seven leagued boots in tales gone by, this shall bestride the sea and ride the sky. thus shall he fly, and beat above your nation the clashing pinions of apocalypse, ye shall be deep sea fish in pale prostration under the sky foam of his flying ships. when terror above your cities, dropping doom, shall shut all england in a lampless tomb, your widows and your orphans now forlorn shall be no safer than the dead they mourn. when all their lights grow dark, their lives grow gray, what will those widows and those orphans say? saint george: saint george for merrie england. he saw the aeroplanes in vision and he saw courage and patriotism. i think he must rejoice today that betrayal of the allied cause has not been at the hands of an englishman. he had said many hard things about the english aristocracy and gentry: but these two virtues he had always granted were theirs. and in his vision he saw hope: england may soon be poor enough to be praised with an undivided heart. we are not sure that the ruins of wembley may not be the restoration of westminster. it is when a nation has recovered from the illusion of owning everything that it discovers that it does stand for something; and for that something it will fight with a lucid and just tenacity which no mere megalomania can comprehend. we are not so perverse as to wish to see england ruined that she may be respected. but we do think she will be happy in having the sort of respect that could remain even if she were ruined. patriotic as the english have always been, the patriotism of their educated class has seldom had this peculiar sort of extra energy that is given by a conscience completely at rest. if that were added, they might well make such a stand as would astound the world. all their other virtues, their humour and sporting spirit and freedom from the morbidities and cruelties of fatigue, might enter into their full heritage when joined to the integrity and intellectual dignity that belong to self defence and self respect. we are far from sure that the world has not yet to see our nation in its finest phase. what may be in the womb of night we know not, nor what are those dim outlines that show on the horizon. "in truth" he wrote, "no man knows how near we are to death or to dawn. i am not sure whether i am making this speech from a scaffolding or a scaffold." it is easy for the young to undertake hard things: they never know how hard they are. and they are certain of success. the "lessons of experience" signify to the young that other men have failed: their own experience shall teach others the meaning of success. but to begin again at fifty, with the special spring of youth gone and with the sad lessons of one's own experience in the mind: this calls indeed for a rare courage. gilbert knew all the cost in time, energy, money and reputation that he would have to pay--that he did pay. and he stood increasingly alone. cecil's had been the irreparable loss, but others of the old circle were dropping out and their places were not filled. jack phillimore's death in 1926 was a heavy blow. to his memory gilbert dedicated _the queen of seven swords_, published the year of his death. you go before me on all roads on bridges broad enough to spread between the learned and the dunce between the living and the dead. the gulf between the socialist group and the distributist had become far more obvious than of yore: shaw and wells would still write for g.k. but only because he was their friend. if f. y. eccles, if desmond mccarthy today contributed, it would too be chiefly from affection for gilbert. one article by mr. mccarthy described the old days when the original _eye witness_ was in being and he, cecil and belloc sat around the table editing it and sticking triolets thrown off in hot haste into those nasty little spaces left by articles that did not quite fit, or supplying three or four articles and a ballade urbane while the printers waited. we have to print a triolet when space is clamouring for matter we try to put it off and yet we have to print a triolet it is with infinite regret that we admit the silly patter we have to print a triolet when space is clamouring for matter. such joyous scrambles are proper to youth, and now none of them were young. all authors worthy of the name have found their platform and made permanent engagements by middle life: professional men are absorbed by work and life: they simply had not time to give as of yore to build up this new-old venture. the names of shaw and wells continue to appear among the contributors, often enough in religious debate. reading the files and visiting the two men to talk of gilbert, i made one discovery that is curious from whichever side you look at it. two able and indeed brilliant men betrayed not only an amazing degree of ignorance concerning the tenets of catholicism but also a bland conviction that they knew them well. wells in conversation based his claim on the fact that he had long been intimately acquainted with an ex-nun. shaw i fancy felt he must know all about something that had surrounded him in infancy--for, as the reader must have noticed, he is much preoccupied by the thought of his irish descent and education. but what seems to me even stranger about the situation is the absence on the catholic side of any effort to explain to these men the doctrines they misconstrued. when wells, for instance, gave a crude and inaccurate statement of the doctrine of the fall, belloc laughed at him, chesterton and father mcnabb both wrote long and picturesque articles, illuminating to a believer but, as instruction to an unbeliever, quite useless. a correspondence that seemed likely to drag on forever ended abruptly with wells asking about the fall, "tell me, did it really happen?" to which chesterton briefly replied, "yes." i imagine he thought he and the other writers had said this several times already, but in fact they had not. perhaps they did not realise where the beginning must be made in instructing otherwise instructed men on the subject of catholicism. it is all very interesting and curious. but it largely explains why bernard shaw found it hard to believe that gilbert believed in transubstantiation. has any catholic ever explained the philosophic meaning of transubstantiation to the great old irish man of english letters? even gilbert was perhaps too much inclined simply to play the fool in high-spirited fashion with those who attacked the faith in his paper or other papers. but then how well he played it! here are some imaginary interviews on . . . the recently discovered traces of an actual historical flood: a discovery which has shaken the christian world to its foundations by its apparent agreement with the book of genesis. . . . the dean of st. paul's remarked: "i do not see that there is any cause for alarm. protestantism is still founded on an impregnable rock: on that deep and strong foundation of disbelief in the bible which supports the spiritual and intellectual life of all true christians today. even if dark doubts should arise, and it should seem for the moment as if certain passages in the scripture story were true, we must not lose heart; the cloud will pass: and we have still the priceless possession of the open bible, with all its inexhaustible supply of errors and inconsistencies: a continual source of interest to scholars and a permanent bulwark against rome. . . ." mr. h. g. wells exclaimed: "i am interested in the flood of the future: not in any of these little local floods that may have taken place in the past. i want a broader, larger, more complete and coordinated sort of flood: a flood that will really cover the whole ground. i want to get people to understand that in the future we shall not divide water, in this petty way, into potty little ponds and lakes and rivers: it will be one big satisfying thing, the same everywhere. _aprã¨s moi le dã©luge_. belloc in his boorish boozy way may question my knowledge of french; but i fancy that quotation will settle him."* [* march 30, 1929.] on the favourite topic of modern advertisement, having read an essay which said that good salesmanship made "everything in the garden beautiful," gilbert again thought of genesis: there was only one actor in that ancient drama who seems to have had any real talent for salesmanship. he seems to have undertaken to deliver the goods with exactly the right preliminaries of promises and praise. he knew all about advertisement: we may say he knew all about publicity, though not at the moment addressing a very large public. he not only took up the slogan of eat more fruit, but he distinctly declared that any customers purchasing his particular brand of fruit would instantly become as gods. and as this is exactly what is promised to the purchasers of every patent medicine, popular tonic, saline draught or medicinal wine at the present day, there can be no question that he was in advance of his age. it is extraordinary that humanity, which began with the apple and ended with the patent medicine, has not even yet become exactly like gods. it is still more extraordinary (and probably the result of a malicious interpolation by priests at a later date) that the record ends with some extraordinary remarks to the effect that one thus pursuing the bright career of salesmanship is condemned to crawl on his stomach and eat a great deal of dirt.* [* march 23, 1929.] the relation between belloc and the paper, as between belloc and gilbert himself, was a unique one. not indeed its "onlie begetter," he was equally with cecil begetter of the original paper and its first editor. he was gilbert's chief guide to the historical and political scene of europe. both men shared, had fought all their lives for, their ideas of freedom, the family, restoration of property and all that is involved in catholic christianity. and belloc said repeatedly that he had no platform for the continuous expression of these ideas. such books as his _cruise of the nona_ found still as wide a public as had _the path to rome_ a quarter century earlier, and in those books his philosophy may be read. but he had, too, urgent commentaries on foreign affairs and current politics--and for these _g.k.'s weekly_ became his platform as completely as the _new witness_ had been in the past. to gilbert this appeared one chief value of his paper: in an article from which i quote in the next chapter he gives it as one of the two reasons for which he toiled to keep _g.k.'s weekly_ in existence. week by week belloc on current or foreign affairs wrote of what was happening and what would presently come of it. and who can say reading those articles today that it would not have changed the defeats of this war into victory at a far earlier date had our statesmen read and heeded--the analysis for instance of the peril of the aeroplane, of the threat to the empire from japan, the importance of keeping italy's friendship in the mediterranean, the growing strength of germany and the awful risk we took in allowing her to rearm, in failing to arm against her? whether he was right or, as many held, wildly wrong about what underlay our failures of judgment, his views must be briefly traced because of their effect on gilbert and others. in the financial world he saw england in the first years after the war dominated by the international banking power, which made us as it were a local branch of wall street. in his view it was the bankers both of america and england who first insisted that germany could not pay her reparations and later made england repudiate her own war debts to america (though she had, he showed, already paid in interest and principal more than half of what had been lent). the banks did this because they had lent commercially both to germany and england sums whose safety meant more to them than moneys merely owing to the nations--which would not benefit the banks! england thus became subservient to the united states and had to follow american financial policies. it was these policies that led to the abandonment of the unwritten alliance with france and especially to allowing germany to rearm (helped by loans from these same banks), to reoccupy the rhineland and remilitarise the ruhr. next, in belloc's view, came a worse stage yet in which the banks had given place to big business which was increasingly controlling parliament. the plutocracy that had bit by bit eaten into our aristocracy and gained ascendancy in the govemment was not, like our ancient aristocracy, trained for the business and was utterly uninformed especially in foreign affairs. the one remaining hope, the permanent officials, especially of the foreign office, were less and less listened to; latterly he held too that even the foreign office had lost its old sure touch. hence a constant vacillation in our policies which weakened england's position and made certain some terrible disaster. this fear is ever present in belloc's articles and ever brooded on by the editor. he rallied his forces to urge, week after week, the possible alternative to disaster--the recovery by the people of england of power and freedom, the restoration of england to its place in a restored europe, freed from the german menace. despite the natural high spirits a certain gloom and more than a touch of fierceness mark the work of these years. summing up "the twenties" of the century, chesterton saw them as singularly bankrupt spiritually and intellectually, and he foresaw from their sowing a miserable harvest. chapter xxvi the distributist league and distributism _to say we must have socialism or capitalism is like saying we must choose between all men going into monasteries and a few men having harems. if i denied such a sexual alternative i should not need to call myself a monogamist; i should be content to call myself a man_. advance number of _g.k.'s weekly_, nov. 1924 from _g.k.'s weekly_ grew the distributist league. its start in 1926 was marked by intense enthusiasm, and its progress was recorded week by week in the paper. the inaugural meeting took place in essex hall, essex street, strand, on september 17, 1926. g.k. summed up their aim in the words: "their simple idea was to restore possession." he added that francis bacon had long ago said: "property is like muck, it is good only if it be spread." the following week the first committee meeting took place. chesterton was elected president; captain went, secretary, and maurice reckitt, treasurer. it was planned to form a branch in birmingham. alternative names were discussed: the cobbett club, the luddite league, the league of small property: the cow and acres, however suitable as the name of a public house at which we could assemble, is too limited as an economic statement. . . . the league of the little people (president, mr. g. k. chesterton) may seem at first too suggestive of the fairies; but it has been strongly supported among us: and again: suppose we call our movement, "the lost property league" . . . the idea of the restoration of lost property is far more essential to our whole conception than even the idea of liberty, as now commonly understood. the liberty and property defense league implies that property is there to be defended. "the lost property league" describes the exact state of the case.* [* from an article called, "name this child" and another later article.] in october another meeting of the central branch was held in essex hall to debate "have we lost liberty?" the croydon and birmingham branches were arranging meetings, g.k. conferred with the members of the manchester branch, and glasgow announced that it was only awaiting the christening to form a branch. bath held its first public meeting, with the mayor in the chair, and the meeting had to overflow into a very large hall. it was decided to reduce the price of the paper to twopence-twopenny trash* was the title of the leading article--in order to give the league an opportunity of extending the paper's radius of action as an organ of the league's principles. . . . _"every reader who has been buying one copy at sixpence, must take three copies at twopence_ until his two surplus copies have secured two new readers. . . . the league would have to make itself responsible for the success of this experiment and save the paper which gave it birth, or die of inanition, for it is certainly not yet strong enough to leave its mother."** [* this was the name given to cobbett's _weekly register_ by his enemies.] [** _g.k.'s weekly_, november 6, 1926.] it is clear that gilbert's hopes at this stage ran high. he had not dreamed that the initial success of the league would be so great. recording a sensational increase in the sale of the paper, he wrote on november 13, 1926: "it was when we faced defeat that we were surprised by victory; and we are quite serious in believing that this is part of a practical philosophy that may yet outlast the philosophy of bluff." recording a meeting of the league: he wrote: we find it difficult to express the effect the meeting had upon us. we were astonished, we were overwhelmed. had we anything to do with the making of this ardent, eager, indefatigable creature? the answer is, of course, that though we had something to do with the shaping of the body, we had nothing to do with the birth of the soul. that was a miracle, a miracle we had hoped for, and which yet, when it happened, overwhelmed us. we have the happy feeling that we have helped to shape something which will go far above and beyond us. . . . there were well over 100 members present, many of them spoke, and nearly all the others would have spoken if there had been time to hear them. it was a great night.* [* november 13, 1926.] father vincent mcnabb has said truly that there are no words for the real things. thus distributism is not only a rather ugly word but also a word holding less than half the content of the idea they were aiming at. belloc covered more of it in the title of his book: the _restoration of property_, while perhaps a better name still was _the outline of sanity_. this chesterton had chosen for a series of articles that became a book. he was asking for a return to the sanity of field and workshop, of craftsman and peasant, from the insanity of trusts and machinery, of unemployment, over-production and starvation. "we are destroying food because we do not need it. we are starving men because we do not need them." after the first meeting of the league, the notes of the week recorded that the printing order for the paper based on actual demand had risen in two weeks from 4,650 to 7,000. "of course we owe everything to the league which in manchester, liverpool, glasgow, croydon, chatham, worthing, chorley, cambridge, oxford, bath and london has made the newsagents aware of the paper." by november 27, the sales had risen to over 8,000. then was held the first formal meeting of the central branch of the league, at which it was agreed: "that members should make a habit of dealing at small shops." they should avoid even small shops which sweat their employees, each branch should prepare a list of small shops for the use of its members. and that is only a beginning. we hope to enlist the support of the small farmer and the small master craftsman. we hope, little by little, to put the small producer in touch with the small retailer. we hope in the end to establish within the state a community, almost self-supporting, of men and women pledged to distributism, and to a large extent practising it. less and less, then, will the juggling of finance have power over us; for it does not matter what they call the counters when you are exchanging hams for handkerchiefs, or pigs for pianos. the cockpit is worth reading during the months that follow, for here were voiced any criticisms that the readers had to make of the paper and of the league--any criticism that the league had to make of itself. there was plenty. many leaguers and readers felt for instance that the spirit of criticism of others was too fully developed in the paper, so that when attempts were made to act on distributive principles by people not in league with the league they were given short shrift instead of meeting even modified encouragement. the league was begged to spend more time clarifying its principles, less time in criticism. but much more fundamental was the constantly recurrent question: when is the league going to begin to do something? to this the answer, given often by g.k. himself was that, while the league hoped in time to create that community of which he had written, its own work was only that of propaganda--of a wider and wider dissemination of the principles of distributism. their work, they said, was to talk. outdoor propaganda started in glasgow and came thence to london. in october 1931 the secretary said they must "convince men there is a practical alternative to capitalism and socialism, _by showing them how to set about achieving it."_ and in november he subscribed to opinions voiced in the cockpit for the last two years by saying that the london branch acted in the spirit of "a pleasant friday evening debating society, which regarded discussion as an end in itself." one would imagine that all this meant a call to action, but the action was merely the establishment of a research department and the start of a new paper _the distributist_ for the discussion of the league's domestic business. the research secretary will explain his plans, enroll volunteers and allot tasks, thus "equipping the league with the information for lack of which it is as yet unable to agree on practical measures." the effectiveness of its propaganda would, members were told, depend on its research. "the pious appointment of investigators," wrote a leader in _g.k.'s weekly_ in reference to a government commission, "to report what is already common knowledge is nothing less than a face-saving, time-marking, shifty expedient." i don't think this article was one of gilbert's, but i do wonder whether as time went on he did not recall his own old comparison between the early christian and the modern socialist. for distributists far more than socialists should have been vowed to action. there was a grave danger both of making their propaganda ineffective by lack of example and of weakening themselves as distributists. yet there were many difficulties in their path, some of which may best be seen if we go back a little and recall the way in which the encyclical _rerum novarum_ was received by catholics at the end of the last century. written in europe where the remains of the mediaeval social structure still lingered on far more than in industrial england or america, it was taken by the more conservative catholics as a general confirmation of the established order. i well remember people like my own father and father bernard vaughan quoting it in this sense. and if they tended to advert to only one half of it, the more radical catholics readily obliged by appearing conscious solely of the other half and thus enabling themselves to be dismissed as one-sided. unfortunately they were worse than one-sided: they were curiously blind, with rare exceptions, to those true implications of the document which spelt distributism--for which the word had not then been coined--or the _restoration of property_. _"the law, therefore, should favour ownership and its policy should be to induce as many people as possible to become owners._ many excellent results will follow from this; and first of all, property will certainly become more equitably divided. for the effect of social change and revolution has been to divide society into two widely different castes. . . . _if workpeople can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land, the result will be that the the gulf between vast wealth and deep poverty will be bridged over, and the two orders will be brought nearer together."_* yet the pope's words were treated almost as an acceptance of the existing conditions of property by the more conservative, while the more radical simply tried to evade them. the question of my youth undoubtedly was: how far can a catholic go on the road to socialism? [* _rerum novarum_ (translation in husslein's _the christian social manifesto_). italics mine.] distributism would seem today to have cut like a sword the knot of this mental confusion, but it did not do so for many people. i suppose the leading distributist among the clergy was father vincent mcnabb and i have heard him called a socialist a hundred times. and even among those who had accepted the distributist ideal and had now had fifteen years of the _new witness_ and _g.k.'s weekly_ to meditate upon--to say nothing of the belloc and chesterton books--there was still a good deal of confusion of mind to be cleared up. the chesterbelloc had begun a mental revolution, but even the mind cannot be turned upside down in a moment of time; and then there is the will to be considered. gilbert often claimed that the society he advocated was the norm, that the modern world was abnormal, was insane. but to achieve the normal in an abnormal world calls for high courage and a high degree of energy. it is much easier to sit and drink beer while planning the world that one wishes was there--the world of simplicity, hard work and independence. and about the details of this new world there was room for a variety of opinion. the distributists soon began to argue and even to quarrel--about the admission of machinery into the distributist state, about the nature of one another's distributism and what was necessary to constitute a distributist. the effect on gilbert is interesting, for it showed his belief in the importance of the league. he hoped, he said, that the quarrel would not "turn into a dispute"--that it would remain a personal quarrel. "for impersonal quarrel is schism." he urged again and again that the dogmas of their creed should be defined. heaven forbid that we should ever be true distributists: as a substitute for being distributists. it would be a dismal thing to join the long and wavering procession of true christians, true socialists, true imperialists; who are now progressing drearily into a featureless future; ready to change anything whatever except their names. these people escape endlessly by refusing definition which they call dogma. . . . practical politics are necessary, but they are in a sense narrow; and by themselves they do tend to split the world up into small sects. only dogma is sufficiently universal to include us all. of the world surrounding him which refused definitions he said, "because there is no image there is nothing except imaginaries."* but i think there must have been some blushes on distributists' cheeks as they read his apology for some slight absence of mind. he explained his own "ghastly ignorance" of the details of the dispute, "which is bound up with the economic facts of the position," with the fact especially of [* october 12, 1929.] my own highly inadequate rendering of the part of the financier. i am the thin and shadowy approximation to a capitalist. . . . i could only manage until very lately to keep this paper in existence at all, by earning the money in the open market; and more especially in that busy and happy market where corpses are sold in batches; i mean the mart of murder and mystery, the booth of the detective story. many a squire has died in a dank, garden arbour, transfixed by a mysterious dagger, many a millionaire has perished silently though surrounded by a ring of private secretaries, in order that mr. belloc may have a paper in which he is allowed to point out that a great empire does not default because it is growing richer. many a shot has rung out in the silent night, many a constable has hurled himself through a crashing door, from under which there crawled a crimson stain, in order that there might be a page somewhere for mr. kenrick's virile and logical exposition of the principles of distributism. many an imperial jewel has vanished from its golden setting, many a detective crawled about on the carpet for clues, before some of those little printers' bills could be settled which enabled the most distinguished and intelligent of distributists to denounce each other as capitalists and communists, in the columns of the cockpit and elsewhere. this being my humble and even highly irrelevant contribution to the common team-work, it is obvious that it could not be done at the same time as a close following of the varying shades of thought in the distributist debates. and, this ignorance of mine, though naturally very irritating to people better informed, has at least the advantage of giving some genuineness to my impartiality. i have never belonged distinctively to any of the different distributist groups. i have never had time. as time went on however and the disputes continued, he wrote a series of articles* which have in them that note so special to him, so embarrassing to some of his admirers, of deep and genuine respect for every person and every opinion. the small numbers of the distributists, the greatness of the work to be done by them, would make any split in their ranks "a tremendous tragedy." the difficulty in keeping any movement in being was that of holding together the ardent pioneers and the rank and file. [* september 10, 17, 24, october 1, 1932.] men who really have common convictions tend to break up. it is only those who have no convictions who always hang together. . . . roughly the position is that there is a moderate body which regards extremists as visionary; a more extreme body which regards moderates as ineffective; and lastly a catastrophic simplification in the social scene, which makes the simple enthusiast seem more fitted to the simple disaster. there were two approaches that should be made to these differences. the first was to state the fundamental principles of distributism. the crux of the quarrel was the question of machinery. but even those who held that machinery should be abolished in the distributist state held it, he claimed, not as a first principle, but as a deduction from their first principles. chesterton himself felt that machinery should be limited but not abolished; the order of things had been historically that men had been deprived of property and enslaved on the land before the machine-slavery of industrialism had become possible. the whole history of the machine might have been reversed in a state of free men. if a machine were used on a farm employing fifty men that would do the work of forty, it means forty men become unemployed, "but it is only because they were employed that they are unemployed. now you and i, i hope to heaven, are not trying to increase employment. it is almost the only thing that is as bad as unemployment." in other words, he did not want men to be employees. men working for themselves, men their own employers, their own employees--that was the objective of distributism. a wide distribution of property was its primary aim. and he did not want the league to consist entirely of extremists lest it should be thought to consist entirely of cranks, especially at a moment when "intelligent people are beginning to like distributism _because_ distributism is normal." the other approach was heralded in the final article of the series (october 1, 1932) by a reference to the excitement over the buckfast benedictines who had just built their abbey church with their own hands--an adventure to which, if i understand it as completely as i share it, the english blood will never be entirely cold. but about these new heroes of architecture there is one note that is not new; that comes from a very ancient tradition of psychology and morals. and that is that the adventurer has a right to his adventure; and the amateur has a right to his hobby; or rather to his love. but neither has any right to a general judgment of coldness or contempt for those whose hobby is human living; and whose chief adventures are at home. you will never hear the builders of buckfast shouting aloud, "down with downside; for it was designed by a careful gothic architect!" you will never hear them say, "how contemptible are these catholics who pray in common churches; tawdry with waxwork imagery and repository art." of the great adventurers who advance out of the christian past, in search of christian future, you could never say that the pioneers despise the army. what seemed to chesterton the oddest feature in the opposition to his idea of sanity was the apparent assumption that he was offering an impossible ideal to a world that was already working quite well. with bland disregard of the breakdown of their own system, the orthodox economists were challenging him to establish the flawlessness of his. they laughed at the distributist desire if not to abolish at least to limit machinery. they adjured him to be more practical. chesterton had replied in an earlier article: there may be, and we ourselves believe there are, a certain number of things that had better be always done by machinery. . . . machinery is now being used to produce numberless things that nobody needs. machinery is being used to produce more machinery, to be used merely for the production of things that nobody needs. machinery is being used to produce very badly things that everybody wants produced very well. machinery is being used for enormously expensive transport of things that might just as well be used where they are. machinery is being used to take things thousands of miles in order to sell them and bring them back again because they are not sold. machinery is being used to produce ornament that nobody ever looks at and architecture that nobody wants to look at. machinery is taking suicides to monte carlo and coals to newcastle, and all normal human purpose and intelligence to bedlam; and our critics gaze at it reverently and ask us how we expect ever to be so practical as that.* [* june 13, 1925.] this desperate situation must be met by strengthening the home, re-establishing the small workshop, re-creating the english peasantry. but first the ground might have to be cleared. one phrase used in his articles--the "catastrophic simplification of the social scene"--reminds us once more how keenly aware gilbert was of something that had not yet happened, the present war with its break-up of the social order. in the article, from which i have been quoting, he compares the urgency of the hour to the period of the french revolution; in his _outline of sanity_ seven years earlier he had stressed the distributist ideal as the last chance to do deliberately and well what nemesis will do wastefully and without pity; whether we cannot build a bridge from these slippery downward slopes to freer and firmer land beyond, without consenting yet that our most noble nation must descend into that valley of humiliation in which nations disappear from history.* [* _outline of sanity_, p. 34.] in this book which he had tried in vain, he tells us, to make "a grammar of distributism," he touches on the enormous changes that had made such a grammar of far greater urgency. when _rerum novarum_ was issued, or even eighteen years later when g.k. wrote _what's wrong with the world_, individualist competition had not yet given place to the trust, combine or merger. "the american trust is not private enterprise. it would be truer to call the spanish inquisition private judgment." the decline of trade had hardly begun at the turn of the century, liberty was still fairly widespread. but today we had lost liberty as well as property and were living under the worst features of a socialist state. "i am one of those who believe that the cure for centralisation is decentralisation." both in the book and in the paper he urged constantly a double line of escape towards the restoration of freedom, initiative, property and the free family: the one line was the comparatively negative one of winning such concessions from the state as would make action possible, the other was personal action to be taken without any state aid or even encouragement. the germ of recovery lay in human nature. if you get poison out of a man's system "the time will come when he himself will think he would like a little ordinary food. if things even begin to be released they will begin to recover." to the question did chesterton believe distributism would save england, he answered, "no, i think englishmen will save england, if they begin to have half a chance. i am therefore in this sense hopeful. i believe that the breakdown has been a breakdown of machinery and not of men." a most difficult question to answer is the degree of the league's success. its stated aim was propaganda, the spreading of ideas. "there is a danger that the tendency to regard talking as negligible may invade our little movement . . . our main business is to talk." one sees the point, of course; yet i cannot help feeling that it would have been better if the majority of leaguers had done some bit of constructive work towards a distributist world and sweated out of their system the irritability that found vent in some of their quarrels. after all the fight for freedom as far as it concerned attacking government was carried on week by week by the small group running the paper. "the main body of distributists would have learnt their own principles better by trying to act them, and been far more effective in conveying them to others." some members saw the need of individual action. father vincent set out in one number of the paper fifteen things that men could do for themselves as a step to the practice of a distributist philosophy. father vincent, indeed, must be put beside chesterton and belloc as a really great distributist writer. useful books were written too by mr. heseltine and mr. blyton, who both also set to work to grow their own food. mr. blyton is still writing and still growing food. a workshop was started at glasgow (probably the most active of the branches), father vincent came to a league meeting clad in home-spun and home-woven garments, mr. blyton urged the example of what had been done by the society of friends in creating real wealth in the hands of the poor by their allotment schemes. (a weakness was visible, i think, in the very different and contemptuous treatment of ford's effort to promote part-time farming among his workers during the depression because it was made by ford, who was certainly no distributist.) but the most inspiring article in the paper in many a year was written by a man who, having tried in vain to get his writings printed, decided to start practising distributism. he had pondered long, he says, on how the rank and file of the movement who were neither writers nor speakers should help, and the answer came to him "do it yourself." after a fascinating description of how he built "the nucleus of a dwelling house against the time that a small plot of land could be secured" he ends: by responsible work a man can best realise the dignity of his human personality. but most of us are caught in the net of industry and the best way out would seem to be to create, that is to employ one's leisure in conscious creative effort. this usually means the use of hand as well as head, and the concentration on some familiar craft. the aim also should be to acquire ownership in a small way; that is to acquire the means of production. if we are not at all events partly independent, how is it possible to urge on others the principles of small ownership. in saying this he spoke from experience, for he had found that before he began his experiment his friends were exasperated by references to the principles of distributism, while the sight of the building in progress began to convert them. i have found many letters striking the note of gratitude to gilbert for his goodness and the inspiration he has given. one of these, written by a sailor from h.m.s. _hood_, is pure distributism: "your articles are so interesting tho' so hard to understand. . . . why not come down a bit and educate the working class who are always in trouble because they don't know what they want. you see, sir, your use of words and phrases are so complicated, personally that's why i'm so fascinated when i read them, but really us average council school educated people can't learn from you as we should . . . but what i do understand helps me to live. . . ." the sailor goes on to tell the story of his life: a workhouse child, a farm boy: a seaman on a submarine who spent his "danger money" on a bit of land in cornwall, married now and with two boys. "what a thrill of pleasure we have when we gaze over our land. . . . to be reared in a workhouse and then to leave a freehold home and land to one's children may not seem much to most people but still out of that my sons can build again. . . . i feel you understand this letter, what is in my heart, and i want to thank you very much for what you have done for me." towards the end of september 1932 the league held a meeting to which gilbert came "as peacemaker." in the course of his speech he remarked that he had often said harsh things of america in the days of her prosperity but that in these days of adversity we might learn much from that country. he instanced the saying he had heard from a business man on his recent visit, "there's nothing for it but to go back to the farm," and noted the fact that america still had this large element of family farms as a basis for recovery. the suggestion that distributists wanted to turn everybody into peasants had been another point answered in _the outline_--"what we offer is proportion. we wish to correct the proportions of the modern state."* a considerable return to the family farm would greatly improve this proportion. [* _outline of sanity_, p. 56.] but if he had spoken "harshly" of the united states it was nothing to the way he had talked of the british empire. although at moments he saw in imagination the romance of the fact that england had acquired an empire "absentmindedly" through englishmen with the solitary spirit of adventure and discovery, yet he had an unfortunate habit of abusing the dominions. they were the "suburbs" of england (a curious phrase from the man who found suburbs "intoxicating"); we could not learn from them as we could from europe for they were inferior to us; these and many other hard things he would throw out again and again in his articles. one letter in the _cockpit_ reproached him; from a new zealander of english descent it asked him whether he really meant that those of his own race were so utterly indifferent to him; whether he really preferred bohemians and norwegians to britons. the letter received no answer. my husband and i used to wonder with secret smiles whether he was the australian from whom gilbert derived the idea of that country as a "raw and remote colony." belloc also, in a letter extolling the faith, asked "what else would print civilised stuff in australasia?" many years earlier gilbert had written, in reviewing a book on the cottages of england, of the inconsistency of the english upper classes who exalt the achievement of the national character in creating the empire and disparage it concerning the possibility of re-creating the rural life of england. "their creed contains two great articles: first that the common englishman can get on anywhere, and second that the common englishman cannot get on in england." surely chesterton had this same inconsistency, as it were, in reverse? the common englishman was great in england, the common irishman was great in ireland, the common scot was a figure of romance in scotland, but when these common men created a new country that new country became contemptible. the empire took a magnificent revenge, for it was in the "suburbs of england" that distributism was first taken seriously and used as practical politics. a far more effectively distributist paper than _the distributist_ appeared in ceylon under the able editorship of j. p. de fonseka, in which action was recorded and the movements of government watched and sometimes affected from the distributist angle, and catholic social thinking formed on distributist lines. this paper has a considerable effect also in india. but of course the main distributist impact has been felt in the states, in canada and in australia. there is a double-edged difficulty in talking about the influence of anyone on his times. on the one hand, as mgr. knox pointed out, all our generation has grown up under chesterton's influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking chesterton. one sees unacknowledged (and unconscious) quotations from him in books and articles, one hears them in speeches and sermons. on the other hand into the making of a movement there flow so many streams that it is possible to claim too much for a single influence however powerful. an american distributist said to me lately that the movement set on foot by chesterton had reached incredible proportions for one generation. i think this is true but we have also to render thanks (for example) to the suicide of the commercial-capitalist-combine which created the void for our philosophy. that the distributist league has had much influence i doubt: in the united states the chesterton spirit is better represented by that admirable paper _free america_ than by the american distributists--for _free america_ is offering us precisely what the league has for the most part failed to offer--the laboratory test of the distributist ideal. every number carries stories of men who have in part-time or whole-time farming, in small shops, in backyard industries tried out distributism and can tell us how it has worked and _how to work it_. its editors herbert agar, ralph borsodi, canon ligutti and others, all foremost in the ruralist movement, acknowledge debt to chesterton and are carrying on the torch. monsignor ligutti's own work in the field of part-time farming, his own periodical and the thoughts that inspire the catholic rural life movement of america are among the most important manifestations of that universal religious and rural awakening for which chesterton worked so hard and longed so ardently. in canada the antigonish movement has shown a happy blending of theory and practise. for the university itself has in its extension movement and by its organ _the maritime co-operator_ provided the theory, while up and down the country co-operative groups have built their own houses and canneries, started their own co-operative stores and savings banks, and made the maritime provinces a hopeful and property-owning community of small farmers and fisher folk. several important books have grown out of this movement and at its basis lies the insistence on adult education which shall make ordinary men "masters of their destiny." surely it is the authentic voice of chesterton when dr. tompkins says "trust the little fellow" or dr. coady declares "the people are great and powerful and can do everything." in australia distributism has given a fresh slant to both labour and catholic leadership. the direct debt to chesterton of the _australian catholic worker_ is immense, and while the paper also owes much to _the catholic worker_ of america and to the jocistes of france and belgium, we find too that in america, france, and belgium, chesterton himself is studied more than any other catholic englishman. the campion society founded in melbourne in 1931, the catholic guild of social studies in adelaide, the aquinas society in brisbane, the chesterton club in perth and the campion society in sydney have all based their thinking and their action on the chesterbelloc philosophy. these groups have closely analysed belloc's _servile state_ and _restoration of property_ and have applied its principles in their social action in a most interesting fashion. thus they opposed--and helped to defeat--a scheme for compulsory national insurance chiefly on the ground that "the social services in a modern state were the insurance premiums which capitalism paid on its life policy." with wages high enough to keep families in reasonable comfort and save a little, with well distributed property, national insurance would be rendered unnecessary. yet on the other hand they supported--and won--national "child endowment" because although fundamentally only a palliative this at least strengthened the family by supplementing wages and helping parents towards ownership and property. most important however of all the australian developments has been the approval of the main distributist ideal by the australasian hierarchy as the aim of catholic social action. this was especially set out in their statement on social justice, issued on occasion of the first social justice sunday in 1940.* the hierarchy of new zealand joined with that of australia in establishing this celebration for the third sunday after easter. indeed, the social policy of australian catholicism has produced the slogan "property for the people," while the policy has been brought into action both by many scattered individuals in that huge but thinly populated country and in organised fashion by the rural life movements with their own organs of expression. [* published by the australian c.t.s.] if it is difficult to estimate the impact of mind upon mind it becomes bewilderingly impossible to weigh, in such a movement as distributism, the actual practical effects. partly because, while distributism leads naturally to co-operation (an individual, says chesterton, is only the latin word for an atom and to reduce society to individuals is to smash it to atoms), still the movement is essentially local, the groups usually small. for my own part i have travelled a good deal, always with a primary interest in social developments, and everywhere i have found chesterton or his derivatives. the numbers in america alone--both in the states and canada--who are trying out these ideas in big and small communities is amazing. i did begin to make a list of vital movements beginning with the jocistes and the american catholic worker, roving over the world and trying to estimate in each movement i had met the proportion of chesterton's influence, and again the extent to which one movement is in debt to another--but i gave it up in despair. one can only say that certainly there has been a great stirring of the waters in every country: each has taken and has given to the other: and most of those thus co-operating have been the "little" men whom g.k. loved and in whom dr. tompkins tells us to trust. to utter nobly the thoughts of that little man was, chesterton held, the highest aim that poet or prophet could set before him. distributism is that little man's philosophy. chesterton gave it large utterance. and he could do it the more richly because--as he said many years ago of the religious philosophy that was the basis of his social outlook--"i did not make it. god and humanity made it and it made me." meanwhile he himself distributed royally. he gave help to the catholic land movement, to cecil houses, to all who asked him for help. he educated several nieces and nephews of frances and gave money or lent it in considerable sums to old friends in difficulties. if some event--perhaps judgment day--should call together all those helped financially by gilbert and frances, i think they will be surprised to meet one another and to discover what a lot of them there are. they gave too to the catholic church at beaconsfield, which later became gilbert's monument, and to which top meadow was left after frances's death. but even top meadow was distributed, a small piece being cut off the garden and left to dorothy collins. and i think even in a distributist heaven it must add to gilbert's happiness to see the seventeen rabbits, the chickens and the beehives--to say nothing of the huge quantities of vegetables produced on this fragment of his property. for this war like the last, with all its suffering, will, if the bureaucracy permit it, again energise the people of england into that creative action which is the only soil for the seed of distributism. it began by distributing the people. and london was no place for a distributist movement. it is no chance that the growth of this philosophy is among small groups and in the countryside. "on the land," as father vincent often says, "you need not waste a moment of time or a scrap of material." this is the fierce and pious thrift that gilbert saw in his youth as so poetical and in his age as a part of the philosophy of distributism. chapter xxvii silver wedding the consideration of the distributist league that flowed out of the foundation of _g.k.'s weekly_ in 1925 has carried us some years ahead of our story. back then to 1926 when frances and gilbert had been married 25 years. one of the things taught me long ago when i first visited them at beaconsfield was that it was properly to be called beckonsfield: that it was not named for disraeli but that he, impertinently, had chosen to be named for it. gilbert often spelt it bekonsfield to impress his point. both in theory and practice he had a lot of local patriotism and a little of that special pride taken by all men in houses built by themselves. but most of his pride went out to the fact that his home was intensely english. he quoted a lover of sussex who said among the beech trees of buckinghamshire, "this is really the most english part of england." he felt it "no accident that has called this particular stretch of england the home counties." public life was so ugly just now, the decay of patriotism under the corroding influence of an evil and cowardly sort of pacifism was hateful to him, but england still remained to re-vitalise the english when the time should come. the oaks that had made our ships could still fill us with "heroic memories; of nelson dying under the low oaken beams or collingwood scattering the acorns that they might grow into battleships." yet if, he said, "i were choosing an entirely english emblem, i should choose the beech-tree." beaconsfield was, by one theory, named from the beech forests that surrounded it, and while the oaks suggested adventure and the british lion, the beeches suggest rather the pigs that feed upon their mast and villages that grow up in the hollows and slow curves of the hills. "the return to the real england with real englishmen would be a return to the beech-woods, which still make this town like a home. at least they did until recently. i shall probably be told tomorrow that several beech forests have been removed to enable a motorist, temporarily deaf and blind, to go from birmingham to brighton." it is at top meadow, whither they moved in 1922, that i always see frances and gilbert in a memory picture. they were to live there for the rest of their lives, and life there was the quiet background for all the vast mental activity and the journeying over england and ireland and europe and america that marked the years that remained. the house began simply as a huge room or studio built in the field opposite overroads. at one end was a stage which became the dining room: at the other end a minute study for gilbert. the roof was high with great beams: at the study end was a musicians' gallery. a wide open fireplace held two rushbottomed seats on one of which frances sat in winter. they were the only warm corners, but gilbert did not feel the cold and certainly could not have fitted into the inglenook. opposite the fire was a long low window looking into the prettiest garden, where st. francis stood guardian and preached perpetually to the birds. a pool held water lilies; and the flowers that surrounded the pool and the house were also cut and brought indoors in great quantities. frances loved to have them in glowing masses against the background of books. new shelves had to be added every year as the books accumulated. big as the room was, the wall space was not enough and one large bookcase was built out from the wall near the fireplace into the middle of the room, as in a public library. it looked well there and it screened one from the bitterest blasts. for the place seemed full of air from the four winds of heaven. the rest of the house was built on to this room and looked tiny beside it. kitchen and servants' quarters, two fair-sized and one very small bedroom, a minute sitting room for frances where she kept her collection of tiny things--toys and ornaments mostly less than an inch, many far smaller, that were the delight of children. she had not, gilbert remarked, allowed her taste to guide her in choosing a husband. a mixture of gilbert's strong and weak qualities affected his dealings with his dependents. i am not sure he felt certain that it was quite right that he should have a gardener: anyhow, no man was ever paid so highly and allowed to idle so completely as was the gardener i remember there, an exceedingly able gardener when he chose to work. to such trifles as the disappearance of coal or tools, neither gilbert nor frances would dream of adverting. and they were entirely at the mercy of a "hard case" story at all times. one man used to call weekly to receive ten shillings--for what service no one was able to form the faintest conception. should he fail to appear gilbert mailed the money. he was found one day fighting another man on the doorstep for daring to beg from mr. chesterton! from a conventional point of view the maids were inconceivably casual. neither gilbert nor frances would have thought it right to insist on caps or indeed on any sort of uniform. it is my impression that i have been waited on at dinner by someone garbed in a skirt, a sweater and a pair of bedroom slippers. and the parlor maid took for granted her own presence beside frances and dorothy collins as a chief mourner at gilbert's funeral. according to bernard shaw, writing of dickens, marriage between a genius and an ordinary or normal woman could not succeed--the gap was too wide. dickens had thought he could go through with it, only because he had not measured the gap. in this theory, as in so much else, gilbert stood violently opposed to shaw. no doubt he must at times have realised that there was an intellectual gap between himself and the ordinary man or woman, but it was a thing utterly unimportant. character, love, sanity: these things mattered infinitely more, and he more than once depicts the genius as painfully climbing to reach the ordinary. his views concerning the sexes were equally at variance with those of shaw and of most of the moderns. he was quite frankly the old-fashioned man and frances was the old-fashioned woman. they both agreed that there is one side of life that belongs to man--the side of endless cigars smoked over endless discussions about the universe. gilbert, in _what's wrong with the world_, tells us that the voice in which the working woman summons her husband from the tavern is the same voice as that of the hostess who, leaving the men in the dining room, tells her husband not to stay too long over the cigars. of this voice he entirely approved so long as it did not ask to stay on in the dining room. he often said that the important thing for a country was that the men should be manly, the women womanly: the thing he hated was the modern hybrid: the woman who gate-crashes the male side of life: no one, he had said in a letter of his engagement time, "takes such a fierce pleasure as i do in things being themselves." and both he and frances found amusement in that "eternal equality" which gilbert saw in the sexes so long as they kept their eternal separateness. if everything, he said, is trying to be red some things are redder than others, but there is an eternal and unalterable equality between red and green. it so happens that in the matter of the wives of great men he had something to say more than once. he longed to hear the point of view of mrs. cobbett who "remains in the background of his life in a sort of powerful silence." he combated shaw's notion that the young poet would repudiate domestic toils for his wife: rather he would idealise them--though this, gilbert admits, might at times be hard on the wife. but the matter is best expressed in the love scene in one of his later romances: _tales of the long bow:_ that valley had a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment, as if the west wind had been snared in it and tamed into a summer air. . . . "what would you say if i turned the world upside down and set my foot upon the sun and the moon?" "i should say," replied joan hardy, still smiling, "that you wanted somebody to look after you." he stared at her for a moment in an almost abstracted fashion as if he had not fully understood; then he laughed quite suddenly and uncontrollably, like a man who has seen something very close to him that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. so a man will fall over something in a game of hiding-and-seeking, and get up shaken with laughter. "what a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an aeroplane," he said. "what a thing is horse-sense, and how much finer really than the poetry of pegasus! and when there is everything else as well that makes the sky clean and the earth kind, beauty and bravery and the lifting of the head--well, you are right enough, joan. will you take care of me?"* [* pp. 89, 119.] frances was not especially interesting intellectually although she had much more mind than joan in the story, but above all she carried with her a "quality of repose with a stir of refreshment." "will you take care of me?" neither of them probably had measured at first all that that care would mean. only bit by bit would the full degree of his physical dependence, as we have seen it through the years, become clear to her. the strenuous campaign in the matter of appearances begun during the engagement might alter in direction but had rather to be intensified in degree as he grew older. shaving, bathing, even dressing were daily problems to him. "heat the water," an early secretary at overroads heard frances saying to the cook, "mr. chesterton is going to have a bath." and "o, need i," came in tones of deepest depression from the study. the thought of that vast form climbing into and out of the bathtub does make one realise how a matter of easy everyday practice to the normal person became to him almost a heroic venture. his tie, his boots, were equally a problem: i remember his appearing once at breakfast in two ties and claiming, when i noticed it, that it proved he paid too much, not too little, attention to dress. doctors, dentists, oculists were all needed at times, but gilbert would never discover the need or achieve appointments or the keeping of them. still more serious was the question of how the two were to live and to do all the acts of generosity that to them both seemed almost more necessary than their own living. hard as he worked, dorothy collins has told me that when she came to them in this year (1926) they had almost nothing saved. it may be remembered that gilbert wrote to frances during their engagement that his only quality as a shopper was ability to get rid of money and that he was not good at "such minor observances" as bringing home what he had bought or even remembering what it was. through boyhood and into manhood his parents, as we have seen, had never given him money to handle and he certainly never learnt to handle it later in life. "he spent money like water," belloc told me. realising his own incapacity he arranged fairly early to have frances look after their finances, bank the money and draw checks. "when we set up a house, darling," he had said, "i think you will have to do the shopping." all he handled was small sums by way of pocket money--"very playfully regarded by both" father o'connor writes, for he had often witnessed the joke that they made of it. "what could she do," he continues, "when gilbert went out with â£5.18.6 or words to that effect, and came back invariably without a copper, not knowing where his money had gone?" at a hotel in warsaw the manager entreated him not to bring every beggar in town around the door. he could never refuse a beggar and the money not given away was probably dropped in the street or in a shop. the solution they hit upon was that of accounts at the shops and hotels or anything that could not simply be brought home by frances and placed by his side. father o'connor wrote to dorothy collins of "the loving care with which frances anticipated all his wishes--never was the cigar box out of date--_you_ know this, and it was so long before you came. and his toddle to the railway hotel for port or a quart according to climatic conditions. . . . she devised and built the studio for gilbert to play at and play in. it used to be crowded at receptions, as on the night when gilbert broke his arm. he had been toying with the tankard that evening, to the detriment of social intercourse, but not much, i thought. we were all in good fettle. the _ballad of the white horse_ was just going to the printers. that was never penned in fleet street. nor _the everlasting man_. he wrote verbosely there in the office. at beaconsfield he was pulled together, braced." the studio, become the house, almost certainly cost more than they had planned--building always does--but the two great drains were the benefactions and the paper. frances signed, as a matter of course, every check gilbert wanted, but i imagine it was sometimes with a little sigh that she wrote the checks for the endless telephones, telegrams, printers' bills and other expenses that poured out to support a paper which to her seemed chiefly a drain on gilbert's energies that could not but diminish his creative writing. in the six years 1927-1933, he paid over â£3000 into the paper. 1931-2 were the worst years. in them the checks she had to sign totalled â£1500. the last sentences quoted from father o'connor touch on the deepest--perhaps the only deep--problem for them both. for far the hardest thing was the struggle against the real danger that he might again drink too much, as he had before the illness that so nearly killed him in 1915. this struggle was rendered especially hard by two elements in her make-up: frances wanted always to give gilbert exactly what _he_ wanted, and she hated to admit even to herself anything that could be called a fault in him. she saw the overwork that she was powerless to stop: she could not but be aware how great it made the temptation. it was for her to remember the old illness, to be vigilant without worrying him, to help him against himself. after the long illness dr. pocock had advised total abstinence for some years, largely because, as he told me, gilbert, unless specially warned, ate and drank absentmindedly anything that happened to be there! he observed this prohibition faithfully until dr. pocock left beaconsfield in 1919. dr. bakewell, who succeeded him advised moderation but only occasionally found it necessary to order total abstention. it was the amount of liquid he feared rather than its nature. when he forbade wine he did so because wine increased the general tendency to absorb liquid. for gilbert was always unslakeably thirsty. daily he drank several bottles of vichy water or evian, also of claret at what may be called the "open" seasons, and many cups of tea and coffee. spirits he practically never touched, nor such heavier wines as port and sherry. but even two bottles of claret or burgundy, although usually appearing to brighten his intellect, might well be a serious strain on the digestion of a man who overworked the mind without exercising the body. "he loved to sip a glass of wine," monsignor o'connor writes, "and to stroll between sips in and out of his study, brooding and jotting, and then the dictation was ready for the morning." dorothy collins once kept a record for a few weeks of the number of words dictated of the book of the moment--usually thirteen to fourteen thousand, about twenty-one hours weekly--exclusive of journalism, editing and lecturing. the pressure was tremendous and increasing, nor was it felt by gilbert only. in a letter to maurice baring at the time of his conversion he writes: "for deeper reasons than i could ever explain, my mind has to turn especially on the thought of my wife, whose life has been in many ways a very heroic tragedy; and to whom i am so much in debt of honour that i cannot bear to leave her, even psychologically, if it be possible by tact and sympathy to take her with me." frances would indeed have been amazed to find herself cast for such a part. her life had held two tragic events--gertrude's death and the much sadder death of her brother, believed to have killed himself. with her faith and her profound affections such an end had stabbed deep. yet certainly frances did not view herself as other than happy: in fact, i think she very seldom thought about herself at all. there was something of heroism in this very self-forgetfulness. frances never had good health and for some years had suffered from arthritis of the spine. yet intimate as i was i knew this only after her death. my husband was saying lately that had he been asked to choose adjectives to describe frances he would have chosen "cheerful" and "well-balanced." of all the people we have known we felt she was one of the closest to the norm of sanity and mental health: quite an achievement for a woman suffering from a really painful complaint. yet i think when gilbert used the strong phrase "heroic tragedy" he saw with his great insight that his frail wife, beside their heavy cross of childlessness, beside the burden of her own physical and spiritual sufferings, was carrying the weight of his achievement, and that it was not a light one. heroic was the right word but tragedy the wrong, for this life given to her keeping ended on a note of triumph. the treatment of a situation of this kind can, of course, easily be made unreal. in the sort of golden glow cast by the imagination on fleet street with its taverns and its drinks, next morning's headache is always omitted: but even the finer, deeper glow of the domestic hearth has its ashy moments. no finite beings can conduct their lives with complete absence of errors and regrets. in any human relationship, however perfect, the people concerned sometimes bore or annoy or even hurt one another. that is one of the main things that sends catholics week by week or month by month to the confessional, which brings for everyman something of the renewal and re-creation of daily joy that the genius gilbert saw when he wrote _manalive_. in this story the hero is always eloping with his own wife and marrying her again. flora finching's "it was not ecstasy it was comfort" is a common enough view of a reasonably successful marriage, but gilbert wanted to keep and did keep the flashes of ecstasy. when he wrote _manalive_ he had been married eleven years and he used a thought that had inspired a poem to frances while they were engaged. the heroine in the story keeps changing her second name, but the name is always a colour: in one town the hero runs away with her as mary grey, in another as mary green. thus as a girl gilbert had seen frances in green and had understood why green trees and fields are beautiful; had seen her in grey and had learnt a new love for grey winter days, and the grey robes of palmers; and in blue- then saw i how the fashioner splashed reckless blue on sky and sea and ere 'twas good enough for her he tried it on eternity. when they came back from jerusalem gilbert dedicated to frances the _ballad of st. barbara_ and we find him again at his old trick: seeing as her throne the great stones of the mediaeval walls, seeing nature as her background. with all apologies to the cynics i am afraid that the judgment of the biographer upon all the evidence must be that after twenty-five years gilbert not only loved his wife tenderly, but was still ardently in love with her! a curious prayer of his youth was fulfilled as they celebrated this year their silver wedding. a wan new garment of young green, touched as you turned your soft brown hair; and in me surged the strangest prayer ever in lover's heart hath been. that i who saw your youth's bright page, a rainbow change from robe to robe, might see you on this earthly globe, crowned with the silver crown of age. your dear hair powdered in strange guise, your dear face touched with colours pale, and gazing through the mask and veil the mirth of your immortal eyes.* [* "the last masquerade," _collected poems_, pp. 348-9.] four years earlier frances had aided gilbert in making the decision for which she was not yet herself ready, to do the act which he called "the most difficult of all my acts of freedom." and indeed much of that freedom of full manhood he owed to her. now after four years of waiting she was almost ready to join him. she wrote to father o'connor: june 20 [1926] dear padre- i want now, as soon as i can see a few days clear before me to place myself under instruction to enter the church. the whole position is full of difficulties and i pray you padre to tell me the first step to take. i _don't_ want my instruction to be here. i don't want to be the talk of beaconsfield and for people to say i've only followed gilbert. it isn't true and i've had a hard fight not to let my love for him lead me to the truth. i knew you would not accept me for such motives. but i am very tired and very worried. many things are difficult for me. my health included which makes strenuous attention a bit of a strain. i know you understand--tell me what i shall do. yours affecly frances chesterton. between this letter and the next gilbert and frances celebrated their silver wedding. july 12 my dear padre- we have had such a week of alarums and excitements that i had not even time to thank you for the spoons. they are just what i like and incidentally just what i wanted. i feel so hopeless at getting out of this net of responsibilities in which i am at present enmeshed and to find time for instruction. i feel i have a lot to learn and i think after all i had better go quietly to father walker* and talk to him. gilbert is writing to you himself. i know he thinks i have made myself rather unhappy about things--and he is so involved with the paper (i pray he gives it up) we have not been able to talk over things sensibly. please be very patient with me, because it is so difficult to get clear. my nephew peter is very ill and i have to spend a lot of time with my poor sister. [* the parish priest.] yrs gratefully frances chesterton. [undated] dear padre- many grateful thanks. did you receive your copy of the "incredulity of father brown." it was put aside for you, but i do not know if it was sent off or appropriated by somebody else. i have written to father walker and after having seen him and had a talk i shall know what i ought to do. it is only the mass of work, the paper, my poor peter and money worries that keep me on the edge from morning till night. i feel the paper must go, it is too much for gilbert (4 days work always) and consequently too much for me who have to attend to everything else. trying to settle an income-tax dispute has nearly brought me to tears. you will understand how difficult it is to get time to think and adjust my conclusions. yrs affect. frances chesterton. this group of letters is for frances amazingly unreserved. i have never known a happier catholic than she was once the shivering on the bank was over and the plunge had been taken. one would say she had been in the church all her life. this was indeed a year of fulfillment: the year of the completion of their home, for they surprisingly acquired a daughter! i sometimes wondered why frances and gilbert had never adopted a child: they lavished much love on nieces, nephews and godchildren, but this was the only fulfillment to their longing until almost old age--and even then their conscious act was merely that of engaging a secretary. they had had many secretaries before, some of whom came with a quite inadequate training. "they learnt on gilbert," as a friend once put it. it was difficult, too, for the secretaries, since neither gilbert nor frances had any idea of hours or of the arrangement of work. it was quite probable that gilbert would suddenly want to dictate late in the evening or again that frances would ask the secretary of the moment to run into the village for the fish in the middle of the morning. hence rather general discomfort. gilbert dictated straight to the typewriter, so shorthand was not needed. he went very slowly with many pauses. but it is typical of this period that no carbons were kept of letters sent, no files of letters received. in 1926 came dorothy collins. not only did she bring order out of chaos, but she became first the very dear friend of both frances and gilbert and finally all that their own daughter could have been. i remember how frances talked of her to me when she was hoping dorothy would become a catholic (which she did some years later) and again when she herself was left solitary by her husband's death, and how i felt with inward thanksgiving that no child could mean more to her mother. but long before this stage was reached came a great lightening of the burden of living. no longer would frances cry over income tax returns, no longer would money worry her. chauffeur as well as secretary dorothy drove them both to london for engagements and through england and europe on holidays or lecture tours. she went with them to america and handled the business of their second tour there. now when friends rang up to make arrangements frances or gilbert could say: "would you ring again when dorothy comes in. i'm not quite sure. she keeps the engagement book." and while dorothy sternly warded off the undesirables, it worked out much better for friends as no engagement book had been kept before with any regularity. now engagements were kept as well as an engagement book. frances would still deal with the clothing question, but dorothy handled it if she were unwell, and in every case delivered him punctually and brought him home again. a few of the lectures and debates of these years were: "is journalism justifiable?", "an aspect of st. francis of assisi," "the problem of liberty," "is the house of commons any use," "what poland is," "culture and the coming peril," "progress and old books," "americanization," "the modern novel," "if i were a dictator." the excitement of catholics everywhere had been intense when gilbert came into the church: in england it was almost as great over frances. her real wish to remain in the background, her dislike of publicity, were seldom believed in by those who did not know her. i happened to be present at a conversation between the proprietor and the editor of a catholic paper which had displayed a poster all over london announcing her conversion. one of them had heard that she was annoyed and for a moment both seemed a little dashed. then said one: "of course she has to pretend not to like it"--and this was at once accepted by the other: for both took for granted that such publicity could in reality have given her nothing but pleasure. it was difficult at first for either frances or gilbert to see the wood for the trees in their new environment, and it was the greatest good fortune that the year of frances's reception was also that of the new simplification following upon dorothy's arrival. for the preceding few years had resembled the hectic period of the lionising of the young chesterton of 1904. requests poured in, for lectures, for articles, for introductions to books. "are there no other catholics to do things?" frances asked me rather plaintively. of these years monsignor knox said later, "his health had begun to decline, and he was overworked, partly through our fault." a dip into the post bag brings up some letters from father martindale to gilbert and frances passing on various requests, but also realising the difficulty: "i sympathize with all desperately busy men": "i have already protected him by advising small or fussy groups not to invite him now and again." the solitary recollection i have of any interest gilbert showed in a review of his books is the remark he made to my husband when father martindale had said of _the queen of seven swords_ "francis thompson is here outpassed." gilbert repeated the phrase and said eagerly: "he wouldn't say it unless he meant it, would he?" c.c.m., who has himself been caricatured talking on the radio, typing and eating at the same time, as different from g.k.c. as possible in his pale slimness and almost transparent appearance, was no less busy over a thousand activities. it was interesting that he should ask gilbert's help, especially in that cementing of catholics throughout the empire that has always so passionately preoccupied him. in the war he had discovered in military hospitals the ordinary englishman and above all the ordinary australian and new zealander. to them and to the apostolate of the sea he was to devote primarily all his later life. writing therefore to counsel the chestertons as to which catholic works should have precedence, we find him wanting an article for a new zealand paper "the only one of its sort in n.z., and you may say that it affects the _entire catholic_ community of the two islands," an autographed book for "a hulking devotee of yours and a member of the australia rugger team, i think eight of them are catholics." this "would give enormous joy to him" and "would be known in no time throughout australia. do try to." from south africa he wrote to frances: you will be surprised to get a letter from me from a nameless place 50 miles inland from the nyanga mountains, which you will find (variously spelt) westward from, say beira on the african east coast. this is the reason- recently a boy in a kraal here was found cutting pious pictures from a newspaper that he had somehow got hold of (he was a good little catholic!). "why are you cutting out that one?" "because _this_ is a great mukuru in the catholic church." (mukuru is potentate and will serve from st. joseph right along to the pope, not to mention the little flower. . . .) the great mukuru in this case was yourself! so there! i hope you will smile with pleasure, but not try to answer, as please god i sail on the 31st and ought to be back in london in early sept., a good deal better, thank god. please remember me affectionately to gilbert. this is the first time a typemachine has clicked just here; its accompaniment, in an otherwise dead silence, is a distant gurgling yodel, so to say--some native feeling happy in the brilliantly hot sunlight, which, all the same, cannot make the thin air hot. i sleep (when possible) under furs, with the occasional insect dropping off the thatch over my head. later, planning a meeting for the apostolate of the sea at queen's hall, he writes to gilbert: similarly fr. mcnabb must be given his head and i have told him he shall be given it. i hope to be purely practical and possibly a little sentimental. . . . the seaman is everywhere, yet, for us, nowhere. he carries everywhere his child's heart, man's body, hungry unfed soul, unique power of feeding his goodness into others. the all-round (the world) man; the sea-limited man; the man whose life is made up of storms and stars; the most secretive and the most open-hearted man of any. . . . now _i_ will do all the clumsy stuff. _you_ pull it all up into the human-sublime divine-humble air. he has no privacy, and is more lonely than anyone. he has water, and god; and must find christ walking over the waves towards him. and no ghost. father vincent mcnabb who was to be "given his head" at this meeting was not a new friend of catholic days but a very old one. a friendly critic of my manuscript asks whether he, even more than belloc or chesterton, does not merit the title of the father of distributism. at least he brings into the movement something none other could bring. he bases his social philosophy closely on the gospels--of which his knowledge is almost unique--and his articles bear such titles as "the economics of bethlehem" or "big scale agriculture and the gospels." hatred of machinery has combined with love of poverty to sunder him from a typewriter, and these articles are all handwritten in most exquisite and legible script. his letters have always come in old envelopes turned inside out; he walks whenever possible and wears a shabby white habit and broken boots. both frances and gilbert loved him dearly and their rare meetings were red letter days for both. besides the link of distributism the two men were united in caring deeply for the reawakened interest in st. thomas and his philosophy. the benedictine, as well as the dominican, outlook and history especially appealed to gilbert, and the friendship with father ignatius rice, which had begun almost with the century, grew steadily. he assisted, as we have seen, at gilbert's reception into the church: and whenever they met after that gilbert would remind him, "we were together on the great day." high wycombe was the chesterton's parish until, largely by their help, a church could be built at beaconsfield. at first this church was served by father walker, parish priest of high wycombe. it was he who had prepared gilbert for his first communion and he has sent me some of his recollections: it certainly did not take long to prepare him for he evidently knew as much as i could tell him. nevertheless, he said i was to treat him as i would any child whom i was teaching. this, knowing the man whom i was instructing, for i had at the time carefully waded through his orthodoxy twice, was, indeed, an undertaking of magnitude. however, i went through the catechism (he was importunate that i should use it as he said all the children made use of it), very meticulously explaining all the details, to which he lent a most vigilant and unswerving attention. for instance, he wanted me to explain the reason of the drop of water being put into the wine at the preparing of the chalice for the holy sacrifice. father walker describes gilbert opening a bazaar and spending lavishly at every stall, afterwards being photographed in his company. father walker himself weighed 245 lbs., and the caption was "giants in the faith." on his departure, gilbert presided at the farewell meeting and made a speech which, says father walker, "gave me no end of delight." father (now monsignor) smith became the first rector of beaconsfield as a separate parish. the chestertons loved the little church there which later became gilbert's memorial and to which, among other things, they gave a very beautiful statue of our lady. but when it had first been dedicated there had been for both frances and gilbert a deep disappointment. curiously enough, neither of them had any devotion to the little flower who was chosen as patron: they had hoped for a dedication to the english martyrs. later gilbert used to tell dorothy, who loved st. thã©rã¨se, that he could not care for her, "with all apologies to you, dorothy." he did not go often to confession, dorothy says, but when he did go you could hear him all over the church. getting up in the morning was always a fearful effort to him, and starting for early mass he would say to her, "what but religion would bring us to such an evil pass!" meanwhile the books went on. in 1926 appeared _the outline of sanity, the catholic church and conversion_, chiefly concerned with his own mental history, _the incredulity of father brown_ and _the queen of seven swords_. in 1927 for the first time his scattered poems were brought into the volume of _collected poems_. st. augustine asks whether we can praise god before we know him: gilbert answered that question when by praise and thanksgiving he came as a boy to the discovery of god, beginning by a passionate desire to thank someone for the universe. there is much praise in the collected poems. there is the note of hope in an almost hopeless fight in _the ballad of the white horse_. there are lovely poems to his wife. since browning none has understood the sacrament of marriage as well as gilbert chesterton. in 1927 there also appeared, beside a couple of pamphlets: the return of don quixote robert louis stevenson the secret of father brown the judgment of dr. johnson _robert louis stevenson_ took gilbert back to his boyhood and is by general agreement among the best of his literary studies. but the best thing he ever said apropos of stevenson came not in this book but in his attack on the "science" of eugenics: keats died young; but he had more pleasure in a minute than a eugenist gets in a month. stevenson had lung trouble; and it may, for all i know, have been perceptible to the eugenic eye even a generation before. but who would perform that illegal operation: the stopping of stevenson? intercepting a letter bursting with good news, confiscating a hamper full of presents and prizes, pouring torrents of intoxicating wine into the sea, all this is a faint approximation for the eugenic inaction of the ancestors of stevenson. this, however, is not the essential point; with stevenson it is not merely a case of the pleasure we get, but of the pleasure he got. if he had died without writing a line, he would have had more red-hot joy than is given to most men. shall i say of him, to whom i owe so much, let the day perish wherein he was born? shall i pray that the stars of the twilight thereof be dark and it be not numbered among the days of the year, because it shut not up the days of his mother's womb? i respectfully decline; like job, i will put my hand upon my mouth.* [* _eugenics and other evils,_ p. 57.] when the _stevenson_ itself appeared, sir edmund gosse wrote: i have just finished reading the book in which you smite the detractors of r.l.s. hip and thigh. i cannot express without a sort of hyperbole the sentiments which you have awakened; of joy, of satisfaction, of relief, of malicious and vindictive pleasure. we are avenged at last. . . . it is and always since his death has been impossible for me to write anything which went below the surface of r.l.s. i loved him, and still love him, too tenderly to analyse him. but you, who have the privilege of not being dazzled by having known him, have taken the task into your strong competent hands. you could not have done it better. the latest survivor, the only survivor, of his little early circle of intimate friends thanks you from the bottom of his heart. _don quixote_ is a fantasia about the future: in which the study of heraldry leads to the discovery of england and the centuries of her happiness and of her faith. increasingly gilbert saw the only future for his country in a re-marriage between those divorced three hundred years ago: england and the catholic church. _don quixote_ is among the less good of his books, but like all the works of these years it is saturated with catholicism. i wondered whether i felt more admiration or amazement when a man once asked us to publish a book on chesterton saying, "i am an atheist myself but that doesn't matter, as i don't deal with his religion." as a young man gilbert had wanted to marry the religion of dr. johnson to the republicanism of wilkes and in his catholic faith of today he saw simply the rounding out and the completing of the religion of dr. johnson. _the judgment of dr. johnson_, his play about that great man was, like _magic_, an immense succã¨s d'estime but not a stage success: it was brilliantly acted and appreciatively criticised but could not win a public. bernard shaw was still constantly urging gilbert towards the drama. belloc too believed he could write a successful play and he and anstey (author of _vice versa_) suggested the dramatising of a belloc story. but neither the scenario they jointly sketched for belloc's _emerald_ nor another made by gilbert alone for his own _flying inn_ ever reached the stage. i remember going with the chestertons to a pre-view of a father brown picture. two of the stories had been cleverly combined, the cast was first rate, including una o'connor and walter connolly, and i came out feeling convinced that father brown would become another charlie chan. the stories would adapt so well, abounding as they do in scenes impossible for the stage but perfectly easy for the screen--high walls, windows, ladders, flying harlequins. but the first picture failed (possibly because it was too short) and no more were made. the drama remained the one field in which he had no success. shaw's name for gilbert and belloc--the chesterbelloc--had come by the public to be used for the novels in which they collaborated. belloc wrote the story, chesterton drew the pictures, and the resulting product was known as the chesterbelloc. a number of letters from mr. belloc beg gilbert to do the drawings early in order to help the story. "i have already written a number of _situations_ which you might care to sketch. i append a list. your _drawing_ makes all the difference to my _thinking:_ i see the people in action more clearly." and again, "i can't write till i have the inspiration of your pencil. for the comedy in me is ailing." belloc would come over to beaconsfield for a day or a night and the two men retire into gilbert's minute study whence hoots of laughter would be heard. at the end of a couple of hours they would emerge with the drawings for a book complete, indeed several more than were needed. father rice asked gilbert once what he was writing and he replied, "my publishers have demanded a fresh batch of corpses." the little detective-priest ("i am very fond," said one reader to chesterton, "of that officious little loafer") became a feature in crime anthologies, and when anthony berkeley in 1929 wanted to found the detective club he wrote that it "would be quite incomplete without the creator of father brown." gilbert soon became president. "needless to say," writes dorothy sayers, "he read his part of the initiation ceremony with tremendous effect and enormous gusto." in an article gilbert wrote about the club, he called it "a very small and quiet conspiracy, to which i am proud to belong." meeting in various restaurants its members would "discuss various plots and schemes of crime." some results of these discussions may be seen in the initiation ceremonies which he made public in the article "thereby setting a good example to the mafia, the ku klux klan, the illuminati . . . and all the other secret societies which now conduct the greater part of public life, in the age of publicity and public opinion." _the ruler shall say to the candidate:_ m.n. is it your firm desire to become a member of the detection club? _then the candidate shall answer in a loud voice:_ that is my desire. _ruler:_ do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of divine revelation, feminine intuition, mumbo jumbo, jiggery-pokery, coincidence or act of god? _candidate:_ i do. _ruler:_ do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? _candidate:_ i do. _ruler:_ do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, death-rays, ghosts, hypnotism, trap-doors, chinamen, super-criminals and lunatics; and utterly and for ever to forswear mysterious poisons unknown to science? _candidate:_ i do. _ruler:_ will you honour the king's english? _candidate:_ i will. _then the ruler shall ask:_ m.n. is there anything you hold sacred? _then the candidate having named a thing which he holds of peculiar sanctity, the ruler shall ask:_ m.n. do you swear by (_here the ruler shall name the thing which the candidate has declared to be his peculiar sanctity_) to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a member of the club? _but, if the candidate is not able to name a thing which he holds sacred, then the ruler shall propose the oath in this manner following:_ m.n. do you, as you hope to increase your sales, swear to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a member of the club? a book called _the floating admiral_ was brought out by the club. chesterton wrote the introduction and each member produced one chapter. reading it without inside knowledge i conceived that the idea was for each to clear up the problems created by his predecessor and create fresh ones for his successor. gilbert tells of the subtler joke underlying the story: perhaps the most characteristic thing that the detection club ever did was to publish a detective story, which was quite a good detective story, but the best things in which could not possibly be understood by anybody except the gang of criminals that had produced it. it was called _the floating admiral_, and was written somewhat uproariously in the manner of one of those "paper games" in which each writer in turn continues a story of which he knows neither head nor tail. it turned out remarkably readable, but the joke of it will never be discovered by the ordinary reader; for the truth is that almost every chapter thus contributed by an amateur detective is a satire on the personal peculiarities of the last amateur detective. this, it will be sternly said, is not the way to become a best-seller. it is a matter of taste; but to my mind there is always a curious tingle of obscure excitement, in the works of this kind which have remained here and there in literary history; the sort of book that it is even more enjoyable to write than to read. _the floating admiral_ was a fair success financially. "we hired a sort of garret," writes monsignor knox "with the proceeds, as club rooms; and on the night after we all received our keys the premises were burglariously entered; why or by whom is still a mystery, but it was a good joke that it should happen to the detective club." lord peter and father brown and monsieur poirot--how were the mighty fallen! there is a custom in both english and scottish universities of electing a lord rector with the accompaniment of much undergraduate "ragging" of the choicest kind. the candidates usually each represent a political party but personal popularity has much to say in their success. at the scottish universities the contests are particularly spirited, and his keen sense of fun made gilbert ready to accept frequent invitations to stand. at glasgow in 1925 austen chamberlain got 1242, votes, chesterton 968 and sidney webb 285. "what swamped you," wrote jack phillimore, always critical of the gentler sex, "was the women, whose simple snobbery cannot get past the top hat and frock coat and right honourable . . . boyle was never kidnapped: others were removed into the mountains." the last sentence might have been lifted from sir walter: it refers to a pleasing habit among scots undergraduates of kidnapping the supporters of their opponents and keeping them safely concealed till after the election. whether or not it was through their simple snobbery, as professor phillimore said, it was certainly the women's vote that swamped him: of the 374 votes by which austen chamberlain beat chesterton, the men only accounted for 20, the women for 354. but it must have been some profounder passion that caused one of england's leading women novelists to write to the secretary of the glasgow university liberal club: i fail to see why you should desire to embarrass liberalism at one of its least happy moments by associating it with that village idiot on a large scale who is responsible for the muddled economics and disagreeable fantastics of "g.k.'s weekly." this was the outlook of that official liberalism which had long made it so difficult for gilbert to go on calling himself a liberal. the servile state was in full swing and official liberalism asked nothing better than to be allowed to operate it. whether belloc and cecil chesterton had been right or wrong at an earlier date in seeing the political parties in collusion it is certain that by now an utter bankruptcy in statesmanship had reduced them all to saying the same things while they did nothing. ten years later, on the day of the last general election of his life, gilbert wrote: the liberal has formed the opinion that peace is decidedly preferable to its alternative of war; and that this should be achieved through support of the league of nations interfering with the ambitions of other nations. the ministerialist, on the other hand, holds that we should, if possible, employ a machinery called the league of nations; with the object of securing peace, to which he is much attached. the ministerialist demands that strong action should be taken to reduce unemployment; but the liberal does not scruple to retort that unemployment is an evil, against which strong action must be taken. the liberal thinks that we ought to revive our trade, thus thwarting and throwing himself across the path of the national tory, who still insists that our trade should be revived. thus the two frowning cohorts confront each other; and i hear the noise of battle even as i write. in june 1928 he was invited to stand for edinburgh university. he replied: i do hope you will forgive me if there has been any delay in acknowledging your exceedingly flattering communication; i have been away from home and moving about a good deal; and have only just returned from london. certainly there is nothing which i should feel as so great an honour, or one so exciting or so undeserved, as to receive even the invitation to stand for such a position in the great university that has already been so generous to me. if you really think it would be of any service to your cause, i can hardly refuse such a compliment. of course you understand that it is only in a rather independent sense, though as i think in the right sense, that i shall always call myself a liberal; indeed, i find it difficult to imagine any real sort of liberal who is not really an independent liberal. i am quite certain i am not a tory or a socialist. he was defeated at this election by winston churchill who got 864 votes to 593 for g.k. and 332 for mrs. sidney webb. he was again defeated at aberdeen in 1933, coming second to major elliott, the other candidates being c. m. grieve and aldous huxley. at one stage of the contest the _daily express_ writes: "the huxley supporters are smarting under the surprise attack made by the chestertonians at the huxley concert at the week-end and are preparing reprisals." the following letter is g.k.'s reply to the first proposal from the aberdeen students: 25th october, 1933 i can at least assure you that the delay in acknowledging properly the most flattering compliment which you have paid me was not due to any notion of neglecting it. it was due to the practical necessity at the moment of discovering and deciding on a fact which may, for all i know, save you the trouble of further consideration of the matter; and it is for this reason that i mention the practical difficulty first. i now find that i shall almost certainly be obliged to be out of england (and scotland) for about three or four months, or conceivably a little more, beginning about the middle of january. i do not know what preliminary formalities would be demanded of me as a candidate, or when the demand for them would arise. but i was so strongly impressed with the honour you have paid me that i thought it my duty to find out the facts on this particular point, so that you might act on it in any way you think right. in any case, if the delay thus involved has placed you in any difficulty, i need not say that i shall fully understand your finding the project unworkable; and i shall be quite content to remember the compliment of the request. there is another consideration which would help the practical side of the case; and for that i fear i must make the practical enquiries of you, as people understanding the circumstances. you do not mention the party you represent; and though i am, like most of us, long past attaching a horrid sanctity to the name, i hope you will forgive that much curiosity in a poor bewildered journalist, who has been exhibited in many lights and cross-lights. i was put up as a candidate at glasgow as a liberal, which is really quite true; but i think i managed in my election pamphlet to give my own definition of liberalism. i have also more recently, on a public platform in glasgow, supported my friend mr. compton mackenzie when he stood as a scottish nationalist. both these positions i am quite prepared to defend; but in the latter, you might naturally prefer a nationalist candidate who was not only a quarter of a scotsman. i may remark that as the quarter is called keith, and comes from aberdeen, i am rather thrilled at the name of marischal college. there is one other point i think it only right to mention, for your sake as much as my own. you know the local conditions. do you think it likely that we should be left with one and a half votes, looking a little ridiculous, because the miserable quarter of a scot happens to have the same religion as bruce and maxy stuart? i only ask for information; which you alone could supply. but it may be that the considerations i have already mentioned have disposed of the matter. believe me, my gratitude is none the less. gilbert said of my father that he showed an embarrassing respect for younger men. surely gilbert's own tone of respect must here have embarrassed even undergraduates. the uncertainty of success or failure only troubled him as it might affect his supporters. the sporting element in the contest appealed to his undying boyishness. perhaps this chapter may find its best conclusion in the vivid memories written down in answer to my request of one of gilbert's younger friends--douglas woodruff--who came to know him in the year of that silver wedding which meant so much that i have chosen it for the title of a chapter covering much of chesterton's catholic life. chesterton devotes a long passage in the _autobiography_ to the dinner given at the old adelphi terrace hotel to belloc on his sixtieth birthday, in july 1930. i remember very well the high old fashioned car the chestertons used to hire in beaconsfield, for i accompanied him with particular instructions to deliver him safely and on time, as was very necessary for he was in the chair. we might have lost him, for we went first to the times office where i was then working, as i had proofs to correct before disappearing for the rest of the evening, and he was seized with the idea that it would be very good fun for him to enter printing house square and have it announced that it was mr. chesterton come to write the leaders, having brought the thunder with him under his cloak. quite early on the drive up he began speculating about who would be at the party, and when he had suggested various figures who were certainly not going to be there he said with a mixture of regret and acceptance, "there is always such a _sundering_ quality about belloc's quarrels." when he rose to propose the toast he said at once that if he or anybody else in the room was remembered at all in the future it would be because they had been associated with the guest of the evening. he meant that. the evening stood out in his memory because it was so unlike the ordinary sort of dinners he knew where he was a principal figure. it delighted him that without any programme or premeditation all the thirty diners in turn made speeches, in the main parody speeches. it was, in short, a party and not a performance. in the decade when i had the good fortune to know topmeadow he was still paying the price of a literary fame which he had sought in youth because it meant success in his calling and an income, but which became a barrier he was always meeting and breaking through. many literary men genuinely enough prefer company in which they are on just the same footing as everyone else to company in which they are little kings, but chesterton was exceptional in liking to live in the fullest equality of intercourse not only with all sorts of men but with the lesser practitioners of his own calling. he sought the affection and not the admiration of his fellow men, or, more precisely, he sought neither: what he sought was to do things like discovering the truth in their company. no man more naturally distinguished between a man and his views, or found easier the theological injunction to hate the sin but love the sinner. one of the few occasions on which i recall him as rather hurt was just after he had met stanley baldwin, at taplow, and had not been welcomed as a fellow englishman sharing immense things like the love of the english country or english letters, but with a cold correctitude from a politician who seemed chiefly conscious he was meeting in g.k. a man who week by week sought to bring political life into hatred, ridicule and contempt. he was not made by nature for the kind of journalistic tradition which belloc and cecil chesterton established and his loyal affection for them made him adopt. i recall him expounding to the lawyers of the thomas more society the absurdity of the legal definition of libel, arguing that of its nature free discussion meant arousing at any rate ridicule and contempt if not hatred against men and measures of which you disapproved. it was ridicule that he preferred to arouse. the lawyers were quite unconvinced, as they generally are when laymen have any complaints about the law, and they soon realized that to chesterton the whole idea of involving the law because of arguments and discussions and invective was hitting below the belt. he could be seen at his happiest in the mock trials which were held every summer for the last ten years of his life at the london school of economics, for the king edward vii hospital fund. he was relied upon year after year to prosecute. one year it was leading actors and actresses, another year sculptors and architects, another year politicians, another headmasters. he entered completely into the spirit of an entertainment which combined two of his abiding interests, public debate and private theatricals. that was a setting in which he could completely exemplify his favourite recipe for the modern world, that it should be approached in a spirit of intellectual ferocity and personal amiability. but what marked his own contributions to these affairs was the intellectual "ferocity," in the weight and content of his criticism. most of the eminent men who consented to take part came to play a game for the sake of the hospitals, and because they rarely unbent like that in public they were wholly facetious and trivial. to chesterton there was no difficulty or incongruity in combining the fun of acting with the fun of genuine intellectual discussion. when he prosecuted the headmasters of leading public schools for destroying freedom of thought i came down in a lift with them afterwards and found they were volubly nettled at the drastic and serious case he had made inside the stage setting of burlesque, and seemed to think he had not been playing the game when he wrapped up so much meaning in his speech and examinations. this had never entered his head; it had come perfectly naturally to him to make wholly real and material points even in a mock trial and with a wealth of fun. but he liked being one of a troupe on a stage very much more than being a lonely and eminent figure on a platform, because to him the great attraction of discussion was that it should be a joint quest, a mental walk with an object in view, but also with an eye for everything that might and would turn up on the way. he laughed his high laugh--like charlemagne his voice was unequal to his physical scale--at his own jokes because they came to him as part of the joint findings of the quest, something he had seen and collected and brought for the pot. when he made jokes about his size as he so commonly did at the outset of a speech, it was to get rid of the elevation of the platform, and to get on to easy equal terms with the audience; "i am not a cat burglar," he began to the union at oxford, and had won them. the radio suited him so excellently, precisely because it is a personal sitting down man to man relationship that the successful broadcaster must establish; that was the relationship inside which he naturally thought. his difficulty was that while he had not the faintest desire to be "a literary man," and still less a prophet, the kind of truth he divined was, in fact, on the scale of the prophets. it seemed to me that over the last decade of his life he found himself more and more in the dilemma that in the life of his mind he was living with ideas, the fruit of a contemplative preoccupation with the incarnation and the sacraments, which he shrank from talking about, from a natural humility and a clear and grateful understanding of the catholic tradition of reverence and reticence. england is full enough of men to whom the distinction between the platform and the pulpit is very unreal; they have a moral message and they do not much mind where they give it. but chesterton, unlike most public men who deal in general ideas, did not come to the idea of public speaking through the protestant tradition but through the secular tradition, the freethinker's debate, the political and not the religious side of hyde park oratory, where men in knots shout one another down, not where some lonely longhaired prophet declaims conversion. after he became a catholic he sought to set himself frontiers, the apologetic territory suitable for a layman like himself. but he found himself more and more preoccupied with a territory further inland, penetrating all the time to the deeper meaning of the creed he had embraced. he could look back and see how most of his early books had seized upon some essential part of catholic doctrine. . . . he had written what he had seen at the time, but he did not stop looking because he had written, and then he always continued to see more, the great contemplative. he looked out on the universe from a very solid tower of observation because in all but the deepest sense of the word he always had a home. his lasting significance is his pilgrimage, but the spiritual journey was lived out in a warmly rich setting. when he wrote of "the home" he was not dealing with a notion but with a surrounding reality, one on which he had opened his eyes as a baby and which he enjoyed without a break to the end. frances chesterton is among the great wives of our literary history. when he said "i can never have enough nothing to do," it was the remark of a man with a house he was generally in, a house full of things. he loved to produce cigars and wine, but tea also remained an important fixed part of the day, in the victorian tradition, and when he was told by the doctor he had better drink nothing, he had many alternatives, like detective stories read over tea and buns, which other lovers of wine would perhaps have found no consolation. other men are secret drinkers, he would confide, i am a secret teetotaller. the first time i had tea with him, in artillery mansions in 1926, i was much struck that he brought three detective stories to the teatable. i imagine he always had time for _jack redskin on the trail_, or whatever it might be because he had the gift, to an extent i have never seen elsewhere, of opening a book and as it were pouring the contents down in one draught like a champion german beer drinker. he once seized from my shelves in lincoln's inn, wyndham lewis's _apes of god_ saying it was a book he had not seen and wanted to see. it is a folio and i suggested he should take it away. but he opened it and stood reading it and here and there, not a process which could be called dipping, but a kind of sucking out of the printed contents, as though he were a vacuum cleaner and you could see the lines of type leaving the pages and being absorbed. when he put it down it was to discuss the thesis and illustrations of the book as a man fully possessed of its whole standpoint. once he made one of his common confusions and forgot he was addressing the wiseman dining society on the oxford movement. in the train from beaconsfield he said how nice it was that he had not got to speak. frances chesterton told him not to be silly, he knew he was speaking on the oxford movement. he was visibly disconcerted at the start, for many grave seniors had assembled to hear him; but all went well in the discussion as soon as he was attacked for something he had said about newman's views. you cannot catch me out about newman, he said, with joy of battle, and he produced then and there a most detailed account of just where in newman's writings the points in question were developed. yet he was curiously content to read what happened to come his way and to rely upon his friends for references and facts, remembering what they might tell him, but not ordering the books which would have greatly strengthened him in the sort of newspaper arguments in which he was so often employed. he had a large collection of books at topmeadow, but they gave the impression that they had assembled themselves. masses of them were adventure stories, many were presentation copies from writers. you felt that they had got into the house knowing that it was a hospitable one, if not built for books, and that they would probably be allowed to stay. but he had a study which would barely home him, and the library room he did eventually build was only finished as he died. i think nothing is more superficial or belittling to him than the idea that while he might have liked the real country he could not like beaconsfield, as it developed into a dormitory town while he lived there. his sympathies were far too wide. he liked to tell how he had had to complain of the noise made by an adjoining cinema company. his secretary had said mr. chesterton finds he cannot write; and the cinema people replied we are well aware of that. he liked to think of mr. garvin near by, "not that i see him very much," he said, "but i like to think that that great factory is steaming away night and day." he had great satisfaction when a friend and i, driving away in the evening, knocked down a white wooden post outside the house in starting the car. he held that he had witnessed just how many a grand old local custom must have originated, in men covering up their mistakes by saying they were fulfilling a ritual which had fallen into neglect. you must say you did it on purpose, he said, say it was a rite too long omitted and it will soon be kept up every year and men will forget its origin, and it will be known as the bump of beaconsfield. when a friend of his brought him a two-bladed african spear, he said, as he threw it about the lawn, that it was sad to think how many lawns there were in beaconsfield and how few weapons were ever thrown on any of them, although all men enjoyed, or would enjoy spear throwing more, he believed, than they enjoyed clock golf. he at any rate was a genuinely free man, who did what it amused and pleased him to do, and did not think he had to choose between the forms of activity or rest currently pursued by his neighbours. much of the serene atmosphere of his home came from that quiet resolute practice of the liberty of a free mind. chapter xxviii columbus _he wished to discover america. his gay and thoughtless friends, who could not understand him, pointed out that america had already been discovered, i think they said by christopher columbus, some time ago, and that there were big cities of anglo-saxon people there already, new york and boston and so on. but the admiral explained to them, kindly enough, that this had nothing to do with it. they might have discovered america, but he had not_. from _a fragment_, in _the coloured lands_. in the chapter of his _autobiography_ entitled "the incomplete traveller" chesterton has said "after all, the strangest country i ever visited was england." it was of the very essence of his philosophy that each one of us has to make again the discoveries of our ancestors if we are to be travellers and not trippers. "the traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to see." thus chesterton tried to discover each country that he visited and he records that the nearer countries are sometimes harder to discover than the more remote. for poland is more akin to england than is france: ireland more mysterious than italy. france, ireland and supremely palestine brought their contribution to that mental and spiritual development traced in earlier chapters. on ireland, rome, jerusalem and the united states he wrote books. it may really be said that on the states he wrote two books, for in the volume of essays _sidelights on new london and newer york_ which followed his second visit he showed a much greater understanding than in _what i saw in america_. his first visit took place in 1921-22, his second in 1930. on the first trip frances kept clippings of almost all their interviews. gilbert himself said that, while the headlines in american newspapers became obscure in their violent efforts to startle, what was written underneath the headlines was usually good journalism and the press cuttings of this tour bear out his remark. interviewers report accurately and with a good deal of humour. sketches of g.k.'s personal appearance abound, and if occasionally they contradict one another in detail they yet contrive to convey a vivid and fairly truthful impression of the "leonine" head, the bulky form, the gestures and mannerisms. that a man of letters and lecturer should choose to wear proudly not one of these titles but that of journalist, was pleasing and flattering to the brotherhood. the atmosphere of the tour is best conveyed by rather copious quotation. a crowd of journalists met him at the boat. one of them writes of . . . his voluminous figure, quite imposing when he stands up, though not so abundantly johnsonian as his pictures lead one to expect. he has cascades of grey hair above a pinkly beaming face, a rather straggly blond mustache, and eyes that seem frequently to be taking up infinity in a serious way. his falsetto laugh, prominent teeth and general aspect are rather rooseveltian. . . . mr. chesterton, who is accompanied by mrs. chesterton, and who will deliver a lecture soon in boston on the ignorance of the educated, said he did not expect to go further west than chicago, since "having seen both jerusalem and chicago, i think i shall have touched on the extremes of civilization." in the event he visited omaha and oklahoma city and went south as far as nashville, tennessee. possibly frances had thought she would pass unnoticed but in fact, besides constant photographs of the pair, the lynx eye of the interviewer was upon her as much as upon him. on arrival at new york: he shook hands with some half-dozen customs officials who welcomed him to the city on their own behalf. the impression given by mr. chesterton as he moved majestically along the pier or on the ship was one of huge bulk. to the ordinary sized people on the pier he seemed to blot out the liner and the river. mrs. chesterton was busy with the baggage. "my wife understands these things," he said with a sweep of his stick. "i don't." . . . in order to get the two figures into the same picture one of the newspaper photographers requested mr. chesterton to sit in a big armchair while his wife stood beside him. when they were settled in the required pose he exclaimed: "i say i don't like this; people will think that i am a german." another newspaper remarks: "he was accompanied by his wife, who looked very small beside him. she attended to the baggage examination, opening trunks and bags while her husband delivered a short essay on the equality of men and women in england since the war." this reporter was perhaps not without irony: but if it actually happened like that, g.k. must have seen the joke too for he has a similar situation in the first scene of his play "the judgement of dr. johnson." the same reporter adds that chesterton speaks in essays, so that his interviewers "received a brief essay instead of a direct reply to a leading question." we next come upon them in their new york hotel: i found, with mrs. chesterton at the biltmore, this big, gentle, leonine man of letters six feet of him and 200 odd lbs. there is a delightful story of how an american, driving with him through london, remarked "everyone seems to know you, mr. chesterton." "yes," mournfully responded the gargantuan author, "and if they don't they ask." he really doesn't look anything like as fat as his caricatures make him, however, and he has a head big enough to go with his massive tallness. his eyes are brilliant english blue behind the big rimmed eyeglasses: his wavy hair, steel grey; his heavy mustache, bright yellow. physically he is the crackling electric spark of the heaven-home-and-mother party, the only man who can give the cleverest radical debaters a roland for their oliver. in subsequent interviews g.k.'s height grew to six foot three and his weight to 300 lbs. (which was surely closer to the mark); his mannerisms were greatly remarked. mr. chesterton speaks clearly, in a rather high-pitched voice. he accompanies his remarks with many nervous little gestures. his hands, at times, stray into his pockets. he leans over the reading desk as if he would like to get down into the audience and make it a sort of heart-to-heart talk. mr. chesterton's right hand spent a restless and rather disturbing evening. it would start from the reading desk at which he stood and fall to the points of that vast waistcoat which inspired the description of him as "a fellow of infinite vest." it would wander aimlessly a moment about his--stomach is a word that is taboo among the polite english--equator, and then shift swiftly to the rear until the thumb found the hip pocket. there the hand would rest a moment, to return again to the reading desk and to describe once more the quarter circle. once in a while it would twist a ring upon the left hand, once in a while it would be clasped behind the broad back, but only for a moment. to the hip pocket and back again was its sentry-go, and it was a faithful soldier. several interviewers remark on the unexpected calibre of his voice. he himself spoke of it as "the mouse that came forth from the mountain." one would never suspect him of being our leading american best-seller. his accent, mannerisms, and dress are pro-piccadilly and he likes his oolong with a lump of sugar. he thinks with his cigar, a black london cheeroot. he, gilbert k. chesterton, was sipping a cup of tea, expertly brewed by mrs. chesterton when a reporter yesterday entered his room at the blackstone [in chicago]. before he submitted to interrogation he lighted the cigar. "my muse," he explained. "a parnassian pleasure. tobacco smoke is the ichor of mental life. some men write with a pencil, others with a typewriter, i write with my cigar." . . . throughout the interview he was profoundly concerned not with the subjects under discussion, but with the black cheeroot. seven times it went out. seven times he relighted it. the eighth time he tossed it away. when asked which of his works he considered the greatest, he said: "i don't consider any of my works in the least great." . . . "slang," he said, "is too sacred and precious to be used promiscuously. its use should be led up to reverently for it expresses what the king's english could not." "seeing and hearing a man like gilbert keith chesterton," said a detroit newspaper, "makes a meal for the imagination that no reading of books by him or about him can accomplish." he spoke sunday in orchestra hall on the ignorance of the educated; it grows more difficult as his tour progresses, he admits, and the lecture, he insists, grows worse. his thesis is that "the besetting evil of all educated people is that they tend to substitute theories for things." the uneducated man never makes this mistake. he states the simple fact that he sees a german drinking beer: he does not say "there is a teuton consuming alcohol." at toronto the chairman--a professor of english--thought that there must have been an error in the title as printed, and announced that mr. chesterton would speak on the ignorance of the _un_educated. another detroit newspaper quotes from the lecture: there is a deeper side to such fallacies. the whole catastrophe of the great war may be traced to the racial theory. if people had looked at peoples as nations in place of races the intolerable ambition of prussia might have been stopped before it attained the captaincy of the south german states. the only other lecture subjects mentioned are "shall we abolish the inevitable" and "the perils of health." there are innumerable caricatures. one by cosmo hamilton is accompanied with a story of how he once debated with chesterton. the subject was: "there is no law in england." g.k. made so overwhelming a case that hamilton decided the only way of making reply possible was to twist the subject making it "there are no laws in england" and "go off at 1000 tangents like a worried terrier." to hear chesterton's howl of joy when he twigged how i had slipped out, to see him double himself up in an agony of laughter at my personal insults, to watch the effect of his sportsmanship on a shocked audience who were won to mirth by his intense and pea-hen-like quarks of joy was a sight and a sound for the gods. probably chesterton has forgotten this incident but i haven't and never will, and i carried away from that room a respect and admiration for this tomboy among dictionaries, this philosophical peter pan, this humorous dr. johnson, this kindly and gallant cherub, this profound student and wise master which has grown steadily ever since. in the _daily sketch_, hamilton later described g.k. speaking in this debate: during the whole inspired course of his brilliant reasoning, he caught the little rivulets which ran down his face, and just as they were about to drop from the first of his several chins flicked them generously among the disconcerted people who sat actually at his feet. from time to time, too, unaware of this, he grasped deep into his pockets and rattled coins and keys, going from point to point, from proof to proof, until the constitution of england was quite devoid of law and out from under his waistcoat bulged a line of shirt. it was monstrous, gigantic, amazing, deadly, delicious. nothing like it has ever been done before or will ever be seen, heard and felt like it again. a clever caricature depicts dickens in one corner, his arms full of bricks, hammers and jagged objects, labelled "american notes." the rest of the picture is an immense drawing of a smiling chesterton, his arms full of roses, labelled "kind words for america." he is pointing at dickens and saying: "america must have changed a great deal since then." not only gilbert but also frances was constantly interviewed. "i tell them," one interviewer quotes her as saying, "that i didn't know i was the wife of a great man till i came to america. it never bothered me before." this, coming from one of those english wives, so popularly portrayed as representing the acme of submission, was delightful. a slight, slim little figure, looking slighter and slimmer in the wake of her overshadowing husband, with an outward appearance of unsurpassed mildness and meekness which her conversation readily dispelled, the wife of this delightful englishman of letters presented a very intimate chestertonian paradox. frances kept a diary of which almost the first entry is "so far my feelings towards this country are entirely hostile, but it would be unfair to judge too soon. we have refused all invitations; it's the only thing to do." this idea they must have abandoned, for one paper after gilbert's death describes him as an immense success socially but "a big bland failure" as a lecturer. as the tour proceeds the entries in the diary become more favorable but unlike her letters from poland--where what she liked best was anything really polish--the diary shows frances as singling out for approval those things approximately english--e.g., houses where she stayed in boston and philadelphia. she hated hustle, heat and crowds, and the diary is full of remarks about her exhaustion. g.k. commented in one interview on the different conception of a club in england and in america. while groups of men entertained him, women's clubs were entertaining his wife. but an english club "is really a promoter of unsociability. . . . and while the english woman in her club does not, perhaps, stare into vacancy with the same fervour, fixity and ferocity as the english man, still there is something of the sort, you know." after a lecture in philadelphia a lady asked him, "mr. chesterton, what makes women talk so much?" heaving himself out of his chair, he answered only "god, madam." two further caricatures were an impression drawn by will coyne for the new york _evening post_ of chesterton as porthos of the pen, and another, drawn for the new york _herald_ by stewart davis, of chesterton supplying "paradoxygen to the world." this was accompanied by a poem called paradoxygen, by edward anthony: o gilbert i know there are many who like your talks on the darkness of light, the shortness of length and the weakness of strength and the one on the lowness of height. my neighbour keeps telling me "how i adore his legality of the illicit and i've also a liking intense for his striking obscurity of the explicit." but i am unmoved. what's the reason? 0, well, the same i intend to expound some evening next week, when i'm going to speak on the shallowness of the profound. "everyone who goes to america for a short time," said g.k., "is expected to write a book; and nearly everybody does." in accordance with this convention he wrote _what i saw in america_. he did see a great deal. the same imagination that had found the mediaeval aspect of jerusalem saw many elements missed not only by the ordinary tourist but by the people themselves who live nearest to them. thus he keenly appreciated the traditional elements in philadelphia, boston and baltimore: in coming into some of these more stable cities of the states i felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which is satisfied in the eternal cities of the mediterranean. i felt in america what many americans suppose can only be felt in europe. i have seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than when i saw from afar off, above that vast grey labyrinth of philadelphia, great penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned a new world; and remembered that his body lay buried in a field at the turning of a lane, a league from my own door. in baltimore the catholic history appealed to him yet more strongly, and, invited to visit cardinal gibbons, he felt himself touching "the end of a living chain." in boston, "much more beautiful than its name," he companioned again with the autocrat and recalled how in his own youth english and american literature seemed to be one thing. indeed he was there reminded even "of english things that have largely vanished from england." washington he saw both as a beautiful city and an idea--"a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without personal commerce." and in nashville, tennessee it was "with a sort of intensity of feeling" that he found himself "before a dim and faded picture; and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of andrew jackson, watchful like a white eagle." the things chesterton chose for description all have relevance to the main thesis of the book which has often been missed and which emerges most clearly in the first and the last chapters. he insists always that he writes as a foreigner--and indeed repeats frequently that it is by keeping our own distinct nationality that englishmen and americans will best understand and like one another--but he writes also as a man not unconscious of history. thus writing, the older cities represent to him one trend in the states and new york another. i am sorry to say that he does not appreciate new york as he ought, because of his dislike of cosmopolitanism. its beauty he sees as breath-taking: not solid and abiding but a kind of fairyland. the lights on broadway evoked from him the exclamation "what a glorious garden of wonders this would be for anyone who was lucky enough to be unable to read," and he imagines a simple peasant who fancies that they must be announcing in letters of fire: "liberty, equality, fraternity," and must be put up on occasion of some great national feast, whereas they are but advertising signs put up to make money. the skyline seemed to him most lovely: "vertical lines that suggest a sort of rush upwards, as of great cataracts topsy turvy--the strong daylight finds everywhere the broken edges of things and the sort of hues we see in newly turned earth or the white sections of trees. . . ." he feels the intense "imaginative pleasure of those dizzy turrets and dancing fires." but he ends with the note that really spoilt new york for him: "if those nightmare buildings were really all built for nothing, how noble they would be." advertisement, big business, monopoly might have invaded the old traditionary cities of america as they had those of england, but new york existed (he felt) as a new and startling expression of them. they shrieked in every light and from every sky-scraper. the whole question of america was: would the older simpler really great historical tradition win, or would it be defeated by the new and towering evil? he has an interesting chapter on the countryside, finding hope in the considerable extension of small ownership among the farmers and in the houses built from the growing material that wood is, but he is again depressed at the reflection that the culture of the countryside is not its own but imported from the towns--therefore itself largely commercialised. roaming over the world in search of his examples chesterton sees the ideal of the early republicans as dead in the republics of today, and nowhere more dead than in america. it would be useless, he feels, to invoke jefferson or lincoln in the modern world against the tyranny of wage-slavery or in favour of racial justice because "the bridge of brotherhood had broken down in the modern mind." jefferson the deist "said the sight of slavery in his country made him tremble, remembering that god is just," but the modern who has lost these absolute standards has "grown dizzy with degree and relativity." hence came the same terrible peril in both england and america: that in the eyes of the new plutocracy the idea of manhood has gone. "there were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt that we were the superior sort." only in one direction did he see real hope. the new dreams of the 18th century had gone, but the ancient dogmas of the catholic church remained. catholics might forget brotherhood, like their fellows, but "the catholic type of christianity had rivetted itself irrevocably to the manhood of all men." "the church would always continue to ordain negroes and canonise beggars and labourers." "where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils it could not save itself even by surrender. . . . there is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man." i have put that final sentence in capitals for it is the climax both of gilbert's thinking about america and of one of the most important trains of thought that brought him to the home of liberty secured for the human race by dogma--that is to say by revealed truth. he went home to be received into the catholic church as i have earlier related. _what i saw in america_ is of special importance in relation to later discussions in _g.k.'s weekly_. while the journalists seemed convinced on his first visit that he had nothing but roses to throw, and compared him favorably to dickens, a collection of quotations could be made from _g.k.'s weekly_ of a quite opposite kind, yet i do not think he ever attacks america as much as he attacks england. he was himself much amused at finding he was expected to be either "for america" or "against america," both of which attitudes appeared to him absurd. in that sense he was neither for nor against his own country. he liked americans, he disliked certain trends in america: because he loved england he disliked the same trends even more in england. certain things in modern civilisation which he hated he did regard as primarily american. american comfort to him seemed acute discomfort. he thought every american lives in an "airless furnace in the middle of which he sits and eats lumps of ice." he had a great hatred of intelligence tests which he called the "palpable balderdash of irresponsible yankee boomsters. . . . it is really one of the maladies of american democracy to be swept by these prairie fires of pseudo-scientifc fads, and throw itself into eugenics or anthropometric inquiry with the buoyancy of babies." he believed that there was more democracy in america than in england. but he hated what he called the "glare of american advertisement." he spoke of a "common thief like the american millionaire" but he certainly did not exclude the english millionaire from the same indictment. his whole view of advertisement reaches a peak in an article* entitled "if you have smiles." [* _g.k.'s weekly_, december 10, 1927.] we read the other day an absolutely solemn and almost tender piece of advice, in a leading american magazine, about the preservation of beauty and health. it was intended quite seriously. . . . after describing in most complicated detail how the young woman of today (well known to be enamored of all that is natural and free) is to strap up her head and face every night, as if it had to be bandaged after an accident, it proceeds to say with the most refined american accent: "with the face thus fixed in smile formation: . . ." but we have a difficulty about taking this serious advice of american beauty business even so seriously as to meditate on its social menace. the prospect of such a world of idiots ought to depress us, but . . . no, it is no good. our faces are fixed in smile formation when we think of that american. he repeated often how much he liked the inhabitants of main street (grievously wronged by sinclair lewis). american ideals are not nearly so nice as american realities. we lament not so much what babbitt is as what he is trying to be. what he is is a simple and kindly man . . . what he's trying to be is the abomination of desolation; the man who made salesmanship an art; the man who would not stay down; the man who got the million dollar post after taking our correspondence course; the man who learned social charm in six lessons.* [* jan. 14, 1928.] at the time of the depreciation of the franc belloc's articles in _g.k.'s weekly_, echoed in the leaders, pointed to finance, especially american finance, as the criminal that was forcing down the french currency. an american correspondent in the paper attacked these attacks on the ground that they were inspired by british imperialism! chesterton felt it a little hard to be at this date confused with kipling. he replied that his correspondent committed "the blunder of an extravagant and excessive admiration for england." he speaks of that tremendous procession that passed through paris, literally an army of cripples. it was a march of all those walking units, those living fragments of humanity that had been left by the long stand of five years upon the french frontiers; a devastated area that passed endlessly like a river . . . they illustrate the main fact that france was in the center of that far-flung fighting line of civilization; that it was upon her that the barbarian quarrel concentrated; and that is an historical fact which the foolish vanity of many englishmen, as well as of many americans, is perpetually tempted to deny. our critic is therefore quite beside the mark if he imagines that i am trying to score off his country out of a cheap jealousy on behalf of my own. my jealousy is for justice and for a large historical understanding of this great passage in history. my own country won glory enough in that and other fields to make it quite unnecessary for any sane englishman to shut his eyes to europe in order to brag about england. . . . i have not the faintest doubt what thomas jefferson would have said, if he had been told that a few financial oligarchs who happen to live in new york, were beating down the french wealth; and had then seen pass before him that awful panorama of the wrecks of the french republican army; heart-shaking, like a resurrection of the dead. . . . i do not admit, therefore, that in supporting the french peasants and soldiers against the money dealers and wire-pullers of the town, i am attacking america or even merely defending france.* [* _g.k.'s weekly_, sept. 1, 1926.] on november 6 and 13, 1926 he writes two articles on "the yankee and the chinaman," in which he contrasts the philosophic spirit with the so-called scientific. like bishop barnes in england wanting to analyse the consecrated host, edison was reported in america as having said that he would find out if there was a soul by some scientific test: any philosophic chinaman would know what to think of a man who said, "i have got a new gun that will shoot a hole through your memory of last monday," or "i have got a saw sharp enough to cut up the cube root of 666," or "i will boil your affection for aunt susan until it is quite liquid." in 1927 gilbert, frances and dorothy spent a month in poland where immense enthusiasm was shown for the man who had consistently proclaimed poland's greatness and its true place in europe. invited by the government, "all the hospitality i received," he says, "was far too much alive to remind me of anything official." one of the multitude of unwritten books of which g.k. dreamed was a book about poland. the poles and the english were, he felt, alike in many things but the englishman had never been given the opportunity to understand the pole. we knew nothing of their history and did not understand the resurrection we had helped to bring about. "the nonsense talked in the newspapers when they discuss what they call the polish corridor" was only possible from want of realisation of what poland had been before she was rent in three by prussia, austria and russia. thus too we did not realise "the self-evident fact that the poles always have a choice of evils." pilsudski told him that _of the two_ he preferred germany to russia, while dmowski voiced the more general opinion in telling him that _of the two_ he preferred russia to germany. for the moment at any rate tortured poland was herself and incredibly happy. revival in this agricultural country had been amazingly swift. peasant proprietors abounded and lived well on twelve acres or so, while even labourers possessed plots of land and a cow or two. "the p.e.n. club dinner," frances wrote in a letter to her mother, "was, i fancy, considered by the poles a huge success. if numbers indicate anything, it certainly was. i found it a little embarrassing to have to eat hot kidneys and mushrooms standing about with hundreds of guests, and this was only the preliminary to a long dinner that followed and refreshments that apparently continued until two o'clock in the morning. the speeches were really perfectly marvellous and delivered in english quite colloquial and very witty and showing a detailed knowledge of gilbert's works which no englishman of my acquaintance possesses. gilbert made an excellent, in fact, a very eloquent speech in reply, which drew forth thunders of applause." their hosts drove the chestertons all over the country and showed them home life on the little farms, home industries and arts--brightly woven garments and pottery for use, not for exhibition--and the great historic scenes of poland's history. with the scene he remembered most vividly, gilbert's musings on poland conclude: they were visiting a young nobleman who excused the devastation of his own home by bolshevik soldiers in the heat of battle but added, "there is only one thing i really resent." . . . he led us out into a long avenue lined with poplars; and at the end of it was a statue of the blessed virgin; with the head and the hands shot off. but the hands had been lifted; and it is a strange thing that the very mutilation seemed to give more meaning to the attitude of intercession; asking mercy for the merciless race of men.* [* _autobiography_, p. 330.] karel capek who had long wanted chesterton to visit prague wrote mournfully, "you wrote me that it would be difficult for you to come to prague this spring. but it was in the newspapers that you were last month in warsaw; why in heaven's sake did you not come to prague on this occasion? what a pity for us! now we are waiting for a compensation." two earlier letters had shown him eager for contributions from chesterton for a leading review. another delightful letter is dated december 24th (no year given): my dear mr. chesterton, it is just christmas eve; my friends presented me with some of your books, and i cannot omit to thank you for the consolation and trust i found there as already so many times. be blessed, mr. chesterton. i wrote you twice without getting any answer; but it is christian to insist, and so i write you again. please, would you be so kind to tell me, if it shall be possible for you to come next year to prague? our pen club is anxious to invite you as our guest of honour. if you would like to come next spring, i beg you to be my guest. you are fond of old things: prague is one. you shall find here so many people who cherish you. i like you myself as no other writer; it's for yours sake that being in london i went to habit in notting-hill and it is for yours sake that i liked it. i cannot believe that i should not meet you again. please, come to prague. i wish you a happy new year, mr. chesterton. you must be happy, making your readers happier. you are so good. yours sincerely, karel capek. he never, alas, got to prague, or to many another country that wanted him. there are letters asking him to lecture in australia, to lecture again in u.s.a., in south america "to make them aware of english thought and literature." "the argentine intelligencia," says philip guedalla, "is acutely aware of your writings. local professors terrified me by asking me on various occasions to explain the precise position which you occupied in our catholic youth. . . . a visit from you would mean a very great deal to british intellectual prestige in these parts." no catholic englishman was anything like so widely known in europe. books have been written about him in many languages and his works translated into french, german, dutch, czech, russian, polish, spanish and italian. a letter from russia asks for his photograph for _the magazine of international literature_ as a writer whose works are well known in the soviet union. the kulturbund in vienna sends an emissary inviting him there also and, like prague, the vienna p.e.n. club wants him. "you have a distressing habit," maude royden once wrote, "of being the only person one really wants to hear on certain subjects." a visit to rome in 1929 produced _the resurrection of rome_. despite brilliant passages the book is disappointing. it bears no comparison with _the new jerusalem_ and gives an impression of being thrown together hastily before the ideas had been thought through to their ultimate conclusions. perhaps rome was too big even for chesterton. he never loved the renaissance as he did the middle ages, but he saw it not as primarily pagan but as one more example of the immense vitality of a catholicism which had had so many rebirths that it had buried its own past deeper than the past of paganism. he loved the fountains that threw their water everywhere and he felt about rome that the greatest monuments might be removed and yet the city's personality would remain. for rome is greater than her monuments. he wanted to argue with those who cared for pagan rome alone and who spent their time despising the "oratory in stone" of the papal city and gazing only on the forum. "and it never once occurs to them to remember that the old romans were italians, or to ask what a forum was for." he was, as usual, constantly invited to lecture--at the english college, the scots college, the american college, the beda. at the holy child convent he spoke to a crowded audience on "thomas more and humanism." father cuthbert, o.s.f.c., thanking him, remarked on the mental resemblance between more and chesterton, saying that he could quite well imagine them sitting together making jokes, some of them very good and some of them very bad. "chesterton and more," says father vincent mcnabb, "were both cockneys." gilbert's classical insight also seemed to him like the great chancellor's; "erasmus says that though more didn't know much greek, he knew what the words ought to mean." he interviewed mussolini and found that mussolini was interviewing him, so that he talked at some length of distributism and his own social ideal. mussolini knew at least some of gilbert's books. he told cyril clemens that he had keenly enjoyed _the man who was thursday_. he promised at the end of this interview that he would go away and think over what chesterton had said, and it might have been better for the world had he kept that promise. for what had been said was an outline of the one possible alternative to the growing tyranny of governments. from his anxiety to be fair to fascism, gilbert was often accused of being in favour of it, but, both in this book and in several articles, having given the case for it he went on to give the case against it--a much stronger case than that usually given by its opponents. the case for fascism lay in the breakdown of true democracy and the reign of the tyranny of wealth in the democratic countries. chesterton would, he said, have been on the side of the partito popolare as against the fascism that succeeded it; in england and america he would "have infinitely preferred that the purgation of our plutocratic politics should have been achieved by radicals and republicans. it was they who did not prefer it." it was not that fascism was not open to attack but "that liberalism has unfortunately lost the right to attack it." those of us who were in italy at that time will remember the truth of his description of the vitality and happiness that seemed to glow among the people. _giovinezza, bellezza_, heard everywhere, had then no hollow sound at the heart of it. italy was radiant with hope. in mussolini himself gilbert saluted a belief in "the civic necessity of virtue," in the "ideal that public life should be public," in human dignity, in respect for women as mothers, in piety and the honour due to the dead. yet, summing up the man and the movement, he saw it as primarily the sort of riot that is provoked by the evils of an evil government, only "in the italy of the twentieth century the rioters have become the rulers." for although mussolini had in many ways made his rule popular, although in his concessions to modern ideas and inventions he was "rather breathlessly progressive," yet in the true sense of the word mussolini was a reactionary. a reactionary is one who merely reacts against something, or permits "that something to make [him] do something against it. . . . a reactionary is one in whom weariness itself has become a form of energy. even when he is right there is always a danger that what was really good in the previous society may be destroyed by what is good in the new one." mussolini's reaction was against the liberalism in which as an idea chesterton still believed, it was a reaction from democracy to authority. and his weakness, the fundamental weakness of fascism was that "it appeals to an appetite for authority, without very clearly giving the authority for the appetite. . . . when i try to put the case for it in philosophical terms, there is some doubt about the ultimates of the philosophy." it seemed to chesterton that there were only two possible fixed and orderly constitutions, hereditary monarchy or majority rule. the demand of the fascists to hold power as an intelligent and active minority was in fact to invite other intelligent and active minorities to dispute that rule; and then only by tyranny could anarchy be prevented. "fascism," he said in summary, "has brought back order into the state; but this will not be lasting unless it has brought back order into the mind." the two things in the roman visit that remain most prominent in dorothy's memory are gilbert's loss of a medal of our lady that he always wore and his audience with the holy father. the loss of the medal seemed to distress him out of all normal proportion. he had the elevator boy looking for it on hands and knees and gave him a huge reward for finding it. gilbert has left no record of his papal audience. but, says dorothy, it excited him so greatly that he did no work for two days before the event or two days after. their second visit to america in 1930-31 was far better enjoyed by gilbert, and also i think by frances until she got ill, because on it they came much closer to the real people of the country, especially during the period when he was lecturing at the university of notre dame, indiana. they lived at a little house in south bend and he lectured every night, alternating a course on victorian literature with one on the great figures of victorian history. there were 36 lectures all told, and the average attendance at each lecture was 500. at notre dame and the sister college of st. mary's, i felt the best way to get the atmosphere of this visit would be to get together for a talk the people who remembered gilbert: they would stimulate one another's memories. i invoked the aid of sister madeleva and she suggested the two fathers leo ward, professors engels and o'grady, and, best of all johnnie mangan the chauffeur. johnnie is a great institution at notre dame. he remembered driving my father nearly thirty years ago and he had specially vivid memories of the chesterton period. we all sat in a circle in sister madeleva's sitting room. i give here the notes i took. johnnie mangan: "it was the hardest job getting him into the car, harder getting him out. he'd walk on the porch and all the children came. he'd talk to the children on the road. money meant nothing to him: the lady would give me the money saying himself would leave it in the shop if the barber wasn't honest enough to give change. "he enjoyed everything: when they dedicated the stadium he stayed till the very end. father o'donnell introduced him to all the naval officers and he was the last off the ground. he enjoyed talking to all the naval officers. he loved cheer-leading." mr. o'grady: "he spent one evening in professor phillips' room after the lecture from 9 to 2.30 a.m. his host was deaf, g.k. learnt later, and he made another date when he found his host had missed most of the fun." mr. engels: "he would sit around consuming home-made ale by the quart; said the head of the philosophy faculty made the best brew in the college. enjoyed little drives round the countryside. the faculty were a little shy of inviting him." "in a lecture he got an immense laugh by calling queen elizabeth an 'old crock.' he then laughed above all the rest." mr. engels noticed mannerisms: "the constant shifting of his great bulk around," "rotating while he was talking," "flipping his eyeglasses," "lumbering on to the stage, going through all his pockets, finally finding a piece of dirty yellow paper and talking from it as if most laboriously gathered and learned notes. but the paper was only for show. father burke saw him get out of the cab, he got on to the stair landing and then saw g.k.'s yellow paper on the ground. he had delivered his whole course with hardly a single note--occasionally looked through material for a quarter of an hour or so before speaking." all thought him a great entertainer as well as an informing talker. "no one enjoyed himself more than he did." trying to get him for an informal gathering they mentioned they had some canadian ales--quite something in prohibition days. g.k.: "the ales have it." johnnie: "he'd chat all the time he was driving." father leo l. ward: "the problem of getting g.k. to and fro in a coupe was only solved by backing him in." they remembered g.k. "in charley's big chair, his hands barely touching over his great expanse." they recalled that on receiving his honorary degree he said the last time he received one at edinburgh they tapped him with john knox's hat. he did not expect anything so drastic here: perhaps they might tap him with tom heflin's sombrero.* when he had been invited to notre dame he was not certain where it was but with a name like that, even if it were in the mountains of the moon, he should feel at home. "if i ever meet anybody who suggests there's something calvinistic or puritanical in catholicism i shall ask, 'have you ever heard of the university of notre dame?'" [* tom heflin was the fiercely anti-catholic senator from alabama.] johnnie: "he'd do anything she'd say, or miss collins. they certainly had that man by the neck, but they took wonderful care of him." mr. o'grady: "it was a very intelligent arrangement. and did they tidy him." johnnie: "very much so. it was their business every evening." sister madeleva: "did he walk on the campus and see the students?" johnnie: "he didn't walk much only to charlie phillips' rooms. he didn't mind being a little late but his lady and miss collins loaded him into the car to get him there on time. "the woman they lodged with used to swear like a trooper. but she (the landlady) cried like a kid when he left. and he and the lady seemed lonesome at leaving her. "in his spare time at the house he would be drawing some fancy stuff." "what did he talk to you about?" johnnie: "he'd just talk about the country, he'd admire the streams and things like that. i took him to the virgin forest and i could hardly get him back. he even got out to notice the trees. he spent almost an hour. the women raved at me and said i must get him back at a certain time. he'd ask me the names of the trees. he loved rivers and would ask me about the fish. at one time father o'donnell thought he should drive to chicago or some big town but he didn't care for towns, said they all looked alike to him, so after that we always went to the country." someone asked, "did he ever get grouchy?" johnnie: "he always had a smile. was always calling kids over to talk to him. he'd touch one with his stick to make him look round and play with him, and then he'd laugh himself sick playing with them. the kids were always around him. the ones of four or five years, those were the ones he'd notice the most. he liked to ask them things and then if they gave a good answer he could get a good laugh at it." mr. o'grady: "i know he enjoyed himself here. i met him in ottawa afterwards. he was autographing a book, the pen was recalcitrant and he shook it over the rug, 'dear me, i'm always cluttering up people's rugs.' his cousin in ottawa had him completely surrounded by ash trays but the cigar had ash almost half length and it was falling everywhere." father ward: "father miltner one evening in pleasant fall weather found g.k. on the porch. the campus was empty. he got a grunt in return to his greeting, tried three or four times, almost no answer. g.k. looked glum. "'well, you're not very gay this evening.' "'one should be given the luxury of a little private grouch once in a while.'" to johnnie--"did he take the lecture business seriously?" "no. he just wanted five minutes on the porch when he would talk to no one but the kids." mr. o'grady: "he said once, 'what i like about notes is that when once you begin you can completely disregard them.' he stood for the first lecture but mostly he sat. he enjoyed a joke so much, and they enjoyed his enjoyment." mr. engels: "for the first lecture he stood--part of him stood behind a little rostrum, after that he sat at a big table." father leo r. ward was at oxford when he debated "that the law is a hass" and was amazed at the way the undergraduates adored him. "his opponent begged them not to vote for g.k. at this critical moment in the world's history. they cheered g.k. but voted against him to make the other fellow feel good." sister madeleva: "what did he do for recreation?" johnnie: "he did a lot of--sketching i guess you'd call it--and he'd read the papers." sister madeleva: "did he like the campus?" johnnie: "very much." "did he ever go down to the grotto?" johnnie: "he seen it but he never got out of the car." "was it hard for him to walk?" johnnie: "no, he could walk kinda fast, but it was so hard for him to get in or out of the car." "where did he go to church?" johnnie: "he came here to notre dame. he was close to 400 lbs. but he'd never give it away. he'd break an ordinary scale, i guess. i brought him under the main building, he got stuck in the door of the car. father o'donnell tried to help. mr. chesterton said it reminded him of an old irishwoman: 'why don't you get out sideways?' 'i have no sideways.'" to the debate with darrow, frances taylor patterson had gone a little uneasy lest chesterton's arguments "might seem somewhat literary in comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the famous trial lawyer." she found however that both trained mind and rapier tongue were the property of g.k.c. i have never heard mr. darrow alone, but taken relatively, when that relativity is to chesterton, he appears positively muddle headed. as chesterton summed it up, he felt as if darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, and simply kept sparring with a dummy of his own mental making. when something went wrong with the microphone, darrow sat back until it could be fixed. whereupon g.k.c. jumped up and carried on in his natural voice, "science you see is not infallible!" . . . chesterton had the audience with him from the start, and when it was over, everyone just sat there, not wishing to leave. they were loath to let the light die!* [* _chesterton_ by cyril clemens, pp. 67-68.] as in england, so also in the states, gilbert's debating was held to be far better than his straight lecturing. he never missed the opportunity for a quick repartee and yet when he scored the audience felt that he did so with utter kindness. at a debate with dr. horace t. bridges of the ethical cultural society on "is psychology a curse?" bishop craig stewart who presided, describes how: in his closing remarks chesterton devastatingly sideswiped his opponent and wound up the occasion in a storm of laughter and applause, "it is clear that i have won the debate, and we are all prepared to acknowledge that psychology is a curse. let us, however, be magnanimous. let us allow at least one person in this unhappy world to practice this cursed psychology, and i should like to nominate dr. bridges." the bishop on another occasion introduced gilbert at a luncheon in chicago by quoting oliver herford's lines: when plain folks such as you and i see the sun sinking in the sky, we think it is the setting sun: but mr. gilbert chesterton is not so easily misled; he calmly stands upon his head, and upside down obtains a new and chestertonian point of view. observing thus how from his nose the sun creeps closer to his toes he cries in wonder and delight how fine the sunrise is tonight! the fact that nearly all the headlines he chose sounded like paradoxes, the fact that they did not themselves agree with him, had on chesterton's opponents and on some members of his audience one curious effect. dr. bridges when asked his opinion of his late sparring partner, after paying warm tribute to his brilliance as a critic, his humour and his great personal charm, discovered in his "subconscious" (is psychology a curse?) "a certain intellectual recklessness that made him indifferent to truth and reality . . . fundamentally--perhaps i should say subconsciously--he was a thorough-going skeptic and acted upon the principle that, since we cannot really be positive about anything we had better believe what it pleases us to believe." so too at the british university of aberystwyth when chesterton spoke on "liberty," taking first historically the fights of barons against despots, yeomen against barons, factory hands against owners, and then giving as a modern instance the fight of the pedestrian to keep the liberty of the highway, we are told that "the senior history lecturer and some others were of the opinion that the whole thesis of the address was a gigantic leg-pull." chesterton must have seen again the fixed stare on the faces of the nottingham tradesmen thirty years earlier on the famous occasion when he himself "got up and played with water." but that earlier audience had the intellectual advantage over the university professors that they tried to find out what he meant with infinite inquiring. gilbert often said that his comic illustrations ought not to have prevented this. but it was really more his inability to resist making himself into a figure of fun. he was funny and the jokes were funny but they did prevent his really being given by all the position given him by so many, of the modern dr. johnson. it is possible, though not easy, to imagine johnson dragged from the station to his hotel by forty undergraduates of aberystwyth while members of the o.t.c. secured a footing on the carriage armed with a battle axe (borrowed from the arts department), hoes, rakes, spades, etc.--their officers having refused them the privilege of bearing arms on the occasion. but it is scarcely possible to imagine the doctor called upon for a speech standing on the steps of the hotel and saying, "you need never be ashamed of the athletic prowess of this college. the pyramids, we are told, were built by slave labour. but the slaves were not expected to haul the pyramids in one piece!"* [* _chesterton_ by cyril clemens, p. 50.] in san francisco i saw many people who had met gilbert including a journalist who took him to a "bootleg joint"--which is western for a speakeasy. there he asked for "some specialty of the house" and was offered a mule. "six of these babies will put you on your ear," remarked the bartender. "what did he say about my ear?" gilbert queried. he downed three of the potent mixture, in spite of his theory against cocktails and his host remarked his continued poise with admiration while the bartender commented "he can take it," another slang expression that appeared to be new to gilbert. he told his host, mr. williams, that he delighted in meeting such folk as bartenders and all the simpler people whom he saw too seldom. this suggested an idea--would he come out to a school across the bay which could not afford his fees, because it educated the daughters of poorer catholics. he agreed at once and not only talked to them brilliantly for three quarters of an hour, but also wrote for the children about 50 autographs. but of course, he had forgotten something--an engagement to attend a big social function. a huge car arrived at the school complete with chauffeur and several agitated ladies. "mr. chesterton, you have broken an important engagement." "i have filled an important engagement," he answered, "lecturing to the daughters of the poor." if it were possible for gilbert to be better loved anywhere than in england that anywhere was certainly america. from coast to coast i have met his devotees. i have come across only one expression of the opposite feeling--and that from a man who seems (from his opening sentence) to have been unable to stay away from the lectures he so detested: i heard chesterton some six or seven times in this country. his physical make-up repelled me. he looked like a big eater and animalism is repugnant to most of us. his appearance was against him. not one of his lectures seemed to me worth the price of admission and some of them were so bad that they seemed contemptuous morsels flung at audiences for whom he adjudged anything good enough. one of his lectures, at the academy brooklyn, was a great disappointment. and he charged $1,000 for it. it was not worth $10 and chesterton knew it. after the lecture, he remarked to a friend of mine, "i think that was the worst lecture i ever gave." he may have been right. certainly it was the worst i ever heard him give. but he took the thousand and a bonus of $200 for the extra large crowd in attendance. no: i did not like chesterton. what of the money? with his american agent chesterton had a quite usual arrangement: he received half the fees paid. the agent made engagements, paid travelling expenses and received for this the other half. out of the half chesterton received, he paid a further ten per cent to the london agent who had introduced him to the american agent; he also had to pay the expenses of his wife and his secretary and further gave a large present to his secretary for her trouble on the tour: the rest went chiefly into _g.k.'s weekly_. i doubt if he could have told anyone at what figure the original fee stood for any lecture. one of the basilian fathers, then a novice, remembers gilbert's appearance in toronto. the subject of this lecture was "culture and the coming peril." the coming peril, he explained, was not bolshevism (because bolshevism had now been tried--"the best way to destroy a utopia is to establish it. the net result of bolshevism is that the modern world will not imitate it"). nor by coming peril did he mean another great war (the next great war, he added, "would happen when germany tried to monkey about with the frontiers of poland"). the coming peril was the intellectual, educational, psychological, artistic overproduction which, equally with economic overproduction, threatened the well-being of contemporary civilisation. people were inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves. at question period he was asked: "why is dean inge gloomy?" "because of the advance of the catholic church. next question please." "how tall are you and what do you weigh?" "i am six feet two inches, but my weight has never been accurately calculated." "is george bernard shaw a coming peril?" "heavens, no. he is a disappearing pleasure." for an apparently haphazard collection of essays _sidelights on new london and newer york_, published on his return to england from the second visit, has a surprising unity. blitzed in london and out of print in new york it is now hard to obtain, which is a pity as it is full of good things. discussing the fashions of today chesterton attempts "to remove these things from the test of time and subject them to the test of truth," and this rule of an eternal test is the one he tried to apply in all his comments. obviously nothing human is perfect--and this includes the human judgment, even chesterton's judgment. talking of the past or of the present, of england or america, he may often have been wrong and he would certainly have been the last man to claim infallibility for his judgments. his weakness as a critic was perhaps a tendency to get his proportions wrong--to make too much of some things he saw or experienced, to little of others. his qualities were intellectual curiosity and personal amiability together with the measuring rod of an eternal standard. this second visit to america only deepened in gilbert's mind many of the impressions made by the first. yet the atmosphere of the book is curiously different from that of _what i saw in america_. living in the country even a few months had so greatly deepened his understanding. he still preferred the quakers to the puritans, "the essential of the puritan mood is the misdirection of moral anger." he still felt that as a whole the united states had started with "a great political idea, but a small spiritual idea": that it needed a "return to the vision" in politics and sociology. it was the fashion today to laugh at the wish for "great open spaces," yet the "real sociological object in going to america was to find those open spaces. it was not to find more engineers and electric batteries and mechanical gadgets in the home. these may have been the result of america: they were not the causes of america." asked why he admired america yet hated americanisation, he replied: i should have thought that i had earned some right to apply this obvious distinction to any foreign country, since i have consistently applied it to my own country. if the egoism is excusable, i am myself an englishman (which some identify with an egoist) and i have done my best to praise and glorify a number of english things: english inns, english roads, english jokes and jokers; even to the point of praising the roads for being crooked or the humour for being cockney; but i have invariably written, ever since i have written at all, against the cult of british imperialism. and when that perilous power and opportunity, which is given by wealth and worldly success, largely passed from the british empire to the united states, i have applied exactly the same principle to the united states. i think that imperialism is none the less imperialism because it is spread by economic pressure or snobbish fashion rather than by conquest; indeed i have much more respect for the empire that is spread by fighting than for the empire that is spread by finance.* [* _sidelights on new london & newer york_, p. 178.] he felt that the real causes for admiration, the real greatness of america, could be found partly through facing its incompleteness and defects, partly through contemplating the character of the greatest and most typical of americans, abraham lincoln. whilst i was in america, i often lingered in small towns and wayside places; and in a curious and almost creepy fashion the great presence of abraham lincoln continually grew upon me. i think it is necessary to linger a little in america, and especially in what many would call the most uninteresting or unpleasing parts of america, before this strong sense of a strange kind of greatness can grow upon the soul. . . . the externals of the middle west affect an englishman as ugly, and yet ugliness is not exactly the point. there are things in england that are quite as ugly or even uglier. rows of red brick villas in the suburbs of a town in the midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. but they are different. they are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. the surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. but american ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. it is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its worthy objects have around them a sort of halo of refuse. somebody said of the rugged and sardonic dr. temple, once archbishop of canterbury: "there are no polished corners in our temple." . . . there are no polished corners even in the great american cities, which are full of fine and stately classical buildings, not unworthy to be compared to temples. nobody seems to mind the juxtaposition of unsightly things and important things. there is some deep difference of feeling about the need for completeness and harmony, and there is the same thing in the political and ethical life of the great western nation. it was out of this landscape that the great president came, and one might almost trace a fanciful shadow of his figure in the thin trees and the stiff wooden pillars. a man of any imagination might look down these strange streets, with their frame-houses filled with the latest conveniences and surrounded with the latest litter, till he could see approaching down the long perspective that long ungainly figure, with the preposterous stove-pipe hat and the rustic umbrella and deep melancholy eyes, the humour and the hard patience and the heart that fed upon hope deferred. that is admiring abraham lincoln, and that is admiring america.* [* ibid., pp. 168-170.] among the "stately and classical buildings" were those making up the university of notre dame where he had been lecturing and which turned his musings in a direction they were ever inclined to take. founded by a group of frenchmen a century ago with a capital of four hundred dollars in a small log building on a clearing of ten acres, the university today numbers forty-five buildings on a seventeen hundred acre campus. the gold dome of the church visible from miles away, the interesting combination of the extraordinary fame of its football team with a keen spiritual life, especially fascinated gilbert. he wrote a poem dedicated to the university and called "the arena." in it he pictures first the golden image on "the gilded house of nero" that stood for all the horrors of the pagan amphitheatre. then comes in contrast another image: i have seen, where a strange country opened its secret plains about me, one great golden dome stand lonely with its golden image, one seen afar, in strange fulfilment, through the sunlit indian summer that apocalyptic portent that has clothed her with the sun. the boys shout "notre dame" as they watch the fortunes of the fray and chesterton sees our lady presiding fittingly even over a football contest. and i saw them shock the whirlwind of the world of dust and dazzle: and thrice they stamped, a thunderclap; and thrice the sand-wheel swirled; and thrice they cried like thunder on our lady of the victories, the mother of the master of the masterers of the world. he recurs to a favourite thought that the mother of sorrows is the cause of human joy: queen of death and deadly weeping those about to live salute thee, youth untroubled; youth untortured; hateless war and harmless mirth and the new lord's larger largesse holier bread and happier circus, since the queen of sevenfold sorrow has brought joy upon the earth. no wonder that, as johnnie mangan said, you could not drag him away from the game, if the game meant also a meditation. the "holier bread" came perhaps to his mind from the fact that the average of daily communion is unusually high at notre dame. when he desired for americans a return to their great political vision he desired also an opening of the eyes to that greater spiritual vision which was to him the supreme opportunity of the human spirit. e. s. p. haynes in _fritto misto_, comments on the absence of any reference to universities in _what i saw in america_. nor have i anywhere found any discussion by chesterton of the intellectual quality of catholic education--any comparison with the secular teaching--either in england or in america. but that the problems of these two countries and of all the world could be solved only by what that golden dome housed he cried with no uncertain voice. death is in the world around, resurrection in the church of the god who died and rose again. queen of death and life undying those about to live salute thee. chapter xxix the soft answer _i have only one virtue that i know of i could really forgive unto seventy times seven_. the notebook one of the commonest of biographers' problems is the question of quarrels and broken friendships. at the distance of time separating a life from its record some of these look so empty of meaning as to imperil any reputation--yet they happened, and when they were happening they probably appeared full of significance. other quarrels involve issues of importance in which the biographer cannot take wholeheartedly the side of his hero. thus my own father, writing _his_ father's life, had to pronounce judgment on newman's side in the issues that divided them, yet later, writing newman's biography, he had to admit the faults of temper that at least weakened the cardinal's case. for only so could he tell an entirely truthful story. in chesterton's life there is no such problem. attacks on public characters in his paper, attacks on abuses and ideas, absorbed all his pugnacity. fellow writers, rival journalists, friends, furnished often enough material for a quarrel; but chesterton would never take it up. he excelled in the soft answer--not that answer which seeming soft subtly provokes to wrath, but the genuine article. belloc said of him that he possessed "the two virtues of humility and charity"--those most royal of all christian virtues. in the heat of argument he retained a fairness of mind that saw his opponent's case and would never turn an argument into a quarrel. and most people both liked him and felt that he liked them. while he was having his great controversy with blatchford back in 1906, it is clear from letters between them that the two men remained on the friendliest terms. edward macdonald writes of his experiences of chesterton when he was working with him on the paper. he loved all the jokes about his size. he was the first to see the point and to roar with laughter when douglas woodruff introduced him to a meeting as "mr. chesterton who has just been looking round in america. . . ." he came into the office once on press day and saw the disordered pile of papers and proofs on my desk. the place was certainly in an awful mess. i wanted to show him a particular letter and shoved my hand into the middle of one pile and was lucky enough to put my hand right on the right document. g.k.c. complimented me on a filing system that demanded a keen memory and then remarked enviously "i wish they'd let me have a desk like that at home." when thomas derrick drew his famous cartoon of g.k.c. milking a cow he hesitated to give it to me for fear that g.k.c. would be offended. i wanted to print it in a special number and telephoned to beaconsfield. "mr. chesterton, i have here a cartoon of derrick and would like to put it in the special number. but as you are the subject of the cartoon derrick is afraid you may not like it." "i would rather it were not printed," he replied. "i never liked the idea of my name being used in the title of the paper and don't want well-intentioned but embarrassing personalities. of course, if it were highly satirical, insulting and otherwise unflattering i'd gladly have it on the front-page." i assured him that it was anything but flattering and on the front-page it went. it was used as the frontispiece of g.k.'s miscellany. many of the obituary writers said that he hated the cinema. in fact he told me once that he had long wished to write a new translation of cyrano and would like to try his hand at a film scenario of the play. his fingers had itched in the first place to retranslate the duel scene in order to restore the strength of the ballade in english. when he saw the film version of a father brown story i asked him what he thought of it. he had liked the film as a film and the acting. he added as an afterthought, "it gave me an idea for a new father brown story." a short-hand note was taken of the famous debate with bernard shaw. it was decided to devote four pages of _g.k.'s weekly_ to a report which i tried to compile by avoiding the third person and concentrating on significant quotations. but whereas shaw put his points in a few words from which elaboration could be cut, g.k.c.'s argument was so closely knit that it was difficult to leave out passages without spoiling the effect. he walked into the room as my pencil went through a fairly long extract from shaw's speech. "and whose words are you so gaily murdering?" he asked. "shaw's, mr. chesterton." "very well. now put them all back and murder mine. i refuse to deny shaw a full opportunity to state his case in my paper." as a result shaw's speech took up a great part of the space allotted and g.k.c. was inadequately reported. he was always careful if he had reviewed a book in the paper criticising its ideas to take an immediate opportunity to show the author his warm personal friendliness. middleton murry, sending him a book of his own, criticised g.k. as "perverse" for thinking communism and capitalism alike. your clean idea [of liberty and property] delights me, i believe, quite as much as it does you. but it is a vision and a dream, in this capitalistic world. . . . the communist is the man who has made up his mind to "go through with" the grim business of capitalism to the bitter end because he knows there is no going back. he makes a choice between following a dream which he _knows_ is only a dream, and following a hope which he knows his own devotion may help to make real. communism is the faith which a man wins through blank and utter despair. . . . for my own part, if it were possible, i would rather see the world converted to christianity than to communism. but the world has had its chance of becoming christian; it will not get it again. . . . the wrath to come--that is what communism is. and we can flee from it only by repentance. and repentance itself means communism. that is the fact as i see it. i hope, and sometimes dream, that we shall have the communism of repentance, and not the communism of wrath here in england. chesterton replied (may 19, 1932): thank you so very much for your most interesting and generous letter, which reached me indirectly and was delayed; also for your most interesting and generous book, which i immediately sat down and read at a sitting; which in its turn so stimulated me that i immediately wrote a rapid and rather curt reply for my own little rag. i fear you will find the reply more controversial than i meant it to be; for your book is so packed with challenges that i could not but make my very short article a thing packed with mere repartees. but i do hope you will understand how warm a sympathy i have with very much of what you say and with all the motives with which you say it. needless to say, i agree with every word you say against capitalism; but i particularly want to congratulate you on what you say about parasitic parliamentary labour. i thought that chapter was quite triumphant. as for the rest, it is true that it has not shaken me in my conviction that the catholic church is larger than you or me, than your moods or mine; and the heroic but destructive mood in which you write is a very good example. you say that christ set the example of a self-annihilation which seems to me almost nihihist; but i will never deny that catholics have saluted that mood as the imitation of christ. lately a friend of mine, young, virile, handsome, happily circumstanced, walked straight off and buried himself in a monastery; never, so to speak, to reappear on earth. why did he do it? psychologically, i cannot imagine. not, certainly, from fear of hell or wish to be "rewarded" by heaven. as an instructed catholic, he knew as well as i do that he could save his soul by normal living. i can only suppose that there is something in what you say; that christ and others do accept a violent reversal of all normal things. but why do you say that christ did it and has left no christians who do it? our church has stood in the derision of four hundred years, because there were still christians who did it. and they did it to themselves, as christ did; you will not misunderstand me if i say that this is different from throwing out a violent theory for other people to follow. now for the application. some of these monks, less cloistered, are to my knowledge, helping the english people to get back to the ownership of their own land; renewing agriculture as they did in the dark ages. why do you say there is no chance for this normal property and liberty? you can only mean to say of our scheme exactly what you yourself admit about the communist scheme. that it requires awful and almost inhuman sacrifices; that we must turn the mind upside-down; that we must alter the whole psychology of modern englishmen. we must do that to make them communists. why is it an answer to say we must do that to make them distributists? i could point out many ways in which our ideal is nearer and more native to men; but i will not prolong this debate. i should be very sorry that you should think it is only a debate. i only ask you to believe that we sympathise where we do not agree; but on this we do not agree. mr. murry wrote later of gilbert: "i liked the man immensely and he was a very honourable opponent of mine, much the most honourable i ever encountered."* [* mark twain quarterly, chesterton memorial no.] _g.k.'s weekly_ was of course gilbert's own platform, so perhaps his care to apologise and his great magnanimity are more remarkable in incidents outside its columns. t. s. eliot had his platform--he edited the _criterion_. chesterton on being reproached by him for a hasty article not only apologised but dedicated a book to mr. eliot. he had written confusing him with another critic who disapproved of alliteration and had also misquoted a stanza of his poetry. mr. eliot had written: i should like you to know that it was apparently your "sympathetic reviewer," not i, who made the remark about alliteration; to which it seems he added a more general criticism of mine: so that _snob_ is not the right corrective. some of your comments seem to be based on a belief that i object to alliteration. and may i add, as a humble versifier, that i _prefer_ my verse to be quoted correctly, if at all. chesterton replied: i am so very sorry if my nonsense in the _mercury_ had any general air of hostility, to say nothing of any incidental injustices of which i was quite unaware. i meant it to be quite amiable; like the tremulous badinage of the oldest inhabitant in the bar parlour, when he has been guyed by the brighter lads of the village. i cannot imagine that i ever said anything about you or any particular person being a snob; for it was quite out of my thoughts and too serious for the whole affair. i certainly did have the impression, from the way the reviewer put it, that you disapproved of my alliteration; i also added that you would be quite right if you did. i certainly did quote you from memory, and even quote from a quotation; i also mentioned that i was doing so casual a thing. of course, on the strictest principles, all quotations should be verified; and i should certainly have done so if i had in any way resented anything you said, or been myself writing in a spirit of resentment. if you think a letter to the _mercury_ clearing up these points would be fairer to everybody, of course i should be delighted to write one. this attitude of the "oldest inhabitant" was the chestertonian fashion of accepting the youthful demand for something new. when a young writer in _colosseum_ alluded to him as out of date he took it with the utmost placidity. "good," he said to edward macdonald. "i like to see people refusing to accept the opinions of others before they've examined them themselves. they're perfectly entitled to say that i'm not a literary lion but a landseer lion." mr. eliot's answer was a request to gilbert to write in the _criterion_ and an explanation that he had felt in a false position since he rather liked alliteration than otherwise. thus too when chesterton had answered a newspaper report of a speech made by c. e. m. joad, the latter complained that it was a criticism "not of anything that i think, but of a garbled newspaper caricature of a few of the things i think, taken out of their context and falsified." he added that he had not said science would destroy religion but that at its present rate of decline the _church of england_ would become a dead letter in a hundred and fifty years. next, that science "has no bearing upon the spiritual truths of religion," but has been presented, at any rate by the church of england, in a texture of obsolete ideas about the nature of the physical universe and the behaviour of physical things which science has shown to be untrue. finally that religion is vital but it is in mysticism that the core of religion lies for me, and mystical experience, as i understand it, does not want organizing. i may be wrong in all this, but i hope that this explanation, such as it is, will lead you to think that i am not such an arrogant fool as your article suggests. chesterton replied (may 4, 1930): i hope you will forgive my delay in thanking you for your very valuable and reasonable letter; but i have been away from home; and for various reasons my correspondence has accumulated very heavily. i am extremely glad to remember that, even before receiving your letter, i was careful to say in my article that my quarrel was not personally with you, but with the newspapers which had used what you said as a part of a stupid stunt against organised religion. i am even more glad to learn that they had misused your name and used what you did not say. i ought to have known, by this time, that they are quite capable of it; and i entirely agree that the correction you make in the report makes all the difference in the world. i do not think i ever meant or said that you were an arrogant fool or anything like it; but most certainly it is one thing to say that religion will die in a century (as the report stated) and quite another to say that the church of england will experience a certain rate of decline, whether the prediction be true or no. i shall certainly take some opportunity to correct my statement prominently in the _illustrated london news_; i hope i should do so in any case; but in this case it supports my main actual contention; that there is in the press a very vulgar and unscrupulous attack on the historic christian church. the four points you raise are so interesting that i feel i ought to touch on them; though you will forgive me if i do so rather rapidly. with the first i have already dealt; and in that matter i can only apologise, both for myself and my unfortunate profession; and touching the second i do not suppose we should greatly disagree; i merely used it as one example of the futility of fatalistic prophecies such as the one attributed by the newspapers to you. but a thorough debate between us, if there were time for it, touching the third and fourth points, might possibly remove our differences, but would certainly reveal them. in the third paragraph you say something that has been said many times, and doubtless means something; but i can say quite honestly that i have never been quite certain of what it means. naturally i hold no brief for the church of england as such; indeed i am inclined to congratulate you on having found any one positive set of "ideas," obsolete or not, which that church is solidly agreed in "presenting." but i have been a member of that church myself, and in justice to it, i must say that neither then nor now did i see clearly what are these things "about the nature of the physical universe, which science has shown to be untrue." i was not required as an anglican, any more than as a catholic, to believe that god had two hands and ten fingers to mould adam from clay; but even if i had been, it would be rather difficult to define the scientific discovery that makes it impossible. i should like to see the defined christian dogma written down and the final scientific discovery written against it. i have never seen this yet. what i have seen is that even the greatest scientific dogmas are not final. we have just this moment agreed that the ideas of the physical universe, which are really and truly "obsolete," are the very ideas taught by physicists thirty years ago. what i think you mean is that science has shown _miracles_ to be untrue. but miracles are not ideas about the nature of the physical universe. they are ideas about the nature of a power capable of breaking through the nature of the physical universe. and science has not shown that to be untrue, for anybody who can think. lastly, you say that it is indeed necessary that religion should exist, but that its essence is mysticism; and this does not need to be organised. i should answer that nothing on earth needs to be organised so much as mysticism. you say that man tends naturally to religion; he does indeed; often in the form of human sacrifice or the temples of sodom. almost all extreme evil of that kind is mystical. the only way of keeping it healthy is to have some rules, some responsibilities, some definitions of dogma and moral function. that at least, as you yourself put it, is what i think; and i hope you will not blame me for saying so. but as to what i said, in that particular article, it was quite clearly written upon wrong information and it will give me great pleasure to do my best to publish the fact. in any such argument gilbert was never, in the words of the gospel, "willing to justify himself." he only wanted to justify certain ideas, and the thought of having misrepresented anyone else was distressing to him. even the hardened controversialist coulton wrote in the course of one of their arguments: if i speak very plainly of your historical methods, it is not that i do not fully respect your conversion. i have more sympathy with your catholicity than (partly no doubt by my own fault) you may be inclined to think; i believe you to have made a sacrifice of the sort that is never altogether vain; it is therefore part of my faith that you are near to that which i also am trying to approach; and, if this belief does little or nothing to colour my criticisms in this particular discussion, that is because i believe true catholicism, like true protestantism, can only gain by the explosion of historical falsehoods, if indeed they be false, with the least possible delay. if (on the other hand) they are truths then you may be trusted to make out the best possible case for them, and my words will recoil upon myself. the dispute was about puritanism and catholicism. it was republished as a pamphlet. it is the only case i have found in which chesterton wrote several versions of one letter (to the _cambridge review_). in its final form he omitted one illuminating illustration. coulton had maintained that the mediaevals condemned dancing as much as the puritans and had dug up various mouldy theologians who classed it as a mortal sin. father lopez retorted by a quotation from st. thomas saying it was quite right to dance at weddings and on such like occasions, provided the dancing was of a decent kind. chesterton comments: we have already travelled very far from the first vision of mr. coulton, of dark ages full of one monotonous wail over the mortal sin of dancing. to class it seriously as a mortal sin is to class it with adultery or theft or murder. it is interesting to imagine st. thomas and the moderate moralists saying: "you may murder at weddings; you may commit adultery to celebrate your release from prison; you may steal if you do not do it with immodest gestures," and so on. the calm tone of st. thomas about the whole thing is alone evidence of a social atmosphere different from that described. the rest of his analysis of coulton's method of dealing with a historical document and distorting it is in the published version. a valuable part of chesterton's line is also interesting as a comment on his own historical work. the expert he says is so occupied with detail that he overlooks the broad facts that anyone could see. on this point the review of coulton's mediaeval history in the _church times_ is illuminating. the reviewer noted that in the index under the word "church" occurred such notes as: "soldiers sleeping in," "horses stabled in," and other allusions to extraordinary happenings. but nowhere, he said, could he find any mention of the normal use of a church--that men prayed in it. with h. g. wells several interchanges of letters have shown in earlier chapters how the soft answer turned aside a wrath easily aroused, but also easily dissipated. another exchange of letters only three years before gilbert's death must be given. the third letter is undated and i am not sure if it belongs here or refers to another of gilbert's reviews of a book of wells. 47 chiltern court, n.w.i. dec. 10, 1933 dear old g.k.c. an _illustrated london news_ xmas cutting comes like the season's greetings. if after all my atheology turns out wrong and your theology right i feel i shall always be able to pass into heaven (if i want to) as a friend of g.k.c.'s. bless you. my warmest good wishes to you and mrs. g.k.c. h.g. my dear h.g., i do hope my secretary let you know that at the moment when i got your most welcome note i was temporarily laid out in bed and able to appreciate it, but not to acknowledge it. as to the fine point of theology you raise--i am content to answer (with the subtle and exquisite irony of the yanks) i should worry. if i turn out to be right, you will triumph, not by being a friend of mine, but by being a friend of man, by having done a thousand things for men like me in every way from imagination to criticism. the thought of the vast variety of that work, and how it ranges from towering visions to tiny pricks of humour, overwhelmed me suddenly in retrospect: and i felt we had none of us ever said enough. also your words, apart from their generosity, please me as the first words i have heard for a long time of the old agnosticism of my boyhood when my brother cecil and my friend bentley almost worshipped old huxley like a god. i think i have nothing to complain of except the fact that the other side often forget that we began as free-thinkers as much as they did: and there was no earthly power but thinking to drive us on the way we went. thanking you again a thousand times for your letter . . . and everything else. yours always g. k. chesterton. my dear chesterton: you write wonderful praise and it leaves me all aquiver. my warmest thanks for it. but indeed that wonderful fairness of mind is very largely a kind of funk in me--i know the creature from the inside--funk and something worse, a kind of deep, complex cunning. well anyhow you take the superficial merit with infinite charity--and it has inflated me and just for a time i am an air balloon over the heads of my fellow creatures. yours ever h. g. wells. gilbert loved to praise his fellows in the field of letters even when their philosophy differed from his own. in the obituaries in _g.k.'s weekly_ this is especially noticeable. of two men of letters who died in 1928, he wrote with respect and admiration although with a mind divided between pure literary appreciation and those principles whereby he instinctively measured all things. of sir edmund gosse he wrote "the men from whom we would consent to learn are dying." g.k. felt he could never himself appreciate without judging, but he could learn from gosse a uniquely "sensitive impartiality." with him "there passes away a great and delicate spirit which might in some sense be called the spirit of the eighteenth century; which might indeed be very rightly called the spirit of reason and civilisation."* [* may 26th, 1928.] "these are the things we hoped would stay and they are going," he quoted from swinburne, and of him and of hardy, who died in 1928, and in whom he saluted "an honourable dignity and simplicity" he felt that though they had stated something false about the universe--that all the good things are fugitive and only the bad things unchanged--yet ". . . something rather like it might be a half truth about the world. i mean about the modern world. . . ." these poets lamented the passing of roses and sunbeams, but in the modern world it is rather as if, in some inverted witchcraft the rose tree withered and faded from sight, and the rose leaves remained hovering in empty air. it is as if there could be sunbeams when there was no more sun. it is not only the better but the bigger and stronger part of a thing that is sacrificed to the small and secondary part. the real evil in the change that has been passing over society is the fact that it has sapped foundations and, worse still, has not shaken the palaces and spires. it is as if there was a disease in the world that only devours the bones. we have not weakened the gilded parody of marriage, we have only weakened the marriage: . . . we have not abolished the house of lords because it was not democratic. we have merely preserved the aristocracy, on condition that it shall not be aristocratic. . . . we have not yet even disestablished the church; but there is a very pressing proposal that we should turn out of it the only people who really believe it is the church. . . . there is now in the minds of nearly all capitalists a sort of corrupt communism. . . . the bank remains, the fund remains, the foreign financier remains, parliamentary procedure remains, jix remains. these are the things we hoped would go; but they are staying. sixteen years earlier chesterton had in _the victorian age in literature_ characterised hardy's novels as "the village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot." yet cyril clemens has told me that hardy recited to him some of chesterton's poetry, and i think this obituary links with that fact in showing that a profound difference in their philosophy of life did not prevent a mutual appreciation and even admiration. gilbert chesterton entered the last years of his life having made no enemies in the exceedingly sensitive literary world to which he primarily belonged. whether he had made any in the world of politics i do not know, but he certainly felt no enmities. he said once it was impossible to hate anything except an idea, and to him i think it was. against one politician who died in 1930 he had many years ago launched his strongest bit of ironical writing--lord birkenhead, then f. e. smith, who had spoken of the welsh disestablishment bill as having "shocked the conscience of every christian community in europe."--the last lines of chesterton's mordant answer ran for your legal cause or civil you fight well and get your fee; for your god or dream or devil you will answer, not to me. talk about the pews and steeples and the cash that goes therewith: but the souls of christian peoples . . . chuck it, smith. later, smith had stood with sir edward carson against cecil chesterton at the old bailey. now he was dead and many who had feared him in his lifetime were blackening his memory with subtle sneers and innuendo. gilbert refused to join in this and he wrote in his paper: "in him we were confronted by and fought, not a set of principles but a man. . . . lord birkenhead was a great fighter! with one more pagan virtue--pride--he would have been a great pagan." lord balfour died in the same year. with him neither the paper nor its editor had fought personally, but upon almost all his policies had stood in opposition. yet few better appreciations of him appeared than the article entitled by chesterton "a man of distinction." the english squire was an unconscious aristocrat; the scotch laird was a conscious aristocrat; and lord balfour with all his social grace and graciousness, was conscious and even self-conscious. but this was only another way of saying that he had a mind which mirrored everything, including himself; and that, whatever else he did, he did not act blindly or in the dark. he was sometimes quite wrong; but his errors were purely patriotic; both in the narrow sense of nationalism and in the larger sense of loyalty and disinterestedness. he instances balfour's policies in ireland and egypt and continues: in some ways he seems to me to have been too good a stoic to be entirely a good christian; or rather (to put it more correctly) to feel, like the rest of us, that he was a bad christian. . . . there was much more in him of the scotch puritan than of the english cavalier. it is supremely characteristic of the present parliamentary atmosphere that everybody accused lord balfour of incomprehensible compromise and vagueness, because he was completely logical and absolutely clear. clarity does look like a cloud of confusion to people whose minds live in confusion twice confounded. . . . . . . people said his distinctions were fine distinctions; and so they were; very fine indeed. a fine distinction is like a fine painting or a fine poem or anything else fine; a triumph of the human mind . . . the great power of distinction; by which a man becomes in the true sense distinguished.* [* march 29, 1930.] the distinction mr. swinnerton draws* between belloc and chesterton may be a little too absolute, but substantially it is right. "one reason for the love of chesterton was that while he fought he sang lays of chivalry and in spite of all his seriousness warred against wickedness rather than a fleshly opponent, while belloc sang only after the battle and warred against men as well as ideas." [* _georgian scene_, p. 88.] did the tendency to find good in his opponents, did chesterton's universal charity deaden, as belloc believes, the effect of his writing? he wounded none, but thus also he failed to provide weapons wherewith one may wound and kill folly. now without wounding and killing, there is no battle; and thus, in this life, no victory; but also no peril to the soul through hatred.* [* _the place of chesterton in english letters_, p. 81.] in various controversies during the final years of _g.k.'s weekly_ the very opposite opinion is expressed. hoffman nickerson writes of the "subversive" nature of chesterton's work, of his giving weapons to communism and doing his bit towards starting "a very nasty class war" in america. mr. nickerson was allowed to develop this theme in a series of articles in chesterton's own paper. correspondents too complained often enough in the paper of its attacks on vested interests and on other schools of thought than its own. in the course of a controversy with mr. penty, in which i think g.k. most distinctly misunderstood his opponent but in which both men kept the friendliest tone, penty says that chesterton treats as a drive much that he himself would call a drift: that the mind is more in fault than the will of mankind in getting the world into its present mess. with this diagnosis chesterton certainly agreed for the greater part of mankind. he spoke often of a "madness in the modern mind." psychology meant "the mind studying itself instead of studying the truth" and it was part of what had destroyed the mind. "advertisements often tell us to watch this blank space. i confess i do watch that blank space, the modern mind, not so much for what will appear in it, as for what has already disappeared from it." thus too when the rev. dick shepherd remarrying a divorced woman--i.e., encouraging her to take again the solemn vow she had already broken--said that he heard the voice of christ: "go in peace," it was not for impiety that chesterton condemned him. he wrote with restraint "there is scarcely a shade of difference left between meaning well and meaning nothing." was penty still right in thinking he saw a drive where he ought to see a drift and nickerson in thinking he was dangerously subversive in his attitude to the rich? and anyhow what about belloc? i incline to think that the truth was that while g.k. could never hate an individual he could hate a group. if he suddenly remembered an individual in that group he hastily excepted him from the group in order to leave the objects of his hatred entirely impersonal. thus he hated politicians but found real difficulty in hating a politician. he hated what he called the plutocracy, but no individual rich man. i do think however that while believing firmly in original sin he was somewhat inclined to see it as operative more especially in the well-to-do classes. his championship of the poor was in no way impersonal. his burning love and pity went out to every beggar. he tended to love all men but the poor he loved with an undivided heart, and when he thought of them his thoughts grew harsh towards the rich who were collectively their oppressors. i doubt if he allowed enough for the degree of stupidity required to amass a fortune. he would have agreed that love of money narrowed the mind: i doubt if he fully grasped that only a mind already narrow can love money so exclusively as to pursue it successfully. and i am pretty sure he did not allow enough for the fact that rich like poor are caught today in the machinery they have created. he saw the bewildered, confused labourer who has lost his liberty: he failed to see the politician also bewildered, the millionaire also confused, afraid to let go for fear he might be submerged. and yet at moments he did see it. he wrote in the paper a short series of articles on men of the nineteenth century who had created the confusion of today; on malthus, adam smith and darwin. far from its being true that supernatural religion had first been destroyed and morality lost in consequence, it had been the christian morality that was first destroyed in the mind. g.k. summarised adam smith's teachings as: "god so made the world that he could achieve the good if men were sufficiently greedy for the goods." thus the man of today "whenever he is tempted to be selfish half remembers smith and self-interest. whenever he would harden his heart against a beggar, he half remembers malthus and a book about population; whenever he has scruples about crushing a rival he half remembers darwin and his scruples become unscientific." because none of these theories were in their own day seen as heresies and denounced as heresies they have lived on vaguely to poison the atmosphere and the mind of today. english conservatives had been shocked when chesterton began: mr. nickerson was shocked when he was ending: because he demanded a revolution. surely, mr. nickerson said, if he looked at communism closely he would prefer capitalism. he not only would, he constantly said he did. but he wanted a revolution from both: he preferred that it should not be "nasty" for what he wanted was the christian revolution. like all revolutions however it must begin in the mind and he felt less and less hopeful as he watched that blank space. but i do not believe that chesterton failed because he had not at his command the weapon of hatred. here belloc surely makes the same mistake that swift (whom he instances) made and for the same reason. the frenchman and the irishman understand the rapier of biting satire as does not the englishman: for direct abuse of anyone, no matter how richly merited, nearly always puts the englishman on the side of the man who is being abused. what happened to swift's gulliver--that most fierce attack upon the human race? the english people drew its sting and turned it into a nursery book that has delighted their children ever since. there are more ways than one of winning a battle: you can win the man instead of the argument and chesterton won many men. or you can take a weapon that once belonged chiefly to the enemy but which chesterton wrested from him; a very useful weapon: the laugh. orthodoxy, doctrinal and moral, was a lawful object of amusement to voltaire and his followers but now the laugh has passed to the other side and chesterton was (with belloc himself) the first to seize this powerful weapon. thus when bishop barnes of birmingham said that st. francis was dirty and probably had fleas many catholics were furious and spoke in solemn wrath. chesterton wrote the simple verse _a broad-minded bishop rebukes the verminous saint francis_ if brother francis pardoned brother flea there still seems need of such strange charity seeing he is, for all his gay goodwill bitten by funny little creatures still. i shall never forget going to hear chesterton debate on birth control with some advanced woman or other. outside the hall were numbers of her satellites offering their literature. i was just about to say something unpleasant to one of them when a verse flashed into my mind: if i had been a heathen, i'd have crowned neaera's curls, and filled my life with love affairs, my house with dancing girls! but higgins is a heathen and to lecture-rooms is forced where his aunts who are not married demand to be divorced. the rebuke died on my lips: why get angry with the poor old aunts of higgins demanding the destruction of their unconceived and inconceivable babies? swinburne had mocked at christian virtue but the dolores of chesterton replied to him: i am sorry old dear if i hurt you, no doubt it is all very nice, with the lilies and languors of virtue and the raptures and roses of vice. but the notion impels me to anger that vice is all rapture for me, and if you think virtue is languor just try it and see. but in fact g.k. did not merely use laughter as a weapon: he was often simply amused--and did not conceal it. he told desmond gleeson that he remembered reading renan's christ "while i was standing in the queue waiting to see 'charley's aunt.' but it is obvious which is the better farce for 'charley's aunt' is still running." no wonder that eileen duggan when she pictured him as a modern st. george saw him "shouting gleefully 'bring on your dragons.'" even dragons may be bothered by the unexpected. and it may well be that when the rapier of anger has been blunted against the armour of some accustomed fighter he will be driven off the field by gales of chestertonian laughter. chapter xxx our lady's tumbler _i hate to be influenced. i like to be commanded or to be free. in both of these my own soul can take a clear and conscious part: for when i am free it must be for something that i really like, and not something that i am persuaded to pretend to like: and when i am commanded, it must be by something i know, like the ten commandments. but the thing called pressure, of which the polite name is persuasion, i always feel to be a hidden enemy. it is all a part of that worship of formlessness, and flowing tendencies, which is really the drift of cosmos back into chaos. i remember how i suddenly recoiled in youth from the influence of matthew arnold (who said many things very well worth saying) when he told me that god was "a stream of tendency." since then i have hated tendencies: and liked to know where i was going and go there--or refuse_. _g.k.'s weekly_, aug. 18, 1928. in 1932, when gilbert had been in the church just ten years and frances six, my husband and i met them at the eucharistic congress in dublin. they were staying at the vice-regal lodge and were very happy in that gathering of the catholic world brought about by the congress. it was this thought of the potential of the faith for a unity the league of nations could not achieve--only dogma is strong enough to unite mankind--that gave its title to the book _christendom in dublin_. in the crowd that thronged to that great gathering he saw democracy. its orderliness was more than a mere organisation: it was self-determination of the people. "a whole mob, what many would call a whole rabble, was doing exactly what it wanted; and what it wanted was to be christian." the mind of that crowd was stretched over the centuries as the faint sound of st. patrick's bell that had been silent so many centuries was heard in phoenix park at the consecration of the mass: it was stretched over the earth as the people of the earth gathered into one place which had become for the time rome or the christian centre. during the congress an eastern priest accosted g.k. with praise of his writings. his own mind full of the great ideas of christendom and the faith, he felt a huge disproportion in the allusion to himself. and when later the priest asked to be photographed at his side it flashed through g.k.'s mind that he had heard in the east that an idiot was supposed to bring luck. this sort of humorous yet sincere intellectual humility startles us in the same kind of way as does the spiritual humility of the saints. we have to accept it in the same kind of way--without in the least understanding it, but simply because we cannot fail to see it. but the world could fail even to see it. it could and did fail in imagining a mind so absorbed in the contemplation of infinite greatness that its own pin-point littleness became an axiom: rather it seemed an affectation--none the less an affectation and much the less pardonable because the laughter was directed against others as well as against himself. there is an old mediaeval story of a tumbler who, converted and become a monk, found himself inapt at the offices of choir and scriptorium so he went before a statue of our lady and there played all his tricks. quite exhausted at last he looked up at the statue and said, "lady, this is a choice performance." there is more than a touch of our lady's tumbler in gilbert. he knew he could give in his own fashion a choice performance, but meeting a priest come from a far land where he had reconciled a hitherto schismatic group with the great body of the catholic church, who could forgive sins and offer the holy sacrifice, he truly felt "something disproportionate in finding one's own trivial trade, or tricks of the trade, amid the far-reaching revelations of such a trysting-place of all the tribes of men."* [* _christendom in dublin_, p. 35.] his awe and reverence for priests was, says father rice, enormous. "he would carefully weigh their opinion however fatuous." his comment on the bad statues and fripperies which so many catholics find a trial was: "it shows the wisdom of the church. the whole thing is so terrific that if people did not have these let-downs they would go mad." yet it may have been a fear of excess of this special let-down that made him reluctant to go to lourdes. lisieux he never liked but he was, dorothy says, fascinated by lourdes when she persuaded him to go. he went several times to the torch-light procession and he said as he had said in dublin, "this is the only real league of nations." the thing he liked best in dublin was the spontaneous outburst of little altars and amateur decorations in the poorest quarters of the city. the story he loved to tell was that of the old woman who said when on the last day the clouds looked threatening: "well, if it rains now he will have brought it on himself." the year of the congress two other books were published: _sidelights on new london and newer york_, already discussed, and _chaucer_. the books contrast agreeably: one throwing the ideal against the real of his own day, the other evoking his ideal from the past. the _chaucer_ was much criticised--chiefly because he was not a chaucer scholar. as a matter of fact the notion of his writing this book did not originate with chesterton but with richard de la mare who had projected a series of essays called "the poets on the poets." this developed, still at his suggestion, into a literary biography of chaucer. but in any event g.k. had all his life combatted the notion that only a scholar should write on such themes. he stood resolutely for the rights of the amateur: yet i think the scholar might well start off with some exasperation on reading that if chaucer had been called the father of english poetry, so had "an obscure anglo-saxon like caedmon," whose writing was "not in that sense poetry and not in any sense english." it is a curious example of one of the faults chesterton himself most hated--overlooking something because it was too big: something too that he had realised in an earlier work--for caedmon spoke the language of alfred the great. in a brilliant garnering of the fruits of her scholarship--_word hoard_--margaret williams has quoted chesterton's alfred as a stirring expression of the significance of the spiritual conquest of england by christianity. in the same book she shows how superficial is the view which believes that the english language was a creation of the norman conquest. the struggle, she says "between the english and french tongues lasted for some three hundred years, until the two finally blended into a unified language, basically teutonic, richly romantic. the english spirit emerged predominant by a moral victory over its conqueror. . . ."* [* _word hoard_ by margaret williams, p. 4.] no one would wish that chesterton should have ignored the immense debt owed by our language to the french tributary that so enriched its main stream, but it seems strange that in his hospitable mind, in which alfred's england held so large a place, he should not have found room for an appreciation of the saxon structure of chaucer and for all that makes him unmistakably one in a line of which caedmon was the first great poet. in this book, only his debt to france is stressed, because england is to be thought of as part of europe--and the part she is a part of is apparently france! yet what excellent things there are in the book: the great poet exists to show the small man how great he is. . . . the great poet is alone strong enough to measure that broken strength we call the weakness of man. the real vice of the victorians was that they regarded history as a story that ended well because it ended with the victorians. they turned all human records into one three-volume novel; and were quite sure that they themselves were the third volume. he quotes troilus and cressida on "the christian majesty of the mystery of marriage": any man who really understands it does not see a greek king sitting on an ivory throne, nor a feudal lord sitting on a faldstool but god in a primordial garden, granting the most gigantic of the joys of the children of men. when we talk of wild poetry, we sometimes forget the parallel of wild flowers. they exist to show that a thing may be more modest and delicate for being wild. romance was a strange by-product of religion; all the more because religion, through some of its representatives may have regretted having produced it. . . . even the church, as imperfectly represented on its human side, contrived to inspire even what it had denounced, and transformed even what it had abandoned. the best chapter is the last: the moral of the story--and that moral is: "that no man should desert that [catholic] civilisation. it can cure itself but those who leave it cannot cure it. not nestorius, nor mahomet, nor calvin, nor lenin have cured, nor will cure the real evils of christendom; for the severed hand does not heal the whole body." healing must come from a recovery of the norm, of the balance, of the equilibrium that mediaeval philosophy and culture were always seeking. "the meaning of aquinas is that mediaevalism was always seeking a centre of gravity. the meaning of chaucer is that, when found, it was always a centre of gaiety. . . ." the name of aquinas thus introduced on almost the last page of this book shows chesterton's mind already busy on the next and perhaps most important book of his life: _st. thomas aquinas_. "great news this," wrote shaw to frances, "about the divine doctor. i have been preaching for years that intellect is a passion that will finally become the most ecstatic of all the passions; and i have cherished thomas as a most praiseworthy creature for being my forerunner on this point." when we were told that gilbert was writing a book on st. thomas and that we might have the american rights, my husband felt a faint quiver of apprehension. was chesterton for once undertaking a task beyond his knowledge? such masses of research had recently been done on st. thomas by experts of such high standing and he could not possibly have read it all. nor should we have been entirely reassured had we heard what dorothy collins told us later concerning the writing of it. he began by rapidly dictating to dorothy about half the book. so far he had consulted no authorities but at this stage he said to her: "i want you to go to london and get me some books." "what books?" asked dorothy. "i don't know," said g.k. she wrote therefore to father o'connor and from him got a list of classic and more recent books on st. thomas. g.k. "flipped them rapidly through," which is, says dorothy, the only way she ever saw him read, and then dictated to her the rest of his own book without referring to them again. there are no marks on any of them except a little sketch of st. thomas which was drawn in the margin opposite a description of the affair, which g.k. so vividly dramatises, of siger of brabant. had we known all this we should have been asking ourselves even more definitely: what will the experts say? of the verdict of the greatest of them we were not long left in doubt. etienne gilson, who has given two of the most famous of philosophical lecture series--the gifford lectures at aberdeen and the william james lectures at harvard--had begun his admiration for chesterton with _greybeards at play_ and had thought _orthodoxy_ "the best piece of apologetic the century had produced." when _st. thomas_ appeared he said to a friend of mine "chesterton makes one despair. i have been studying st. thomas all my life and i could never have written such a book." after gilbert's death, asked to give an appreciation, he returned to the same topic- i consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on st. thomas. nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement. everybody will no doubt admit that it is a "clever" book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying st. thomas aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called "wit" of chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. he has guessed all that which they had tried to demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty. that is all they can see of him.* [* _chesterton_, by cyril clemens, pp. 150-151.] in joining the church chesterton had found like all converts, from st. paul to cardinal newman, that he had come into the land of liberty and especially of intellectual liberty. "conversion," he said, "calls on a man to stretch his mind, as a man awakening from sleep may stretch his arms and legs."* [* _well and shallows_, p. 130.] i suppose one of the reasons why the surrounding world finds it hard to receive this statement from a convert is that he has only to look around him to see so many catholics wrapped in slumbers as placid as the next man's. to this very real difficulty, and to all its implications, chesterton unfortunately seldom adverted. to the scandal wrought by evil catholics, historical or contemporary, he was not blind--he summarised one element in the reformation conflict: bad men who had no right to their right reason good men who had good reason to be wrong. but i wish that with his rare insight into minds he had analysed us average catholics. he might have startled us awake by explaining to non-catholics _how_ those who know such truths and feed upon such food can yet appear so dull and lifeless. anyhow, whether the fault lie in part with us or entirely with the world at large, certain it is that in that world a convert is always expected to justify not merely his beliefs but his sincerity in continuing to hold them. i wonder if the pharisees said of st. paul that they were sure he really wanted to return to his old allegiance as some said it of newman, or spoke as arnold bennett did when he accused chesterton of being modernist in his secret thoughts? were st. paul's epistles an apologia pro vita sua? an apologia does not of course mean an apology but a justification, and the ground on which justification was sometimes demanded amused gilbert rather than annoying him. playing the parlour game which consists of guessing at what point in an article on hydraulics, elegiacs or neo-platonism dean inge will burst into his daily attack on the church, he wrote: the dean of st. paul's got to business, in a paragraph in the second half of his article, in which he unveiled to his readers all the horrors of a quotation from newman; a very shocking and shameful passage in which the degraded apostate says that he is happy in his religion, and in being surrounded by the things of his religion; that he likes to have objects that have been blessed by the holy and beloved, that there is a sense of being protected by prayers, sacramentals and so on; and that happiness of this sort satisfies the soul. the dean, having given us this one ghastly glimpse of the cardinal's spiritual condition, drops the curtain with a groan and says it is paganism. how different from the christian orthodoxy of plotinus!* [* _the thing_, pp. 156-7.] this playful, not to say frivolous, tone was fresh cause of annoyance to those who were apt to be annoyed. it is easier to understand their objection than the opposite one: that he became dull and prosy after he joined the church (or alternatively after he left fleet street for beaconsfield). the only real difficulty about his later work arises from the riot of his high spirits. in his own style i must say there are moments when even i want to read the riot act. and those who admire him less feel this more keenly. bad puns, they say, wild and sometimes ill-mannered jokes are perhaps pardonable in youth but in middle age they are inexcusable. the complainants against _the thing_ are in substance the complainants against _orthodoxy_ grown more vehement with the passage of years. the idea had been adumbrated of calling one of his books: _joking apart_ and only rejected because of the fear that if he said he was _not_ joking everyone would be quite certain that he was. this greatly amused g.k. and he began the book (it actually appeared as _the well and the shallows_) with "an apology for buffoons." after defending the human instinct of punning he remarked that "many moderns suffer from the disease of the suppressed pun." they are actuated even in their thinking by merely verbal association. i for one greatly prefer the sort of frivolity that is thrown to the surface like froth to the sort of frivolity that festers under the surface like slime. to pelt an enemy with a foolish pun or two will never do him any grave injustice; the firework is obviously a firework and not a deadly fire. it may be playing to the gallery, but even the gallery knows it is only playing.* [* _well and shallows_, pp. 11-12.] such playing was a necessity if the gallery, i.e. all the people, were to be made to listen; if the things you were thinking about were important to them as well as to yourself: if the ideas were more important than the dignity or reputation of the person who uttered them. in this book gilbert sketched briefly one side of his reason for feeling these ideas of paramount importance for everybody. "my six conversions" concerned reasons given him by the world that would have made him become a catholic if he were not one already. he had been brought up to treasure liberty and in his boyhood the world had seemed freer than the church. today in a world of fascism, communism and bureaucracy the church alone offered a reasoned liberty. he had been brought up to reverence certain ideals of purity: today they were laughed at everywhere but in the church. the "sure conclusions" of science that had stood foursquare in his boyhood had become like a dissolving view. liberalism had abdicated when the people of spain freely chose the church and english liberals defended the forcing upon them of a minority rule. "there are no fascists; there are no socialists; there are no liberals; there are no parliamentarians. there is the one supremely inspiring and irritating institution in the world and there are its enemies." above all, he felt increasingly, as time went on that those who left the faith did not get freedom but merely fashion; that there was something ironic in the name the atheists chose when they called themselves secularists. by definition they had tied themselves to the fashion of this world that passeth away. these six conversions then were what the world would have forced upon him: the church as an alternative to a continually worsening civilisation. while he hated the utopias of the futurists and while he accepted the christian view of life as a probation he felt too that life today was abnormally degraded and unhappy. there is a sense in which men may be made normally happy; but there is another sense in which we may truly say, without undue paradox, that what they want is to get back to their normal unhappiness. at present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. they have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to contend with; time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection and dissatisfaction with themselves. but they have not got the elements of consolation and encouragement that ought normally to renew their hopes or restore their self-respect. they have not got vision or conviction, or the mastery of their work, or the loyalty of their household, or any form of human dignity. even the latest utopians, the last lingering representatives of that fated and unfortunate race, do not really promise the modern man that he shall do anything, or own anything, or in any effectual fashion be anything. they only promise that, if he keeps his eyes open, he will see something; he will see the universal trust or the world state or lord melchett coming in the clouds in glory. but the modern man cannot even keep his eyes open. he is too weary with toil and a long succession of unsuccessful utopias. he has fallen asleep.* [* _g.k.'s weekly_, october 20, 1928.] chesterton demanded urgently that the worldlings who had failed to make the world workable should abdicate. "the organic thing called religion has in fact the organs that take hold on life. it can feed where the fastidious doubter finds no food; it can reproduce where the solitary sceptic boasts of being barren." in short, in religion alone was darwin justified, for catholicism was the "spiritual survival of the fittest."* [* _well and shallows_, p. 82.] if these six conversions are read without the balancing of something deeper they have the superficial look that belongs of necessity to apologetics. some essays in _the well and the shallows_, most of _the thing, christendom in dublin_, and above all, _the queen of seven swords_ give us that deeper quieter thinking when the mind is meditating upon the great mysteries of the faith. only very occasionally is it possible to glimpse beneath gilbert's reserve, but such glimpses are illuminating. father walker, who prepared him for his first communion, writes, "it was one of the most happy duties i had ever to perform. . . . that he was perfectly well aware of the immensity of the real presence on the morning of his first communion, can be gathered from the fact that he was covered with perspiration when he actually received our lord. when i was congratulating him he said, 'i have spent the happiest hour of my life.'" yet he went but seldom to holy communion, and an unfinished letter to father walker gives the reason. "the trouble with me is that i am much too frightened of that tremendous reality on the altar. i have not grown up with it and it is too much for me. i think i am morbid; but i want to be told so by authority." and in _christendom in dublin_, he says: "the word eucharist is but a verbal symbol, we might say a vague verbal mask, for something so tremendous that the assertion and the denial of it have alike seemed a blasphemy; a blasphemy that has shaken the world with the earthquake of two thousand years." i have heard it said that in these later years gilbert's writing became obscure, and i think it is partly true. only partly, for the old clarity is still there except when he is dealing with matters almost too deep for human speech. he wrote in _the thing:_ a thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into catholicism . . . the great mysteries like the blessed trinity or the blessed sacrament are the starting-point for trains of thought . . . stimulating, subtle and even individual. . . . to accept the logos as a truth is to be in the atmosphere of the absolute, not only with st. john the evangelist, but with plato and all the great mystics of the world. . . . to exalt the mass is to enter into a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all the relations of matter and mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most impersonal abstractions as well as the most personal affections. . . . even what are called the fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull. they are like the finest operations of surgery; separating nerve from nerve but giving life. it is easy enough to flatten out everything around for miles with dynamite if our only object is to give death. but just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues so the theologian is dealing with living ideas; and if he draws a line between them it is naturally a very fine line. if there appears a contradiction in the picture of chesterton the philosopher pondering on the logos and chesterton the child offering trinkets to our lady, we may remember the eternal wisdom "playing in the world, playing before god always" whose delight is to be with the children of men. chapter xxxi the living voice chesterton spoke once of the keen joy for the intellect of discovering the causes of things, but he was not greatly interested in science. he would have said that although the physical sciences did represent an advance in the grasp of truth it was, in the words of browning, only the "very superficial truth." he desired a knowledge of causes that did not dwell simply on what was secondary but led back to the first and final cause. to the mediaeval thinker, science was fascinating as philosophy's little sister: it was to philosophy what nature was to man. nature had been to st. francis a little lovely, dancing sister. science had been to st. thomas the handmaid of philosophy. the modern world thought these proportions fantastic. huxley used nature as a word for god. physical science had ousted philosophy. an american friend lately told me of a girl who, asked if she believed in god replied, "sure, i believe in god, but i'm not nuts about him." gilbert was not "nuts" about science: therefore in a world that saw nothing else to be "nuts" about he was called its enemy. and as with other things taken more solemnly by most moderns he preferred to get fun out of the inventions of the age. he wrote in a fairly early number of _g.k.'s weekly:_ eskimo song . . . so that the audience in chicago will have the advantage of hearing eskimos singing. (or words to that effect.) --_wireless programme_. oh who would not want such a wonderful thing as the pleasure of hearing the eskimos sing? i wish i had eskimos out on the lawn, or perched on the window to wake me at dawn: with eskimos singing in every tree oh that would be glory, be glory for me! oh list to the song that the eskimos sing, when the penguin would be if he could on the wing, would soar to the sun if he could, like the lark, but for most of the time it is totally dark. or hark to the bacchanal songs that resound when they're making a night of it half the year round, and carousing for months till the morning is pale, go home with the milk of the walrus and whale. oh list to the sweet serenades that are hers, who expensively gowned in most elegant furs, leans forth from the lattice delighted to know that her heart is like ice and her hand is like snow. * * * * * god bless all the dear little people who roam and hail in the icebergs the hills of their home; for i might not object to be listening in if i hadn't to hear the whole programme begin. and the president preach international peace, and parricide show an alarming increase, and a justice at bootle excuse the police, and how to clean trousers when spotted with grease, and a pianist biting his wife from caprice, and an eminent baptist's arrival at nice, and a banker's regrettably painless decease, and the new quarantine for the plucking of geese, and a mad millionaire's unobtrusive release, and a marquis divorced by a usurer's niece- if all of these items could suddenly cease and leave me with one satisfactory thing i really _should_ like to hear eskimos sing. this was hardly the expression of an attitude to science, but he did have such an attitude. life was to him a story told by god: the people in it the characters in that story. but since the story was told by god it was, quite literally, a magic story, a fairy story, a story full of wonders created by a divine will. as a child a toy telephone rigged up by his father from the house to the end of the garden had breathed that magic quality more than the transatlantic cable could reveal it in later life. it did not need mechanical inventions to make him see life as marvellous. his over-ruling interest was not in mechanics but in will: the will of god had created the laws of nature and could supersede them: the will of man could discover these laws and harness them to its purposes. gold is where you find it and the value of science depends on the will of man: a position which may not sound so absurd in the light of the harnessing of science to the purposes of destruction. when discussing machines "we sometimes tend," said chesterton in _sidelights_, "to overlook the quiet and even bashful presence of the machine gun." there was an impishness in gilbert, especially in his youth, that encouraged the idea of his enmity to science. where he saw a long white beard he felt like tweaking it: an enquiring nose simply asked to be pulled. it was only in (comparatively) sober age that he bothered in _the everlasting man_ to explain "i am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine scholars, but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from certain imperfect investigations."* that "vast and vague public opinion" certainly suspected him of irreverence even towards sincere and genuine scholars. yet it was by his use of the most marvelous of modern inventions that he won in the end the widest hearing among that public that he had ever known. [* _the everlasting man_, p. 67.] it is not so many years ago that we donned earphones in a doubtful hope of being able to hear something over the radio. it is the less surprising that it was only in the last few years of his life that gilbert became first interested in the invention and presently one of the broadcasters most in request by the b.b.c. he felt about the radio as he did about most modern inventions: that they were splendid opportunities that were not being taken--or else were being taken to the harm of humanity by the wrong people. what was the use of "calling all countries" if you had nothing to say to them. "what much modern science fails to realise," he wrote, "is that there is little use in knowing without thinking." and again, writing about the amazing discoveries of the day: "nobody is taking the smallest trouble to consider who in the future will be in command of the electricity and capable of giving us the shocks. with all the shouting about the new marvels, hardly anybody utters a word or even a whisper about how they are to be prevented from turning into the old abuses. . . . people sometimes wonder why we not infrequently refer to the old scandal covered by the word marconi. it is precisely because all these things are really covered by that word. there could not be a shorter statement of the contradiction than in men howling that word as a discovery and hushing it up as a story."* [* _g.k.'s weekly_, aug. 15, 1925.] for the thing that really frightened him about the radio was its possibilities as a new instrument of tyranny. the british broadcasting company holds in england a monopoly and is to a considerable extent under government control. it is possible to forbid advertising programmes because the costs are met by a tax of 10 sh. a year levied on the possession of a radio set. in an article called "the unseen catastrophe" (january 28, 1928) gilbert wrote: suppose you had told some of the old whigs, let alone liberals, that there was an entirely new type of printing press, eclipsing all others; and that as this was to be given to the king, all printing would henceforth be government printing. they would be roaring like rebels, or even regicides, yet that is exactly what we have done with the whole new invention of wireless. suppose it were proposed that the king's officers should search all private houses to make sure there were no printing presses, they would be ready for a new revolution. yet that is exactly what is proposed for the protection of the government monopoly of broadcasting. . . . there is really no protection against propaganda . . . being entirely in the hands of the government; except indeed, the incredible empty-headedness of those who govern. . . . on that sort of thing at least, we are all socialists now. it is wicked to nationalize mines or railroads; but we lose no time in nationalizing tongues and talk . . . we might once have used, and we shall now never use, the twentieth century science against the nineteenth century hypocrisy. it was prevented by a swift, sweeping and intolerant state monopoly; a monster suddenly swallowing all rivals, alternatives, discussions, or delays, with one snap of its gigantic jaws. that is what i mean by saying, "we cannot see the monsters that overcome us." but i suppose that even jonah, when once he was swallowed, could not see the whale. in the autumn of 1932 gilbert was first asked to undertake a series of radio talks for the b.b.c. every one seems agreed that he was an extraordinary success. letters from broadcasting house are full of such remarks as: "you do it admirably," "quite superb at the microphone." in one his work is called "unique." radio was now added to all his other activities during the four years he still had to live. dorothy kept a diary in which she noted in one year the giving of as many as forty lectures, and entered reminders of engagements of the most varying kinds all over england: from the king's garden party to the aylesbury education committee and the oxford union: to scotland for rectorial campaigns: dinners at the inner temple and the philosophical society: detection club dinners and mock trials, at one of which he was defendant on the charge of "perversely preferring the past to the present." besides the books discussed in the last chapter, the dickens' _introductions_ and the _collected poems_ were republished in 1933. other books were planned, including one on shakespeare. that same year gilbert's mother died. during her last illness frances was torn between london and beaconsfield, for her own mother was dying in a nursing home at beaconsfield, her mother-in-law at warwick gardens. once i drove with her between the two and she told me how she suffered at the difficulty of giving help to two dying agnostics. she told me on that drive how she knew her mother-in-law had not liked her but had lately made her very happy by saying she realised now that she had been the right wife for gilbert. to a cousin, nora grosjean, frances spoke too of how she and mrs. edward had drawn together in those last days and she added, "no mother ever thinks any woman good enough for her son." nora grosjean also reports, "aunt marie said to me more than once, 'i always respect frances--she kept gilbert out of debt.'" warwick gardens had been their home so long that vast accumulations of papers had piled up there. "mister ed." too had been in a sort keeper of the family archives. gilbert glanced at the mass and, as i mentioned at the beginning of this book, told the dustman to carry it off. half had already gone when dorothy collins arrived and saved the remainder. she piled it into her car and drove back to beaconsfield, gilbert keeping up a running commentary all the way on "the hoarding habits of women." the money that came to gilbert and frances after mrs. edward's death made it possible for them to plan legacies not only for friends and relatives but also for the catholic church in beaconsfield with which they had increasingly identified their lives and their interests. their special dream was that top meadow itself should be a convent--best of all a school--and in this hope they bequeathed it to the church. a year later another family event, this time a joyful one, took gilbert back to his youth; mollie kidd, daughter of annie firmin, became engaged to be married. she was a rather special young cousin to gilbert both because of the old affection for her mother and because she had played hostess to him in canada when her mother was ill. he wrote postmark. aug. 28, 1934 my dear mollie, i am afraid that chronologically, or by the clock, i am relatively late in sending you my most warm congratulations--and yet i do assure you that i write as one still thrilled and almost throbbing with good news. it would take pages to tell you all i feel about it: beginning with my first memory of your mother, when she was astonishingly like you, except that she had yellow plaits of hair down her back. i do not absolutely insist that you should now imitate her in this: but you would not be far wrong if you imitate her in anything. and so on--till we come to the superb rhetorical passage about you and the right fulfilment of youth. it would take pages: and that is why the pages are never written. we bad correspondents, we vile non-writers of letters, have a sort of secret excuse, that no one will ever listen to till the day of judgment, when all infinite patience will have to listen to so much. it is often because we think so much about our friends that we do not write to them--the letters would be too long. especially in the case of wretched writing men like me, who feel in their spare time that writing is loathsome and thinking about their friends pleasant. in the course of turning out about ten articles, on hitler, on humanism, on determinism, on distributism, on dollfuss and darwin and the devil knows what, there really are thoughts about real people that cross my mind suddenly and make me really happy in a real way: and one of them is the news of your engagement. please believe, dear mollie, that i am writing the truth, though i am a journalist: and give my congratulations to everyone involved. yours with love, g. k. chesterton. and in that year came two bits of public recognition of rather different kinds. he was elected to the athenaeum club under rule ii--honoris causa; and he and belloc were given by the pope the title of knight commander of st. gregory with star. during these years the paper had gone steadily on "at some considerable inconvenience" because, he said, he still felt it had a part to play. at home and abroad the scene had been steadily darkening. in july 1930, three years before hitler came to the chancellorship, we find the following among the notes of the week: when we are told that the ancient marshal hindenburg is now dictator of germany we suspect a note of exaggeration . . . hindenburg never was the dictator of anything and never will be. he is, however the man who keeps the seat warm for a dictator to come. hindenburg has led us back to frederick the great. . . . hindenburg has now given rein to the extreme nationalists, with the delivered provinces to support him in the flush of patriotism. and the extreme nationalists have only one policy: to reconstitute the unjust frontiers of germany, which europe fought to amend. in 1931 had come the customs union between germany and austria, the obvious impotence of the league of nations to restrain japan, the "national" government and falling sterling in england. less than two years later hitler was chancellor of germany, and in 1934 came the murder of dollfuss. chesterton wrote of the tragedy whereby the name germany was taken from austria and given to prussia. with dollfuss fell all that was left of the holy roman empire: the barbarians had invaded the center of our civilisation and like the turks besieging vienna had struck at its heart. he regarded hitler merely as the tool of prussianism. the new paganism was the logical outcome of the old prussianism: it was too the apotheosis of tyranny. "in the pagan state, in antiquity or modernity, you cannot appeal from tyranny to god; because the tyranny is the god." belloc solemnly warned our country that we were making inevitable "the death in great pain of innumerable young englishmen now boys. . . . it may be in two years or in five or in ten the blow will fall." (november 8, 1934.) yet even this seemed less terrible to chesterton than the state of mind then prevailing: the mood--nay the fever--of pacifism that demanded the isolation of england from europe's peril. he called it "mafficking for peace": a sort of imperialism that forgot that the atlantic is wider than the straits of dover and allowed lord beaverbrook to regard england as a part of canada. "englishmen who have felt that fever will one day look back on it with shame." "this most noble and generous nation," he wrote with a note of agony, "which lost its religion in the seventeenth century has lost its morals in the twentieth." the league of nations had, g. k. held, been thought at first to be a kind of pentecost but had in reality "come together to rebuild the tower of babel." and this because it had no common basis in religion. "humanitarianism does not unite humanity. for even one isolated man is half divine." but today man had despaired of man. "hope for the superman is another name for despair of man." reading a recent commentary in a review, i suddenly saw that politics and economics were not what mattered most in the paper. the commentary in question was to the effect that _g.k.'s weekly_ was inferior to the _new witness_ because g.k. had "only" general principles and ideas and no detailed inside knowledge of how the world of finance and politics was going. looking again through the articles i had marked as most characteristically his, i saw that they were not only chiefly about ideas and principles but also that they were mostly pure poetry. chesterton was, i believe, greatest and most permanently effective when he was moved, not by a passing irritation with the things that pass, but by the great emotions evoked by the eternal, emotions which in eternity alone will find full fruition. there are in the paper articles in which, appearing to speak out of his own knowledge, he is merely repeating information given him by belloc. and it was quite out of chesterton's character to write with certainty about what he did not know with certainty. hence this writing is his weakest. but the paper has, too, some of his strongest work and his mind as he drew to the end of life lingered on thoughts that had haunted him in its beginning. before the boer war had introduced me to politics, or worse still to politicians [he wrote in a christmas article in 1934], i had some vague and groping ideas of my own about a general view or vision of existence. it was a long time before i had anything worth calling a religion; what i had was not even sufficiently coherent to be called a philosophy. but it was, in a sense, a view of life; i had it in the beginning; and i am more and more coming back to it in the end. . . . my original and almost mystical conviction of the miracle of all existence and the essential excitement of all experience.* [* december 6, 1934.] this he felt must be the profound philosophy by which distributism should succeed and whereby he tested the modern world and found it wanting- something of which christmas is the best traditional symbol. it was then no more than a notion about the point at which extremes meet, and the most common thing becomes a cosmic and mystical thing. i did not want so much to alter the place and use of things as to weight them with a new dimension; to deepen them by going down to the potential nothing; to lift them to infinity by measuring from zero. the most logical form of this is in thanks to a creator; but at every stage i felt that such praises could never rise too high; because they could not even reach the height of our own thanks for unthinkable existence, or horror of more unthinkable non-existence. and the commonest things, as much as the most complex, could thus leap up like fountains of praise. . . . we shall need a sort of distributist psychology, as well as a distributist philosophy. that is partly why i am not content with plausible solutions about credit or corporative rule. we need a new (or old) theory and practice of pleasure. the vulgar school of panem et circenses only gives people circuses; it does not even tell them how to enjoy circuses. but we have not merely to tell them how to enjoy circuses. we have to tell them how to enjoy enjoyment.* [* december 13, 1934.] in attacking a special abuse, chesterton was most successful when he took the thought to a deeper depth. the following christmas (1935) he wrote: we live in a terrible time, of war and rumour of war. . . . international idealism in its effort to hold the world together . . . is admittedly weakened and often disappointed. i should say simply that it does not go deep enough. . . . if we really wish to make vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder we must see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family; and feel about hitler as men felt about herod. the modern world tended to gild pure gold and then try to scrape the gilt off the gingerbread, to paint the lily and then complain of its gaudiness. thus it had vulgarised christmas and now demanded the abolition of christmas because it was vulgar. it was the truth he had emphasised years ago in contrast with shaw: the world had spoilt the ideas but it was the christian ideas the world needed, if only in order to recover the human ideas. he went on- if we want to talk about poverty, we must talk about it as the hunger of a human being. . . . we must say first of the beggar, not that there is insufficient housing accommodation, but that he has not where to lay his head . . . we must talk of the human family in language as plain and practical and positive as that in which mystics used to talk of the holy family. we must learn again to use the naked words that describe a natural thing. . . . then we shall draw on the driving force of many thousand years, and call up a real humanitarianism out of the depths of humanity. i should like to collect all the essays and poems on christmas; he wrote several every year, yet each is different, each goes to the heart of his thought. as christopher morley says: "one of the simple greatnesses of g.k.c. shows in this, that we think of him instinctively toward christmas time."* some men, it may be, are best moved to reform by hate, but chesterton was best moved by love and nowhere does that love shine more clearly than in all he wrote about christmas. it will be for this philosophy, this charity, this poetry that men will turn over the pages of _g.k.'s weekly_ a century hence if the world still lasts. it is for us who are his followers to see that they are truly creative. destruction of evil is a great work but if it leaves only a vacuum, nature abhors that vacuum. creation is what matters for the future and chesterton's writing is creative. [* _mark twain quarterly_, spring, 1937.] so too with the radio. in this new medium his mind was alert to present his new-old ideas, his fundamental philosophy of life after some fresh fashion. a letter from broadcasting house (nov. 2, 1932) after his first talk records the delight of all who heard it: the building rings with your praises! i knew i was not alone in my delight over your first talk. i think even you in your modesty will find some pleasure in hearing what widespread interest there is in what you are doing. you bring us something very rare to the microphone. i am most anxious that you should be with us till after christmas. you will have a vast public by christmas and it is good that they should hear you. would you undertake six further fortnightly talks from january 16th onwards? he was asked to submit a manuscript but promised he should not be kept to the letter of it. "we should like you to make variations as these occur to you as you speak at the microphone. only so can the talk have a real show of spontaneity about it." "you will forgive me," one official writes, "if i insist on speaking to you personally. that is how i think of our relations." g.k. was unique and they told him so. a lot of reading was necessary for these talks--each one dealing with from four to ten books--and also a principle of selection. the principle gilbert chose for one series was historical: "literature lives by history. otherwise it exists: like trigonometry." in the fifth talk of the autumn series of 1934, he gives a general idea of what he has been attempting. this is the hardest job i have had in all these wireless talks; and i confront you in a spirit of hatred because of the toils i have endured on your behalf; but, after all, what are my sufferings compared to yours? incredible as it may seem to anybody who has heard these talks, they had originally a certain consistent plan. i dealt first with heroic and half-legendary stories, touched upon medieval chivalry, then on the party-heroes of elizabethan or puritan times; then on the eighteenth century and then the nineteenth. in this address i had meant to face the twentieth century; but i find it almost faceless, largely featureless; and, anyhow, very bewildering. i had meant to take books typical of the twentieth century as a book on steele is typical of the eighteenth or a book on rossetti of the nineteenth. and i have collected a number of most interesting twentieth century books, claiming to declare a twentieth-century philosophy; they really have a common quality; but i rather hesitate to define it. suppose i said that the main mark of the twentieth century in ethics as in economics, is bankruptcy. i fear you might think i was a little hostile in my criticism. suppose i said that all these books are marked by a brilliant futility. you might almost fancy that i was not entirely friendly to them. you would be mistaken. all of them are good; some of them are very good indeed. but the question does recur; what is the good of being good in that way? . . . mr. geoffrey west's curious "post war credo" has one commandment. he does say, he does shout, we might say, he does yell, that there must be no war . . . but he cannot impose his view because authority has gone; and he cannot prove his view; because reason has gone. so again it all comes back to taste. and i have enjoyed the banquet of these excellent books; but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. the peculiar half-official half-private direction of broadcasting house is based on a theory of strict impartiality towards all opinions and an attempt simply to give the public the programmes that the public wants. whether it is possible to maintain such a position is another question: that this is the theory there is no doubt--and one result is an abiding uncertainty of mind in most of the officials. broadcasting house hangs suspended in the air of public opinion and that fickle breath leaves them in no security as to any of their artists. the resulting sensitiveness became soothed as the months passed on and they got as near to trusting chesterton as they ever come with any one. true, letters came attacking him, but far more enthusiastically approving of him. and the attacks he answered often by private letters that turned the critic into a friend. some of his suggestions were not acceptable. he was warned off a proposed humorous talk about dean inge and bishop barnes in a series called "speeches that never happened"--("subject too serious," "avoid religion"). but he was later asked to talk in a series on freedom as a catholic and also to debate with bertrand russell on "who should bring up our children." in this debate he was especially brilliant, says maurice baring; and another friend wrote "i have just been listening not without joy to your putting it across mr. bertrand russell. . . . "_afterthought:_ what a mincer! it struck me very much, having read much of his writing with interest. it just shows that the spoken word still has something that the written one can't convey. is there a mincing mind, of which a mincing voice is the outward and visible warning?" it was interesting that the last few years of gilbert's life should have furnished this unique opportunity of contact through the spoken word between him and the english people. his voice on the radio had none of the defects that marred it in a hall: his material was far better arranged, his delivery perfect. he seemed to be there beside the listener, talking in amity and exchanging confidences. the morning after his death edward macdonald passed a barber's shop off chancery lane. the man was lathering a customer's face but recognising mr. macdonald, left the customer and ran out brush in hand. "i just want to say i was sorry to hear the news," he said. "he was a grand man." mr. macdonald asked him if he knew chesterton well. "never read a word he wrote," the barber answered. "but i always listened to him on the wireless. he seemed to be sitting beside me in the room." "that man," edward macdonald comments, "emphasised what i still think: that g.k.c. in another year or so would have become the dominating voice from broadcasting house." in 1934 gilbert had jaundice and on his recovery he started with frances and dorothy on one of those trips that were his greatest pleasure. they went to rome--it was holy year--and thence to sicily, intending to go on to palestine. at syracuse, however, gilbert became really ill with inflammation of the nerves of the neck and shoulders. they stayed five weeks in syracuse, gave up the trip to palestine and returned home by malta. gilbert and frances were to have dined at admiralty house but he was too unwell to dine out and only came up one afternoon. lady fisher remembers going to see them at the osborne hotel. gilbert was sitting on a rickety basket chair, obviously in pain and talking a good deal in order to hide it. she sympathised with him for the cold weather, his obvious physical misery, and the discomfort of his chair. "you must never sympathise with me," gilbert answered, "for i can always turn every chair into a story." the next year they motored in france and italy and gilbert records in the _autobiography_ an experience in a french cafã© when he felt a rare thrill--not in talking on the radio but in listening--on a day that "was dateless, even for my dateless life; for i had forgotten time and had no notion of anything anywhere, when in a small french town i strolled into a cafã© noisy with french talk. wireless songs wailed unnoted; which is not surprising, for french talk is much better than wireless. and then, unaccountably, i heard a voice speaking in english; and a voice i had heard before. for i heard the words, '. . . wherever you are, my dear people, whether in this country or beyond the sea,' and i remembered monarchy and an ancient cry; for it was the king; and that is how i kept the jubilee." after he got home i remember how delightedly gilbert quoted the captions on two banners hung in the heart of the london slums. one read, "down with capitalism--god save the king." the other read, "lousy but loyal." he knew that it was true and it served to increase the passionate quality of his pity. patient he could be for himself, but the lot of the poor aroused in him a terrible anger--and in a broadcast on liberty he gave that anger vent. for worse than the presence of lice in our slums was the absence of liberty. he would gladly, he said, have spoken merely as an englishman but he had been asked to speak as a catholic, and therefore, "i am going to point out that catholicism created english liberty; that the freedom has remained exactly in so far as the faith has remained; and that where it is true that all our faith has gone, all our freedom is going. if i do this, i cannot ask most of you to agree with me; if i did anything else, i could not ask any of you to respect me." other speakers in the series had dwelt on the liberty secured to englishmen by our parliamentary and juridical system, both, he noted of catholic origin. but in his eyes even that liberty was being imperilled today where it was not lost, while the most important freedom of all--freedom to handle oneself and one's daily life--had disappeared for the mass of the people. the liberty so widely praised that followed the reformation has been a limited liberty because it was only a literary liberty. . . . you always talked about verbal liberty; you hardly ever talked about vital liberty . . . the faddist was free to preach his fads; but the free man was no longer free to protect his freedom. . . . monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, responsible forms of rule, have collapsed under plutocracy, which is irresponsible rule. and this has come upon us because we departed from the old morality in three essential points. first, we supported notions against normal customs. second, we made the state top-heavy with a new and secretive tyranny of wealth. and third, we forgot that there is no faith in freedom without faith in free will. a servile fatalism dogs the creed of materialism; because nothing, as dante said, less than the generosity of god could give to man, after all ordinary orderly gifts, the noblest of all things, which is liberty. the thoughts that had thronged and pressed on him for half a century found final expression in these broadcasts. most of all in two talks: one given only three months before his death in a series entitled "the spice of life," the other two years earlier in one called "seven days hard." he was haunted by the ingratitude of humanity. as in his boyhood, he saw the wonder of the world that god has given to the children of men and he saw them unconscious of that wonder. what did a week mean for most of them? seven dull days. what did it really mean? "what has really happened during the last seven days and nights? seven times we have been dissolved into darkness as we shall be dissolved into dust; our very selves, so far as we know, have been wiped out of the world of living things; and seven times we have been raised alive like lazarus, and found all our limbs and senses unaltered, with the coming of the day." seven days of human life, the meaning of the phrase, "the spice of life," both brought the same recurring motif that "a great many people are at this moment paying rather too much attention to the spice of life, and rather too little attention to life." not in any "distraction from life is the secret we are all seeking, the secret of enjoying life. i am perfectly certain that all our world will end in despair unless there is some way of making the mind itself, the ordinary thoughts we have at ordinary times, more healthy and more happy than they seem to be just now, to judge by most modern novels and poems. . . ." a week had never been for chesterton just seven days hard, although he had worked hard enough. he had enjoyed the spice of life, he had liked beer and skittles and the distractions of life and its high points of achievement. but it is much more important to remember that i have been intensely and imaginatively happy in the queerest because the quietest places. i have been filled with life from within in a cold waiting-room, in a deserted railway junction. i have been completely alive sitting on an iron seat under an ugly lamp-post at a third rate watering place. in short, i have experienced the mere excitement of existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as ditchwater. and, by the way, is ditchwater dull? naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun. the younger generation were despairing of life in the face of life's manifold gifts. chesterton as a youth had revolted against the pessimism of his elders, now he revolted as an old man against a young generation corroded by a yet more poisonous pessimism. "the hollow men" t. s. eliot had called a poem and in it came the lines this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper. forgive me if i say in my old world fashion, that i'm damned if i ever felt like that . . . i knew that the world was perishable and would end, but i did not think it would end with a whimper, but, if anything, with a trump of doom . . . i will even be so indecently frivolous as to burst into song, and say to the young pessimists: some sneer; some snigger; some simper; in the youth where we laughed, and sang. and they may end with a whimper but we will end with a bang. his last message for this generation was the sound of a trumpet calling us to resurrection. a dead world must find life again, must go back to the meaning of the book of genesis at which it had learnt to sneer: must realise a week once more with--"the grandeur of that conception, by which a week has become a wonderful and mystical thing in which man imitates god in his labour and in his rest." through his call sounds a note of most solemn warning. unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which moderns call a dull life, our whole civilisation will be in ruins in about fifteen years. whenever anybody proposes anything really practical, to solve the economic evil today, the answer always is that the solution would not work, because the modern town populations would think life dull. that is because they are entirely unacquainted with life. they know nothing but distractions from life; dreams which may be found in the cinema; that is, brief oblivions of life. . . . unless we can make daybreak and daily bread and the creative secrets of labour interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our civilisation a fatigue which is the one disease from which civilisations do not recover. so died the great pagan civilisation; of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods.* [* _the listener_, january 31, 1934.] this splendid world that god has given us, and the furniture of it as the writer of genesis saw it in his vision, has in it the material of happiness in labour and in the true end of labour. "for the true end of all creation is completion; and the true end of all completion is contemplation." chapter xxxii last days dorothy told me one day in 1935 that gilbert had written the beginning of an autobiography some years before but had laid it aside. she had, she said, a superstitious feeling about urging him to get on with it--as though the survey of his life and the end of his life would somehow be tied together. i urged her to get over this feeling because of all the book would mean to the world. after this talk she got out the manuscript and laid it on gilbert's desk. he read what he had written and immediately set about dictating the rest of the book. early in 1936 he told a group of friends that the book was finished. one of them said "nunc dimittis" and edward macdonald, who was present, commented: "the words were chilling, though he seemed to be in fairly good health. but certainly he was tired. . . ." the book showed no sign of fatigue. high-spirited and intensely amusing, it seemed to promise many more--for into almost old age he had carried the imagination and energy in which as a very young man we saw his resemblance to the youthful dickens. reviewing his life with the thread of thanksgiving that had been his clue throughout, he looked back on it as "indefensibly happy" and it was in truth a rich and full human existence. yet father vincent, who knew him intimately, speaks of him in these last years as heartbroken by public events, as suffering with the pains of creation. "he was crucified to his thought. like st. thomas he was never away from his thought. a fellow friar had to care for thomas, to feed him 'sicut nutrix' because of his absorption in his thought." thus father vincent saw frances cherishing gilbert both mind and body. a friend, protesting vehemently against the phrase "crucified to his thought" says, "it was his life-long beatitude to observe and ponder and conclude." of his own so-called paradoxes gilbert was wont to maintain that it was god not he, who made them, and here we have surely one of the paradoxes of human life. intense vitality, joy in living, vigor of creative thought bring to their owners immense happiness _and_ acute suffering. is it not a part of the most fundamental of all antinomies--the greatness and the littleness of man? created for eternity and prisoned in time, we have no perfect joy in this world, and the reaching upward and outward of the mind is at once the keenest joy and the fiercest pain--rather as we talk of growing pains. only gilbert loved to grow so much that he would not think of the pain. "you must never pity me," he said to lady fisher, and all through his life he was saying and meaning "you must never pity me." but while he was writing the _autobiography_ and giving thanks for his life, its last months were shadowed by trials especially heavy for a man of his imagination and temperament. for now more than ever his thought was not allowed to concentrate on those realities where the joy of contemplation overpowers the pain of growth. he loved italy--even more than france he says in one letter--yet he could not but condemn the invasion of abyssinia. the shadow of the spanish war loomed on the horizon and behind it a darker shadow. in his political thinking chesterton was haunted by the present war. then too, while public controversy did not trouble him at all, he hated any breach of the peace within the ranks of his own small army. the fights among the staff of the paper about distributism had been as nothing compared with those about abyssiania. there are leading articles taking one line and letters in the cockpit in violent opposition. maurice reckitt writes in _as it happened:_ in the last autumn of his life i wrote to him privately in distress at the line which the _weekly_ was taking on abyssinia, and saying that i felt that i ought to leave the board, as i was so much out of sympathy with this. i received this reply, from which i have deleted only some personal references: "top meadow, beaconsfield 19th september 1935. "my dear mr. maurice reckitt, "i do hope you will forgive me for the delay in answering your most important letter, involving as it does tragic dooms of separation which i hope need not be fulfilled. . . . i should like to ask you to defer your decision at least until you have seen the next week's number of the paper, in which i expand further the argument i have used in the current number and bring it, i think, rather nearer to your natural and justifiable point of view. between ourselves, and without prejudice to anybody, i do think myself that there ought to have been a more definite condemnation of the attack on abyssinia. the whole thing happened while i was having a holiday. . . . "very shortly, the mortal danger, to me, is the rehabilitation of capitalism, in spite of the slump, which will certainly take the form of a hypocritical patriotism and glorification of england, at the expense of italy or anybody else. for the moment i only want you to understand that this is the mountainous peril that towers in my own mind. "yours always, "g. k. chesterton." three months later in _g.k.'s weekly_ he wrote about the whole matter in an article in which he treated the question as largely one of proportion. not enough was being said in england of her own or the league's position about japan's attack on china: too much (in proportion) about italy in abyssinia. "if the league of nations really were an impartial judicial authority; and if (what is about as probable) i were one of the judges; and if the abyssinian case were brought before me, i should decide instantly against italy. i have again and again in this place stated in the strongest words the particular case against italy." he was against italy in abyssinia as he had been against england in south africa. but "i should not be bound to rejoice at the prussians riding into paris because it might prevent the british riding into pretoria." "tragic dooms of separation" on public issues were not the only trouble with _g.k.'s weekly:_ the staff were also engaged in violent personal quarrels about which gilbert was asked to take sides--was even bitterly reproached by one for supposedly favouring another. it would be hard today to say what it was all about, but two of the contestants have told me since that had they had the least notion how ill he was getting they would have died rather than so distress him. for it was a real and a very deep distress. it may be remembered that miss dunham noted how gilbert used to make a mysterious sign in the air as he lit his cigar. that sign, says dorothy, was the sign of the cross. long ago he had written of human life as something not grey and drab but shot through with strong and even violent colours that took the pattern of the cross. he saw the cross signed by god on the trees as their branches spread to right and left: he saw it signed by man as he shaped a paling or a door post. the habit grew upon him of making it constantly: in the air with his match, as he lit his cigar, over a cup of coffee. as he entered a room he would make on the door the sign of our redemption. no, we must never pity him even when his life was pressed upon by that sign which stands for joy through pain. those nearest to him grew anxious quite early in 1936. he was overtired and working with the weary insistence that over-fatigue can bring. the remedy so often successful of a trip to the continent was tried. they went to lourdes and lisieux and he seemed better and sang a good deal in his tuneless voice as dorothy drove them through the lanes of france. from lisieux he wrote a pencilled letter, long and almost illegible "under the shadow of the shrine"--trying to reconcile the disputants with himself and with one another. the summer was cold and bleak and the tour was all too short. home again his mind seemed not to grip as well as usual and he began to fall asleep during his long hours of work. the doctor was called and thought very seriously of the state of his heart--that heart which many years ago another doctor had called too small for his enormous frame. the thought of a chesterton whose heart was too small presents a paradox in his own best manner. to edward macdonald who had missed a message that he was too ill to be visited, gilbert talked in his old fashion and promised a poem he had just thought of for the paper--on st. martin of tours. "the point is that he was a true distributist. he gave _half_ his cloak to the beggar." soon after this he fell into a sort of reverie from which awaking he said: "the issue is now quite clear. it is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side." frances and he had both thought his recovery in 1916 was a miracle. "i did not dare," said frances, "to pray for another miracle." monsignor smith anointed him and then father vincent arrived in response to a message from frances which he thought meant she wanted him to see gilbert for the last time. taken to the sick room he sang over the dying man the salve regina. this hymn to our lady is sung in the dominican order over every dying friar and it was surely fitting for the biographer of st. thomas and the ardent suppliant of our lady: "salve regina, mater misericordiae, vita dulcedo et spes nostra salve. . . . et jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui nobis post hoc exsilium ostende. . . ." gilbert's pen lay on the table beside his bed and father vincent picked it up and kissed it. it was june 14, 1936, the sunday within the octave of corpus christi, the same feast as his reception into the church fourteen years earlier. the introit for that day's mass was printed on his memorial card, so that, as father ignatius rice noted with a smile, even his memorial card had a joke about his size: the lord became my protector and he brought me forth into a large place. he saved me because he was well pleased with me. i will love thee o lord my strength. the lord is my firmament and my refuge and my deliverer. to these words from the mass, frances added walter de la mare's tribute: knight of the holy ghost, he goes his way wisdom his motley, truth his loving jest; the mills of satan keep his lance in play, pity and innocence his heart at rest. the day of the funeral was one of blazing sunshine. "one of your days," gilbert would have said to frances. grey days were his, when nature's colours he said were brightest against her more sombre background, sunny days were hers for she loved a blue blazing sky. the little church near the railway was filled to overflowing by his friends from london, from all over england, from france even and from america. all beaconsfield wanted to honour him, so the funeral procession instead of taking the direct route passed through the old town where he had so often sat in the barber's shop and chatted with his fellow citizens. at top meadow we gathered to talk. frances a few of us saw for a little while in her own room. with that utter self-forgetfulness that was hers she said to her sister-in-law, "it was so much worse for you. you had cecil for such a short time." later mgr. knox preached in westminster cathedral to a crowd far vaster. both frances and cardinal hinsley received telegrams from cardinal pacelli (now pope pius xii). to cardinal hinsley he cabled "holy father deeply grieved death mr. gilbert keith chesterton devoted son holy church gifted defender of the catholic faith. his holiness offers paternal sympathy people of england assures prayers dear departed, bestows apostolic benediction." this telegram was read to the vast crowd in the cathedral and found an echo in the hearts of his fellow countrymen. hugh kingsmill wrote to cyril clemens: "my friend hesketh pearson was staying with me when i read of chesterton's death. i told him of it through the bathroom door, and he sent up a hollow groan which must have echoed that morning all over england." it was with reason that the pope offered his sympathy not to catholics alone, but to all the people of england. to the policeman who said at the funeral, "we'd all have been here if we could have got off duty. he was a grand man." to the man at the _times_ office who broke in on the announcement of his death, "good god. that isn't _our_ chesterton, is it?" to the barber who had to leave his customer unshaved that he might talk to edward macdonald. to all of us, his friends, on whom the loss lay almost unbearably heavy. to those for whom his presence would have pierced and lightened even the dark shadow of the war. to all the people of england. once more a pope had bestowed upon an englishman the title defender of the faith. the first man to receive it had been henry viii and the words are still engraved on the coins of england. the secular press would not print the telegram in full because it bestowed upon a subject a royal title. after gilbert's death frances tried to take up life again. she visited her cousins in germany, a university professor and his english wife, who were undergoing the persecution of the swastika. she was deeply moved by their suffering and the peril they stood in. home again she surrounded herself more than ever with children, taking a catechism class and encouraging her small scholars to come to top meadow where her garden also helped her towards a difficult peace and serenity, rendered harder by the struggle with ill health. soon we began to realise that the physical weakness, which all her courage could not overcome, was more than merely her old malady. "what did frances die of?" bernard shaw wrote to me. "was it of widowhood?" in fact it was a most painful cancer heroically endured. she was cared for by dorothy and presently by the nuns of the bon secours. her friends visited her as they were allowed. father vincent mcnabb, after a talk of almost an hour, noted how never once did she speak of herself or of her suffering. her concerns were for dorothy, for the church, and for gilbert's memory; eric gill's monument, the biography, the permanence of his own writing. she survived him little more than two years. near the end, from the face of a dying woman shrunken with pain, we still could see those "great heavenly eyes that seem to make the truth at the heart of things almost too terribly simple and naked for the sons of flesh."* [* letter from gilbert, see [chapter viii].] appendix a an earlier chesterton both the _autobiography_ and _prison life_ of george laval chesterton are worth reading. there is conscious humour: we feel it might be our own chesterton when we hear the captain describing himself as "laughing immoderately" because he had made a fool of himself and others were laughing at him. there is unconscious humour, especially in the astonishing style, full of such phrases as "i was the most obnoxious to peril," or "something not far removed from impunity stalked abroad." captain chesterton started life as a soldier. during the peninsular war his regiment was stationed at cartagena. "it was a subject of deep mortification to most of us to be thus supinely occupied in this lone garrison, thereby being debarred from the peninsular medal, and hence a widespread disaffection on that most tender subject which no reasoning has been equal to dispel." however, later he saw a good deal of active service, being in the war of 1812, in the course of which the battle of bladensburg was fought and washington fell to the british arms. "the astonished slaves," he says, describing the advance on washington, "rested from their work in the fields contiguous; and the awe-struck peasants and yeomen of this portion of america beheld with perturbation the tremendous preparations to devastate their blooming country." to the smaller professional armies of that day peace was a misfortune, and in his quaint style captain chesterton describes the demonstrations of joy on the part of himself and his fellow officers at the escape of napoleon from elba, foreseeing, as he frankly observes, "a scope for further adventure and hope of personal advancement." this hope was short-lived and we next see him fighting in the british legion of a rebel south american army against spain. the general mismanagement of this expedition, and the fact that the republicans killed all their prisoners "was a death blow to all my past enthusiasm in the republican cause." many british officers "participating with me in the detestation for cold-blooded butchery, conspired from that moment to elude this detested service. . . . mark ye who delight in transcendant liberalism . . . the cruel exigencies of such a warfare." in his acceptance of "transcendant liberalism," yet his determination to see truly what passed before his eyes and when needful to change his standpoint, this earlier chesterton was much like the later. he had not the genius of gilbert, he could not see so far, but he shared his refusal to be blinded by custom, theory or even patriotism. in his accounts of army life he had commented fearlessly on the cruelty of the punishments and described his fellow officers as made ill by seeing a private receive five hundred lashes. he had noted corruption in the "train service" which "was consequently divested of its genuine claim to honour." fãªted by the planters of jamaica, he had yet spoken with horror of their slave ownership. now he was appointed governor of a prison in england and here began the great work of his life in a frontal attack on the corruptions he discovered. the yardsmen did a secret traffic in all the goods forbidden in the prison, there were caches of tobacco, spirits and such things under the pavements, the weaker prisoners were robbed by the stronger. the women's and men's quarters were so arranged that by connivance of the jailors frequent meetings took place. on one of these occasions captain chesterton himself appeared: my hands were seized with tender empressement, and i was addressed as "my love," "my darling," "my dear creature:" and all the conventional endearments of the pavã© were showered upon me. i had to struggle for enlargement, and beat a hasty retreat, quite confounded by my initiation into "prison discipline." and the consternation occasioned by this discovery became perfectly electric.* [* _revelations of prison life_, pp. 84-85.] attempts to bribe him were followed by attempts to kill him, but he stood firm. mrs. fry invoked his aid to improve the home conditions to which the prisoners had to return. chesterton turned to dickens and to dickens's friend, miss coutts, in defiance of a narrow-minded magistrate who perversely insisted (as was by cynical interpretation literally too true) that miss coutts had no right to confer with prisoners within those walls, nor was it "to be tolerated that mr. charles dickens should walk into the prison whenever he pleased."* [* ibid., p. 186.] from cold bath fields the reforms begun by captain chesterton and warmly seconded by dickens spread to other prisons, "although (he declares) i consented to forego pecuniary advantage, i cling the more tenaciously to the credit of my past exertions; when, beset with fraud, ferocity, and moral pollution, i achieved a triumph fraught with civilizing influences."* [* ibid., p. v.] appendix b prize poem written at st. paul's this is the only version i have been able to find. across the top is written in another hand: "this is not exactly the same as given in the prize poem." the difference is probably slight. st. francis xavier the apostle of the indies he left his dust, by all the myriad tread of yon dense millions trampled to the strand, or 'neath some cross forgotten lays his head where dark seas whiten on a lonely land: he left his work, what all his life had planned, a waning flame to flicker and to fall, mid the huge myths his toil could scarce withstand, and the light died in temple and in hall, and the old twilight sank and settled over all. he left his name, a murmur in the east, that dies to silence amid older creeds, with which he strove in vain: the fiery priest of faiths less fitted to their ruder needs: as some lone pilgrim, with his staff and beads, mid forest-brutes whom ignorance makes tame, he dwelt, and sowed an eastern church's seeds he reigned a teacher and a priest of fame: he died and dying left a murmur and a name. he died: and she, the church that bade him go, yon dim enchantress with her mystic claim, has ringed his forehead with her aureole-glow, and monkish myths, and all the whispered fame of miracle, has clung about his name: so rome has said: but we, what answer we who in grim indian gods and rites of shame o'er all the east the teacher's failure see, his eastern church a dream, his toil a vanity. this then we say: as time's dark face at last moveth its lips of thunder to decree the doom that grew through all the murmuring past to be the canon of the times to be: no child of truth or priest of progress he yet not the less a hero of his wars striving to quench the light he could not see, and god, who knoweth all that makes and mars, judges his soul unseen which throbs among the stars. god only knows, man failing in his choice, how far apparent failure may succeed, god only knows what echo of his voice lives in the cant of many a fallen creed, god only gives the labourer his meed for all the lingering influence widely spread broad branching into many a word and deed when dim oblivion veils the fountain-head; so lives and lingers on the spirit of the dead. this then we say: let all things further rest and this brave life, with many thousands more be gathered up in the eternal's breast in that dim past his love is bending o'er healing all shattered hopes and failure sore: since he had bravely looked on death and pain for what he chose to worship and adore cast boldly down his life for loss or gain in the eternal lottery: not to be in vain. appendix c the chestertons the composition of _the chestertons_ is not without interest for the student of legendary literature. by a curious paradox the book had to be strikingly untrue to be accepted as true, since the jokes about sisters-in-law are legion, so that mere commonplace shafts of what is called "feminine spite" would have gained little credence. yet on the other hand, mrs. cecil chesterton was able (to quote _the mikado_) to get from her husband a good deal of "corroborative detail designed to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." of these details some are true, some false, all arranged to support the main untruth of frances and gilbert's relation to one another. the thesis of the book is that gilbert was an unhappy and frustrated man (a) because frances shrank from consummating their marriage, and (b) because she dragged him away from his london life and friends to bury him in a middle class suburb. i confess that i am victorian enough heartily to dislike writing this appendix. yet it is necessary, for many who read _the chestertons_ have supposed that a story told by so near a connection must be true. the ground was laid for the introduction of the legend by the tale of the red haired phantom, if i may describe it in the terms of a ghost story. that ghost was easy to lay (see introduction). next comes the odd account of gilbert and frances' honeymoon and of the years that followed. it is of course possible that the first night of their marriage was not happy--especially in the victorian days of reticence which left wife and even possibly husband unprepared for life together: (though this did not normally prevent a happy marriage and a pack of children afterwards). but i find it impossible to imagine cecil chesterton, like the bridesmaid on the honeymoon, receiving and passing on such a story as that of gilbert "quivering with self-reproach" so that after the first night he "dared not even contemplate a repetition. . . . gilbert, young and vital, was condemned to a pseudo-monastic life, in which he lived with a woman but never enjoyed one." (p. 282) there is a psychological reason for thinking this story especially improbable and a physical reason for dismissing it as actually impossible. a white horse had from his childhood been for gilbert the supreme sign of romance, and he had chosen to spend the first night of his honeymoon at the white horse inn. from his honeymoon he wrote home that he had "a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife. what more can any man want?" ten years later he wrote _the ballad of the white horse_ and dedicated it to frances, saying, "o go you onward, where you are shall honour and laughter be. past purpled forest and pearled foam, god's winged pavilion free to roam, your face, that is a wandering home, a flying home for me." and over thirty years later he wrote again of beginning his honeymoon under the shadow of the white horse, and compared it to a trip to fairyland. can any human being read the record of this recurrent motif and reconcile it with mrs. cecil's picture? let me refer again to _the ballad of the white horse_. is it conceivable that any man should write after ten years of frustration and unhappiness: up through an empty house of stars being what heart you are, up the inhuman steeps of space as on a staircase go in grace carrying the firelight on your face beyond the loneliest star. this is not the way a man writes to a neurotic cold-hearted woman who has made a hermit of him! mrs. cecil was of course never in the intimacy of the family. she only married cecil in 1917--by which date gilbert and frances had been married sixteen years--and before that she was merely an acquaintance. but frances's intimates could have told her how absurd her story was, for by a rare good fortune the operation frances underwent to enable her to bear children is itself evidence one could hardly have hoped for in a matter which civilized people are not much given to discussing. frances talked of the operation to monsignor o'connor, to dorothy collins and to annie firmin, and i have quoted the doctor's letter about it (see above, [chapter xv]). it was an abiding tragedy for both husband and wife that it was unsuccessful. frances would have shrunk from no suffering in her passionate wish for a child. there is another curiosity in the legend: gilbert, despite this story, was apparently perfectly happy in london during the _first eight years of marriage:_ it was only after the removal to beaconsfield and in almost middle life that he began to be "frustrated." poor frances: what a picture of her had been proposed for posterity: so powerful she could waft gilbert away from london and from his friends, could force him to make her his banker and reduce him to a "bounty" strictly limited to half-a-crown, yet so powerless that "she had to sign" the cheques for _g.k.'s weekly_, much as she hated it. her poetry (described as "quite charming") is spoken of as appearing in "little parish magazines"--the only papers she cared to read owing to her implacable hatred for fleet street. it is hard to picture frances with an implacable hatred for anything, and it will be remembered that she actually begged father o'connor to leave gilbert to be "a jolly journalist." the periodicals in which her poems appeared were _the observer_, _the sunday times_, _the daily chronicle,_ the _westminster gazette_ and _the new witness_. personally i have never much admired frances's verse, but a professional journalist might have been quite pleased at "making" all these papers. not one poem ever appeared in a parish magazine so far as either dorothy or i have been able to ascertain. the point is not a very important one but the sneer is symptomatic. a curious magic pervades _the chestertons:_ succulent sausages appear in the kitchen at overstrand mansions, and flowing torrents of beer, so that gilbert can steal away from an unsympathetic wife to consume them with his fleet street friends. a studio materialises in a meadow at beaconsfield. can we imagine gilbert cooking or even ordering sausages, getting beer to the flat, designing or discovering the studio? anyone thinking about what really happened would realise that frances ordered the beer and sausages, frances built the studio. but that is not the sort of thought we are to think about frances. about her we are told: that she always wore the wrong colors: that she gave gilbert insufficient and indigestible food: that she did not know what work meant: that mrs. belloc thought gilbert ought to beat her: that she kept the journalists away when gilbert was dying (in point of fact both telephone and door bell were so near the sick room that the use of both had to be avoided): that she did not give her guests enough to eat at his funeral: that she actually sought the quiet of her own room instead of staying downstairs to receive condolences when her husband's coffin had just been lowered into the grave. with all this spate of detail, we are not told that frances left â£1000 to mrs. cecil plus â£500 for her cecil houses. even if i could have ignored the attack on frances, i should be obliged as his biographer to deal with the attack on gilbert--more subtly but no less certainly made. the story of the marriage affects gilbert as much as frances, and the book culminates in the final assertion that his drinking killed him. here are the comments (sent to me by dorothy) of the doctor who attended gilbert and frances from 1919 until they died: "today dr. bakewell came in and answered the questions about the book which we asked him. "(1) he says that the idea that g.k. was better when drinking in fleet street because the stimulus of conversation would eat up effects of the alcohol is absolute nonsense. it would have just as bad an effect under any conditions. dr. bakewell said that g.k. was his patient for nearly twenty years and during that time he never treated him for alcoholism or saw any trace of it, though in an absentminded way he was always liable to drink too much of anything if it were there--even water. "without the 'understanding, loving, tactful care' of frances he would have died twenty years before. certainly if he had racketted around fleet street any longer. "dr. bakewell said gilbert was 'perfectly happy in beaconsfield and not in any way frustrated. there was no frustration of any kind and no longing for london life or friends.' he was very intimate with gilbert and would have known if there had been. "(2) the doctor says that gilbert died of a failing heart owing to fatty degeneration, leading to dropsy. "(3) frances had arthritis of the spine. (not curvature as stated by mrs. cecil.) "the doctor said that he put him on the water wagon several times and when this was done gilbert observed the rule most meticulously. dr. bakewell said that he did not do it very often because he did not consider that drink was in any way affecting gilbert's health during the greater part of the time he knew him." in a later conversation he added that when he did forbid alcohol at certain periods it was simply to make liquid less attractive, as too much of even water was bad for gilbert. the statement made by mrs. cecil that drinking in london was not so serious because the talk and excitement among friends would carry off the effects, is thought by doctors almost comic. dr. bakewell denies it absolutely: dr. pocock who, it will be remembered, attended gilbert during his illness of 1914-15 says, "absolute nonsense: would probably have been worse in london." he adds also, "i cannot understand why such an attack was made upon g.k. from my personal observation he owed a very great deal to mrs. g.k. who greatly helped his restoration to health." one can get one's pen'orth of fun out of the chapter on the exile of beaconsfield when one remembers the true story of those years: rome, jerusalem, u.s.a., poland, france, spain, malta, lectures all over england, lively contests for the lord rectorship of three universities, london again and again--for editing, mock trials, debates and distributist beanos--and frequently in furnished flats which frances would take for the winter months. one can only suppose that mrs. cecil was so little intimate with them that she did not realise all this. and then beaconsfield itself--parties in the studio; people down from london, visitors from poland, france, america, italy, holland and other countries; the eric gills, the bernard shaws, the garvins, the emile cammaerts and others living in the neighborhood; the guest room always occupied by some intimate. meanwhile the books poured out of the little study. mrs. cecil thinks gilbert hardly ever again wrote a masterpiece after leaving battersea, yet in support of this idea she lists as masterpieces _the ball and the cross_ (written at beaconsfield), _lepanto_ (written at beaconsfield), _magic_ (written at beaconsfield), _stevenson_ (written at beaconsfield) and _the ballad of the white horse_(mainly written at beaconsfield). of all the books she mentions in this connection only three were written in london! and she admits that the world at large did not share her view of the sterilizing effect of beaconsfield, for she writes, "meanwhile his fame grew wider, his sales greater. in exile he ruled a literary world."* [* p. 83.] gilbert left to mrs. cecil chesterton sums equal to those later left to her by frances--â£1000 for herself and â£500 for cecil houses. the ingratitude that omitted all mention of these benefactions struck the imagination of several of the chesterton family as the worst feature in the book. but to gilbert and frances the giving of money even in their own lifetime was a slight matter. they had given something far greater. why is the memory of cecil chesterton alive today? because of his brother's labors. why is it possible for mrs. cecil to declare that he was the greater editor, to imply that he was the greater man? because gilbert kept saying so. never has such devotion been shown by one brother to the memory of another: never has the greater man exalted the lesser to such a pedestal. we are told in _the chestertons_ that frances sacrificed both gilbert and herself on the altar of her family. truly there was much self-sacrifice in the lives of both to family, friends and causes. they did not feel it as self-sacrifice to enrich the lives of others even at cost to themselves. but the heaviest cost they paid lay in the years of a toil that was literally killing gilbert while frances watched him growing old too soon and straining his heart with work crushingly heavy: and if there was a single altar for that supreme sacrifice it was no other than the altar of cecil's memory. acknowledgments i am exceedingly grateful to the following publishers for permission to quote from these books: dodd, mead & co.: _the man who was thursday; orthodoxy; the napoleon of notting hill; heretics; george bernard shaw; the ball and the cross; the poet and the lunatic; alarms and discursions; the ballad of the white horse; what's wrong with the world; manalive; sidelights on new london and newer york; the uses of diversity; the history of england; irish impressions; collected poems; the queen of seven swords; the everlasting man; cobbett; outline of sanity; tales of the long bow; what i saw in america; the thing; the defendant; the barbarism of berlin: or the appetite of tyranny; eugenics and other evils; collected poems; g. k. chesterton, a criticism_ (by cecil chesterton). doubleday doran: _st. francis of assisi; the years between_. e. p. dutton & co., inc.: _criticisms and appreciations of the works of charles dickens_. farrar & rinehart: _chaucer_. the macmillan company: _robert browning; the catholic church and conversion_. oxford university press: _the victorian age in literature_. g. p. putnam's sons: _rufus isaacs, first marquess of reading_. university of notre dame: _the arena_. "gehazi," by rudyard kipling, from _the years between_, copyright 1914, 1919 by rudyard kipling, is reprinted by permission of mrs. bambridge and doubleday doran and co., inc., of new york, and the macmillan company, of canada, publishers. bibliography in this list i have given dates of earliest publication. in some cases publication in england preceded that in the united states. 1900. _greybeards at play_. r. b. johnson. reprinted 1930. _the wild knight and other poems_. included in _collected poems_. 1901. _the defendant_. 1902. _g. f. watts_. _twelve types_. 1903. _robert browning_. 1904. _the napoleon of notting hill_. 1905. _the club of queer trades_. _heretics_. 1906. _charles dickens_. 1907. _the man who was thursday_. 1908. _orthodoxy_. _all things considered_. 1909. _george bernard shaw_. _the ball and the cross_. _tremendous trifles_. _defence of nonsense_. 1910. _what's wrong with the world?_ _william blake_. _alarms and discursions_. _five types_. 1911. _the innocence of father brown_. _appreciations and criticisms of the works of charles dickens_. _the ballad of the white horse_. 1912. _manalive_. _a miscellany of men_. _simplicity of tolstoy_. _the victorian age in literature_. 1913. _magic_. a play. 1914. _the wisdom of father brown_. _the flying inn_. _the barbarism of berlin_. 1915. _poems_. _wine, water, and song_. reprint of poems from _the flying inn_. _the crimes of england_. _letters to an old garibaldian_. 1916. _a shilling for my thoughts_. 1917. _a short history of england_. _utopia of usurers_. 1919. _irish impressions_. 1920. _the uses of diversity_. _the new jerusalem_. _the superstition of divorce_. 1922. _eugenics and other evils_. _the man who knew too much_. _what i saw in america_. _the ballad of st. barbara_. in _collected poems_. 1923. _fancies versus fads_. _st. francis of assisi_. 1924. _the end of the roman road_. preface by st. john adcock. 1925. _the everlasting man_. _tales of the long bow_. _william cobbett_. _the superstitions of the sceptic_. 1926. _the incredulity of father brown_. _the outline of sanity_. _a gleaming cohort_. _the queen of seven swords_. poems. not included in _collected poems_. _the catholic church and conversion_. _culture and the coming peril_. university of london publication. _social reform and birth control_. pamphlet--simpkin kent & co., league of national life. 1927. _collected poems_. _the return of don quixote_. _robert louis stevenson_. _the secret of father brown_. _the judgment of dr. johnson_. a play. _gloria in profundis_. short poem. 1928. _generally speaking_. _essays of to-day and yesterday series_. _short stories of to-day and yesterday series_. reprinted from other volumes. _the sword of wood_. short story. edition de luxe, signed. reprinted in everyman edition. 1929. _the poet and the lunatics_. _omnibus volume--father brown stories_. _ubi ecclesia_. short poem. _the thing_. catholic essays. _g.k.c. as m.c_. collection of introductions. _the turkey and the turk_. christmas play. ill. by thomas derrick. 1930. _the grave of arthur_. short poem. ariel poem series. _come to think of it_. essays. edited by e. v. lucas. _the resurrection of rome_. 1931. _all is grist_. essays edited by e. v. lucas. 1932. _chaucer_. a study. _sidelights on new london and newer york_. essays. _christendom in dublin_. essays on eucharistic congress, dublin. 1933. _all i survey_. essays. edited by e. v. lucas. _st. thomas aquinas_. _collected poems_. republished _collected prefaces to charles dickens's works_. reprinted. _methuen's library of humour_. 1 vol. 1934. _avowals and denials_. essays. 1935. _the scandal of father brown_. _george bernard shaw_. new edition with additional chapter. the later phases. _the well and the shadows_. 1936. _as i was saying_. essays. edited by e. v. lucas. posthumous publications 1936. _autobiography_. 1937. _the paradoxes of mr. pond_. 1938. _the colored lands_. 1940. _the end of the armistice_. prefaces to other authors' books 1902. carlyle, _past and present_. _nonsense rhymes_, by w. c. monkhouse. _r.l.s._, in bookman booklets. _tolstoy_, in bookman booklets. 1903. _boswell. life of johnson extracts_. 1904. 0. w. holmes, _autocrat of the breakfast table_. red letter library. carlyle, _sartor resartus_. national library. bunyan, _pilgrim's progress_. national library. 1905. maxim gorky, _creatures that once were men_. 1906. _dickens_ in everyman library. prefaces to all volumes. _matthew arnold_. everyman library. _elsie lang_. literary london. _characteristics of r.l.s_. little books for bookmen. _tennyson as an intellectual force_. little books for bookmen. 1907. _the book of job_. george haw, _from workhouse to westminster: will crooks_. 1908. ruskin, _poems_. muses library. w. w. crotch, _the cottage homes of england_. 1909. darrell figgis. _a vision of life_. margaret arndt, _meadows of play_. 1910. _thackeray, selection_. masters of literature series. _eyes of youth, anthology_. 1911. _johnson, extracts_. ed. alice meynell. thackeray, _the book of snobs_. red letter library. 1912. _famous paintings, reproduced in colour_. a. v. baverstock, _english agricultural labourer_. _aesop's fables_. translated by vernon jones. 1913. dickens, _the christmas carol_. waverley dickens. 1915. _bohemia's claim for freedom_. london, czech committee. 1916. c. c. mendell and e. shanks, _hilaire belloc_. cobbett, _cottage economy_. harewranath maitra, _hinduism_. 1917. s. nordentoft, _practical pacifism and its adversaries_. 1918. sybil bristowe, _provocations_. william dyson, _australia at war_. leonard merrick, _house of lynch_. 1919. cecil chesterton, _history of the u. s. a_. bernard capes, _the skeleton key_. 1920. m. e. jones, _life in old cambridge_. 1921. vivienne dayrell, _little wings_. h. m. bateman, _a book of drawings_. 1922. jane austen, _love and friendship_. 1923. irene hernaman, _child mediums_. 0. r. vassall phillips, _the mustard tree_. 1924. 0. f. dudley, _will men be like gods_. greville macdonald, _george macdonald and his wife_. _catholic who's who_. p. m. wright, _purple hours_. 1925. fulton sheen, _god and intelligence_. alexander arnoux, _abishag_. trans. joyce davis. 1926. a. h. godwin, _gilbert and sullivan_. johnson, _rasselas_. _catholic who's who_. l. g. sieveking, _bats in the belfry_. _the man who was thursday_, dramatized version. w. s. masterman, _the wrong letter_. _royal society of literature, essays_, vol. vi. 1927. e. turner, _grandmamma's book of rhymes_. g. c. heseltine, _the change_. essays on the land. h. massis, _defence of the west_. _forster's life of dickens_. everyman library. 1928. mary webb, _the golden arrow_. 1929. h. ghã©on, _the secret of the cure d'ars_, trans. f. sheed. w. r. titterton, _drinking songs_. 1930. miss c. noran, _book on spanish history_. _king lear_. de luxe edition. illustrated yunge. introduction to _vanity fair_, thackeray. limited edition club, new york. 1931. _giotto's frescoes at assisi reproduced_. john gibbons, _through unknown portugal_. f. goetel, _the messenger of the snow_. francis thompson, _the hound of heaven_. a. a. thomas, _the burns we love_. j. p. de fonseka, _serendipitry_. daniel o'grady, _cosmology_. 1932. gleeson, _essays_. _essays of the year_, argonaut press. _six centuries of english literature_, vol. vi. meredith to rupert brooke. mrs. homewood, _reminiscences_. _penn country book_. 1933. _life of sydney smith_. hesketh pearson. _tale of two cities_. 1934. _peregrine pickle_. first edition club, u. s. a. pamphlet on _nazi germany_ for friends of europe publication, edited by lord tyrrell. _g.k.'s miscellany_. 1935. fr. dowsell, _the betrayal: a passion play_. fr. vincent mcnabb, _book of essays_. _detective stories_. collection from hutchinson. 1936. f. a. macnutt, _a papal chamberlain_. 1935. letterpress to _stations of the cross_, by f. brangwyn. i doubt whether the list of introductions is complete but dorothy collins has done her best to make it so. of the books and essays about chesterton there is no end. those i have used in writing this book are _father brown on chesterton_, monsignor o'connor. _g. k. chesterton, a criticism_, cecil chesterton. _the place of chesterton in english literature_, hilaire belloc. _the laughing prophet_, emile cammaerts. _g. k. chesterton_, cyril clemens. for the chapters on sociology i have consulted the invaluable series on the english labourer by the hammonds, c. s. orpen's _open fields_, trevelyan's _social history of england_, cobbett's _rural rides and cottage economy_ and haas' _english labourer_. for the marconi chapter i have used the reports of the parliamentary commission and of the trial of cecil chesterton, c. f. g. masterman's _life_ and that of lord reading, and contemporary press accounts. throughout i have made use of the files of _the eyewitness, the new witness_ and _g.k.'s weekly_.