Books: A Miscellany of Men

G >> G. K. Chesterton >> A Miscellany of Men

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Nearly all the great newspapers, both pompous and frivolous, will declare
dogmatically day after day, until every one half believes it, that red and
green are the only two colours in the paint-box. THE OBSERVER will say:
"No one who knows the solid framework of politics or the emphatic first
principles of an Imperial people can suppose for a moment that there is
any possible compromise to be made in such a matter; we must either fulfill
our manifest racial destiny and crown the edifice of ages with the august
figure of a Green Premier, or we must abandon our heritage, break our
promise to the Empire, fling ourselves into final anarchy, and allow the
flaming and demoniac image of a Red Premier to hover over our dissolution
and our doom." The DAILY MAIL would say: "There is no halfway house in
this matter; it must be green or red. We wish to see every honest
Englishman one colour or the other." And then some funny man in the
popular Press would star the sentence with a pun, and say that the DAILY
MAIL liked its readers to be green and its paper to be read. But no one
would even dare to whisper that there is such a thing as yellow.

For the purposes of pure logic it is clearer to argue with silly examples
than with sensible ones: because silly examples are simple. But I could
give many grave and concrete cases of the kind of thing to which I refer.
In the later part of the Boer War both parties perpetually insisted in
every speech and pamphlet that annexation was inevitable and that it was
only a question whether Liberals or Tories should do it. It was not
inevitable in the least; it would have been perfectly easy to make peace
with the Boers as Christian nations commonly make peace with their
conquered enemies. Personally I think that it would have been better for
us in the most selfish sense, better for our pocket and prestige, if we
had never effected the annexation at all; but that is a matter of opinion.
What is plain is that it was not inevitable; it was not, as was said,
the only possible course; there were plenty of other courses; there were
plenty of other colours in the box. Again, in the discussion about
Socialism, it is repeatedly rubbed into the public mind that we must
choose between Socialism and some horrible thing that they call
Individualism. I don't know what it means, but it seems to mean that
anybody who happens to pull out a plum is to adopt the moral philosophy of
the young Horner--and say what a good boy he is for helping himself.

It is calmly assumed that the only two possible types of society are a
Collectivist type of society and the present society that exists at this
moment and is rather like an animated muck-heap. It is quite unnecessary
to say that I should prefer Socialism to the present state of things. I
should prefer anarchism to the present state of things. But it is simply
not the fact that Collectivism is the only other scheme for a more equal
order. A Collectivist has a perfect right to think it the only sound
scheme; but it is not the only plausible or possible scheme. We might
have peasant proprietorship; we might have the compromise of Henry George;
we might have a number of tiny communes; we might have co-operation; we
might have Anarchist Communism; we might have a hundred things. I am not
saying that any of these are right, though I cannot imagine that any of
them could be worse than the present social madhouse, with its top-heavy
rich and its tortured poor; but I say that it is an evidence of the stiff
and narrow alternative offered to the civic mind, that the civic mind is
not, generally speaking, conscious of these other possibilities. The
civic mind is not free or alert enough to feel how much it has the world
before it. There are at least ten solutions of the Education question,
and no one knows which Englishmen really want. For Englishmen are only
allowed to vote about the two which are at that moment offered by the
Premier and the Leader of the Opposition. There are ten solutions of the
drink question; and no one knows which the democracy wants; for the
democracy is only allowed to fight about one Licensing Bill at a time.

So that the situation comes to this: The democracy has a right to answer
questions, but it has no right to ask them. It is still the political
aristocracy that asks the questions. And we shall not be unreasonably
cynical if we suppose that the political aristocracy will always be rather
careful what questions it asks. And if the dangerous comfort and
self-flattery of modern England continues much longer there will be less
democratic value in an English election than in a Roman saturnalia of
slaves. For the powerful class will choose two courses of action, both of
them safe for itself, and then give the democracy the gratification of
taking one course or the other. The lord will take two things so much
alike that he would not mind choosing from them blindfold--and then for a
great jest he will allow the slaves to choose.

THE MAD OFFICIAL

Going mad is the slowest and dullest business in the world. I have very
nearly done it more than once in my boyhood, and so have nearly all my
friends, born under the general doom of mortals, but especially of moderns;
I mean the doom that makes a man come almost to the end of thinking
before he comes to the first chance of living.

But the process of going mad is dull, for the simple reason that a man
does not know that it is going on. Routine and literalism and a certain
dry-throated earnestness and mental thirst, these are the very atmosphere
of morbidity. If once the man could become conscious of his madness, he
would cease to be man. He studies certain texts in Daniel or cryptograms
in Shakespeare through monstrously magnifying spectacles, which are on his
nose night and day. If once he could take off the spectacles he would
smash them. He deduces all his fantasies about the Sixth Seal or the
Anglo-Saxon Race from one unexamined and invisible first principle. If
he could once see the first principle, he would see that it is not there.

This slow and awful self-hypnotism of error is a process that can occur
not only with individuals, but also with whole societies. It is hard to
pick out and prove; that is why it is hard to cure. But this mental
degeneration may be brought to one test, which I truly believe to be a
real test. A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so
long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. Crusaders not cutting
their beards till they found Jerusalem, Jacobins calling each other
Harmodius and Epaminondas when their names were Jacques and Jules, these
are wild things, but they were done in wild spirits at a wild moment.

But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State
is growing insane. For instance, I have a gun license. For all I know,
this would logically allow me to fire off fifty-nine enormous field-guns
day and night in my back garden. I should not be surprised at a man doing
it; for it would be great fun. But I should be surprised at the
neighbours putting up with it, and regarding it as an ordinary thing
merely because it might happen to fulfill the letter of my license.

Or, again, I have a dog license; and I may have the right (for all I know)
to turn ten thousand wild dogs loose in Buckinghamshire. I should not be
surprised if the law were like that; because in modern England there is
practically no law to be surprised at. I should not be surprised even at
the man who did it; for a certain kind of man, if he lived long under the
English landlord system, might do anything. But I should be surprised at
the people who consented to stand it. I should, in other words, think the
world a little mad if the incident, were received in silence.

Now things every bit as wild as this are being received in silence every
day. All strokes slip on the smoothness of a polished wall. All blows
fall soundless on the softness of a padded cell. For madness is a passive
as well as an active state: it is a paralysis, a refusal of the nerves to
respond to the normal stimuli, as well as an unnatural stimulation. There
are commonwealths, plainly to be distinguished here and there in history,
which pass from prosperity to squalor, or from glory to insignificance, or
from freedom to slavery, not only in silence, but with serenity. The face
still smiles while the limbs, literally and loathsomely, are dropping from
the body. These are peoples that have lost the power of astonishment at
their own actions. When they give birth to a fantastic fashion or a
foolish law, they do not start or stare at the monster they have brought
forth. They have grown used to their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos;
and the whirlwind is the breath of their nostrils. These nations are
really in danger of going off their heads en masse; of becoming one vast
vision of imbecility, with toppling cities and crazy country-sides, all
dotted with industrious lunatics. One of these countries is modern
England.

Now here is an actual instance, a small case of how our social conscience
really works: tame in spirit, wild in result, blank in realisation; a
thing without the light of mind in it. I take this paragraph from a daily
paper:--"At Epping, yesterday, Thomas Woolbourne, a Lambourne labourer,
and his wife were summoned for neglecting their five children. Dr. Alpin
said he was invited by the inspector of the N.S.P.C.C. to visit
defendants' cottage. Both the cottage and the children were dirty. The
children looked exceedingly well in health, but the conditions would be
serious in case of illness. Defendants were stated to be sober. The man
was discharged. The woman, who said she was hampered by the cottage
having no water supply and that she was ill, was sentenced to six weeks'
imprisonment. The sentence caused surprise, and the woman was removed
crying, 'Lord save me!'"

I know no name for this but Chinese. It calls up the mental picture of
some archaic and changeless Eastern Court, in which men with dried faces
and stiff ceremonial costumes perform some atrocious cruelty to the
accompaniment of formal proverbs and sentences of which the very meaning
has been forgotten. In both cases the only thing in the whole farrago
that can be called real is the wrong. If we apply the lightest touch of
reason to the whole Epping prosecution it dissolves into nothing.

I here challenge any person in his five wits to tell me what that woman
was sent to prison for. Either it was for being poor, or it was for being
ill. Nobody could suggest, nobody will suggest, nobody, as a matter of
fact, did suggest, that she had committed any other crime. The doctor was
called in by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Was
this woman guilty of cruelty to children? Not in the least. Did the
doctor say she was guilty of cruelty to children? Not in the least. Was
these any evidence even remotely bearing on the sin of cruelty? Not a rap.
The worse that the doctor could work himself up to saying was that
though the children were "exceedingly" well, the conditions would be
serious in case of illness. If the doctor will tell me any conditions
that would be comic in case of illness, I shall attach more weight to his
argument.

Now this is the worst effect of modern worry. The mad doctor has gone mad.
He is literally and practically mad; and still he is quite literally and
practically a doctor. The only question is the old one, Quis docebit
ipsum doctorem? Now cruelty to children is an utterly unnatural thing;
instinctively accursed of earth and heaven. But neglect of children is a
natural thing; like neglect of any other duty, it is a mere difference of
degree that divides extending arms and legs in calisthenics and extending
them on the rack. It is a mere difference of degree that separates any
operation from any torture. The thumb-screw can easily be called Manicure.
Being pulled about by wild horses can easily be called Massage. The
modern problem is not so much what people will endure as what they will
not endure. But I fear I interrupt.... The boiling oil is boiling; and
the Tenth Mandarin is already reciting the "Seventeen Serious Principles
and the Fifty-three Virtues of the Sacred Emperor."

THE ENCHANTED MAN

When I arrived to see the performance of the Buckinghamshire Players, who
acted Miss Gertrude Robins's POT LUCK at Naphill a short time ago, it is
the distressing, if scarcely surprising, truth that I entered very late.
This would have mattered little, I hope, to any one, but that late comers
had to be forced into front seats. For a real popular English audience
always insists on crowding in the back part of the hall; and (as I have
found in many an election) will endure the most unendurable taunts rather
than come forward. The English are a modest people; that is why they are
entirely ruled and run by the few of them that happen to be immodest. In
theatrical affairs the fact is strangely notable; and in most playhouses
we find the bored people in front and the eager people behind.

As far as the performance went I was quite the reverse of a bored person;
but I may have been a boring person, especially as I was thus required to
sit in the seats of the scornful. It will be a happy day in the dramatic
world when all ladies have to take off their hats and all critics have to
take off their heads. The people behind will have a chance then. And as
it happens, in this case, I had not so much taken off my head as lost it.
I had lost it on the road; on that strange journey that was the cause of
my coming in late. I have a troubled recollection of having seen a very
good play and made a very bad speech; I have a cloudy recollection of
talking to all sorts of nice people afterwards, but talking to them
jerkily and with half a head, as a man talks when he has one eye on a
clock.

And the truth is that I had one eye on an ancient and timeless clock, hung
uselessly in heaven; whose very name has passed into a figure for such
bemused folly. In the true sense of an ancient phrase, I was moonstruck.
A lunar landscape a scene of winter moonlight had inexplicably got in
between me and all other scenes. If any one had asked me I could not have
said what it was; I cannot say now. Nothing had occurred to me; except
the breakdown of a hired motor on the ridge of a hill. It was not an
adventure; it was a vision.

I had started in wintry twilight from my own door; and hired a small car
that found its way across the hills towards Naphill. But as night
blackened and frost brightened and hardened it I found the way
increasingly difficult; especially as the way was an incessant ascent.
Whenever we topped a road like a staircase it was only to turn into a yet
steeper road like a ladder.

At last, when I began to fancy that I was spirally climbing the Tower of
Babel in a dream, I was brought to fact by alarming noises, stoppage, and
the driver saying that "it couldn't be done." I got out of the car and
suddenly forgot that I had ever been in it.

From the edge of that abrupt steep I saw something indescribable, which I
am now going to describe. When Mr. Joseph Chamberlain delivered his great
patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch parts of South
Africa, he made use of the expression "the illimitable veldt." The word
"veldt" is Dutch, and the word "illimitable" is Double Dutch. But the
meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave him a sense
of largeness and dreariness which he had never found in England. Well,
if he never found it in England it was because he never looked for it in
England. In England there is an illimitable number of illimitable veldts.
I saw six or seven separate eternities in cresting as many different
hills. One cannot find anything more infinite than a finite horizon, free
and lonely and innocent. The Dutch veldt may be a little more desolate
than Birmingham. But I am sure it is not so desolate as that English hill
was, almost within a cannon-shot of High Wycombe.

I looked across a vast and voiceless valley straight at the moon, as if at
a round mirror. It may have been the blue moon of the proverb; for on
that freezing night the very moon seemed blue with cold. A deathly frost
fastened every branch and blade to its place. The sinking and softening
forests, powdered with a gray frost, fell away underneath me into an abyss
which seemed unfathomable. One fancied the world was soundless only
because it was bottomless: it seemed as if all songs and cries had been
swallowed in some unresisting stillness under the roots of the hills. I
could fancy that if I shouted there would be no echo; that if I hurled
huge stones there would be no noise of reply. A dumb devil had bewitched
the landscape: but that again does not express the best or worst of it.
All those hoary and frosted forests expressed something so inhuman that it
has no human name. A horror of unconsciousness lay on them; that is the
nearest phrase I know. It was as if one were looking at the back of the
world; and the world did not know it. I had taken the universe in the
rear. I was behind the scenes. I was eavesdropping upon an unconscious
creation.

I shall not express what the place expressed. I am not even sure that it
is a thing that ought to be expressed. There was something heathen about
its union of beauty and death; sorrow seemed to glitter, as it does in
some of the great pagan poems. I understood one of the thousand poetical
phrases of the populace, "a God-forsaken place." Yet something was
present there; and I could not yet find the key to my fixed impression.
Then suddenly I remembered the right word. It was an enchanted place.
It had been put to sleep. In a flash I remembered all the fairy-tales
about princes turned to marble and princesses changed to snow. We were in
a land where none could strive or cry out; a white nightmare. The moon
looked at me across the valley like the enormous eye of a hypnotist; the
one white eye of the world.

There was never a better play than POT LUCK; for it tells a tale with a
point and a tale that might happen any day among English peasants. There
were never better actors than the local Buckinghamshire Players: for they
were acting their own life with just that rise into exaggeration which is
the transition from life to art. But all the time I was mesmerised by the
moon; I saw all these men and women as enchanted things. The poacher shot
pheasants; the policeman tracked pheasants; the wife hid pheasants; they
were all (especially the policeman) as true as death. But there was
something more true to death than true to life about it all: the figures
were frozen with a magic frost of sleep or fear or custom such as does not
cramp the movements of the poor men of other lands. I looked at the
poacher and the policeman and the gun; then at the gun and the policeman
and the poacher; and I could find no name for the fancy that haunted and
escaped me. The poacher believed in the Game Laws as much as the
policeman. The poacher's wife not only believed in the Game Laws, but
protected them as well as him. She got a promise from her husband that he
would never shoot another pheasant. Whether he kept it I doubt; I fancy
he sometimes shot a pheasant even after that. But I am sure he never shot
a policeman. For we live in an enchanted land.

THE SUN WORSHIPPER

There is a shrewd warning to be given to all people who are in revolt.
And in the present state of things, I think all men are revolting in that
sense; except a few who are revolting in the other sense. But the warning
to Socialists and other revolutionaries is this: that as sure as fate, if
they use any argument which is atheist or materialistic, that argument
will always be turned against them at last by the tyrant and the slave.
To-day I saw one too common Socialist argument turned Tory, so to speak,
in a manner quite startling and insane. I mean that modern doctrine,
taught, I believe, by most followers of Karl Marx, which is called the
materialist theory of history. The theory is, roughly, this: that all the
important things in history are rooted in an economic motive. In short,
history is a science; a science of the search for food.

Now I desire, in passing only, to point out that this is not merely untrue,
but actually the reverse of the truth. It is putting it too feebly to
say that the history of man is not only economic. Man would not have any
history if he were only economic. The need for food is certainly
universal, so universal that it is not even human. Cows have an economic
motive, and apparently (I dare not say what ethereal delicacies may be in
a cow) only an economic motive. The cow eats grass anywhere and never
eats anything else. In short, the cow does fulfill the materialist theory
of history: that is why the cow has no history. "A History of Cows" would
be one of the simplest and briefest of standard works. But if some cows
thought it wicked to eat long grass and persecuted all who did so; if the
cow with the crumpled horn were worshipped by some cows and gored to death
by others; if cows began to have obvious moral preferences over and above
a desire for grass, then cows would begin to have a history. They would
also begin to have a highly unpleasant time, which is perhaps the same
thing.

The economic motive is not merely not inside all history; it is actually
outside all history. It belongs to Biology or the Science of Life; that
is, it concerns things like cows, that are not so very much alive. Men
are far too much alive to get into the science of anything; for them we
have made the art of history. To say that human actions have depended on
economic support is like saying that they have depended on having two legs.
It accounts for action, but not for such varied action; it is a
condition, but not a motive; it is too universal to be useful. Certainly
a soldier wins the Victoria Cross on two legs; he also runs away on two
legs. But if our object is to discover whether he will become a V.C. or a
coward the most careful inspection of his legs will yield us little or no
information. In the same way a man will want food if he is a dreamy
romantic tramp, and will want food if he is a toiling and sweating
millionaire. A man must be supported on food as he must be supported on
legs. But cows (who have no history) are not only furnished more
generously in the matter of legs, but can see their food on a much grander
and more imaginative scale. A cow can lift up her eyes to the hills and
see uplands and peaks of pure food. Yet we never see the horizon broken
by crags of cake or happy hills of cheese.

So far the cow (who has no history) seems to have every other advantage.
But history--the whole point of history--precisely is that some two legged
soldiers ran away while others, of similar anatomical structure, did not.
The whole point of history precisely is: some people (like poets and
tramps) chance getting money by disregarding it, while others (such as
millionaires) will absolutely lose money for the fun of bothering about it.
There would be no history if there were only economic history. All the
historical events have been due to the twists and turns given to the
economic instinct by forces that were not economic. For instance, this
theory traces the French war of Edward III to a quarrel about the French
wines. Any one who has even smelt the Middle Ages must feel fifty answers
spring to his lips; but in this cause one will suffice. There would have
been no such war, then, if we all drank water like cows. But when one is
a man one enters the world of historic choice. The act of drinking wine
is one that requires explanation. So is the act of not drinking wine.

But the capitalist can get much more fun out of the doctrine.

When strikes were splitting England right and left a little while ago, an
ingenious writer, humorously describing himself as a Liberal, said that
they were entirely due to the hot weather. The suggestion was eagerly
taken up by other creatures of the same kind, and I really do not see why
it was not carried farther and applied to other lamentable uprisings in
history. Thus, it is a remarkable fact that the weather is generally
rather warm in Egypt; and this cannot but throw a light on the sudden and
mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape from captivity. The
English strikers used some barren republican formula (and as the
definitions of the medieval schoolmen), some academic shibboleth about
being free men and not being forced to work except for a wage accepted by
them. Just in the same way the Israelites in Egypt employed some dry
scholastic quibble about the extreme difficulty of making bricks with
nothing to make them of. But whatever fantastic intellectual excuses they
may have put forward for their strange and unnatural conduct in walking
out when the prison door was open, there can be no doubt that the real
cause was the warm weather. Such a climate notoriously also produces
delusions and horrible fancies, such as Mr. Kipling describes. And it
was while their brains were disordered by the heat that the Jews fancied
that they were founding a nation, that they were led by a prophet, and, in
short, that they were going to be of some importance in the affairs of the
world.

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