Books: A Miscellany of Men

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

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As I reflected it crawled back into my memory that I had mildly played the
fool in that house on that distant day. I had some red chalk in my pocket,
I think, and I wrote things on the unpapered plaster walls; things
addressed to Mr. Harrogate. A dim memory told me that I had written up in
what I supposed to be the dining-room:

James Harrogate, thank God for meat,
Then eat and eat and eat and eat,

or something of that kind. I faintly feel that some longer lyric was
scrawled on the walls of what looked like a bedroom, something beginning:

When laying what you call your head,
O Harrogate, upon your bed,

and there all my memory dislimns and decays. But I could still see quite
vividly the plain plastered walls and the rude, irregular writing, and the
places where the red chalk broke. I could see them, I mean, in memory;
for when I came down that road again after a sixth of a century the house
was very different.

I had seen it before at noon, and now I found it in the dusk. But its
windows glowed with lights of many artificial sorts; one of its low square
windows stood open; from this there escaped up the road a stream of
lamplight and a stream of singing. Some sort of girl, at least, was
standing at some sort of piano, and singing a song of healthy
sentimentalism in that house where long ago my blessing had died on the
wind and my poems been covered up by the wallpaper. I stood outside that
lamplit house at dusk full of those thoughts that I shall never express if
I live to be a million any better than I expressed them in red chalk upon
the wall. But after I had hovered a little, and was about to withdraw, a
mad impulse seized me. I rang the bell. I said in distinct accents to a
very smart suburban maid, "Does Mr. James Harrogate live here?"

She said he didn't; but that she would inquire, in case I was looking for
him in the neighbourhood; but I excused her from such exertion. I had one
moment's impulse to look for him all over the world; and then decided not
to look for him at all.

THE PRIEST OF SPRING

The sun has strengthened and the air softened just before Easter Day.
But it is a troubled brightness which has a breath not only of novelty but
of revolution, There are two great armies of the human intellect who will
fight till the end on this vital point, whether Easter is to be
congratulated on fitting in with the Spring--or the Spring on fitting in
with Easter.

The only two things that can satisfy the soul are a person and a story;
and even a story must be about a person. There are indeed very voluptuous
appetites and enjoyments in mere abstractions like mathematics, logic, or
chess. But these mere pleasures of the mind are like mere pleasures of
the body. That is, they are mere pleasures, though they may be gigantic
pleasures; they can never by a mere increase of themselves amount to
happiness. A man just about to be hanged may enjoy his breakfast;
especially if it be his favourite breakfast; and in the same way he may
enjoy an argument with the chaplain about heresy, especially if it is his
favourite heresy. But whether he can enjoy either of them does not depend
on either of them; it depends upon his spiritual attitude towards a
subsequent event. And that event is really interesting to the soul;
because it is the end of a story and (as some hold) the end of a person.

Now it is this simple truth which, like many others, is too simple for our
scientists to see. This is where they go wrong, not only about true
religion, but about false religions too; so that their account of
mythology is more mythical than the myth itself. I do not confine myself
to saying that they are quite incorrect when they state (for instance)
that Christ was a legend of dying and reviving vegetation, like Adonis or
Persephone. I say that even if Adonis was a god of vegetation, they have
got the whole notion of him wrong. Nobody, to begin with, is sufficiently
interested in decaying vegetables, as such, to make any particular mystery
or disguise about them; and certainly not enough to disguise them under
the image of a very handsome young man, which is a vastly more interesting
thing. If Adonis was connected with the fall of leaves in autumn and the
return of flowers in spring, the process of thought was quite different.
It is a process of thought which springs up spontaneously in all children
and young artists; it springs up spontaneously in all healthy societies.
It is very difficult to explain in a diseased society.

The brain of man is subject to short and strange snatches of sleep. A
cloud seals the city of reason or rests upon the sea of imagination; a
dream that darkens as much, whether it is a nightmare of atheism or a
daydream of idolatry. And just as we have all sprung from sleep with a
start and found ourselves saying some sentence that has no meaning, save
in the mad tongues of the midnight; so the human mind starts from its
trances of stupidity with some complete phrase upon its lips; a complete
phrase which is a complete folly. Unfortunately it is not like the dream
sentence, generally forgotten in the putting on of boots or the putting in
of breakfast. This senseless aphorism, invented when man's mind was
asleep, still hangs on his tongue and entangles all his relations to
rational and daylight things. All our controversies are confused by
certain kinds of phrases which are not merely untrue, but were always
unmeaning; which are not merely inapplicable, but were always
intrinsically useless. We recognise them wherever a man talks of "the
survival of the fittest," meaning only the survival of the survivors; or
wherever a man says that the rich "have a stake in the country," as if the
poor could not suffer from misgovernment or military defeat; or where a
man talks about "going on towards Progress," which only means going on
towards going on; or when a man talks about "government by the wise few,"
as if they could be picked out by their pantaloons. "The wise few" must
mean either the few whom the foolish think wise or the very foolish who
think themselves wise.

There is one piece of nonsense that modern people still find themselves
saying, even after they are more or less awake, by which I am particularly
irritated. It arose in the popularised science of the nineteenth century,
especially in connection with the study of myths and religions. The
fragment of gibberish to which I refer generally takes the form of saying
"This god or hero really represents the sun." Or "Apollo killing the
Python MEANS that the summer drives out the winter." Or "The King dying in
a western battle is a SYMBOL of the sun setting in the west." Now I
should really have thought that even the skeptical professors, whose
skulls are as shallow as frying-pans, might have reflected that human
beings never think or feel like this. Consider what is involved in this
supposition. It presumes that primitive man went out for a walk and saw
with great interest a big burning spot on the sky. He then said to
primitive woman, "My dear, we had better keep this quiet. We mustn't let
it get about. The children and the slaves are so very sharp. They might
discover the sun any day, unless we are very careful. So we won't call
it 'the sun,' but I will draw a picture of a man killing a snake; and
whenever I do that you will know what I mean. The sun doesn't look at all
like a man killing a snake; so nobody can possibly know. It will be a
little secret between us; and while the slaves and the children fancy I am
quite excited with a grand tale of a writhing dragon and a wrestling
demigod, I shall really MEAN this delicious little discovery, that there
is a round yellow disc up in the air." One does not need to know much
mythology to know that this is a myth. It is commonly called the Solar
Myth.

Quite plainly, of course, the case was just the other way. The god was
never a symbol or hieroglyph representing the sun. The sun was a
hieroglyph representing the god. Primitive man (with whom my friend
Dombey is no doubt well acquainted) went out with his head full of gods
and heroes, because that is the chief use of having a head. Then he saw
the sun in some glorious crisis of the dominance of noon on the distress
of nightfall, and he said, "That is how the face of the god would shine
when he had slain the dragon," or "That is how the whole world would bleed
to westward, if the god were slain at last."

No human being was ever really so unnatural as to worship Nature. No man,
however indulgent (as I am) to corpulency, ever worshipped a man as round
as the sun or a woman as round as the moon. No man, however attracted to
an artistic attenuation, ever really believed that the Dryad was as lean
and stiff as the tree. We human beings have never worshipped Nature; and
indeed, the reason is very simple. It is that all human beings are
superhuman beings. We have printed our own image upon Nature, as God has
printed His image upon us. We have told the enormous sun to stand still;
we have fixed him on our shields, caring no more for a star than for a
starfish. And when there were powers of Nature we could not for the time
control, we have conceived great beings in human shape controlling them.
Jupiter does not mean thunder. Thunder means the march and victory of
Jupiter. Neptune does not mean the sea; the sea is his, and he made it.
In other words, what the savage really said about the sea was, "Only my
fetish Mumbo could raise such mountains out of mere water." What the
savage really said about the sun was, "Only my great great-grandfather
Jumbo could deserve such a blazing crown."

About all these myths my own position is utterly and even sadly simple.
I say you cannot really understand any myths till you have found that one
of them is not a myth. Turnip ghosts mean nothing if there are no real
ghosts. Forged bank-notes mean nothing if there are no real bank-notes.
Heathen gods mean nothing, and must always mean nothing, to those of us
that deny the Christian God. When once a god is admitted, even a false
god, the Cosmos begins to know its place: which is the second place. When
once it is the real God the Cosmos falls down before Him, offering flowers
in spring as flames in winter. "My love is like a red, red rose" does not
mean that the poet is praising roses under the allegory of a young lady.
"My love is an arbutus" does not mean that the author was a botanist so
pleased with a particular arbutus tree that he said he loved it. "Who art
the moon and regent of my sky" does not mean that Juliet invented Romeo to
account for the roundness of the moon. "Christ is the Sun of Easter" does
not mean that the worshipper is praising the sun under the emblem of
Christ. Goddess or god can clothe themselves with the spring or summer;
but the body is more than raiment. Religion takes almost disdainfully the
dress of Nature; and indeed Christianity has done as well with the snows
of Christmas as with the snow-drops of spring. And when I look across
the sun-struck fields, I know in my inmost bones that my joy is not solely
in the spring, for spring alone, being always returning, would be always
sad. There is somebody or something walking there, to be crowned with
flowers: and my pleasure is in some promise yet possible and in the
resurrection of the dead.

THE REAL JOURNALIST

Our age which has boasted of realism will fail chiefly through lack of
reality. Never, I fancy, has there been so grave and startling a divorce
between the real way a thing is done and the look of it when it is done.
I take the nearest and most topical instance to hand a newspaper.
Nothing looks more neat and regular than a newspaper, with its parallel
columns, its mechanical printing, its detailed facts and figures, its
responsible, polysyllabic leading articles. Nothing, as a matter of fact,
goes every night through more agonies of adventure, more hairbreadth
escapes, desperate expedients, crucial councils, random compromises, or
barely averted catastrophes. Seen from the outside, it seems to come
round as automatically as the clock and as silently as the dawn. Seen
from the inside, it gives all its organisers a gasp of relief every
morning to see that it has come out at all; that it has come out without
the leading article upside down or the Pope congratulated on discovering
the North Pole.

I will give an instance (merely to illustrate my thesis of unreality) from
the paper that I know best. Here is a simple story, a little episode in
the life of a journalist, which may be amusing and instructive: the tale
of how I made a great mistake in quotation. There are really two stories:
the story as seen from the outside, by a man reading the paper; and the
story seen from the inside, by the journalists shouting and telephoning
and taking notes in shorthand through the night.

This is the outside story; and it reads like a dreadful quarrel. The
notorious G. K. Chesterton, a reactionary Torquemada whose one gloomy
pleasure was in the defence of orthodoxy and the pursuit of heretics, long
calculated and at last launched a denunciation of a brilliant leader of
the New Theology which he hated with all the furnace of his fanatic soul.
In this document Chesterton darkly, deliberately, and not having the fear
of God before his eyes, asserted that Shakespeare wrote the line "that
wreathes its old fantastic roots so high." This he said because he had
been kept in ignorance by Priests; or, perhaps, because he thought
craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious and forgotten
rhyme called 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'. Anyhow, that orthodox
gentleman made a howling error; and received some twenty-five letters and
post-cards from kind correspondents who pointed out the mistake.

But the odd thing is that scarcely any of them could conceive that it was
a mistake. The first wrote in the tone of one wearied of epigrams, and
cried, "What is the joke NOW?" Another professed (and practised, for all
I know, God help him) that he had read through all Shakespeare and failed
to find the line. A third wrote in a sort of moral distress, asking, as
in confidence, if Gray was really a plagiarist. They were a noble
collection; but they all subtly assumed an element of leisure and
exactitude in the recipient's profession and character which is far from
the truth. Let us pass on to the next act of the external tragedy.

In Monday's issue of the same paper appeared a letter from the same
culprit. He ingenuously confessed that the line did not belong to
Shakespeare, but to a poet whom he called Grey. Which was another
cropper--or whopper. This strange and illiterate outbreak was printed by
the editor with the justly scornful title, "Mr. Chesterton 'Explains'?"
Any man reading the paper at breakfast saw at once the meaning of the
sarcastic quotation marks. They meant, of course, "Here is a man who
doesn't know Gray from Shakespeare; he tries to patch it up and he can't
even spell Gray. And that is what he calls an Explanation." That is the
perfectly natural inference of the reader from the letter, the mistake,
and the headline--as seen from the outside. The falsehood was serious;
the editorial rebuke was serious. The stern editor and the sombre,
baffled contributor confront each other as the curtain falls.

And now I will tell you exactly what really happened. It is honestly
rather amusing; it is a story of what journals and journalists really are.
A monstrously lazy man lives in South Bucks partly by writing a column
in the Saturday Daily News. At the time he usually writes it (which is
always at the last moment) his house is unexpectedly invaded by infants of
all shapes and sizes. His Secretary is called away; and he has to cope
with the invading pigmies. Playing with children 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 lighted 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; and he is
able to observe some newspapers and circulars in wrappers lying on the
table. One is a dingy book catalogue; the second is a shiny pamphlet
about petrol; the third is a paper called The Christian Commonwealth. He
opens it anyhow, and sees in the middle of a page a sentence with which he
honestly disagrees. It says that the sense of beauty in Nature is a new
thing, hardly felt before Wordsworth. A stream of images and pictures
pour through his head, like skies chasing each other or forests running by.
"Not felt before Wordsworth!" he thinks. "Oh, but this won't do...
bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang...night's candles are
burnt out... glowed with living sapphires. leaving their moon-loved
maze...antique roots fantastic... antique roots wreathed high...what is
it in As You Like It?"

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. That is the first scene; that is how an
article is really written.

The scene now changes to the newspaper office. The writer of the article
has discovered his mistake and wants to correct it by the next day: but
the next day is Sunday. He cannot post a letter, so he rings up the paper
and dictates a letter by telephone. He leaves the title to his friends at
the other end; he knows that they can spell "Gray," as no doubt they can:
but the letter is put down by journalistic custom in a pencil scribble and
the vowel may well be doubtful. The friend writes at the top of the
letter "'G. K. C.' Explains," putting the initials in quotation marks.
The next man passing it for press is bored with these initials (I am with
him there) and crosses them out, substituting with austere civility, "Mr.
Chesterton Explains." But and now he hears the iron laughter of the Fates,
for the blind bolt is about to fall--but he neglects to cross out the
second "quote" (as we call it) and it goes up to press with a "quote"
between the last words. Another quotation mark at the end of "explains"
was the work of one merry moment for the printers upstairs. So the
inverted commas were lifted entirely off one word on to the other and a
totally innocent title suddenly turned into a blasting sneer. But that
would have mattered nothing so far, for there was nothing to sneer at. In
the same dark hour, however, there was a printer who was (I suppose) so
devoted to this Government that he could think of no Gray but Sir Edward
Grey. He spelt it "Grey" by a mere misprint, and the whole tale was
complete: first blunder, second blunder, and final condemnation.

That is a little tale of journalism as it is; if you call it egotistic and
ask what is the use of it I think I could tell you. You might remember it
when next some ordinary young workman is going to be hanged by the neck on
circumstantial evidence.

THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT

Of all the great nations of Christendom, the Scotch are by far the most
romantic. I have just enough Scotch experience and just enough Scotch
blood to know this in the only way in which a thing can really be known;
that is, when the outer world and the inner world are at one. I know it
is always said that the Scotch are practical, prosaic, and puritan; that
they have an eye to business. I like that phrase "an eye" to business.

Polyphemus had an eye for business; it was in the middle of his forehead.
It served him admirably for the only two duties which are demanded in a
modern financier and captain of industry: the two duties of counting sheep
and of eating men. But when that one eye was put out he was done for.
But the Scotch are not one-eyed practical men, though their best friends
must admit that they are occasionally business-like. They are, quite
fundamentally, romantic and sentimental, and this is proved by the very
economic argument that is used to prove their harshness and hunger for the
material. The mass of Scots have accepted the industrial civilisation,
with its factory chimneys and its famine prices, with its steam and smoke
and steel--and strikes. The mass of the Irish have not accepted it. The
mass of the Irish have clung to agriculture with claws of iron; and have
succeeded in keeping it. That is because the Irish, though far inferior
to the Scotch in art and literature, are hugely superior to them in
practical politics. You do need to be very romantic to accept the
industrial civilisation. It does really require all the old Gaelic
glamour to make men think that Glasgow is a grand place. Yet the miracle
is achieved; and while I was in Glasgow I shared the illusion. I have
never had the faintest illusion about Leeds or Birmingham. The industrial
dream suited the Scots. Here was a really romantic vista, suited to a
romantic people; a vision of higher and higher chimneys taking hold upon
the heavens, of fiercer and fiercer fires in which adamant could evaporate
like dew. Here were taller and taller engines that began already to
shriek and gesticulate like giants. Here were thunderbolts of
communication which already flashed to and fro like thoughts. It was
unreasonable to expect the rapt, dreamy, romantic Scot to stand still in
such a whirl of wizardry to ask whether he, the ordinary Scot, would be
any the richer.

He, the ordinary Scot, is very much the poorer. Glasgow is not a rich
city. It is a particularly poor city ruled by a few particularly rich men.
It is not, perhaps, quite so poor a city as Liverpool, London,
Manchester, Birmingham, or Bolton. It is vastly poorer than Rome, Rouen,
Munich, or Cologne. A certain civic vitality notable in Glasgow may,
perhaps, be due to the fact that the high poetic patriotism of the Scots
has there been reinforced by the cutting common sense and independence of
the Irish. In any case, I think there can be no doubt of the main
historical fact. The Scotch were tempted by the enormous but unequal
opportunities of industrialism, because the Scotch are romantic. The
Irish refused those enormous and unequal opportunities, because the Irish
are clear-sighted. They would not need very clear sight by this time to
see that in England and Scotland the temptation has been a betrayal. The
industrial system has failed.

I was coming the other day along a great valley road that strikes out of
the westland counties about Glasgow, more or less towards the east and the
widening of the Forth. It may, for all I know (I amused myself with the
fancy), be the way along which Wallace came with his crude army, when he
gave battle before Stirling Brig; and, in the midst of mediaeval
diplomacies, made a new nation possible. Anyhow, the romantic quality of
Scotland rolled all about me, as much in the last reek of Glasgow as in
the first rain upon the hills. The tall factory chimneys seemed trying to
be taller than the mountain peaks; as if this landscape were full (as its
history has been full) of the very madness of ambition. The wageslavery
we live in is a wicked thing. But there is nothing in which the Scotch
are more piercing and poetical, I might say more perfect, than in their
Scotch wickedness. It is what makes the Master of Ballantrae the most
thrilling of all fictitious villains. It is what makes the Master of
Lovat the most thrilling of all historical villains. It is poetry. It
is an intensity which is on the edge of madness or (what is worse) magic.
Well, the Scotch have managed to apply something of this fierce
romanticism even to the lowest of all lordships and serfdoms; the
proletarian inequality of today. You do meet now and then, in Scotland,
the man you never meet anywhere else but in novels; I mean the self-made
man; the hard, insatiable man, merciless to himself as well as to others.
It is not "enterprise"; it is kleptomania. He is quite mad, and a much
more obvious public pest than any other kind of kleptomaniac; but though
he is a cheat, he is not an illusion. He does exist; I have met quite two
of him. Him alone among modern merchants we do not weakly flatter when we
call him a bandit. Something of the irresponsibility of the true dark
ages really clings about him. Our scientific civilisation is not a
civilisation; it is a smoke nuisance. Like smoke it is choking us; like
smoke it will pass away. Only of one or two Scotsmen, in my experience,
was it true that where there is smoke there is fire.

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