ESSAYS
I remember one splendid morning,
all blue and silver, in the summer holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away
from the task of doing nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and
picked up a walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my
pocket. I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house,
belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village), and
asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown paper. She had
a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistook the purpose and the
rationale of the existence of brown paper. She seemed to have an idea that if a
person wanted brown paper he must be wanting to tie up parcels; which was the
last thing I wanted to do; indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be
beyond my mental capacity. Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities
of toughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only
wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the
least; and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question, not of
tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively irrelevant
in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw she offered to overwhelm
me with note-paper.
I then tried to explain the rather
delicate logical shade, that I not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality
of brownness in paper, just as I like the quality of brownness in October
woods, or in beer. Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil
of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of
fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce
stars that sprang out of divine darkness. All this I said (in an off-hand way)
to the old woman; and I put the brown paper in my pocket along with the chalks,
and possibly other things. I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval
and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the
pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the
sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my
pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is
past.
With my stick and my knife, my
chalks and my brown paper, I went out on to the great downs. . .
I crossed one swell of living turf
after another, looking for a place to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven's
sake, imagine I was going to sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and
seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and
saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred
or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper. They
are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw.
When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have
drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the
soul of a cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and
the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that
belongs to all beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of
the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best
out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old
poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care very much
about Nature because they did not describe it much.
They preferred writing about great
men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write it.
The gave out much less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more.
They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at
which they had stared all day. . . The greenness of a thousand green leaves
clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of
forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went in
like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.
But as I sat scrawling these silly
figures on the 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 chalk, 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. In a sense our age has realised this fact,
and expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that white
was a blank and colourless thing, negative and non-committal, then white would
be used instead of black and grey for the funereal dress of this pessimistic
period. Which is not the case.
Meanwhile I could not find my
chalk.
I sat on the hill in a sort of
despair. There was no town near at which it was even remotely probable there
would be such a thing as an artist's colourman. And yet, without any white, my
absurd little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there
were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for
expedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and again,
so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a man in the
Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass. Imagine a gentleman
in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt water with him for his
chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk. The
landscape was made entirely of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles
until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece of the rock I sat on: it did
not mark so well as the shop chalks do, but it gave the effect. And I stood
there in a trance of pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only
a grand peninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is something even
more admirable. It is a piece of chalk
FROM THE AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
from the essay "In Defence of
Baby Worship" from THE DEFENDANT. 1903.
The two facts which attract almost
every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and
secondly, that they are in consequence very happy. . .
The most unfathomable schools and
sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of
three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and
astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common sense.
The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are
remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets
and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the
body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always to remember that within
every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the
seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars,
new grass, new cities, a new sea.
. . . If we could see the stars as
a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. . . We may scale the
heavens and find new stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have
not found - [the one] on which we were born. But the influence of children goes
further than its first trifling effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces
us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revloutionary theory
of the marvellousness of all things. We do actually treat talking in children
as marvellous, walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children
as marvellous. . . [and] that attitude towards children is right. It is our
attitude towards grown up people that is wrong. . .
Our attitude towards children
consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect; [we
reverence, love, fear and forgive them.] We bow to grown people, take off our
hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate
them properly. . . If we treated all grown-up persons with precisely that dark
affection and dazed respect with which we treat [the limitations of an infant,
accepting their blunders, delighted at all their faltering attempts, marveling
at their small accomplishments], we should be in a far more wise and tolerant
temper. . .
The essential rectitude of our
view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be
supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel oursleves or our
own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible
to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to been
through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can
see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to
think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like
imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf
of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small. . . we feel the
same kind of obligation to these creatures that [God] might feel. . .
But [it is] the humorous look of
children [that] is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the
cosmos together. . . [They] give us the most perfect hint of the humor that
awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.
FROM THE AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
If a prosperous modern man, with a
high hat and a frock-coat, were to solemnly pledge himself before all his
clerks and friends to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to
hop up to the City on one leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's
'Liberty' seventy-six times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to
anyone of the name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left
ear in his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on
the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should
immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes expressed,
was 'an artist in life.' Yet these vows are not more extraordinary than the
vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar periods were made, not by fanatics
merely, but by the greatest figures in civic and national civilization -- by
kings, judges, poets, and priests. One man swore to chain two mountains
together, and the great chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument
of that mystical folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem
with a patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that
these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any saner
than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary and reliable
object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like a dog. And it is not
easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very high compliment to the Holy
City by setting out for it under conditions which render it to the last degree
improbable that he will ever get there.
But about this there is one
striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved in that way in our time, we
should, as we have said, regard them as symbols of the 'decadence.' But the men
who did these things were not decadent; they belonged generally to the most
robust classes of what is generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be
urged that if men essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the
capricious direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not
hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments of life,
such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad promises and
performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same monstrous
self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which it is necessary
to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning. And if we consider
seriously and correctly the nature of vows, we shall, unless I am much
mistaken, come to the conclusion that it is perfectly sane, and even sensible,
to swear to chain mountains together, and that, if insanity is involved at all,
it is a little insane not to do so.
The man who makes a vow makes an
appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is
that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror
of one's self, of the weakness and mutability of one's self, has perilously
increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern
man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland
Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier things), but
because he has a profound conviction that before he had got to the three
hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would be excessively tired
of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other words, we fear that by that
time he will be, in the common but hideously significant phrase, another man.
Now, it is this horrible fairy tale of a man constantly changing into other men
that is the soul of the decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent
calm, look forward to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor
on Tuesday, Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday, may
seem a nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One
great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago, in which he
powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement by declaring that he
could stand in the prison yard and entirely comprehend the feelings of a man
about to be hanged.
'For he that lives more lives than
one
More deaths than one must die.'
And the end of all this is that
maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadents, and compared
with which physical pain itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing.
The one hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally
acting a play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be
human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the
free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot
scare us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to defying enemies
who we know cannot conquer us -- this is the grinning tyranny of decadence
which is called freedom.
Let us turn, on the other hand, to
the maker of vows. The man who made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and
natural expression to the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example,
to chain two mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief of love,
or aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like all
great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it exegi monumentum aere perennius was the
only sentiment that would satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of
course, easily see the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two
mountains together. But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the
earth to the moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he
said, that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take
from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement of a
vow.
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 yoke
mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a
yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a
phrase, a phrase that is a black and 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.
It is exactly this backdoor, this
sense of having a retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterlizing
spirit in modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane
attempt to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus, in politics the modern
Jingoes practically say, 'Let us have the pleasure of conquerors without the pains
of soldiers: let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race.' Thus, in religion and
morals, the decadent mystics say: 'Let us have the fragrance of sacred purity
without the sorrows of self-restraint; let us sing hymns alternately to the
Virgin and Priapus.' Thus in love the free-lovers say: 'Let us have the
splendour of offering ourselves without the peril of committing ourselves; let
us see whether one cannot commit suicide an unlimited number of times.'
Emphatically it will not work.
There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the
aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights
for his own flag, to the aesthetic 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.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
The Extraordinary Cabman first
appeared in London's Daily News. It was later collected in the volume of essays
Tremendous Trifles.
From time to time I have
introduced into this newspaper column the narration of incidents that have
really occurred. I do not mean to insinuate that in this respect it stands
alone among newspaper columns. I mean only that I have found that my meaning
was better expressed by some practical parable out of daily life than by any
other method; therefore I propose to narrate the incident of the extraordinary
cabman, which occurred to me only three days ago, and which, slight as it
apparently is, aroused in me a moment of genuine emotion bordering upon
despair.
On the day that I met the strange
cabman I had been lunching in a little restaurant in Soho in company with three
or four of my best friends. My best friends are all either bottomless sceptics
or quite uncontrollable believers, so our discussion at luncheon turned upon
the most ultimate and terrible ideas. And the whole argument worked out
ultimately to this: that the question is whether a man can be certain of
anything at all. I think he can be certain, for if (as I said to my friend,
furiously brandishing an empty bottle) it is impossible intellectually to
entertain certainty, what is this certainty which it is impossible to
entertain? If I have never experienced such a thing as certainty I cannot even
say that a thing is not certain. Similarly, if I have never experienced such a
thing as green I cannot even say that my nose is not green. It may be as green
as possible for all I know if I have really no experience of greenness. So we
shouted at each other and shook the room; because metaphysics is the only
thoroughly emotional thing. And the difference between us was very deep,
because it was a difference as to the object of the whole thing called
broad-mindedness or the opening of the intellect. For my friend said that he
opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for
opening¹s sake, opening infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my
intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I
was doing it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look
uncommonly silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.
[Editor's Note - From other writings of Chesterton, we know that the
"open-minded" friend referred to here is H.G. Wells. Also, we learn
from the paragraph to follow that Hilaire Belloc was another of those present
at this Soho meeting. And it is quite possible, even probable, that George
Bernard Shaw was also in the party.]
Now when this argument was over,
or at least when it was cut short (for it will never be over), I went away with
one of my companions, who in the confusion and comparative insanity of a
General Election had somehow become a member of Parliament, and I drove with
him in a cab from the corner of Leicester Square to the members' entrance of
the House of Commons, where the police received me with a quite unusual
tolerance. Whether they thought that he was my keeper or that I was his keeper
is a discussion between us which still continues.
It is necessary in this narrative
to preserve the utmost exactitude of detail. After leaving my friend at the
House I took the cab on a few hundred yards to an office in Victoria Street
which I had to visit. I then got out and offered him more that his fare. He
looked at it, but not with the surly doubt and general disposition to try it on
which is not unknown among normal cabmen. But this was no normal, perhaps, no
human, cabman. He looked at it with a dull and infantile astonishment, clearly
quite genuine. "Do you know, sir," he said, "you've only given
me 1s. 8d?" I remarked, with some surprise, that I did know it. "Now
you know, sir," said he in a kindly, appealing, reasonable way, "you
know that ain't the fare form Euston." "Euston," I repeated
vaguely, for the phrase at that moment sounded to me like China or Arabia.
"What on earth has Euston got to do with It?" "You hailed me
just outside Euston Station," began the man with astonishing precision,
"and then you said ‹" "What is the name of Tartarus are you
talking about?" I said with Christian forbearance; "I took you at the
south-west corner of Leicester Square." "Leicester Square," he
exclaimed, loosening a kind of cataract of scorn, "why we ain't been near
Leicester Square to-day. You hailed me outside Euston Station, and you said
‹" "Are you mad, or am I?" I asked with scientific calm.
I looked at the man. No ordinary
dishonest cabman would think of creating so solid and colossal and creative a
lie. And this man was not a dishonest cabman. If ever a human face was heavy
and simple and humble, and with great big blue eyes protruding like a frog's,
if ever (in short) a human face was all that a human face should be, it was the
face of that resentful and respectful cabman. I looked up and down the street;
an unusually dark twilight seemed to be coming on. And for one second the old
nightmare of the sceptic put its finger on my nerve. What was certainty? Was
anybody certain of anything? Heavens! to think of the dull rut of the sceptics
who go on asking whether we possess a future life. The exciting question for
real scepticism is whether we possess past life. What is a minute ago,
rationalistically considered, except a tradition and a picture? The darkness
grew deeper from the road. The cabman calmly gave me the most elaborate details
of the gesture, the words, the complex but consistent course of action which I
had adopted since that remarkable occasion when I had hailed him outside Euston
Station. How did I know (my sceptical friends would say) that I had not hailed
him outside Euston. I was firm about my assertion; he was quite equally firm
about his. He was obviously quite as honest a man as I, and a member of a much more
respectable profession. In that moment the universe and the stars swung just a
hair's breadth from their balance, and the foundations of the earth were moved.
But for the same reason that I believe in Democracy, for the same reason that I
believe in free will, for the same reason that I believe in fixed character of
virtue, the reason that could only be expressed by saying that I do not choose
to be a lunatic, I continued to believe that this honest cabman was wrong, and
I repeated to him that I had really taken him at the corner of Leicester
Square. He began with the same evident and ponderous sincerity, "You
hailed me outside Euston Station, and you said ‹"
And at this moment there came over
his features a kind of frightful transfiguration of living astonishment, as if
he had been lit up like a lamp from the inside. "Why, I beg your pardon,
sir," he said. "I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon. You took me
from Leicester Square. I remember now. I beg your pardon." And with that
this astonishing man let out his whip with a sharp crack at his horse and went
trundling away. The whole of which interview, before the banner of St. George I
swear, is strictly true.
I looked at the strange cabman as
he lessened in the distance and the mists. I do not know whether I was right in
fancying that although his face had seemed so honest there was something
unearthly and demoniac about him when seen from behind. Perhaps he had been
sent to tempt me from my adherence to those sanities and certainties which I
had defended earlier in the day. In any case it gave me pleasure to remember
that my sense of reality, though it had rocked for an instant, had remained
erect.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
A certain politician (whom I would
not discuss here on any account) once said of a certain institution (which wild
horses shall not induce me to name) that "It must be mended or ended."
Few people who use this useful phrase about reform notice the important thing
about it. The important thing about it is that the two methods described here
are not similar but opposite; between mending and ending that is not a
difference of degree but of vital antagonism of kind. Mending is based upon the
idea that the original nature of a thing is good; ending is based upon the idea
that the original nature of a thing is bad or at least, has lost all power of
being good.
If I "mend" an armchair
it is because I want an armchair. I mend the armchair because I wish to restore
it to a state of more complete armchairishness. My objection to the armchair in
its unmended state is that its defects prevent it from being in the fullest
sense an armchair at all. If (let us say) the back has come off and three of
the legs have disappeared, I realize, in looking at it, not merely that it
presents a sense of general irregularity to the eye; I realize that in such and
such respects it does definitely fall short of the Divine and Archetypal
Armchair, which, as Plato would have pointed out, exists in heaven.
But it is possible that I might
possess among my drawing room furniture some object, let us say a rack or a
thumbscrew, of which the nature and raison d'être was repellent to my moral
feelings. If my thumbscrew fell into slight disrepair, I should not mend it at
all; because the more I mended my thumbscrew the more thumbscrewy it would be.
If my private rack were out of order, I should be in no way disturbed; for my private
code of ethics prevents me from racking anyone, and the more it was out of
order the less likely it would be that any casual passer-by could get racked on
it.
In short, a thing is either bad or
good in its original aims and functions. If it is good, we are in favor of
mending it; and because we are in favor of mending it, we are necessarily
opposed to ending it. If it is bad, we are in favor of ending it; and because
we are in favor of ending it, we ought to fly into a passion at the mere
thought of mending it. It is the question of this fundamental alternative, the
right or wrong of the primary idea, which we have to settle in the case of
receiving money for charity from members of dubious or disputed trades, from a
publican or a pirate.
This is an extremely good example
of the fact I have often enunciated, the fact that there is nothing so really
practical and urgent as ideal philosophy. If being a publican is a bad thing in
its nature, the quickest way of getting a good settlement is to punish the man
for being a publican, to suppress him like a smuggler, to treat the man who
administers beer like a man who administers poison. But if being a publican is
a good thing in itself, the quickest way of getting a good publican is to
admire the man because he is a publican, to follow him in great crowds, and
crown him with laurel because he is a publican. It is a practical course to
destroy a thing; but the only other practical course is to idealize it. A
respected despot may sometimes be good; but a despicable despot must always be
despicable. If you are going to end an innkeeper, it can be done quite easily
with a hatchet. But if you are going to mend an innkeeper, you must do it
tenderly, you must do it reverently. You must nail an extra arm or leg on his
person, keeping always before you the Platonic image of the perfect innkeeper,
to whose shape you seek to restore him.
So I would deal with the seller of
whiskey or of battleships, whose contributions to charity were spurned for
conscience' sake by Mr. Bernard Shaw's latest dramatic creation. Certainly
Major Barbara's rejection of the alms cannot rationally be imitated unless we
suppress the trades. If we think these tradesmen wrong, it is absurd merely to
refuse their contributions to charities. To do so amounts merely to this: that
we tolerate them all the time they are doing evil, and only begin to insult
them when they begin to do good.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Illustrated London News (ILN), January 3, 1920
A vast amount of nonsense is
talked against negative and destructive things. The silliest sort of
progressive complains of negative morality, and compares it unfavorably with
positive morality. The silliest sort of conservative complains of destructive
reform and compares it unfavorably with constructive reform. Both the
progressive and the conservative entirely neglect to consider the very meaning
of the words "yes" and "no". To give the answer
"yes" to one question is to imply the answer "no" to
another question. To desire the construction of something is to desire the
destruction of whatever prevents its construction. This is particularly plain
in the fuss about the "negative" morality of the Ten Commandments.
The truth is that the curtness of the Commandments is an evidence, not of the
gloom and narrowness of a religion but of its liberality and humanity. It is
shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted precisely because
most things are permitted and only a few things are forbidden. An optimist who
insisted on a purely positive morality would have to begin by telling a man
that he might pick dandelions on a common and go on for months before he came
to the fact that he might throw pebbles into the sea. In comparison with this
positive morality the Ten Commandments rather shine in that brevity which is
the soul of wit.
But of course the fallacy is even
more fundamental than this. Negative morality is positive morality, stated in
the plainest and therefore the most positive way. If I am told not to murder
Mr. Robinson, if I am stopped in the very act of murdering Mr. Robinson, it is
obvious that Mr. Robinson is not only spared, but in a sense renewed, and even
created. And those who like Mr. Robinson, among them my reactionary romanticism
might suggest the inclusion of Mrs. Robinson, will be well aware that they have
recovered a living and complex unity. And similarly, those who like European
civilisation, and the common code of what used to be called Christendom, will
realize that salvation is not negative, but highly positive, and even highly
complex. They will rejoice at its escape, long before they have leisure for its
examination. But, without examination, they will know that there is a great
deal to be examined, and a great deal that is worth examination. Nothing is
negative except nothing. It is not our rescue that was negative, but only the
nothingness and annihilation from which we were rescued.
On the other side there is the
same fallacy about merely destructive reform. It could be applied just as
easily to the merely destructive war. In both cases destruction may be
essential to the avoidance of destruction, and also to the very possibility of
construction. Men are not merely destroying a ship in order to have a
shipwreck; they may be merely destroying a tree in order to have a ship. To
complain that we spent four years in the Great War in mere destruction is to
complain that we spent them in escaping from being destroyed. And it is, once
again, to forget the fact that the failure of the murderer means the life of a
positive and not a negative Mr. Robinson. If we take the imaginary Mr. Robinson
as a type of the average modern man in Western Europe, and study him from head
to foot, we shall find defects as well as merits. And in the whole civilisation
we have saved, we shall find defects that amounts to diseases. Its feet, if not
of clay, are certainly in clay, stuck in the mud of a materialistic industrial
destitution and despair. To say it is a positive good and glory to have saved
Mr. Robinson from strangling is to miss the whole meaning of human life. It is
to forget every good as soon as we have saved it, that is, to lose it as soon
as we have got it. Progress of that kind is a hope that is the enemy of faith,
and a faith that is the enemy of charity.
When our hopes for the coming time
seem disturbed or doubtful, and peace chaotic, let us remember that it is
really our disappointment that is an illusion. It is our rescue that is a
reality. Our grounds for gratitude are really far greater than our powers of
being grateful. It is in the mood of a noble sort of humility, and even a noble
sort of fear, that new things are really made. We adorn things most when we love
them most. And we love them most when we have nearly lost them.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
The other day, while I was
meditating on morality and Mr. H. Pitt, I was, so to speak, snatched up and put
into a jury box to try people. The snatching took some weeks, but to me it
seemed something sudden and arbitrary. I was put into this box because I lived
in Battersea, and my name began with a C. Looking round me, I saw that there
were also summoned and in attendance in the court whole crowds and processions
of men, all of whom lived in Battersea, and all of whose names began with a C.
It seems that they always summon
jurymen in this sweeping alphabetical way. At one official blow, so to speak,
Battersea is denuded of all its C's, and left to get on as best it can with the
rest of the alphabet. A Cumberpatch is missing from one street - a Chizzolpop
from another - three Chucksterfields from Chucksterfield House; the children
are crying out for an absent Cadgerboy; the woman at the street corner is
weeping for her Coffintop, and will not be comforted. We settle down with a
rollicking ease into our seats (for we are a bold, devil-may-care race, the C's
of Battersea), and an oath is administered to us in a totally inaudible manner
by an individual resembling an army surgeon in his second childhood. We
understand, however, that we are to well and truly try the case between our
sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at the bar, neither of whom has put in
an appearance as yet.
Just when I was wondering whether
the King and the prisoner were, perhaps, coming to an amicable understanding in
some adjoining public-house, the prisoner's bead appears above the barrier of
the dock; he is accused of stealing bicycles, and he is the living image of a
great friend of mine. We go into the matter of the stealing of the bicycles. We
do well and truly try the case between the King and the prisoner in the affair
of the bicycles. And we come to the conclusion, after a brief but reasonable
discussion, that the King is not in any way implicated. Then we pass on to a
woman who neglected her children, and who looks as if somebody or something had
neglected her. And I am one of those who fancy that something had.
All the time that the eye took in
these light appearances and the brain passed these light criticisms, there was
in this heart a barbaric pity and fear which men have never been able to utter
from the beginning, but which is the power behind half the poems of the world.
The mood cannot even inadequately be suggested, except faintly by this
statement that tragedy is the highest expression of the infinite value of human
life. Never had I stood so close to pain; and never so far away from pessimism.
Ordinarily, I should not have spoken of these dark emotions at all, for speech
about them is too difficult, but I mention them now for a specific and
particular reason to the statement of which I will proceed at once. I speak of
these feelings because out of the furnace of them there came a curious
realisation of a political or social truth. I saw with a queer and
indescribable kind of clearness what a jury really is, and why we must never
let it go.
The trend of our epoch up to this
time has been consistently towards socialism and professionalism. We tend to
have trained soldiers because they fight better, trained singers because they
sing better, trained dancers because they dance better, specially instructed
laughers because they laugh better, and so on and so on. The principle has been
applied to law and politics by innumerable modern writers. Many Fabians have
insisted that a greater part of our political work should be performed by
experts. Many legalists have declared that the untrained jury should be
altogether supplanted by the trained Judge.
Now, if this world of ours were
really what is called reasonable, I do not know that there would be any fault
to find with this. But the true result of all experience and the true
foundation of all religion is this. That the four or five things that it is
most practically essential that a man should know, are all of them what people
call paradoxes. That is to say, that though we all find them in life to be mere
plain truths, yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty of
seeming verbal contradictions. One of them, for instance, is the unimpeachable
platitude that the man who finds most pleasure for himself is often the man who
least bunts for it. Another is a paradox of courage; the fact that the way to
avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it. Whoever is careless enough
of his bones to climb some hopeless cliff above the tide may save his bones by
that carelessness. Whoever will lose his life, the same shall save it; an
entirely practical and prosaic statement. [Lk. 9:24]
Now, one of these four or five
paradoxes which should be taught to every infant prattling at his mother's knee
is the following: That the more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it,
and the more a man learns a thing the less he knows it. The Fabian argument of
the expert, that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted, would
be absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied a
thing and practiced it every day went on seeing more and more of its
significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its
significance. In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we are
continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility, seeing less and less
of the significance of the sky or the stones.
Now, it is a terrible business to
mark a man out for the vengeance of men. But it is a thing to which a man can
grow accustomed, as he can to other terrible things; he can even grow
accustomed to the sun. And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even
the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen,
is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid
(several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used
to it.
Strictly they do not see the
prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do
not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop.
Therefore, the instinct of Christian civilisation has most wisely declared that
into their judgments there shall upon every occasion be infused fresh blood and
fresh thoughts from the streets. Men shall come in who can see the court and
the crowd, and coarse faces of the policemen and the professional criminals,
the wasted faces of the wastrels, the unreal faces of the gesticulating
counsel, and see it all as one sees a new picture or a ballet hitherto
unvisited.
Our civilisation 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. 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.
FROM THE AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if
only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. This,
however, is not generally a part of the domestic apparatus on the premises. I
think myself that the thing might be managed with several pails of Aspinall and
a broom. Only if one worked in a really sweeping and masterly way, and laid on
the colour in great washes, it might drip down again on one’s face in floods of
rich and mingled colour like some strange fairy rain; and that would have its
disadvantages. I am afraid it would be necessary to stick to black and white in
this form of artistic composition. To that purpose, indeed, the white ceiling
would be of the greatest possible use; in fact, it is the only use I think of a
white ceiling being put to.
But for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed I might never have
discovered it. For years I have been looking for some blank spaces in a modern
house to draw on. Paper is much too small for any really allegorical design; as
Cyrano de Bergerac says, “Il me faut des géants” [“I need giants”].
But when I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the modern rooms such as we
all live in I was continually disappointed. I found an endless pattern and
complication of small objects hung like a curtain of fine links between me and
my desire. I examined the walls; I found them to my surprise to be already
covered with wallpaper, and I found the wallpaper to be already covered with
uninteresting images, all bearing a ridiculous resemblance to each other. I
could not understand why one arbitrary symbol (a symbol apparently entirely
devoid of any religious or philosophical significance) should thus be sprinkled
all over my nice walls like a sort of small-pox. The Bible must be referring to
wallpapers, I think, when it says, “Use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles
do.” I found the Turkey carpet a mass of unmeaning colours, rather like the
Turkish Empire, or like the sweetmeat called Turkish Delight. I do not exactly
know what Turkish Delight really is; but I suppose it is Macedonian Massacres. Everywhere
that I went forlornly, with my pencil or my paint brush, I found that others
had unaccountably been before me, spoiling the walls, the curtains, and the
furniture with their childish and barbaric designs.
. . . . .
Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching until this
occasion when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying on my
back in bed. Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my vision, that
breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition of Paradise, since
it means purity and also means freedom. But alas! like all heavens, now that it
is seen it is found to be unattainable; it looks more austere and more distant
than the blue sky outside the window. For my proposal to paint on it with the
bristly end of a broom has been discouraged—never mind by whom; by a person
debarred from all political rights—and even my minor proposal to put the other
end of the broom into the kitchen fire and turn it to charcoal has not been
conceded. Yet I am certain that it was from persons in my position that all the
original inspiration came for covering the ceilings of palaces and cathedrals
with a riot of fallen angels or victorious gods. I am sure that it was only
because Michael Angelo was engaged in the ancient and honourable occupation of
lying in bed that he ever realized how the roof of the Sistine Chapel might be
made into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted in the
heavens.
The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is
hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a
kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous than the
exultation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of
very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human
morality. If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major
morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered
more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. Cleanliness is
not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made essential and godliness
is regarded as an offence. A playwright can attack the institution of marriage
so long as he does not misrepresent the manners of society, and I have met
Ibsenite pessimists who thought it wrong to take beer but right to take prussic
acid. Especially this is so in matters of hygiene; notably such matters as
lying in bed. Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of
personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if
it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning. It is upon
the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad
about its opposite.
. . . . .
Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up
the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms
may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man’s minor actions
and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should
be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is
true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should
like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let
them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof,
sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles,
but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon. This alarming growth of
good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which mere
custom can ensure, it means too little emphasis on those virtues which custom
can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of
inspired candour. If ever that abrupt appeal is made to us we may fail. A man
can get used to getting up at five o’clock in the morning. A man cannot very
well get used to being burnt for his opinions; the first experiment is commonly
fatal. Let us pay a little more attention to these possibilities of the heroic
and unexpected. I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed
of an almost terrible virtue.
For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic
caution to be added. Even for those who can do their work in bed (like
journalists), still more for those whose work cannot be done 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.
(1909)
Chesterton,
GK. “On lying in bed.” 1909. Quotidiana. Ed. Patrick Madden. 13 Dec 2007.
I feel an almost savage envy on hearing that London has been flooded in
my absence, while I am in the mere country. My own Battersea has been, I
understand, particularly favoured as a meeting of the waters. Battersea was
already, as I need hardly say, the most beautiful of human localities. Now that
it has the additional splendour of great sheets of water, there must be
something quite incomparable in the landscape (or waterscape) of my own
romantic town. Battersea must be a vision of Venice. The boat that brought the
meat from the butcher’s must have shot along those lanes of rippling silver
with the strange smoothness of the gondola. The greengrocer who brought
cabbages to the corner of the Latchmere Road must have leant upon the oar with
the unearthly grace of the gondolier. There is nothing so perfectly poetical as
an island; and when a district is flooded it becomes an archipelago.
Some consider such romantic views of flood or fire slightly lacking in
reality. But really this romantic view of such inconveniences is quite as
practical as the other. The true optimist who sees in such things an
opportunity for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more sensible than the
ordinary “Indignant Ratepayer” who sees in them an opportunity for grumbling.
Real pain, as in the case of being burnt at Smithfield or having a toothache,
is a positive thing; it can be supported, but scarcely enjoyed. But, after all,
our toothaches are the exception, and as for being burnt at Smithfield, it only
happens to us at the very longest intervals. And most of the inconveniences
that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative
inconveniences—things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear
grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait
for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a
railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway
station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures.
Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new
sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down
suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and
started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys’ habit in
this matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen. Their
meditations may be full of rich and fruitful things. Many of the most purple
hours of my life have been passed at Clapham Junction, which is now, I suppose,
under water. I have been there in many moods so fixed and mystical that the
water might well have come up to my waist before I noticed it particularly. But
in the case of all such annoyances, as I have said, everything depends upon the
emotional point of view. You can safely apply the test to almost every one of
the things that are currently talked of as the typical nuisance of daily life.
For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to
have to run after one’s hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the well-ordered
and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and running exhausts one. The
same people run much faster in games and sports. The same people run much more
eagerly after an uninteresting, little leather ball than they will after a nice
silk hat. There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one’s hat; and
when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is
comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are
comic—eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the
things that are most worth doing—such as making love. A man running after a hat
is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.
Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat
with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a
jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no animal could be wilder.
In fact, I am inclined to believe that hat-hunting on windy days will be the
sport of the upper classes in the future. There will be a meet of ladies and
gentlemen on some high ground on a gusty morning. They will be told that the
professional attendants have started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or
whatever be the technical term. Notice that this employment will in the fullest
degree combine sport with humanitarianism. The hunters would feel that they
were not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were inflicting
pleasure, rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who were looking on.
When last I saw an old gentleman running after his hat in Hyde Park, I told him
that a heart so benevolent as his ought to be filled with peace and thanks at
the thought of how much unaffected pleasure his every gesture and bodily
attitude were at that moment giving to the crowd.
The same principle can be applied to every other typical domestic worry.
A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of cork out of his
glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated. Let him think for a
moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark pools, and let his soul be
immediately irradiated with gratification and repose. Again, I have known some
people of very modern views driven by their distress to the use of theological
terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer
was jammed tight and they could not pull it out. A friend of mine was
particularly afflicted in this way. Every day his drawer was jammed, and every
day in consequence it was something else that rhymes to it. But I pointed out
to him that this sense of wrong was really subjective and relative; it rested
entirely upon the assumption that the drawer could, should, and would come out
easily. “But if,” I said, “you picture to yourself that you are pulling against
some powerful and oppressive enemy, the struggle will become merely exciting
and not exasperating. Imagine that you are tugging up a lifeboat out of the
sea. Imagine that you are roping up a fellow-creature out of an Alpine crevass.
Imagine even that you are a boy again and engaged in a tug-of-war between
French and English.” Shortly after saying this I left him; but I have no doubt
at all that my words bore the best possible fruit. I have no doubt that every
day of his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a flushed face
and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts to himself, and
seeming to hear all round him the roar of an applauding ring.
So I do not think that it is altogether fanciful or incredible to
suppose that even the floods in London may be accepted and enjoyed poetically.
Nothing beyond inconvenience seems really to have been caused by them; and inconvenience,
as I have said, is only one aspect, and that the most unimaginative and
accidental aspect of a really romantic situation. An adventure is only an
inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly
considered. The water that girdled the houses and shops of London must, if
anything, have only increased their previous witchery and wonder. For as the
Roman Catholic priest in the story said: “Wine is good with everything except
water,” and on a similar principle, water is good with everything except wine.
(1908)
Chesterton,
G. K.. “On running after one’s hat.” 1908. Quotidiana. Ed. Patrick Madden. 1 Dec 2007.
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Rafael Gil-Nogués
ragilno@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press
HOME | E-TEXTS | TRANSLATIONS | OTHER ARTS | LINKS