My relations with the readers of this page have been long and pleasant,
but--perhaps for that very reason--I feel that the time has come when I
ought to confess the one great crime of my life. It happened a long time
ago; but it is not uncommon for a belated burst of remorse to reveal
such dark episodes long after they have occurred. It has nothing to do
with the orgies of the Anti-Puritan League. That body is so offensively
respectable that a newspaper, in describing it the other day, referred
to my friend Mr. Edgar Jepson as Canon Edgar Jepson; and it is believed
that similar titles are intended for all of us. No; it is not by the
conduct of Archbishop Crane, of Dean Chesterton, of the Rev. James
Douglas, of Monsignor Bland, and even of that fine and virile old
ecclesiastic, Cardinal Nesbit, that I wish (or rather, am driven by
my conscience) to make this declaration. The crime was committed in
solitude and without accomplices. Alone I did it. Let me, with the
characteristic thirst of penitents to get the worst of the confession
over, state it first of all in its most dreadful and indefensible form.
There is at the present moment in a town in Germany (unless he has died
of rage on discovering his wrong), a restaurant-keeper to whom I still
owe twopence. I last left his open-air restaurant knowing that I owed
him twopence. I carried it away under his nose, despite the fact that
the nose was a decidedly Jewish one. I have never paid him, and it is
highly improbable that I ever shall. How did this villainy come to occur
in a life which has been, generally speaking, deficient in the dexterity
necessary for fraud? The story is as follows--and it has a moral, though
there may not be room for that.
.....
It is a fair general rule for those travelling on the Continent that the
easiest way of talking in a foreign language is to talk philosophy. The
most difficult kind of talking is to talk about common necessities. The
reason is obvious. The names of common necessities vary completely
with each nation and are generally somewhat odd and quaint. How, for
instance, could a Frenchman suppose that a coalbox would be called a
“scuttle”? If he has ever seen the word scuttle it has been in the
Jingo Press, where the “policy of scuttle” is used whenever we give
up something to a small Power like Liberals, instead of giving up
everything to a great Power, like Imperialists. What Englishman in
Germany would be poet enough to guess that the Germans call a glove a
“hand-shoe.” Nations name their necessities by nicknames, so to
speak. They call their tubs and stools by quaint, elvish, and almost
affectionate names, as if they were their own children! But any one can
argue about abstract things in a foreign language who has ever got as
far as Exercise IV. in a primer. For as soon as he can put a
sentence together at all he finds that the words used in abstract or
philosophical discussions are almost the same in all nations. They are
the same, for the simple reason that they all come from the things that
were the roots of our common civilisation. From Christianity, from
the Roman Empire, from the mediaeval Church, or the French Revolution.
“Nation,” “citizen,” “religion,” “philosophy,” “authority,” “the
Republic,” words like these are nearly the same in all the countries in
which we travel. Restrain, therefore, your exuberant admiration for the
young man who can argue with six French atheists when he first lands at
Dieppe. Even I can do that. But very likely the same young man does not
know the French for a shoe-horn. But to this generalisation there
are three great exceptions. (1) In the case of countries that are not
European at all, and have never had our civic conceptions, or the old
Latin scholarship. I do not pretend that the Patagonian phrase for
“citizenship” at once leaps to the mind, or that a Dyak’s word for “the
Republic” has been familiar to me from the nursery. (2) In the case of
Germany, where, although the principle does apply to many words such
as “nation” and “philosophy,” it does not apply so generally, because
Germany has had a special and deliberate policy of encouraging the
purely German part of its language. (3) In the case where one does not
know any of the language at all, as is generally the case with me.
.....
Such at least was my situation on the dark day on which I committed my
crime. Two of the exceptional conditions which I have mentioned were
combined. I was walking about a German town, and I knew no German. I
knew, however, two or three of those great and solemn words which hold
our European civilisation together--one of which is “cigar.” As it was a
hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort of beer-garden, and
ordered a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the lager, and paid for
it. I smoked the cigar, forgot to pay for it, and walked away, gazing
rapturously at the royal outline of the Taunus mountains. After about
ten minutes, I suddenly remembered that I had not paid for the cigar. I
went back to the place of refreshment, and put down the money. But the
proprietor also had forgotten the cigar, and he merely said guttural
things in a tone of query, asking me, I suppose, what I wanted. I said
“cigar,” and he gave me a cigar. I endeavoured while putting down the
money to wave away the cigar with gestures of refusal. He thought that
my rejection was of the nature of a condemnation of that particular
cigar, and brought me another. I whirled my arms like a windmill,
seeking to convey by the sweeping universality of my gesture that my
rejection was a rejection of cigars in general, not of that particular
article. He mistook this for the ordinary impatience of common men, and
rushed forward, his hands filled with miscellaneous cigars, pressing
them upon me. In desperation I tried other kinds of pantomime, but the
more cigars I refused the more and more rare and precious cigars were
brought out of the deeps and recesses of the establishment. I tried in
vain to think of a way of conveying to him the fact that I had already
had the cigar. I imitated the action of a citizen smoking, knocking off
and throwing away a cigar. The watchful proprietor only thought I was
rehearsing (as in an ecstasy of anticipation) the joys of the cigar he
was going to give me. At last I retired baffled: he would not take the
money and leave the cigars alone. So that this restaurant-keeper (in
whose face a love of money shone like the sun at noonday) flatly and
firmly refused to receive the twopence that I certainly owed him; and
I took that twopence of his away with me and rioted on it for months. I
hope that on the last day the angels will break the truth very gently to
that unhappy man.
.....
This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud, and the
moral of it is this--that civilisation is founded upon abstractions. The
idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed by physical motions at
all, because it is an abstract idea. And civilisation obviously would be
nothing without debt. So when hard-headed fellows who study scientific
sociology (which does not exist) come and tell you that civilisation is
material or indifferent to the abstract, just ask yourselves how many of
the things that make up our Society, the Law, or the Stocks and Shares,
or the National Debt, you would be able to convey with your face and
your ten fingers by grinning and gesticulating to a German innkeeper.