Gilbert Keith Chesterton is commonly known as a writer of paradox. He
is something of a paradox himself, for he is half-Scotch, half-French,
and wholly English. This paradox is not any more startling than the
fact that yellow and blue, when mixed together, become green. England
is half-way between Scotland and France! He handles paradox very
skilfully, but there are times when he imagines he is making a paradox
and is only making a pun; and there are other times when he is merely
making nonsense. He states in a book called "What's Wrong With the
World" that "the prime truth of woman, the universal mother" is "that
if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." That is singular
paradox! I can understand a prime truth which declares that a thing is
worth doing, even if it be done badly, but I cannot understand a prime
truth which seems to make a merit of bad workmanship.
Elsewhere in the same book, he says that "submission to a weak man
is discipline. Submission to a strong man is servility." The proper
commentary on that paradox can only be made by a soldier. I can
assure Mr. Chesterton that the discipline of a weak man is the nearest
approach to tyranny I know, and it flies to pieces in times of great
distress. Your strong man can hold thoroughly frightened men to
their manhood with a word and a wave of the hand, but your weak man
demoralizes them with the fretful tyranny which he calls strength. The
submission of strong men to a weak man may be called discipline, but
it would be better named self-assurance. But in the field itself, when
authority and strength are needed, that weak man is quietly pushed into
the background, and the really strong man, although he may be a private
soldier, takes command. One can, of course, pick holes in many of Mr.
Chesterton's paradoxes in that manner, but it is profitless to do so.
Our work now is to discover what is of value in his doctrine and to
describe what is unsound in it.
Roughly, one may say that Mr. Chesterton stands for the common man
against the very clever man. He believes more in the People than he
believes in Particular Persons. As he himself would say, he trusts
Man more than he trusts any man, a statement which reads better than
it sounds. He believes in tradition, even in legend, which is the
wisdom accumulated by Man, not out of his mind so much as out of
his experience. He believes in the institution of private property,
provided that the property is widely distributed. In other words, he
believes in what is called Peasant Proprietorship. He does not believe
in Progress as Mr. Wells, for example, believes in it, and he will tell
you very emphatically that the common man was happier in the Middle
Ages than he is to-day. There are times when it seems to me that Mr.
Chesterton's "common man" is as mythical as the "average man" of the
newspapers and the "economic man" of the economists; and I am very
dubious about the happiness of the poor people of the Middle Ages.
It would be foolish to carry one's doctrine too far, but if there is
anything in this theory of Man deriving wisdom from experience, surely
it is reasonable to suppose that human beings, having discovered a
means of living which ensures some comfort and security to them, will
not easily be deprived of it. Mr. Chesterton asks us to believe that
the "common" man permitted the rich lord to rob him of his rights
almost in ignorance of the fact that he was being robbed of them. It
is just as probable that he was ignorant of them because he never had
them.
Mr. Chesterton believes, too, in what he calls "the ancient and
universal things" as against what he calls "the modern and specialist
things." He has invented a theory which establishes man as the great
specialist and woman as the great amateur, and he would keep woman out
of the polling-booth, not because the vote is too good for her, but
because it is not good enough. He demands that the woman shall stay
in the home, not for the Teutonic reason that she is inferior to man
and must work in a narrow area, but for the Chestertonic reason that
she is capable of more varied work than man and can only find adequate
range for her variety in the broad dominions of the home. "Women were
not kept at home," he says, "in order to keep them narrow; on the
contrary, they were kept home in order to keep them broad." The effort
must seem to many persons to have been a singularly unsuccessful one,
but Mr. Chesterton will have none of this sophistry. "I do not even
pause to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was a general
servant," he asserts; discovering in her "generalness" a virtue where
others would discover only a certainty of incompetence and muddle.
If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman
drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of
Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that
the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless
and of small import to the soul, then, as I say, I give it up; I
do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a
definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to
be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets,
cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching
morals, manners, theology and hygiene--I can understand how this
might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow
it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children
about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own
children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same
thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No;
a woman's function is laborous, but because it is gigantic, not
because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of
her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.
I have quoted that extensive passage because it is a good example of
Mr. Chesterton's style and his thought. It is a mixture of soundness
and unsoundness, in which the two things merge so imperceptibly that
there is difficulty in distinguishing the one from the other. It is not
easy to see why the stenographer, travelling to an office every morning
at the same hour by the same underground railway, and typing more or
less the same sort of letter for a specified number of hours before she
returns every evening by the same underground railway to the home from
which she set out in the morning, should be more broad-minded than the
woman who stays at home performing a variety of jobs; and perhaps Mr.
Chesterton is justified in his faith by the fact that the stenographer
is most eager to escape from the office to the home by the way of
marriage.
Nevertheless, I suspect that the home is not quite the broadening
influence Mr. Chesterton declares it to be, and Mr. Chesterton himself
provides me with the ground for my suspicion. To be Queen Elizabeth
within a certain area may be enlarging for the mind. To be Whiteley
(or Marshal Field, in America) within a certain area may be enlarging
for the mind. To be Aristotle within a certain area may he enlarging
for the mind. But to be Queen Elizabeth _and_ Whiteley _and_ Aristotle
within a certain area is paralyzing for the mind. The stenographer
who does one thing every day, has time to think of many things: the
wife and mother who does many things every day has time to think of
nothing. I do not believe that the stenographer, who accepts the
responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, regards the drudgery of
them as an unparalleled opportunity for exhibiting her versatility; and
I have observed that the people who are most keen on such "modern and
specialist things" as labour-saving devices, are just those women who,
in Mr. Chesterton's judgment, should be most reluctant to accept them.