A MISCELLANY OF MEN
By G. K. Chesterton
Contents
THE SUFFRAGIST
THE POET AND THE CHEESE
THE THING
THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS
THE NAMELESS MAN
THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA
THE VOTER AND THE TWO VOICES
THE MAD OFFICIAL
THE ENCHANTED MAN
THE SUN WORSHIPPER
THE WRONG INCENDIARY
THE FREE MAN
THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER
THE PRIEST OF SPRING
THE REAL JOURNALIST
THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT
THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY
THE FOOL
THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS
THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS
THE MYSTAGOGUE
THE RED REACTIONARY
THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS
THE MUMMER
THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY
THE NEW THEOLOGIAN
THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN
THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER
THE SULTAN
THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS
THE MAN ON TOP
THE OTHER KIND OF MAN
THE MEDIÆVAL VILLAIN
THE DIVINE DETECTIVE
THE ELF OF JAPAN
THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE
THE CONTENTED MAN
THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL
THE SUFFRAGIST
Rightly or wrongly, it is certain that a man both liberal and chivalric,
can and very often does feel a dis-ease and distrust touching
those political women we call Suffragettes. Like most other popular
sentiments, it is generally wrongly stated even when it is rightly felt.
One part of it can be put most shortly thus: that when a woman puts up
her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which
he is not afraid of her. He can be afraid of her speech and still more
of her silence; but force reminds him of a rusted but very real weapon
of which he has grown ashamed. But these crude summaries are never quite
accurate in any matter of the instincts. For the things which are the
simplest so long as they are undisputed invariably become the subtlest
when once they are disputed: which was what Joubert meant, I suppose,
when he said, “It is not hard to believe in God if one does not define
Him.” When the evil instincts of old Foulon made him say of the poor,
“Let them eat grass,” the good and Christian instincts of the poor
made them hang him on a lamppost with his mouth stuffed full of that
vegetation. But if a modern vegetarian aristocrat were to say to the
poor, “But why don't you like grass?” their intelligences would be much
more taxed to find such an appropriate repartee. And this matter of the
functions of the sexes is primarily a matter of the instincts; sex and
breathing are about the only two things that generally work best
when they are least worried about. That, I suppose, is why the same
sophisticated age that has poisoned the world with Feminism is also
polluting it with Breathing Exercises. We plunge at once into a forest
of false analogies and bad blundering history; while almost any man or
woman left to themselves would know at least that sex is quite different
from anything else in the world.
There is no kind of comparison possible between a quarrel of man and
woman (however right the woman may be) and the other quarrels of slave
and master, of rich and poor, or of patriot and invader, with which the
Suffragists deluge us every day. The difference is as plain as noon;
these other alien groups never came into contact until they came into
collision. Races and ranks began with battle, even if they afterwards
melted into amity. But the very first fact about the sexes is that they
like each other. They seek each other: and awful as are the sins and
sorrows that often come of their mating, it was not such things that
made them meet. It is utterly astounding to note the way in which modern
writers and talkers miss this plain, wide, and overwhelming fact: one
would suppose woman a victim and nothing else. By this account ideal,
emancipated woman has, age after age, been knocked silly with a stone
axe. But really there is no fact to show that ideal, emancipated woman
was ever knocked silly; except the fact that she is silly. And that
might have arisen in so many other ways. Real responsible woman has
never been silly; and any one wishing to knock her would be wise (like
the streetboys) to knock and run away. It is ultimately idiotic to
compare this prehistoric participation with any royalties or rebellions.
Genuine royalties wish to crush rebellions. Genuine rebels wish to
destroy kings. The sexes cannot wish to abolish each other; and if we
allow them any sort of permanent opposition it will sink into something
as base as a party system.
As marriage, therefore, is rooted in an aboriginal unity of instincts,
you cannot compare it, even in its quarrels, with any of the mere
collisions of separate institutions. You could compare it with the
emancipation of negroes from planters--if it were true that a white
man in early youth always dreamed of the abstract beauty of a black
man. You could compare it with the revolt of tenants against a
landlord--if it were true that young landlords wrote sonnets to
invisible tenants. You could compare it to the fighting policy of the
Fenians--if it were true that every normal Irishman wanted an
Englishman to come and live with him. But as we know there are no
instincts in any of these directions, these analogies are not only
false but false on the cardinal fact. I do not speak of the comparative
comfort or merit of these different things: I say they are different. It
may be that love turned to hate is terribly common in sexual matters: it
may be that hate turned to love is not uncommon in the rivalries of race
or class. But any philosophy about the sexes that begins with anything
but the mutual attraction of the sexes, begins with a fallacy; and all
its historical comparisons are as irrelevant and impertinent as puns.
But to expose such cold negation of the instincts is easy: to express
or even half express the instincts is very hard. The instincts are very
much concerned with what literary people call “style” in letters or more
vulgar people call “style” in dress. They are much concerned with how
a thing is done, as well as whether one may do it: and the deepest
elements in their attraction or aversion can often only be conveyed
by stray examples or sudden images. When Danton was defending himself
before the Jacobin tribunal he spoke so loud that his voice was heard
across the Seine, in quite remote streets on the other side of the
river. He must have bellowed like a bull of Bashan. Yet none of us would
think of that prodigy except as something poetical and appropriate. None
of us would instinctively feel that Danton was less of a man or even
less of a gentleman, for speaking so in such an hour. But suppose we
heard that Marie Antoinette, when tried before the same tribunal,
had howled so that she could be heard in the Faubourg St.
Germain--well, I leave it to the instincts, if there are any left.
It is not wrong to howl. Neither is it right. It is simply a question
of the instant impression on the artistic and even animal parts of
humanity, if the noise were heard suddenly like a gun.
Perhaps the nearest verbal analysis of the instinct may be found in
the gestures of the orator addressing a crowd. For the true orator must
always be a demagogue: even if the mob be a small mob, like the French
committee or the English House of Lords. And “demagogue,” in the good
Greek meaning, does not mean one who pleases the populace, but one who
leads it: and if you will notice, you will see that all the instinctive
gestures of oratory are gestures of military leadership; pointing the
people to a path or waving them on to an advance. Notice that long
sweep of the arm across the body and outward, which great orators use
naturally and cheap orators artificially. It is almost the exact gesture
of the drawing of a sword.
The point is not that women are unworthy of votes; it is not even that
votes are unworthy of women. It is that votes are unworthy of men, so
long as they are merely votes; and have nothing in them of this ancient
militarism of democracy. The only crowd worth talking to is the crowd
that is ready to go somewhere and do something; the only demagogue worth
hearing is he who can point at something to be done: and, if he points
with a sword, will only feel it familiar and useful like an elongated
finger. Now, except in some mystical exceptions which prove the rule,
these are not the gestures, and therefore not the instincts, of women.
No honest man dislikes the public woman. He can only dislike the
political woman; an entirely different thing. The instinct has nothing
to do with any desire to keep women curtained or captive: if such a
desire exists. A husband would be pleased if his wife wore a gold crown
and proclaimed laws from a throne of marble; or if she uttered oracles
from the tripod of a priestess; or if she could walk in mystical
motherhood before the procession of some great religious order. But that
she should stand on a platform in the exact altitude in which he stands;
leaning forward a little more than is graceful and holding her mouth
open a little longer and wider than is dignified--well, I only
write here of the facts of natural history; and the fact is that it is
this, and not publicity or importance, that hurts. It is for the modern
world to judge whether such instincts are indeed danger signals; and
whether the hurting of moral as of material nerves is a tocsin and a
warning of nature.
THE POET AND THE CHEESE
There is something creepy in the flat Eastern Counties; a brush of the
white feather. There is a stillness, which is rather of the mind than of
the bodily senses. Rapid changes and sudden revelations of scenery, even
when they are soundless, have something in them analogous to a movement
of music, to a crash or a cry. Mountain hamlets spring out on us with
a shout like mountain brigands. Comfortable valleys accept us with open
arms and warm words, like comfortable innkeepers. But travelling in the
great level lands has a curiously still and lonely quality; lonely even
when there are plenty of people on the road and in the market-place.
One's voice seems to break an almost elvish silence, and something
unreasonably weird in the phrase of the nursery tales, “And he went a
little farther and came to another place,” comes back into the mind.
In some such mood I came along a lean, pale road south of the fens, and
found myself in a large, quiet, and seemingly forgotten village. It was
one of those places that instantly produce a frame of mind which, it may
be, one afterwards decks out with unreal details. I dare say that grass
did not really grow in the streets, but I came away with a curious
impression that it did. I dare say the marketplace was not literally
lonely and without sign of life, but it left the vague impression of
being so. The place was large and even loose in design, yet it had the
air of something hidden away and always overlooked. It seemed shy, like
a big yokel; the low roofs seemed to be ducking behind the hedges and
railings; and the chimneys holding their breath. I came into it in that
dead hour of the afternoon which is neither after lunch nor before tea,
nor anything else even on a half-holiday; and I had a fantastic feeling
that I had strayed into a lost and extra hour that is not numbered in
the twenty-four.
I entered an inn which stood openly in the market-place yet was almost
as private as a private house. Those who talk of “public-houses” as if
they were all one problem would have been both puzzled and pleased with
such a place. In the front window a stout old lady in black with an
elaborate cap sat doing a large piece of needlework. She had a kind of
comfortable Puritanism about her; and might have been (perhaps she was)
the original Mrs. Grundy. A little more withdrawn into the parlour sat
a tall, strong, and serious girl, with a face of beautiful honesty and
a pair of scissors stuck in her belt, doing a small piece of needlework.
Two feet behind them sat a hulking labourer with a humorous face like
wood painted scarlet, with a huge mug of mild beer which he had not
touched, and probably would not touch for hours. On the hearthrug there
was an equally motionless cat; and on the table a copy of 'Household
Words'.
I was conscious of some atmosphere, still and yet bracing, that I had
met somewhere in literature. There was poetry in it as well as piety;
and yet it was not poetry after my particular taste. It was somehow at
once solid and airy. Then I remembered that it was the atmosphere in
some of Wordsworth's rural poems; which are full of genuine freshness
and wonder, and yet are in some incurable way commonplace. This was
curious; for Wordsworth's men were of the rocks and fells, and not of
the fenlands or flats. But perhaps it is the clearness of still water
and the mirrored skies of meres and pools that produces this crystalline
virtue. Perhaps that is why Wordsworth is called a Lake Poet instead
of a mountain poet. Perhaps it is the water that does it. Certainly the
whole of that town was like a cup of water given at morning.
After a few sentences exchanged at long intervals in the manner of
rustic courtesy, I inquired casually what was the name of the town. The
old lady answered that its name was Stilton, and composedly continued
her needlework. But I had paused with my mug in air, and was gazing at
her with a suddenly arrested concern. “I suppose,” I said, “that it has
nothing to do with the cheese of that name.” “Oh, yes,” she answered,
with a staggering indifference, “they used to make it here.”
I put down my mug with a gravity far greater than her own. “But this
place is a Shrine!” I said. “Pilgrims should be pouring into it from
wherever the English legend has endured alive. There ought to be a
colossal statue in the market-place of the man who invented Stilton
cheese. There ought to be another colossal statue of the first cow who
provided the foundations of it. There should be a burnished tablet let
into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton
cheese, and survived. On the top of a neighbouring hill (if there
are any neighbouring hills) there should be a huge model of a Stilton
cheese, made of some rich green marble and engraven with some haughty
motto: I suggest something like 'Ver non semper viret; sed Stiltonia
semper virescit.'” The old lady said, “Yes, sir,” and continued her
domestic occupations.
After a strained and emotional silence, I said, “If I take a meal here
tonight can you give me any Stilton?”
“No, sir; I'm afraid we haven't got any Stilton,” said the immovable
one, speaking as if it were something thousands of miles away.
“This is awful,” I said: for it seemed to me a strange allegory of
England as she is now; this little town that had lost its glory; and
forgotten, so to speak, the meaning of its own name. And I thought it
yet more symbolic because from all that old and full and virile life,
the great cheese was gone; and only the beer remained. And even that
will be stolen by the Liberals or adulterated by the Conservatives.
Politely disengaging myself, I made my way as quickly as possible to
the nearest large, noisy, and nasty town in that neighbourhood, where I
sought out the nearest vulgar, tawdry, and avaricious restaurant.
There (after trifling with beef, mutton, puddings, pies, and so on) I
got a Stilton cheese. I was so much moved by my memories that I wrote
a sonnet to the cheese. Some critical friends have hinted to me that my
sonnet is not strictly new; that it contains “echoes” (as they express
it) of some other poem that they have read somewhere. Here, at least,
are the lines I wrote:
SONNET TO A STILTON CHEESE
Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;
England has need of thee, and so have I--
She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour,
League after grassy league from Lincoln tower
To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.
Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,
Like a tall green volcano rose in power.
Plain living and long drinking are no more,
And pure religion reading 'Household Words',
And sturdy manhood sitting still all day
Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;
While my digestion, like the House of Lords,
The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.
I confess I feel myself as if some literary influence, something that
has haunted me, were present in this otherwise original poem; but it is
hopeless to disentangle it now.
THE THING
The wind awoke last night with so noble a violence that it was like
the war in heaven; and I thought for a moment that the Thing had broken
free. For wind never seems like empty air. Wind always sounds full and
physical, like the big body of something; and I fancied that the Thing
itself was walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests of
beech.
Let me explain. The vitality and recurrent victory of Christendom have
been due to the power of the Thing to break out from time to time from
its enveloping words and symbols. Without this power all civilisations
tend to perish under a load of language and ritual. One instance of this
we hear much in modern discussion: the separation of the form from the
spirit of religion. But we hear too little of numberless other cases of
the same stiffening and falsification; we are far too seldom reminded
that just as church-going is not religion, so reading and writing are
not knowledge, and voting is not self-government. It would be easy to
find people in the big cities who can read and write quickly enough to
be clerks, but who are actually ignorant of the daily movements of the
sun and moon.
The case of self-government is even more curious, especially as one
watches it for the first time in a country district. Self-government
arose among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the
ancients) out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood.
The notion of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foes
of it seem to think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be
consulted as one consults an Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be asked
a lot of fancy questions, to see how he answers them. He and his fellows
are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives.
They shall decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the wheel, of
the spade or the spear. The men of the valley shall settle whether the
valley shall be devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; the
men of the town shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches or
splendid with spires. Of their own nature and instinct they shall gather
under a patriarchal chief or debate in a political market-place. And in
case the word “man” be misunderstood, I may remark that in this moral
atmosphere, this original soul of self-government, the women always have
quite as much influence as the men. But in modern England neither the
men nor the women have any influence at all. In this primary matter, the
moulding of the landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people
are utterly impotent. They stand and stare at imperial and economic
processes going on, as they might stare at the Lord Mayor's Show.
Round about where I live, for instance, two changes are taking place
which really affect the land and all things that live on it, whether for
good or evil. The first is that the urban civilisation (or whatever
it is) is advancing; that the clerks come out in black swarms and the
villas advance in red battalions. The other is that the vast estates
into which England has long been divided are passing out of the hands
of the English gentry into the hands of men who are always upstarts and
often actually foreigners.
Now, these are just the sort of things with which self-government was
really supposed to grapple. People were supposed to be able to indicate
whether they wished to live in town or country, to be represented by a
gentleman or a cad. I do not presume to prejudge their decision; perhaps
they would prefer the cad; perhaps he is really preferable. I say that
the filling of a man's native sky with smoke or the selling of his roof
over his head illustrate the sort of things he ought to have some say
in, if he is supposed to be governing himself. But owing to the strange
trend of recent society, these enormous earthquakes he has to pass over
and treat as private trivialities. In theory the building of a villa
is as incidental as the buying of a hat. In reality it is as if all
Lancashire were laid waste for deer forests; or as if all Belgium
were flooded by the sea. In theory the sale of a squire's land to a
moneylender is a minor and exceptional necessity. In reality it is a
thing like a German invasion. Sometimes it is a German invasion.
Upon this helpless populace, gazing at these prodigies and fates, comes
round about every five years a thing called a General Election. It
is believed by antiquarians to be the remains of some system of
self-government; but it consists solely in asking the citizen questions
about everything except what he understands. The examination paper of
the Election generally consists of some such queries as these: “I. Are
the green biscuits eaten by the peasants of Eastern Lithuania in your
opinion fit for human food? II. Are the religious professions of the
President of the Orange Free State hypocritical or sincere? III. Do you
think that the savages in Prusso-Portuguese East Bunyipland are as happy
and hygienic as the fortunate savages in Franco-British West Bunyipland?
IV. Did the lost Latin Charter said to have been exacted from Henry III
reserve the right of the Crown to create peers? V. What do you think of
what America thinks of what Mr. Roosevelt thinks of what Sir Eldon Gorst
thinks of the state of the Nile? VI. Detect some difference between the
two persons in frock-coats placed before you at this election.”
Now, it never was supposed in any natural theory of self-government that
the ordinary man in my neighbourhood need answer fantastic questions
like these. He is a citizen of South Bucks, not an editor of 'Notes and
Queries'. He would be, I seriously believe, the best judge of whether
farmsteads or factory chimneys should adorn his own sky-line, of whether
stupid squires or clever usurers should govern his own village. But
these are precisely the things which the oligarchs will not allow him to
touch with his finger. Instead, they allow him an Imperial destiny and
divine mission to alter, under their guidance, all the things that he
knows nothing about. The name of self-government is noisy everywhere:
the Thing is throttled.
The wind sang and split the sky like thunder all the night through;
in scraps of sleep it filled my dreams with the divine discordances
of martyrdom and revolt; I heard the horn of Roland and the drums of
Napoleon and all the tongues of terror with which the Thing has gone
forth: the spirit of our race alive. But when I came down in the morning
only a branch or two was broken off the tree in my garden; and none of
the great country houses in the neighbourhood were blown down, as would
have happened if the Thing had really been abroad.
THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS
The man who thinks backwards is a very powerful person to-day: indeed,
if he is not omnipotent, he is at least omnipresent. It is he who writes
nearly all the learned books and articles, especially of the scientific
or skeptical sort; all the articles on Eugenics and Social Evolution
and Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it. But
especially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the
writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage. For
the man who thinks backwards is very frequently a woman.
Thinking backwards is not quite easy to define abstractedly; and,
perhaps, the simplest method is to take some object, as plain as
possible, and from it illustrate the two modes of thought: the right
mode in which all real results have been rooted; the wrong mode, which
is confusing all our current discussions, especially our discussions
about the relations of the sexes. Casting my eye round the room, I
notice an object which is often mentioned in the higher and subtler of
these debates about the sexes: I mean a poker. I will take a poker and
think about it; first forwards and then backwards; and so, perhaps, show
what I mean.
The sage desiring to think well and wisely about a poker will begin
somewhat as follows: Among the live creatures that crawl about this star
the queerest is the thing called Man. This plucked and plumeless bird,
comic and forlorn, is the butt of all the philosophies. He is the only
naked animal; and this quality, once, it is said, his glory, is now his
shame. He has to go outside himself for everything that he wants. He
might almost be considered as an absent-minded person who had gone
bathing and left his clothes everywhere, so that he has hung his hat
upon the beaver and his coat upon the sheep. The rabbit has white warmth
for a waistcoat, and the glow-worm has a lantern for a head. But man has
no heat in his hide, and the light in his body is darkness; and he must
look for light and warmth in the wild, cold universe in which he is
cast. This is equally true of his soul and of his body; he is the one
creature that has lost his heart as much as he has lost his hide. In a
spiritual sense he has taken leave of his senses; and even in a literal
sense he has been unable to keep his hair on. And just as this external
need of his has lit in his dark brain the dreadful star called religion,
so it has lit in his hand the only adequate symbol of it: I mean the red
flower called Fire. Fire, the most magic and startling of all material
things, is a thing known only to man and the expression of his sublime
externalism. It embodies all that is human in his hearths and all that
is divine on his altars. It is the most human thing in the world; seen
across wastes of marsh or medleys of forest, it is veritably the purple
and golden flag of the sons of Eve. But there is about this generous and
rejoicing thing an alien and awful quality: the quality of torture. Its
presence is life; its touch is death. Therefore, it is always necessary
to have an intermediary between ourselves and this dreadful deity; to
have a priest to intercede for us with the god of life and death; to
send an ambassador to the fire. That priest is the poker. Made of
a material more merciless and warlike than the other instruments of
domesticity, hammered on the anvil and born itself in the flame, the
poker is strong enough to enter the burning fiery furnace, and, like
the holy children, not be consumed. In this heroic service it is often
battered and twisted, but is the more honourable for it, like any other
soldier who has been under fire.
Now all this may sound very fanciful and mystical, but it is the right
view of pokers, and no one who takes it will ever go in for any wrong
view of pokers, such as using them to beat one's wife or torture one's
children, or even (though that is more excusable) to make a policeman
jump, as the clown does in the pantomime. He who has thus gone back to
the beginning, and seen everything as quaint and new, will always see
things in their right order, the one depending on the other in degree of
purpose and importance: the poker for the fire and the fire for the man
and the man for the glory of God.
This is thinking forwards. Now our modern discussions about everything,
Imperialism, Socialism, or Votes for Women, are all entangled in
an opposite train of thought, which runs as follows:--A modern
intellectual comes in and sees a poker. He is a positivist; he will not
begin with any dogmas about the nature of man, or any day-dreams about
the mystery of fire. He will begin with what he can see, the poker; and
the first thing he sees about the poker is that it is crooked. He says,
“Poor poker; it's crooked.” Then he asks how it came to be crooked; and
is told that there is a thing in the world (with which his temperament
has hitherto left him unacquainted)--a thing called fire. He points
out, very kindly and clearly, how silly it is of people, if they want
a straight poker, to put it into a chemical combustion which will very
probably heat and warp it. “Let us abolish fire,” he says, “and then
we shall have perfectly straight pokers. Why should you want a fire
at all?” They explain to him that a creature called Man wants a fire,
because he has no fur or feathers. He gazes dreamily at the embers for
a few seconds, and then shakes his head. “I doubt if such an animal is
worth preserving,” he says. “He must eventually go under in the cosmic
struggle when pitted against well-armoured and warmly protected species,
who have wings and trunks and spires and scales and horns and shaggy
hair. If Man cannot live without these luxuries, you had better abolish
Man.” At this point, as a rule, the crowd is convinced; it heaves up all
its clubs and axes, and abolishes him. At least, one of him.
Before we begin discussing our various new plans for the people's
welfare, let us make a kind of agreement that we will argue in a
straightforward way, and not in a tail-foremost way. The typical modern
movements may be right; but let them be defended because they are right,
not because they are typical modern movements. Let us begin with the
actual woman or man in the street, who is cold; like mankind before the
finding of fire. Do not let us begin with the end of the last red-hot
discussion--like the end of a red hot poker. Imperialism may be
right. But if it is right, it is right because England has some divine
authority like Israel, or some human authority like Rome; not because we
have saddled ourselves with South Africa, and don't know how to get rid
of it. Socialism may be true. But if it is true, it is true because the
tribe or the city can really declare all land to be common land, not
because Harrod's Stores exist and the commonwealth must copy them.
Female suffrage may be just. But if it is just, it is just because women
are women, not because women are sweated workers and white slaves and
all sorts of things that they ought never to have been. Let not the
Imperialist accept a colony because it is there, nor the Suffragist
seize a vote because it is lying about, nor the Socialist buy up an
industry merely because it is for sale.
Let us ask ourselves first what we really do want, not what recent legal
decisions have told us to want, or recent logical philosophies proved
that we must want, or recent social prophecies predicted that we shall
some day want. If there must be a British Empire, let it be British, and
not, in mere panic, American or Prussian. If there ought to be female
suffrage, let it be female, and not a mere imitation as coarse as
the male blackguard or as dull as the male clerk. If there is to be
Socialism, let it be social; that is, as different as possible from all
the big commercial departments of to-day. The really good journeyman
tailor does not cut his coat according to his cloth; he asks for more
cloth. The really practical statesman does not fit himself to existing
conditions, he denounces the conditions as unfit. History is like some
deeply planted tree which, though gigantic in girth, tapers away at
last into tiny twigs; and we are in the topmost branches. Each of us is
trying to bend the tree by a twig: to alter England through a distant
colony, or to capture the State through a small State department, or to
destroy all voting through a vote. In all such bewilderment he is wise
who resists this temptation of trivial triumph or surrender, and happy
(in an echo of the Roman poet) who remembers the roots of things.
THE NAMELESS MAN
There are only two forms of government—the monarchy or personal
government, and the republic or impersonal government. England is not a
government; England is an anarchy, because there are so many kings.
But there is one real advantage (among many real disadvantages) in the
method of abstract democracy, and that is this: that under impersonal
government politics are so much more personal. In France and America,
where the State is an abstraction, political argument is quite full
of human details--some might even say of inhuman details. But in
England, precisely because we are ruled by personages, these personages
do not permit personalities. In England names are honoured, and
therefore names are suppressed. But in the republics, in France
especially, a man can put his enemies' names into his article and his
own name at the end of it.
This is the essential condition of such candour. If we merely made our
anonymous articles more violent, we should be baser than we are now. We
should only be arming masked men with daggers instead of cudgels. And I,
for one, have always believed in the more general signing of articles,
and have signed my own articles on many occasions when, heaven knows,
I had little reason to be vain of them. I have heard many arguments for
anonymity; but they all seem to amount to the statement that anonymity
is safe, which is just what I complain of. In matters of truth the fact
that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a
proof that you ought to publish it.
But there is one answer to my perpetual plea for a man putting his name
to his writing. There is one answer, and there is only one answer, and
it is never given. It is that in the modern complexity very often a
man's name is almost as false as his pseudonym. The prominent person
today is eternally trying to lose a name, and to get a title. For
instance, we all read with earnestness and patience the pages of the
'Daily Mail', and there are times when we feel moved to cry, “Bring to
us the man who thought these strange thoughts! Pursue him, capture
him, take great care of him. Bring him back to us tenderly, like some
precious bale of silk, that we may look upon the face of the man who
desires such things to be printed. Let us know his name; his social
and medical pedigree.” But in the modern muddle (it might be said)
how little should we gain if those frankly fatuous sheets were indeed
subscribed by the man who had inspired them. Suppose that after every
article stating that the Premier is a piratical Socialist there were
printed the simple word “Northcliffe.” What does that simple word
suggest to the simple soul? To my simple soul (uninstructed otherwise)
it suggests a lofty and lonely crag somewhere in the wintry seas towards
the Orkheys or Norway; and barely clinging to the top of this crag the
fortress of some forgotten chieftain. As it happens, of course, I
know that the word does not mean this; it means another Fleet Street
journalist like myself or only different from myself in so far as he has
sought to secure money while I have sought to secure a jolly time.
A title does not now even serve as a distinction: it does not
distinguish. A coronet is not merely an extinguisher: it is a
hiding-place.
But the really odd thing is this. This false quality in titles does not
merely apply to the new and vulgar titles, but to the old and historic
titles also. For hundreds of years titles in England have been
essentially unmeaning; void of that very weak and very human instinct in
which titles originated. In essential nonsense of application there is
nothing to choose between Northcliffe and Norfolk. The Duke of Norfolk
means (as my exquisite and laborious knowledge of Latin informs me) the
Leader of Norfolk. It is idle to talk against representative government
or for it. All government is representative government until it begins
to decay. Unfortunately (as is also evident) all government begins to
decay the instant it begins to govern. All aristocrats were first meant
as envoys of democracy; and most envoys of democracy lose no time in
becoming aristocrats. By the old essential human notion, the Duke of
Norfolk ought simply to be the first or most manifest of Norfolk men.
I see growing and filling out before me the image of an actual Duke of
Norfolk. For instance, Norfolk men all make their voices run up very
high at the end of a sentence. The Duke of Norfolk's voice, therefore,
ought to end in a perfect shriek. They often (I am told) end sentences
with the word “together”; entirely irrespective of its meaning. Thus
I shall expect the Duke of Norfolk to say: “I beg to second the motion
together”; or “This is a great constitutional question together.” I
shall expect him to know much about the Broads and the sluggish rivers
above them; to know about the shooting of water-fowl, and not to
know too much about anything else. Of mountains he must be wildly and
ludicrously ignorant. He must have the freshness of Norfolk; nay, even
the flatness of Norfolk. He must remind me of the watery expanses, the
great square church towers and the long level sunsets of East England.
If he does not do this, I decline to know him.
I need not multiply such cases; the principle applies everywhere. Thus I
lose all interest in the Duke of Devonshire unless he can assure me that
his soul is filled with that strange warm Puritanism, Puritanism shot
with romance, which colours the West Country. He must eat nothing but
clotted cream, drink nothing but cider, reading nothing but 'Lorna
Doone', and be unacquainted with any town larger than Plymouth, which he
must regard with some awe, as the Central Babylon of the world. Again, I
should expect the Prince of Wales always to be full of the mysticism and
dreamy ardour of the Celtic fringe.
Perhaps it may be thought that these demands are a little extreme; and
that our fancy is running away with us. Nevertheless, it is not my Duke
of Devonshire who is funny; but the real Duke of Devonshire. The point
is that the scheme of titles is a misfit throughout: hardly anywhere do
we find a modern man whose name and rank represent in any way his type,
his locality, or his mode of life. As a mere matter of social comedy,
the thing is worth noticing. You will meet a man whose name suggests a
gouty admiral, and you will find him exactly like a timid organist:
you will hear announced the name of a haughty and almost heathen grande
dame, and behold the entrance of a nice, smiling Christian cook. These
are light complications of the central fact of the falsification of all
names and ranks. Our peers are like a party of mediæval knights who
should have exchanged shields, crests, and pennons. For the present rule
seems to be that the Duke of Sussex may lawfully own the whole of Essex;
and that the Marquis of Cornwall may own all the hills and valleys so
long as they are not Cornish.
The clue to all this tangle is as simple as it is terrible. If England
is an aristocracy, England is dying. If this system IS the country,
as some say, the country is stiffening into more than the pomp and
paralysis of China. It is the final sign of imbecility in a people that
it calls cats dogs and describes the sun as the moon--and is very
particular about the preciseness of these pseudonyms. To be wrong, and
to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence. The disease
called aphasia, in which people begin by saying tea when they mean
coffee, commonly ends in their silence. Silence of this stiff sort is
the chief mark of the powerful parts of modern society. They all seem
straining to keep things in rather than to let things out. For the kings
of finance speechlessness is counted a way of being strong, though it
should rather be counted a way of being sly. By this time the Parliament
does not parley any more than the Speaker speaks. Even the newspaper
editors and proprietors are more despotic and dangerous by what they do
not utter than by what they do. We have all heard the expression “golden
silence.” The expression “brazen silence” is the only adequate phrase
for our editors. If we wake out of this throttled, gaping, and wordless
nightmare, we must awake with a yell. The Revolution that releases
England from the fixed falsity of its present position will be not less
noisy than other revolutions. It will contain, I fear, a great deal of
that rude accomplishment described among little boys as “calling names”;
but that will not matter much so long as they are the right names.
THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an English Peasant.
Indeed, the type can only exist in community, so much does it depend on
cooperation and common laws. One must not think primarily of a French
Peasant; any more than of a German Measle. The plural of the word is its
proper form; you cannot have a Peasant till you have a peasantry. The
essence of the Peasant ideal is equality; and you cannot be equal all by
yourself.
Nevertheless, because human nature always craves and half creates
the things necessary to its happiness, there are approximations and
suggestions of the possibility of such a race even here. The nearest
approach I know to the temper of a Peasant in England is that of the
country gardener; not, of course, the great scientific gardener attached
to the great houses; he is a rich man's servant like any other. I mean
the small jobbing gardener who works for two or three moderate-sized
gardens; who works on his own; who sometimes even owns his house; and
who frequently owns his tools. This kind of man has really some of the
characteristics of the true Peasant--especially the characteristics
that people don't like. He has none of that irresponsible mirth which
is the consolation of most poor men in England. The gardener is even
disliked sometimes by the owners of the shrubs and flowers; because
(like Micaiah) he prophesies not good concerning them, but evil. The
English gardener is grim, critical, self-respecting; sometimes even
economical. Nor is this (as the reader's lightning wit will flash back
at me) merely because the English gardener is always a Scotch gardener.
The type does exist in pure South England blood and speech; I have
spoken to the type. I was speaking to the type only the other evening,
when a rather odd little incident occurred.
It was one of those wonderful evenings in which the sky was warm and
radiant while the earth was still comparatively cold and wet. But it
is of the essence of Spring to be unexpected; as in that heroic and
hackneyed line about coming “before the swallow dares.” Spring never is
Spring unless it comes too soon. And on a day like that one might pray,
without any profanity, that Spring might come on earth as it was in
heaven. The gardener was gardening. I was not gardening. It is needless
to explain the causes of this difference; it would be to tell the
tremendous history of two souls. It is needless because there is a more
immediate explanation of the case: the gardener and I, if not equal in
agreement, were at least equal in difference. It is quite certain that
he would not have allowed me to touch the garden if I had gone down
on my knees to him. And it is by no means certain that I should have
consented to touch the garden if he had gone down on his knees to me.
His activity and my idleness, therefore, went on steadily side by side
through the long sunset hours.
And all the time I was thinking what a shame it was that he was not
sticking his spade into his own garden, instead of mine: he knew about
the earth and the underworld of seeds, the resurrection of Spring and
the flowers that appear in order like a procession marshalled by a
herald. He possessed the garden intellectually and spiritually, while
I only possessed it politically. I know more about flowers than
coal-owners know about coal; for at least I pay them honour when they
are brought above the surface of the earth. I know more about gardens
than railway shareholders seem to know about railways: for at least I
know that it needs a man to make a garden; a man whose name is Adam. But
as I walked on that grass my ignorance overwhelmed me--and yet that
phrase is false, because it suggests something like a storm from the sky
above. It is truer to say that my ignorance exploded underneath me, like
a mine dug long before; and indeed it was dug before the beginning of
the ages. Green bombs of bulbs and seeds were bursting underneath me
everywhere; and, so far as my knowledge went, they had been laid by
a conspirator. I trod quite uneasily on this uprush of the earth; the
Spring is always only a fruitful earthquake. With the land all alive
under me I began to wonder more and more why this man, who had made the
garden, did not own the garden. If I stuck a spade into the ground, I
should be astonished at what I found there...and just as I thought this
I saw that the gardener was astonished too.
Just as I was wondering why the man who used the spade did not profit by
the spade, he brought me something he had found actually in my soil. It
was a thin worn gold piece of the Georges, of the sort which are called,
I believe, Spade Guineas. Anyhow, a piece of gold.
If you do not see the parable as I saw it just then, I doubt if I can
explain it just now. He could make a hundred other round yellow fruits:
and this flat yellow one is the only sort that I can make. How it came
there I have not a notion--unless Edmund Burke dropped it in his
hurry to get back to Butler's Court. But there it was: this is a cold
recital of facts. There may be a whole pirate's treasure lying under
the earth there, for all I know or care; for there is no interest in a
treasure without a Treasure Island to sail to. If there is a treasure it
will never be found, for I am not interested in wealth beyond the dreams
of avarice since I know that avarice has no dreams, but only insomnia.
And, for the other party, my gardener would never consent to dig up the
garden.
Nevertheless, I was overwhelmed with intellectual emotions when I saw
that answer to my question; the question of why the garden did not
belong to the gardener. No better epigram could be put in reply than
simply putting the Spade Guinea beside the Spade. This was the only
underground seed that I could understand. Only by having a little more
of that dull, battered yellow substance could I manage to be idle while
he was active. I am not altogether idle myself; but the fact remains
that the power is in the thin slip of metal we call the Spade Guinea,
not in the strong square and curve of metal which we call the Spade.
And then I suddenly remembered that as I had found gold on my ground by
accident, so richer men in the north and west counties had found coal in
their ground, also by accident.
I told the gardener that as he had found the thing he ought to keep it,
but that if he cared to sell it to me it could be valued properly, and
then sold. He said at first, with characteristic independence, that he
would like to keep it. He said it would make a brooch for his wife. But
a little later he brought it back to me without explanation. I could not
get a ray of light on the reason of his refusal; but he looked lowering
and unhappy. Had he some mystical instinct that it is just such
accidental and irrational wealth that is the doom of all peasantries?
Perhaps he dimly felt that the boy's pirate tales are true; and that
buried treasure is a thing for robbers and not for producers. Perhaps
he thought there was a curse on such capital: on the coal of the
coal-owners, on the gold of the gold-seekers. Perhaps there is.
THE VOTER AND THE TWO VOICES
The real evil of our Party System is commonly stated wrong. It was
stated wrong by Lord Rosebery, when he said that it prevented the best
men from devoting themselves to politics, and that it encouraged a
fanatical conflict. I doubt whether the best men ever would devote
themselves to politics. The best men devote themselves to pigs and
babies and things like that. And as for the fanatical conflict in
party politics, I wish there was more of it. The real danger of the two
parties with their two policies is that they unduly limit the outlook of
the ordinary citizen. They make him barren instead of creative, because
he is never allowed to do anything except prefer one existing policy to
another. We have not got real Democracy when the decision depends upon
the people. We shall have real Democracy when the problem depends upon
the people. The ordinary man will decide not only how he will vote, but
what he is going to vote about.