from ever seeing stones. You do not do it by locking up all the stones
in the Geological Museum, and only issuing tickets of admission to
adults. You do not do it by trying to pick up all the pebbles on the
beach, for fear he should practise throwing them into the sea. You do
not even adopt so obvious and even pressing a social reform as
forbidding roads to be made of anything but asphalt, or directing that
all gardens shall be made on clay and none on gravel. You neglect all
these great opportunities opening before you; you neglect all these
inspiring vistas of social science and enlightenment. When you want to
prevent a child from throwing stones, you fall back on the stalest and
most sentimental and even most superstitious methods. You do it by
trying to preserve some reasonable authority and influence over the
child. You trust to your private relation with the boy, and not to your
public relation with the stone. And what is true of the natural missile
is just as true, of course, of the artificial missile; especially as it
is a very much more ineffectual and therefore innocuous missile. A man
could be really killed, like St. Stephen, with the stones in the road. I
doubt if he could be really killed, like St. Sebastian, with the arrows
in the toy-shop. But anyhow the very plain principle is the same. If you
can teach a child not to throw a stone, you can teach him when to shoot
an arrow; if you cannot teach him anything, he will always have
something to throw. If he can be persuaded not to smash the Archdeacon’s
hat with a heavy flint, it will probably be possible to dissuade him
from transfixing that head-dress with a toy arrow. If his training
deters him from heaving half a brick at the postman, it will probably
also warn him against constantly loosening shafts of death against the
policeman. But the notion that the child depends upon particular
implements, labelled dangerous, in order to be a danger to himself and
other people, is a notion so nonsensical that it is hard to see how any
human mind can entertain it for a moment. The truth is that all sorts of
faddism, both official and theoretical, have broken down the natural
authority of the domestic institution, especially among the poor; and
the faddists are now casting about desperately for a substitute for the
thing they have themselves destroyed. The normal thing is for the
parents to prevent a boy from doing more than a reasonable amount of
damage with his bow and arrow; and for the rest, to leave him to a
reasonable enjoyment of them. Officialism cannot thus follow the life of
the individual boy, as can the individual guardian. You cannot appoint a
particular policeman for each boy, to pursue him when he climbs trees or
falls into ponds. So the modern spirit has descended to the
indescribable mental degradation of trying to abolish the abuse of
things by abolishing the things themselves; which is as if it were to
abolish ponds or abolish trees. Perhaps it will have a try at that
before long. Thus we have all heard of savages who try a tomahawk for
murder, or burn a wooden club for the damage it has done to society. To
such intellectual levels may the world return.
There are indeed yet lower levels. There is a story from America about a
little boy who gave up his toy cannon to assist the disarmament of the
world. I do not know if it is true, but on the whole I prefer to think
so; for it is perhaps more tolerable to imagine one small monster who
could do such a thing than many more mature monsters who could invent or
admire it. There were some doubtless who neither invented nor admired.
It is one of the peculiarities of the Americans that they combine a
power of producing what they satirize as “sobstuff” with a parallel
power of satirizing it. And of the two American tall stories, it is
sometimes hard to say which is the story and which the satire. But it
seems clear that some people did really repeat this story in a
reverential spirit. And it marks, as I have said, another stage of
cerebral decay. You can (with luck) break a window with a toy arrow; but
you can hardly bombard a town with a toy gun. If people object to the
mere model of a cannon, they must equally object to the picture of a
cannon, and so to every picture in the world that depicts a sword or a
spear. There would be a splendid clearance of all the great
art-galleries of the world. But it would be nothing to the destruction
of all the great libraries of the world, if we logically extended the
principle to all the literary masterpieces that admit the glory of arms.
When this progress had gone on for a century or two, it might begin to
dawn on people that there was something wrong with their moral
principle. What is wrong with their moral principle is that it is
immoral. Arms, like every other adventure or art of man, have two sides
according as they are invoked for the infliction or the defiance of
wrong. They have also an element of real poetry and an element of
realistic and therefore repulsive prose. The child’s symbolic sword and
bow are simply the poetry without the prose; the good without the evil.
The toy sword is the abstraction and emanation of the heroic, apart
from all its horrible accidents. It is the soul of the sword, that will
never be stained with blood.
False Theory and the Theatre
A theatrical manager recently insisted on introducing Chinese labour
into the theatrical profession. He insisted on having real Chinamen to
take the part of Chinese servants; and some actors seem to have resented
it--as I think, very reasonably. A distinguished actress, who is clever
enough to know better, defended it on the ground that nothing must
interfere with the perfection of a work of art. I dispute the moral
thesis in any case; and Nero would no doubt have urged it in defence of
having real deaths in the amphitheatre. I do not admit in any case that
the artist can be entirely indifferent to hunger and unemployment, any
more than to lions or boiling oil. But, as a matter of fact, there is no
need to raise the moral question, because the case is equally strong in
relation to the artistic question. I do not think that a Chinese
character being represented by a Chinese actor is the finishing touch to
the perfection of a work of art. I think it is the last and lowest phase
of the vulgarity that is called realism. It is in the same style and
taste as the triumphs on which, I believe, some actor-managers have
prided themselves: the triumphs of having real silver for goblets or
real jewels for crowns. That is not the spirit of a perfect artist, but
rather of a purse-proud parvenu. The perfect artist would be he who
could put on a crown of gilt wire or tinsel and make us feel he was a
king.
Moreover, if the principle is to be extended from properties to persons,
it is not easy to see where the principle can stop. If we are to insist
on real Asiatics to act “Chu Chin Chow,” why not insist on real
Venetians to act “The Merchant of Venice”? We did experiment recently,
and I believe very successfully, in having the Jew acted by a real Jew.
But I hardly think we should like to make it a rule that nobody must be
allowed to act Shylock unless he can prove his racial right to call upon
his father Abraham. Must the characters of Macbeth and Macduff only be
represented by men with names like Macpherson and Macnab? Must the
Prince of Denmark be native there and to the manner born? Must we import
a crowd of Greeks before we are allowed to act “Troilus and Cressida,”
or a mob of real Egyptians to form the background of “Antony and
Cleopatra”? Will it be necessary to kidnap an African gentleman out of
Africa, by the methods of the slave trade, and force him into acting
Othello? It was rather foolishly suggested at one time that our allies
in Japan might be offended at the fantastic satire of “The Mikado.” As a
matter of fact, the satire of “The Mikado” is not at all directed
against Japanese things, but exclusively against English things. But I
certainly think there might be some little ill-feeling in Japan if gangs
of Japanese coolies were shipped across two continents merely in order
to act in it. If once this singular rule be recognized, a dramatist
will certainly be rather shy of introducing Zulus or Red Indians into
his dramas, owing to the difficulty in securing appropriate dramatic
talent. He will hesitate before making his hero an Eskimo. He will
abandon his intention of seeking his heroine in the Sandwich Islands. If
he were to insist on introducing real cannibals, it seems possible that
they might insist on introducing real cannibalism. This would be quite
in the spirit of Nero and all the art critics of the Roman realism of
the amphitheatre. But surely it would be putting almost too perfect a
finishing touch to the perfection of a work of art. That kind of
finishing touch is a little too finishing.
The irony grew more intense when the newspapers that had insisted on
Chinamen because they could not help being Chinamen began to praise them
with admiration and astonishment because they looked Chinese. This opens
up a speculation so complex and contradictory that I do not propose to
follow it, for I am interested here not in the particular incident but
in the general idea. It will be a sufficient statement of the
fundamental fact of all the arts if I say simply that I do not believe
in the resemblance. I do not believe that a Chinaman does look like a
Chinaman. That is, I do not believe that any Chinaman will necessarily
look like _the_ Chinaman--the Chinaman in the imagination of the artist
and the interest of the crowd. We all know the fable of the man who
imitated a pig, and his rival who was hooted by the crowd because he
could only produce what was (in fact) the squeak of a real pig. The
crowd was perfectly right. The crowd was a crowd of very penetrating and
philosophical art critics. They had come there not to hear an ordinary
pig, which they could hear by poking in any ordinary pigsty. They had
come to hear how the voice of the pig affects the immortal mind and
spirit of man; what sort of satire he would make of it; what sort of fun
he can get out of it; what sort of exaggeration he feels to be an
exaggeration of its essence, and not of its accidents. In other words,
they had come to hear a squeak, but the sort of squeak which expresses
what a man thinks of a pig--not the vastly inferior squeak which only
expresses what a pig thinks of a man. I have myself a poetical
enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where the pigs
have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether
pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.
Therefore the actor who imitated the quadruped may well have put into
his squeak something of the pathetic cry of one longing for the wings of
the dove. The quadruped himself might express no such sentiment; he
might appear, and generally does appear, singularly unconscious of his
own lack of feathers. But the same principle is true of things more
dignified than the most dignified porker, though clad in the most superb
plumage. If a vision of a stately Arab has risen in the imagination of
an author who is an artist, he will be wise if he confides it to an
actor who is also an artist. He will be much wiser to confide it to an
actor than to an Arab. The actor, being a fellow-countryman and a
fellow-artist, may bring out what the author thinks the Arab stands for;
whereas the real Arab might be a particular individual who at that
particular moment refused to stand for anything of the sort, or for
anything at all. The principle is a general one; and I mean no
disrespect to China in the porcine parallel, or in the figurative
association of pigs and pigtails.
But, as a matter of fact, the argument is especially apt in the case of
China. For I fear that China is chiefly interesting to most of us as the
other end of the world. It is valued as something far-off, and therefore
fantastical, like a kingdom in the clouds of sunrise. It is not the very
real virtues of the Chinese tradition--its stoicism, its sense of
honour, its ancient peasant cults--that most people want to put into a
play. It is the ordinary romantic feeling about something remote and
extravagant, like the Martians or the Man in the Moon. It is perfectly
reasonable to have that romantic feeling in moderation, like other
amusements. But it is not reasonable to expect the remote person to feel
remote from himself, or the man at the other end of the world not to
feel it as this end. We must not ask the outlandish Oriental to feel
outlandish, or a Chinaman to be astonished at being Chinese. If,
therefore, the literary artist has the legitimate literary purpose of
expressing the mysterious and alien atmosphere which China implies to
him, he will probably do it much better with the aid of an actor who is
not Chinese. Of course, I am not criticizing the particular details of
the particular performance, of which I know little or nothing. I do not
know the circumstances; and under the circumstances, for all I know, the
experiment may have been very necessary or very successful. I merely
protest against a theory of dramatic truth, urged in defence of the
dramatic experiment, which seems to me calculated to falsify the whole
art of the drama. It is founded on exactly the same fallacy as that of
the infant in Stevenson’s nursery rhyme, who thought that the Japanese
children must suffer from home-sickness through being always abroad in
Japan.
This brings us very near to an old and rather threadbare theatrical
controversy, about whether staging should be simple or elaborate. I do
not mean to begin that argument all over again. What is really wanted is
not so much the simple stage-manager as the simple spectator. In a very
real sense, what is wanted is the simple critic, who would be in truth
the most subtle critic. The healthy human instincts in these things are
at least as much spoiled by sophistication in the stalls as by
elaboration on the stage. A really simple mind would enjoy a simple
scene--and also a gorgeous scene. A popular instinct, to be found in all
folklore, would know well enough when the one or the other was
appropriate. But what is involved here is not the whole of that
sophistication, but only one particular sophistry, and against that
sophistry we may well pause to protest. It is the critical fallacy of
cutting off a real donkey’s head to put it on Bottom the Weaver; when
the head is symbolical, and in that case more appropriate to the critic
than to the actor.
The Secret Society of Mankind
With that fantastic love of paradox which gives pain to so many critics,
I once suggested that there may be some truth in the notion of the
brotherhood of men. This was naturally a subject for severe criticism
from the modern or modernist standpoint; and I remember that the
cleverest refutation of it occurred in a book which was called “We
Moderns.” It was written by Mr. Edward Moore, and very well written too;
indeed the author did himself some injustice in insisting on his own
modernity; for he was not so very modern after all, but really quite
lucid and coherent. But I will venture to take his remark as a text here
because it concerns a matter on which most moderns darken counsel in a
highly incoherent manner. It concerns the nature of the unity of men;
which I did certainly state in its more defiant form as the equality of
man. And I said that this norm or meeting-place of mankind can be found
in the two extremes of the comic and the tragic. I said that no
individual tragedy could be so tragic as having to die; and all men have
equally to die. I said that nothing can be funnier than having two legs;
and all men can join equally in the joke.
The critic in question was terribly severe on this remark. I believe
that the words of his condemnation ran as follows: “Well, in this
passage, there is an error so plain, it is almost inconceivable that a
responsible thinker could have put it forward even in jest. For it is
clear that the tragic and comic elements of which Mr. Chesterton speaks
make not only mankind, but _all life_, equal. Everything that lives must
die; and therefore it is, in Mr. Chesterton’s sense, tragic. Everything
that lives has shape; and therefore it is, in Mr. Chesterton’s sense,
comic. His premises lead to the equality not of mankind, but of all that
lives; whether it be leviathan or butterfly, oak or violet, worm or
eagle.... Would that he had said this! Then we who affirm inequality
would be the first to echo him.” I do not feel it hard to show that
where Mr. Moore thinks equality wrong is exactly where it is right; and
I will begin with mortality; premising that the same is true (for those
who believe it) of immortality. Both are absolutes: a man cannot be
somewhat mortal; nor can he be rather immortal.
To begin with, it must be understood that having an equality in being
black or white is not even the same as being equally black or white. It
is generally fair to take a familiar illustration; and I will take the
ordinary expression about being all in the same boat. Mr. Moore and I
and all men are not only all in the same boat, but have a very real
equality implied in that fact. Nevertheless, since there is a word
“inner” as well as a word “in,” there is a sense in which some of us
might be more in the boat than others. My fellow passengers might have
stowed me at the bottom of the boat and sat on top of me, moved by a
natural distaste for my sitting on top of them. I have noticed that I am
often thus packed in a preliminary fashion into the back seats or basic
parts of cabs, cars, or boats; there being evidently a feeling that I am
the stuff of which the foundations of an edifice are made rather than
its toppling minarets or tapering spires. Meanwhile Mr. Moore might be
surveying the world from the masthead, if there were one, or leaning out
over the prow with the forward gestures of a leader of men, or even
sitting by preference on the edge of the boat with his feet paddling in
the water, to indicate the utmost possible aristocratic detachment from
us and our concerns. Nevertheless, in the large and ultimate matters
which are the whole meaning of the phrase “all in the same boat,” we
should be all equally in the same boat. We should be all equally
dependent upon the reassuring fact that a boat can float. If it did not
float but sink, each one of us would have lost his one and only boat at
the same decisive time and in the same disconcerting manner. If the King
of the Cannibal Islands, upon whose principal island we might suffer the
inconvenience of being wrecked, were to exclaim in a loud voice “I will
eat every single man who has arrived by that identical boat and no
other,” we should all be eaten, and we should all be equally eaten. For
being eaten, considered as a tragedy, is not a matter of degree.
Now there is a fault in every analogy; but the fault in my analogy is
not a fault in my argument; it is the chief fault in Mr. Moore’s
argument. It may be said that even in a shipwreck men are not equal, for
some of us might be so strong that we could swim to the shore, or some
of us might be so tough that the island king would repent of his rash
vow after the first bite. But it is precisely here that I have again,
as delicately as possible, to draw the reader’s attention to the modest
and little-known institution called death. We are all in a boat which
will certainly drown us all, and drown us equally, the strongest with
the weakest; we sail to the land of an ogre, _edax rerum_, who devours
all without distinction. And the meaning in the phrase about being all
in the same boat is, not that there are no degrees among the people in a
boat, but that all those degrees are nothing compared with the
stupendous fact that the boat goes home or goes down. And it is when I
come to the particular criticism on my remarks about “the fact of having
to die” that I feel most confident that I was right and that Mr. Moore
is wrong.
It will be noted that I spoke of the fact of having to die, not of the
fact of dying. The brotherhood of men, being a spiritual thing, is not
concerned merely with the truth that all men will die, but with the
truth that all men know it. It is true, as Mr. Moore says, that
everything will die, “whether it be leviathan or butterfly, oak or
violet, worm or eagle”; but exactly what, at the very start, we do not
know is whether they know it. Can Mr. Moore draw forth leviathan with a
hook, and extract his hopes and fears about the heavenly harpooner? Can
he worm its philosophy out of a worm, or get the caterpillar to talk
about the faint possibility of a butterfly? The caterpillar on the leaf
may repeat to Blake his mother’s grief; but it does not repeat to
anybody its own grief about its own mother. Can he know whether oaks
confront their fate with hearts of oak, as the phrase is used in a
sailor’s song? He cannot; and this is the whole point about human
brotherhood, the point the vegetarians cannot see. This is why a
harpooner is not an assassin; this is why eating whale’s blubber, though
not attractive to the fancy, is not repulsive to the conscience. We do
not know what a whale thinks of death; still less what the other whales
think of his being killed and eaten. He may be a pessimistic whale, and
be perpetually wishing that this too, too solid blubber would melt, thaw
and resolve itself into a dew. He may be a fanatical whale, and feel
frantically certain of passing instantly into a polar paradise of
whales, ruled by the sacred whale who swallowed Jonah. But we can elicit
no sign or gesture from him suggestive of such reflections; and the
working common sense of the thing is that no creatures outside man seem
to have any sense of death at all. Mr. Moore has therefore chosen a
strangely unlucky point upon which to challenge the true egalitarian
doctrine. Almost the most arresting and even startling stamp of the
solidarity and sameness of mankind is precisely this fact, not only of
death, but of the shadow of death. We do know of any man whatever what
we do not know of any other thing whatever, that his death is what we
call a tragedy. From the fact that it is a tragedy flow all the forms
and tests by which we say it is a murder or an execution, a martyrdom or
a suicide. They all depend on an echo or vibration, not only in the soul
of man, but in the souls of all men.
Oddly enough, Mr. Moore has made exactly the same mistake about the
comic as about the tragic. It is true, I think, that almost everything
which has a shape is humorous; but it is not true that everything which
has a shape has a sense of humour. The whale may be laughable, but it is
not the whale who laughs; the image indeed is almost alarming. And the
instant the question is raised, we collide with another colossal fact,
dwarfing all human differentiations; the fact that man is the only
creature who does laugh. In the presence of this prodigious fact, the
fact that men laugh in different degrees, and at different things,
shrivels not merely into insignificance but into invisibility. It is
true that I have often felt the physical universe as something like a
firework display: the most practical of all practical jokes. But if the
cosmos is meant for a joke, men seem to be the only cosmic conspirators
who have been let into the joke. There could be no fraternity like our
freemasonry in that secret pleasure. It is true that there are no limits
to this jesting faculty, that it is not confined to common human jests;
but it is confined to human jesters. Mr. Moore may burst out laughing
when he beholds the morning star, or be thrown into convulsions of
amusement by the effect of moonrise seen through a mist. He may, to
quote his own catalogue, see all the fun of an eagle or an oak tree. We
may come upon him in some quiet dell rolling about in uproarious mirth
at the sight of a violet. But we shall not find the violet in a state of
uproarious mirth at Mr. Moore. He may laugh at the worm; but the worm
will not turn and laugh at him. For that comfort he must come to his
fellow-sinners: I shall always be ready to oblige.
The truth involved here has had many names; that man is the image of
God; that he is the microcosm; that he is the measure of all things. He
is the microcosm in the sense that he is the mirror, the only crystal we
know in which the fantasy and fear in things are, in the double and real
sense, things of reflection. In the presence of this mysterious
monopoly the differences of men are like dust. That is what the equality
of men means to me; and that is the only intelligible thing it ever
meant to anybody. The common things of men infinitely outclass all
classes. For a man to disagree with this it is necessary that he should
understand it; Mr. Moore may really disagree with it; but the ordinary
modern anti-egalitarian does not understand it, or apparently anything
else. If a man says he had some transcendental dogma of his own, as Mr.
Moore may possibly have, which mixes man with nature or claims to see
other values in men, I shall say no more than that my religion is
different from his, and I am uncommonly glad of it. But if he simply
says that men cannot be equal because some of them are clever and some
of them are stupid--why then I shall merely agree (not without tears)
that some of them are very stupid.
The Sentimentalism of Divorce