CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - The Man and His Newspaper
At a little station, which I decline to specify, somewhere between
Oxford and Guildford, I missed a connection or miscalculated a route
in such manner that I was left stranded for rather more than an hour.
I adore waiting at railway stations, but this was not a very
sumptuous specimen. There was nothing on the platform except a chocolate
automatic machine, which eagerly absorbed pennies but produced no
corresponding chocolate, and a small paper-stall with a few remaining
copies of a cheap imperial organ which we will call the Daily Wire.
It does not matter which imperial organ it was, as they all say
the same thing.
Though I knew it quite well already, I read it with gravity as I
strolled out of the station and up the country road. It opened with
the striking phrase that the Radicals were setting class against class.
It went on to remark that nothing had contributed more to make our
Empire happy and enviable, to create that obvious list of glories
which you can supply for yourself, the prosperity of all classes
in our great cities, our populous and growing villages, the success
of our rule in Ireland, etc., etc., than the sound Anglo-Saxon
readiness of all classes in the State "to work heartily hand-in-hand."
It was this alone, the paper assured me, that had saved us from
the horrors of the French Revolution. "It is easy for the Radicals,"
it went on very solemnly, "to make jokes about the dukes.
Very few of these revolutionary gentlemen have given to the poor one half
of the earnest thought, tireless unselfishness, and truly Christian
patience that are given to them by the great landlords of this country.
We are very sure that the English people, with their sturdy
common sense, will prefer to be in the hands of English gentlemen
rather than in the miry claws of Socialistic buccaneers."
Just when I had reached this point I nearly ran into a man.
Despite the populousness and growth of our villages, he appeared
to be the only man for miles, but the road up which I had wandered
turned and narrowed with equal abruptness, and I nearly knocked him
off the gate on which he was leaning. I pulled up to apologize,
and since he seemed ready for society, and even pathetically
pleased with it, I tossed the Daily Wire over a hedge and fell
into speech with him. He wore a wreck of respectable clothes,
and his face had that plebeian refinement which one sees in small
tailors and watchmakers, in poor men of sedentary trades.
Behind him a twisted group of winter trees stood up as gaunt
and tattered as himself, but I do not think that the tragedy
that he symbolized was a mere fancy from the spectral wood.
There was a fixed look in his face which told that he was one
of those who in keeping body and soul together have difficulties
not only with the body, but also with the soul.
He was a Cockney by birth, and retained the touching accent
of those streets from which I am an exile; but he had lived nearly
all his life in this countryside; and he began to tell me the affairs
of it in that formless, tail-foremost way in which the poor
gossip about their great neighbours. Names kept coming and going
in the narrative like charms or spells, unaccompanied by any
biographical explanation. In particular the name of somebody called
Sir Joseph multiplied itself with the omnipresence of a deity.
I took Sir Joseph to be the principal landowner of the district;
and as the confused picture unfolded itself, I began to form
a definite and by no means pleasing picture of Sir Joseph.
He was spoken of in a strange way, frigid and yet familiar, as a child
might speak of a stepmother or an unavoidable nurse; something intimate,
but by no means tender; something that was waiting for you by your own
bed and board; that told you to do this and forbade you to do that,
with a caprice that was cold and yet somehow personal. It did not
appear that Sir Joseph was popular, but he was "a household word."
He was not so much a public man as a sort of private god or omnipotence.
The particular man to whom I spoke said he had "been in trouble,"
and that Sir Joseph had been "pretty hard on him."
And under that grey and silver cloudland, with a background of those
frost-bitten and wind-tortured trees, the little Londoner told me
a tale which, true or false, was as heartrending as Romeo and Juliet.
He had slowly built up in the village a small business as
a photographer, and he was engaged to a girl at one of the lodges,
whom he loved with passion. "I'm the sort that 'ad better marry,"
he said; and for all his frail figure I knew what he meant.
But Sir Joseph, and especially Sir Joseph's wife, did not want
a photographer in the village; it made the girls vain, or perhaps they
disliked this particular photographer. He worked and worked until
he had just enough to marry on honestly; and almost on the eve of his
wedding the lease expired, and Sir Joseph appeared in all his glory.
He refused to renew the lease; and the man went wildly elsewhere.
But Sir Joseph was ubiquitous; and the whole of that place was
barred against him. In all that country he could not find a shed
to which to bring home his bride. The man appealed and explained;
but he was disliked as a demagogue, as well as a photographer.
Then it was as if a black cloud came across the winter sky;
for I knew what was coming. I forget even in what words he told
of Nature maddened and set free. But I still see, as in a photograph,
the grey muscles of the winter trees standing out like tight ropes,
as if all Nature were on the rack.
"She 'ad to go away," he said.
"Wouldn't her parents," I began, and hesitated on the word "forgive."
"Oh, her people forgave her," he said. "But Her Ladyship..."
"Her Ladyship made the sun and moon and stars," I said, impatiently.
"So of course she can come between a mother and the child of her body."
"Well, it does seem a bit 'ard ..." he began with a break in his voice.
"But, good Lord, man," I cried, "it isn't a matter of hardness!
It's a matter of impious and indecent wickedness. If your Sir Joseph
knew the passions he was playing with, he did you a wrong for which
in many Christian countries he would have a knife in him."
The man continued to look across the frozen fields with a frown.
He certainly told his tale with real resentment, whether it
was true or false, or only exaggerated. He was certainly sullen
and injured; but he did not seem to think of any avenue of escape.
At last he said:
"Well, it's a bad world; let's 'ope there's a better one."
"Amen," I said. "But when I think of Sir Joseph, I understand
how men have hoped there was a worse one."
Then we were silent for a long time and felt the cold of the day
crawling up, and at last I said, abruptly:
"The other day at a Budget meeting, I heard."
He took his elbows off the stile and seemed to change from
head to foot like a man coming out of sleep with a yawn.
He said in a totally new voice, louder but much more careless,
"Ah yes, sir,... this 'ere Budget ... the Radicals are doing
a lot of 'arm."
I listened intently, and he went on. He said with a sort of careful
precision, "Settin' class against class; that's what I call it.
Why, what's made our Empire except the readiness of all classes
to work 'eartily 'and-in-'and."
He walked a little up and down the lane and stamped with the cold.
Then he said, "What I say is, what else kept us from the 'errors
of the French Revolution?"
My memory is good, and I waited in tense eagerness for the phrase
that came next. "They may laugh at Dukes; I'd like to see them 'alf
as kind and Christian and patient as lots of the landlords are.
Let me tell you, sir," he said, facing round at me with the final air
of one launching a paradox. "The English people 'ave some common sense,
and they'd rather be in the 'ands of gentlemen than in the claws
of a lot of Socialist thieves."
I had an indescribable sense that I ought to applaud, as if I
were a public meeting. The insane separation in the man's soul
between his experience and his ready-made theory was but a type
of what covers a quarter of England. As he turned away,
I saw the Daily Wire sticking out of his shabby pocket.
He bade me farewell in quite a blaze of catchwords, and went
stumping up the road. I saw his figure grow smaller and smaller
in the great green landscape; even as the Free Man has grown smaller
and smaller in the English countryside.
I was walking the other day in a kitchen garden, which I find has somehow
got attached to my premises, and I was wondering why I liked it.
After a prolonged spiritual self-analysis I came to the conclusion
that I like a kitchen garden because it contains things to eat.
I do not mean that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden
is often very beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on
some monstrous cabbage is much subtler and grander than the mere
freakish and theatrical splashing of yellow and violet on a pansy.
Few of the flowers merely meant for ornament are so ethereal
as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautiful as an orchard;
but why is it that the word "orchard" sounds as beautiful as
the word "flower-garden," and yet also sounds more satisfactory?
I suggest again my extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery:
that it contains things to eat.
The cabbage is a solid; it can be approached from all sides at once;
it can be realized by all senses at once. Compared with that
the sunflower, which can only be seen, is a mere pattern, a thing
painted on a flat wall. Now, it is this sense of the solidity
of things that can only be uttered by the metaphor of eating.
To express the cubic content of a turnip, you must be all round it
at once. The only way to get all round a turnip at once is to eat
the turnip. I think any poetic mind that has loved solidity,
the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, the firmness
of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were things to eat.
If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only white firwood
were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread:
but there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles,
certain split stones of blue and green, that make me wish my
teeth were stronger.
Somebody staring into the sky with the same ethereal
appetite declared that the moon was made of green cheese.
I never could conscientiously accept the full doctrine.
I am Modernist in this matter. That the moon is made of cheese
I have believed from childhood; and in the course of every month
a giant (of my acquaintance) bites a big round piece out of it.
This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not contrary
to it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some degree
actually contradicted by the senses and the reason; first because
if the moon were made of green cheese it would be inhabited;
and second because if it were made of green cheese it would be green.
A blue moon is said to be an unusual sight; but I cannot think
that a green one is much more common. In fact, I think I have seen
the moon looking like every other sort of cheese except a green cheese.
I have seen it look exactly like a cream cheese: a circle of warm
white upon a warm faint violet sky above a cornfield in Kent.
I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese, rising a dull red
copper disk amid masts and dark waters at Honfleur. I have seen it
look like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an ordinary sensible
Prussian blue sky; and I have once seen it so naked and ruinous-looking,
so strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyere cheese,
that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it,
as if it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and
unearthly cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green;
and I incline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough.
The moon, like everything else, will ripen by the end of the world;
and in the last days we shall see it taking on those volcanic
sunset colours, and leaping with that enormous and fantastic life.
But this is a parenthesis; and one perhaps slightly lacking in
prosaic actuality. Whatever may be the value of the above speculations,
the phrase about the moon and green cheese remains a good example
of this imagery of eating and drinking on a large scale.
The same huge fancy is in the phrase "if all the trees were bread
and cheese," which I have cited elsewhere in this connection;
and in that noble nightmare of a Scandinavian legend, in
which Thor drinks the deep sea nearly dry out of a horn.
In an essay like the present (first intended as a paper to be read
before the Royal Society) one cannot be too exact; and I will concede
that my theory of the gradual vire-scence of our satellite is to be
regarded rather as an alternative theory than as a law finally
demonstrated and universally accepted by the scientific world.
It is a hypothesis that holds the field, as the scientists say
of a theory when there is no evidence for it so far.
But the reader need be under no apprehension that I have suddenly
gone mad, and shall start biting large pieces out of the trunks
of trees; or seriously altering (by large semicircular mouthfuls)
the exquisite outline of the mountains. This feeling for expressing
a fresh solidity by the image of eating is really a very old one.
So far from being a paradox of perversity, it is one of the oldest
commonplaces of religion. If any one wandering about wants to have
a good trick or test for separating the wrong idealism from the right,
I will give him one on the spot. It is a mark of false religion
that it is always trying to express concrete facts as abstract;
it calls sex affinity; it calls wine alcohol; it calls brute starvation
the economic problem. The test of true religion is that its energy
drives exactly the other way; it is always trying to make men feel
truths as facts; always trying to make abstract things as plain
and solid as concrete things; always trying to make men, not merely
admit the truth, but see, smell, handle, hear, and devour the truth.
All great spiritual scriptures are full of the invitation not to test,
but to taste; not to examine, but to eat. Their phrases are full
of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna and dreadful wine.
Worldliness, and the polite society of the world, has despised
this instinct of eating; but religion has never despised it.
When we look at a firm, fat, white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not
suggest that we should desire to eat it; that would be highly abnormal.
But I really mean that we should think it good to eat; good for
some one else to eat. For, indeed, some one else is eating it;
the grass that grows upon its top is devouring it silently,
but, doubtless, with an uproarious appetite.
It is a platitude, and none the less true for that, that we need
to have an ideal in our minds with which to test all realities.
But it is equally true, and less noted, that we need a reality
with which to test ideals. Thus I have selected Mrs. Buttons,
a charwoman in Battersea, as the touchstone of all modern
theories about the mass of women. Her name is not Buttons;
she is not in the least a contemptible nor entirely a comic
figure. She has a powerful stoop and an ugly, attractive face,
a little like that of Huxley--without the whiskers, of course.
The courage with which she supports the most brutal bad luck has
something quite creepy about it. Her irony is incessant and inventive;
her practical charity very large; and she is wholly unaware
of the philosophical use to which I put her.
But when I hear the modern generalization about her sex on all sides
I simply substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then.
When on the one side the mere sentimentalist says, "Let woman
be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of social
art and domestic ornament," then I merely repeat it to myself
in the "other form," "Let Mrs. Buttons be content to be dainty
and exquisite, a protected piece of social art, etc." It is
extraordinary what a difference the substitution seems to make.
And on the other hand, when some of the Suffragettes say in their
pamphlets and speeches, "Woman, leaping to life at the trumpet call
of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp
the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought"--
in order to understand such a sentence I say it over again in the
amended form: "Mrs. Buttons, leaping to life at the trumpet call
of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp
the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought."
Somehow it sounds quite different. And yet when you say Woman I
suppose you mean the average woman; and if most women are as capable
and critical and morally sound as Mrs. Buttons, it is as much as we
can expect, and a great deal more than we deserve.
But this study is not about Mrs. Buttons; she would require
many studies. I will take a less impressive case of my principle,
the principle of keeping in the mind an actual personality when we
are talking about types or tendencies or generalized ideals.
Take, for example, the question of the education of boys.
Almost every post brings me pamphlets expounding some advanced and
suggestive scheme of education; the pupils are to be taught separate;
the sexes are to be taught together; there should be no prizes;
there should be no punishments; the master should lift the boys
to his level; the master should descend to their level; we should
encourage the heartiest comradeship among boys, and also the tenderest
spiritual intimacy with masters; toil must be pleasant and holidays
must be instructive; with all these things I am daily impressed
and somewhat bewildered. But on the great Buttons' principle I
keep in my mind and apply to all these ideals one still vivid fact;
the face and character of a particular schoolboy whom I once knew.
I am not taking a mere individual oddity, as you will hear.
He was exceptional, and yet the reverse of eccentric; he was
(in a quite sober and strict sense of the words) exceptionally average.
He was the incarnation and the exaggeration of a certain spirit
which is the common spirit of boys, but which nowhere else became
so obvious and outrageous. And because he was an incarnation he was,
in his way, a tragedy.
I will call him Simmons. He was a tall, healthy figure, strong, but a
little slouching, and there was in his walk something between a slight
swagger and a seaman's roll; he commonly had his hands in his pockets.
His hair was dark, straight, and undistinguished; and his face,
if one saw it after his figure, was something of a surprise.
For while the form might be called big and braggart, the face
might have been called weak, and was certainly worried. It was a
hesitating face, which seemed to blink doubtfully in the daylight.
He had even the look of one who has received a buffet that
he cannot return. In all occupations he was the average boy;
just sufficiently good at sports, just sufficiently bad at work
to be universally satisfactory. But he was prominent in nothing,
for prominence was to him a thing like bodily pain. He could not endure,
without discomfort amounting to desperation, that any boy should
be noticed or sensationally separated from the long line of boys;
for him, to be distinguished was to be disgraced.
Those who interpret schoolboys as merely wooden and barbarous,
unmoved by anything but a savage seriousness about tuck or cricket,
make the mistake of forgetting how much of the schoolboy life is
public and ceremonial, having reference to an ideal; or, if you like,
to an affectation. Boys, like dogs, have a sort of romantic
ritual which is not always their real selves. And this romantic
ritual is generally the ritual of not being romantic; the pretence
of being much more masculine and materialistic than they are.
Boys in themselves are very sentimental. The most sentimental thing
in the world is to hide your feelings; it is making too much of them.
Stoicism is the direct product of sentimentalism; and schoolboys
are sentimental individually, but stoical collectively,
For example, there were numbers of boys at my school besides myself
who took a private pleasure in poetry; but red-hot iron would not
have induced most of us to admit this to the masters, or to repeat
poetry with the faintest inflection of rhythm or intelligence.
That would have been anti-social egoism; we called it "showing off."
I myself remember running to school (an extraordinary thing to do)
with mere internal ecstasy in repeating lines of Walter Scott
about the taunts of Marmion or the boasts of Roderick Dhu, and then
repeating the same lines in class with the colourless decorum
of a hurdy-gurdy. We all wished to be invisible in our uniformity;
a mere pattern of Eton collars and coats.
But Simmons went even further. He felt it as an insult to brotherly
equality if any task or knowledge out of the ordinary track was
discovered even by accident. If a boy had learnt German in infancy;
or if a boy knew some terms in music; or if a boy was forced to confess
feebly that he had read "The Mill on the Floss"--then Simmons was in
a perspiration of discomfort. He felt no personal anger, still less
any petty jealousy, what he felt was an honourable and generous shame.
He hated it as a lady hates coarseness in a pantomime; it made him
want to hide himself. Just that feeling of impersonal ignominy
which most of us have when some one betrays indecent ignorance,
Simmons had when some one betrayed special knowledge. He writhed
and went red in the face; he used to put up the lid of his
desk to hide his blushes for human dignity, and from behind
this barrier would whisper protests which had the hoarse emphasis
of pain. "O, shut up, I say. .. O, I say, shut up. ... O, shut
it, can't you?" Once when a little boy admitted that he had
heard of the Highland claymore, Simmons literally hid his head
inside his desk and dropped the lid upon it in desperation;
and when I was for a moment transferred from the bottom of the form
for knowing the name of Cardinal Newman, I thought he would have
rushed from the room.
His psychological eccentricity increased; if one can call
that an eccentricity which was a wild worship of the ordinary.
At last he grew so sensitive that he could not even bear any question
answered correctly without grief. He felt there was a touch
of disloyalty, of unfraternal individualism, even about knowing
the right answer to a sum. If asked the date of the battle of Hastings,
he considered it due to social tact and general good feeling
to answer 1067. This chivalrous exaggeration led to bad feeling
between him and the school authority, which ended in a rupture
unexpectedly violent in the case of so good-humoured a creature.
He fled from the school, and it was discovered upon inquiry that
he had fled from his home also.
I never expected to see him again; yet it is one of the two
or three odd coincidences of my life that I did see him.
At some public sports or recreation ground I saw a group of
rather objectless youths, one of whom was wearing the dashing
uniform of a private in the Lancers. Inside that uniform was
the tall figure, shy face, and dark, stiff hair of Simmons.
He had gone to the one place where every one is dressed alike--
a regiment. I know nothing more; perhaps he was killed in Africa.
But when England was full of flags and false triumphs, when everybody
was talking manly trash about the whelps of the lion and the brave
boys in red, I often heard a voice echoing in the under-caverns
of my memory, "Shut up... O, shut up ... O, I say, shut it."
My forthcoming work in five volumes, "The Neglect of Cheese in
European Literature" is a work of such unprecedented and laborious
detail that it is doubtful if I shall live to finish it.
Some overflowings from such a fountain of information may therefore
be permitted to springle these pages. I cannot yet wholly explain
the neglect to which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously
silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right,
refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint.
He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet I
can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on
the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says:
"If all the trees were bread and cheese"--which is, indeed a rich
and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were
bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part
of England where I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel
and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil
and this anonymous rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese.
Yet it has every quality which we require in exalted poetry.
It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to "breeze" and "seas"
(an essential point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted
even by the civilization of the modern cities. For their citizens,
with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often say, "Cheese it!"
or even "Quite the cheese." The substance itself is imaginative.
It is ancient--sometimes in the individual case, always in the type
and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk, which is one
of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with soda-water.
You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought of it),
that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale.
Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall.
But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song.
Once in endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made
an eccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular
and even illogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four
successive days in four roadside inns in four different counties.
In each inn they had nothing but bread and cheese; nor can
I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese,
if he can get enough of it. In each inn the cheese was good;
and in each inn it was different. There was a noble Wensleydale
cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so on.
Now, it is just here that true poetic civilization differs from that
paltry and mechanical civilization which holds us all in bondage.
Bad customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism.
Good customs are universal and varied, like native chivalry
and self-defence. Both the good and bad civilization cover us
as with a canopy, and protect us from all that is outside.
But a good civilization spreads over us freely like a tree,
varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilization
stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella--artificial,
mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.
So it is with the contrast between the substances that vary
and the substances that are the same wherever they penetrate.
By a wise doom of heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not
the same cheese. Being really universal it varies from valley to valley.
But if, let us say, we compare cheese with soap (that vastly
inferior substance), we shall see that soap tends more and more
to be merely Smith's Soap or Brown's Soap, sent automatically all
over the world. If the Red Indians have soap it is Smith's Soap.
If the Grand Lama has soap it is Brown's soap. There is nothing subtly
and strangely Buddhist, nothing tenderly Tibetan, about his soap.
I fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese (he is not worthy),
but if he does it is probably a local cheese, having some real
relation to his life and outlook. Safety matches, tinned foods,
patent medicines are sent all over the world; but they are not produced
all over the world. Therefore there is in them a mere dead identity,
never that soft play of slight variation which exists in things
produced everywhere out of the soil, in the milk of the kine,
or the fruits of the orchard. You can get a whisky and soda at
every outpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire-builders
go mad. But you are not tasting or touching any environment,
as in the cider of Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine.
You are not approaching Nature in one of her myriad tints of mood,
as in the holy act of eating cheese.
When I had done my pilgrimage in the four wayside public-houses I
reached one of the great northern cities, and there I proceeded,
with great rapidity and complete inconsistency, to a large and
elaborate restaurant, where I knew I could get many other things
besides bread and cheese. I could get that also, however; or at
least I expected to get it; but I was sharply reminded that I
had entered Babylon, and left England behind. The waiter brought
me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut up into contemptibly small pieces;
and it is the awful fact that, instead of Christian bread, he brought
me biscuits. Biscuits--to one who had eaten the cheese of four
great countrysides! Biscuits--to one who had proved anew for himself
the sanctity of the ancient wedding between cheese and bread!
I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. I asked him who
he was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity had joined.
I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding
substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding substance
like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates.
I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious
as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to
understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society.
I have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter,
but against Modern Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong.
When a man says that democracy is false because most people are stupid,
there are several courses which the philosopher may pursue.
The most obvious is to hit him smartly and with precision on the exact
tip of the nose. But if you have scruples (moral or physical)
about this course, you may proceed to employ Reason, which in this
case has all the savage solidity of a blow with the fist.
It is stupid to say that "most people" are stupid. It is like
saying "most people are tall," when it is obvious that "tall"
can only mean taller than most people. It is absurd to denounce
the majority of mankind as below the average of mankind.
Should the man have been hammered on the nose and brained with logic,
and should he still remain cold, a third course opens: lead him
by the hand (himself half-willing) towards some sunlit and yet secret
meadow and ask him who made the names of the common wild flowers.
They were ordinary people, so far as any one knows, who gave
to one flower the name of the Star of Bethlehem and to another
and much commoner flower the tremendous title of the Eye of Day.
If you cling to the snobbish notion that common people are prosaic,
ask any common person for the local names of the flowers,
names which vary not only from county to county, but even from
dale to dale.
But, curiously enough, the case is much stronger than this.
It will be said that this poetry is peculiar to the country populace,
and that the dim democracies of our modern towns at least have lost it.
For some extraordinary reason they have not lost it. Ordinary London
slang is full of witty things said by nobody in particular.
True, the creed of our cruel cities is not so sane and just as the creed
of the old countryside; but the people are just as clever in giving
names to their sins in the city as in giving names to their joys
in the wilderness. One could not better sum up Christianity than by
calling a small white insignificant flower "The Star of Bethlehem."
But then, again, one could not better sum up the philosophy
deduced from Darwinism than in the one verbal picture of "having
your monkey up."
Who first invented these violent felicities of language?
Who first spoke of a man "being off his head"? The obvious comment
on a lunatic is that his head is off him; yet the other phrase is far
more fantastically exact. There is about every madman a singular
sensation that his body has walked off and left the important part
of him behind.
But the cases of this popular perfection in phrase are even
stronger when they are more vulgar. What concentrated irony
and imagination there is for instance, in the metaphor which
describes a man doing a midnight flitting as "shooting the moon"?
It expresses everything about the run away: his eccentric occupation,
his improbable explanations, his furtive air as of a hunter,
his constant glances at the blank clock in the sky.
No; the English democracy is weak enough about a number of things;
for instance, it is weak in politics. But there is no doubt
that democracy is wonderfully strong in literature. Very few books
that the cultured class has produced of late have been such good
literature as the expression "painting the town red."
Oddly enough, this last Cockney epigram clings to my memory.
For as I was walking a little while ago round a corner near
Victoria I realized for the first time that a familiar lamp-post
was painted all over with a bright vermilion just as if it
were trying (in spite of the obvious bodily disqualification)
to pretend that it was a pillar-box. I have since heard
official explanations of these startling and scarlet objects.
But my first fancy was that some dissipated gentleman on his way
home at four o'clock in the morning had attempted to paint the town
red and got only as far as one lamp-post.
I began to make a fairy tale about the man; and, indeed, this phrase
contains both a fairy tale and a philosophy; it really states almost
the whole truth about those pure outbreaks of pagan enjoyment to which
all healthy men have often been tempted. It expresses the desire
to have levity on a large scale which is the essence of such a mood.
The rowdy young man is not content to paint his tutor's door green:
he would like to paint the whole city scarlet. The word which to us
best recalls such gigantesque idiocy is the word "mafficking."
The slaves of that saturnalia were not only painting the town red;
they thought that they were painting the map red--that they were
painting the world red. But, indeed, this Imperial debauch has in it
something worse than the mere larkiness which is my present topic;
it has an element of real self-flattery and of sin. The Jingo
who wants to admire himself is worse than the blackguard who only
wants to enjoy himself. In a very old ninth-century illumination
which I have seen, depicting the war of the rebel angels in heaven,
Satan is represented as distributing to his followers peacock feathers--
the symbols of an evil pride. Satan also distributed peacock
feathers to his followers on Mafeking Night...
But taking the case of ordinary pagan recklessness and pleasure
seeking, it is, as we have said, well expressed in this image.
First, because it conveys this notion of filling the world
with one private folly; and secondly, because of the profound
idea involved in the choice of colour. Red is the most joyful
and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note,
it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this
world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond burns through.
It glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire which destroys us,
in the roses of our romance and in the awful cup of our religion.
It stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in first love.
Now, the profligate is he who wishes to spread this crimson of
conscious joy over everything; to have excitement at every moment;
to paint everything red. He bursts a thousand barrels of wine to
incarnadine the streets; and sometimes (in his last madness) he will
butcher beasts and men to dip his gigantic brushes in their blood.
For it marks the sacredness of red in nature, that it is secret
even when it is ubiquitous, like blood in the human body,
which is omnipresent, yet invisible. As long as blood lives it
is hidden; it is only dead blood that we see. But the earlier
parts of the rake's progress are very natural and amusing.
Painting the town red is a delightful thing until it is done.
It would be splendid to see the cross of St. Paul's as red as
the cross of St. George, and the gallons of red paint running down
the dome or dripping from the Nelson Column. But when it is done,
when you have painted the town red, an extraordinary thing happens.
You cannot see any red at all.
I can see, as in a sort of vision, the successful artist
standing in the midst of that frightful city, hung on all sides
with the scarlet of his shame. And then, when everything is red,
he will long for a red rose in a green hedge and long in vain;
he will dream of a red leaf and be unable even to imagine it.
He has desecrated the divine colour, and he can no longer see it,
though it is all around. I see him, a single black figure against
the red-hot hell that he has kindled, where spires and turrets stand up
like immobile flames: he is stiffened in a sort of agony of prayer.
Then the mercy of Heaven is loosened, and I see one or two flakes
of snow very slowly begin to fall.
CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - The Man and His Newspaper