CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - X On Lying in Bed
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience
if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic
apparatus on the premises. I think myself that the thing
might be managed with several pails of Aspinall and a broom.
Only if one worked in a really sweeping and masterly way,
and laid on the colour in great washes, it might drip down again
on one's face in floods of rich and mingled colour like some
strange fairy rain; and that would have its disadvantages.
I am afraid it would be necessary to stick to black and white
in this form of artistic composition. To that purpose, indeed,
the white ceiling would be of the greatest possible use; in fact,
it is the only use I think of a white ceiling being put to.
But for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed I might never have
discovered it. For years I have been looking for some blank spaces
in a modern house to draw on. Paper is much too small for any really
allegorical design; as Cyrano de Bergerac says, "Il me faut des geants."
But when I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the modern
rooms such as we all live in I was continually disappointed.
I found an endless pattern and complication of small objects
hung like a curtain of fine links between me and my desire.
I examined the walls; I found them to my surprise to be
already covered with wallpaper, and I found the wallpaper
to be already covered with uninteresting images, all bearing
a ridiculous resemblance to each other. I could not understand
why one arbitrary symbol (a symbol apparently entirely
devoid of any religious or philosophical significance)
should thus be sprinkled all over my nice walls like a sort
of small-pox. The Bible must be referring to wallpapers, I think,
when it says, "Use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do."
I found the Turkey carpet a mass of unmeaning colours,
rather like the Turkish Empire, or like the sweetmeat called
Turkish Delight. I do not exactly know what Turkish Delight
really is; but I suppose it is Macedonian Massacres.
Everywhere that I went forlornly, with my pencil or my paint brush,
I found that others had unaccountably been before me,
spoiling the walls, the curtains, and the furniture with their
childish and barbaric designs.
. . . . .
Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching until this occasion
when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying on my back
in bed. Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my vision,
that breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition
of Paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom.
But alas! like all heavens, now that it is seen it is found
to be unattainable; it looks more austere and more distant
than the blue sky outside the window. For my proposal to paint
on it with the bristly end of a broom has been discouraged--
never mind by whom; by a person debarred from all political rights--
and even my minor proposal to put the other end of the broom into
the kitchen fire and turn it to charcoal has not been conceded.
Yet I am certain that it was from persons in my position that all
the original inspiration came for covering the ceilings of palaces
and cathedrals with a riot of fallen angels or victorious gods.
I am sure that it was only because Michael Angelo was engaged
in the ancient and honourable occupation of lying in bed that
he ever realized how the roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made
into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted
in the heavens.
The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed
is hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity
that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing
and dangerous than the exultation of very small and secondary
matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones,
at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality.
If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals,
it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered
more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics.
Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness
is made essential and godliness is regarded as an offence.
A playwright can attack the institution of marriage so long
as he does not misrepresent the manners of society, and I have met
Ibsenite pessimists who thought it wrong to take beer but right
to take prussic acid. Especially this is so in matters of hygiene;
notably such matters as lying in bed. Instead of being regarded,
as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience
and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it
were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning.
It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing
good about it or bad about its opposite.
. . . . .
Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed,
get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society
that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows
more fickle. A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to
be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable
are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true;
our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change.
Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions,
but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden,
sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top
of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles,
but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon.
This alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis
on those virtues which mere custom can ensure, it means too little
emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite ensure,
sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candour.
If ever that abrupt appeal is made to us we may fail.
A man can get use to getting up at five o'clock in the morning.
A man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his opinions;
the first experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay a little more
attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected.
I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed
of an almost terrible virtue.
For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic
caution to be added. Even for those who can do their work in bed
(like journalists), still more for those whose work cannot be done
in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales),
it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional.
But that is not the caution I mean. The caution is this:
if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or
justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick.
But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse;
then he will get up a healthy man. If he does it for some secondary
hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get
up a hypochondriac.
The other day, while I was meditating on morality and Mr. H. Pitt, I was,
so to speak, snatched up and put into a jury box to try people.
The snatching took some weeks, but to me it seemed something sudden
and arbitrary. I was put into this box because I lived in Battersea,
and my name began with a C. Looking round me, I saw that there were
also summoned and in attendance in the court whole crowds and processions
of men, all of whom lived in Battersea, and all of whose names began
with a C.
It seems that they always summon jurymen in this sweeping
alphabetical way. At one official blow, so to speak,
Battersea is denuded of all its C's, and left to get on
as best it can with the rest of the alphabet. A Cumberpatch
is missing from one street--a Chizzolpop from another--
three Chucksterfields from Chucksterfield House; the children
are crying out for an absent Cadgerboy; the woman at the street
corner is weeping for her Coffintop, and will not be comforted.
We settle down with a rollicking ease into our seats
(for we are a bold, devil-may-care race, the C's of Battersea),
and an oath is administered to us in a totally inaudible manner
by an individual resembling an Army surgeon in his second childhood.
We understand, however, that we are to well and truly try the case
between our sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at the bar,
neither of whom has put in an appearance as yet.
. . . . .
Just when I was wondering whether the King and the prisoner
were, perhaps, coming to an amicable understanding in some
adjoining public house, the prisoner's head appears above
the barrier of the dock; he is accused of stealing bicycles,
and he is the living image of a great friend of mine.
We go into the matter of the stealing of the bicycles.
We do well and truly try the case between the King and the
prisoner in the affair of the bicycles. And we come to the
conclusion, after a brief but reasonable discussion, that
the King is not in any way implicated. Then we pass on to a
woman who neglected her children, and who looks as if somebody
or something had neglected her. And I am one of those who fancy
that something had.
All the time that the eye took in these light appearances
and the brain passed these light criticisms, there was in
the heart a barbaric pity and fear which men have never been
able to utter from the beginning, but which is the power behind
half the poems of the world. The mood cannot even adequately
be suggested, except faintly by this statement that tragedy
is the highest expression of the infinite value of human life.
Never had I stood so close to pain; and never so far away
from pessimism. Ordinarily, I should not have spoken of these
dark emotions at all, for speech about them is too difficult;
but I mention them now for a specific and particular
reason to the statement of which I will proceed at once.
I speak these feelings because out of the furnace of them there
came a curious realisation of a political or social truth.
I saw with a queer and indescribable kind of clearness what
a jury really is, and why we must never let it go.
The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards
specialism and professionalism. We tend to have trained soldiers
because they fight better, trained singers because they sing better,
trained dancers because they dance better, specially instructed
laughers because they laugh better, and so on and so on.
The principle has been applied to law and politics by innumerable
modern writers. Many Fabians have insisted that a greater
part of our political work should be performed by experts.
Many legalists have declared that the untrained jury should be
altogether supplanted by the trained Judge.
. . . . .
Now, if this world of ours were really what is called reasonable,
I do not know that there would be any fault to find with this.
But the true result of all experience and the true foundation
of all religion is this. That the four or five things
that it is most practically essential that a man should know,
are all of them what people call paradoxes. That is to say,
that though we all find them in life to be mere plain truths,
yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty
of seeming verbal contradictions. One of them, for instance,
is the unimpeachable platitude that the man who finds most
pleasure for himself is often the man who least hunts for it.
Another is the paradox of courage; the fact that the way
to avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it.
Whoever is careless enough of his bones to climb some hopeful
cliff above the tide may save his bones by that carelessness.
Whoever will lose his life, the same shall save it;
an entirely practical and prosaic statement.
Now, one of these four or five paradoxes which should be taught
to every infant prattling at his mother's knee is the following:
That the more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it,
and the more a man learns a thing the less he knows it.
The Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is trained
should be the man who is trusted would be absolutely unanswerable
if it were really true that a man who studied a thing and practiced
it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance.
But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its significance.
In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we are
continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility,
seeing less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones.
. . . . .
Now it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the vengeance of men.
But it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed, as he can
to other terrible things; he can even grow accustomed to the sun.
And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best,
about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen,
is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they
are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply
that they have got used to it.
Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they
see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see
the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop.
Therefore, the instinct of Christian civilisation has most wisely
declared that into their judgments there shall upon every occasion
be infused fresh blood and fresh thoughts from the streets.
Men shall come in who can see the court and the crowd,
and coarse faces of the policeman and the professional criminals,
the wasted faces of the wastrels, the unreal faces of the
gesticulating counsel, and see it all as one sees a new picture
or a play hitherto unvisited.
Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided,
that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too
important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon
that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know,
but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box.
When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered,
or any trifle of that kind, it uses up specialists. But when it
wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve
of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I
remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
I am sitting under tall trees, with a great wind boiling like surf
about the tops of them, so that their living load of leaves rocks
and roars in something that is at once exultation and agony.
I feel, in fact, as if I were actually sitting at the bottom
of the sea among mere anchors and ropes, while over my head
and over the green twilight of water sounded the everlasting rush
of waves and the toil and crash and shipwreck of tremendous ships.
The wind tugs at the trees as if it might pluck them root
and all out of the earth like tufts of grass. Or, to try yet
another desperate figure of speech for this unspeakable energy,
the trees are straining and tearing and lashing as if they
were a tribe of dragons each tied by the tail.
As I look at these top-heavy giants tortured by an invisible
and violent witchcraft, a phrase comes back into my mind.
I remember a little boy of my acquaintance who was once walking
in Battersea Park under just such torn skies and tossing trees.
He did not like the wind at all; it blew in his face too much;
it made him shut his eyes; and it blew off his hat, of which
he was very proud. He was, as far as I remember, about four.
After complaining repeatedly of the atmospheric unrest, he said
at last to his mother, "Well, why don't you take away the trees,
and then it wouldn't wind."
Nothing could be more intelligent or natural than this mistake.
Any one looking for the first time at the trees might fancy
that they were indeed vast and titanic fans, which by their mere
waving agitated the air around them for miles. Nothing, I say,
could be more human and excusable than the belief that it is
the trees which make the wind. Indeed, the belief is so human
and excusable that it is, as a matter of fact, the belief of about
ninety-nine out of a hundred of the philosophers, reformers,
sociologists, and politicians of the great age in which we live.
My small friend was, in fact, very like the principal modern thinkers;
only much nicer.
. . . . .
In the little apologue or parable which he has thus the honour
of inventing, the trees stand for all visible things
and the wind for the invisible. The wind is the spirit
which bloweth where it listeth; the trees are the material
things of the world which are blown where the spirit lists.
The wind is philosophy, religion, revolution; the trees are
cities and civilisations. We only know that there is a wind
because the trees on some distant hill suddenly go mad.
We only know that there is a real revolution because all
the chimney-pots go mad on the whole skyline of the city.
Just as the ragged outline of a tree grows suddenly more
ragged and rises into fantastic crests or tattered tails,
so the human city rises under the wind of the spirit into toppling
temples or sudden spires. No man has ever seen a revolution.
Mobs pouring through the palaces, blood pouring down the gutters,
the guillotine lifted higher than the throne, a prison
in ruins, a people in arms--these things are not revolution,
but the results of revolution.
You cannot see a wind; you can only see that there is a wind.
So, also, you cannot see a revolution; you can only see that
there is a revolution. And there never has been in the history
of the world a real revolution, brutally active and decisive,
which was not preceded by unrest and new dogma in the reign
of invisible things. All revolutions began by being abstract.
Most revolutions began by being quite pedantically abstract.
The wind is up above the world before a twig on the tree has moved.
So there must always be a battle in the sky before there
is a battle on the earth. Since it is lawful to pray
for the coming of the kingdom, it is lawful also to pray for
the coming of the revolution that shall restore the kingdom.
It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in the trees.
It is lawful to pray "Thine anger come on earth as it
is in Heaven."
. . . . .
The great human dogma, then, is that the wind moves the trees.
The great human heresy is that the trees move the wind.
When people begin to say that the material circumstances have
alone created the moral circumstances, then they have prevented
all possibility of serious change. For if my circumstances
have made me wholly stupid, how can I be certain even that I
am right in altering those circumstances?
The man who represents all thought as an accident of environment
is simply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts--
including that one. To treat the human mind as having an ultimate
authority is necessary to any kind of thinking, even free thinking.
And nothing will ever be reformed in this age or country unless
we realise that the moral fact comes first.
For example, most of us, I suppose, have seen in print and heard
in debating clubs an endless discussion that goes on between Socialists
and total abstainers. The latter say that drink leads to poverty;
the former say that poverty leads to drink. I can only wonder at their
either of them being content with such simple physical explanations.
Surely it is obvious that the thing which among the English proletariat
leads to poverty is the same as the thing which leads to drink;
the absence of strong civic dignity, the absence of an instinct
that resists degradation.
When you have discovered why enormous English estates were not long
ago cut up into small holdings like the land of France, you will have
discovered why the Englishman is more drunken than the Frenchman.
The Englishman, among his million delightful virtues, really has
this quality, which may strictly be called "hand to mouth," because under
its influence a man's hand automatically seeks his own mouth,
instead of seeking (as it sometimes should do) his oppressor's nose.
And a man who says that the English inequality in land is due only
to economic causes, or that the drunkenness of England is due only
to economic causes, is saying something so absurd that he cannot
really have thought what he was saying.
Yet things quite as preposterous as this are said and written under
the influence of that great spectacle of babyish helplessness, the
economic theory of history. We have people who represent that all
great historic motives were economic, and then have to howl at the
top of their voices in order to induce the modern democracy to act
on economic motives. The extreme Marxian politicians in England
exhibit themselves as a small, heroic minority, trying vainly to
induce the world to do what, according to their theory, the world
always does. The truth is, of course, that there will be a social
revolution the moment the thing has ceased to be purely economic.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy.
You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
. . . . .
I get up from under the trees, for the wind and the slight
rain have ceased. The trees stand up like golden pillars
in a clear sunlight. The tossing of the trees and the blowing
of the wind have ceased simultaneously. So I suppose there
are still modern philosophers who will maintain that the trees
make the wind.
He was a quiet man, dressed in dark clothes, with a large limp straw hat;
with something almost military in his moustache and whiskers,
but with a quite unmilitary stoop and very dreamy eyes.
He was gazing with a rather gloomy interest at the cluster,
one might almost say the tangle, of small shipping which grew thicker
as our little pleasure boat crawled up into Yarmouth Harbour.
A boat entering this harbour, as every one knows, does not
enter in front of the town like a foreigner, but creeps round
at the back like a traitor taking the town in the rear.
The passage of the river seems almost too narrow for traffic,
and in consequence the bigger ships look colossal. As we passed
under a timber ship from Norway, which seemed to block up the heavens
like a cathedral, the man in a straw hat pointed to an odd wooden
figurehead carved like a woman, and said, like one continuing
a conversation, "Now, why have they left off having them.
They didn't do any one any harm?"
I replied with some flippancy about the captain's wife being jealous;
but I knew in my heart that the man had struck a deep note.
There has been something in our most recent civilisation which is
mysteriously hostile to such healthy and humane symbols.
"They hate anything like that, which is human and pretty," he continued,
exactly echoing my thoughts. "I believe they broke up all the jolly
old figureheads with hatchets and enjoyed doing it."
"Like Mr. Quilp," I answered, "when he battered the wooden Admiral
with the poker."
His whole face suddenly became alive, and for the first time
he stood erect and stared at me.
"Do you come to Yarmouth for that?" he asked.
"For what?"
"For Dickens," he answered, and drummed with his foot on the deck.
"No," I answered; "I come for fun, though that is much the same thing."
"I always come," he answered quietly, "to find Peggotty's boat.
It isn't here."
And when he said that I understood him perfectly.
There are two Yarmouths; I daresay there are two hundred
to the people who live there. I myself have never come
to the end of the list of Batterseas. But there are two to
the stranger and tourist; the poor part, which is dignified,
and the prosperous part, which is savagely vulgar.
My new friend haunted the first of these like a ghost;
to the latter he would only distantly allude.
"The place is very much spoilt now . . . trippers, you know,"
he would say, not at all scornfully, but simply sadly.
That was the nearest he would go to an admission of the monstrous
watering place that lay along the front, outblazing the sun,
and more deafening than the sea. But behind--out of earshot
of this uproar--there are lanes so narrow that they seem
like secret entrances to some hidden place of repose.
There are squares so brimful of silence that to plunge into one
of them is like plunging into a pool. In these places the man
and I paced up and down talking about Dickens, or, rather,
doing what all true Dickensians do, telling each other verbatim
long passages which both of us knew quite well already.
We were really in the atmosphere of the older England.
Fishermen passed us who might well have been characters
like Peggotty; we went into a musty curiosity shop and
bought pipe-stoppers carved into figures from Pickwick.
The evening was settling down between all the buildings
with that slow gold that seems to soak everything when we went
into the church.
In the growing darkness of the church, my eye caught the coloured
windows which on that clear golden evening were flaming with all the
passionate heraldry of the most fierce and ecstatic of Christian arts.
At length I said to my companion:
"Do you see that angel over there? I think it must be meant
for the angel at the sepulchre."
He saw that I was somewhat singularly moved, and he raised his eyebrows.
"I daresay," he said. "What is there odd about that?"
After a pause I said, "Do you remember what the angel at
the sepulchre said?"
"Not particularly," he answered; "but where are you off
to in such a hurry?"
I walked him rapidly out of the still square, past the
fishermen's almshouses, towards the coast, he still inquiring
indignantly where I was going.
"I am going," I said, "to put pennies in automatic machines
on the beach. I am going to listen to the niggers. I am going
to have my photograph taken. I am going to drink ginger-beer
out of its original bottle. I will buy some picture postcards.
I do want a boat. I am ready to listen to a concertina,
and but for the defects of my education should be ready to play it.
I am willing to ride on a donkey; that is, if the donkey is willing.
I am willing to be a donkey; for all this was commanded me
by the angel in the stained-glass window."
"I really think," said the Dickensian, "that I had better put
you in charge of your relations."
"Sir," I answered, "there are certain writers to whom humanity
owes much, whose talent is yet of so shy or delicate or retrospective
a type that we do well to link it with certain quaint places
or certain perishing associations. It would not be unnatural
to look for the spirit of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill,
or even for the shade of Thackeray in Old Kensington.
But let us have no antiquarianism about Dickens, for Dickens
is not an antiquity. Dickens looks not backward, but forward;
he might look at our modern mobs with satire, or with fury,
but he would love to look at them. He might lash our democracy,
but it would be because, like a democrat, he asked much from it.
We will not have all his books bound up under the title
of 'The Old Curiosity Shop.' Rather we will have them
all bound up under the title of 'Great Expectations.'
Wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make
something of it, swallow it with a holy cannibalism,
and assimilate it with the digestion of a giant. We must
take these trippers as he would have taken them, and tear
out of them their tragedy and their farce. Do you remember
now what the angel said at the sepulchre? 'Why seek ye the
living among the dead? He is not here; he is risen.'"
With that we came out suddenly on the wide stretch of the sands,
which were black with the knobs and masses of our laughing and quite
desperate democracy. And the sunset, which was now in its final glory,
flung far over all of them a red flush and glitter like the gigantic
firelight of Dickens. In that strange evening light every figure
looked at once grotesque and attractive, as if he had a story to tell.
I heard a little girl (who was being throttled by another little girl)
say by way of self-vindication, "My sister-in-law 'as got four rings
aside her weddin' ring!"
I stood and listened for more, but my friend went away.
Last week, in an idle metaphor, I took the tumbling of trees
and the secret energy of the wind as typical of the visible world
moving under the violence of the invisible. I took this metaphor
merely because I happened to be writing the article in a wood.
Nevertheless, now that I return to Fleet Street (which seems to me,
I confess, much better and more poetical than all the wild woods
in the world), I am strangely haunted by this accidental comparison.
The people's figures seem a forest and their soul a wind.
All the human personalities which speak or signal to me seem to have
this fantastic character of the fringe of the forest against the sky.
That man that talks to me, what is he but an articulate tree?
That driver of a van who waves his hands wildly at me to tell me
to get out of the way, what is he but a bunch of branches stirred
and swayed by a spiritual wind, a sylvan object that I can continue
to contemplate with calm? That policeman who lifts his hand
to warn three omnibuses of the peril that they run in encountering
my person, what is he but a shrub shaken for a moment with that
blast of human law which is a thing stronger than anarchy?
Gradually this impression of the woods wears off. But this
black-and-white contrast between the visible and invisible, this deep
sense that the one essential belief is belief in the invisible as against
the visible, is suddenly and sensationally brought back to my mind.
Exactly at the moment when Fleet Street has grown most familiar (that is,
most bewildering and bright), my eye catches a poster of vivid violet,
on which I see written in large black letters these remarkable words:
"Should Shop Assistants Marry?"
. . . . .
When I saw those words everything might just as well
have turned upside down. The men in Fleet Street might
have been walking about on their hands. The cross of
St. Paul's might have been hanging in the air upside down.
For I realise that I have really come into a topsy-turvy country;
I have come into the country where men do definitely believe
that the waving of the trees makes the wind. That is to say,
they believe that the material circumstances, however black
and twisted, are more important than the spiritual realities,
however powerful and pure. "Should Shop Assistants Marry?" I am
puzzled to think what some periods and schools of human history
would have made of such a question. The ascetics of the East
or of some periods of the early Church would have thought
that the question meant, "Are not shop assistants too saintly,
too much of another world, even to feel the emotions of the sexes?"
But I suppose that is not what the purple poster means.
In some pagan cities it might have meant, "Shall slaves so vile
as shop assistants even be allowed to propagate their abject race?"
But I suppose that is not what the purple poster meant.
We must face, I fear, the full insanity of what it does mean.
It does really mean that a section of the human race is asking
whether the primary relations of the two human sexes are particularly
good for modern shops. The human race is asking whether Adam
and Eve are entirely suitable for Marshall and Snelgrove.
If this is not topsy-turvy I cannot imagine what would be.
We ask whether the universal institution will improve our
(please God) temporary institution. Yet I have known many
such questions. For instance, I have known a man ask seriously,
"Does Democracy help the Empire?" Which is like saying,
"Is art favourable to frescoes?"
I say that there are many such questions asked.
But if the world ever runs short of them, I can suggest
a large number of questions of precisely the same kind,
based on precisely the same principle.
"Do Feet Improve Boots?"--"Is Bread Better when Eaten?"--"Should
Hats have Heads in them?"--"Do People Spoil a Town?"--"Do Walls
Ruin Wall-papers?"--"Should Neckties enclose Necks?"--"Do Hands
Hurt Walking-sticks?"--"Does Burning Destroy Firewood?"--"Is
Cleanliness Good for Soap?"--"Can Cricket Really Improve
Cricket-bats?"--"Shall We Take Brides with our Wedding Rings?"
and a hundred others.
Not one of these questions differs at all in intellectual purport
or in intellectual value from the question which I have quoted from
the purple poster, or from any of the typical questions asked by
half of the earnest economists of our times. All the questions they
ask are of this character; they are all tinged with this same initial
absurdity. They do not ask if the means is suited to the end; they
all ask (with profound and penetrating scepticism) if the end is suited
to the means. They do not ask whether the tail suits the dog.
They all ask whether a dog is (by the highest artistic canons)
the most ornamental appendage that can be put at the end of a tail.
In short, instead of asking whether our modern arrangements,
our streets, trades, bargains, laws, and concrete institutions are
suited to the primal and permanent idea of a healthy human life,
they never admit that healthy human life into the discussion
at all, except suddenly and accidentally at odd moments;
and then they only ask whether that healthy human life is suited
to our streets and trades. Perfection may be attainable or
unattainable as an end. It may or may not be possible to talk
of imperfection as a means to perfection. But surely it passes
toleration to talk of perfection as a means to imperfection.
The New Jerusalem may be a reality. It may be a dream.
But surely it is too outrageous to say that the New Jerusalem
is a reality on the road to Birmingham.
. . . . .
This is the most enormous and at the same time the most secret
of the modern tyrannies of materialism. In theory the thing ought
to be simple enough. A really human human being would always put
the spiritual things first. A walking and speaking statue of God
finds himself at one particular moment employed as a shop assistant.
He has in himself a power of terrible love, a promise of paternity,
a thirst for some loyalty that shall unify life, and in the ordinary
course of things he asks himself, "How far do the existing conditions
of those assisting in shops fit in with my evident and epic destiny
in the matter of love and marriage?" But here, as I have said,
comes in the quiet and crushing power of modern materialism.
It prevents him rising in rebellion, as he would otherwise do.
By perpetually talking about environment and visible things,
by perpetually talking about economics and physical necessity,
painting and keeping repainted a perpetual picture of iron
machinery and merciless engines, of rails of steel, and of
towers of stone, modern materialism at last produces this
tremendous impression in which the truth is stated upside down.
At last the result is achieved. The man does not say as
he ought to have said, "Should married men endure being modern
shop assistants?" The man says, "Should shop assistants marry?"
Triumph has completed the immense illusion of materialism.
The slave does not say, "Are these chains worthy of me?"
The slave says scientifically and contentedly, "Am I even worthy
of these chains?"
CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - X On Lying in Bed