CHESTERTON-THE DEFENDANT
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* * * * *
The 'Defences' of which this volume is composed have appeared in The
Speaker, and are here reprinted, after revision and amplification, by
permission of the Editor. Portions of 'The Defence of Publicity'
appeared in The Daily News.
October, 1901.
The reissue of a series of essays so ephemeral and even superfluous may
seem at the first glance to require some excuse; probably the best
excuse is that they will have been completely forgotten, and therefore
may be read again with entirely new sensations. I am not sure, however,
that this claim is so modest as it sounds, for I fancy that Shakespeare
and Balzac, if moved to prayers, might not ask to be remembered, but to
be forgotten, and forgotten thus; for if they were forgotten they would
be everlastingly re-discovered and re-read. It is a monotonous memory
which keeps us in the main from seeing things as splendid as they are.
The ancients were not wrong when they made Lethe the boundary of a
better land; perhaps the only flaw in their system is that a man who had
bathed in the river of forgetfulness would be as likely as not to climb
back upon the bank of the earth and fancy himself in Elysium.
If, therefore, I am certain that most sensible people have forgotten
the existence of this book--I do not speak in modesty or in pride--I
wish only to state a simple and somewhat beautiful fact. In one respect
the passing of the period during which a book can be considered current
has afflicted me with some melancholy, for I had intended to write
anonymously in some daily paper a thorough and crushing exposure of the
work inspired mostly by a certain artistic impatience of the too
indulgent tone of the critiques and the manner in which a vast number of
my most monstrous fallacies have passed unchallenged. I will not repeat
that powerful article here, for it cannot be necessary to do anything
more than warn the reader against the perfectly indefensible line of
argument adopted at the end of p. 28. I am also conscious that the title
of the book is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. It is a legal metaphor,
and, speaking legally, a defendant is not an enthusiast for the
character of King John or the domestic virtues of the prairie-dog. He is
one who defends himself, a thing which the present writer, however
poisoned his mind may be with paradox, certainly never dreamed of
attempting.
Criticism upon the book considered as literature, if it can be so
considered, I should, of course, never dream of discussing--firstly,
because it is ridiculous to do so; and, secondly, because there was, in
my opinion, much justice in such criticism.
But there is one matter on which an author is generally considered as
having a right to explain himself, since it has nothing to do with
capacity or intelligence, and that is the question of his morals.
I am proud to say that a furious, uncompromising, and very effective
attack was made upon what was alleged to be the utter immorality of this
book by my excellent friend Mr. C.F.G. Masterman, in the 'Speaker.' The
tendency of that criticism was to the effect that I was discouraging
improvement and disguising scandals by my offensive optimism. Quoting
the passage in which I said that 'diamonds were to be found in the
dust-bin,' he said: 'There is no difficulty in finding good in what
humanity rejects. The difficulty is to find it in what humanity accepts.
The diamond is easy enough to find in the dust-bin. The difficulty is to
find it in the drawing-room.' I must admit, for my part, without the
slightest shame, that I have found a great many very excellent things in
drawing-rooms. For example, I found Mr. Masterman in a drawing-room. But
I merely mention this purely ethical attack in order to state, in as few
sentences as possible, my difference from the theory of optimism and
progress therein enunciated. At first sight it would seem that the
pessimist encourages improvement. But in reality it is a singular truth
that the era in which pessimism has been cried from the house-tops is
also that in which almost all reform has stagnated and fallen into
decay. The reason of this is not difficult to discover. No man ever did,
and no man ever can, create or desire to make a bad thing good or an
ugly thing beautiful. There must be some germ of good to be loved, some
fragment of beauty to be admired. The mother washes and decks out the
dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash and deck out a
goblin with a heart like hell. No one can kill the fatted calf for
Mephistopheles. The cause which is blocking all progress today is the
subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not
good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are
revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These
essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet
ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be
loved first and improved afterwards.
G. K. C.
* * * * *
In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes
that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a
level, and make us all realize that we live on a planet with a sloping
roof, you will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with
loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose.
The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It
is often difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come
together except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination
conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it is
always associated with one idea, recurrent and at last instinctive. The
scene was the scene of the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, a
prophet as much more gigantic than after-prophets as the boulders are
more gigantic than the pebbles. He spoke some words--words that seemed
shameful and tremendous--and the world, in terror, buried him under a
wilderness of stones. The place is the monument of an ancient fear.
If we followed the same mood of fancy, it would he more difficult to
imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth
that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried
under the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare.
Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more
commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation--it is
a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of
minor poetry. It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that
our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. If we
weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what
is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he
was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang
in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has
not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the
pointing out of the earth.
Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope--the
telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt. For
the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and
as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of
human history--that men are continually tending to undervalue their
environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves.
The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the
tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible
humility.
This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the
ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his
environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself.
This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a
strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon,
have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location
of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only
our eyes that have changed.
The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not.
Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt,
and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody,
and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican.
The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives
and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other
people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that
if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto
death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons
of God. Jesus Christ was crucified, it may be remembered, not because of
anything he said about God, but on a charge of saying that a man could
in three days pull down and rebuild the Temple. Every one of the great
revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have
been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the
slowness of men in realizing its goodness. The prophet who is stoned is
not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a rejected lover. He suffers
from an unrequited attachment to things in general.
It becomes increasingly apparent, therefore, that the world is in a
permanent danger of being misjudged. That this is no fanciful or
mystical idea may be tested by simple examples. The two absolutely basic
words 'good' and 'bad,' descriptive of two primal and inexplicable
sensations, are not, and never have been, used properly. Things that are
bad are not called good by any people who experience them; but things
that are good are called bad by the universal verdict of humanity.
Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such
as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in
itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a
bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other
knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except
on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically
planted in the middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife
which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good
thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in
the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough
for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us;
what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we
call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us.
We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not
because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair
principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic
continent does not make ivory black.
Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged
perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough
to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by
which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be
something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have
investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of
them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but
eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter
and diamonds into the sea. I have found that every man is disposed to
call the green leaf of the tree a little less green than it is, and the
snow of Christmas a little less white than it is; therefore I have
imagined that the main business of a man, however humble, is defence. I
have conceived that a defendant is chiefly required when worldlings
despise the world--that a counsel for the defence would not have been
out of place in that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary
and Man was rejected of men.
* * * * *
One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is
undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which
we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorant
in a literary sense, which is only like saying that a modern novel is
ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the
astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically--it is the actual
centre of a million flaming imaginations.
In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar
literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking,
despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the
character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a
haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to
some variety of deep-sea fishes. The old scholars left the whole
under-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness.
To-day, however, we have reversed this principle. We do despise vulgar
compositions, and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger of
becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean
law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to
examine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar
publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous
exaggeration and misconception than the current boys' literature of the
lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed,
and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the
daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the
lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture.
But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must
have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which
fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and
older than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of
us in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatis personae,
but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by
careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professional
story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I
wish sincerely that anyone had the moral courage to spread that carpet
and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable that all the
tales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original artistic
workmanship. Literature and fiction are two entirely different things.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. A work of art can hardly
be too short, for its climax is its merit. A story can never be too
long, for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, like the last
halfpenny or the last pipelight. And so, while the increase of the
artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and
impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true
romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is
no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These
two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.
But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the
common-sense recognition of this fact--that the youth of the lower
orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic
reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its
wholesomeness--we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this
reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under
discussion do not read 'The Egoist' and 'The Master Builder.' It is the
custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of
the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs away with
an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's knowledge
that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary
researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the
novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from
young people possessed of no little native humour. If I had forged a
will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence
of Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the greatest entertainment
in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most
people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find
their principal motives for conduct in printed books.
Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by
magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is
not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put
in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that
the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded,
appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial
theory, and this is rubbish.
So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls
in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: The whole
bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with
adventures, rambling, disconnected and endless. It does not express any
passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It
runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the
medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy,
recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures
in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being
kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by
such dehumanized and naked narrative as this.
Among these stories there are a certain number which deal
sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates,
which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers
like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the
same thing as Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' Scott's 'Rob Roy,' Scott's 'Lady of
the Lake,' Byron's 'Corsair,' Wordsworth's 'Rob Roy's Grave,'
Stevenson's 'Macaire,' Mr. Max Pemberton's 'Iron Pirate,' and a thousand
more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents.
Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in 'Ivanhoe' will lead a
boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks
that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will
set him up for life as a blackmailer. In the case of our own class, we
recognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the
young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is
different from it. It might at least cross our minds that, for whatever
other reason the errand-boy reads 'The Red Revenge,' it really is not
because he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives.
In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by
speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.
This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is
simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings.
He says, with a modest swagger, 'I have invited twenty-five factory
hands to tea.' If he said 'I have invited twenty-five chartered
accountants to tea,' everyone would see the humour of so simple a
classification. But this is what we have done with this lumberland of
foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new
disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of
man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist
is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new
way of expressing them. These common and current publications have
nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and
heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that
unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all.
Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by
the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and
dazzling epigram.
If the authors and publishers of 'Dick Deadshot,' and such remarkable
works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to
take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught
at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and
warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. Yet
they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their
idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of
the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively
criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the
high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room
tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstall in
Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or
suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are our
luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled
in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very
time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether
morality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the Penny
Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the
proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it
(quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading
philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant
that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are
placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.
But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are the
criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of
humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never
doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is
noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies
spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these
maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who
believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of
people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy
writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call
Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those
iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as
their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a
'many-faced and fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than to
be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good
many modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards. So long as the
coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched
by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on
the side of life. The poor--the slaves who really stoop under the
burden of life--have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but
never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling
literature will always be a 'blood and thunder' literature, as simple as
the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.
* * * * *
If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to
solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the
leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one
leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's 'Liberty' seventy-six
times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the
name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in
his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on
the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should
immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes
expressed, was 'an artist in life.' Yet these vows are not more
extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar
periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures
in civic and national civilization--by kings, judges, poets, and
priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great
chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical
folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a
patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that
these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any
saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary
and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like
a dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very
high compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions
which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get
there.
But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved
in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as
symbols of the 'decadence.' But the men who did these things were not
decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is
generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men
essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious
direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not
hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments
of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad
promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same
monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which
it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning.
And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of vows, we shall,
unless I am much mistaken, come to the conclusion that it is perfectly
sane, and even sensible, to swear to chain mountains together, and that,
if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to do so.
The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some
distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep
the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one's self, of the
weakness and mutability of one's self, has perilously increased, and is
the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man
refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in
Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier
things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got
to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would
be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other
words, we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously
significant phrase, another man. Now, it is this horrible fairy tale
of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the
Decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look forward
to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor on Tuesday,
Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday, may seem a
nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One
great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago, in
which he powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement by
declaring that he could stand in the prison yard and entirely comprehend
the feelings of a man about to be hanged:
'For he that lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.'
And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which
descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain
itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which
imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a
play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be
human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of
the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we
know cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us,
to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us--this is the
grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.
Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who made a
vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the
greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two
mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief, or love, or
aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like
all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it
exegi monumentum oere perennius was the only sentiment that would
satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see
the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two mountains together.
But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth to the
moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said,
that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take
from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement
of a vow. For what could be more maddening than an existence in which
our mother or aunt received the information that we were going to
assassinate the King or build a temple on Ben Nevis with the genial
composure of custom?
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent
of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to
listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to
imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on
mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently
imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a
phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two
words--'free-love'--as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.
It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage
merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.
Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest
liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him
as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the
heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every
liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one
that he wants.
In Mr. Bernard Shaw's brilliant play 'The Philanderer,' we have a vivid
picture of this state of things. Charteris is a man perpetually
endeavouring to be a free-lover, which is like endeavouring to be a
married bachelor or a white negro. He is wandering in a hungry search
for a certain exhilaration which he can only have when he has the
courage to cease from wandering. Men knew better than this in old
times--in the time, for example, of Shakespeare's heroes. When
Shakespeare's men are really celibate they praise the undoubted
advantages of celibacy, liberty, irresponsibility, a chance of continual
change. But they were not such fools as to continue to talk of liberty
when they were in such a condition that they could be made happy or
miserable by the moving of someone else's eyebrow. Suckling classes love
with debt in his praise of freedom.
'And he that's fairly out of both
Of all the world is blest.
He lives as in the golden age,
When all things made were common;
He takes his pipe, he takes his glass,
He fears no man or woman.'
This is a perfectly possible, rational and manly position. But what have
lovers to do with ridiculous affectations of fearing no man or woman?
They know that in the turning of a hand the whole cosmic engine to the
remotest star may become an instrument of music or an instrument of
torture. They hear a song older than Suckling's, that has survived a
hundred philosophies. 'Who is this that looketh out of the window, fair
as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners?'
As we have said, it is exactly this backdoor, this sense of having a
retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterilizing spirit in
modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt
to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus, in politics the modern
Jingoes practically say, 'Let us have the pleasures of conquerors
without the pains of soldiers: let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race.'
Thus, in religion and morals, the decadent mystics say: 'Let us have the
fragrance of sacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint; let us
sing hymns alternately to the Virgin and Priapus.' Thus in love the
free-lovers say: 'Let us have the splendour of offering ourselves
without the peril of committing ourselves; let us see whether one cannot
commit suicide an unlimited number of times.'
Emphatically it will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless,
for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one
thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to
the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover
who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring
self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have
satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know
that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain
would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and
snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways
and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise
from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a
man is burning his ships.
* * * * *
CHESTERTON-THE DEFENDANT