CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XIX How I Met the President
I sometimes fancy that every great city must have been built by night.
At least, it is only at night that every part of a great city is great.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps
architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
At least, I think many people of those nobler trades that work
by night (journalists, policemen, burglars, coffee-stall keepers,
and such mistaken enthusiasts as refuse to go home till morning)
must often have stood admiring some black bulk of building with a crown
of battlements or a crest of spires and then burst into tears at
daybreak to discover that it was only a haberdasher's shop with huge
gold letters across the face of it.
. . . . .
I had a sensation of this sort the other day as I happened to be
wandering in the Temple Gardens towards the end of twilight.
I sat down on a bench with my back to the river, happening to
choose such a place that a huge angle and facade of building
jutting out from the Strand sat above me like an incubus.
I dare say that if I took the same seat to-morrow by daylight I
should find the impression entirely false. In sunlight the thing
might seem almost distant; but in that half-darkness it seemed
as if the walls were almost falling upon me. Never before have I
had so strongly the sense which makes people pessimists in politics,
the sense of the hopeless height of the high places of the earth.
That pile of wealth and power, whatever was its name, went up above
and beyond me like a cliff that no living thing could climb.
I had an irrational sense that this thing had to be fought, that I
had to fight it; and that I could offer nothing to the occasion
but an indolent journalist with a walking-stick.
Almost as I had the thought, two windows were lit in that black,
blind face. It was as if two eyes had opened in the huge
face of a sleeping giant; the eyes were too close together,
and gave it the suggestion of a bestial sneer. And either
by accident of this light or of some other, I could now read
the big letters which spaced themselves across the front;
it was the Babylon Hotel. It was the perfect symbol of everything
that I should like to pull down with my hands if I could.
Reared by a detected robber, it is framed to be the fashionable
and luxurious home of undetected robbers. In the house of man
are many mansions; but there is a class of men who feel normal
nowhere except in the Babylon Hotel or in Dartmoor Gaol.
That big black face, which was staring at me with its flaming
eyes too close together, that was indeed the giant of all epic
and fairy tales. But, alas! I was not the giant-killer;
the hour had come, but not the man. I sat down on the seat again
(I had had one wild impulse to climb up the front of the hotel
and fall in at one of the windows), and I tried to think,
as all decent people are thinking, what one can really do.
And all the time that oppressive wall went up in front of me,
and took hold upon the heavens like a house of the gods.
. . . . .
It is remarkable that in so many great wars it has been
the defeated who have won. The people who were left
worst at the end of the war were generally the people
who were left best at the end of the whole business.
For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the Christians.
But they did not end in the decline of the Christians;
they ended in the decline of the Saracens. That huge prophetic wave
of Moslem power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns
of Christendom, that wave was broken, and never came on again.
The Crusaders had saved Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem.
The same applies to that epic of Republican war in the eighteenth
century to which we Liberals owe our political creed.
The French Revolution ended in defeat: the kings came back
across a carpet of dead at Waterloo. The Revolution had
lost its last battle; but it had gained its first object.
It had cut a chasm. The world has never been the same since.
No one after that has ever been able to treat the poor merely
as a pavement.
These jewels of God, the poor, are still treated as mere
stones of the street; but as stones that may sometimes fly.
If it please God, you and I may see some of the stones
flying again before we see death. But here I only remark
the interesting fact that the conquered almost always conquer.
Sparta killed Athens with a final blow, and she was born again.
Sparta went away victorious, and died slowly of her own wounds.
The Boers lost the South African War and gained South Africa.
And this is really all that we can do when we fight something really
stronger than ourselves; we can deal it its death-wound one moment;
it deals us death in the end. It is something if we can shock
and jar the unthinking impetus and enormous innocence of evil;
just as a pebble on a railway can stagger the Scotch express.
It is enough for the great martyrs and criminals of the French revolution,
that they have surprised for all time the secret weakness of the strong.
They have awakened and set leaping and quivering in his crypt for ever
the coward in the hearts of kings.
. . . . .
When Jack the Giant-Killer really first saw the giant his
experience was not such as has been generally supposed.
If you care to hear it I will tell you the real story of Jack
the Giant-Killer. To begin with, the most awful thing which Jack
first felt about the giant was that he was not a giant.
He came striding across an interminable wooded plain, and against
its remote horizon the giant was quite a small figure, like a figure
in a picture--he seemed merely a man walking across the grass.
Then Jack was shocked by remembering that the grass which the man
was treading down was one of the tallest forests upon that plain.
The man came nearer and nearer, growing bigger and bigger,
and at the instant when he passed the possible stature of humanity
Jack almost screamed. The rest was an intolerable apocalypse.
The giant had the one frightful quality of a miracle;
the more he became incredible the more he became solid.
The less one could believe in him the more plainly one could see him.
It was unbearable that so much of the sky should be occupied
by one human face. His eyes, which had stood out like bow windows,
became bigger yet, and there was no metaphor that could
contain their bigness; yet still they were human eyes.
Jack's intellect was utterly gone under that huge hypnotism
of the face that filled the sky; his last hope was submerged,
his five wits all still with terror.
But there stood up in him still a kind of cold chivalry, a dignity of dead
honour that would not forget the small and futile sword in his hand.
He rushed at one of the colossal feet of this human tower, and when
he came quite close to it the ankle-bone arched over him like a cave.
Then he planted the point of his sword against the foot and leant on it
with all his weight, till it went up to the hilt and broke the hilt,
and then snapped just under it. And it was plain that the giant felt
a sort of prick, for he snatched up his great foot into his great hand
for an instant; and then, putting it down again, he bent over and stared
at the ground until he had seen his enemy.
Then he picked up Jack between a big finger and thumb and threw
him away; and as Jack went through the air he felt as if he were
flying from system to system through the universe of stars.
But, as the giant had thrown him away carelessly, he did not strike
a stone, but struck soft mire by the side of a distant river.
There he lay insensible for several hours; but when he awoke again
his horrible conqueror was still in sight. He was striding away
across the void and wooded plain towards where it ended in the sea;
and by this time he was only much higher than any of the hills.
He grew less and less indeed; but only as a really high mountain
grows at last less and less when we leave it in a railway train.
Half an hour afterwards he was a bright blue colour, as are the
distant hills; but his outline was still human and still gigantic.
Then the big blue figure seemed to come to the brink of the big
blue sea, and even as it did so it altered its attitude.
Jack, stunned and bleeding, lifted himself laboriously upon one
elbow to stare. The giant once more caught hold of his ankle,
wavered twice as in a wind, and then went over into the great sea
which washes the whole world, and which, alone of all things God
has made, was big enough to drown him.
People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has
always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing
away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always
dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men.
The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private;
I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly
the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this
is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it
is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.
The Yellow Pressman seems to have no power of catching the first
fresh fact about a man that dominates all after impressions.
For instance, before I met Bernard Shaw I heard that he spoke with
a reckless desire for paradox or a sneering hatred of sentiment;
but I never knew till he opened his mouth that he spoke with
an Irish accent, which is more important than all the other
criticisms put together.
Journalism is not personal enough. So far from digging out
private personalities, it cannot even report the obvious personalities
on the surface. Now there is one vivid and even bodily impression
of this kind which we have all felt when we met great poets
or politicians, but which never finds its way into the newspapers.
I mean the impression that they are much older than we thought they were.
We connect great men with their great triumphs, which generally
happened some years ago, and many recruits enthusiastic for the thin
Napoleon of Marengo must have found themselves in the presence
of the fat Napoleon of Leipzic.
I remember reading a newspaper account of how a certain rising politician
confronted the House of Lords with the enthusiasm almost of boyhood.
It described how his "brave young voice" rang in the rafters.
I also remember that I met him some days after, and he was considerably
older than my own father. I mention this truth for only one purpose:
all this generalisation leads up to only one fact--the fact that I once
met a great man who was younger than I expected.
. . . . .
I had come over the wooded wall from the villages about Epsom, and down
a stumbling path between trees towards the valley in which Dorking lies.
A warm sunlight was working its way through the leafage; a sunlight
which though of saintless gold had taken on the quality of evening.
It was such sunlight as reminds a man that the sun begins to set
an instant after noon. It seemed to lessen as the wood strengthened
and the road sank.
I had a sensation peculiar to such entangled descents;
I felt that the treetops that closed above me were the fixed
and real things, certain as the level of the sea; but that
the solid earth was every instant failing under my feet.
In a little while that splendid sunlight showed only in splashes,
like flaming stars and suns in the dome of green sky.
Around me in that emerald twilight were trunks of trees of every
plain or twisted type; it was like a chapel supported on columns
of every earthly and unearthly style of architecture.
Without intention my mind grew full of fancies on the nature
of the forest; on the whole philosophy of mystery and force.
For the meaning of woods is the combination of energy with complexity.
A forest is not in the least rude or barbarous; it is only dense
with delicacy. Unique shapes that an artist would copy or a
philosopher watch for years if he found them in an open plain are
here mingled and confounded; but it is not a darkness of deformity.
It is a darkness of life; a darkness of perfection. And I began
to think how much of the highest human obscurity is like this,
and how much men have misunderstood it. People will tell you,
for instance, that theology became elaborate because it was dead.
Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become elaborate;
it is only the live tree that grows too many branches.
. . . . .
These trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out
into deep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the
evening was so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a
sunset all to itself. I went along that road according to directions
that had been given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling
beyond which the wood changed only faintly to a garden.
It was as if the curious courtesy and fineness of that character
I was to meet went out from him upon the valley; for I felt
on all these things the finger of that quality which the old
English called "faerie"; it is the quality which those can
never understand who think of the past as merely brutal;
it is an ancient elegance such as there is in trees.
I went through the garden and saw an old man sitting by a table,
looking smallish in his big chair. He was already an invalid,
and his hair and beard were both white; not like snow, for snow
is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even fierce;
rather they were white like the white thistledown. I came up
quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand,
and I saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young.
He was the one great man of the old world whom I have met
who was not a mere statue over his own grave.
He was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about
the books he had written; he was far too much alive for that.
He talked about the books he had not written. He unrolled
a purple bundle of romances which he had never had time to sell.
He asked me to write one of the stories for him, as he would
have asked the milkman, if he had been talking to the milkman.
It was a splendid and frantic story, a sort of astronomical farce.
It was all about a man who was rushing up to the Royal Society
with the only possible way of avoiding an earth-destroying comet;
and it showed how, even on this huge errand, the man was tripped
up at every other minute by his own weakness and vanities;
how he lost a train by trifling or was put in gaol for brawling.
That is only one of them; there were ten or twenty more.
Another, I dimly remember, was a version of the fall of Parnell;
the idea that a quite honest man might be secret from a pure love
of secrecy, of solitary self-control. I went out of that garden with a
blurred sensation of the million possibilities of creative literature.
The feeling increased as my way fell back into the wood; for a wood
is a palace with a million corridors that cross each other everywhere.
I really had the feeling that I had seen the creative quality;
which is supernatural. I had seen what Virgil calls the Old Man
of the Forest: I had seen an elf. The trees thronged behind my path;
I have never seen him again; and now I shall not see him,
because he died last Tuesday.
Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert
that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them;
and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it. There is a very real
thing which may be called the love of humanity; in our time it
exists almost entirely among what are called uneducated people;
and it does not exist at all among the people who talk about it.
A positive pleasure in being in the presence of any other human being
is chiefly remarkable, for instance, in the masses on Bank Holiday;
that is why they are so much nearer Heaven (despite appearances)
than any other part of our population.
I remember seeing a crowd of factory girls getting into an empty
train at a wayside country station. There were about twenty of them;
they all got into one carriage; and they left all the rest of the
train entirely empty. That is the real love of humanity. That is
the definite pleasure in the immediate proximity of one's own kind.
Only this coarse, rank, real love of men seems to be entirely
lacking in those who propose the love of humanity as a substitute
for all other love; honourable, rationalistic idealists.
I can well remember the explosion of human joy which marked
the sudden starting of that train; all the factory girls
who could not find seats (and they must have been the majority)
relieving their feelings by jumping up and down. Now I have never
seen any rationalistic idealists do this. I have never seen twenty
modern philosophers crowd into one third-class carriage for the
mere pleasure of being together. I have never seen twenty Mr.
McCabes all in one carriage and all jumping up and down.
Some people express a fear that vulgar trippers will overrun
all beautiful places, such as Hampstead or Burnham Beeches.
But their fear is unreasonable; because trippers always
prefer to trip together; they pack as close as they can;
they have a suffocating passion of philanthropy.
. . . . .
But among the minor and milder aspects of the same principle,
I have no hesitation in placing the problem of the colloquial barber.
Before any modern man talks with authority about loving men, I insist
(I insist with violence) that he shall always be very much pleased
when his barber tries to talk to him. His barber is humanity:
let him love that. If he is not pleased at this, I will not accept any
substitute in the way of interest in the Congo or the future of Japan.
If a man cannot love his barber whom he has seen, how shall he love
the Japanese whom he has not seen?
It is urged against the barber that he begins by talking about
the weather; so do all dukes and diplomatists, only that they talk about
it with ostentatious fatigue and indifference, whereas the barber talks
about it with an astonishing, nay incredible, freshness of interest.
It is objected to him that he tells people that they are going bald.
That is to say, his very virtues are cast up against him;
he is blamed because, being a specialist, he is a sincere specialist,
and because, being a tradesman, he is not entirely a slave.
But the only proof of such things is by example; therefore I will prove
the excellence of the conversation of barbers by a specific case.
Lest any one should accuse me of attempting to prove it by fictitious
means, I beg to say quite seriously that though I forget the exact
language employed, the following conversation between me and a human
(I trust), living barber really took place a few days ago.
. . . . .
I had been invited to some At Home to meet the Colonial Premiers,
and lest I should be mistaken for some partly reformed bush-ranger out of
the interior of Australia I went into a shop in the Strand to get shaved.
While I was undergoing the torture the man said to me:
"There seems to be a lot in the papers about this new shaving, sir.
It seems you can shave yourself with anything--with a stick or a stone
or a pole or a poker" (here I began for the first time to detect
a sarcastic intonation) "or a shovel or a----"
Here he hesitated for a word, and I, although I knew nothing about
the matter, helped him out with suggestions in the same rhetorical vein.
"Or a button-hook," I said, "or a blunderbuss or a battering-ram
or a piston-rod----"
He resumed, refreshed with this assistance, "Or a curtain rod
or a candle-stick, or a----"
"Cow-catcher," I suggested eagerly, and we continued in this ecstatic duet
for some time. Then I asked him what it was all about, and he told me.
He explained the thing eloquently and at length.
"The funny part of it is," he said, "that the thing isn't new at all.
It's been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before.
There is always a notion that the razor might be done without somehow.
But none of those schemes ever came to anything; and I don't believe
myself that this will."
"Why, as to that," I said, rising slowly from the chair and trying
to put on my coat inside out, "I don't know how it may be in the case
of you and your new shaving. Shaving, with all respect to you,
is a trivial and materialistic thing, and in such things
startling inventions are sometimes made. But what you say
reminds me in some dark and dreamy fashion of something else.
I recall it especially when you tell me, with such evident
experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is not really new.
My friend, the human race is always trying this dodge of making
everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off
one thing it shifts on to another. If one man has not the toil
of preparing a man's chin, I suppose that some other man has the toil
of preparing something very curious to put on a man's chin.
It would be nice if we could be shaved without troubling anybody.
It would be nicer still if we could go unshaved without annoying anybody--
"'But, O wise friend, chief Barber of the Strand,
Brother, nor you nor I have made the world.'
"Whoever made it, who is wiser, and we hope better than we, made it
under strange limitations, and with painful conditions of pleasure.
"In the first and darkest of its books it is fiercely written
that a man shall not eat his cake and have it; and though
all men talked until the stars were old it would still be true
that a man who has lost his razor could not shave with it.
But every now and then men jump up with the new something
or other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice,
that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that there
is no real difference between being shaved and not being shaved.
The difference, they say, is only a difference of degree;
everything is evolutionary and relative. Shavedness is
immanent in man. Every ten-penny nail is a Potential Razor.
The superstitious people of the past (they say) believed that
a lot of black bristles standing out at right angles to one's
face was a positive affair. But the higher criticism teaches
us better. Bristles are merely negative. They are a Shadow
where Shaving should be.
"Well, it all goes on, and I suppose it all means something.
But a baby is the Kingdom of God, and if you try to kiss a baby
he will know whether you are shaved or not. Perhaps I am mixing
up being shaved and being saved; my democratic sympathies have
always led me to drop my 'h's.' In another moment I may suggest
that goats represent the lost because goats have long beards.
This is growing altogether too allegorical.
"Nevertheless," I added, as I paid the bill, "I have really been
profoundly interested in what you told me about the New Shaving.
Have you ever heard of a thing called the New theology?"
He smiled and said that he had not.
There is only one reason why all grown-up people do not play with toys;
and it is a fair reason. The reason is that playing with toys
takes so very much more time and trouble than anything else.
Playing as children mean playing is the most serious thing in the world;
and as soon as we have small duties or small sorrows we have to
abandon to some extent so enormous and ambitious a plan of life.
We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy;
we have not enough strength for play. This is a truth which every one
will recognize who, as a child, has ever played with anything at all;
any one who has played with bricks, any one who has played with dolls,
any one who has played with tin soldiers. My journalistic work,
which earns money, is not pursued with such awful persistency as that
work which earned nothing.
. . . . .
Take the case of bricks. If you publish a book to-morrow
in twelve volumes (it would be just like you) on "The Theory
and Practice of European Architecture," your work may be laborious,
but it is fundamentally frivolous. It is not serious as the work
of a child piling one brick on the other is serious; for the simple
reason that if your book is a bad book no one will ever be able
ultimately and entirely to prove to you that it is a bad book.
Whereas if his balance of bricks is a bad balance of bricks,
it will simply tumble down. And if I know anything of children,
he will set to work solemnly and sadly to build it up again.
Whereas, if I know anything of authors, nothing would induce you
to write your book again, or even to think of it again if you
could help it.
Take the case of dolls. It is much easier to care for an educational
cause than to care for a doll. It is as easy to write an article on
education as to write an article on toffee or tramcars or anything else.
But it is almost as difficult to look after a doll as to look after
a child. The little girls that I meet in the little streets of Battersea
worship their dolls in a way that reminds one not so much of play
as idolatry. In some cases the love and care of the artistic symbol
has actually become more important than the human reality which it was,
I suppose, originally meant to symbolize.
I remember a Battersea little girl who wheeled her large baby sister
stuffed into a doll's perambulator. When questioned on this course of
conduct, she replied: "I haven't got a dolly, and Baby is pretending
to be my dolly." Nature was indeed imitating art. First a doll had
been a substitute for a child; afterwards a child was a mere substitute
for a doll. But that opens other matters; the point is here that such
devotion takes up most of the brain and most of the life; much as if
it were really the thing which it is supposed to symbolize. The point
is that the man writing on motherhood is merely an educationalist;
the child playing with a doll is a mother.
Take the case of soldiers. A man writing an article on military strategy
is simply a man writing an article; a horrid sight. But a boy making a
campaign with tin soldiers is like a General making a campaign with live
soldiers. He must to the limit of his juvenile powers think about the
thing; whereas the war correspondent need not think at all. I remember
a war correspondent who remarked after the capture of Methuen: "This
renewed activity on the part of Delarey is probably due to his being
short of stores." The same military critic had mentioned a few
paragraphs before that Delarey was being hard pressed by a column which
was pursuing him under the command of Methuen. Methuen chased Delarey;
and Delarey's activity was due to his being short of stores.
Otherwise he would have stood quite still while he was chased.
I run after Jones with a hatchet, and if he turns round and tries
to get rid of me the only possible explanation is that he has
a very small balance at his bankers. I cannot believe that any boy
playing at soldiers would be as idiotic as this. But then any one
playing at anything has to be serious. Whereas, as I have only too
good reason to know, if you are writing an article you can say anything
that comes into your head.
. . . . .
Broadly, then, what keeps adults from joining in children's
games is, generally speaking, not that they have no pleasure
in them; it is simply that they have no leisure for them.
It is that they cannot afford the expenditure of toil
and time and consideration for so grand and grave a scheme.
I have been myself attempting for some time past to complete
a play in a small toy theatre, the sort of toy theatre
that used to be called Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured;
only that I drew and coloured the figures and scenes myself.
Hence I was free from the degrading obligation of having to pay
either a penny or twopence; I only had to pay a shilling a sheet
for good cardboard and a shilling a box for bad water colours.
The kind of miniature stage I mean is probably familiar to every one;
it is never more than a development of the stage which Skelt
made and Stevenson celebrated.
But though I have worked much harder at the toy theatre than I
ever worked at any tale or article, I cannot finish it; the work
seems too heavy for me. I have to break off and betake myself
to lighter employments; such as the biographies of great men.
The play of "St. George and the Dragon," over which I have burnt
the midnight oil (you must colour the thing by lamplight because
that is how it will be seen), still lacks most conspicuously,
alas! two wings of the Sultan's Palace, and also some comprehensible
and workable way of getting up the curtain.
All this gives me a feeling touching the real meaning of immortality.
In this world we cannot have pure pleasure. This is partly because
pure pleasure would be dangerous to us and to our neighbours.
But it is partly because pure pleasure is a great deal too much trouble.
If I am ever in any other and better world, I hope that I shall have
enough time to play with nothing but toy theatres; and I hope that I
shall have enough divine and superhuman energy to act at least one play
in them without a hitch.
. . . . .
Meanwhile the philosophy of toy theatres is worth any one's
consideration. All the essential morals which modern men need
to learn could be deduced from this toy. Artistically considered,
it reminds us of the main principle of art, the principle which
is in most danger of being forgotten in our time. I mean the fact
that art consists of limitation; the fact that art is limitation.
Art does not consist in expanding things. Art consists of cutting
things down, as I cut down with a pair of scissors my very ugly
figures of St. George and the Dragon. Plato, who liked definite
ideas, would like my cardboard dragon; for though the creature has
few other artistic merits he is at least dragonish. The modern
philosopher, who likes infinity, is quite welcome to a sheet of
the plain cardboard. The most artistic thing about the theatrical
art is the fact that the spectator looks at the whole thing through
a window. This is true even of theatres inferior to my own; even at
the Court Theatre or His Majesty's you are looking through a window;
an unusually large window. But the advantage of the small
theatre exactly is that you are looking through a small window.
Has not every one noticed how sweet and startling any
landscape looks when seen through an arch? This strong,
square shape, this shutting off of everything else is not
only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential of beauty.
The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
This especially is true of the toy theatre; that, by reducing
the scale of events it can introduce much larger events.
Because it is small it could easily represent the earthquake in Jamaica.
Because it is small it could easily represent the Day of Judgment.
Exactly in so far as it is limited, so far it could play easily
with falling cities or with falling stars. Meanwhile the big
theatres are obliged to be economical because they are big.
When we have understood this fact we shall have understood something
of the reason why the world has always been first inspired by
small nationalities. The vast Greek philosophy could fit easier
into the small city of Athens than into the immense Empire of Persia.
In the narrow streets of Florence Dante felt that there was room
for Purgatory and Heaven and Hell. He would have been stifled
by the British Empire. Great empires are necessarily prosaic;
for it is beyond human power to act a great poem upon so great a scale.
You can only represent very big ideas in very small spaces.
My toy theatre is as philosophical as the drama of Athens.
CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XIX How I Met the President