CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XXVIII The Lion
Except for some fine works of art, which seem to be there by accident,
the City of Brussels is like a bad Paris, a Paris with everything noble
cut out, and everything nasty left in. No one can understand Paris
and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance
and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure;
but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of
roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others,
but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion,
they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.
For the indecency of many of their books and papers is not of the sort
which charms and seduces, but of the sort that horrifies and hurts;
they are torturing themselves. They lash their own patriotism into life
with the same whips which most men use to lash foreigners to silence.
The enemies of France can never give an account of her infamy or decay
which does not seem insipid and even polite compared with the things which
the Nationalists of France say about their own nation. They taunt and
torment themselves; sometimes they even deliberately oppress themselves.
Thus, when the mob of Paris could make a Government to please itself,
it made a sort of sublime tyranny to order itself about. The spirit is
the same from the Crusades or St. Bartholomew to the apotheosis of Zola.
The old religionists tortured men physically for a moral truth.
The new realists torture men morally for a physical truth.
Now Brussels is Paris without this constant purification of pain.
Its indecencies are not regrettable incidents in an
everlasting revolution. It has none of the things which make good
Frenchmen love Paris; it has only the things which make unspeakable
Englishmen love it. It has the part which is cosmopolitan--
and narrows; not the part which is Parisian--and universal.
You can find there (as commonly happens in modern centres)
the worst things of all nations--the DAILY MAIL from England,
the cheap philosophies from Germany, the loose novels of France,
and the drinks of America. But there is no English broad fun,
no German kindly ceremony, no American exhilaration, and,
above all, no French tradition of fighting for an idea.
Though all the boulevards look like Parisian boulevards,
though all the shops look like Parisian shops, you cannot look
at them steadily for two minutes without feeling the full
distance between, let us say, King Leopold and fighters
like Clemenceau and Deroulede.
. . . . .
For all these reasons, and many more, when I had got into Brussels I began
to make all necessary arrangements for getting out of it again; and I
had impulsively got into a tram which seemed to be going out of the city.
In this tram there were two men talking; one was a little man with a
black French beard; the other was a baldish man with bushy whiskers,
like the financial foreign count in a three-act farce. And about the time
that we reached the suburb of the city, and the traffic grew thinner,
and the noises more few, I began to hear what they were saying.
Though they spoke French quickly, their words were fairly easy to follow,
because they were all long words. Anybody can understand long words
because they have in them all the lucidity of Latin.
The man with the black beard said: "It must that we have the Progress."
The man with the whiskers parried this smartly by saying:
"It must also that we have the Consolidation International."
This is a sort of discussion which I like myself, so I listened
with some care, and I think I picked up the thread of it.
One of the Belgians was a Little Belgian, as we speak
of a Little Englander. The other was a Belgian Imperialist,
for though Belgium is not quite strong enough to be altogether
a nation, she is quite strong enough to be an empire.
Being a nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being
an empire only means kicking your inferiors. The man with whiskers
was the Imperialist, and he was saying: "The science, behold there
the new guide of humanity."
And the man with the beard answered him: "It does not suffice to
have progress in the science; one must have it also in the sentiment
of the human justice."
This remark I applauded, as if at a public meeting, but they were much
too keen on their argument to hear me. The views I have often heard in
England, but never uttered so lucidly, and certainly never so fast.
Though Belgian by nation they must both have been essentially French.
Whiskers was great on education, which, it seems, is on
the march. All the world goes to make itself instructed.
It must that the more instructed enlighten the less instructed.
Eh, well then, the European must impose upon the savage the science
and the light. Also (apparently) he must impose himself on
the savage while he is about it. To-day one travelled quickly.
The science had changed all. For our fathers, they were
religious, and (what was worse) dead. To-day humanity had
electricity to the hand; the machines came from triumphing;
all the lines and limits of the globe effaced themselves.
Soon there would not be but the great Empires and confederations,
guided by the science, always the science.
Here Whiskers stopped an instant for breath; and the man with
the sentiment for human justice had "la parole" off him in a flash.
Without doubt Humanity was on the march, but towards the sentiments,
the ideal, the methods moral and pacific. Humanity directed itself
towards Humanity. For your wars and empires on behalf of civilisation,
what were they in effect? The war, was it not itself an affair of the
barbarism? The Empires were they not things savage? The Humanity had
passed all that; she was now intellectual. Tolstoy had refined all
human souls with the sentiments the most delicate and just. Man was
become a spirit; the wings pushed. . . .
. . . . .
At this important point of evolution the tram came to a jerky stoppage;
and staring around I found, to my stunned consternation, that it
was almost dark, that I was far away from Brussels, that I could not
dream of getting back to dinner; in short, that through the clinging
fascination of this great controversy on Humanity and its recent complete
alteration by science or Tolstoy, I had landed myself Heaven knows where.
I dropped hastily from the suburban tram and let it go on without me.
I was alone in the flat fields out of sight of the city.
On one side of the road was one of those small, thin woods
which are common in all countries, but of which, by a coincidence,
the mystical painters of Flanders were very fond. The night was
closing in with cloudy purple and grey; there was one ribbon of silver,
the last rag of the sunset. Through the wood went one little path,
and somehow it suggested that it might lead to some sign of life--
there was no other sign of life on the horizon. I went along it,
and soon sank into a sort of dancing twilight of all those tiny trees.
There is something subtle and bewildering about that sort of frail
and fantastic wood. A forest of big trees seems like a bodily barrier;
but somehow that mist of thin lines seems like a spiritual barrier.
It is as if one were caught in a fairy cloud or could not pass a phantom.
When I had well lost the last gleam of the high road a curious
and definite feeling came upon me. Now I suddenly felt something
much more practical and extraordinary--the absence of humanity:
inhuman loneliness. Of course, there was nothing really lost
in my state; but the mood may hit one anywhere. I wanted men--
any men; and I felt our awful alliance over all the globe.
And at last, when I had walked for what seemed a long time, I saw
a light too near the earth to mean anything except the image of God.
I came out on a clear space and a low, long cottage, the door
of which was open, but was blocked by a big grey horse,
who seemed to prefer to eat with his head inside the sitting-room.
I got past him, and found he was being fed by a young man
who was sitting down and drinking beer inside, and who saluted
me with heavy rustic courtesy, but in a strange tongue.
The room was full of staring faces like owls, and these I
traced at length as belonging to about six small children.
Their father was still working in the fields, but their mother
rose when I entered. She smiled, but she and all the rest
spoke some rude language, Flamand, I suppose; so that we
had to be kind to each other by signs. She fetched me beer,
and pointed out my way with her finger; and I drew a picture
to please the children; and as it was a picture of two men
hitting each other with swords, it pleased them very much.
Then I gave a Belgian penny to each child, for as I said on chance
in French, "It must be that we have the economic equality."
But they had never heard of economic equality, while all
Battersea workmen have heard of economic equality, though it
is true that they haven't got it.
I found my way back to the city, and some time afterwards I actually
saw in the street my two men talking, no doubt still saying,
one that Science had changed all in Humanity, and the other that
Humanity was now pushing the wings of the purely intellectual.
But for me Humanity was hooked on to an accidental picture.
I thought of a low and lonely house in the flats, behind a veil
or film of slight trees, a man breaking the ground as men have
broken from the first morning, and a huge grey horse champing
his food within a foot of a child's head, as in the stable
where Christ was born.
On my last morning on the Flemish coast, when I knew that
in a few hours I should be in England, my eye fell upon one
of the details of Gothic carving of which Flanders is full.
I do not know whether the thing is old, though it was certainly
knocked about and indecipherable, but at least it was certainly
in the style and tradition of the early Middle Ages.
It seemed to represent men bending themselves (not to say
twisting themselves) to certain primary employments.
Some seemed to be sailors tugging at ropes; others, I think,
were reaping; others were energetically pouring something
into something else. This is entirely characteristic of
the pictures and carvings of the early thirteenth century,
perhaps the most purely vigorous time in all history.
The great Greeks preferred to carve their gods and heroes
doing nothing. Splendid and philosophic as their composure
is there is always about it something that marks the master
of many slaves. But if there was one thing the early
mediaevals liked it was representing people doing something--
hunting or hawking, or rowing boats, or treading grapes,
or making shoes, or cooking something in a pot. "Quicquid agunt
homines, votum, timor, ira voluptas." (I quote from memory.)
The Middle Ages is full of that spirit in all its monuments and
manuscripts. Chaucer retains it in his jolly insistence on
everybody's type of trade and toil. It was the earliest and
youngest resurrection of Europe, the time when social order was
strengthening, but had not yet become oppressive; the time when
religious faiths were strong, but had not yet been exasperated.
For this reason the whole effect of Greek and Gothic carving is
different. The figures in the Elgin marbles, though often reining
their steeds for an instant in the air, seem frozen for ever
at that perfect instant. But a mass of mediaeval carving
seems actually a sort of bustle or hubbub in stone.
Sometimes one cannot help feeling that the groups actually
move and mix, and the whole front of a great cathedral has
the hum of a huge hive.
. . . . .
But about these particular figures there was a peculiarity
of which I could not be sure. Those of them that had any heads
had very curious heads, and it seemed to me that they had their
mouths open. Whether or no this really meant anything or was
an accident of nascent art I do not know; but in the course
of wondering I recalled to my mind the fact that singing was
connected with many of the tasks there suggested, that there
were songs for reapers and songs for sailors hauling ropes.
I was still thinking about this small problem when I walked
along the pier at Ostend; and I heard some sailors uttering
a measured shout as they laboured, and I remembered that sailors
still sing in chorus while they work, and even sing different
songs according to what part of their work they are doing.
And a little while afterwards, when my sea journey was over, the sight
of men working in the English fields reminded me again that there
are still songs for harvest and for many agricultural routines.
And I suddenly wondered why if this were so it should be
quite unknown, for any modern trade to have a ritual poetry.
How did people come to chant rude poems while pulling certain
ropes or gathering certain fruit, and why did nobody do
anything of the kind while producing any of the modern things?
Why is a modern newspaper never printed by people singing in chorus?
Why do shopmen seldom, if ever, sing?
. . . . .
If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while
auditing and bankers while banking? If there are songs for all
the separate things that have to be done in a boat, why are there
not songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a bank?
As the train from Dover flew through the Kentish gardens,
I tried to write a few songs suitable for commercial gentlemen.
Thus, the work of bank clerks when casting up columns might begin
with a thundering chorus in praise of Simple Addition.
"Up my lads and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o'er.
Hear the Stars of Morning shouting: 'Two and Two are four.'
Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the sophists roar,
Though we weep and pawn our watches, Two and Two are Four."
"There's a run upon the Bank--Stand away! For the Manager's
a crank and the Secretary drank,
and the Upper Tooting Bank
Turns to bay!
Stand close: there is a run On the Bank. Of our ship, our royal one,
let the ringing legend run,
that she fired with every gun
Ere she sank."
. . . . .
And as I came into the cloud of London I met a friend of mine
who actually is in a bank, and submitted these suggestions
in rhyme to him for use among his colleagues. But he was not
very hopeful about the matter. It was not (he assured me)
that he underrated the verses, or in any sense lamented their
lack of polish. No; it was rather, he felt, an indefinable
something in the very atmosphere of the society in which we
live that makes it spiritually difficult to sing in banks.
And I think he must be right; though the matter is very mysterious.
I may observe here that I think there must be some mistake in
the calculations of the Socialists. They put down all our distress,
not to a moral tone, but to the chaos of private enterprise.
Now, banks are private; but post-offices are Socialistic:
therefore I naturally expected that the post-office would fall into
the collectivist idea of a chorus. Judge of my surprise when the
lady in my local post-office (whom I urged to sing) dismissed the
idea with far more coldness than the bank clerk had done. She
seemed indeed, to be in a considerably greater state of depression
than he. Should any one suppose that this was the effect of the
verses themselves, it is only fair to say that the specimen verse
of the Post-Office Hymn ran thus:
"O'er London our letters are shaken like snow,
Our wires o'er the world like the thunderbolts go.
The news that may marry a maiden in Sark,
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park."
Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy):
"Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park."
And the more I thought about the matter the more painfully
certain it seemed that the most important and typical modern
things could not be done with a chorus. One could not,
for instance, be a great financier and sing; because the
essence of being a great financier is that you keep quiet.
You could not even in many modern circles be a public man
and sing; because in those circles the essence of being
a public man is that you do nearly everything in private.
Nobody would imagine a chorus of money-lenders. Every one
knows the story of the solicitors' corps of volunteers who,
when the Colonel on the battlefield cried "Charge!" all said
simultaneously, "Six-and-eightpence." Men can sing while
charging in a military, but hardly in a legal sense. And at
the end of my reflections I had really got no further than
the sub-conscious feeling of my friend the bank-clerk--that
there is something spiritually suffocating about our life;
not about our laws merely, but about our life. Bank-clerks
are without songs, not because they are poor, but because
they are sad. Sailors are much poorer. As I passed homewards
I passed a little tin building of some religious sort, which
was shaken with shouting as a trumpet is torn with its own
tongue. THEY were singing anyhow; and I had for an instant
a fancy I had often had before: that with us the super-human
is the only place where you can find the human. Human nature
is hunted and has fled into sanctuary.
More than a month ago, when I was leaving London for a holiday,
a friend walked into my flat in Battersea and found me surrounded
with half-packed luggage.
"You seem to be off on your travels," he said. "Where are you going?"
With a strap between my teeth I replied, "To Battersea."
"The wit of your remark," he said, "wholly escapes me."
"I am going to Battersea," I repeated, "to Battersea via Paris, Belfort,
Heidelberg, and Frankfort. My remark contained no wit. It contained
simply the truth. I am going to wander over the whole world until once
more I find Battersea. Somewhere in the seas of sunset or of sunrise,
somewhere in the ultimate archipelago of the earth, there is one little
island which I wish to find: an island with low green hills and great
white cliffs. Travellers tell me that it is called England (Scotch
travellers tell me that it is called Britain), and there is a rumour
that somewhere in the heart of it there is a beautiful place called
Battersea."
"I suppose it is unnecessary to tell you," said my friend,
with an air of intellectual comparison, "that this is Battersea?"
"It is quite unnecessary," I said, "and it is spiritually untrue.
I cannot see any Battersea here; I cannot see any London or
any England. I cannot see that door. I cannot see that chair:
because a cloud of sleep and custom has come across my eyes.
The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else; and that
is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays.
Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France? Do you suppose
that I go to Germany in order to see Germany? I shall enjoy them both;
but it is not them that I am seeking. I am seeking Battersea.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land;
it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
Now I warn you that this Gladstone bag is compact and heavy,
and that if you utter that word 'paradox' I shall hurl it at your head.
I did not make the world, and I did not make it paradoxical.
It is not my fault, it is the truth, that the only way to go
to England is to go away from it."
But when, after only a month's travelling, I did come back
to England, I was startled to find that I had told the exact truth.
England did break on me at once beautifully new and beautifully old.
To land at Dover is the right way to approach England (most things
that are hackneyed are right), for then you see first the full,
soft gardens of Kent, which are, perhaps, an exaggeration,
but still a typical exaggeration, of the rich rusticity of England.
As it happened, also, a fellow-traveller with whom I had fallen
into conversation felt the same freshness, though for another cause.
She was an American lady who had seen Europe, and had
never yet seen England, and she expressed her enthusiasm
in that simple and splendid way which is natural to Americans,
who are the most idealistic people in the whole world.
Their only danger is that the idealist can easily become the idolator.
And the American has become so idealistic that he even idealises money.
But (to quote a very able writer of American short stories)
that is another story.
"I have never been in England before," said the American lady,
"yet it is so pretty that I feel as if I have been away from it
for a long time."
"So you have," I said; "you have been away for three hundred years."
"What a lot of ivy you have," she said. "It covers the churches
and it buries the houses. We have ivy; but I have never seen it
grow like that."
"I am interested to hear it," I replied, "for I am making a little
list of all the things that are really better in England.
Even a month on the Continent, combined with intelligence,
will teach you that there are many things that are better abroad.
All the things that the DAILY MAIL calls English are better abroad.
But there are things entirely English and entirely good.
Kippers, for instance, and Free Trade, and front gardens,
and individual liberty, and the Elizabethan drama, and hansom cabs,
and cricket, and Mr. Will Crooks. Above all, there is the happy
and holy custom of eating a heavy breakfast. I cannot imagine that
Shakespeare began the day with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman
or a German. Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a
light bursts upon me; for the first time I see the real meaning of
Mrs. Gallup and the Great Cipher. It is merely a mistake in the
matter of a capital letter. I withdraw my objections; I accept
everything; bacon did write Shakespeare."
"I cannot look at anything but the ivy," she said,
"it looks so comfortable."
While she looked at the ivy I opened for the first time for many
weeks an English newspaper, and I read a speech of Mr. Balfour
in which he said that the House of Lords ought to be preserved
because it represented something in the nature of permanent public
opinion of England, above the ebb and flow of the parties.
Now Mr. Balfour is a perfectly sincere patriot, a man who, from his
own point of view, thinks long and seriously about the public needs,
and he is, moreover, a man of entirely exceptionable intellectual power.
But alas, in spite of all this, when I had read that speech I
thought with a heavy heart that there was one more thing that I had
to add to the list of the specially English things, such as kippers
and cricket; I had to add the specially English kind of humbug.
In France things are attacked and defended for what they are.
The Catholic Church is attacked because it is Catholic,
and defended because it is Catholic. The Republic is defended
because it is Republican, and attacked because it is Republican.
But here is the ablest of English politicians consoling everybody
by telling them that the House of Lords is not really the House
of Lords, but something quite different, that the foolish accidental
peers whom he meets every night are in some mysterious way experts
upon the psychology of the democracy; that if you want to know
what the very poor want you must ask the very rich, and that if you
want the truth about Hoxton, you must ask for it at Hatfield.
If the Conservative defender of the House of Lords were a logical
French politician he would simply be a liar. But being an English
politician he is simply a poet. The English love of believing that
all is as it should be, the English optimism combined with the strong
English imagination, is too much even for the obvious facts.
In a cold, scientific sense, of course, Mr. Balfour knows that nearly
all the Lords who are not Lords by accident are Lords by bribery.
He knows, and (as Mr. Belloc excellently said) everybody in Parliament
knows the very names of the peers who have purchased their peerages.
But the glamour of comfort, the pleasure of reassuring himself
and reassuring others, is too strong for this original knowledge;
at last it fades from him, and he sincerely and earnestly
calls on Englishmen to join with him in admiring an august and
public-spirited Senate, having wholly forgotten that the Senate
really consists of idiots whom he has himself despised;
and adventurers whom he has himself ennobled.
"Your ivy is so beautifully soft and thick," said the American lady,
"it seems to cover almost everything. It must be the most poetical
thing in England."
"It is very beautiful," I said, "and, as you say, it is very English.
Charles Dickens, who was almost more English than England,
wrote one of his rare poems about the beauty of ivy.
Yes, by all means let us admire the ivy, so deep, so warm,
so full of a genial gloom and a grotesque tenderness.
Let us admire the ivy; and let us pray to God in His mercy
that it may not kill the tree."
The other day, to my great astonishment, I caught a train; it was
a train going into the Eastern Counties, and I only just caught it.
And while I was running along the train (amid general admiration)
I noticed that there were a quite peculiar and unusual number of
carriages marked "Engaged." On five, six, seven, eight, nine carriages
was pasted the little notice: at five, six, seven, eight, nine windows
were big bland men staring out in the conscious pride of possession.
Their bodies seemed more than usually impenetrable, their faces more
than usual placid. It could not be the Derby, if only for the minor
reasons that it was the opposite direction and the wrong day.
It could hardly be the King. It could hardly be the French President.
For, though these distinguished persons naturally like to be private
for three hours, they are at least public for three minutes.
A crowd can gather to see them step into the train; and there was no
crowd here, or any police ceremonial.
Who were those awful persons, who occupied more of the train
than a bricklayer's beanfeast, and yet were more fastidious
and delicate than the King's own suite? Who were these that
were larger than a mob, yet more mysterious than a monarch?
Was it possible that instead of our Royal House visiting the Tsar,
he was really visiting us? Or does the House of Lords
have a breakfast? I waited and wondered until the train
slowed down at some station in the direction of Cambridge.
Then the large, impenetrable men got out, and after them
got out the distinguished holders of the engaged seats.
They were all dressed decorously in one colour; they had neatly
cropped hair; and they were chained together.
I looked across the carriage at its only other occupant, and our
eyes met. He was a small, tired-looking man, and, as I afterwards learnt,
a native of Cambridge; by the look of him, some working tradesman there,
such as a journeyman tailor or a small clock-mender. In order to make
conversation I said I wondered where the convicts were going.
His mouth twitched with the instinctive irony of our poor, and he said:
"I don't s'pose they're goin' on an 'oliday at the seaside with little
spades and pails." I was naturally delighted, and, pursuing the same vein
of literary invention, I suggested that perhaps dons were taken down
to Cambridge chained together like this. And as he lived in Cambridge,
and had seen several dons, he was pleased with such a scheme. Then when
we had ceased to laugh, we suddenly became quite silent; and the bleak,
grey eyes of the little man grew sadder and emptier than an open sea.
I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking the same, because all
modern sophists are only sophists, and there is such a thing as mankind.
Then at last (and it fell in as exactly as the right last note of a tune
one is trying to remember) he said: "Well, I s'pose we 'ave to do it."
And in those three things, his first speech and his silence and his
second speech, there were all the three great fundamental facts of
the English democracy, its profound sense of humour, its profound sense
of pathos, and its profound sense of helplessness.
. . . . .
It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt
(like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out.
For every practical purpose of a political state, for every practical
purpose of a tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted.
At a tea-party it is equally obvious that he that exalteth
himself must be abased, if possible without bodily violence.
Now people talk of democracy as being coarse and turbulent:
it is a self-evident error in mere history. Aristocracy is the thing
that is always coarse and turbulent: for it means appealing to the
self-confident people. Democracy means appealing to the different
people. Democracy means getting those people to vote who would never
have the cheek to govern: and (according to Christian ethics) the
precise people who ought to govern are the people who have not the
cheek to do it. There is a strong example of this truth in my friend
in the train. The only two types we hear of in this argument about crime
and punishment are two very rare and abnormal types.
We hear of the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no
problem at all: as if physical kindness would cure everything:
as if one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible.
This mere belief in bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental;
it is simply snobbish. For if comfort gives men virtue,
the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous--which is absurd.
Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and more watery
type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who says,
with a sort of splutter, "Flog the brutes!" or who tells you
with innocent obscenity "what he would do" with a certain man--
always supposing the man's hands were tied.
This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak
and unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental
humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears
in the modern babel. Yet you very rarely meet either of them
in a train. You never meet anyone else in a controversy.
The man you meet in a train is like this man that I met:
he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectually doubtful.
So far from luxuriating in the loathsome things that could
be "done" to criminals, he feels bitterly how much better it
would be if nothing need be done. But something must be done.
"I s'pose we 'ave to do it." In short, he is simply a sane man,
and of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is a man
who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
. . . . .
Now the real difficulty of discussing decently this problem
of the proper treatment of criminals is that both parties
discuss the matter without any direct human feeling.
The denouncers of wrong are as cold as the organisers of wrong.
Humanitarianism is as hard as inhumanity.
Let me take one practical instance. I think the flogging
arranged in our modern prisons is a filthy torture; all its
scientific paraphernalia, the photographing, the medical attendance,
prove that it goes to the last foul limit of the boot and rack.
The cat is simply the rack without any of its intellectual reasons.
Holding this view strongly, I open the ordinary humanitarian books or
papers and I find a phrase like this, "The lash is a relic of barbarism."
So is the plough. So is the fishing net. So is the horn or
the staff or the fire lit in winter. What an inexpressibly feeble
phrase for anything one wants to attack--a relic of barbarism!
It is as if a man walked naked down the street to-morrow,
and we said that his clothes were not quite in the latest fashion.
There is nothing particularly nasty about being a relic of barbarism.
Man is a relic of barbarism. Civilisation is a relic of barbarism.
But torture is not a relic of barbarism at all. In actuality it is simply
a relic of sin; but in comparative history it may well be called a relic
of civilisation. It has always been most artistic and elaborate when
everything else was most artistic and elaborate. Thus it was detailed
exquisite in the late Roman Empire, in the complex and gorgeous sixteenth
century, in the centralised French monarchy a hundred years before the
Revolution, and in the great Chinese civilisation to this day. This is,
first and last, the frightful thing we must remember. In so far as we
grow instructed and refined we are not (in any sense whatever) naturally
moving away from torture. We may be moving towards torture. We must know
what we are doing, if we are to avoid the enormous secret cruelty which
has crowned every historic civilisation.
The train moves more swiftly through the sunny English fields.
They have taken the prisoners away, and I do not know what they
have done with them.
CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XXVIII The Lion