CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - The Futurists
It was a warm golden evening, fit for October, and I was watching
(with regret) a lot of little black pigs being turned out of my garden,
when the postman handed to me, with a perfunctory haste which doubtless
masked his emotion, the Declaration of Futurism. If you ask me what
Futurism is, I cannot tell you; even the Futurists themselves seem
a little doubtful; perhaps they are waiting for the future to find out.
But if you ask me what its Declaration is, I answer eagerly;
for I can tell you quite a lot about that. It is written by an
Italian named Marinetti, in a magazine which is called Poesia.
It is headed "Declaration of Futurism" in enormous letters; it is
divided off with little numbers; and it starts straight away like this:
"1. We intend to glorify the love of danger, the custom of energy,
the strengt of daring. 2. The essential elements of our poetry
will be courage, audacity, and revolt. 3. Literature having up
to now glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and slumber,
we wish to exalt the aggressive movement, the feverish insomnia,
running, the perilous leap, the cuff and the blow." While I am
quite willing to exalt the cuff within reason, it scarcely seems
such an entirely new subject for literature as the Futurists imagine.
It seems to me that even through the slumber which fills the Siege
of Troy, the Song of Roland, and the Orlando Furioso, and in spite
of the thoughtful immobility which marks "Pantagruel," "Henry V,"
and the Ballad of Chevy Chase, there are occasional gleams
of an admiration for courage, a readiness to glorify the love
of danger, and even the "strengt of daring," I seem to remember,
slightly differently spelt, somewhere in literature.
The distinction, however, seems to be that the warriors of
the past went in for tournaments, which were at least dangerous
for themselves, while the Futurists go in for motor-cars,
which are mainly alarming for other people. It is the Futurist
in his motor who does the "aggressive movement," but it is the
pedestrians who go in for the "running" and the "perilous leap."
Section No. 4 says, "We declare that the splendour of the world
has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed.
A race-automobile adorned with great pipes like serpents
with explosive breath. ... A race-automobile which seems
to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the Victory
of Samothrace." It is also much easier, if you have the money.
It is quite clear, however, that you cannot be a Futurist at
all unless you are frightfully rich. Then follows this lucid
and soul-stirring sentence: "5. We will sing the praises of man
holding the flywheel of which the ideal steering-post traverses
the earth impelled itself around the circuit of its own orbit."
What a jolly song it would be--so hearty, and with such a simple
swing in it! I can imagine the Futurists round the fire in a tavern
trolling out in chorus some ballad with that incomparable refrain;
shouting over their swaying flagons some such words as these:
A notion came into my head as new as it was bright
That poems might be written on the subject of a fight;
No praise was given to Lancelot, Achilles, Nap or Corbett,
But we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal
steering-post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit
of its own orbit.
Then lest it should be supposed that Futurism would be so weak
as to permit any democratic restraints upon the violence and levity
of the luxurious classes, there would be a special verse in honour
of the motors also:
My fathers scaled the mountains in their pilgrimages far,
But I feel full of energy while sitting in a car;
And petrol is the perfect wine, I lick it and absorb it,
So we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal
steering-post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit
of its own orbit.
Yes, it would be a rollicking catch. I wish there were space to finish
the song, or to detail all the other sections in the Declaration.
Suffice it to say that Futurism has a gratifying dislike both of
Liberal politics and Christian morals; I say gratifying because,
however unfortunately the cross and the cap of liberty have quarrelled,
they are always united in the feeble hatred of such silly
megalomaniacs as these. They will "glorify war--the only true
hygiene of the world--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture
of Anarchism, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman."
They will "destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism,
feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice." The proclamation ends with
an extraordinary passage which I cannot understand at all, all about
something that is going to happen to Mr. Marinetti when he is forty.
As far as I can make out he will then be killed by other poets,
who will be overwhelmed with love and admiration for him.
"They will come against us from far away, from everywhere,
leaping on the cadence of their first poems, clawing the air with
crooked fingers and scenting at the Academy gates the good smell
of our decaying minds." Well, it is satisfactory to be told,
however obscurely, that this sort of thing is coming to an end
some day, to be replaced by some other tomfoolery. And though
I commonly refrain from clawing the air with crooked fingers,
I can assure Mr. Marinetti that this omission does not disqualify me,
and that I scent the good smell of his decaying mind all right.
I think the only other point of Futurism is contained in this
sentence: "It is in Italy that we hurl this overthrowing and
inflammatory Declaration, with which to-day we found Futurism,
for we will free Italy from her numberless museums which cover
her with countless cemeteries." I think that rather sums it up.
The best way, one would think, of freeing oneself from a museum
would be not to go there. Mr. Marinetti's fathers and grandfathers
freed Italy from prisons and torture chambers, places where people
were held by force. They, being in the bondage of "moralism,"
attacked Governments as unjust, real Governments, with real guns.
Such was their utilitarian cowardice that they would die in hundreds
upon the bayonets of Austria. I can well imagine why Mr. Marinetti
in his motor-car does not wish to look back at the past. If there
was one thing that could make him look smaller even than before it
is that roll of dead men's drums and that dream of Garibaldi going by.
The old Radical ghosts go by, more real than the living men,
to assault I know not what ramparted city in hell. And meanwhile
the Futurist stands outside a museum in a warlike attitude,
and defiantly tells the official at the turnstile that he will never,
never come in.
There is a certain solid use in fools. It is not so much that they
rush in where angels fear to tread, but rather that they let out
what devils intend to do. Some perversion of folly will float
about nameless and pervade a whole society; then some lunatic
gives it a name, and henceforth it is harmless. With all really
evil things, when the danger has appeared the danger is over.
Now it may be hoped that the self-indulgent sprawlers of Poesia
have put a name once and for all to their philosophy. In the case
of their philosophy, to put a name to it is to put an end to it.
Yet their philosophy has been very widespread in our time; it could
hardly have been pointed and finished except by this perfect folly.
The creed of which (please God) this is the flower and finish
consists ultimately in this statement: that it is bold and spirited
to appeal to the future. Now, it is entirely weak and half-witted
to appeal to the future. A brave man ought to ask for what he wants,
not for what he expects to get. A brave man who wants Atheism in
the future calls himself an Atheist; a brave man who wants Socialism,
a Socialist; a brave man who wants Catholicism, a Catholic.
But a weak-minded man who does not know what he wants in the future
calls himself a Futurist.
They have driven all the pigs away. Oh that they had driven away
the prigs, and left the pigs! The sky begins to droop with darkness
and all birds and blossoms to descend unfaltering into the healthy
underworld where things slumber and grow. There was just one true
phrase of Mr. Marinetti's about himself: "the feverish insomnia."
The whole universe is pouring headlong to the happiness of the night.
It is only the madman who has not the courage to sleep.
The Duc de Chambertin-Pommard was a small but lively relic of a really
aristocratic family, the members of which were nearly all Atheists
up to the time of the French Revolution, but since that event
(beneficial in such various ways) had been very devout.
He was a Royalist, a Nationalist, and a perfectly sincere patriot
in that particular style which consists of ceaselessly asserting
that one's country is not so much in danger as already destroyed.
He wrote cheery little articles for the Royalist Press entitled
"The End of France" or "The Last Cry," or what not, and he gave
the final touches to a picture of the Kaiser riding across a pavement
of prostrate Parisians with a glow of patriotic exultation.
He was quite poor, and even his relations had no money.
He walked briskly to all his meals at a little open cafe,
and he looked just like everybody else.
Living in a country where aristocracy does not exist, he had a high
opinion of it. He would yearn for the swords and the stately
manners of the Pommards before the Revolution--most of whom had been
(in theory) Republicans. But he turned with a more practical
eagerness to the one country in Europe where the tricolour has
never flown and men have never been roughly equalized before the
State. The beacon and comfort of his life was England, which all
Europe sees clearly as the one pure aristocracy that remains.
He had, moreover, a mild taste for sport and kept an English
bulldog, and he believed the English to be a race of bulldogs,
of heroic squires, and hearty yeomen vassals, because he read all
this in English Conservative papers, written by exhausted little
Levantine clerks. But his reading was naturally for the most part
in the French Conservative papers (though he knew English well),
and it was in these that he first heard of the horrible Budget.
There he read of the confiscatory revolution planned by the
Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer, the sinister Georges Lloyd.
He also read how chivalrously Prince Arthur Balfour of Burleigh
had defied that demagogue, assisted by Austen the Lord Chamberlain
and the gay and witty Walter Lang. And being a brisk partisan
and a capable journalist, he decided to pay England a special visit
and report to his paper upon the struggle.
He drove for an eternity in an open fly through beautiful woods,
with a letter of introduction in his pocket to one duke, who was
to introduce him to another duke. The endless and numberless avenues
of bewildering pine woods gave him a queer feeling that he was driving
through the countless corridors of a dream. Yet the vast silence
and freshness healed his irritation at modern ugliness and unrest.
It seemed a background fit for the return of chivalry. In such
a forest a king and all his court might lose themselves hunting
or a knight errant might perish with no companion but God. The castle
itself when he reached it was somewhat smaller than he had expected,
but he was delighted with its romantic and castellated outline.
He was just about to alight when somebody opened two enormous gates
at the side and the vehicle drove briskly through.
"That is not the house?" he inquired politely of the driver.
"No, sir," said the driver, controlling the corners of his mouth.
"The lodge, sir."
"Indeed," said the Duc de Chambertin-Pommard, "that is where
the Duke's land begins?"
"Oh no, sir," said the man, quite in distress. "We've been in his
Grace's land all day."
The Frenchman thanked him and leant back in the carriage,
feeling as if everything were incredibly huge and vast, like Gulliver
in the country of the Brobdingnags.
He got out in front of a long facade of a somewhat severe building,
and a little careless man in a shooting jacket and knickerbockers
ran down the steps. He had a weak, fair moustache and dull, blue,
babyish eyes; his features were insignificant, but his manner
extremely pleasant and hospitable, This was the Duke of Aylesbury,
perhaps the largest landowner in Europe, and known only as a horsebreeder
until he began to write abrupt little letters about the Budget.
He led the French Duke upstairs, talking trivialties in a hearty way,
and there presented him to another and more important English oligarch,
who got up from a writing-desk with a slightly senile jerk.
He had a gleaming bald head and glasses; the lower part of his
face was masked with a short, dark beard, which did not conceal
a beaming smile, not unmixed with sharpness. He stooped
a little as he ran, like some sedentary head clerk or cashier;
and even without the cheque-book and papers on his desk would
have given the impression of a merchant or man of business.
He was dressed in a light grey check jacket. He was the Duke
of Windsor, the great Unionist statesman. Between these two loose,
amiable men, the little Gaul stood erect in his black frock coat,
with the monstrous gravity of French ceremonial good manners.
This stiffness led the Duke of Windsor to put him at his ease
(like a tenant), and he said, rubbing his hands:
"I was delighted with your letter ... delighted. I shall be very
pleased if I can give you--er--any details."
"My visit," said the Frenchman, "scarcely suffices for
the scientific exhaustion of detail. I seek only the idea.
The idea, that is always the immediate thing."
"Quite so," said the other rapidly; "quite so ... the idea."
Feeling somehow that it was his turn (the English Duke having done all
that could be required of him) Pommard had to say: "I mean the idea
of aristocracy. I regard this as the last great battle for the idea.
Aristocracy, like any other thing, must justify itself to mankind.
Aristocracy is good because it preserves a picture of human dignity
in a world where that dignity is often obscured by servile necessities.
Aristocracy alone can keep a certain high reticence of soul and body,
a certain noble distance between the sexes."
The Duke of Aylesbury, who had a clouded recollection of having squirted
soda-water down the neck of a Countess on the previous evening,
looked somewhat gloomy, as if lamenting the theoretic spirit
of the Latin race. The elder Duke laughed heartily, and said:
"Well, well, you know; we English are horribly practical.
With us the great question is the land. Out here in the country
... do you know this part?"
"Yes, yes," cried the Frenchmen eagerly. "I See what you mean.
The country! the old rustic life of humanity! A holy war upon
the bloated and filthy towns. What right have these anarchists to attack
your busy and prosperous countrysides? Have they not thriven under
your management? Are not the English villages always growing larger
and gayer under the enthusiastic leadership of their encouraging squires?
Have you not the Maypole? Have you not Merry England?"
The Duke of Aylesbury made a noise in his throat, and then said
very indistinctly: "They all go to London."
"All go to London?" repeated Pommard, with a blank stare. "Why?"
This time nobody answered, and Pommard had to attack again.
"The spirit of aristocracy is essentially opposed to the greed
of the industrial cities. Yet in France there are actually
one or two nobles so vile as to drive coal and gas trades,
and drive them hard." The Duke of Windsor looked at the carpet.
The Duke of Aylesbury went and looked out of the window.
At length the latter said: "That's rather stiff, you know.
One has to look after one's own business in town as well."
"Do not say it," cried the little Frenchman, starting up.
"I tell you all Europe is one fight between business and honour.
If we do not fight for honour, who will? What other right have we
poor two-legged sinners to titles and quartered shields except
that we staggeringly support some idea of giving things which
cannot be demanded and avoiding things which cannot be punished?
Our only claim is to be a wall across Christendom against the Jew
pedlars and pawnbrokers, against the Goldsteins and the--"
The Duke of Aylesbury swung round with his hands in his pockets.
"Oh, I say," he said, "you've been readin' Lloyd George.
Nobody but dirty Radicals can say a word against Goldstein."
"I certainly cannot permit," said the elder Duke, rising rather shakily,
"the respected name of Lord Goldstein--"
He intended to be impressive, but there was something in the Frenchman's
eye that is not so easily impressed; there shone there that steel
which is the mind of France,
"Gentlemen," he said, "I think I have all the details now.
You have ruled England for four hundred years. By your own
account you have not made the countryside endurable to men.
By your own account you have helped the victory of vulgarity and smoke.
And by your own account you are hand and glove with those very
money-grubbers and adventurers whom gentlemen have no other business
but to keep at bay. I do not know what your people will do;
but my people would kill you."
Some seconds afterwards he had left the Duke's house, and some hours
afterwards the Duke's estate.
I suppose that, taking this summer as a whole, people will not
call it an appropriate time for praising the English climate.
But for my part I will praise the English climate till I die--
even if I die of the English climate. There is no weather
so good as English weather. Nay, in a real sense there is no
weather at all anywhere but in England. In France you have much
sun and some rain; in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds;
in Scotland and Ireland you have rain, either thick or thin;
in America you have hells of heat and cold, and in the Tropics you have
sunstrokes varied by thunderbolts. But all these you have on a broad
and brutal scale, and you settle down into contentment or despair.
Only in our own romantic country do you have the strictly romantic
thing called Weather; beautiful and changing as a woman.
The great English landscape painters (neglected now like everything
that is English) have this salient distinction: that the Weather is not
the atmosphere of their pictures; it is the subject of their pictures.
They paint portraits of the Weather. The Weather sat to Constable.
The Weather posed for Turner, and a deuce of a pose it was.
This cannot truly be said of the greatest of their continental
models or rivals. Poussin and Claude painted objects, ancient
cities or perfect Arcadian shepherds through a clear medium
of the climate. But in the English painters Weather is the hero;
with Turner an Adelphi hero, taunting, flashing and fighting,
melodramatic but really magnificent. The English climate,
a tall and terrible protagonist, robed in rain and thunder and snow
and sunlight, fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground.
I admit the superiority of many other French things besides French art.
But I will not yield an inch on the superiority of English weather and
weather-painting. Why, the French have not even got a word for Weather:
and you must ask for the weather in French as if you were asking
for the time in English.
Then, again, variety of climate should always go with stability of abode.
The weather in the desert is monotonous; and as a natural consequence
the Arabs wander about, hoping it may be different somewhere.
But an Englishman's house is not only his castle; it is his fairy castle.
Clouds and colours of every varied dawn and eve are perpetually
touching and turning it from clay to gold, or from gold to ivory.
There is a line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden
which is literally different on every one of the three hundred
and sixty-five days. Sometimes it seems as near as a hedge,
and sometimes as far as a faint and fiery evening cloud.
The same principle (by the way) applies to the difficult problem
of wives. Variability is one of the virtues of a woman.
It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have
one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.
Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit
of calling a grey day a "colourless" day. Grey is a colour,
and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour. There is also an
insulting style of speech about "one grey day just like another"
You might as well talk about one green tree just like another.
A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun;
so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ
as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt.
One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove's plumage.
One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey
like the smoke of substantial kitchens. No things could seem
further apart than the doubt of grey and the decision of scarlet.
Yet grey and red can mingle, as they do in the morning clouds:
and also in a sort of warm smoky stone of which they build the little
towns in the west country. In those towns even the houses that are wholly
grey have a glow in them; as if their secret firesides were such furnaces
of hospitality as faintly to transfuse the walls like walls of cloud.
And wandering in those westland parts I did once really find a sign-post
pointing up a steep crooked path to a town that was called Clouds.
I did not climb up to it; I feared that either the town would not be
good enough for the name, or I should not be good enough for the town.
Anyhow, the little hamlets of the warm grey stone have a geniality
which is not achieved by all the artistic scarlet of the suburbs;
as if it were better to warm one's hands at the ashes of Glastonbury
than at the painted flames of Croydon.
Again, the enemies of grey (those astute, daring and evil-minded men)
are fond of bringing forward the argument that colours suffer in
grey weather, and that strong sunlight is necessary to all the hues
of heaven and earth. Here again there are two words to be said;
and it is essential to distinguish. It is true that sun is needed
to burnish and bring into bloom the tertiary and dubious colours;
the colour of peat, pea-soup, Impressionist sketches, brown velvet
coats, olives, grey and blue slates, the complexions of vegetarians,
the tints of volcanic rock, chocolate, cocoa, mud, soot, slime, old boots;
the delicate shades of these do need the sunlight to bring out
the faint beauty that often clings to them. But if you have a
healthy negro taste in colour, if you choke your garden with poppies
and geraniums, if you paint your house sky-blue and scarlet,
if you wear, let us say, a golden top-hat and a crimson frock-coat,
you will not only be visible on the greyest day, but you will notice
that your costume and environment produce a certain singular effect.
You will find, I mean, that rich colours actually look more
luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a sombre
background and seem to be burning with a lustre of their
own. Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks.
There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret,
like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.
A bright blue sky is necessarily the high light of the picture;
and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a
grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies
are really the red lost eyes of day; and the sunflower is the
vice-regent of the sun.
Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless;
that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence,
especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise.
Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some
other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white
or bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded
of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is
grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they
may still remind us of the morning.
I have now lived for about two months in the country, and have gathered
the last rich autumnal fruit of a rural life, which is a strong desire
to see London. Artists living in my neighbourhood talk rapturously
of the rolling liberty of the landscape, the living peace of woods.
But I say to them (with a slight Buckinghamshire accent), "Ah, that is
how Cockneys feel. For us real old country people the country
is reality; it is the town that is romance. Nature is as plain
as one of her pigs, as commonplace, as comic, and as healthy.
But civilization is full of poetry, even if it be sometimes
an evil poetry. The streets of London are paved with gold;
that is, with the very poetry of avarice." With these typically
bucolic words I touch my hat and go ambling away on a stick,
with a stiffness of gait proper to the Oldest Inhabitant;
while in my more animated moments I am taken for the Village Idiot.
Exchanging heavy but courteous salutations with other gaffers, I reach
the station, where I ask for a ticket for London where the king lives.
Such a journey, mingled of provincial fascination and fear,
did I successfully perform only a few days ago; and alone and
helpless in the capital, found myself in the tangle of roads around
the Marble Arch.
A faint prejudice may possess the mind that I have slightly exaggerated
my rusticity and remoteness. And yet it is true as I came to that corner
of the Park that, for some unreasonable reason of mood, I saw all London
as a strange city and the civilization itself as one enormous whim.
The Marble Arch itself, in its new insular position, with traffic
turning dizzily all about it, struck me as a placid monstrosity.
What could be wilder than to have a huge arched gateway, with people
going everywhere except under it? If I took down my front door
and stood it up all by itself in the middle of my back garden,
my village neighbours (in their simplicity) would probably stare.
Yet the Marble Arch is now precisely that; an elaborate entrance
and the only place by which no one can enter. By the new arrangement
its last weak pretence to be a gate has been taken away. The cabman
still cannot drive through it, but he can have the delights of riding
round it, and even (on foggy nights) the rapture of running into it.
It has been raised from the rank of a fiction to the dignity
of an obstacle.
As I began to walk across a corner of the Park, this sense of what
is strange in cities began to mingle with some sense of what is
stern as well as strange. It was one of those queer-coloured
winter days when a watery sky changes to pink and grey and green,
like an enormous opal. The trees stood up grey and angular,
as if in attitudes of agony; and here and there on benches under
the trees sat men as grey and angular as they. It was cold even for me,
who had eaten a large breakfast and purposed to eat a perfectly
Gargantuan lunch; it was colder for the men under the trees.
And to eastward through the opalescent haze, the warmer whites
and yellows of the houses in Park-lane shone as unsubstantially
as if the clouds themselves had taken on the shape of mansions to mock
the men who sat there in the cold. But the mansions were real--
like the mockery.
No one worth calling a man allows his moods to change his convictions;
but it is by moods that we understand other men's convictions.
The bigot is not he who knows he is right; every sane man knows
he is right. The bigot is he whose emotions and imagination
are too cold and weak to feel how it is that other men go wrong.
At that moment I felt vividly how men might go wrong, even unto dynamite.
If one of those huddled men under the trees had stood up and asked
for rivers of blood, it would have been erroneous--but not irrelevant.
It would have been appropriate and in the picture; that lurid grey
picture of insolence on one side and impotence on the other.
It may be true (on the whole it is) that this social machine
we have made is better than anarchy. Still, it is a machine;
and we have made it. It does hold those poor men helpless:
and it does lift those rich men high ... and such men--good Lord!
By the time I flung myself on a bench beside another man I was half
inclined to try anarchy for a change.
The other was of more prosperous appearance than most of the men
on such seats; still, he was not what one calls a gentleman,
and had probably worked at some time like a human being. He
was a small, sharp-faced man, with grave, staring eyes, and
a beard somewhat foreign. His clothes were black; respectable
and yet casual; those of a man who dressed conventionally
because it was a bore to dress unconventionally--as it is.
Attracted by this and other things, and wanting an outburst
for my bitter social feelings, I tempted him into speech,
first about the cold, and then about the General Election.
To this the respectable man replied:
"Well, I don't belong to any party myself. I'm an Anarchist."
I looked up and almost expected fire from heaven.
This coincidence was like the end of the world. I had sat down
feeling that somehow or other Park-lane must be pulled down;
and I had sat down beside the man who wanted to pull it down.
I bowed in silence for an instant under the approaching apocalypse;
and in that instant the man turned sharply and started talking
like a torrent.
"Understand me," he said. "Ordinary people think an Anarchist means
a man with a bomb in his pocket. Herbert Spencer was an Anarchist.
But for that fatal admission of his on page 793, he would be a
complete Anarchist. Otherwise, he agrees wholly with Pidge."
This was uttered with such blinding rapidity of syllabification
as to be a better test of teetotalism than the Scotch one of saying
"Biblical criticism" six times. I attempted to speak, but he began
again with the same rippling rapidity.
"You will say that Pidge also admits government in that tenth chapter
so easily misunderstood. Bolger has attacked Pidge on those lines.
But Bolger has no scientific training. Bolger is a psychometrist,
but no sociologist. To any one who has combined a study of Pidge with
the earlier and better discoveries of Kruxy, the fallacy is quite clear.
Bolger confounds social coercion with coercional social action."
His rapid rattling mouth shut quite tight suddenly, and he looked
steadily and triumphantly at me, with his head on one side.
I opened my mouth, and the mere motion seemed to sting him to
fresh verbal leaps.
"Yes," he said, "that's all very well. The Finland Group has
accepted Bolger. But," he said, suddenly lifting a long finger as
if to stop me, "but--Pidge has replied. His pamphlet is published.
He has proved that Potential Social Rebuke is not a weapon of
the true Anarchist. He has shown that just as religious authority
and political authority have gone, so must emotional authority
and psychological authority. He has shown--"
I stood up in a sort of daze. "I think you remarked,"
I said feebly, "that the mere common populace do not quite
understand Anarchism"--"Quite so," he said with burning swiftness;
"as I said, they think any Anarchist is a man with a bomb, whereas--"
"But great heavens, man!" I said; "it's the man with the bomb that
I understand! I wish you had half his sense. What do I care how many
German dons tie themselves in knots about how this society began?
My only interest is about how soon it will end. Do you see those fat
white houses over in Park-lane, where your masters live?"
He assented and muttered something about concentrations of capital.
"Well," I said, "if the time ever comes when we all storm
those houses, will you tell me one thing? Tell me how we shall
do it without authority? Tell me how you will have an army
of revolt without discipline?"
For the first instant he was doubtful; and I had bidden him farewell,
and crossed the street again, when I saw him open his mouth and begin
to run after me. He had remembered something out of Pidge.
I escaped, however, and as I leapt on an omnibus I saw again the enormous
emblem of the Marble Arch. I saw that massive symbol of the modern mind:
a door with no house to it; the gigantic gate of Nowhere.
CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - The Futurists