CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - V The Extraordinary Cabman
From time to time I have introduced into this newspaper column the
narration of incidents that have really occurred. I do not mean to
insinuate that in this respect it stands alone among newspaper
columns. I mean only that I have found that my meaning was better
expressed by some practical parable out of daily life than by any
other method; therefore I propose to narrate the incident of the
extraordinary cabman, which occurred to me only three days ago, and
which, slight as it apparently is, aroused in me a moment of genuine
emotion bordering upon despair.
On the day that I met the strange cabman I had been lunching
in a little restaurant in Soho in company with three or four
of my best friends. My best friends are all either bottomless
sceptics or quite uncontrollable believers, so our discussion
at luncheon turned upon the most ultimate and terrible ideas.
And the whole argument worked out ultimately to this: that the
question is whether a man can be certain of anything at all.
I think he can be certain, for if (as I said to my friend,
furiously brandishing an empty bottle) it is impossible
intellectually to entertain certainty, what is this certainty
which it is impossible to entertain? If I have never experienced
such a thing as certainty I cannot even say that a thing is not
certain. Similarly, if I have never experienced such a thing as
green I cannot even say that my nose is not green. It may be as
green as possible for all I know, if I have really no experience
of greenness. So we shouted at each other and shook the room;
because metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing.
And the difference between us was very deep, because it
was a difference as to the object of the whole thing
called broad-mindedness or the opening of the intellect.
For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the sun
opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake,
opening infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened
my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it
again on something solid. I was doing it at the moment.
And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly silly
if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.
. . . . .
Now when this argument was over, or at least when it was cut short
(for it will never be over), I went away with one of my companions,
who in the confusion and comparative insanity of a General Election
had somehow become a member of Parliament, and I drove with him in a cab
from the corner of Leicester-square to the members' entrance of the House
of Commons, where the police received me with a quite unusual tolerance.
Whether they thought that he was my keeper or that I was his keeper
is a discussion between us which still continues.
It is necessary in this narrative to preserve the utmost exactitude
of detail. After leaving my friend at the House I took the cab
on a few hundred yards to an office in Victoria-street which I
had to visit. I then got out and offered him more than his fare.
He looked at it, but not with the surly doubt and general
disposition to try it on which is not unknown among normal cabmen.
But this was no normal, perhaps, no human, cabman. He looked at it
with a dull and infantile astonishment, clearly quite genuine.
"Do you know, sir," he said, "you've only given me 1s.8d?"
I remarked, with some surprise, that I did know it. "Now you know,
sir," said he in a kindly, appealing, reasonable way, "you know
that ain't the fare from Euston." "Euston," I repeated vaguely,
for the phrase at that moment sounded to me like China or Arabia.
"What on earth has Euston got to do with it?" "You hailed me just outside
Euston Station," began the man with astonishing precision, "and then
you said----" "What in the name of Tartarus are you talking about?"
I said with Christian forbearance; "I took you at the south-west
corner of Leicester-square." "Leicester-square," he exclaimed,
loosening a kind of cataract of scorn, "why we ain't been near
Leicester-square to-day. You hailed me outside Euston Station,
and you said----" "Are you mad, or am I?" I asked with scientific calm.
I looked at the man. No ordinary dishonest cabman would
think of creating so solid and colossal and creative a lie.
And this man was not a dishonest cabman. If ever a human
face was heavy and simple and humble, and with great big
blue eyes protruding like a frog's, if ever (in short)
a human face was all that a human face should be, it was the
face of that resentful and respectful cabman. I looked up and
down the street; an unusually dark twilight seemed to be coming
on. And for one second the old nightmare of the sceptic put
its finger on my nerve. What was certainty? Was anybody
certain of anything? Heavens! to think of the dull rut of the
sceptics who go on asking whether we possess a future life.
The exciting question for real scepticism is whether we
possess a past life. What is a minute ago, rationalistically
considered, except a tradition and a picture? The darkness grew
deeper from the road. The cabman calmly gave me the most elaborate
details of the gesture, the words, the complex but consistent
course of action which I had adopted since that remarkable
occasion when I had hailed him outside Euston Station. How did I
know (my sceptical friends would say) that I had not hailed him
outside Euston. I was firm about my assertion; he was quite equally
firm about his. He was obviously quite as honest a man as I, and a
member of a much more respectable profession. In that moment
the universe and the stars swung just a hair's breadth from
their balance, and the foundations of the earth were moved.
But for the same reason that I believe in Democracy, for the same
reason that I believe in free will, for the same reason that I
believe in fixed character of virtue, the reason that could
only be expressed by saying that I do not choose to be a lunatic,
I continued to believe that this honest cabman was wrong,
and I repeated to him that I had really taken him at the corner
of Leicester-square. He began with the same evident and
ponderous sincerity, "You hailed me outside Euston Station,
and you said----"
And at this moment there came over his features a kind
of frightful transfiguration of living astonishment,
as if he had been lit up like a lamp from the inside.
"Why, I beg your pardon, sir," he said. "I beg your pardon.
I beg your pardon. You took me from Leicester-square. I remember now.
I beg your pardon." And with that this astonishing man let out
his whip with a sharp crack at his horse and went trundling away.
The whole of which interview, before the banner of St. George I swear,
is strictly true.
. . . . .
I looked at the strange cabman as he lessened in the distance
and the mists. I do not know whether I was right in fancying
that although his face had seemed so honest there was something
unearthly and demoniac about him when seen from behind.
Perhaps he had been sent to tempt me from my adherence to those
sanities and certainties which I had defended earlier in the day.
In any case it gave me pleasure to remember that my sense of reality,
though it had rocked for an instant, had remained erect.
Some time ago I wrote in these columns an article called
"The Extraordinary Cabman." I am now in a position to
contribute my experience of a still more extraordinary cab.
The extraordinary thing about the cab was that it did not like me;
it threw me out violently in the middle of the Strand.
If my friends who read the DAILY NEWS are as romantic (and as rich)
as I take them to be, I presume that this experience is not uncommon.
I suppose that they are all being thrown out of cabs, all over London.
Still, as there are some people, virginal and remote from the world,
who have not yet had this luxurious experience, I will give
a short account of the psychology of myself when my hansom cab
ran into the side of a motor omnibus, and I hope hurt it.
I do not need to dwell on the essential romance of the hansom cab--
that one really noble modern thing which our age, when it is judged,
will gravely put beside the Parthenon. It is really modern in that
it is both secret and swift. My particular hansom cab was modern in
these two respects; it was also very modern in the fact that it came
to grief. But it is also English; it is not to be found abroad; it
belongs to a beautiful, romantic country where nearly everybody is
pretending to be richer than they are, and acting as if they were.
It is comfortable, and yet it is reckless; and that combination
is the very soul of England. But although I had always
realised all these good qualities in a hansom cab, I had not
experienced all the possibilities, or, as the moderns put it,
all the aspects of that vehicle. My enunciation of the merits
of a hansom cab had been always made when it was the right way up.
Let me, therefore, explain how I felt when I fell out of a hansom
cab for the first and, I am happy to believe, the last time.
Polycrates threw one ring into the sea to propitiate the Fates.
I have thrown one hansom cab into the sea (if you will excuse a rather
violent metaphor) and the Fates are, I am quite sure, propitiated.
Though I am told they do not like to be told so.
I was driving yesterday afternoon in a hansom cab down one
of the sloping streets into the Strand, reading one of my own
admirable articles with continual pleasure, and still more
continual surprise, when the horse fell forward, scrambled a moment
on the scraping stones, staggered to his feet again, and went forward.
The horses in my cabs often do this, and I have learnt to enjoy
my own articles at any angle of the vehicle. So I did not see
anything at all odd about the way the horse went on again.
But I saw it suddenly in the faces of all the people on the pavement.
They were all turned towards me, and they were all struck
with fear suddenly, as with a white flame out of the sky.
And one man half ran out into the road with a movement of the
elbow as if warding off a blow, and tried to stop the horse.
Then I knew that the reins were lost, and the next moment the horse
was like a living thunder-bolt. I try to describe things exactly
as they seemed to me; many details I may have missed or mis-stated;
many details may have, so to speak, gone mad in the race down the road.
I remember that I once called one of my experiences narrated in this
paper "A Fragment of Fact." This is, at any rate, a fragment of fact.
No fact could possibly be more fragmentary than the sort of fact
that I expected to be at the bottom of that street.
. . . . .
I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally
found that the converted do not understand their own religion.
Thus I have always urged in this paper that democracy has
a deeper meaning than democrats understand; that is, that common
and popular things, proverbs, and ordinary sayings always have
something in them unrealised by most who repeat them. Here is one.
We have all heard about the man who is in momentary danger,
and who sees the whole of his life pass before him in a moment.
In the cold, literal, and common sense of words, this is obviously
a thundering lie. Nobody can pretend that in an accident
or a mortal crisis he elaborately remembered all the tickets
he had ever taken to Wimbledon, or all the times that he had ever
passed the brown bread and butter.
But in those few moments, while my cab was tearing towards
the traffic of the Strand, I discovered that there is a truth
behind this phrase, as there is behind all popular phrases.
I did really have, in that short and shrieking period,
a rapid succession of a number of fundamental points of view.
I had, so to speak, about five religions in almost as many seconds.
My first religion was pure Paganism, which among sincere men
is more shortly described as extreme fear. Then there succeeded
a state of mind which is quite real, but for which no proper
name has ever been found. The ancients called it Stoicism,
and I think it must be what some German lunatics mean
(if they mean anything) when they talk about Pessimism.
It was an empty and open acceptance of the thing that happens--
as if one had got beyond the value of it. And then, curiously enough,
came a very strong contrary feeling--that things mattered very
much indeed, and yet that they were something more than tragic.
It was a feeling, not that life was unimportant, but that
life was much too important ever to be anything but life.
I hope that this was Christianity. At any rate, it occurred
at the moment when we went crash into the omnibus.
It seemed to me that the hansom cab simply turned over on top of me,
like an enormous hood or hat. I then found myself crawling
out from underneath it in attitudes so undignified that they
must have added enormously to that great cause to which the
Anti-Puritan League and I have recently dedicated ourselves.
I mean the cause of the pleasures of the people. As to my demeanour
when I emerged, I have two confessions to make, and they are both
made merely in the interests of mental science. The first is that
whereas I had been in a quite pious frame of mind the moment before
the collision, when I got to my feet and found I had got off with a
cut or two I began (like St. Peter) to curse and to swear.
A man offered me a newspaper or something that I had dropped.
I can distinctly remember consigning the paper to a state
of irremediable spiritual ruin. I am very sorry for this now,
and I apologise both to the man and to the paper. I have not the
least idea what was the meaning of this unnatural anger; I mention
it as a psychological confession. It was immediately followed by
extreme hilarity, and I made so many silly jokes to the policeman
that he disgraced himself by continual laughter before all the
little boys in the street, who had hitherto taken him seriously.
. . . . .
There is one other odd thing about the matter which I also mention
as a curiosity of the human brain or deficiency of brain.
At intervals of about every three minutes I kept on reminding
the policeman that I had not paid the cabman, and that I hoped
he would not lose his money. He said it would be all right,
and the man would appear. But it was not until about half an hour
afterwards that it suddenly struck me with a shock intolerable
that the man might conceivably have lost more than half a crown;
that he had been in danger as well as I. I had instinctively
regarded the cabman as something uplifted above accidents, a god.
I immediately made inquiries, and I am happy to say that they
seemed to have been unnecessary.
But henceforward I shall always understand with a darker and more delicate
charity those who take tythe of mint, and anise, and cumin, and neglect
the weightier matters of the law; I shall remember how I was once really
tortured with owing half a crown to a man who might have been dead.
Some admirable men in white coats at the Charing Cross Hospital tied
up my small injury, and I went out again into the Strand. I felt upon
me even a kind of unnatural youth; I hungered for something untried.
So to open a new chapter in my life I got into a hansom cab.
A friend of mine who was visiting a poor woman in bereavement
and casting about for some phrase of consolation that should
not be either insolent or weak, said at last, "I think one can
live through these great sorrows and even be the better.
What wears one is the little worries." "That's quite right, mum,"
answered the old woman with emphasis, "and I ought to know,
seeing I've had ten of 'em." It is, perhaps, in this sense
that it is most true that little worries are most wearing.
In its vaguer significance the phrase, though it contains a truth,
contains also some possibilities of self-deception and error.
People who have both small troubles and big ones have the
right to say that they find the small ones the most bitter;
and it is undoubtedly true that the back which is bowed under
loads incredible can feel a faint addition to those loads;
a giant holding up the earth and all its animal creation might
still find the grasshopper a burden. But I am afraid that the
maxim that the smallest worries are the worst is sometimes used
or abused by people, because they have nothing but the very
smallest worries. The lady may excuse herself for reviling the
crumpled rose leaf by reflecting with what extraordinary dignity
she would wear the crown of thorns--if she had to. The gentleman
may permit himself to curse the dinner and tell himself that he
would behave much better if it were a mere matter of starvation.
We need not deny that the grasshopper on man's shoulder is
a burden; but we need not pay much respect to the gentleman
who is always calling out that he would rather have an elephant
when he knows there are no elephants in the country.
We may concede that a straw may break the camel's back,
but we like to know that it really is the last straw and
not the first.
I grant that those who have serious wrongs have a real right
to grumble, so long as they grumble about something else.
It is a singular fact that if they are sane they almost always
do grumble about something else. To talk quite reasonably about
your own quite real wrongs is the quickest way to go off your head.
But people with great troubles talk about little ones,
and the man who complains of the crumpled rose leaf very often
has his flesh full of the thorns. But if a man has commonly
a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified
in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills.
I do no deny that molehills can sometimes be important.
Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more
abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before,
they have no atmosphere. No one ever had a mystical premonition
that he was going to tumble over a hassock. William III.
died by falling over a molehill; I do not suppose that with all his
varied abilities he could have managed to fall over a mountain.
But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man
(not William III.) to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make
them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty
I do not here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental
limitations that are always falling across our path--bad weather,
confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments
or arrangements, waiting at railway stations, missing posts,
finding unpunctuality when we want punctuality, or, what is worse,
finding punctuality when we don't. It is of the poetic pleasures
to be drawn from all these that I sing--I sing with confidence
because I have recently been experimenting in the poetic pleasures
which arise from having to sit in one chair with a sprained foot,
with the only alternative course of standing on one leg like a stork--
a stork is a poetic simile; therefore I eagerly adopted it.
To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if
the thing itself symbolise something other than isolation.
If we wish to see what a house is it must be a house in some
uninhabited landscape. If we wish to depict what a man really
is we must depict a man alone in a desert or on a dark sea sand.
So long as he is a single figure he means all that humanity means;
so long as he is solitary he means human society; so long
as he is solitary he means sociability and comradeship.
Add another figure and the picture is less human--not more so.
One is company, two is none. If you wish to symbolise
human building draw one dark tower on the horizon; if you
wish to symbolise light let there be no star in the sky.
Indeed, all through that strangely lit season which we
call our day there is but one star in the sky--a large,
fierce star which we call the sun. One sun is splendid;
six suns would be only vulgar. One Tower Of Giotto is sublime;
a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white posts.
The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry
of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in
following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping
the single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find
the poetry of all human anatomy in standing on a single leg.
To express complete and perfect leggishness the leg must stand
in sublime isolation, like the tower in the wilderness.
As Ibsen so finely says, the strongest leg is that which
stands most alone.
This lonely leg on which I rest has all the simplicity
of some Doric column. The students of architecture tell us
that the only legitimate use of a column is to support weight.
This column of mine fulfils its legitimate function.
It supports weight. Being of an animal and organic consistency,
it may even improve by the process, and during these few
days that I am thus unequally balanced, the helplessness
or dislocation of the one leg may find compensation in the
astonishing strength and classic beauty of the other leg.
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson in Mr. George Meredith's novel might
pass by at any moment, and seeing me in the stork-like attitude
would exclaim, with equal admiration and a more literal exactitude,
"He has a leg." Notice how this famous literary phrase supports
my contention touching this isolation of any admirable thing.
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, wishing to make a clear and perfect
picture of human grace, said that Sir Willoughby Patterne had a leg.
She delicately glossed over and concealed the clumsy and offensive
fact that he had really two legs. Two legs were superfluous
and irrelevant, a reflection, and a confusion. Two legs would have
confused Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson like two Monuments in London.
That having had one good leg he should have another--
this would be to use vain repetitions as the Gentiles do.
She would have been as much bewildered by him as if he had
been a centipede.
All pessimism has a secret optimism for its object. All surrender
of life, all denial of pleasure, all darkness, all austerity,
all desolation has for its real aim this separation of something
so that it may be poignantly and perfectly enjoyed. I feel
grateful for the slight sprain which has introduced this mysterious
and fascinating division between one of my feet and the other.
The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.
In one of my feet I can feel how strong and splendid a foot is;
in the other I can realise how very much otherwise it might
have been. The moral of the thing is wholly exhilarating.
This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and
beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us.
If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself
if only for a moment. If you wish to realise how fearfully
and wonderfully God's image is made, stand on one leg.
If you want to realise the splendid vision of all visible things--
wink the other eye.
For some time I had been wandering in quiet streets in the curious
town of Besancon, which stands like a sort of peninsula
in a horse-shoe of river. You may learn from the guide books
that it was the birthplace of Victor Hugo, and that it is
a military station with many forts, near the French frontier.
But you will not learn from guide books that the very tiles
on the roofs seem to be of some quainter and more delicate
colour than the tiles of all the other towns of the world;
that the tiles look like the little clouds of some strange sunset,
or like the lustrous scales of some strange fish. They will not
tell you that in this town the eye cannot rest on anything without
finding it in some way attractive and even elvish, a carved face
at a street corner, a gleam of green fields through a stunted arch,
or some unexpected colour for the enamel of a spire or dome.
. . . . .
Evening was coming on and in the light of it all these colours
so simple and yet so subtle seemed more and more to fit together
and make a fairy tale. I sat down for a little outside a cafe
with a row of little toy trees in front of it, and presently
the driver of a fly (as we should call it) came to the same place.
He was one of those very large and dark Frenchmen, a type not
common but yet typical of France; the Rabelaisian Frenchman,
huge, swarthy, purple-faced, a walking wine-barrel; he was a sort
of Southern Falstaff, if one can imagine Falstaff anything but English.
And, indeed, there was a vital difference, typical of two nations.
For while Falstaff would have been shaking with hilarity like
a huge jelly, full of the broad farce of the London streets,
this Frenchman was rather solemn and dignified than otherwise--
as if pleasure were a kind of pagan religion. After some
talk which was full of the admirable civility and equality
of French civilisation, he suggested without either eagerness
or embarrassment that he should take me in his fly for an hour's
ride in the hills beyond the town. And though it was growing late
I consented; for there was one long white road under an archway
and round a hill that dragged me like a long white cord.
We drove through the strong, squat gateway that was made by Romans,
and I remember the coincidence like a sort of omen that as we
passed out of the city I heard simultaneously the three sounds
which are the trinity of France. They make what some poet calls
"a tangled trinity," and I am not going to disentangle it.
Whatever those three things mean, how or why they co-exist;
whether they can be reconciled or perhaps are reconciled already;
the three sounds I heard then by an accident all at once make up
the French mystery. For the brass band in the Casino gardens behind
me was playing with a sort of passionate levity some ramping tune
from a Parisian comic opera, and while this was going on I heard
also the bugles on the hills above, that told of terrible loyalties
and men always arming in the gate of France; and I heard also,
fainter than these sounds and through them all, the Angelus.
. . . . .
After this coincidence of symbols I had a curious sense of having
left France behind me, or, perhaps, even the civilised world.
And, indeed, there was something in the landscape wild
enough to encourage such a fancy. I have seen perhaps
higher mountains, but I have never seen higher rocks;
I have never seen height so near, so abrupt and sensational,
splinters of rock that stood up like the spires of churches,
cliffs that fell sudden and straight as Satan fell from heaven.
There was also a quality in the ride which was not only astonishing,
but rather bewildering; a quality which many must have noticed
if they have driven or ridden rapidly up mountain roads.
I mean a sense of gigantic gyration, as of the whole
earth turning about one's head. It is quite inadequate
to say that the hills rose and fell like enormous waves.
Rather the hills seemed to turn about me like the enormous sails
of a windmill, a vast wheel of monstrous archangelic wings.
As we drove on and up into the gathering purple of the sunset this
dizziness increased, confounding things above with things below.
Wide walls of wooded rock stood out above my head like a roof.
I stared at them until I fancied that I was staring down at a
wooded plain. Below me steeps of green swept down to the river.
I stared at them until I fancied that they swept up to the sky.
The purple darkened, night drew nearer; it seemed only to cut clearer
the chasms and draw higher the spires of that nightmare landscape.
Above me in the twilight was the huge black hulk of the driver,
and his broad, blank back was as mysterious as the back
of Death in Watts' picture. I felt that I was growing
too fantastic, and I sought to speak of ordinary things.
I called out to the driver in French, "Where are you taking me?"
and it is a literal and solemn fact that he answered me in the same
language without turning around, "To the end of the world."
I did not answer. I let him drag the vehicle up dark,
steep ways, until I saw lights under a low roof of little
trees and two children, one oddly beautiful, playing at ball.
Then we found ourselves filling up the strict main street
of a tiny hamlet, and across the wall of its inn was written
in large letters, LE BOUT DU MONDE--the end of the world.
The driver and I sat down outside that inn without a word, as if all
ceremonies were natural and understood in that ultimate place.
I ordered bread for both of us, and red wine, that was good but
had no name. On the other side of the road was a little plain
church with a cross on top of it and a cock on top of the cross.
This seemed to me a very good end of the world; if the story
of the world ended here it ended well. Then I wondered whether I
myself should really be content to end here, where most certainly
there were the best things of Christendom--a church and children's
games and decent soil and a tavern for men to talk with men.
But as I thought a singular doubt and desire grew slowly in me,
and at last I started up.
"Are you not satisfied?" asked my companion. "No," I said,
"I am not satisfied even at the end of the world."
Then, after a silence, I said, "Because you see there are two
ends of the world. And this is the wrong end of the world;
at least the wrong one for me. This is the French end of the world.
I want the other end of the world. Drive me to the other end
of the world."
"The other end of the world?" he asked. "Where is that?"
"It is in Walham Green," I whispered hoarsely. "You see it
on the London omnibuses. 'World's End and Walham Green.'
Oh, I know how good this is; I love your vineyards and your
free peasantry, but I want the English end of the world.
I love you like a brother, but I want an English cabman,
who will be funny and ask me what his fare 'is.' Your bugles
stir my blood, but I want to see a London policeman.
Take, oh, take me to see a London policeman."
He stood quite dark and still against the end of the sunset,
and I could not tell whether he understood or not. I got back
into his carriage.
"You will understand," I said, "if ever you are an exile even
for pleasure. The child to his mother, the man to his country,
as a countryman of yours once said. But since, perhaps, it is
rather too long a drive to the English end of the world,
we may as well drive back to Besancon."
Only as the stars came out among those immortal hills I wept
for Walham Green.
On the first of May I was sitting outside a cafe in the Place de
la Bastille in Paris staring at the exultant column, crowned with
a capering figure, which stands in the place where the people
destroyed a prison and ended an age. The thing is a curious
example of how symbolic is the great part of human history.
As a matter of mere material fact, the Bastille when it was taken
was not a horrible prison; it was hardly a prison at all.
But it was a symbol, and the people always go by a sure
instinct for symbols; for the Chinaman, for instance,
at the last General Election, or for President Kruger's hat
in the election before; their poetic sense is perfect.
The Chinaman with his pigtail is not an idle flippancy.
He does typify with a compact precision exactly the thing
the people resent in African policy, the alien and grotesque
nature of the power of wealth, the fact that money has no roots,
that it is not a natural and familiar power, but a sort of airy
and evil magic calling monsters from the ends of the earth.
The people hate the mine owner who can bring a Chinaman
flying across the sea, exactly as the people hated the wizard
who could fetch a flying dragon through the air. It was the same
with Mr. Kruger's hat. His hat (that admirable hat) was not merely
a joke. It did symbolise, and symbolise extremely well, the exact
thing which our people at that moment regarded with impatience and
venom; the old-fashioned, dingy, Republican simplicity, the
unbeautiful dignity of the bourgeois, and the heavier truisms of
political morality. No; the people are sometimes wrong on the
practical side of politics; they are never wrong on the artistic
side.
. . . . .
So it was, certainly, with the Bastille. The destruction of the Bastille
was not a reform; it was something more important than a reform.
It was an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image.
The people saw the building like a giant looking at them with
a score of eyes, and they struck at it as at a carved fact.
For of all the shapes in which that immense illusion called materialism
can terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive are big buildings.
Man feels like a fly, an accident, in the thing he has himself made.
It requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that
man made this confounding thing and man could unmake it.
Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street
taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual,
a ritual meaning far beyond its immediate political results.
It is a religious service. If, for instance, the Socialists were
numerous or courageous enough to capture and smash up the Bank
of England, you might argue for ever about the inutility of the act,
and how it really did not touch the root of the economic problem
in the correct manner. But mankind would never forget it.
It would change the world.
Architecture is a very good test of the true strength
of a society, for the most valuable things in a human
state are the irrevocable things--marriage, for instance.
And architecture approaches nearer than any other art to
being irrevocable, because it is so difficult to get rid of.
You can turn a picture with its face to the wall; it would be a
nuisance to turn that Roman cathedral with its face to the wall.
You can tear a poem to pieces; it is only in moments of
very sincere emotion that you tear a town-hall to pieces.
A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like a dogma.
Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence like a dogma.
People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world,
like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously
because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see
anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in
the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.
But along with this decision which is involved in creating a building,
there goes a quite similar decision in the more delightful
task of smashing one. The two of necessity go together.
In few places have so many fine public buildings been set up
as here in Paris, and in few places have so many been destroyed.
When people have finally got into the horrible habit of preserving
buildings, they have got out of the habit of building them.
And in London one mingles, as it were, one's tears because so few
are pulled down.
. . . . .
As I sat staring at the column of the Bastille, inscribed to Liberty
and Glory, there came out of one corner of the square (which, like
so many such squares, was at once crowded and quiet) a sudden and
silent line of horsemen. Their dress was of a dull blue, plain and
prosaic enough, but the sun set on fire the brass and steel of their
helmets; and their helmets were carved like the helmets of the Romans.
I had seen them by twos and threes often enough before.
I had seen plenty of them in pictures toiling through the snows
of Friedland or roaring round the squares at Waterloo.
But now they came file after file, like an invasion,
and something in their numbers, or in the evening light that lit
up their faces and their crests, or something in the reverie
into which they broke, made me inclined to spring to my feet
and cry out, "The French soldiers!" There were the little men
with the brown faces that had so often ridden through the capitals
of Europe as coolly as they now rode through their own.
And when I looked across the square I saw that the two other corners
were choked with blue and red; held by little groups of infantry.
The city was garrisoned as against a revolution.
Of course, I had heard all about the strike, chiefly from a baker.
He said he was not going to "Chomer." I said, "Qu'est-ce que
c'est que le chome?" He said, "Ils ne veulent pas travailler."
I said, "Ni moi non plus," and he thought I was a class-conscious
collectivist proletarian. The whole thing was curious, and the true
moral of it one not easy for us, as a nation, to grasp, because our
own faults are so deeply and dangerously in the other direction.
To me, as an Englishman (personally steeped in the English optimism
and the English dislike of severity), the whole thing seemed a fuss
about nothing. It looked like turning out one of the best armies
in Europe against ordinary people walking about the street.
The cavalry charged us once or twice, more or less harmlessly.
But, of course, it is hard to say how far in such criticisms
one is assuming the French populace to be (what it is not)
as docile as the English. But the deeper truth of the matter tingled,
so to speak, through the whole noisy night. This people has
a natural faculty for feeling itself on the eve of something--of the
Bartholomew or the Revolution or the Commune or the Day of Judgment.
It is this sense of crisis that makes France eternally young.
It is perpetually pulling down and building up, as it pulled down
the prison and put up the column in the Place de La Bastille.
France has always been at the point of dissolution. She has found
the only method of immortality. She dies daily.
CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - V The Extraordinary Cabman