CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - III: THE COMMON VISION
The common conception among the dregs of Darwinian culture
is that men have slowly worked their way out of inequality
into a state of comparative equality. The truth is, I fancy,
almost exactly the opposite. All men have normally and naturally
begun with the idea of equality; they have only abandoned it late
and reluctantly, and always for some material reason of detail.
They have never naturally felt that one class of men was superior
to another; they have always been driven to assume it through
certain practical limitations of space and time.
For example, there is one element which must always tend
to oligarchy--or rather to despotism; I mean the element of hurry.
If the house has caught fire a man must ring up the fire engines;
a committee cannot ring them up. If a camp is surprised by night
somebody must give the order to fire; there is no time to vote it.
It is solely a question of the physical limitations of time and space;
not at all of any mental limitations in the mass of men commanded.
If all the people in the house were men of destiny it would
still be better that they should not all talk into the telephone
at once; nay, it would be better that the silliest man of all should
speak uninterrupted. If an army actually consisted of nothing
but Hanibals and Napoleons, it would still be better in the case
of a surprise that they should not all give orders together.
Nay, it would be better if the stupidest of them all gave the orders.
Thus, we see that merely military subordination, so far from resting
on the inequality of men, actually rests on the equality of men.
Discipline does not involve the Carlylean notion that somebody
is always right when everybody is wrong, and that we must discover
and crown that somebody. On the contrary, discipline means that
in certain frightfully rapid circumstances, one can trust anybody
so long as he is not everybody. The military spirit does not mean
(as Carlyle fancied) obeying the strongest and wisest man.
On the contrary, the military spirit means, if anything, obeying the
weakest and stupidest man, obeying him merely because he is a man,
and not a thousand men. Submission to a weak man is discipline.
Submission to a strong man is only servility.
Now it can be easily shown that the thing we call aristocracy
in Europe is not in its origin and spirit an aristocracy at all.
It is not a system of spiritual degrees and distinctions like,
for example, the caste system of India, or even like the old Greek
distinction between free men and slaves. It is simply the remains
of a military organization, framed partly to sustain the sinking
Roman Empire, partly to break and avenge the awful onslaught
of Islam. The word Duke simply means Colonel, just as the word
Emperor simply means Commander-in-Chief. The whole story is told
in the single title of Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, which merely
means officers in the European army against the contemporary
Yellow Peril. Now in an army nobody ever dreams of supposing
that difference of rank represents a difference of moral reality.
Nobody ever says about a regiment, "Your Major is very humorous
and energetic; your Colonel, of course, must be even more
humorous and yet more energetic " No one ever says, in reporting
a mess-room conversation, "Lieutenant Jones was very witty,
but was naturally inferior to Captain Smith." The essence of an army
is the idea of official inequality, founded on unofficial equality.
The Colonel is not obeyed because he is the best man, but because he is
the Colonel. Such was probably the spirit of the system of dukes
and counts when it first arose out of the military spirit and military
necessities of Rome. With the decline of those necessities it
has gradually ceased to have meaning as a military organization,
and become honeycombed with unclean plutocracy. Even now it
is not a spiritual aristocracy--it is not so bad as all that.
It is simply an army without an enemy--billeted upon the people.
Man, therefore, has a specialist as well as comrade-like aspect;
and the case of militarism is not the only case of such
specialist submission. The tinker and tailor, as well as the soldier
and sailor, require a certain rigidity of rapidity of action:
at least, if the tinker is not organized that is largely why he does
not tink on any large scale. The tinker and tailor often represent
the two nomadic races in Europe: the Gipsy and the Jew; but the Jew
alone has influence because he alone accepts some sort of discipline.
Man, we say, has two sides, the specialist side where he must
have subordination, and the social side where he must have equality.
There is a truth in the saying that ten tailors go to make a man;
but we must remember also that ten Poets Laureate or ten Astronomers Royal
go to make a man, too. Ten million tradesmen go to make Man himself;
but humanity consists of tradesmen when they are not talking shop.
Now the peculiar peril of our time, which I call for argument's sake
Imperialism or Caesarism, is the complete eclipse of comradeship
and equality by specialism and domination.
There are only two kinds of social structure conceivable--
personal government and impersonal government. If my
anarchic friends will not have rules--they will have rulers.
Preferring personal government, with its tact and flexibility,
is called Royalism. Preferring impersonal government,
with its dogmas and definitions, is called Republicanism.
Objecting broadmindedly both to kings and creeds is called Bosh;
at least, I know no more philosophic word for it. You can
be guided by the shrewdness or presence of mind of one ruler,
or by the equality and ascertained justice of one rule; but you must
have one or the other, or you are not a nation, but a nasty mess.
Now men in their aspect of equality and debate adore the idea
of rules; they develop and complicate them greatly to excess.
A man finds far more regulations and definitions in his club,
where there are rules, than in his home, where there is a ruler.
A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance,
carries this mummery to the point of a methodical madness.
The whole system is stiff with rigid unreason;
like the Royal Court in Lewis Carroll. You would think
the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly silent.
You would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put
it on to go away; therefore he takes off his hat to walk out
and puts in on to stop in. Names are forbidden, and a man
must call his own father "my right honorable friend the member
for West Birmingham." These are, perhaps, fantasies of decay:
but fundamentally they answer a masculine appetite.
Men feel that rules, even if irrational, are universal;
men feel that law is equal, even when it is not equitable.
There is a wild fairness in the thing--as there is in tossing up.
Again, it is gravely unfortunate that when critics do attack
such cases as the Commons it is always on the points
(perhaps the few points) where the Commons are right.
They denounce the House as the Talking-Shop, and complain that it
wastes time in wordy mazes. Now this is just one respect in
which the Commons are actually like the Common People. If they
love leisure and long debate, it is be cause all men love it;
that they really represent England. There the Parliament does
approach to the virile virtues of the pothouse.
The real truth is that adumbrated in the introductory section
when we spoke of the sense of home and property, as now we speak
of the sense of counsel and community. All men do naturally
love the idea of leisure, laughter, loud and equal argument;
but there stands a specter in our hall. We are conscious
of the towering modern challenge that is called specialism
or cut-throat competition--Business. Business will have nothing
to do with leisure; business will have no truck with comradeship;
business will pretend to no patience with all the legal
fictions and fantastic handicaps by which comradeship protects
its egalitarian ideal. The modern millionaire, when engaged
in the agreeable and typical task of sacking his own father,
will certainly not refer to him as the right honorable clerk from
the Laburnum Road, Brixton. Therefore there has arisen in modern
life a literary fashion devoting itself to the romance of business,
to great demigods of greed and to fairyland of finance.
This popular philosophy is utterly despotic and anti-democratic;
this fashion is the flower of that Caesarism against which I am
concerned to protest. The ideal millionaire is strong in the
possession of a brain of steel. The fact that the real millionaire
is rather more often strong in the possession of a head of wood,
does not alter the spirit and trend of the idolatry. The essential
argument is "Specialists must be despots; men must be specialists.
You cannot have equality in a soap factory; so you cannot have
it anywhere. You cannot have comradeship in a wheat corner;
so you cannot hare it at all. We must have commercial civilization;
therefore we must destroy democracy." I know that plutocrats hare
seldom sufficient fancy to soar to such examples as soap or wheat.
They generally confine themselves, with fine freshness of mind,
to a comparison between the state and a ship. One anti-democratic
writer remarked that he would not like to sail in a vessel
in which the cabin-boy had an equal vote with the captain.
It might easily be urged in answer that many a ship (the Victoria,
for instance) was sunk because an admiral gave an order which a
cabin-boy could see was wrong. But this is a debating reply;
the essential fallacy is both deeper and simpler. The elementary fact
is that we were all born in a state; we were not all born on a ship;
like some of our great British bankers. A ship still remains
a specialist experiment, like a diving-bell or a flying ship:
in such peculiar perils the need for promptitude constitutes the need
for autocracy. But we live and die in the vessel of the state;
and if we cannot find freedom camaraderie and the popular element
in the state, we cannot find it at all. And the modern doctrine
of commercial despotism means that we shall not find it at all.
Our specialist trades in their highly civilized state cannot
(it says) be run without the whole brutal business of bossing
and sacking, "too old at forty" and all the rest of the filth.
And they must be run, and therefore we call on Caesar. Nobody but
the Superman could descend to do such dirty work.
Now (to reiterate my title) this is what is wrong. This is the huge
modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions,
instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul.
If soap boiling is really inconsistent with brotherhood,
so much the worst for soap-boiling, not for brotherhood.
If civilization really cannot get on with democracy, so much
the worse for civilization, not for democracy. Certainly, it would
be far better to go back to village communes, if they really
are communes. Certainly, it would be better to do without soap
rather than to do without society. Certainly, we would sacrifice
all our wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical science
and frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such
as has often come to us with comrades in a common tavern.
I do not say the sacrifice will be necessary; I only say it
will be easy.
It will be better to adopt in this chapter the same process
that appeared a piece of mental justice in the last.
My general opinions on the feminine question are such as many
suffragists would warmly approve; and it would be easy to state
them without any open reference to the current controversy.
But just as it seemed more decent to say first that I was not
in favor of Imperialism even in its practical and popular sense,
so it seems more decent to say the same of Female Suffrage,
in its practical and popular sense. In other words,
it is only fair to state, however hurriedly, the superficial
objection to the Suffragettes before we go on to the really
subtle questions behind the Suffrage.
Well, to get this honest but unpleasant business over, the objection
to the Suffragettes is not that they are Militant Suffragettes.
On the contrary, it is that they are not militant enough.
A revolution is a military thing; it has all the military virtues;
one of which is that it comes to an end. Two parties fight
with deadly weapons, but under certain rules of arbitrary honor;
the party that wins becomes the government and proceeds to govern.
The aim of civil war, like the aim of all war, is peace.
Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil war in this
soldierly and decisive sense; first, because they are women;
and, secondly, because they are very few women. But they can
raise something else; which is altogether another pair of shoes.
They do not create revolution; what they do create is anarchy;
and the difference between these is not a question of violence,
but a question of fruitfulness and finality. Revolution of its
nature produces government; anarchy only produces more anarchy.
Men may have what opinions they please about the beheading
of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that Bradshaw
and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed.
Someone conquered; something occurred. You can only knock off
the King's head once. But you can knock off the King's hat any
number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite:
so long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder
(instead of an attempt to enforce a new order) there is no logical
end to it; it can feed on itself and renew itself forever.
If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul, but only wanted to be
a nuisance, he could, possibly, have prevented any government
arising successfully out of the Revolution. But such a proceeding
would not have deserved the dignified name of rebellion.
It is exactly this unmilitant quality in the Suffragettes that makes
their superficial problem. The problem is that their action has none
of the advantages of ultimate violence; it does not afford a test.
War is a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply
and unanswerably--numbers, and an unnatural valor. One does discover
the two urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many
are ready to be dead. But a tiny minority, even an interested minority,
may maintain mere disorder forever. There is also, of course, in the case
of these women, the further falsity that is introduced by their sex.
It is false to state the matter as a mere brutal question of strength.
If his muscles give a man a vote, then his horse ought to have two votes
and his elephant five votes. The truth is more subtle than that;
it is that bodily outbreak is a man's instinctive weapon, like the hoofs
to the horse or the tusks to the elephant. All riot is a threat
of war; but the woman is brandishing a weapon she can never use.
There are many weapons that she could and does use. If (for example)
all the women nagged for a vote they would get it in a month.
But there again, one must remember, it would be necessary to get all
the women to nag. And that brings us to the end of the political surface
of the matter. The working objection to the Suffragette philosophy
is simply that overmastering millions of women do not agree with it.
I am aware that some maintain that women ought to have votes whether the
majority wants them or not; but this is surely a strange and childish case
of setting up formal democracy to the destruction of actual democracy.
What should the mass of women decide if they do not decide their general
place in the State? These people practically say that females may vote
about everything except about Female Suffrage.
But having again cleared my conscience of my merely political
and possibly unpopular opinion, I will again cast back and try
to treat the matter in a slower and more sympathetic style;
attempt to trace the real roots of woman's position in
the western state, and the causes of our existing traditions
or perhaps prejudices upon the point. And for this purpose
it is again necessary to travel far from the modern topic,
the mere Suffragette of today, and to go back to subjects which,
though much more old, are, I think, considerably more fresh.
Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three
or four things that have been with man almost since his beginning;
which at least we hear of early in the centuries and often among
the tribes. Let me suppose that you see a knife on the table,
a stick in the corner, or a fire on the hearth. About each of these
you will notice one speciality; that not one of them is special.
Each of these ancestral things is a universal thing;
made to supply many different needs; and while tottering pedants
nose about to find the cause and origin of some old custom,
the truth is that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins.
The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils,
to cut throats; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects.
The stick is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down;
partly to point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with
like a balancing pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette,
partly to kill with like a club of a giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel;
an elongated finger and an extra leg. The case is the same, of course,
with the fire; about which the strangest modern views have arisen.
A queer fancy seems to be current that a fire exists to warm people.
It exists to warm people, to light their darkness, to raise
their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms,
to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make
checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles,
and to be the red heart of a man's house and that hearth for which,
as the great heathens said, a man should die.
Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always
proposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes
always answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern
man will wave a cigarette instead of a stick; he will cut his pencil
with a little screwing pencil-sharpener instead of a knife; and he will
even boldly offer to be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a fire.
I have my doubts about pencil-sharpeners even for sharpening pencils;
and about hot water pipes even for heat. But when we think of all
those other requirements that these institutions answered, there opens
before us the whole horrible harlequinade of our civilization.
We see as in a vision a world where a man tries to cut his throat with
a pencil-sharpener; where a man must learn single-stick with a cigarette;
where a man must try to toast muffins at electric lamps, and see red
and golden castles in the surface of hot water pipes.
The principle of which I speak can be seen everywhere in a
comparison between the ancient and universal things and the modern
and specialist things. The object of a theodolite is to lie level;
the object of a stick is to swing loose at any angle; to whirl
like the very wheel of liberty. The object of a lancet is to lance;
when used for slashing, gashing, ripping, lopping off heads and limbs,
it is a disappointing instrument. The object of an electric light is
merely to light (a despicable modesty); and the object of an asbestos
stove . . . I wonder what is the object of an asbestos stove?
If a man found a coil of rope in a desert he could at least
think of all the things that can be done with a coil of rope;
and some of them might even be practical. He could tow a boat
or lasso a horse. He could play cat's-cradle, or pick oakum.
He could construct a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord
her boxes for a travelling maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow,
or he could hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate
traveller who should find a telephone in the desert. You can
telephone with a telephone; you cannot do anything else with it.
And though this is one of the wildest joys of life, it falls by one
degree from its full delirium when there is nobody to answer you.
The contention is, in brief, that you must pull up a hundred roots,
and not one, before you uproot any of these hoary and simple expedients.
It is only with great difficulty that a modem scientific sociologist
can be got to see that any old method has a leg to stand on.
But almost every old method has four or five legs to stand on.
Almost all the old institutions are quadrupeds; and some of
them are centipedes.
Consider these cases, old and new, and you will observe
the operation of a general tendency. Everywhere there was
one big thing that served six purposes; everywhere now there
are six small things; or, rather (and there is the trouble),
there are just five and a half. Nevertheless, we will not
say that this separation and specialism is entirely useless
or inexcusable. I have often thanked God for the telephone;
I may any day thank God for the lancet; and there is none
of these brilliant and narrow inventions (except, of course,
the asbestos stove) which might not be at some moment
necessary and lovely. But I do not think the most austere
upholder of specialism will deny that there is in these old,
many-sided institutions an element of unity and universality
which may well be preserved in its due proportion and place.
Spiritually, at least, it will be admitted that some all-round
balance is needed to equalize the extravagance of experts.
It would not be difficult to carry the parable of the knife
and stick into higher regions. Religion, the immortal maiden,
has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant of mankind.
She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an unalterable
cosmos and also with the practical rules of the rapid and
thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student
and told fairy tales to the children; it was her business
to confront the nameless gods whose fears are on all flesh,
and also to see the streets were spotted with silver and scarlet,
that there was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for
ringing bells. The large uses of religion have been broken
up into lesser specialities, just as the uses of the hearth
have been broken up into hot water pipes and electric bulbs.
The romance of ritual and colored emblem has been taken over
by that narrowest of all trades, modem art (the sort called art
for art's sake), and men are in modern practice informed that they
may use all symbols so long as they mean nothing by them.
The romance of conscience has been dried up into the science
of ethics; which may well be called decency for decency's sake,
decency unborn of cosmic energies and barren of artistic flower.
The cry to the dim gods, cut off from ethics and cosmology,
has become mere Psychical Research. Everything has been
sundered from everything else, and everything has grown cold.
Soon we shall hear of specialists dividing the tune from
the words of a song, on the ground that they spoil each other;
and I did once meet a man who openly advocated the separation
of almonds and raisins. This world is all one wild divorce court;
nevertheless, there are many who still hear in their souls
the thunder of authority of human habit; those whom Man hath
joined let no man sunder.
This book must avoid religion, but there must (I say)
be many, religious and irreligious, who will concede
that this power of answering many purposes was a sort
of strength which should not wholly die out of our lives.
As a part of personal character, even the moderns will agree that
many-sidedness is a merit and a merit that may easily be overlooked.
This balance and universality has been the vision of many groups
of men in many ages. It was the Liberal Education of Aristotle;
the jack-of-all-trades artistry of Leonardo da Vinci and his friends;
the august amateurishness of the Cavalier Person of Quality like
Sir William Temple or the great Earl of Dorset. It has appeared
in literature in our time in the most erratic and opposite shapes,
set to almost inaudible music by Walter Pater and enunciated
through a foghorn by Walt Whitman. But the great mass of men
have always been unable to achieve this literal universality,
because of the nature of their work in the world.
Not, let it be noted, because of the existence of their work.
Leonardo da Vinci must have worked pretty hard; on the other hand,
many a government office clerk, village constable or elusive
plumber may do (to all human appearance) no work at all,
and yet show no signs of the Aristotelian universalism.
What makes it difficult for the average man to be a
universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist;
he has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well
as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless society.
This is generally true of males from the first hunter to the last
electrical engineer; each has not merely to act, but to excel.
Nimrod has not only to be a mighty hunter before the Lord,
but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters.
The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer,
or he is outstripped by engineers yet more electrical.
Those very miracles of the human mind on which the modern
world prides itself, and rightly in the main, would be
impossible without a certain concentration which disturbs
the pure balance of reason more than does religious bigotry.
No creed can be so limiting as that awful adjuration that
the cobbler must not go beyond his last. So the largest and
wildest shots of our world are but in one direction and with
a defined trajectory: the gunner cannot go beyond his shot,
and his shot so often falls short; the astronomer cannot go
beyond his telescope and his telescope goes such a little way.
All these are like men who have stood on the high peak of a mountain
and seen the horizon like a single ring and who then descend down
different paths towards different towns, traveling slow or fast.
It is right; there must be people traveling to different towns;
there must be specialists; but shall no one behold the horizon?
Shall all mankind be specialist surgeons or peculiar plumbers;
shall all humanity be monomaniac? Tradition has decided
that only half of humanity shall be monomaniac. It has decided
that in every home there shall be a tradesman and a Jack-of
all-trades. But it has also decided, among other things,
that the Jack of-all-trades shall be a Gill-of-all-trades. It
has decided, rightly or wrongly, that this specialism
and this universalism shall be divided between the sexes.
Cleverness shall be left for men and wisdom for women.
For cleverness kills wisdom; that is one of the few sad
and certain things.
But for women this ideal of comprehensive capacity (or common-sense)
must long ago have been washed away. It must have melted
in the frightful furnaces of ambition and eager technicality.
A man must be partly a one-idead man, because he is a
one-weaponed man--and he is flung naked into the fight.
The world's demand comes to him direct; to his wife indirectly.
In short, he must (as the books on Success say) give "his best";
and what a small part of a man "his best" is! His second
and third best are often much better. If he is the first violin
he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is
a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil,
a fountain pen, a hand at whist, a gun, and an image of God.
And it should be remarked in passing that this force upon a man to develop
one feature has nothing to do with what is commonly called our competitive
system, but would equally exist under any rationally conceivable kind
of Collectivism. Unless the Socialists are frankly ready for a fall
in the standard of violins, telescopes and electric lights, they must
somehow create a moral demand on the individual that he shall keep up
his present concentration on these things. It was only by men being
in some degree specialist that there ever were any telescopes; they must
certainly be in some degree specialist in order to keep them going.
It is not by making a man a State wage-earner that you can prevent him
thinking principally about the very difficult way he earns his wages.
There is only one way to preserve in the world that high levity and that
more leisurely outlook which fulfils the old vision of universalism.
That is, to permit the existence of a partly protected half of humanity;
a half which the harassing industrial demand troubles indeed, but only
troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be in every center
of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one who does not "give
her best," but gives her all.
Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one.
The fire need not blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water;
its point is that it blazes more than water and warms more than light.
The wife is like the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion,
the fire is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected
to cook: not to excel in cooking, but to cook; to cook better
than her husband who is earning the coke by lecturing on botany
or breaking stones. Like the fire, the woman is expected to tell
tales to the children, not original and artistic tales, but tales--
better tales than would probably be told by a first-class cook.
Like the fire, the woman is expected to illuminate and ventilate,
not by the most startling revelations or the wildest winds of thought,
but better than a man can do it after breaking stones or lecturing.
But she cannot be expected to endure anything like this universal
duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty of competitive or
bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook;
a school mistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress;
a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker,
but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not one trade but
twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her second bests.
This is what has been really aimed at from the first in what
is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women.
Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow;
on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad.
The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness,
a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs.
It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she
was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come almost
as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades.
But the woman's professions, unlike the child's, were all truly
and almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing but
her universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid.
This is the substance of the contention I offer about the historic
female position. I do not deny that women have been wronged
and even tortured; but I doubt if they were ever tortured so much
as they are tortured now by the absurd modern attempt to make
them domestic empresses and competitive clerks at the same time.
I do not deny that even under the old tradition women had
a harder time than men; that is why we take off our hats.
I do not deny that all these various female functions were exasperating;
but I say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various.
I do not pause even to deny that woman was a servant; but at least
she was a general servant.
The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman
stands for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which
the mind must return after every excursion on extravagance.
The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's;
but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's. There must
in every machine be a part that moves and a part that stands still;
there must be in everything that changes a part that is unchangeable.
And many of the phenomena which moderns hastily condemn are really parts
of this position of the woman as the center and pillar of health.
Much of what is called her subservience, and even her pliability,
is merely the subservience and pliability of a universal remedy;
she varies as medicines vary, with the disease. She has
to be an optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist
to the happy-go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the Quixote
from being put upon, and the bully from putting upon others.
The French King wrote--
"Toujours femme varie Bien fol qui s'y fie,"
but the truth is that woman always varies, and that is exactly why
we always trust her. To correct every adventure and extravagance
with its antidote in common-sense is not (as the moderns
seem to think) to be in the position of a spy or a slave.
It is to be in the position of Aristotle or (at the lowest)
Herbert Spencer, to be a universal morality, a complete system
of thought. The slave flatters; the complete moralist rebukes.
It is, in short, to be a Trimmer in the true sense of that honorable term;
which for some reason or other is always used in a sense exactly
opposite to its own. It seems really to be supposed that a Trimmer
means a cowardly person who always goes over to the stronger side.
It really means a highly chivalrous person who always goes over
to the weaker side; like one who trims a boat by sitting where there
are few people seated. Woman is a trimmer; and it is a generous,
dangerous and romantic trade.
The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently plain one.
Supposing it to be conceded that humanity has acted at least
not unnaturally in dividing itself into two halves, respectively
typifying the ideals of special talent and of general sanity
(since they are genuinely difficult to combine completely in one
mind), it is not difficult to see why the line of cleavage has
followed the line of sex, or why the female became the emblem
of the universal and the male of the special and superior.
Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman
who frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be
specially prominent in experiment and adventure; and second,
that the same natural operation surrounded her with very young children,
who require to be taught not so much anything as everything.
Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world.
To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house
with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions
that there are, and some that there aren't. It would be odd
if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist.
Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment
(even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised
more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself
too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view.
I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast
this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world.
But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely
difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question.
For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what
they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery,
all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word.
If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman
drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens
or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard
work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small
import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know
what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area,
deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley
within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets cakes.
and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals,
manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might
exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it.
How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about
the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children
about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing
to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's
function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it
is minute I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task;
I will never pity her for its smallness.
But though the essential of the woman's task is universality,
this does not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe
though largely wholesome prejudices. She has, on the whole,
been more conscious than man that she is only one half of humanity;
but she has expressed it (if one may say so of a lady) by getting her
teeth into the two or three things which she thinks she stands for.
I would observe here in parenthesis that much of the recent
official trouble about women has arisen from the fact that they
transfer to things of doubt and reason that sacred stubbornness
only proper to the primary things which a woman was set to guard.
One's own children, one's own altar, ought to be a matter of principle--
or if you like, a matter of prejudice. On the other hand,
who wrote Junius's Letters ought not to be a principle or a prejudice,
it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent inquiry.
But take an energetic modern girl secretary to a league
to show that George III wrote Junius, and in three months she
will believe it, too, out of mere loyalty to her employers.
Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity.
They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop
a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm.
That is why they do office work so well; and that is why they ought
not to do it.
CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - III: THE COMMON VISION