CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XXIII The Toy Theatre
My relations with the readers of this page have been
long and pleasant, but--perhaps for that very reason--
I feel that the time has come when I ought to confess
the one great crime of my life. It happened a long time ago;
but it is not uncommon for a belated burst of remorse
to reveal such dark episodes long after they have occurred.
It has nothing to do with the orgies of the Anti-Puritan League.
That body is so offensively respectable that a newspaper,
in describing it the other day, referred to my friend
Mr. Edgar Jepson as Canon Edgar Jepson; and it is believed
that similar titles are intended for all of us. No; it is
not by the conduct of Archbishop Crane, of Dean Chesterton,
of the Rev. James Douglas, of Monsignor Bland, and even of that
fine and virile old ecclesiastic, Cardinal Nesbit, that I wish
(or rather, am driven by my conscience) to make this declaration.
The crime was committed in solitude and without accomplices.
Alone I did it. Let me, with the characteristic thirst
of penitents to get the worst of the confession over, state it
first of all in its most dreadful and indefensible form.
There is at the present moment in a town in Germany (unless he
has died of rage on discovering his wrong), a restaurant-keeper
to whom I still owe twopence. I last left his open-air restaurant
knowing that I owed him twopence. I carried it away under his
nose, despite the fact that the nose was a decidedly Jewish one.
I have never paid him, and it is highly improbable that I ever shall.
How did this villainy come to occur in a life which has been,
generally speaking, deficient in the dexterity necessary for fraud?
The story is as follows--and it has a moral, though there
may not be room for that.
. . . . .
It is a fair general rule for those travelling on the Continent that
the easiest way of talking in a foreign language is to talk philosophy.
The most difficult kind of talking is to talk about common necessities.
The reason is obvious. The names of common necessities vary completely
with each nation and are generally somewhat odd and quaint.
How, for instance, could a Frenchman suppose that a coalbox would
be called a "scuttle"? If he has ever seen the word scuttle
it has been in the Jingo Press, where the "policy of scuttle"
is used whenever we give up something to a small Power like Liberals,
instead of giving up everything to a great Power, like Imperialists.
What Englishman in Germany would be poet enough to guess that the Germans
call a glove a "hand-shoe." Nations name their necessities by nicknames,
so to speak. They call their tubs and stools by quaint, elvish,
and almost affectionate names, as if they were their own children!
But any one can argue about abstract things in a foreign language who has
ever got as far as Exercise IV. in a primer. For as soon as he can
put a sentence together at all he finds that the words used in abstract
or philosophical discussions are almost the same in all nations.
They are the same, for the simple reason that they all come
from the things that were the roots of our common civilisation.
From Christianity, from the Roman Empire, from the mediaeval Church,
or the French Revolution. "Nation," "citizen," "religion," "philosophy,"
"authority," "the Republic," words like these are nearly the same
in all the countries in which we travel. Restrain, therefore,
your exuberant admiration for the young man who can argue with six
French atheists when he first lands at Dieppe. Even I can do that.
But very likely the same young man does not know the French for a
shoe-horn. But to this generalisation there are three great exceptions.
(1) In the case of countries that are not European at all, and have
never had our civic conceptions, or the old Latin scholarship.
I do not pretend that the Patagonian phrase for "citizenship"
at once leaps to the mind, or that a Dyak's word for "the Republic"
has been familiar to me from the nursery. (2) In the case of Germany,
where, although the principle does apply to many words such as "nation"
and "philosophy," it does not apply so generally, because Germany
has had a special and deliberate policy of encouraging the purely
German part of its language. (3) In the case where one does not know
any of the language at all, as is generally the case with me.
. . . . .
Such at least was my situation on the dark day on which I committed
my crime. Two of the exceptional conditions which I have mentioned
were combined. I was walking about a German town, and I knew no German.
I knew, however, two or three of those great and solemn words which
hold our European civilisation together--one of which is "cigar."
As it was a hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort
of beer-garden, and ordered a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the
lager, and paid for it. I smoked the cigar, forgot to pay for it,
and walked away, gazing rapturously at the royal outline of the
Taunus mountains. After about ten minutes, I suddenly remembered
that I had not paid for the cigar. I went back to the place of
refreshment, and put down the money. But the proprietor also had
forgotten the cigar, and he merely said guttural things in a tone
of query, asking me, I suppose, what I wanted. I said "cigar," and
he gave me a cigar. I endeavoured while putting down the money to
wave away the cigar with gestures of refusal. He thought that my
rejection was of the nature of a condemnation of that particular cigar,
and brought me another. I whirled my arms like a windmill,
seeking to convey by the sweeping universality of my gesture
that my rejection was a rejection of cigars in general,
not of that particular article. He mistook this for the ordinary
impatience of common men, and rushed forward, his hands
filled with miscellaneous cigars, pressing them upon me.
In desperation I tried other kinds of pantomime, but the more
cigars I refused the more and more rare and precious cigars
were brought out of the deeps and recesses of the establishment.
I tried in vain to think of a way of conveying to him the fact
that I had already had the cigar. I imitated the action
of a citizen smoking, knocking off and throwing away a cigar.
The watchful proprietor only thought I was rehearsing
(as in an ecstasy of anticipation) the joys of the cigar
he was going to give me. At last I retired baffled:
he would not take the money and leave the cigars alone.
So that this restaurant-keeper (in whose face a love of money
shone like the sun at noonday) flatly and firmly refused
to receive the twopence that I certainly owed him; and I took
that twopence of his away with me and rioted on it for months.
I hope that on the last day the angels will break the truth
very gently to that unhappy man.
. . . . .
This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud,
and the moral of it is this--that civilisation is founded
upon abstractions. The idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed
by physical motions at all, because it is an abstract idea.
And civilisation obviously would be nothing without debt.
So when hard-headed fellows who study scientific sociology
(which does not exist) come and tell you that civilisation
is material or indifferent to the abstract, just ask yourselves
how many of the things that make up our Society, the Law,
or the Stocks and Shares, or the National Debt, you would be
able to convey with your face and your ten fingers by grinning
and gesticulating to a German innkeeper.
Sown somewhere far off in the shallow dales of Hertfordshire there
lies a village of great beauty, and I doubt not of admirable virtue,
but of eccentric and unbalanced literary taste, which asked the present
writer to come down to it on Sunday afternoon and give an address.
Now it was very difficult to get down to it at all on Sunday afternoon,
owing to the indescribable state into which our national laws
and customs have fallen in connection with the seventh day.
It is not Puritanism; it is simply anarchy. I should have some
sympathy with the Jewish Sabbath, if it were a Jewish Sabbath,
and that for three reasons; first, that religion is an intrinsically
sympathetic thing; second, that I cannot conceive any religion
worth calling a religion without a fixed and material observance;
and third, that the particular observance of sitting still and doing
no work is one that suits my temperament down to the ground.
But the absurdity of the modern English convention is that it
does not let a man sit still; it only perpetually trips him
up when it has forced him to walk about. Our Sabbatarianism
does not forbid us to ask a man in Battersea to come and talk
in Hertfordshire; it only prevents his getting there.
I can understand that a deity might be worshipped with joys,
with flowers, and fireworks in the old European style.
I can understand that a deity might be worshipped with sorrows.
But I cannot imagine any deity being worshipped with inconveniences.
Let the good Moslem go to Mecca, or let him abide in his tent,
according to his feelings for religious symbols. But surely Allah
cannot see anything particularly dignified in his servant being
misled by the time-table, finding that the old Mecca express is
not running, missing his connection at Bagdad, or having to wait
three hours in a small side station outside Damascus.
So it was with me on this occasion. I found there was no telegraph
service at all to this place; I found there was only one weak
thread of train-service. Now if this had been the authority
of real English religion, I should have submitted to it at once.
If I believed that the telegraph clerk could not send the telegram
because he was at that moment rigid in an ecstasy of prayer,
I should think all telegrams unimportant in comparison.
If I could believe that railway porters when relieved from their
duties rushed with passion to the nearest place of worship,
I should say that all lectures and everything else ought
to give way to such a consideration. I should not complain
if the national faith forbade me to make any appointments
of labour or self-expression on the Sabbath. But, as it is,
it only tells me that I may very probably keep the Sabbath
by not keeping the appointment.
. . . . .
But I must resume the real details of my tale. I found that there
was only one train in the whole of that Sunday by which I could
even get within several hours or several miles of the time or place.
I therefore went to the telephone, which is one of my
favourite toys, and down which I have shouted many valuable,
but prematurely arrested, monologues upon art and morals.
I remember a mild shock of surprise when I discovered that one
could use the telephone on Sunday; I did not expect it to be
cut off, but I expected it to buzz more than on ordinary days,
to the advancement of our national religion. Through this instrument,
in fewer words than usual, and with a comparative economy of epigram,
I ordered a taxi-cab to take me to the railway station.
I have not a word to say in general either against telephones
or taxi-cabs; they seem to me two of the purest and most
poetic of the creations of modern scientific civilisation.
Unfortunately, when the taxi-cab started, it did exactly
what modern scientific civilisation has done--it broke down.
The result of this was that when I arrived at King's Cross my
only train was gone; there was a Sabbath calm in the station,
a calm in the eyes of the porters, and in my breast, if calm
at all, if any calm, a calm despair.
There was not, however, very much calm of any sort in my
breast on first making the discovery; and it was turned
to blinding horror when I learnt that I could not even send
a telegram to the organisers of the meeting. To leave
my entertainers in the lurch was sufficiently exasperating;
to leave them without any intimation was simply low.
I reasoned with the official. I said: "Do you really mean
to say that if my brother were dying and my mother in this place,
I could not communicate with her?" He was a man of literal
and laborious mind; he asked me if my brother was dying.
I answered that he was in excellent and even offensive health,
but that I was inquiring upon a question of principle.
What would happen if England were invaded, or if I
alone knew how to turn aside a comet or an earthquake.
He waved away these hypotheses in the most irresponsible spirit,
but he was quite certain that telegrams could not reach this
particular village. Then something exploded in me; that element
of the outrageous which is the mother of all adventures sprang
up ungovernable, and I decided that I would not be a cad merely
because some of my remote ancestors had been Calvinists.
I would keep my appointment if I lost all my money and all my wits.
I went out into the quiet London street, where my quiet London
cab was still waiting for its fare in the cold misty morning.
I placed myself comfortably in the London cab and told the London
driver to drive me to the other end of Hertfordshire.
And he did.
. . . . .
I shall not forget that drive. It was doubtful weather, even in
a motor-cab, the thing was possible with any consideration for the driver,
not to speak of some slight consideration for the people in the road.
I urged the driver to eat and drink something before he started,
but he said (with I know not what pride of profession or delicate
sense of adventure) that he would rather do it when we arrived--
if we ever did. I was by no means so delicate; I bought
a varied selection of pork-pies at a little shop that was open
(why was that shop open?--it is all a mystery), and ate them
as we went along. The beginning was sombre and irritating.
I was annoyed, not with people, but with things, like a baby;
with the motor for breaking down and with Sunday for being Sunday.
And the sight of the northern slums expanded and ennobled, but did
not decrease, my gloom: Whitechapel has an Oriental gaudiness
in its squalor; Battersea and Camberwell have an indescribable
bustle of democracy; but the poor parts of North London . . . well,
perhaps I saw them wrongly under that ashen morning and on
that foolish errand.
It was one of those days which more than once this year broke
the retreat of winter; a winter day that began too late to be spring.
We were already clear of the obstructing crowds and quickening our pace
through a borderland of market gardens and isolated public-houses,
when the grey showed golden patches and a good light began
to glitter on everything. The cab went quicker and quicker.
The open land whirled wider and wider; but I did not lose my sense of
being battled with and thwarted that I had felt in the thronged slums.
Rather the feeling increased, because of the great difficulty
of space and time. The faster went the car, the fiercer and thicker
I felt the fight.
The whole landscape seemed charging at me--and just missing me.
The tall, shining grass went by like showers of arrows;
the very trees seemed like lances hurled at my heart, and shaving
it by a hair's breadth. Across some vast, smooth valley I saw
a beech-tree by the white road stand up little and defiant.
It grew bigger and bigger with blinding rapidity. It charged me
like a tilting knight, seemed to hack at my head, and pass by.
Sometimes when we went round a curve of road, the effect was yet
more awful. It seemed as if some tree or windmill swung round
to smite like a boomerang. The sun by this time was a blazing fact;
and I saw that all Nature is chivalrous and militant.
We do wrong to seek peace in Nature; we should rather seek
the nobler sort of war; and see all the trees as green banners.
. . . . .
I gave my address, arriving just when everybody was deciding to leave.
When my cab came reeling into the market-place they decided,
with evident disappointment, to remain. Over the lecture I draw
a veil. When I came back home I was called to the telephone,
and a meek voice expressed regret for the failure of the motor-cab,
and even said something about any reasonable payment.
"Whom can I pay for my own superb experience? What is
the usual charge for seeing the clouds shattered by the sun?
What is the market price of a tree blue on the sky-line
and then blinding white in the sun? Mention your price for
that windmill that stood behind the hollyhocks in the garden.
Let me pay you for . . ." Here it was, I think, that we
were cut off.
For three days and three nights the sea had charged England
as Napoleon charged her at Waterloo. The phrase is instinctive,
because away to the last grey line of the sea there was only the look
of galloping squadrons, impetuous, but with a common purpose.
The sea came on like cavalry, and when it touched the shore it
opened the blazing eyes and deafening tongues of the artillery.
I saw the worst assault at night on a seaside parade where the sea
smote on the doors of England with the hammers of earthquake,
and a white smoke went up into the black heavens. There one
could thoroughly realise what an awful thing a wave really is.
I talk like other people about the rushing swiftness of a wave.
But the horrible thing about a wave is its hideous slowness.
It lifts its load of water laboriously: in that style at once
slow and slippery in which a Titan might lift a load of rock
and then let it slip at last to be shattered into shock of dust.
In front of me that night the waves were not like water:
they were like falling city walls. The breaker rose first as if it
did not wish to attack the earth; it wished only to attack the stars.
For a time it stood up in the air as naturally as a tower; then it went
a little wrong in its outline, like a tower that might some day fall.
When it fell it was as if a powder magazine blew up.
. . . . .
I have never seen such a sea. All the time there blew across
the land one of those stiff and throttling winds that one can
lean up against like a wall. One expected anything to be blown
out of shape at any instant; the lamp-post to be snapped
like a green stalk, the tree to be whirled away like a straw.
I myself should certainly have been blown out of shape if I had
possessed any shape to be blown out of; for I walked along the edge
of the stone embankment above the black and battering sea and could
not rid myself of the idea that it was an invasion of England.
But as I walked along this edge I was somewhat surprised
to find that as I neared a certain spot another noise mingled
with the ceaseless cannonade of the sea.
Somewhere at the back, in some pleasure ground or casino
or place of entertainment, an undaunted brass band was playing
against the cosmic uproar. I do not know what band it was.
Judging from the boisterous British Imperialism of most
of the airs it played, I should think it was a German band.
But there was no doubt about its energy, and when I came quite
close under it it really drowned the storm. It was playing such
things as "Tommy Atkins" and "You Can Depend on Young Australia,"
and many others of which I do not know the words, but I should
think they would be "John, Pat, and Mac, With the Union Jack,"
or that fine though unwritten poem, "Wait till the Bull Dog
gets a bite of you." Now, I for one detest Imperialism,
but I have a great deal of sympathy with Jingoism.
And there seemed something so touching about this unbroken
and innocent bragging under the brutal menace of Nature
that it made, if I may so put it, two tunes in my mind.
It is so obvious and so jolly to be optimistic about England,
especially when you are an optimist--and an Englishman.
But through all that glorious brass came the voice
of the invasion, the undertone of that awful sea.
I did a foolish thing. As I could not express my meaning
in an article, I tried to express it in a poem--a bad one.
You can call it what you like. It might be called "Doubt,"
or "Brighton." It might be called "The Patriot," or yet
again "The German Band." I would call it "The Two Voices,"
but that title has been taken for a grossly inferior poem.
This is how it began--
"They say the sun is on your knees
A lamp to light your lands from harm,
They say you turn the seven seas
To little brooks about your farm.
I hear the sea and the new song
that calls you empress all day long.
"(O fallen and fouled! O you that lie
Dying in swamps--you shall not die,
Your rich have secrets, and stronge lust,
Your poor are chased about like dust,
Emptied of anger and surprise--
And God has gone out of their eyes,
Your cohorts break--your captains lie,
I say to you, you shall not die.)"
Then I revived a little, remembering that after all there
is an English country that the Imperialists have never found.
The British Empire may annex what it likes, it will never annex England.
It has not even discovered the island, let alone conquered it.
I took up the two tunes again with a greater sympathy for the first--
"I know the bright baptismal rains,
I love your tender troubled skies,
I know your little climbing lanes,
Are peering into Paradise,
From open hearth to orchard cool,
How bountiful and beautiful.
"(O throttled and without a cry,
O strangled and stabbed, you shall not die,
The frightful word is on your walls,
The east sea to the west sea calls,
The stars are dying in the sky,
You shall not die; you shall not die.)"
Then the two great noises grew deafening together, the noise of the
peril of England and the louder noise of the placidity of England.
It is their fault if the last verse was written a little rudely
and at random--
"I see you how you smile in state
Straight from the Peak to Plymouth Bar,
You need not tell me you are great,
I know how more than great you are.
I know what William Shakespeare was,
I have seen Gainsborough and the grass.
"(O given to believe a lie,
O my mad mother, do do not die,
Whose eyes turn all ways but within,
Whose sin is innocence of sin,
Whose eyes, blinded with beams at noon,
Can see the motes upon the moon,
You shall your lover still pursue.
To what last madhouse shelters you
I will uphold you, even I.
You that are dead. You shall not die.)"
But the sea would not stop for me any more than for Canute;
and as for the German band, that would not stop for anybody.
Some Policemen and a Moral
The other day I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood
in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and
intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the keeping
off of the profane, we disguise by the exoteric name of Nothing.
At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at
a tree, practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of
knife-throwing by which men murder each other in Stevenson's romances.
Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something
about their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that
reminded me, I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy.
They asked what the knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it,
what my address was, trade, religion, opinions on the Japanese war,
name of favourite cat, and so on. They also said I was damaging the tree;
which was, I am sorry to say, not true, because I could not hit it.
The peculiar philosophical importance, however, of the incident was this.
After some half-hour's animated conversation, the exhibition of
an envelope, an unfinished poem, which was read with great care, and,
I trust, with some profit, and one or two other subtle detective strokes,
the elder of the two knights became convinced that I really was what I
professed to be, that I was a journalist, that I was on the DAILY NEWS
(this was the real stroke; they were shaken with a terror common
to all tyrants), that I lived in a particular place as stated,
and that I was stopping with particular people in Yorkshire,
who happened to be wealthy and well-known in the neighbourhood.
In fact the leading constable became so genial and complimentary
at last that he ended up by representing himself as a reader
of my work. And when that was said, everything was settled.
They acquitted me and let me pass.
"But," I said, "what of this mangled tree? It was to the rescue
of that Dryad, tethered to the earth, that you rushed like
knight-errants. You, the higher humanitarians, are not deceived
by the seeming stillness of the green things, a stillness like
the stillness of the cataract, a headlong and crashing silence.
You know that a tree is but a creature tied to the ground by one leg.
You will not let assassins with their Swedish daggers shed the green
blood of such a being. But if so, why am I not in custody;
where are my gyves? Produce, from some portion of your persons,
my mouldy straw and my grated window. The facts of which I have just
convinced you, that my name is Chesterton, that I am a journalist,
that I am living with the well-known and philanthropic Mr. Blank
of Ilkley, cannot have anything to do with the question of whether
I have been guilty of cruelty to vegetables. The tree is none
the less damaged even though it may reflect with a dark pride that it
was wounded by a gentleman connected with the Liberal press.
Wounds in the bark do not more rapidly close up because they are
inflicted by people who are stopping with Mr. Blank of Ilkley.
That tree, the ruin of its former self, the wreck of what was once
a giant of the forest, now splintered and laid low by the brute
superiority of a Swedish knife, that tragedy, constable, cannot be wiped
out even by stopping for several months more with some wealthy person.
It is incredible that you have no legal claim to arrest
even the most august and fashionable persons on this charge.
For if so, why did you interfere with me at all?"
I made the later and larger part of this speech to the silent wood,
for the two policemen had vanished almost as quickly as they came.
It is very possible, of course, that they were fairies.
In that case the somewhat illogical character of their view
of crime, law, and personal responsibility would find a bright
and elfish explanation; perhaps if I had lingered in the glade
till moonrise I might have seen rings of tiny policemen
dancing on the sward; or running about with glow-worm belts,
arresting grasshoppers for damaging blades of grass.
But taking the bolder hypothesis, that they really were policemen,
I find myself in a certain difficulty. I was certainly
accused of something which was either an offence or was not.
I was let off because I proved I was a guest at a big house.
The inference seems painfully clear; either it is not
a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood,
or else it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man.
Suppose a very poor person, poorer even than a journalist,
a navvy or unskilled labourer, tramping in search of work,
often changing his lodgings, often, perhaps, failing in his rent.
Suppose he had been intoxicated with the green gaiety
of the ancient wood. Suppose he had thrown knives at trees
and could give no description of a dwelling-place except
that he had been fired out of the last. As I walked home
through a cloudy and purple twilight I wondered how he would
have got on.
Moral. We English are always boasting that we are very illogical;
there is no great harm in that. There is no subtle spiritual evil
in the fact that people always brag about their vices; it is when they
begin to brag about their virtues that they become insufferable.
But there is this to be said, that illogicality in your constitution
or your legal methods may become very dangerous if there happens to be
some great national vice or national temptation which many take advantage
of the chaos. Similarly, a drunkard ought to have strict rules and hours;
a temperate man may obey his instincts.
Take some absurd anomaly in the British law--the fact, for instance,
that a man ceasing to be an M. P. has to become Steward of the
Chiltern Hundreds, an office which I believe was intended originally
to keep down some wild robbers near Chiltern, wherever that is.
Obviously this kind of illogicality does not matter very much,
for the simple reason that there is no great temptation to take
advantage of it. Men retiring from Parliament do not have any
furious impulse to hunt robbers in the hills. But if there were
a real danger that wise, white-haired, venerable politicians taking
leave of public life would desire to do this (if, for instance,
there were any money in it), then clearly, if we went on saying
that the illogicality did not matter, when (as a matter of fact)
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was hanging Chiltern shop-keepers every day
and taking their property, we should be very silly. The illogicality
would matter, for it would have become an excuse for indulgence.
It is only the very good who can live riotous lives.
Now this is exactly what is present in cases of police investigation
such as the one narrated above. There enters into such things a great
national sin, a far greater sin than drink--the habit of respecting a
gentleman. Snobbishness has, like drink, a kind of grand poetry.
And snobbishness has this peculiar and devilish quality of evil,
that it is rampant among very kindly people, with open hearts
and houses. But it is our great English vice; to be watched
more fiercely than small-pox. If a man wished to hear the worst
and wickedest thing in England summed up in casual English words,
he would not find it in any foul oaths or ribald quarrelling.
He would find it in the fact that the best kind of working man,
when he wishes to praise any one, calls him "a gentleman."
It never occurs to him that he might as well call him "a marquis,"
or "a privy councillor"--that he is simply naming a rank or class,
not a phrase for a good man. And this perennial temptation to a
shameful admiration, must, and, I think, does, constantly come
in and distort and poison our police methods.
In this case we must be logical and exact; for we have to keep watch
upon ourselves. The power of wealth, and that power at its vilest,
is increasing in the modern world. A very good and just people,
without this temptation, might not need, perhaps, to make clear rules and
systems to guard themselves against the power of our great financiers.
But that is because a very just people would have shot them long ago,
from mere native good feeling.
In the town of Belfort I take a chair and I sit down in the street. We
talk in a cant phrase of the Man in the Street, but the Frenchman is the
man in the street. Things quite central for him are connected with these
lamp-posts and pavements; everything from his meals to his martyrdoms.
When first an Englishman looks at a French town or village his
first feeling is simply that it is uglier than an English town
or village; when he looks again he sees that this comparative
absence of the picturesque is chiefly expressed in the plain,
precipitous frontage of the houses standing up hard and flat
out of the street like the cardboard houses in a pantomime--
a hard angularity allied perhaps to the harshness of French logic.
When he looks a third time he sees quite simply that it is all because
the houses have no front gardens. The vague English spirit loves to have
the entrance to its house softened by bushes and broken by steps.
It likes to have a little anteroom of hedges half in the house
and half out of it; a green room in a double sense. The Frenchman
desires no such little pathetic ramparts or halting places, for the
street itself is a thing natural and familiar to him.
. . . . .
The French have no front gardens; but the street is every man's
front garden. There are trees in the street, and sometimes fountains.
The street is the Frenchman's tavern, for he drinks in the street.
It is his dining-room, for he dines in the street. It is his
British Museum, for the statues and monuments in French streets are not,
as with us, of the worst, but of the best, art of the country,
and they are often actually as historical as the Pyramids.
The street again is the Frenchman's Parliament, for France has
never taken its Chamber of Deputies so seriously as we take our House
of Commons, and the quibbles of mere elected nonentities in an official
room seem feeble to a people whose fathers have heard the voice
of Desmoulins like a trumpet under open heaven, or Victor Hugo
shouting from his carriage amid the wreck of the second Republic.
And as the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines in the street
so also he fights in the street and dies in the street, so that
the street can never be commonplace to him.
Take, for instance, such a simple object as a lamp-post. In London
a lamp-post is a comic thing. We think of the intoxicated
gentleman embracing it, and recalling ancient friendship.
But in Paris a lamp-post is a tragic thing. For we think
of tyrants hanged on it, and of an end of the world. There is,
or was, a bitter Republican paper in Paris called LA LANTERNE.
How funny it would be if there were a Progressive paper in England
called THE LAMP POST! We have said, then, that the Frenchman is the man
in the street; that he can dine in the street, and die in the street.
And if I ever pass through Paris and find him going to bed in the street,
I shall say that he is still true to the genius of his civilisation.
All that is good and all that is evil in France is alike connected
with this open-air element. French democracy and French indecency
are alike part of the desire to have everything out of doors.
Compared to a cafe, a public-house is a private house.
. . . . .
There were two reasons why all these fancies should float through
the mind in the streets of this especial town of Belfort.
First of all, it lies close upon the boundary of France and Germany,
and boundaries are the most beautiful things in the world.
To love anything is to love its boundaries; thus children will always
play on the edge of anything. They build castles on the edge
of the sea, and can only be restrained by public proclamation
and private violence from walking on the edge of the grass.
For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come
to the beginning of it.
Hence this town seemed all the more French for being on the very margin
of Germany, and although there were many German touches in the place--
German names, larger pots of beer, and enormous theatrical barmaids
dressed up in outrageous imitation of Alsatian peasants--yet the fixed
French colour seemed all the stronger for these specks of something else.
All day long and all night long troops of dusty, swarthy, scornful little
soldiers went plodding through the streets with an air of stubborn
disgust, for German soldiers look as if they despised you, but French
soldiers as if they despised you and themselves even more than you.
It is a part, I suppose, of the realism of the nation which has made
it good at war and science and other things in which what is necessary
is combined with what is nasty. And the soldiers and the civilians
alike had most of them cropped hair, and that curious kind of head
which to an Englishman looks almost brutal, the kind that we call
a bullet-head. Indeed, we are speaking very appropriately when we call
it a bullet-head, for in intellectual history the heads of Frenchmen
have been bullets--yes, and explosive bullets.
. . . . .
But there was a second reason why in this place one should think
particularly of the open-air politics and the open-air art
of the French. For this town of Belfort is famous for one of
the most typical and powerful of the public monuments of France.
From the cafe table at which I sit I can see the hill beyond the town
on which hangs the high and flat-faced citadel, pierced with
many windows, and warmed in the evening light. On the steep
hill below it is a huge stone lion, itself as large as a hill.
It is hacked out of the rock with a sort of gigantic impression.
No trivial attempt has been made to make it like a common statue;
no attempt to carve the mane into curls, or to distinguish
the monster minutely from the earth out of which he rises,
shaking the world. The face of the lion has something of the bold
conventionality of Assyrian art. The mane of the lion is left
like a shapeless cloud of tempest, as if it might literally
be said of him that God had clothed his neck with thunder.
Even at this distance the thing looks vast, and in some
sense prehistoric. Yet it was carved only a little while ago.
It commemorates the fact that this town was never taken
by the Germans through all the terrible year, but only laid
down its arms at last at the command of its own Government.
But the spirit of it has been in this land from the beginning--
the spirit of something defiant and almost defeated.
As I leave this place and take the railway into Germany the news comes
thicker and thicker up the streets that Southern France is in a flame,
and that there perhaps will be fought out finally the awful modern battle
of the rich and poor. And as I pass into quieter places for the last
sign of France on the sky-line, I see the Lion of Belfort stand at bay,
the last sight of that great people which has never been at peace.
CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XXIII The Toy Theatre