CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG
To C. F G. Masterman, M. P.
My Dear Charles,
I originally called this book "What is Wrong," and it would
have satisfied your sardonic temper to note the number of social
misunderstandings that arose from the use of the title.
Many a mild lady visitor opened her eyes when I remarked casually,
"I have been doing 'What is Wrong' all this morning."
And one minister of religion moved quite sharply in his chair
when I told him (as he understood it) that I had to run upstairs
and do what was wrong, but should be down again in a minute.
Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused me I
cannot conjecture, but I know of what I accuse myself; and that is,
of having written a very shapeless and inadequate book, and one
quite unworthy to be dedicated to you. As far as literature goes,
this book is what is wrong and no mistake.
It may seem a refinement of insolence to present so wild
a composition to one who has recorded two or three of the really
impressive visions of the moving millions of England. You are
the only man alive who can make the map of England crawl with life;
a most creepy and enviable accomplishment. Why then should I
trouble you with a book which, even if it achieves its object
(which is monstrously unlikely) can only be a thundering
gallop of theory?
Well, I do it partly because I think you politicians are none
the worse for a few inconvenient ideals; but more because you
will recognise the many arguments we have had, those arguments
which the most wonderful ladies in the world can never endure
for very long. And, perhaps, you will agree with me that
the thread of comradeship and conversation must be protected
because it is so frivolous. It must be held sacred, it must
not be snapped, because it is not worth tying together again.
It is exactly because argument is idle that men (I mean males)
must take it seriously; for when (we feel), until the crack
of doom, shall we have so delightful a difference again?
But most of all I offer it to you because there exists not
only comradeship, but a very different thing, called friendship;
an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which,
please God, will never break.
Yours always,
G. K. Chesterton.
A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat
sharply defined. It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics,
tables of population, decrease of crime among Congregationalists,
growth of hysteria among policemen, and similar ascertained facts;
it ends with a chapter that is generally called "The Remedy." It is
almost wholly due to this careful, solid, and scientific method
that "The Remedy" is never found. For this scheme of medical question
and answer is a blunder; the first great blunder of sociology.
It is always called stating the disease before we find the cure.
But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social
matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease .
The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern
madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient
to speak of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to
speak of the British Lion. But Britain is no more an organism
than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a nation
the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly.
Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede.
This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of
perpetually talking about "young nations" and "dying nations,"
as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life.
Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility;
they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth.
Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature;
which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new moustache.
Nations consist of people; the first generation may
be decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous.
Similar applications of the fallacy are made by those who see
in the increasing size of national possessions, a simple
increase in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.
These people, indeed, even fall short in subtlety of the parallel
of a human body. They do not even ask whether an empire is growing
taller in its youth, or only growing fatter in its old age.
But of all the instances of error arising from this
physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us:
the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness,
and then propounding a social drug.
Now we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown;
and that for an excellent reason. Because, though there may be doubt
about the way in which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all
about the shape in which it should be built up again. No doctor proposes
to produce a new kind of man, with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs.
The hospital, by necessity, may send a man home with one leg less:
but it will not (in a creative rapture) send him home with one leg extra.
Medical science is content with the normal human body, and only seeks
to restore it.
But social science is by no means always content with the normal
human soul; it has all sorts of fancy souls for sale. Man as a
social idealist will say "I am tired of being a Puritan; I want
to be a Pagan," or "Beyond this dark probation of Individualism I
see the shining paradise of Collectivism." Now in bodily ills
there is none of this difference about the ultimate ideal.
The patient may or may not want quinine; but he certainly
wants health No one says "I am tired of this headache;
I want some toothache," or "The only thing for this Russian
influenza is a few German measles," or "Through this dark
probation of catarrh I see the shining paradise of rheumatism."
But exactly the whole difficulty in our public problems
is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would
regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions
as states of health which others would uncompromisingly
call states of disease. Mr. Belloc once said that he would
no more part with the idea of property than with his teeth;
yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw property is not a tooth, but a toothache.
Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to introduce German efficiency;
and many of us would as soon welcome German measles.
Dr. Saleeby would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I would
rather have rheumatics.
This is the arresting and dominant fact about modern
social discussion; that the quarrel is not merely about
the difficulties, but about the aim. We agree about the evil;
it is about the good that we should tear each other's eyes cut.
We all admit that a lazy aristocracy is a bad thing.
We should not by any means all admit that an active aristocracy would
be a good thing. We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood;
but some of us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one.
Everyone is indignant if our army is weak, including the people
who would be even more indignant if it were strong.
The social case is exactly the opposite of the medical case.
We do not disagree, like doctors, about the precise nature
of the illness, while agreeing about the nature of health.
On the contrary, we all agree that England is unhealthy, but half
of us would not look at her in what the other half would call blooming
health . Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent that they
sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity.
We forget that, while we agree about the abuses of things,
we should differ very much about the uses of them.
Mr. Cadbury and I would agree about the bad public house.
It would be precisely in front of the good public-house that our
painful personal fracas would occur.
I maintain, therefore, that the common sociological method
is quite useless: that of first dissecting abject poverty
or cataloguing prostitution. We all dislike abject poverty;
but it might be another business if we began to discuss independent
and dignified poverty. We all disapprove of prostitution;
but we do not all approve of purity. The only way to discuss
the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal.
We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity?
I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?"
and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated.
What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.
There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify
the endless and useless arguments of philosophers; I mean
the joke about which came first, the chicken or the egg?
I am not sure that properly understood, it is so futile an inquiry
after all. I am not concerned here to enter on those deep
metaphysical and theological differences of which the chicken
and egg debate is a frivolous, but a very felicitous, type.
The evolutionary materialists are appropriately enough
represented in the vision of all things coming from an egg,
a dim and monstrous oval germ that had laid itself by accident.
That other supernatural school of thought (to which I
personally adhere) would be not unworthily typified in the fancy
that this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon
by a sacred unbegotten bird; the mystic dove of the prophets.
But it is to much humbler functions that I here call the awful
power of such a distinction. Whether or no the living bird
is at the beginning of our mental chain, it is absolutely
necessary that it should be at the end of our mental chain.
The bird is the thing to be aimed at--not with a gun, but a
life-bestowing wand. What is essential to our right thinking is this:
that the egg and the bird must not be thought of as equal cosmic
occurrences recurring alternatively forever. They must not become
a mere egg and bird pattern, like the egg and dart pattern. One is
a means and the other an end; they are in different mental worlds.
Leaving the complications of the human breakfast-table out
of account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce
the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order
to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself,
to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist.
Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself.
Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness;
forgetfulness that the production of this happy and conscious
life is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises.
We talk of nothing but useful men and working institutions; that is,
we only think of the chickens as things that will lay more eggs.
Instead of seeking to breed our ideal bird, the eagle
of Zeus or the Swan of Avon, or whatever we happen to want,
we talk entirely in terms of the process and the embryo.
The process itself, divorced from its divine object, becomes doubtful
and even morbid; poison enters the embryo of everything;
and our politics are rotten eggs.
Idealism is only considering everything in its practical essence.
Idealism only means that we should consider a poker in reference
to poking before we discuss its suitability for wife-beating;
that we should ask if an egg is good enough for practical
poultry-rearing before we decide that the egg is bad enough
for practical politics. But I know that this primary pursuit
of the theory (which is but pursuit of the aim) exposes one
to the cheap charge of fiddling while Rome is burning.
A school, of which Lord Rosebery is representative, has endeavored
to substitute for the moral or social ideals which have hitherto
been the motive of politics a general coherency or completeness
in the social system which has gained the nick-name of "efficiency."
I am not very certain of the secret doctrine of this sect in the matter.
But, as far as I can make out, "efficiency" means that we ought
to discover everything about a machine except what it is for.
There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy:
the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man.
It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we
need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist.
A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice,
to the way things commonly work. When things will not work,
you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why
they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning;
but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while
Rome is burning.
It is then necessary to drop one's daily agnosticism
and attempt rerum cognoscere causas. If your aeroplane
has a slight indisposition, a handy man may mend it.
But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely that some
absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to be
dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil.
The more complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more
absent-minded will be the theorist who is needed to deal with it;
and in some extreme cases, no one but the man (probably insane)
who invented your flying-ship could possibly say what was
the matter with it.
"Efficiency," of course, is futile for the same reason
that strong men, will-power and the superman are futile.
That is, it is futile because it only deals with actions after
they have been performed. It has no philosophy for incidents
before they happen; therefore it has no power of choice.
An act can only be successful or unsuccessful when it is over;
if it is to begin, it must be, in the abstract, right or wrong.
There is no such thing as backing a winner; for he cannot be a
winner when he is backed. There is no such thing as fighting on
the winning side; one fights to find out which is the winning side.
If any operation has occurred, that operation was efficient.
If a man is murdered, the murder was efficient. A tropical
sun is as efficient in making people lazy as a Lancashire
foreman bully in making them energetic. Maeterlinck is
as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual tremors
as Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell are in filling a man with jam.
But it all depends on what you want to be filled with.
Lord Rosebery, being a modern skeptic, probably prefers the
spiritual tremors. I, being an orthodox Christian, prefer the jam.
But both are efficient when they have been effected; and inefficient
until they are effected. A man who thinks much about success must
be the drowsiest sentimentalist; for he must be always looking back.
If he only likes victory he must always come late for the battle.
For the man of action there is nothing but idealism.
This definite ideal is a far more urgent and practical matter in our
existing English trouble than any immediate plans or proposals.
For the present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion
of all that men were originally aiming at. No man demands
what he desires; each man demands what he fancies he can get.
Soon people forget what the man really wanted first; and after
a successful and vigorous political life, he forgets it himself.
The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests, a pandemonium
of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliability does not merely prevent any
heroic consistency, it also prevents any really practical compromise.
One can only find the middle distance between two points
if the two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement
between two litigants who cannot both get what they want;
but not if they will not even tell us what they want.
The keeper of a restaurant would much prefer that each customer
should give his order smartly, though it were for stewed ibis
or boiled elephant, rather than that each customer should
sit holding his head in his hands, plunged in arithmetical
calculations about how much food there can be on the premises.
Most of us have suffered from a certain sort of ladies who, by their
perverse unselfishness, give more trouble than the selfish; who almost
clamor for the unpopular dish and scramble for the worst seat.
Most of us have known parties or expeditions full of this seething
fuss of self-effacement. From much meaner motives than those of such
admirable women, our practical politicians keep things in the same
confusion through the same doubt about their real demands.
There is nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle
of small surrenders. We are bewildered on every side by politicians
who are in favor of secular education, but think it hopeless
to work for it; who desire total prohibition, but are certain
they should not demand it; who regret compulsory education,
but resignedly continue it; or who want peasant proprietorship
and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed and
floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything.
If our statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done.
If we ask for something in the abstract we might get something
in the concrete. As it is, it is not only impossible to get
what one wants, but it is impossible to get any part of it,
because nobody can mark it out plainly like a map. That clear
and even hard quality that there was in the old bargaining has
wholly vanished. We forget that the word "compromise" contains,
among other things, the rigid and ringing word "promise."
Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as perfection.
The middle point is as fixed as the extreme point.
If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain
for me to offer, as a common-sense compromise, to walk
along the plank for a reasonable distance. It is exactly
about the reasonable distance that the pirate and I differ.
There is an exquisite mathematical split second at which the plank
tips up. My common-sense ends just before that instant;
the pirate's common-sense begins just beyond it.
But the point itself is as hard as any geometrical diagram;
as abstract as any theological dogma.
But this new cloudy political cowardice has rendered useless
the old English compromise. People have begun to be
terrified of an improvement merely because it is complete.
They call it utopian and revolutionary that anyone should really
have his own way, or anything be really done, and done with.
Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread.
Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf
is better than a whole loaf.
As an instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case
of our everlasting education bills. We have actually contrived
to invent a new kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite,
Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man whose aims were really worldly
and practical, while he pretended that they were religious.
The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really religious,
while he pretends that they are worldly and practical.
The Rev. Brown, the Wesleyan minister, sturdily declares
that he cares nothing for creeds, but only for education;
meanwhile, in truth, the wildest Wesleyanism is tearing his soul.
The Rev. Smith, of the Church of England, explains gracefully,
with the Oxford manner, that the only question for him is
the prosperity and efficiency of the schools; while in truth
all the evil passions of a curate are roaring within him.
It is a fight of creeds masquerading as policies.
I think these reverend gentlemen do themselves wrong; I think
they are more pious than they will admit. Theology is not
(as some suppose) expunged as an error. It is merely concealed,
like a sin. Dr. Clifford really wants a theological atmosphere
as much as Lord Halifax; only it is a different one.
If Dr. Clifford would ask plainly for Puritanism and Lord Halifax
ask plainly for Catholicism, something might be done for them.
We are all, one hopes, imaginative enough to recognize the dignity
and distinctness of another religion, like Islam or the cult
of Apollo. I am quite ready to respect another man's faith;
but it is too much to ask that I should respect his doubt,
his worldly hesitations and fictions, his political bargain
and make-believe. Most Nonconformists with an instinct for
English history could see something poetic and national about
the Archbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop of Canterbury. It is
when he does the rational British statesman that they very
justifiably get annoyed. Most Anglicans with an eye for pluck
and simplicity could admire Dr. Clifford as a Baptist minister.
It is when he says that he is simply a citizen that nobody can
possibly believe him.
But indeed the case is yet more curious than this.
The one argument that used to be urged for our creedless
vagueness was that at least it saved us from fanaticism.
But it does not even do that. On the contrary, it creates
and renews fanaticism with a force quite peculiar to itself.
This is at once so strange and so true that I will ask the reader's
attention to it with a little more precision.
Some people do not like the word "dogma." Fortunately they are free,
and there is an alternative for them. There are two things,
and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice.
The Middle Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine.
Our age is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice.
A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction.
That an ox may be eaten, while a man should not be eaten,
is a doctrine. That as little as possible of anything should be
eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called an ideal.
Now a direction is always far more fantastic than a plan.
I would rather have the most archaic map of the road to
Brighton than a general recommendation to turn to the left.
Straight lines that are not parallel must meet at last; but curves
may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might walk along the frontier
of France and Germany, one on the one side and one on the other,
so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away from each other.
And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of our modern
vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.
It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference
of creed unites men--so long as it is a clear difference.
A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader
must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists,
than any two homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell's chapel.
"I say God is One," and "I say God is One but also Three,"
that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship.
But our age would turn these creeds into tendencies. It would tell
the Trinitarian to follow multiplicity as such (because it was
his "temperament"), and he would turn up later with three hundred
and thirty-three persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it would
turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful intellectual fall.
It would force that previously healthy person not only to admit
that there was one God, but to admit that there was nobody else.
When each had, for a long enough period, followed the gleam
of his own nose (like the Dong) they would appear again;
the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem a Panegoist, both quite mad,
and far more unfit to understand each other than before.
It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness
divides men, it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a
chasm in clear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog.
So a Tory can walk up to the very edge of Socialism, if he knows
what is Socialism. But if he is told that Socialism is a spirit,
a sublime atmosphere, a noble, indefinable tendency, why, then he keeps
out of its way; and quite right too. One can meet an assertion
with argument; but healthy bigotry is the only way in which one can
meet a tendency. I am told that the Japanese method of wrestling
consists not of suddenly pressing, but of suddenly giving way.
This is one of my many reasons for disliking the Japanese civilization.
To use surrender as a weapon is the very worst spirit of the East.
But certainly there is no force so hard to fight as the force which it
is easy to conquer; the force that always yields and then returns.
Such is the force of a great impersonal prejudice, such as possesses
the modern world on so many points. Against this there is no weapon
at all except a rigid and steely sanity, a resolution not to listen
to fads, and not to be infected by diseases.
In short, the rational human faith must armor itself with prejudice
in an age of prejudices, just as it armoured itself with logic in
an age of logic. But the difference between the two mental methods
is marked and unmistakable. The essential of the difference is this:
that prejudices are divergent, whereas creeds are always in collision.
Believers bump into each other; whereas bigots keep out of each other's
way. A creed is a collective thing, and even its sins are sociable.
A prejudice is a private thing, and even its tolerance is misanthropic.
So it is with our existing divisions. They keep out of each other's way;
the Tory paper and the Radical paper do not answer each other;
they ignore each other. Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust
before a common audience, has become in our special epoch very rare.
For the sincere controversialist is above all things a good listener.
The really burning enthusiast never interrupts; he listens to the enemy's
arguments as eagerly as a spy would listen to the enemy's arrangements.
But if you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite
politics, you will find that no medium is admitted between violence
and evasion. You will have no answer except slanging or silence.
A modern editor must not have that eager ear that goes with the
honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is called dignity.
Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing journalism.
In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole object of modern
party combatants is to charge out of earshot.
The only logical cure for all this is the assertion of a human ideal.
In dealing with this, I will try to be as little transcendental
as is consistent with reason; it is enough to say that unless we
have some doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused,
since evolution may turn them into uses. It will be easy for
the scientific plutocrat to maintain that humanity will adapt itself
to any conditions which we now consider evil. The old tyrants
invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future evolution
has produced the snail and the owl; evolution can produce a workman
who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl.
The employer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground;
he will soon become an underground animal, like a mole.
He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the deep seas;
he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble
to alter conditions, conditions will so soon alter men.
The head can be beaten small enough to fit the hat.
Do not knock the fetters off the slave; knock the slave until
he forgets the fetters. To all this plausible modem argument
for oppression, the only adequate answer is, that there is a permanent
human ideal that must not be either confused or destroyed.
The most important man on earth is the perfect man who is not there.
The Christian religion has specially uttered the ultimate sanity of Man,
says Scripture, who shall judge the incarnate and human truth.
Our lives and laws are not judged by divine superiority, but simply
by human perfection. It is man, says Aristotle, who is the measure.
It is the Son of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the quick
and the dead.
Doctrine, therefore, does not cause dissensions;
rather a doctrine alone can cure our dissensions.
It is necessary to ask, however, roughly, what abstract and
ideal shape in state or family would fulfil the human hunger;
and this apart from whether we can completely obtain it or not.
But when we come to ask what is the need of normal men,
what is the desire of all nations, what is the ideal house,
or road, or rule, or republic, or king, or priesthood,
then we are confronted with a strange and irritating difficulty
peculiar to the present time; and we must call a temporary halt
and examine that obstacle.
The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation
of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds
to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief,
to stating what will happen--which is (apparently) much easier.
The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather;
but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography
of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters
of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn.
This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form
of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of
the nineteenth century for the novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells
stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel
of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin:
"Late on a winter's evening two horsemen might have been seen--."
The new story has to begin: "Late on a winter's evening two aviators
will be seen--." The movement is not without its elements of charm;
there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many
people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened;
of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning.
A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough.
An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.
But when full allowance has been made for this harmless
element of poetry and pretty human perversity in the thing,
I shall not hesitate to maintain here that this cult of
the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age.
It is the peculiar evil of this epoch that even its pugnacity
is fundamentally frightened; and the Jingo is contemptible
not because he is impudent, but because he is timid.
The reason why modern armaments do not inflame the imagination
like the arms and emblazonments of the Crusades is a reason
quite apart from optical ugliness or beauty. Some battleships
are as beautiful as the sea; and many Norman nosepieces were
as ugly as Norman noses. The atmospheric ugliness that surrounds
our scientific war is an emanation from that evil panic which is
at the heart of it. The charge of the Crusades was a charge;
it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver.
The charge of the modern armaments is not a charge at all.
It is a rout, a retreat, a flight from the devil, who will catch
the hindmost. It is impossible to imagine a mediaeval knight
talking of longer and longer French lances, with precisely
the quivering employed about larger and larger German ships The
man who called the Blue Water School the "Blue Funk School"
uttered a psychological truth which that school itself would
scarcely essentially deny. Even the two-power standard,
if it be a necessity, is in a sense a degrading necessity.
Nothing has more alienated many magnanimous minds from Imperial
enterprises than the fact that they are always exhibited as stealthy
or sudden defenses against a world of cold rapacity and fear.
The Boer War, for instance, was colored not so much by the creed
that we were doing something right, as by the creed that Boers
and Germans were probably doing something wrong; driving us
(as it was said) to the sea. Mr. Chamberlain, I think,
said that the war was a feather in his cap and so it was:
a white feather.
Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic
armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society.
The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense
of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.
It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words
of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week.
And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation
for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future.
Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of
the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also.
The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind.
There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold;
so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many
great efforts of monumental building or of military glory
which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future
is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers.
The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door.
It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street
of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is
pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children.
The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own
name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered
with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare,
Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself;
the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity.
And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this:
that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals.
They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid
to look back.
Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration.
Among the many things that Leave me doubtful about the modern
habit of fixing eyes on the future, none is stronger than this:
that all the men in history who have really done anything
with the future have had their eyes fixed upon the past.
I need not mention the Renaissance, the very word proves my case.
The originality of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare began with
the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness
of poets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries.
So the great mediaeval revival was a memory of the Roman Empire.
So the Reformation looked back to the Bible and Bible times.
So the modern Catholic movement has looked back to patristic times.
But that modern movement which many would count the most
anarchic of all is in this sense the most conservative of all.
Never was the past more venerated by men than it was by the
French Revolutionists. They invoked the little republics of
antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods.
The Sans-culottes believed (as their name might imply) in a return
to simplicity. They believed most piously in a remote past;
some might call it a mythical past. For some strange reason
man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a graveyard.
Man can only find life among the dead. Man is a misshapen monster,
with his feet set forward and his face turned back. He can make
the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking
about the past. When he tries to think about the future itself,
his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, which some
call Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it
mirrored in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly
he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who
have really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable.
The Calvinists, with their perfect creed of predestination,
were turned to stone. The modern sociological scientists
(with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone.
The only difference is that the Puritans make dignified,
and the Eugenists somewhat amusing, statues.
But there is one feature in the past which more than all
the rest defies and depresses the moderns and drives them
towards this featureless future. I mean the presence in
the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and sometimes abandoned.
The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy to a restless
and rather morbid generation; and they maintain a strange silence
about them--sometimes amounting to an unscrupulous silence.
They keep them entirely out of their newspapers and almost entirely
out of their history books. For example, they will often tell you
(in their praises of the coming age) that we are moving on towards
a United States of Europe. But they carefully omit to tell
you that we are moving away from a United States of Europe,
that such a thing existed literally in Roman and essentially in
mediaeval times. They never admit that the international hatreds
(which they call barbaric) are really very recent, the mere
breakdown of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again,
they will tell you that there is going to be a social revolution,
a great rising of the poor against the rich; but they never rub it
in that France made that magnificent attempt, unaided, and that we
and all the world allowed it to be trampled out and forgotten.
I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing
as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the
ignoring of them in the past. Anyone can test this for himself.
Read any thirty or forty pages of pamphlets advocating peace
in Europe and see how many of them praise the old Popes or Emperors
for keeping the peace in Europe. Read any armful of essays
and poems in praise of social democracy, and see how many of them
praise the old Jacobins who created democracy and died for it.
These colossal ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores.
He looks back along the valley of the past and sees a perspective
of splendid but unfinished cities. They are unfinished,
not always through enmity or accident, but often through fickleness,
mental fatigue, and the lust for alien philosophies.
We have not only left undone those things that we ought to have done,
but we have even left undone those things that we wanted to do
It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the
ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments.
I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the reader
to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern man--
in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two starry
towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past?
Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after
the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to till
a mammoth with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the
Christian saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may
have been sabred by the Manchester Yeomanry or shot in the '48?
Are we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough
to spare them? Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have
either speared or spared? When we decline (in a marked manner)
to fly the red flag and fire across a barricade like our grandfathers,
are we really declining in deference to sociologists--or to soldiers?
Have we indeed outstripped the warrior and passed the ascetical saint?
I fear we only outstrip the warrior in the sense that we should
probably run away from him. And if we have passed the saint,
I fear we have passed him without bowing.
This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness
of the new ideas, the limiting effect of the future.
Our modern prophetic idealism is narrow because it has undergone
a persistent process of elimination. We must ask for new
things because we are not allowed to ask for old things.
The whole position is based on this idea that we have got
all the good that can be got out of the ideas of the past.
But we have not got all the good out of them, perhaps at this
moment not any of the good out of them. And the need here is
a need of complete freedom for restoration as well as revolution.
We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some
rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition.
There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary
or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight
one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies
tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh
as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose
intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.
He cares as little for what will be as for what has been;
he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present
purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence.
If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things
that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption
that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor
of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying,
"You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer
is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction,
can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour.
In the same way society, being a piece of human construction,
can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.
There is another proverb, "As you have made your bed,
so you must lie on it"; which again is simply a lie.
If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.
We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we chose.
It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it;
but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday
is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim:
the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose as a solution
the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that should seem
to eliminate the largest number of evils. It certainly would
eliminate some evils; for instance, the unnatural sense of obeying
cold and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen.
I claim the right to propose the complete independence of the small
Greek or Italian towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton,
if that seems the best way out of our troubles. It would be a way
out of some of our troubles; we could not have in a small state,
for instance, those enormous illusions about men or measures which
are nourished by the great national or international newspapers.
You could not persuade a city state that Mr. Beit was an Englishman,
or Mr. Dillon a desperado, any more than you could persuade
a Hampshire Village that the village drunkard was a teetotaller
or the village idiot a statesman. Nevertheless, I do not as a
fact propose that the Browns and the Smiths should be collected
under separate tartans. Nor do I even propose that Clapham should
declare its independence. I merely declare my independence.
I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe;
and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because
they have been used.
CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG