CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - IV THE FEAR OF THE PAST
The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them
by the fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been
defeated it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite
clearly the other way. The lost causes are exactly those which
might have saved the world. If a man says that the Young Pretender
would have made England happy, it is hard to answer him.
If anyone says that the Georges made England happy, I hope we all know
what to answer. That which was prevented is always impregnable;
and the only perfect King of England was he who was smothered.
Exactly be cause Jacobitism failed we cannot call it a failure.
Precisely because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we cannot
say that it collapsed as a system. But such outbursts were brief
or incidental. Few people realize how many of the largest efforts,
the facts that will fill history, were frustrated in their full
design and come down to us as gigantic cripples. I have only
space to allude to the two largest facts of modern history:
the Catholic Church and that modern growth rooted in
the French Revolution.
When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas
of Canterbury, it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort
of black admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished
even more for his brains. Such a blow will remain forever
unintelligible unless we realise what the brains of St. Thomas were
thinking about just before they were distributed over the floor.
They were thinking about the great mediaeval conception that the church
is the judge of the world. Becket objected to a priest being
tried even by the Lord Chief Justice. And his reason was simple:
because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest.
The judiciary was itself sub judice. The kings were themselves
in the dock. The idea was to create an invisible kingdom,
without armies or prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn
publicly all the kingdoms of the earth. Whether such a supreme
church would have cured society we cannot affirm definitely;
because the church never was a supreme church. We only know
that in England at any rate the princes conquered the saints.
What the world wanted we see before us; and some of us call it
a failure. But we cannot call what the church wanted a failure,
simply because the church failed. Tracy struck a little too soon.
England had not yet made the great Protestant discovery that
the king can do no wrong. The king was whipped in the cathedral;
a performance which I recommend to those who regret the unpopularity
of church-going. But the discovery was made; and Henry VIII scattered
Becket's bones as easily as Tracy had scattered his brains.
Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried;
plenty of Catholics were tried, and found guilty.
My point is that the world did not tire of the church's ideal,
but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for
the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks.
Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility,
but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly, if the
church failed it was largely through the churchmen.
But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun
to end it long before it could have done its work.
In the nature of things it needed a common scheme of life and
thought in Europe. Yet the mediaeval system began to be broken
to pieces intellectually, long before it showed the slightest
hint of falling to pieces morally. The huge early heresies,
like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in moral superiority.
And it is actually true that the Reformation began to tear Europe
apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull it together.
The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to Christianity
at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor
creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they
were told to become Protestants. This explains a great deal
of their subsequent conduct. But I have only taken this
as the first and most evident case of the general truth:
that the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived
(which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough.
Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind
has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.
It has been found difficult; and left untried.
It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution.
A great part of our present perplexity arises from the fact
that the French Revolution has half succeeded and half failed.
In one sense, Valmy was the decisive battle of the West,
and in another Trafalgar. We have, indeed, destroyed the largest
territorial tyrannies, and created a free peasantry in almost all
Christian countries except England; of which we shall say more anon.
But representative government, the one universal relic,
is a very poor fragment of the full republican idea.
The theory of the French Revolution presupposed two things
in government, things which it achieved at the time, but which it
has certainly not bequeathed to its imitators in England, Germany,
and America. The first of these was the idea of honorable poverty;
that a statesman must be something of a stoic; the second was
the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginative English writers,
including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how it was
that men like Robespierre and Marat were ardently admired.
The best answer is that they were admired for being poor--
poor when they might have been rich.
No one will pretend that this ideal exists at all in the haute
politique of this country. Our national claim to political
incorruptibility is actually based on exactly the opposite argument;
it is based on the theory that wealthy men in assured
positions will have no temptation to financial trickery.
Whether the history of the English aristocracy, from the spoliation
of the monasteries to the annexation of the mines, entirely supports
this theory I am not now inquiring; but certainly it is our theory,
that wealth will be a protection against political corruption.
The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed.
He is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may
never afterwards be found with the silver spoons in his pocket.
So strong is our faith in this protection by plutocracy,
that we are more and more trusting our empire in the hands of
families which inherit wealth without either blood or manners.
Some of our political houses are parvenue by pedigree;
they hand on vulgarity like a coat of-arms. In the case of
many a modern statesman to say that he is born with a silver
spoon in his mouth, is at once inadequate and excessive.
He is born with a silver knife in his mouth. But all this
only illustrates the English theory that poverty is perilous
for a politician.
It will be the same if we compare the conditions that have
come about with the Revolution legend touching publicity.
The old democratic doctrine was that the more light that was let
in to all departments of State, the easier it was for a righteous
indignation to move promptly against wrong. In other words,
monarchs were to live in glass houses, that mobs might throw stones.
Again, no admirer of existing English politics (if there is
any admirer of existing English politics) will really pretend
that this ideal of publicity is exhausted, or even attempted.
Obviously public life grows more private every day.
The French have, indeed, continued the tradition of revealing
secrets and making scandals; hence they are more flagrant
and palpable than we, not in sin but in the confession of sin.
The first trial of Dreyfus might have happened in England;
it is exactly the second trial that would have been
legally impossible. But, indeed, if we wish to realise
how far we fall short of the original republican outline,
the sharpest way to test it is to note how far we fall
short even of the republican element in the older regime.
Not only are we less democratic than Danton and Condorcet,
but we are in many ways less democratic than Choiseul
and Marie Antoinette. The richest nobles before the revolt
were needy middle-class people compared with our Rothschilds
and Roseberys. And in the matter of publicity the old French monarchy
was infinitely more democratic than any of the monarchies of today.
Practically anybody who chose could walk into the palace and see
the king playing with his children, or paring his nails.
The people possessed the monarch,, as the people possess Primrose Hill;
that is, they cannot move it, but they can sprawl all over it.
The old French monarchy was founded on the excellent principle
that a cat may look at a king. But nowadays a cat may not look
at a king; unless it is a very tame cat. Even where the press
is free for criticism it is only used for adulation.
The substantial difference comes to something uncommonly like this:
Eighteenth century tyranny meant that you could say "The K
of Brrd is a profligate." Twentieth century liberty really
means that you are allowed to say "The King of Brentford is
a model family man."
But we have delayed the main argument too long for the parenthetical
purpose of showing that the great democratic dream, like the great
mediaeval dream, has in a strict and practical sense been
a dream unfulfilled. Whatever is the matter with modern England
it is not that we have carried out too literally, or achieved
with disappointing completeness, either the Catholicism of Becket
or the equality of Marat. Now I have taken these two cases merely
because they are typical of ten thousand other cases; the world
is full of these unfulfilled ideas, these uncompleted temples.
History does not consist of completed and crumbling ruins; rather it
consists of half-built villas abandoned by a bankrupt-builder. This
world is more like an unfinished suburb than a deserted cemetery.
But it is for this especial reason that such an explanation
is necessary on the very threshold of the definition of ideals.
For owing to that historic fallacy with which I have just dealt,
numbers of readers will expect me, when I propound an ideal, to propound
a new ideal. Now I have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal.
There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists,
which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one
of the old ones. On the day that any copybook maxim is carried
out there will be something like an earthquake on the earth.
There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun;
and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a blue day
in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their ideals.
There is only one really startling thing to be done with the ideal,
and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact,
and its frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be
a more stunning thunderbolt to fulfil the law than to destroy it.
It is true of both the cases I have quoted, and of every case.
The pagans had always adored purity: Athena, Artemis, Vesta. It was
when the virgin martyrs began defiantly to practice purity that they
rent them with wild beasts, and rolled them on red-hot coals.
The world had always loved the notion of the poor man uppermost;
it can be proved by every legend from Cinderella to Whittington,
by every poem from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise. The kings
went mad against France not because she idealized this ideal,
but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and Catherine
of Russia quite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified
them was that the people did. The French Revolution, therefore,
is the type of all true revolutions, because its ideal is as old
as the Old Adam, but its fulfilment almost as fresh, as miraculous,
and as new as the New Jerusalem.
But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the
extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they
have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity;
they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of.
Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied
of waiting for it.
Now, for the purpose of this book, I propose to take only one
of these old ideals; but one that is perhaps the oldest.
I take the principle of domesticity: the ideal house;
the happy family, the holy family of history. For the moment
it is only necessary to remark that it is like the church
and like the republic, now chiefly assailed by those who have
never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it.
Numberless modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory
because they have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor
are driven to the workhouse without ever having known the house.
Generally speaking, the cultured class is shrieking to be let
out of the decent home, just as the working class is shouting
to be let into it.
Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very
generally lay the simple spiritual foundations or the idea.
God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may
truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything.
In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation,
the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination
of creation with limits. Man's pleasure, therefore, is to
possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them;
to be half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs.
The excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions;
the conditions will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an
immortal sonnet on an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock.
But hacking a sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious business,
and making a hero out of an envelope is almost out of the sphere
of practical politics. This fruitful strife with limitations,
when it concerns some airy entertainment of an educated class,
goes by the name of Art. But the mass of men have neither time
nor aptitude for the invention of invisible or abstract beauty.
For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed
by an idea unpopular in present discussions--the idea of property.
The average man cannot cut clay into the shape of a man;
but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden; and though
he arranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate
straight lines, he is still an artist; because he has chosen.
The average man cannot paint the sunset whose colors be admires;
but he can paint his own house with what color he chooses, and though
he paints it pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist;
because that is his choice. Property is merely the art of the democracy.
It means that every man should have something that he can shape
in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of heaven.
But because he is not God, but only a graven image of God,
his self-expression must deal with limits; properly with limits
that are strict and even small.
I am well aware that the word "property" has been defied in our
time by the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think,
to hear people talk, that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers
were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies
of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations.
They do not want their own land; but other people's. When they
remove their neighbor's landmark, they also remove their own.
A man who loves a little triangular field ought to love it
because it is triangular; anyone who destroys the shape,
by giving him more land, is a thief who has stolen a triangle.
A man with the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall
where his garden meets Smith's garden; the hedge where his farm
touches Brown's. He cannot see the shape of his own land unless
he sees the edges of his neighbor's. It is the negation of property
that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate;
just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our
wives in one harem.
As I have said, I propose to take only one central instance;
I will take the institution called the private house or home;
the shell and organ of the family. We will consider cosmic
and political tendencies simply as they strike that ancient and
unique roof. Very few words will suffice for all I have to say
about the family itself. I leave alone the speculations about
its animal origin and the details of its social reconstruction;
I am concerned only with its palpable omnipresence.
It is a necessity far mankind; it is (if you like to put it so)
a trap for mankind. Only by the hypocritical ignoring of a huge
fact can any one contrive to talk of "free love"; as if love
were an episode like lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune.
Suppose whenever a man lit a cigarette, a towering genie arose from
the rings of smoke and followed him everywhere as a huge slave.
Suppose whenever a man whistled a tune he "drew an angel down"
and had to walk about forever with a seraph on a string.
These catastrophic images are but faint parallels to the earthquake
consequences that Nature has attached to sex; and it is perfectly
plain at the beginning that a man cannot be a free lover;
he is either a traitor or a tied man. The second element that creates
the family is that its consequences, though colossal, are gradual;
the cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an infant seraph.
Thence arises the necessity for some prolonged system of co-operation;
and thence arises the family in its full educational sense.
It may be said that this institution of the home is the one
anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law,
and stands outside the State. By its nature it is refreshed
or corrupted by indefinable forces of custom or kinship.
This is not to be understood as meaning that the State has no
authority over families; that State authority is invoked and ought
to be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in most normal cases
of family joys and sorrows, the State has no mode of entry.
It is not so much that the law should not interfere, as that
the law cannot. Just as there are fields too far off for law,
so there are fields too near; as a man may see the North Pole
before he sees his own backbone. Small and near matters
escape control at least as much as vast and remote ones;
and the real pains and pleasures of the family form a strong
instance of this. If a baby cries for the moon, the policeman
cannot procure the moon--but neither can he stop the baby.
Creatures so close to each other as husband and wife,
or a mother and children, have powers of making each other
happy or miserable with which no public coercion can deal.
If a marriage could be dissolved every morning it would not give
back his night's rest to a man kept awake by a curtain lecture;
and what is the good of giving a man a lot of power where
he only wants a little peace? The child must depend on the most
imperfect mother; the mother may be devoted to the most
unworthy children; in such relations legal revenges are vain.
Even in the abnormal cases where the law may operate, this difficulty
is constantly found; as many a bewildered magistrate knows.
He has to save children from starvation by taking away
their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife's
heart because her husband has already broken her head.
The State has no tool delicate enough to deracinate the rooted
habits and tangled affections of the family; the two sexes,
whether happy or unhappy, are glued together too tightly
for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in between them.
The man and the woman are one flesh--yes, even when they are
not one spirit. Man is a quadruped. Upon this ancient and
anarchic intimacy, types of government have little or no effect;
it is happy or unhappy, by its own sexual wholesomeness and
genial habit, under the republic of Switzerland or the despotism
of Siam. Even a republic in Siam would not have done much
towards freeing the Siamese Twins.
The problem is not in marriage, but in sex; and would be felt
under the freest concubinage. Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass
of mankind has not believed in freedom in this matter, but rather
in a more or less lasting tie. Tribes and civilizations differ about
the occasions on which we may loosen the bond, but they all agree
that there is a bond to be loosened, not a mere universal detachment.
For the purposes of this book I am not concerned to discuss
that mystical view of marriage in which I myself believe:
the great European tradition which has made marriage a sacrament.
It is enough to say here that heathen and Christian alike have
regarded marriage as a tie; a thing not normally to be sundered.
Briefly, this human belief in a sexual bond rests on a principle
of which the modern mind has made a very inadequate study.
It is, perhaps, most nearly paralleled by the principle of the second
wind in walking.
The principle is this: that in everything worth having,
even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that
must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure.
The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death;
the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him;
the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the sea bath;
and the success of the marriage comes after the failure
of the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are
so many ways of surviving with success this breaking point,
this instant of potential surrender.
In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a
stage when no one would do it, except for necessity or honor.
It is then that the Institution upholds a man and helps him
on to the firmer ground ahead. Whether this solid fact of human
nature is sufficient to justify the sublime dedication of Christian
marriage is quite an other matter, it is amply sufficient to
justify the general human feeling of marriage as a fixed thing,
dissolution of which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy.
The essential element is not so much duration as security.
Two people must be tied together in order to do themselves justice;
for twenty minutes at a dance, or for twenty years in a marriage
In both cases the point is, that if a man is bored in the first
five minutes he must go on and force himself to be happy.
Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and anarchy (or what
some call liberty) is essentially oppressive, because it is
essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the air like bubbles,
free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result would
be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation.
It would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper,
and then have to shout the last half of it because the other
party was floating away into the free and formless ether
The two must hold each other to do justice to each other.
If Americans can be divorced for "incompatibility of temper"
I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced.
I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one.
The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive
the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable.
For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
In the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what is
called the problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized poverty
of modern industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal
the difficulty is not the problem of poverty, but the problem of wealth.
It is the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life.
Some experience of modern movements of the sort called "advanced" has
led me to the conviction that they generally repose upon some experience
peculiar to the rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which I
have already spoken; the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes.
That implies a long holiday in which to get tired of one woman,
and a motor car in which to wander looking for others; it also implies
money for maintenances. An omnibus conductor has hardly time
to love his own wife, let alone other people's. And the success with
which nuptial estrangements are depicted in modern "problem plays"
is due to the fact that there is only one thing that a drama
cannot depict--that is a hard day's work. I could give many other
instances of this plutocratic assumption behind progressive fads.
For instance, there is a plutocratic assumption behind the phrase
"Why should woman be economically dependent upon man?"
The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn't;
except in the sense in which he is dependent upon her.
A hunter has to tear his clothes; there must be somebody to mend them.
A fisher has to catch fish; there must be somebody to cook them.
It is surely quite clear that this modern notion that woman is a mere
"pretty clinging parasite," "a plaything," etc., arose through the somber
contemplation of some rich banking family, in which the banker, at least,
went to the city and pretended to do something, while the banker's
wife went to the Park and did not pretend to do anything at all.
A poor man and his wife are a business partnership. If one partner
in a firm of publishers interviews the authors while the other
interviews the clerks, is one of them economically dependent?
Was Hodder a pretty parasite clinging to Stoughton? Was Marshall
a mere plaything for Snelgrove?
But of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is this:
the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home (they say)
is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety.
This is indeed a rich man's opinion. The rich man knows that his own
house moves on vast and soundless wheels of wealth, is run by regiments
of servants, by a swift and silent ritual. On the other hand, every sort
of vagabondage of romance is open to him in the streets outside.
He has plenty of money and can afford to be a tramp.
His wildest adventure will end in a restaurant, while the yokel's
tamest adventure may end in a police-court. If he smashes a window
he can pay for it; if he smashes a man he can pension him. He can
(like the millionaire in the story) buy an hotel to get a glass of gin.
And because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone of nearly
all "advanced" and "progressive" thought, we have almost forgotten
what a home really means to the overwhelming millions of mankind.
For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only
place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy.
It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter
arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim.
Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict rules
of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter.
He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes.
I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic,
picnic feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried
to do it in an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man can wear a dressing gown
and slippers in his house; while I am sure that this would not be
permitted at the Savoy, though I never actually tested the point.
If you go to a restaurant you must drink some of the wines on
the wine list, all of them if you insist, but certainly some of them.
But if you have a house and garden you can try to make hollyhock
tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a plain, hard-working man
the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure.
It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.
The home is the one place where he can put the carpet
on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to.
When a man spends every night staggering from bar to bar or from
music-hall to music-hall, we say that he is living an irregular life.
But he is not; he is living a highly regular life,
under the dull, and often oppressive, laws of such places.
Some times he is not allowed even to sit down in the bars;
and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music-halls.
Hotels may be defined as places where you are forced to dress;
and theaters may be defined as places where you are forbidden
to smoke. A man can only picnic at home.
Now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence,
this possession of a definite cell or chamber of liberty,
as the working model for the present inquiry.
Whether we can give every English man a free home of his own
or not, at least we should desire it; and he desires it.
For the moment we speak of what he wants, not of what he
expects to get. He wants, far instance, a separate house;
he does not want a semi-detached house. He may be forced
in the commercial race to share one wall with another man.
Similarly he might be forced in a three-legged race to share
one leg with another man; but it is not so that he pictures
himself in his dreams of elegance and liberty. Again, he does
not desire a flat. He can eat and sleep and praise God in a flat;
he can eat and sleep and praise God in a railway train.
But a railway train is not a house, because it is a house on wheels.
And a flat is not a house, because it is a house on stilts.
An idea of earthy contact and foundation, as well as an
idea of separation and independence, is a part of this
instructive human picture.
I take, then, this one institution as a test. As every
normal man desires a woman, and children born of a woman,
every normal man desires a house of his own to put them into.
He does not merely want a roof above him and a chair
below him; he wants an objective and visible kingdom;
a fire at which he can cook what food he likes, a door
he can open to what friends he chooses. This is the normal
appetite of men; I do not say there are not exceptions.
There may be saints above the need and philanthropists below it.
Opalstein, now he is a duke, may have got used to more than this;
and when he was a convict may have got used to less.
But the normality of the thing is enormous. To give nearly
everybody ordinary houses would please nearly everybody;
that is what I assert without apology. Now in modern England
(as you eagerly point out) it is very difficult to give nearly
everybody houses. Quite so; I merely set up the desideratum;
and ask the reader to leave it standing there while he turns
with me to a consideration of what really happens in the social
wars of our time.
There is, let us say, a certain filthy rookery in Hoxton,
dripping with disease and honeycombed with crime and promiscuity.
There are, let us say, two noble and courageous young men,
of pure intentions and (if you prefer it) noble birth; let us call
them Hudge and Gudge. Hudge, let us say, is of a bustling sort;
he points out that the people must at all costs be got out
of this den; he subscribes and collects money, but he finds
(despite the large financial interests of the Hudges) that the thing
will have to be done on the cheap if it is to be done on the spot.
Her therefore, runs up a row of tall bare tenements like beehives;
and soon has all the poor people bundled into their little
brick cells, which are certainly better than their old quarters,
in so far as they are weather proof, well ventilated and supplied
with clean water. But Gudge has a more delicate nature.
He feels a nameless something lacking in the little brick boxes;
he raises numberless objections; he even assails the celebrated
Hudge Report, with the Gudge Minority Report; and by the end
of a year or so has come to telling Hudge heatedly that the people
were much happier where they were before. As the people preserve
in both places precisely the same air of dazed amiability,
it is very difficult to find out which is right. But at least
one might safely say that no people ever liked stench or starvation
as such, but only some peculiar pleasures en tangled with them.
Not so feels the sensitive Gudge. Long before the final quarrel
(Hudge v. Gudge and Another), Gudge has succeeded in persuading
himself that slums and stinks are really very nice things;
that the habit of sleeping fourteen in a room is what has made
our England great; and that the smell of open drains is absolutely
essential to the rearing of a viking breed.
But, meanwhile, has there been no degeneration in Hudge? Alas, I fear
there has. Those maniacally ugly buildings which he originally
put up as unpretentious sheds barely to shelter human life,
grow every day more and more lovely to his deluded eye.
Things he would never have dreamed of defending, except as crude
necessities, things like common kitchens or infamous asbestos stoves,
begin to shine quite sacredly before him, merely because they reflect
the wrath of Gudge. He maintains, with the aid of eager little books
by Socialists, that man is really happier in a hive than in a house.
The practical difficulty of keeping total strangers out of your
bedroom he describes as Brotherhood; and the necessity for
climbing twenty-three flights of cold stone stairs, I dare say he
calls Effort. The net result of their philanthropic adventure is this:
that one has come to defending indefensible slums and still more
indefensible slum-landlords, while the other has come to treating
as divine the sheds and pipes which he only meant as desperate.
Gudge is now a corrupt and apoplectic old Tory in the Carlton Club;
if you mention poverty to him he roars at you in a thick,
hoarse voice something that is conjectured to be "Do 'em good!"
Nor is Hudge more happy; for he is a lean vegetarian with a gray,
pointed beard and an unnaturally easy smile, who goes about telling
everybody that at last we shall all sleep in one universal bedroom;
and he lives in a Garden City, like one forgotten of God.
Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely
introduce as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding
which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery
men are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human
soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as far
as possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him
to a model dwelling. The second desire is, naturally, to get away from
the model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery.
But I am neither a Hudgian nor a Gudgian; and I think the mistakes
of these two famous and fascinating persons arose from one simple fact.
They arose from the fact that neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought
for an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself.
In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were
not practical politicians.
We may now return to the purpose of our awkward parenthesis
about the praise of the future and the failures of the past.
A house of his own being the obvious ideal for every man, we may now ask
(taking this need as typical of all such needs) why he hasn't got it;
and whether it is in any philosophical sense his own fault.
Now, I think that in some philosophical sense it is his own fault, I think
in a yet more philosophical sense it is the fault of his philosophy.
And this is what I have now to attempt to explain.
Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities,
said, I think, that an Englishman's house is his castle.
This is honestly entertaining; for as it happens the Englishman
is almost the only man in Europe whose house is not his castle.
Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of peasant proprietorship;
that a poor man may be a landlord, though he is only lord
of his own land. Making the landlord and the tenant the same
person has certain trivial advantages, as that the tenant
pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.
But I am not concerned with the defense of small proprietorship,
but merely with the fact that it exists almost everywhere except
in England. It is also true, however, that this estate of small
possession is attacked everywhere today; it has never existed
among ourselves, and it may be destroyed among our neighbors.
We have, therefore, to ask ourselves what it is in human
affairs generally, and in this domestic ideal in particular,
that has really ruined the natural human creation,
especially in this country.
Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden;
but he always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for.
Every man has a house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos;
his house waits for him waist deep in slow Norfolk rivers
or sunning itself upon Sussex downs. Man has always been
looking for that home which is the subject matter of this book.
But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he has
been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time
to be chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his desires.
For the first time in history he begins really to doubt the object
of his wanderings on the earth. He has always lost his way;
but now he has lost his address.
Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies
(or in other words, under the pressure of Hudge and Gudge)
the average man has really become bewildered about the goal of
his efforts; and his efforts, therefore, grow feebler and feebler.
His simple notion of having a home of his own is derided as bourgeois,
as sentimental, or as despicably Christian. Under various
verbal forms he is recommended to go on to the streets--
which is called Individualism; or to the work-house--which is
called Collectivism. We shall consider this process somewhat
more carefully in a moment. But it may be said here that Hudge
and Gudge, or the governing class generally, will never fail for
lack of some modern phrase to cover their ancient predominance.
The great lords will refuse the English peasant his three acres
and a cow on advanced grounds, if they cannot refuse it longer
on reactionary grounds. They will deny him the three acres
on grounds of State Ownership. They will forbid him the cow
on grounds of humanitarianism.
And this brings us to the ultimate analysis of this singular influence
that has prevented doctrinal demands by the English people. There are,
I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy.
It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep
some thirty years ago over the day's newspaper and woke up last week over
the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people.
In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone,
a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland.
In the other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone,
a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland.
If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is.
I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic coincidences.
CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - IV THE FEAR OF THE PAST