CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - IX: HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE
But we are not here concerned with the nature and existence
of the aristocracy, but with the origin of its peculiar power,
why is it the last of the true oligarchies of Europe; and why does
there seem no very immediate prospect of our seeing the end of it?
The explanation is simple though it remains strangely unnoticed.
The friends of aristocracy often praise it for preserving
ancient and gracious traditions. The enemies of aristocracy
often blame it for clinging to cruel or antiquated customs.
Both its enemies and its friends are wrong. Generally speaking
the aristocracy does not preserve either good or bad traditions;
it does not preserve anything except game. Who would dream
of looking among aristocrats anywhere for an old custom?
One might as well look for an old costume! The god of the aristocrats
is not tradition, but fashion, which is the opposite of tradition.
If you wanted to find an old-world Norwegian head-dress, would you
look for it in the Scandinavian Smart Set? No; the aristocrats
never have customs; at the best they have habits, like the animals.
Only the mob has customs.
The real power of the English aristocrats has lain in exactly
the opposite of tradition. The simple key to the power of our upper
classes is this: that they have always kept carefully on the side
of what is called Progress. They have always been up to date,
and this comes quite easy to an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are
the supreme instances of that frame of mind of which we spoke just now.
Novelty is to them a luxury verging on a necessity. They, above all,
are so bored with the past and with the present, that they gape,
with a horrible hunger, for the future.
But whatever else the great lords forgot they never forgot that it
was their business to stand for the new things, for whatever was
being most talked about among university dons or fussy financiers.
Thus they were on the side of the Reformation against the Church,
of the Whigs against the Stuarts, of the Baconian science
against the old philosophy, of the manufacturing system
against the operatives, and (to-day) of the increased power
of the State against the old-fashioned individualists.
In short, the rich are always modern; it is their business.
But the immediate effect of this fact upon the question we
are studying is somewhat singular.
In each of the separate holes or quandaries in which the ordinary
Englishman has been placed, he has been told that his
situation is, for some particular reason, all for the best.
He woke up one fine morning and discovered that the public things,
which for eight hundred years he had used at once as inns
and sanctuaries, had all been suddenly and savagely abolished,
to increase the private wealth of about six or seven men.
One would think he might have been annoyed at that;
in many places he was, and was put down by the soldiery.
But it was not merely the army that kelp him quiet.
He was kept quiet by the sages as well as the soldiers;
the six or seven men who took away the inns of the poor told him
that they were not doing it for themselves, but for the religion
of the future, the great dawn of Protestantism and truth.
So whenever a seventeenth century noble was caught pulling
down a peasant's fence and stealing his field, the noble
pointed excitedly at the face of Charles I or James II
(which at that moment, perhaps, wore a cross expression)
and thus diverted the simple peasant's attention. The great Puritan
lords created the Commonwealth, and destroyed the common land.
They saved their poorer countrymen from the disgrace of paying
Ship Money, by taking from them the plow money and spade money
which they were doubtless too weak to guard. A fine old English
rhyme has immortalized this easy aristocratic habit--
You prosecute the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leave the larger felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.
But here, as in the case of the monasteries, we confront the strange
problem of submission. If they stole the common from the goose,
one can only say that he was a great goose to stand it.
The truth is that they reasoned with the goose; they explained
to him that all this was needed to get the Stuart fox over seas.
So in the nineteenth century the great nobles who became
mine-owners and railway directors earnestly assured everybody
that they did not do this from preference, but owing to a newly
discovered Economic Law. So the prosperous politicians of our own
generation introduce bills to prevent poor mothers from going
about with their own babies; or they calmly forbid their tenants
to drink beer in public inns. But this insolence is not (as you
would suppose) howled at by everybody as outrageous feudalism.
It is gently rebuked as Socialism. For an aristocracy
is always progressive; it is a form of going the pace.
Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying
to live tomorrow.
Thus the Future of which we spoke at the beginning has
(in England at least) always been the ally of tyranny.
The ordinary Englishman has been duped out of his old possessions,
such as they were, and always in the name of progress.
The destroyers of the abbeys took away his bread and gave him
a stone, assuring him that it was a precious stone, the white
pebble of the Lord's elect. They took away his maypole and his
original rural life and promised him instead the Golden Age
of Peace and Commerce inaugurated at the Crystal Palace. And now
they are taking away the little that remains of his dignity
as a householder and the head of a family, promising him
instead Utopias which are called (appropriately enough)
"Anticipations" or "News from Nowhere." We come back, in fact,
to the main feature which has already been mentioned.
The past is communal: the future must be individualist.
In the past are all the evils of democracy, variety and violence
and doubt, but the future is pure despotism, for the future
is pure caprice. Yesterday, I know I was a human fool,
but to-morrow I can easily be the Superman.
The modern Englishman, however, is like a man who should
be perpetually kept out, for one reason after another,
from the house in which he had meant his married life to begin.
This man (Jones let us call him) has always desired
the divinely ordinary things; he has married for love,
he has chosen or built a small house that fits like a coat;
he is ready to be a great grandfather and a local god.
And just as he is moving in, something goes wrong.
Some tyranny, personal or political, suddenly debars him from
the home; and he has to take his meals in the front garden.
A passing philosopher (who is also, by a mere coincidence, the man
who turned him out) pauses, and leaning elegantly on the railings,
explains to him that he is now living that bold life upon
the bounty of nature which will be the life of the sublime future.
He finds life in the front garden more bold than bountiful, and has
to move into mean lodgings in the next spring. The philosopher
(who turned him out), happening to call at these lodgings,
with the probable intention of raising the rent, stops to explain
to him that he is now in the real life of mercantile endeavor;
the economic struggle between him and the landlady is the only thing
out of which, in the sublime future, the wealth of nations can come.
He is defeated in the economic struggle, and goes to the workhouse.
The philosopher who turned him out (happening at that very moment
to be inspecting the workhouse) assures him that he is now at
last in that golden republic which is the goal of mankind;
he is in an equal, scientific, Socialistic commonwealth,
owned by the State and ruled by public officers; in fact,
the commonwealth of the sublime future.
Nevertheless, there are signs that the irrational Jones still
dreams at night of this old idea of having an ordinary home.
He asked for so little, and he has been offered so much.
He has been offered bribes of worlds and systems; he has been offered
Eden and Utopia and the New Jerusalem, and he only wanted a house;
and that has been refused him.
Such an apologue is literally no exaggeration of the facts
of English history. The rich did literally turn the poor out
of the old guest house on to the road, briefly telling them
that it was the road of progress. They did literally force them
into factories and the modern wage-slavery, assuring them all
the time that this was the only way to wealth and civilization.
Just as they had dragged the rustic from the convent food and ale
by saying that the streets of heaven were paved with gold,
so now they dragged him from the village food and ale by
telling him that the streets of London were paved with gold.
As he entered the gloomy porch of Puritanism, so he entered
the gloomy porch of Industrialism, being told that each of them
was the gate of the future. Hitherto he has only gone from prison
to prison, nay, into darkening prisons, for Calvinism opened
one small window upon heaven. And now he is asked, in the same
educated and authoritative tones, to enter another dark porch,
at which he has to surrender, into unseen hands, his children,
his small possessions and all the habits of his fathers.
Whether this last opening be in truth any more inviting than the old
openings of Puritanism and Industrialism can be discussed later.
But there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form
of Collectivism is imposed upon England it will be imposed,
as everything else has been, by an instructed political
class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized.
The aristocracy will be as ready to "administer" Collectivism as they
were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in some ways such
a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them.
It will not be so hard as some innocent Socialists seem to
suppose to induce the Honorable Tomnoddy to take over the milk
supply as well as the stamp supply--at an increased salary.
Mr. Bernard Shaw has remarked that rich men are better than poor men
on parish councils because they are free from "financial timidity."
Now, the English ruling class is quite free from financial timidity.
The Duke of Sussex will be quite ready to be Administrator of Sussex
at the same screw. Sir William Harcourt, that typical aristocrat,
put it quite correctly. "We" (that is, the aristocracy)
"are all Socialists now."
But this is not the essential note on which I desire to end.
My main contention is that, whether necessary or not,
both Industrialism and Collectivism have been accepted as necessities--
not as naked ideals or desires. Nobody liked the Manchester School;
it was endured as the only way of producing wealth.
Nobody likes the Marxian school; it is endured as the only way
of preventing poverty. Nobody's real heart is in the idea
of preventing a free man from owning his own farm, or an old
woman from cultivating her own garden, any more than anybody's
real heart was in the heartless battle of the machines.
The purpose of this chapter is sufficiently served in indicating
that this proposal also is a pis aller, a desperate second best--
like teetotalism. I do not propose to prove here that Socialism
is a poison; it is enough if I maintain that it is a medicine
and not a wine.
The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families
free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic,
of one man one house--this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind.
The world may accept something more official and general, less human
and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes
a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may
be the world's deliverance. but it is not the world's desire.
I have cast about widely to find a title for this section; and I confess
that the word "Imperialism" is a clumsy version of my meaning. But no
other word came nearer; "Militarism" would have been even more misleading,
and "The Superman" makes nonsense of any discussion that he enters.
Perhaps, upon the whole, the word "Caesarism" would have been better;
but I desire a popular word; and Imperialism (as the reader will perceive)
does cover for the most part the men and theories that I mean to discuss.
This small confusion is increased, however, by the fact that I
do also disbelieve in Imperialism in its popular sense,
as a mode or theory of the patriotic sentiment of this country.
But popular Imperialism in England has very little to do
with the sort of Caesarean Imperialism I wish to sketch.
I differ from the Colonial idealism of Rhodes' and Kipling;
but I do not think, as some of its opponents do, that it
is an insolent creation of English harshness and rapacity.
Imperialism, I think, is a fiction created, not by English hardness,
but by English softness; nay, in a sense, even by English kindness.
The reasons for believing in Australia are mostly as sentimental
as the most sentimental reasons for believing in heaven.
New South Wales is quite literally regarded as a place where the wicked
cease from troubling and the weary are at rest; that is, a paradise
for uncles who have turned dishonest and for nephews who are born tired.
British Columbia is in strict sense a fairyland, it is a world where
a magic and irrational luck is supposed to attend the youngest sons.
This strange optimism about the ends of the earth is an English weakness;
but to show that it is not a coldness or a harshness it is quite
sufficient to say that no one shared it more than that gigantic
English sentimentalist--the great Charles Dickens. The end
of "David Copperfield" is unreal not merely because it is an
optimistic ending, but because it is an Imperialistic ending.
The decorous British happiness planned out for David Copperfield and Agnes
would be embarrassed by the perpetual presence of the hopeless tragedy
of Emily, or the more hopeless farce of Micawber. Therefore, both Emily
and Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony where changes
come over them with no conceivable cause, except the climate.
The tragic woman becomes contented and the comic man becomes responsible,
solely as the result of a sea voyage and the first sight of a kangaroo.
To Imperialism in the light political sense, therefore, my only
objection is that it is an illusion of comfort; that an Empire whose
heart is failing should be specially proud of the extremities,
is to me no more sublime a fact than that an old dandy whose
brain is gone should still be proud of his legs. It consoles men
for the evident ugliness and apathy of England with legends of fair
youth and heroic strenuousness in distant continents and islands.
A man can sit amid the squalor of Seven Dials and feel that
life is innocent and godlike in the bush or on the veldt.
Just so a man might sit in the squalor of Seven Dials and feel that
life was innocent and godlike in Brixton and Surbiton. Brixton and
Surbiton are "new"; they are expanding; they are "nearer to nature,"
in the sense that they have eaten up nature mile by mile.
The only objection is the objection of fact. The young men of Brixton
are not young giants. The lovers of Surbiton are not all pagan poets,
singing with the sweet energy of the spring. Nor are the people
of the Colonies when you meet them young giants or pagan poets.
They are mostly Cockneys who have lost their last music of real things
by getting out of the sound of Bow Bells. Mr. Rudyard Kipling,
a man of real though decadent genius, threw a theoretic glamour
over them which is already fading. Mr. Kipling is, in a precise
and rather startling sense, the exception that proves the rule.
For he has imagination, of an oriental and cruel kind, but he has it,
not because he grew up in a new country, but precisely because he grew
up in the oldest country upon earth. He is rooted in a past--
an Asiatic past. He might never have written "Kabul River"
if he had been born in Melbourne.
I say frankly, therefore (lest there should be any air of evasion),
that Imperialism in its common patriotic pretensions appears to me both
weak and perilous. It is the attempt of a European country to create
a kind of sham Europe which it can dominate, instead of the real Europe,
which it can only share. It is a love of living with one's inferiors.
The notion of restoring the Roman Empire by oneself and for oneself
is a dream that has haunted every Christian nation in a different shape
and in almost every shape as a snare. The Spanish are a consistent
and conservative people; therefore they embodied that attempt at Empire
in long and lingering dynasties. The French are a violent people,
and therefore they twice conquered that Empire by violence of arms.
The English are above all a poetical and optimistic people;
and therefore their Empire is something vague and yet sympathetic,
something distant and yet dear. But this dream of theirs of being
powerful in the uttermost places, though a native weakness, is still
a weakness in them; much more of a weakness than gold was to Spain
or glory to Napoleon. If ever we were in collision with our real
brothers and rivals we should leave all this fancy out of account.
We should no more dream of pitting Australian armies against German than
of pitting Tasmanian sculpture against French. I have thus explained,
lest anyone should accuse me of concealing an unpopular attitude,
why I do not believe in Imperialism as commonly understood.
I think it not merely an occasional wrong to other peoples,
but a continuous feebleness, a running sore, in my own.
But it is also true that I have dwelt on this Imperialism that is
an amiable delusion partly in order to show how different it is from
the deeper, more sinister and yet more persuasive thing that I have
been forced to call Imperialism for the convenience of this chapter.
In order to get to the root of this evil and quite un-English Imperialism
we must cast back and begin anew with a more general discussion
of the first needs of human intercourse.
It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace.
Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering
and monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen
to everybody, can stop one's heart with the very thought of them.
But while this is granted, something further may be claimed.
It is not merely true that these universal things are strange;
it is moreover true that they are subtle. In the last analysis
most common things will be found to be highly complicated.
Some men of science do indeed get over the difficulty by dealing
only with the easy part of it: thus, they will call first
love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinct
of self-preservation. But this is only getting over the difficulty
of describing peacock green by calling it blue. There is blue in it.
That there is a strong physical element in both romance and
the Memento Mori makes them if possible more baffling than if they
had been wholly intellectual. No man could say exactly how much
his sexuality was colored by a clean love of beauty, or by the mere
boyish itch for irrevocable adventures, like running away to sea.
No man could say how far his animal dread of the end was mixed
up with mystical traditions touching morals and religion.
It is exactly because these things are animal, but not
quite animal, that the dance of all the difficulties begins.
The materialists analyze the easy part, deny the hard part and go
home to their tea.
It is complete error to suppose that because a thing is vulgar
therefore it is not refined; that is, subtle and hard to define.
A drawing-room song of my youth which began "In the gloaming,
O, my darling," was vulgar enough as a song; but the connection
between human passion and the twilight is none the less an exquisite
and even inscrutable thing. Or to take another obvious instance:
the jokes about a mother-in-law are scarcely delicate,
but the problem of a mother-in-law is extremely delicate.
A mother-in-law is subtle because she is a thing like the twilight.
She is a mystical blend of two inconsistent things--
law and a mother. The caricatures misrepresent her;
but they arise out of a real human enigma. "Comic Cuts"
deals with the difficulty wrongly, but it would need
George Meredith at his best to deal with the difficulty rightly.
The nearest statement of the problem perhaps is this:
it is not that a mother-in-law must be nasty, but that she must
be very nice.
But it is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily
custom we have all heard despised as vulgar or trite.
Take, for the sake of argument, the custom of talking about
the weather. Stevenson calls it "the very nadir and scoff
of good conversationalists." Now there are very deep reasons
for talking about the weather, reasons that are delicate as well
as deep; they lie in layer upon layer of stratified sagacity.
First of all it is a gesture of primeval worship.
The sky must be invoked; and to begin everything with the weather
is a sort of pagan way of beginning everything with prayer.
Jones and Brown talk about the weather: but so do Milton
and Shelley. Then it is an expression of that elementary
idea in politeness--equality. For the very word politeness
is only the Greek for citizenship. The word politeness is akin
to the word policeman: a charming thought. Properly understood,
the citizen should be more polite than the gentleman; perhaps the
policeman should be the most courtly and elegant of the three.
But all good manners must obviously begin with the sharing of
something in a simple style. Two men should share an umbrella;
if they have not got an umbrella, they should at least share
the rain, with all its rich potentialities of wit and philosophy.
"For He maketh His sun to shine...." This is the second element
in the weather; its recognition of human equality in that we all have
our hats under the dark blue spangled umbrella of the universe.
Arising out of this is the third wholesome strain in the custom;
I mean that it begins with the body and with our inevitable
bodily brotherhood. All true friendliness begins with fire
and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost.
Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are already
prigs and may soon be Christian Scientists. Each human soul
has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility
of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh
to meet mankind.
Briefly, in the mere observation "a fine day" there is the whole
great human idea of comradeship. Now, pure comradeship is another
of those broad and yet bewildering things. We all enjoy it;
yet when we come to talk about it we almost always talk nonsense,
chiefly because we suppose it to be a simpler affair than it is.
It is simple to conduct; but it is by no means simple to analyze.
Comradeship is at the most only one half of human life;
the other half is Love, a thing so different that one might fancy
it had been made for another universe. And I do not mean mere
sex love; any kind of concentrated passion, maternal love,
or even the fiercer kinds of friendship are in their nature alien
to pure comradeship. Both sides are essential to life; and both
are known in differing degrees to everybody of every age or sex.
But very broadly speaking it may still be said that women stand
for the dignity of love and men for the dignity of comradeship.
I mean that the institution would hardly be expected if the males
of the tribe did not mount guard over it. The affections
in which women excel have so much more authority and intensity
that pure comradeship would be washed away if it were not rallied
and guarded in clubs, corps, colleges, banquets and regiments.
Most of us have heard the voice in which the hostess tells her
husband not to sit too long over the cigars. It is the dreadful
voice of Love, seeking to destroy Comradeship.
All true comradeship has in it those three elements which I have
remarked in the ordinary exclamation about the weather. First, it has
a sort of broad philosophy like the common sky, emphasizing that we
are all under the same cosmic conditions. We are all in the same boat,
the "winged rock" of Mr. Herbert Trench. Secondly, it recognizes
this bond as the essential one; for comradeship is simply
humanity seen in that one aspect in which men are really equal.
The old writers were entirely wise when they talked of the equality
of men; but they were also very wise in not mentioning women.
Women are always authoritarian; they are always above or below;
that is why marriage is a sort of poetical see-saw. There are
only three things in the world that women do not understand;
and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. But men (a class
little understood in the modern world) find these things the breath
of their nostrils; and our most learned ladies will not even begin
to understand them until they make allowance for this kind of
cool camaraderie. Lastly, it contains the third quality of the weather,
the insistence upon the body and its indispensable satisfaction.
No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept
with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking,
an uproarious materialism which to many women appears only hoggish.
You may call the thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly
an essential. It is at root a resistance to the superciliousness
of the individual. Nay, its very swaggering and howling are humble.
In the heart of its rowdiness there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire
to melt the separate soul into the mass of unpretentious masculinity.
It is a clamorous confession of the weakness of all flesh.
No man must be superior to the things that are common to men.
This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and comic.
Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.
The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as
the word "affinity." There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all
the members, men and women, call each other "Comrade." I have no
serious emotions, hostile or otherwise, about this particular habit:
at the worst it is conventionality, and at the best flirtation.
I am convinced here only to point out a rational principle.
If you choose to lump all flowers together, lilies and dahlias
and tulips and chrysanthemums and call them all daisies,
you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word daisy.
If you choose to call every human attachment comradeship,
if you include under that name the respect of a youth for a
venerable prophetess, the interest of a man in a beautiful woman
who baffles him, the pleasure of a philosophical old fogy in a girl
who is impudent and innocent, the end of the meanest quarrel
or the beginning of the most mountainous love; if you are going
to call all these comradeship, you will gain nothing, you will
only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and universal and open;
but they are only one kind of flower. Comradeship is obvious
and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection;
it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind.
Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment,
knows that it is impersonal. There is a pedantic phrase used
in debating clubs which is strictly true to the masculine emotion;
they call it "speaking to the question." Women speak to each other;
men speak to the subject they are speaking about. Many an honest
man has sat in a ring of his five best friends under heaven
and forgotten who was in the room while he explained some system.
This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are all theoretical,
whether they are talking about God or about golf.
Men are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No one
remembers after a really good talk who has said the good things.
Every man speaks to a visionary multitude; a mystical cloud,
that is called the club.
It is obvious that this cool and careless quality which is essential
to the collective affection of males involves disadvantages and dangers.
It leads to spitting; it leads to coarse speech; it must lead to
these things so long as it is honorable; comradeship must be in some
degree ugly. The moment beauty is mentioned in male friendship,
the nostrils are stopped with the smell of abominable things.
Friendship must be physically dirty if it is to be morally clean.
It must be in its shirt sleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes
with males when left entirely to themselves has only one honorable cure;
and that is the strict discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has
seen our unhappy young idealists in East End Settlements losing their
collars in the wash and living on tinned salmon will fully understand
why it was decided by the wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict,
that if men were to live without women, they must not live without rules.
Something of the same sort of artificial exactitude, of course,
is obtained in an army; and an army also has to be in many ways monastic;
only that it has celibacy without chastity. But these things do not
apply to normal married men. These have a quite sufficient restraint
on their instinctive anarchy in the savage common-sense of the other sex.
There is only one very timid sort of man that is not afraid of women.
Now this masculine love of an open and level camaraderie is
the life within all democracies and attempts to govern by debate;
without it the republic would be a dead formula. Even as it is,
of course, the spirit of democracy frequently differs widely
from the letter, and a pothouse is often a better test than
a Parliament. Democracy in its human sense is not arbitrament
by the majority; it is not even arbitrament by everybody.
It can be more nearly defined as arbitrament by anybody.
I mean that it rests on that club habit of taking a total
stranger for granted, of assuming certain things to be inevitably
common to yourself and him. Only the things that anybody
may be presumed to hold have the full authority of democracy.
Look out of the window and notice the first man who walks by.
The Liberals may have swept England with an over-whelming majority;
but you would not stake a button that the man is a Liberal. The Bible
may be read in all schools and respected in all law courts; but you
would not bet a straw that he believes in the Bible. But you would bet
your week's wages, let us say, that he believes in wearing clothes.
You would bet that he believes that physical courage is a fine thing,
or that parents have authority over children. Of course,
he might be the millionth man who does not believe these things;
if it comes to that, he might be the Bearded Lady dressed up as a man.
But these prodigies are quite a different thing from any mere
calculation of numbers. People who hold these views are not a minority,
but a monstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that have full
democratic authority the only test is this test of anybody.
What you would observe before any newcomer in a tavern--that is
the real English law. The first man you see from the window,
he is the King of England.
The decay of taverns, which is but a part of the general decay
of democracy, has undoubtedly weakened this masculine spirit
of equality. I remember that a roomful of Socialists literally
laughed when I told them that there were no two nobler words
in all poetry than Public House. They thought it was a joke.
Why they should think it a joke, since they want to make all houses
public houses, I cannot imagine. But if anyone wishes to see
the real rowdy egalitarianism which is necessary (to males, at least)
he can find it as well as anywhere in the great old tavern disputes
which come down to us in such books as Boswell's Johnson. It is
worth while to mention that one name especially because the modern
world in its morbidity has done it a strange injustice.
The demeanor of Johnson, it is said, was "harsh and despotic."
It was occasionally harsh, but it was never despotic.
Johnson was not in the least a despot; Johnson was a demagogue,
he shouted against a shouting crowd. The very fact that he wrangled
with other people is proof that other people were allowed
to wrangle with him. His very brutality was based on the idea
of an equal scrimmage, like that of football. It is strictly true
that he bawled and banged the table because he was a modest man.
He was honestly afraid of being overwhelmed or even overlooked.
Addison had exquisite manners and was the king of his company;
he was polite to everybody; but superior to everybody;
therefore he has been handed down forever in the immortal
insult of Pope--
"Like Cato, give his little Senate laws And sit attentive
to his own applause."
Johnson, so far from being king of his company, was a sort of Irish Member
in his own Parliament. Addison was a courteous superior and was hated.
Johnson was an insolent equal and therefore was loved by all who knew him,
and handed down in a marvellous book, which is one of the mere
miracles of love.
This doctrine of equality is essential to conversation;
so much may be admitted by anyone who knows what conversation is.
Once arguing at a table in a tavern the most famous man on
earth would wish to be obscure, so that his brilliant remarks
might blaze like the stars on the background of his obscurity.
To anything worth calling a man nothing can be conceived
more cold or cheerless than to be king of your company.
But it may be said that in masculine sports and games, other than
the great game of debate, there is definite emulation and eclipse.
There is indeed emulation, but this is only an ardent sort
of equality. Games are competitive, because that is the only
way of making them exciting. But if anyone doubts that men
must forever return to the ideal of equality, it is only
necessary to answer that there is such a thing as a handicap.
If men exulted in mere superiority, they would seek to see
how far such superiority could go; they would be glad
when one strong runner came in miles ahead of all the rest.
But what men like is not the triumph of superiors,
but the struggle of equals; and, therefore, they introduce
even into their competitive sports an artificial equality.
It is sad to think how few of those who arrange our sporting
handicaps can be supposed with any probability to realize
that they are abstract and even severe republicans.
No; the real objection to equality and self-rule has nothing to do with
any of these free and festive aspects of mankind; all men are democrats
when they are happy. The philosophic opponent of democracy would
substantially sum up his position by saying that it "will not work."
Before going further, I will register in passing a protest
against the assumption that working is the one test of humanity.
Heaven does not work; it plays. Men are most themselves when they
are free; and if I find that men are snobs in their work but democrats
on their holidays, I shall take the liberty to believe their holidays.
But it is this question of work which really perplexes the question
of equality; and it is with that that we must now deal.
Perhaps the truth can be put most pointedly thus: that democracy
has one real enemy, and that is civilization. Those utilitarian
miracles which science has made are anti-democratic, not so much
in their perversion, or even in their practical result, as in their
primary shape and purpose. The Frame-Breaking Rioters were right;
not perhaps in thinking that machines would make fewer men workmen;
but certainly in thinking that machines would make fewer men masters.
More wheels do mean fewer handles; fewer handles do mean fewer hands.
The machinery of science must be individualistic and isolated.
A mob can shout round a palace; but a mob cannot shout down a telephone.
The specialist appears and democracy is half spoiled at a stroke.
CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - IX: HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE