CHESTERTON-THE DEFENDANT - A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP
In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the
popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of
many mere phrases. It is not true, for example, that the populace prefer
bad literature to good, and accept detective stories because they are
bad literature. The mere absence of artistic subtlety does not make a
book popular. Bradshaw's Railway Guide contains few gleams of
psychological comedy, yet it is not read aloud uproariously on winter
evenings. If detective stories are read with more exuberance than
railway guides, it is certainly because they are more artistic. Many
good books have fortunately been popular; many bad books, still more
fortunately, have been unpopular. A good detective story would probably
be even more popular than a bad one. The trouble in this matter is that
many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good
detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil. To write a
story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of
committing it. To persons of somewhat weak sensibility this is natural
enough; it must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of
sensational crime as one of Shakespeare's plays.
There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective
story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good
epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate
form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent
of the public weal.
The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it
is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is
expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among
mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that
they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our
descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the
mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees.
Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious
the detective story is certainly the 'Iliad.' No one can have failed to
notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London
with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of
elfland, that in the course of that incalculable journey the casual
omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship. The lights of the
city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the
guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the
reader does not. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to
it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively
signalling the meaning of the mystery.
This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. A city
is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while
Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious
ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may
not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no
brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol--a message
from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The
narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention,
the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick
has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every
slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate
covered with addition and subtraction sums. Anything which tends, even
under the fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, to assert
this romance of detail in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably
human character in flints and tiles, is a good thing. It is good that
the average man should fall into the habit of looking imaginatively at
ten men in the street even if it is only on the chance that the eleventh
might be a notorious thief. We may dream, perhaps, that it might be
possible to have another and higher romance of London, that men's souls
have stranger adventures than their bodies, and that it would be harder
and more exciting to hunt their virtues than to hunt their crimes. But
since our great authors (with the admirable exception of Stevenson)
decline to write of that thrilling mood and moment when the eyes of the
great city, like the eyes of a cat, begin to flame in the dark, we must
give fair credit to the popular literature which, amid a babble of
pedantry and preciosity, declines to regard the present as prosaic or
the common as commonplace. Popular art in all ages has been interested
in contemporary manners and costume; it dressed the groups around the
Crucifixion in the garb of Florentine gentlefolk or Flemish burghers.
In the last century it was the custom for distinguished actors to
present Macbeth in a powdered wig and ruffles. How far we are ourselves
in this age from such conviction of the poetry of our own life and
manners may easily be conceived by anyone who chooses to imagine a
picture of Alfred the Great toasting the cakes dressed in tourist's
knickerbockers, or a performance of 'Hamlet' in which the Prince
appeared in a frock-coat, with a crape band round his hat. But this
instinct of the age to look back, like Lot's wife, could not go on for
ever. A rude, popular literature of the romantic possibilities of the
modern city was bound to arise. It has arisen in the popular detective
stories, as rough and refreshing as the ballads of Robin Hood.
There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories.
While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so
universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and
rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the
mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of
departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the
unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to
remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic
world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but
the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance
stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists
of a thieves' kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that
it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure,
while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic
conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and
wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of
man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring
of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable
police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a
successful knight-errantry.
* * * * *
The decay of patriotism in England during the last year or two is a
serious and distressing matter. Only in consequence of such a decay
could the current lust of territory be confounded with the ancient love
of country. We may imagine that if there were no such thing as a pair of
lovers left in the world, all the vocabulary of love might without
rebuke be transferred to the lowest and most automatic desire. If no
type of chivalrous and purifying passion remained, there would be no one
left to say that lust bore none of the marks of love, that lust was
rapacious and love pitiful, that lust was blind and love vigilant, that
lust sated itself and love was insatiable. So it is with the 'love of
the city,' that high and ancient intellectual passion which has been
written in red blood on the same table with the primal passions of our
being. On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet
anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk,
like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun
by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not
realize what the word 'love' means, that they mean by the love of
country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something
of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his
fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a
national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that
a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only
his son. Here clearly the word 'love' is used unmeaningly. It is the
essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone
who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This
sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was
the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like
Chatham. 'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would
think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My
mother, drunk or sober.' No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink
he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be
in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or
not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.
What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and
raucous Jingoism is a renascence of the love of the native land. When
that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly. For the first of all
the marks of love is seriousness: love will not accept sham bulletins or
the empty victory of words. It will always esteem the most candid
counsellor the best. Love is drawn to truth by the unerring magnetism of
agony; it gives no pleasure to the lover to see ten doctors dancing with
vociferous optimism round a death-bed.
We have to ask, then, Why is it that this recent movement in England,
which has honestly appeared to many a renascence of patriotism, seems to
us to have none of the marks of patriotism--at least, of patriotism in
its highest form? Why has the adoration of our patriots been given
wholly to qualities and circumstances good in themselves, but
comparatively material and trivial:--trade, physical force, a skirmish
at a remote frontier, a squabble in a remote continent? Colonies are
things to be proud of, but for a country to be only proud of its
extremities is like a man being only proud of his legs. Why is there not
a high central intellectual patriotism, a patriotism of the head and
heart of the Empire, and not merely of its fists and its boots? A rude
Athenian sailor may very likely have thought that the glory of Athens
lay in rowing with the right kind of oars, or having a good supply of
garlic; but Pericles did not think that this was the glory of Athens.
With us, on the other hand, there is no difference at all between the
patriotism preached by Mr. Chamberlain and that preached by Mr. Pat
Rafferty, who sings 'What do you think of the Irish now?' They are both
honest, simple-minded, vulgar eulogies upon trivialities and truisms.
I have, rightly or wrongly, a notion of the chief cause of this
pettiness in English patriotism of to-day, and I will attempt to expound
it. It may be taken generally that a man loves his own stock and
environment, and that he will find something to praise in it; but
whether it is the most praiseworthy thing or no will depend upon the
man's enlightenment as to the facts. If the son of Thackeray, let us
say, were brought up in ignorance of his father's fame and genius, it is
not improbable that he would be proud of the fact that his father was
over six feet high. It seems to me that we, as a nation, are precisely
in the position of this hypothetical child of Thackeray's. We fall back
upon gross and frivolous things for our patriotism, for a simple reason.
We are the only people in the world who are not taught in childhood our
own literature and our own history.
We are, as a nation, in the truly extraordinary condition of not knowing
our own merits. We have played a great and splendid part in the history
of universal thought and sentiment; we have been among the foremost in
that eternal and bloodless battle in which the blows do not slay, but
create. In painting and music we are inferior to many other nations; but
in literature, science, philosophy, and political eloquence, if history
be taken as a whole, we can hold our own with any. But all this vast
heritage of intellectual glory is kept from our schoolboys like a
heresy; and they are left to live and die in the dull and infantile type
of patriotism which they learnt from a box of tin soldiers. There is no
harm in the box of tin soldiers; we do not expect children to be equally
delighted with a beautiful box of tin philanthropists. But there is
great harm in the fact that the subtler and more civilized honour of
England is not presented so as to keep pace with the expanding mind. A
French boy is taught the glory of Moliere as well as that of Turenne; a
German boy is taught his own great national philosophy before he learns
the philosophy of antiquity. The result is that, though French
patriotism is often crazy and boastful, though German patriotism is
often isolated and pedantic, they are neither of them merely dull,
common, and brutal, as is so often the strange fate of the nation of
Bacon and Locke. It is natural enough, and even righteous enough, under
the circumstances. An Englishman must love England for something;
consequently, he tends to exalt commerce or prize-fighting, just as a
German might tend to exalt music, or a Flamand to exalt painting,
because he really believes it is the chief merit of his fatherland. It
would not be in the least extraordinary if a claim of eating up
provinces and pulling down princes were the chief boast of a Zulu. The
extraordinary thing is, that it is the chief boast of a people who have
Shakespeare, Newton, Burke, and Darwin to boast of.
The peculiar lack of any generosity or delicacy in the current English
nationalism appears to have no other possible origin but in this fact of
our unique neglect in education of the study of the national literature.
An Englishman could not be silly enough to despise other nations if he
once knew how much England had done for them. Great men of letters
cannot avoid being humane and universal. The absence of the teaching of
English literature in our schools is, when we come to think of it, an
almost amazing phenomenon. It is even more amazing when we listen to the
arguments urged by headmasters and other educational conservatives
against the direct teaching of English. It is said, for example, that a
vast amount of English grammar and literature is picked up in the course
of learning Latin and Greek. This is perfectly true, but the
topsy-turviness of the idea never seems to strike them. It is like
saying that a baby picks up the art of walking in the course of learning
to hop, or that a Frenchman may successfully be taught German by helping
a Prussian to learn Ashanti. Surely the obvious foundation of all
education is the language in which that education is conveyed; if a boy
has only time to learn one thing, he had better learn that.
We have deliberately neglected this great heritage of high national
sentiment. We have made our public schools the strongest walls against a
whisper of the honour of England. And we have had our punishment in this
strange and perverted fact that, while a unifying vision of patriotism
can ennoble bands of brutal savages or dingy burghers, and be the best
thing in their lives, we, who are--the world being judge--humane,
honest, and serious individually, have a patriotism that is the worst
thing in ours. What have we done, and where have we wandered, we that
have produced sages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who
could walk with Dante, that we should talk as if we have never done
anything more intelligent than found colonies and kick niggers? We are
the children of light, and it is we that sit in darkness. If we are
judged, it will not be for the merely intellectual transgression of
failing to appreciate other nations, but for the supreme spiritual
transgression of failing to appreciate ourselves.
CHESTERTON-THE DEFENDANT - A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP