CHESTERTON-ALL THING CONSIDERED - LIMERICKS AND COUNSELS OF PERFECTION
The end of the article which I write is always cut off, and,
unfortunately, I belong to that lower class of animals in whom the tail
is important. It is not anybody's fault but my own; it arises from the
fact that I take such a long time to get to the point. Somebody, the
other day, very reasonably complained of my being employed to write
prefaces. He was perfectly right, for I always write a preface to the
preface, and then I am stopped; also quite justifiably.
In my last article I said that I favoured three things--first, the legal
punishment of deliberately false information; secondly, a distinction,
in the matter of reported immorality, between those sins which any
healthy man can see in himself and those which he had better not see
anywhere; and thirdly, an absolute insistence in the great majority of
cases upon the signing of articles. It was at this point that I was cut
short, I will not say by the law of space, but rather by my own
lawlessness in the matter of space. In any case, there is something more
that ought to be said.
It would be an exaggeration to say that I hope some day to see an
anonymous article counted as dishonourable as an anonymous letter. For
some time to come, the idea of the leading article, expressing the
policy of the whole paper, must necessarily remain legitimate; at any
rate, we have all written such leading articles, and should never think
the worse of any one for writing one. But I should certainly say that
writing anonymously ought to have some definite excuse, such as that of
the leading article. Writing anonymously ought to be the exception;
writing a signed article ought to be the rule. And anonymity ought to be
not only an exception, but an accidental exception; a man ought always
to be ready to say what anonymous article he had written. The
journalistic habit of counting it something sacred to keep secret the
origin of an article is simply part of the conspiracy which seeks to put
us who are journalists in the position of a much worse sort of Jesuits
or Freemasons.
As has often been said, anonymity would be all very well if one could
for a moment imagine that it was established from good motives. Suppose,
for instance, that we were all quite certain that the men on the
Thunderer newspaper were a band of brave young idealists who were so
eager to overthrow Socialism, Municipal and National, that they did not
care to which of them especially was given the glory of striking it
down. Unfortunately, however, we do not believe this. What we believe,
or, rather, what we know, is that the attack on Socialism in the
Thunderer arises from a chaos of inconsistent and mostly evil motives,
any one of which would lose simply by being named. A jerry-builder
whose houses have been condemned writes anonymously and becomes the
Thunderer. A Socialist who has quarrelled with the other Socialists
writes anonymously, and he becomes the Thunderer. A monopolist who has
lost his monopoly, and a demagogue who has lost his mob, can both write
anonymously and become the same newspaper. It is quite true that there
is a young and beautiful fanaticism in which men do not care to reveal
their names. But there is a more elderly and a much more common
excitement in which men do not dare to reveal them.
Then there is another rule for making journalism honest on which I
should like to insist absolutely. I should like it to be a fixed thing
that the name of the proprietor as well as the editor should be printed
upon every paper. If the paper is owned by shareholders, let there be a
list of shareholders. If (as is far more common in this singularly
undemocratic age) it is owned by one man, let that one man's name be
printed on the paper, if possible in large red letters. Then, if there
are any obvious interests being served, we shall know that they are
being served. My friends in Manchester are in a terrible state of
excitement about the power of brewers and the dangers of admitting them
to public office. But at least, if a man has controlled politics through
beer, people generally know it: the subject of beer is too fascinating
for any one to miss such personal peculiarities. But a man may control
politics through journalism, and no ordinary English citizen know that
he is controlling them at all. Again and again in the lists of Birthday
Honours you and I have seen some Mr. Robinson suddenly elevated to the
Peerage without any apparent reason. Even the Society papers (which we
read with avidity) could tell us nothing about him except that he was a
sportsman or a kind landlord, or interested in the breeding of badgers.
Now I should like the name of that Mr. Robinson to be already familiar
to the British public. I should like them to know already the public
services for which they have to thank him. I should like them to have
seen the name already on the outside of that organ of public opinion
called Tootsie's Tips, or The Boy Blackmailer, or Nosey Knows,
that bright little financial paper which did so much for the Empire and
which so narrowly escaped a criminal prosecution. If they had seen it
thus, they would estimate more truly and tenderly the full value of the
statement in the Society paper that he is a true gentleman and a sound
Churchman.
Finally, it should be practically imposed by custom (it so happens that
it could not possibly be imposed by law) that letters of definite and
practical complaint should be necessarily inserted by any editor in any
paper. Editors have grown very much too lax in this respect. The old
editor used dimly to regard himself as an unofficial public servant for
the transmitting of public news. If he suppressed anything, he was
supposed to have some special reason for doing so; as that the material
was actually libellous or literally indecent. But the modern editor
regards himself far too much as a kind of original artist, who can
select and suppress facts with the arbitrary ease of a poet or a
caricaturist. He "makes up" the paper as man "makes up" a fairy tale, he
considers his newspaper solely as a work of art, meant to give pleasure,
not to give news. He puts in this one letter because he thinks it
clever. He puts in these three or four letters because he thinks them
silly. He suppresses this article because he thinks it wrong. He
suppresses this other and more dangerous article because he thinks it
right. The old idea that he is simply a mode of the expression of the
public, an "organ" of opinion, seems to have entirely vanished from his
mind. To-day the editor is not only the organ, but the man who plays on
the organ. For in all our modern movements we move away from Democracy.
This is the whole danger of our time. There is a difference between the
oppression which has been too common in the past and the oppression
which seems only too probable in the future. Oppression in the past, has
commonly been an individual matter. The oppressors were as simple as the
oppressed, and as lonely. The aristocrat sometimes hated his inferiors;
he always hated his equals. The plutocrat was an individualist. But in
our time even the plutocrat has become a Socialist. They have science
and combination, and may easily inaugurate a much greater tyranny than
the world has ever seen.
Surely the art of reporting speeches is in a strange state of
degeneration. We should not object, perhaps, to the reporter's making
the speeches much shorter than they are; but we do object to his making
all the speeches much worse than they are. And the method which he
employs is one which is dangerously unjust. When a statesman or
philosopher makes an important speech, there are several courses which
the reporter might take without being unreasonable. Perhaps the most
reasonable course of all would be not to report the speech at all. Let
the world live and love, marry and give in marriage, without that
particular speech, as they did (in some desperate way) in the days when
there were no newspapers. A second course would be to report a small
part of it; but to get that right. A third course, far better if you can
do it, is to understand the main purpose and argument of the speech, and
report that in clear and logical language of your own. In short, the
three possible methods are, first, to leave the man's speech alone;
second, to report what he says or some complete part of what he says;
and third, to report what he means. But the present way of reporting
speeches (mainly created, I think, by the scrappy methods of the Daily
Mail) is something utterly different from both these ways, and quite
senseless and misleading.
The present method is this: the reporter sits listening to a tide of
words which he does not try to understand, and does not, generally
speaking, even try to take down; he waits until something occurs in the
speech which for some reason sounds funny, or memorable, or very
exaggerated, or, perhaps, merely concrete; then he writes it down and
waits for the next one. If the orator says that the Premier is like a
porpoise in the sea under some special circumstances, the reporter gets
in the porpoise even if he leaves out the Premier. If the orator begins
by saying that Mr. Chamberlain is rather like a violoncello, the
reporter does not even wait to hear why he is like a violoncello. He has
got hold of something material, and so he is quite happy. The strong
words all are put in; the chain of thought is left out. If the orator
uses the word "donkey," down goes the word "donkey." If the orator uses
the word "damnable," down goes the word "damnable." They follow each
other so abruptly in the report that it is often hard to discover the
fascinating fact as to what was damnable or who was being compared with
a donkey. And the whole line of argument in which these things occurred
is entirely lost. I have before me a newspaper report of a speech by Mr.
Bernard Shaw, of which one complete and separate paragraph runs like
this--
"Capital meant spare money over and above one's needs. Their country was
not really their country at all except in patriotic songs."
I am well enough acquainted with the whole map of Mr. Bernard Shaw's
philosophy to know that those two statements might have been related to
each other in a hundred ways. But I think that if they were read by an
ordinary intelligent man, who happened not to know Mr. Shaw's views, he
would form no impression at all except that Mr. Shaw was a lunatic of
more than usually abrupt conversation and disconnected mind. The other
two methods would certainly have done Mr. Shaw more justice: the
reporter should either have taken down verbatim what the speaker really
said about Capital, or have given an outline of the way in which this
idea was connected with the idea about patriotic songs.
But we have not the advantage of knowing what Mr. Shaw really did say,
so we had better illustrate the different methods from something that we
do know. Most of us, I suppose, know Mark Antony's Funeral Speech in
"Julius Caesar." Now Mark Antony would have no reason to complain if he
were not reported at all; if the Daily Pilum or the Morning Fasces,
or whatever it was, confined itself to saying, "Mr. Mark Antony also
spoke," or "Mr. Mark Antony, having addressed the audience, the meeting
broke up in some confusion." The next honest method, worthy of a noble
Roman reporter, would be that since he could not report the whole of the
speech, he should report some of the speech. He might say--"Mr. Mark
Antony, in the course of his speech, said--
'When that the poor have cried Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.'"
In that case one good, solid argument of Mark Antony would be correctly
reported. The third and far higher course for the Roman reporter would
be to give a philosophical statement of the purport of the speech. As
thus--"Mr. Mark Antony, in the course of a powerful speech, conceded the
high motives of the Republican leaders, and disclaimed any intention of
raising the people against them; he thought, however, that many
instances could be quoted against the theory of Caesar's ambition, and
he concluded by reading, at the request of the audience, the will of
Caesar, which proved that he had the most benevolent designs towards the
Roman people." That is (I admit) not quite so fine as Shakspere, but it
is a statement of the man's political position. But if a Daily Mail
reporter were sent to take down Antony's oration, he would simply wait
for any expressions that struck him as odd and put them down one after
another without any logical connection at all. It would turn out
something like this: "Mr. Mark Antony wished for his audience's ears. He
had thrice offered Caesar a crown. Caesar was like a deer. If he were
Brutus he would put a wound in every tongue. The stones of Rome would
mutiny. See what a rent the envious Casca paid. Brutus was Caesar's
angel. The right honourable gentleman concluded by saying that he and
the audience had all fallen down." That is the report of a political
speech in a modern, progressive, or American manner, and I wonder
whether the Romans would have put up with it.
The reports of the debates in the Houses of Parliament are constantly
growing smaller and smaller in our newspapers. Perhaps this is partly
because the speeches are growing duller and duller. I think in some
degree the two things act and re-act on each other. For fear of the
newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for
the newspapers. The speeches in our time are more careful and elaborate,
because they are meant to be read, and not to be heard. And exactly
because they are more careful and elaborate, they are not so likely to
be worthy of a careful and elaborate report. They are not interesting
enough. So the moral cowardice of modern politicians has, after all,
some punishment attached to it by the silent anger of heaven. Precisely
because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not
worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be
read, nobody reads them.
Thus we may concede that politicians have done something towards
degrading journalism. It was not entirely done by us, the journalists.
But most of it was. It was mostly the fruit of our first and most
natural sin--the habit of regarding ourselves as conjurers rather than
priests, for the definition is that a conjurer is apart from his
audience, while a priest is a part of his. The conjurer despises his
congregation; if the priest despises any one, it must be himself. The
curse of all journalism, but especially of that yellow journalism which
is the shame of our profession, is that we think ourselves cleverer than
the people for whom we write, whereas, in fact, we are generally even
stupider. But this insolence has its Nemesis; and that Nemesis is well
illustrated in this matter of reporting.
For the journalist, having grown accustomed to talking down to the
public, commonly talks too low at last, and becomes merely barbaric and
unintelligible. By his very efforts to be obvious he becomes obscure.
This just punishment may specially be noticed in the case of those
staggering and staring headlines which American journalism introduced
and which some English journalism imitates. I once saw a headline in a
London paper which ran simply thus: "Dobbin's Little Mary." This was
intended to be familiar and popular, and therefore, presumably, lucid.
But it was some time before I realised, after reading about half the
printed matter underneath, that it had something to do with the proper
feeding of horses. At first sight, I took it, as the historical leader
of the future will certainly take it, as containing some allusion to the
little daughter who so monopolised the affections of the Major at the
end of "Vanity Fair." The Americans carry to an even wilder extreme this
darkness by excess of light. You may find a column in an American paper
headed "Poet Brown Off Orange-flowers," or "Senator Robinson Shoehorns
Hats Now," and it may be quite a long time before the full meaning
breaks upon you: it has not broken upon me yet.
And something of this intellectual vengeance pursues also those who
adopt the modern method of reporting speeches. They also become
mystical, simply by trying to be vulgar. They also are condemned to be
always trying to write like George R. Sims, and succeeding, in spite of
themselves, in writing like Maeterlinck. That combination of words
which I have quoted from an alleged speech of Mr. Bernard Shaw's was
written down by the reporter with the idea that he was being
particularly plain and democratic. But, as a matter of fact, if there is
any connection between the two sentences, it must be something as dark
as the deepest roots of Browning, or something as invisible as the most
airy filaments of Meredith. To be simple and to be democratic are two
very honourable and austere achievements; and it is not given to all the
snobs and self-seekers to achieve them. High above even Maeterlinck or
Meredith stand those, like Homer and Milton, whom no one can
misunderstand. And Homer and Milton are not only better poets than
Browning (great as he was), but they would also have been very much
better journalists than the young men on the Daily Mail.
As it is, however, this misrepresentation of speeches is only a part of
a vast journalistic misrepresentation of all life as it is. Journalism
is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and
life seen in the newspapers another; the public enjoys both, but it is
more or less conscious of the difference. People do not believe, for
instance, that the debates in the House of Commons are as dramatic as
they appear in the daily papers. If they did they would go, not to the
daily paper, but to the House of Commons. The galleries would be crowded
every night as they were in the French Revolution; for instead of seeing
a printed story for a penny they would be seeing an acted drama for
nothing. But the, people know in their hearts that journalism is a
conventional art like any other, that it selects, heightens, and
falsifies. Only its Nemesis is the same as that of other arts: if it
loses all care for truth it loses all form likewise. The modern who
paints too cleverly produces a picture of a cow which might be the
earthquake at San Francisco. And the journalist who reports a speech too
cleverly makes it mean nothing at all.
There has crept, I notice, into our literature and journalism a new way
of flattering the wealthy and the great. In more straightforward times
flattery itself was more straight-forward; falsehood itself was more
true. A poor man wishing to please a rich man simply said that he was
the wisest, bravest, tallest, strongest, most benevolent and most
beautiful of mankind; and as even the rich man probably knew that he
wasn't that, the thing did the less harm. When courtiers sang the
praises of a King they attributed to him things that were entirely
improbable, as that he resembled the sun at noonday, that they had to
shade their eyes when he entered the room, that his people could not
breathe without him, or that he had with his single sword conquered
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The safety of this method was its
artificiality; between the King and his public image there was really no
relation. But the moderns have invented a much subtler and more
poisonous kind of eulogy. The modern method is to take the prince or
rich man, to give a credible picture of his type of personality, as that
he is business-like, or a sportsman, or fond of art, or convivial, or
reserved; and then enormously exaggerate the value and importance of
these natural qualities. Those who praise Mr. Carnegie do not say that
he is as wise as Solomon and as brave as Mars; I wish they did. It would
be the next most honest thing to giving their real reason for praising
him, which is simply that he has money. The journalists who write about
Mr. Pierpont Morgan do not say that he is as beautiful as Apollo; I wish
they did. What they do is to take the rich man's superficial life and
manner, clothes, hobbies, love of cats, dislike of doctors, or what not;
and then with the assistance of this realism make the man out to be a
prophet and a saviour of his kind, whereas he is merely a private and
stupid man who happens to like cats or to dislike doctors. The old
flatterer took for granted that the King was an ordinary man, and set to
work to make him out extraordinary. The newer and cleverer flatterer
takes for granted that he is extraordinary, and that therefore even
ordinary things about him will be of interest.
I have noticed one very amusing way in which this is done. I notice the
method applied to about six of the wealthiest men in England in a book
of interviews published by an able and well-known journalist. The
flatterer contrives to combine strict truth of fact with a vast
atmosphere of awe and mystery by the simple operation of dealing almost
entirely in negatives. Suppose you are writing a sympathetic study of
Mr. Pierpont Morgan. Perhaps there is not much to say about what he
does think, or like, or admire; but you can suggest whole vistas of his
taste and philosophy by talking a great deal about what he does not
think, or like, or admire. You say of him--"But little attracted to the
most recent schools of German philosophy, he stands almost as resolutely
aloof from the tendencies of transcendental Pantheism as from the
narrower ecstasies of Neo-Catholicism." Or suppose I am called upon to
praise the charwoman who has just come into my house, and who certainly
deserves it much more. I say--"It would be a mistake to class Mrs. Higgs
among the followers of Loisy; her position is in many ways different;
nor is she wholly to be identified with the concrete Hebraism of
Harnack." It is a splendid method, as it gives the flatterer an
opportunity of talking about something else besides the subject of the
flattery, and it gives the subject of the flattery a rich, if somewhat
bewildered, mental glow, as of one who has somehow gone through agonies
of philosophical choice of which he was previously unaware. It is a
splendid method; but I wish it were applied sometimes to charwomen
rather than only to millionaires.
There is another way of flattering important people which has become
very common, I notice, among writers in the newspapers and elsewhere. It
consists in applying to them the phrases "simple," or "quiet," or
"modest," without any sort of meaning or relation to the person to whom
they are applied. To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be
modest is the next best thing. I am not so sure about being quiet. I am
rather inclined to think that really modest people make a great deal of
noise. It is quite self-evident that really simple people make a great
deal of noise. But simplicity and modesty, at least, are very rare and
royal human virtues, not to be lightly talked about. Few human beings,
and at rare intervals, have really risen into being modest; not one man
in ten or in twenty has by long wars become simple, as an actual old
soldier does by long wars become simple. These virtues are not things to
fling about as mere flattery; many prophets and righteous men have
desired to see these things and have not seen them. But in the
description of the births, lives, and deaths of very luxurious men they
are used incessantly and quite without thought. If a journalist has to
describe a great politician or financier (the things are substantially
the same) entering a room or walking down a thoroughfare, he always
says, "Mr. Midas was quietly dressed in a black frock coat, a white
waistcoat, and light grey trousers, with a plain green tie and simple
flower in his button-hole." As if any one would expect him to have a
crimson frock coat or spangled trousers. As if any one would expect him
to have a burning Catherine wheel in his button-hole.
But this process, which is absurd enough when applied to the ordinary
and external lives of worldly people, becomes perfectly intolerable when
it is applied, as it always is applied, to the one episode which is
serious even in the lives of politicians. I mean their death. When we
have been sufficiently bored with the account of the simple costume of
the millionaire, which is generally about as complicated as any that he
could assume without being simply thought mad; when we have been told
about the modest home of the millionaire, a home which is generally much
too immodest to be called a home at all; when we have followed him
through all these unmeaning eulogies, we are always asked last of all to
admire his quiet funeral. I do not know what else people think a funeral
should be except quiet. Yet again and again, over the grave of every one
of those sad rich men, for whom one should surely feel, first and last,
a speechless pity--over the grave of Beit, over the grave of
Whiteley--this sickening nonsense about modesty and simplicity has been
poured out. I well remember that when Beit was buried, the papers said
that the mourning-coaches contained everybody of importance, that the
floral tributes were sumptuous, splendid, intoxicating; but, for all
that, it was a simple and quiet funeral. What, in the name of Acheron,
did they expect it to be? Did they think there would be human
sacrifice--the immolation of Oriental slaves upon the tomb? Did they
think that long rows of Oriental dancing-girls would sway hither and
thither in an ecstasy of lament? Did they look for the funeral games of
Patroclus? I fear they had no such splendid and pagan meaning. I fear
they were only using the words "quiet" and "modest" as words to fill up
a page--a mere piece of the automatic hypocrisy which does become too
common among those who have to write rapidly and often. The word
"modest" will soon become like the word "honourable," which is said to
be employed by the Japanese before any word that occurs in a polite
sentence, as "Put honourable umbrella in honourable umbrella-stand;" or
"condescend to clean honourable boots." We shall read in the future that
the modest King went out in his modest crown, clad from head to foot in
modest gold and attended with his ten thousand modest earls, their
swords modestly drawn. No! if we have to pay for splendour let us praise
it as splendour, not as simplicity. When next I meet a rich man I intend
to walk up to him in the street and address him with Oriental hyperbole.
He will probably run away.
In these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to
be scientific. Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor in
saying that he is our doctor, not our priest, or our wife, or ourself.
It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a
watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health
will follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that, obviously, it
is for us to judge. Physical science is like simple addition: it is
either infallible or it is false. To mix science up with philosophy is
only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a
science that has lost all its practical value. I want my private
physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for
my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed. I
apologise for stating all these truisms. But the truth is, that I have
just been reading a thick pamphlet written by a mass of highly
intelligent men who seem never to have heard of any of these truisms in
their lives.
Those who detest the harmless writer of this column are generally
reduced (in their final ecstasy of anger) to calling him "brilliant;"
which has long ago in our journalism become a mere expression of
contempt. But I am afraid that even this disdainful phrase does me too
much honour. I am more and more convinced that I suffer, not from a
shiny or showy impertinence, but from a simplicity that verges upon
imbecility. I think more and more that I must be very dull, and that
everybody else in the modern world must be very clever. I have just been
reading this important compilation, sent to me in the name of a number
of men for whom I have a high respect, and called "New Theology and
Applied Religion." And it is literally true that I have read through
whole columns of the things without knowing what the people were talking
about. Either they must be talking about some black and bestial religion
in which they were brought up, and of which I never even heard, or else
they must be talking about some blazing and blinding vision of God which
they have found, which I have never found, and which by its very
splendour confuses their logic and confounds their speech. But the best
instance I can quote of the thing is in connection with this matter of
the business of physical science on the earth, of which I have just
spoken. The following words are written over the signature of a man
whose intelligence I respect, and I cannot make head or tail of them--
"When modern science declared that the cosmic process knew nothing of a
historical event corresponding to a Fall, but told, on the contrary, the
story of an incessant rise in the scale of being, it was quite plain
that the Pauline scheme--I mean the argumentative processes of Paul's
scheme of salvation--had lost its very foundation; for was not that
foundation the total depravity of the human race inherited from their
first parents?.... But now there was no Fall; there was no total
depravity, or imminent danger of endless doom; and, the basis gone, the
superstructure followed."
It is written with earnestness and in excellent English; it must mean
something. But what can it mean? How could physical science prove that
man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do
not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of
depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall?
What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find a
fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages
would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a
slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is
simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue in
themselves and all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never said
that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls, one
on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent with
everything that we know from physical science. Humanity might have grown
morally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in no way
have contradicted the principle of Evolution. Men of science (not being
raving lunatics) never said that there had been "an incessant rise in
the scale of being;" for an incessant rise would mean a rise without any
relapse or failure; and physical evolution is full of relapse and
failure. There were certainly some physical Falls; there may have been
any number of moral Falls. So that, as I have said, I am honestly
bewildered as to the meaning of such passages as this, in which the
advanced person writes that because geologists know nothing about the
Fall, therefore any doctrine of depravity is untrue. Because science has
not found something which obviously it could not find, therefore
something entirely different--the psychological sense of evil--is
untrue. You might sum up this writer's argument abruptly, but
accurately, in some way like this--"We have not dug up the bones of the
Archangel Gabriel, who presumably had none, therefore little boys, left
to themselves, will not be selfish." To me it is all wild and whirling;
as if a man said--"The plumber can find nothing wrong with our piano; so
I suppose that my wife does love me."
I am not going to enter here into the real doctrine of original sin, or
into that probably false version of it which the New Theology writer
calls the doctrine of depravity. But whatever else the worst doctrine
of depravity may have been, it was a product of spiritual conviction; it
had nothing to do with remote physical origins. Men thought mankind
wicked because they felt wicked themselves. If a man feels wicked, I
cannot see why he should suddenly feel good because somebody tells him
that his ancestors once had tails. Man's primary purity and innocence
may have dropped off with his tail, for all anybody knows. The only
thing we all know about that primary purity and innocence is that we
have not got it. Nothing can be, in the strictest sense of the word,
more comic than to set so shadowy a thing as the conjectures made by the
vaguer anthropologists about primitive man against so solid a thing as
the human sense of sin. By its nature the evidence of Eden is something
that one cannot find. By its nature the evidence of sin is something
that one cannot help finding.
Some statements I disagree with; others I do not understand. If a man
says, "I think the human race would be better if it abstained totally
from fermented liquor," I quite understand what he means, and how his
view could be defended. If a man says, "I wish to abolish beer because I
am a temperance man," his remark conveys no meaning to my mind. It is
like saying, "I wish to abolish roads because I am a moderate walker."
If a man says, "I am not a Trinitarian," I understand. But if he says
(as a lady once said to me), "I believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual
sense," I go away dazed. In what other sense could one believe in the
Holy Ghost? And I am sorry to say that this pamphlet of progressive
religious views is full of baffling observations of that kind. What can
people mean when they say that science has disturbed their view of sin?
What sort of view of sin can they have had before science disturbed it?
Did they think that it was something to eat? When people say that
science has shaken their faith in immortality, what do they mean? Did
they think that immortality was a gas?
Of course the real truth is that science has introduced no new principle
into the matter at all. A man can be a Christian to the end of the
world, for the simple reason that a man could have been an Atheist from
the beginning of it. The materialism of things is on the face of things;
it does not require any science to find it out. A man who has lived and
loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you
like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of
that, it can believe in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made
any more hopeless because we know the names of all the worms who eat
him, or the names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a
thoughtful mind somewhat difficult to discover. My chief objection to
these semi-scientific revolutionists is that they are not at all
revolutionary. They are the party of platitude. They do not shake
religion: rather religion seems to shake them. They can only answer the
great paradox by repeating the truism.
CHESTERTON-ALL THING CONSIDERED - LIMERICKS AND COUNSELS OF PERFECTION