CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - VIII: THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS
When, therefore, it is said that the tradition against Female Suffrage
keeps women out of activity, social influence and citizenship,
let us a little more soberly and strictly ask ourselves what it
actually does keep her out of. It does definitely keep her out
of the collective act of coercion; the act of punishment by a mob.
The human tradition does say that, if twenty men hang a man from
a tree or lamp-post, they shall be twenty men and not women.
Now I do not think any reasonable Suffragist will deny
that exclusion from this function, to say the least of it,
might be maintained to be a protection as well as a veto.
No candid person will wholly dismiss the proposition that the idea
of having a Lord Chancellor but not a Lady Chancellor may at least
be connected with the idea of having a headsman but not a headswoman,
a hangman but not a hangwoman. Nor will it be adequate to answer
(as is so often answered to this contention) that in modern
civilization women would not really be required to capture,
to sentence, or to slay; that all this is done indirectly,
that specialists kill our criminals as they kill our cattle.
To urge this is not to urge the reality of the vote, but to urge
its unreality. Democracy was meant to be a more direct way
of ruling, not a more indirect way; and if we do not feel that we
are all jailers, so much the worse for us, and for the prisoners.
If it is really an unwomanly thing to lock up a robber
or a tyrant, it ought to be no softening of the situation
that the woman does not feel as if she were doing the thing
that she certainly is doing. It is bad enough that men can
only associate on paper who could once associate in the street;
it is bad enough that men have made a vote very much of a fiction.
It is much worse that a great class should claim the vote be cause
it is a fiction, who would be sickened by it if it were a fact.
If votes for women do not mean mobs for women they do not mean
what they were meant to mean. A woman can make a cross on a
paper as well as a man; a child could do it as well as a woman;
and a chimpanzee after a few lessons could do it as well as a child.
But nobody ought to regard it merely as making a cross on paper;
everyone ought to regard it as what it ultimately is, branding the
fleur-de-lis, marking the broad arrow, signing the death warrant.
Both men and women ought to face more fully the things they
do or cause to be done; face them or leave off doing them.
On that disastrous day when public executions were abolished,
private executions were renewed and ratified, perhaps forever.
Things grossly unsuited to the moral sentiment of a society cannot
be safely done in broad daylight; but I see no reason why we
should not still be roasting heretics alive, in a private room.
It is very likely (to speak in the manner foolishly called Irish)
that if there were public executions there would be no executions.
The old open-air punishments, the pillory and the gibbet, at least
fixed responsibility upon the law; and in actual practice they gave
the mob an opportunity of throwing roses as well as rotten eggs;
of crying "Hosannah" as well as "Crucify." But I do not like
the public executioner being turned into the private executioner.
I think it is a crooked oriental, sinister sort of business,
and smells of the harem and the divan rather than of the forum
and the market place. In modern times the official has lost
all the social honor and dignity of the common hangman.
He is only the bearer of the bowstring.
Here, however, I suggest a plea for a brutal publicity
only in order to emphasize the fact that it is this brutal
publicity and nothing else from which women have been excluded.
I also say it to emphasize the fact that the mere modern
veiling of the brutality does not make the situation different,
unless we openly say that we are giving the suffrage, not only
because it is power but because it is not, or in other words,
that women are not so much to vote as to play voting.
No suffragist, I suppose, will take up that position; and a few
suffragists will wholly deny that this human necessity of pains
and penalties is an ugly, humiliating business, and that good
motives as well as bad may have helped to keep women out of it.
More than once I have remarked in these pages that female
limitations may be the limits of a temple as well as of
a prison, the disabilities of a priest and not of a pariah.
I noted it, I think, in the case of the pontifical feminine dress.
In the same way it is not evidently irrational, if men decided
that a woman, like a priest, must not be a shedder of blood.
But there is a further fact; forgotten also because we
moderns forget that there is a female point of view.
The woman's wisdom stands partly, not only for a wholesome
hesitation about punishment, but even for a wholesome hesitation
about absolute rules. There was something feminine and
perversely true in that phrase of Wilde's, that people should
not be treated as the rule, but all of them as exceptions.
Made by a man the remark was a little effeminate; for Wilde did
lack the masculine power of dogma and of democratic cooperation.
But if a woman had said it it would have been simply true;
a woman does treat each person as a peculiar person.
In other words, she stands for Anarchy; a very ancient
and arguable philosophy; not anarchy in the sense of having
no customs in one's life (which is inconceivable), but
anarchy in the sense of having no rules for one's mind.
To her, almost certainly, are due all those working traditions
that cannot be found in books, especially those of education;
it was she who first gave a child a stuffed stocking for
being good or stood him in the corner for being naughty.
This unclassified knowledge is sometimes called rule of thumb
and sometimes motherwit. The last phrase suggests the whole truth,
for none ever called it fatherwit.
Now anarchy is only tact when it works badly. Tact is only anarchy
when it works well. And we ought to realize that in one half
of the world--the private house--it does work well. We modern men
are perpetually forgetting that the case for clear rules and crude
penalties is not self-evident, that there is a great deal to be
said for the benevolent lawlessness of the autocrat, especially on
a small scale; in short, that government is only one side of life.
The other half is called Society, in which women are admittedly dominant.
And they have always been ready to maintain that their kingdom is
better governed than ours, because (in the logical and legal sense)
it is not governed at all. "Whenever you have a real difficulty,"
they say, "when a boy is bumptious or an aunt is stingy, when a silly
girl will marry somebody, or a wicked man won't marry somebody, all your
lumbering Roman Law and British Constitution come to a standstill.
A snub from a duchess or a slanging from a fish-wife are much more
likely to put things straight." So, at least, rang the ancient
female challenge down the ages until the recent female capitulation.
So streamed the red standard of the higher anarchy until Miss Pankhurst
hoisted the white flag.
It must be remembered that the modern world has done deep treason
to the eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum.
A man must be dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea
of fatalistic alternation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul
seeking truth. All modern thinkers are reactionaries; for their
thought is always a reaction from what went before. When you meet
a modern man he is always coming from a place, not going to it.
Thus, mankind has in nearly all places and periods seen that there
is a soul and a body as plainly as that there is a sun and moon.
But because a narrow Protestant sect called Materialists declared
for a short time that there was no soul, another narrow Protestant sect
called Christian Science is now maintaining that there is no body.
Now just in the same way the unreasonable neglect of government
by the Manchester School has produced, not a reasonable regard
for government, but an unreasonable neglect of everything else.
So that to hear people talk to-day one would fancy that every
important human function must be organized and avenged by law;
that all education must be state education, and all employment
state employment; that everybody and everything must be
brought to the foot of the august and prehistoric gibbet.
But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind
will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet,
that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory;
and in short that in most important matters a man has always been
free to ruin himself if he chose. The huge fundamental function
upon which all anthropology turns, that of sex and childbirth,
has never been inside the political state, but always outside of it.
The state concerned itself with the trivial question of killing people,
but wisely left alone the whole business of getting them born.
A Eugenist might indeed plausibly say that the government is an
absent-minded and inconsistent person who occupies himself with
providing for the old age of people who have never been infants.
I will not deal here in any detail with the fact that some Eugenists
have in our time made the maniacal answer that the police ought
to control marriage and birth as they control labor and death.
Except for this inhuman handful (with whom I regret to say I shall
have to deal with later) all the Eugenists I know divide themselves
into two sections: ingenious people who once meant this, and rather
bewildered people who swear they never meant it--nor anything else.
But if it be conceded (by a breezier estimate of men) that they
do mostly desire marriage to remain free from government, it does
not follow that they desire it to remain free from everything. If man
does not control the marriage market by law, is it controlled at all?
Surely the answer is broadly that man does not control the marriage
market by law, but the woman does control it by sympathy and prejudice.
There was until lately a law forbidding a man to marry his deceased
wife's sister; yet the thing happened constantly. There was no law
forbidding a man to marry his deceased wife's scullery-maid; yet it did
not happen nearly so often. It did not happen because the marriage
market is managed in the spirit and by the authority of women;
and women are generally conservative where classes are concerned.
It is the same with that system of exclusiveness by which ladies
have so often contrived (as by a process of elimination)
to prevent marriages that they did not want and even sometimes
procure those they did. There is no need of the broad arrow and
the fleur-de lis, the turnkey's chains or the hangman's halter.
You need not strangle a man if you can silence him. The branded
shoulder is less effective and final than the cold shoulder;
and you need not trouble to lock a man in when you can lock him out.
The same, of course, is true of the colossal architecture which we
call infant education: an architecture reared wholly by women.
Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even
the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.
No one, staring at that frightful female privilege, can quite
believe in the equality of the sexes. Here and there we read
of a girl brought up like a tom-boy; but every boy is brought up
like a tame girl. The flesh and spirit of femininity surround
him from the first like the four walls of a house; and even
the vaguest or most brutal man has been womanized by being born.
Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery;
but nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would
belong to such a monster as man that was born of a man.
But, indeed, with this educational matter I must of necessity embroil
myself later. The fourth section of discussion is supposed to be
about the child, but I think it will be mostly about the mother.
In this place I have systematically insisted on the large part
of life that is governed, not by man with his vote, but by woman
with her voice, or more often, with her horrible silence.
Only one thing remains to be added. In a sprawling and explanatory style
has been traced out the idea that government is ultimately coercion,
that coercion must mean cold definitions as well as cruel consequences,
and that therefore there is something to be said for the old human habit
of keeping one-half of humanity out of so harsh and dirty a business.
But the case is stronger still.
Voting is not only coercion, but collective coercion.
I think Queen Victoria would have been yet more popular and satisfying
if she had never signed a death warrant. I think Queen Elizabeth
would have stood out as more solid and splendid in history if she
had not earned (among those who happen to know her history)
the nickname of Bloody Bess. I think, in short, that the great historic
woman is more herself when she is persuasive rather than coercive.
But I feel all mankind behind me when I say that if a woman has
this power it should be despotic power--not democratic power.
There is a much stronger historic argument for giving Miss Pankhurst
a throne than for giving her a vote. She might have a crown,
or at least a coronet, like so many of her supporters;
for these old powers are purely personal and therefore female.
Miss Pankhurst as a despot might be as virtuous as Queen Victoria,
and she certainly would find it difficult to be as wicked as Queen Bess,
but the point is that, good or bad, she would be irresponsible--
she would not be governed by a rule and by a ruler.
There are only two ways of governing: by a rule and by a ruler.
And it is seriously true to say of a woman, in education and domesticity,
that the freedom of the autocrat appears to be necessary to her.
She is never responsible until she is irresponsible.
In case this sounds like an idle contradiction, I confidently
appeal to the cold facts of history. Almost every despotic
or oligarchic state has admitted women to its privileges.
Scarcely one democratic state has ever admitted them to its rights
The reason is very simple: that something female is endangered
much more by the violence of the crowd. In short, one Pankhurst
is an exception, but a thousand Pankhursts are a nightmare,
a Bacchic orgie, a Witches Sabbath. For in all legends men have
thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.
Now I have only taken the test case of Female Suffrage because it
is topical and concrete; it is not of great moment for me as a
political proposal. I can quite imagine anyone substantially
agreeing with my view of woman as universalist and autocrat
in a limited area; and still thinking that she would be none
the worse for a ballot paper. The real question is whether this
old ideal of woman as the great amateur is admitted or not.
There are many modern things which threaten it much more
than suffragism; notably the increase of self-supporting women,
even in the most severe or the most squalid employments.
If there be something against nature in the idea of a horde
of wild women governing, there is something truly intolerable
in the idea of a herd of tame women being governed.
And there are elements in human psychology that make
this situation particularly poignant or ignominous.
The ugly exactitudes of business, the bells and clocks the fixed
hours and rigid departments, were all meant for the male:
who, as a rule, can only do one thing and can only with the greatest
difficulty be induced to do that. If clerks do not try to shirk
their work, our whole great commercial system breaks down.
It is breaking down, under the inroad of women who are adopting
the unprecedented and impossible course of taking the system
seriously and doing it well. Their very efficiency is
the definition of their slavery. It is generally a very bad
sign when one is trusted very much by one's employers.
And if the evasive clerks have a look of being blackguards,
the earnest ladies are often something very like blacklegs.
But the more immediate point is that the modern working woman bears
a double burden, for she endures both the grinding officialism
of the new office and the distracting scrupulosity of the old home.
Few men understand what conscientiousness is. They understand duty,
which generally means one duty; but conscientiousness is
the duty of the universalist. It is limited by no work days
or holidays; it is a lawless, limitless, devouring decorum.
If women are to be subjected to the dull rule of commerce,
we must find some way of emancipating them from the wild
rule of conscience. But I rather fancy you will find it
easier to leave the conscience and knock off the commerce.
As it is, the modern clerk or secretary exhausts herself to put
one thing straight in the ledger and then goes home to put
everything straight in the house.
This condition (described by some as emancipated) is at least
the reverse of my ideal. I would give woman, not more rights,
but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such
freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories,
I would design specially a house in which she can be free.
And with that we come to the last point of all; the point at
which we can perceive the needs of women, like the rights of men,
stopped and falsified by something which it is the object
of this book to expose.
The Feminist (which means, I think, one who dislikes the chief
feminine characteristics) has heard my loose monologue,
bursting all the time with one pent-up protest.
At this point he will break out and say, "But what are we to do?
There is modern commerce and its clerks; there is the modern family
with its unmarried daughters; specialism is expected everywhere;
female thrift and conscientiousness are demanded and supplied.
What does it matter whether we should in the abstract prefer
the old human and housekeeping woman; we might prefer the Garden
of Eden. But since women have trades they ought to have trades unions.
Since women work in factories, they ought to vote on factory-acts. If
they are unmarried they must be commercial; if they are commercial
they must be political. We must have new rules for a new world--
even if it be not a better one." I said to a Feminist once:
"The question is not whether women are good enough for votes:
it is whether votes are good enough for women." He only answered:
"Ah, you go and say that to the women chain-makers on Cradley Heath."
Now this is the attitude which I attack. It is the huge heresy
of Precedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess
we must grow messier to suit it; that because we have taken
a wrong turn some time ago we must go forward and not backwards;
that because we have lost our way we must lose our map also;
and because we have missed our ideal, we must forget it.
"There are numbers of excellent people who do not think votes unfeminine;
and there may be enthusiasts for our beautiful modern industry
who do not think factories unfeminine. But if these things are
unfeminine it is no answer to say that they fit into each other.
I am not satisfied with the statement that my daughter must
have unwomanly powers because she has unwomanly wrongs.
Industrial soot and political printer's ink are two blacks which do
not make a white. Most of the Feminists would probably agree with me
that womanhood is under shameful tyranny in the shops and mills.
But I want to destroy the tyranny. They want to destroy womanhood.
That is the only difference.
Whether we can recover the clear vision of woman as a tower
with many windows, the fixed eternal feminine from which her sons,
the specialists, go forth; whether we can preserve the tradition
of a central thing which is even more human than democracy
and even more practical than politics; whether, in word,
it is possible to re-establish the family, freed from the filthy
cynicism and cruelty of the commercial epoch, I shall discuss
in the last section of this book. But meanwhile do not talk
to me about the poor chain-makers on Cradley Heath. I know
all about them and what they are doing. They are engaged in a
very wide-spread and flourishing industry of the present age.
They are making chains.
When I wrote a little volume on my friend Mr. Bernard Shaw, it is
needless to say that he reviewed it. I naturally felt tempted to answer
and to criticise the book from the same disinterested and impartial
standpoint from which Mr. Shaw had criticised the subject of it.
I was not withheld by any feeling that the joke was getting a
little obvious; for an obvious joke is only a successful joke; it is
only the unsuccessful clowns who comfort themselves with being subtle.
The real reason why I did not answer Mr. Shaw's amusing attack was this:
that one simple phrase in it surrendered to me all that I
have ever wanted, or could want from him to all eternity.
I told Mr. Shaw (in substance) that he was a charming and clever fellow,
but a common Calvinist. He admitted that this was true,
and there (so far as I am concerned) is an end of the matter.
He said that, of course, Calvin was quite right in holding
that "if once a man is born it is too late to damn or save him."
That is the fundamental and subterranean secret; that is the last
lie in hell.
The difference between Puritanism and Catholicism is not about
whether some priestly word or gesture is significant and sacred.
It is about whether any word or gesture is significant and sacred.
To the Catholic every other daily act is dramatic dedication
to the service of good or of evil. To the Calvinist no act
can have that sort of solemnity, because the person doing
it has been dedicated from eternity, and is merely filling
up his time until the crack of doom. The difference is
something subtler than plum-puddings or private theatricals;
the difference is that to a Christian of my kind this short
earthly life is intensely thrilling and precious; to a Calvinist
like Mr. Shaw it is confessedly automatic and uninteresting.
To me these threescore years and ten are the battle.
To the Fabian Calvinist (by his own confession) they are only a long
procession of the victors in laurels and the vanquished in chains.
To me earthly life is the drama; to him it is the epilogue.
Shavians think about the embryo; Spiritualists about the ghost;
Christians about the man. It is as well to have these things clear.
Now all our sociology and eugenics and the rest of it are
not so much materialist as confusedly Calvinist, they are
chiefly occupied in educating the child before he exists.
The whole movement is full of a singular depression about
what one can do with the populace, combined with a strange
disembodied gayety about what may be done with posterity.
These essential Calvinists have, indeed, abolished some of the more
liberal and universal parts of Calvinism, such as the belief
in an intellectual design or an everlasting happiness.
But though Mr. Shaw and his friends admit it is a superstition that
a man is judged after death, they stick to their central doctrine,
that he is judged before he is born.
In consequence of this atmosphere of Calvinism in the cultured world
of to-day, it is apparently necessary to begin all arguments on education
with some mention of obstetrics and the unknown world of the prenatal.
All I shall have to say, however, on heredity will be very brief,
because I shall confine myself to what is known about it, and that is
very nearly nothing. It is by no means self-evident, but it is a current
modern dogma, that nothing actually enters the body at birth except a life
derived and compounded from the parents. There is at least quite as much
to be said for the Christian theory that an element comes from God, or the
Buddhist theory that such an element comes from previous existences.
But this is not a religious work, and I must submit to those very narrow
intellectual limits which the absence of theology always imposes.
Leaving the soul on one side, let us suppose for the sake of argument
that the human character in the first case comes wholly from parents;
and then let us curtly state our knowledge rather than our ignorance.
Popular science, like that of Mr. Blatchford, is in this matter as mild
as old wives' tales. Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity,
explained to millions of clerks and workingmen that the mother is like
a bottle of blue beads and the father is like a bottle of yellow beads;
and so the child is like a bottle of mixed blue beads and yellow.
He might just as well have said that if the father has two legs
and the mother has two legs, the child will have four legs.
Obviously it is not a question of simple addition or simple
division of a number of hard detached "qualities," like beads.
It is an organic crisis and transformation of the most mysterious sort;
so that even if the result is unavoidable, it will still be unexpected.
It is not like blue beads mixed with yellow beads; it is like blue
mixed with yellow; the result of which is green, a totally novel
and unique experience, a new emotion. A man might live in a complete
cosmos of blue and yellow, like the "Edinburgh Review"; a man might
never have seen anything but a golden cornfield and a sapphire sky;
and still he might never have had so wild a fancy as green.
If you paid a sovereign for a bluebell; if you spilled the mustard
on the blue-books; if you married a canary to a blue baboon;
there is nothing in any of these wild weddings that contains even
a hint of green. Green is not a mental combination, like addition;
it is a physical result like birth. So, apart from the fact that
nobody ever really understands parents or children either, yet even
if we could understand the parents, we could not make any conjecture
about the children. Each time the force works in a different way;
each time the constituent colors combine into a different spectacle.
A girl may actually inherit her ugliness from her mother's good looks.
A boy may actually get his weakness from his father's strength.
Even if we admit it is really a fate, for us it must remain a fairy tale.
Considered in regard to its causes, the Calvinists and materialists
may be right or wrong; we leave them their dreary debate.
But considered in regard to its results there is no doubt about it.
The thing is always a new color; a strange star. Every birth is as
lonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a monstrosity.
On all such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of
ardent ignorance; and nobody has ever been able to offer any theories
of moral heredity which justified themselves in the only scientific sense;
that is that one could calculate on them beforehand. There are
six cases, say, of a grandson having the same twitch of mouth or vice
of character as his grandfather; or perhaps there are sixteen cases,
or perhaps sixty. But there are not two cases, there is not one case,
there are no cases at all, of anybody betting half a crown that
the grandfather will have a grandson with the twitch or the vice.
In short, we deal with heredity as we deal with omens, affinities and
the fulfillment of dreams. The things do happen, and when they
happen we record them; but not even a lunatic ever reckons on them.
Indeed, heredity, like dreams and omens, is a barbaric notion; that is,
not necessarily an untrue, but a dim, groping and unsystematized notion.
A civilized man feels himself a little more free from his family.
Before Christianity these tales of tribal doom occupied the savage north;
and since the Reformation and the revolt against Christianity
(which is the religion of a civilized freedom) savagery is slowly
creeping back in the form of realistic novels and problem plays.
The curse of Rougon-Macquart is as heathen and superstitious as the curse
of Ravenswood; only not so well written. But in this twilight barbaric
sense the feeling of a racial fate is not irrational, and may be
allowed like a hundred other half emotions that make life whole.
The only essential of tragedy is that one should take it lightly.
But even when the barbarian deluge rose to its highest in the madder
novels of Zola (such as that called "The Human Beast", a gross
libel on beasts as well as humanity), even then the application
of the hereditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and fumbling.
The students of heredity are savages in this vital sense; that they
stare back at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to schemes.
In practice no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas
of physical inheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely
used except for special modern purposes, such as the endowment
of research or the oppression of the poor.
After all the modern clatter of Calvinism, therefore, it is
only with the born child that anybody dares to deal;
and the question is not eugenics but education. Or again,
to adopt that rather tiresome terminology of popular science,
it is not a question of heredity but of environment.
I will not needlessly complicate this question by urging at
length that environment also is open to some of the objections
and hesitations which paralyze the employment of heredity.
I will merely suggest in passing that even about the effect of
environment modern people talk much too cheerfully and cheaply.
The idea that surroundings will mold a man is always mixed up
with the totally different idea that they will mold him in one
particular way. To take the broadest case, landscape no doubt
affects the soul; but how it affects it is quite another matter.
To be born among pine-trees might mean loving pine-trees.
It might mean loathing pine-trees. It might quite seriously
mean never having seen a pine-tree. Or it might mean
any mixture of these or any degree of any of them.
So that the scientific method here lacks a little in precision.
I am not speaking without the book; on the contrary, I am
speaking with the blue book, with the guide-book and the atlas.
It may be that the Highlanders are poetical because they
inhabit mountains; but are the Swiss prosaic because they
inhabit mountains? It may be the Swiss have fought for freedom
because they had hills; did the Dutch fight for freedom
because they hadn't? Personally I should think it quite likely.
Environment might work negatively as well as positively.
The Swiss may be sensible, not in spite of their wild skyline,
but be cause of their wild skyline. The Flemings may be
fantastic artists, not in spite of their dull skyline,
but because of it.
I only pause on this parenthesis to show that, even in
matters admittedly within its range, popular science goes
a great deal too fast, and drops enormous links of logic.
Nevertheless, it remains the working reality that what we
have to deal with in the case of children is, for all practical
purposes, environment; or, to use the older word, education.
When all such deductions are made, education is at least
a form of will-worship; not of cowardly fact-worship;
it deals with a department that we can control; it does not
merely darken us with the barbarian pessimism of Zola and
the heredity-hunt. We shall certainly make fools of ourselves;
that is what is meant by philosophy. But we shall not merely
make beasts of ourselves; which is the nearest popular definition
for merely following the laws of Nature and cowering under
the vengeance of the flesh Education contains much moonshine;
but not of the sort that makes mere mooncalves and idiots
the slaves of a silver magnet, the one eye of the world.
In this decent arena there are fads, but not frenzies.
Doubtless we shall often find a mare's nest; but it will not
always be the nightmare's.
CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - VIII: THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS