CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XIV In Topsy-Turvy Land
Once when I was very young I met one of those men who have
made the Empire what it is--a man in an astracan coat,
with an astracan moustache--a tight, black, curly moustache.
Whether he put on the moustache with the coat or whether his Napoleonic
will enabled him not only to grow a moustache in the usual place,
but also to grow little moustaches all over his clothes, I do not know.
I only remember that he said to me the following words: "A man can't
get on nowadays by hanging about with his hands in his pockets."
I made reply with the quite obvious flippancy that perhaps a man got
on by having his hands in other people's pockets; whereupon he began
to argue about Moral Evolution, so I suppose what I said had some
truth in it. But the incident now comes back to me, and connects
itself with another incident--if you can call it an incident--
which happened to me only the other day.
I have only once in my life picked a pocket, and then (perhaps through
some absent-mindedness) I picked my own. My act can really with some
reason be so described. For in taking things out of my own pocket I
had at least one of the more tense and quivering emotions of the thief;
I had a complete ignorance and a profound curiosity as to what I should
find there. Perhaps it would be the exaggeration of eulogy to call me a
tidy person. But I can always pretty satisfactorily account for all my
possessions. I can always tell where they are, and what I have done with
them, so long as I can keep them out of my pockets. If once anything
slips into those unknown abysses, I wave it a sad Virgilian farewell.
I suppose that the things that I have dropped into my pockets
are still there; the same presumption applies to the things
that I have dropped into the sea. But I regard the riches stored
in both these bottomless chasms with the same reverent ignorance.
They tell us that on the last day the sea will give up its dead;
and I suppose that on the same occasion long strings of
extraordinary things will come running out of my pockets.
But I have quite forgotten what any of them are; and there
is really nothing (excepting the money) that I shall be at all
surprised at finding among them.
. . . . .
Such at least has hitherto been my state of innocence.
I here only wish briefly to recall the special, extraordinary,
and hitherto unprecedented circumstances which led me in
cold blood, and being of sound mind, to turn out my pockets.
I was locked up in a third-class carriage for a rather long journey.
The time was towards evening, but it might have been anything,
for everything resembling earth or sky or light or shade
was painted out as if with a great wet brush by an unshifting
sheet of quite colourless rain. I had no books or newspapers.
I had not even a pencil and a scrap of paper with which
to write a religious epic. There were no advertisements
on the walls of the carriage, otherwise I could have plunged
into the study, for any collection of printed words is quite
enough to suggest infinite complexities of mental ingenuity.
When I find myself opposite the words "Sunlight Soap" I can
exhaust all the aspects of Sun Worship, Apollo, and Summer
poetry before I go on to the less congenial subject of soap.
But there was no printed word or picture anywhere; there was
nothing but blank wood inside the carriage and blank wet without.
Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can
be, uninteresting. So I stared at the joints of the walls and seats,
and began thinking hard on the fascinating subject of wood.
Just as I had begun to realise why, perhaps, it was that Christ
was a carpenter, rather than a bricklayer, or a baker,
or anything else, I suddenly started upright, and remembered
my pockets. I was carrying about with me an unknown treasury.
I had a British Museum and a South Kensington collection
of unknown curios hung all over me in different places.
I began to take the things out.
. . . . .
The first thing I came upon consisted of piles and heaps of
Battersea tram tickets. There were enough to equip a paper chase.
They shook down in showers like confetti. Primarily, of course,
they touched my patriotic emotions, and brought tears to my eyes;
also they provided me with the printed matter I required,
for I found on the back of them some short but striking
little scientific essays about some kind of pill. Comparatively
speaking, in my then destitution, those tickets might be regarded
as a small but well-chosen scientific library. Should my railway
journey continue (which seemed likely at the time) for a few months
longer, I could imagine myself throwing myself into the controversial
aspects of the pill, composing replies and rejoinders pro and con
upon the data furnished to me. But after all it was the symbolic
quality of the tickets that moved me most. For as certainly as the
cross of St. George means English patriotism, those scraps of paper
meant all that municipal patriotism which is now, perhaps, the
greatest hope of England.
The next thing that I took out was a pocket-knife. A pocket-knife,
I need hardly say, would require a thick book full of moral
meditations all to itself. A knife typifies one of the most
primary of those practical origins upon which as upon low,
thick pillows all our human civilisation reposes. Metals, the
mystery of the thing called iron and of the thing called steel,
led me off half-dazed into a kind of dream. I saw into the
intrails of dim, damp wood, where the first man among all the
common stones found the strange stone. I saw a vague and violent
battle, in which stone axes broke and stone knives were splintered
against something shining and new in the hand of one desperate man.
I heard all the hammers on all the anvils of the earth.
I saw all the swords of Feudal and all the weals of Industrial war.
For the knife is only a short sword; and the pocket-knife
is a secret sword. I opened it and looked at that brilliant
and terrible tongue which we call a blade; and I thought that
perhaps it was the symbol of the oldest of the needs of man.
The next moment I knew that I was wrong; for the thing
that came next out of my pocket was a box of matches.
Then I saw fire, which is stronger even than steel, the old,
fierce female thing, the thing we all love, but dare not touch.
The next thing I found was a piece of chalk; and I saw
in it all the art and all the frescoes of the world.
The next was a coin of a very modest value; and I saw in it
not only the image and superscription of our own Caesar,
but all government and order since the world began.
But I have not space to say what were the items in the long and
splendid procession of poetical symbols that came pouring out.
I cannot tell you all the things that were in my pocket.
I can tell you one thing, however, that I could not find in my pocket.
I allude to my railway ticket.
I met a man the other day who did not believe in fairy tales.
I do not mean that he did not believe in the incidents narrated
in them--that he did not believe that a pumpkin could turn into
a coach. He did, indeed, entertain this curious disbelief.
And, like all the other people I have ever met who entertained it,
he was wholly unable to give me an intelligent reason for it.
He tried the laws of nature, but he soon dropped that.
Then he said that pumpkins were unalterable in ordinary experience,
and that we all reckoned on their infinitely protracted pumpkinity.
But I pointed out to him that this was not an attitude we
adopt specially towards impossible marvels, but simply
the attitude we adopt towards all unusual occurrences.
If we were certain of miracles we should not count on them.
Things that happen very seldom we all leave out of
our calculations, whether they are miraculous or not.
I do not expect a glass of water to be turned into wine;
but neither do I expect a glass of water to be poisoned with
prussic acid. I do not in ordinary business relations act
on the assumption that the editor is a fairy; but neither do I
act on the assumption that he is a Russian spy, or the lost
heir of the Holy Roman Empire. What we assume in action is
not that the natural order is unalterable, but simply that it
is much safer to bet on uncommon incidents than on common ones.
This does not touch the credibility of any attested tale
about a Russian spy or a pumpkin turned into a coach.
If I had seen a pumpkin turned into a Panhard motor-car
with my own eyes that would not make me any more inclined
to assume that the same thing would happen again. I should not
invest largely in pumpkins with an eye to the motor trade.
Cinderella got a ball dress from the fairy; but I do not suppose
that she looked after her own clothes any the less after it.
But the view that fairy tales cannot really have happened,
though crazy, is common. The man I speak of disbelieved
in fairy tales in an even more amazing and perverted sense.
He actually thought that fairy tales ought not to be told
to children. That is (like a belief in slavery or annexation)
one of those intellectual errors which lie very near
to ordinary mortal sins. There are some refusals which,
though they may be done what is called conscientiously,
yet carry so much of their whole horror in the very act of them,
that a man must in doing them not only harden but slightly
corrupt his heart. One of them was the refusal of milk to young
mothers when their husbands were in the field against us.
Another is the refusal of fairy tales to children.
. . . . .
The man had come to see me in connection with some silly society
of which I am an enthusiastic member; he was a fresh-coloured,
short-sighted young man, like a stray curate who was too
helpless even to find his way to the Church of England. He had a
curious green necktie and a very long neck; I am always meeting
idealists with very long necks. Perhaps it is that their eternal
aspiration slowly lifts their heads nearer and nearer to the stars.
Or perhaps it has something to do with the fact that so many of
them are vegetarians: perhaps they are slowly evolving the neck of
the giraffe so that they can eat all the tops of the trees in
Kensington Gardens. These things are in every sense above me.
Such, anyhow, was the young man who did not believe in fairy tales;
and by a curious coincidence he entered the room when I had just
finished looking through a pile of contemporary fiction, and had
begun to read "Grimm's Fairy tales" as a natural consequence.
The modern novels stood before me, however, in a stack; and you can
imagine their titles for yourself. There was "Suburban Sue: A Tale
of Psychology," and also "Psychological Sue: A Tale of Suburbia";
there was "Trixy: A Temperament," and "Man-Hate: A Monochrome," and all
those nice things. I read them with real interest, but, curiously enough,
I grew tired of them at last, and when I saw "Grimm's Fairy Tales"
lying accidentally on the table, I gave a cry of indecent joy.
Here at least, here at last, one could find a little common sense.
I opened the book, and my eyes fell on these splendid and satisfying
words, "The Dragon's Grandmother." That at least was reasonable;
that at least was true. "The Dragon's Grandmother!" While I was
rolling this first touch of ordinary human reality upon my tongue,
I looked up suddenly and saw this monster with a green tie standing
in the doorway.
. . . . .
I listened to what he said about the society politely enough,
I hope; but when he incidentally mentioned that he did not believe
in fairy tales, I broke out beyond control. "Man," I said,
"who are you that you should not believe in fairy tales?
It is much easier to believe in Blue Beard than to believe in you.
A blue beard is a misfortune; but there are green ties which are sins.
It is far easier to believe in a million fairy tales
than to believe in one man who does not like fairy tales.
I would rather kiss Grimm instead of a Bible and swear to all
his stories as if they were thirty-nine articles than say
seriously and out of my heart that there can be such a man as you;
that you are not some temptation of the devil or some delusion
from the void. Look at these plain, homely, practical words.
'The Dragon's Grandmother,' that is all right; that is rational
almost to the verge of rationalism. If there was a dragon,
he had a grandmother. But you--you had no grandmother!
If you had known one, she would have taught you to love fairy tales.
You had no father, you had no mother; no natural causes can explain you.
You cannot be. I believe many things which I have not seen;
but of such things as you it may be said, 'Blessed is he that has
seen and yet has disbelieved.'"
. . . . .
It seemed to me that he did not follow me with sufficient delicacy,
so I moderated my tone. "Can you not see," I said, "that fairy
tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward;
but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its
nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul
is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels.
Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that
the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is--
what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem
of the modern novel is--what will a madman do with a dull world?
In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad.
In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins,
and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.
In the excellent tale of 'The Dragon's Grandmother,' in all the other
tales of Grimm, it is assumed that the young man setting out on his
travels will have all substantial truths in him; that he will be brave,
full of faith, reasonable, that he will respect his parents,
keep his word, rescue one kind of people, defy another kind,
'parcere subjectis et debellare,' etc. Then, having assumed
this centre of sanity, the writer entertains himself by fancying
what would happen if the whole world went mad all round it,
if the sun turned green and the moon blue, if horses had six legs
and giants had two heads. But your modern literature takes insanity
as its centre. Therefore, it loses the interest even of insanity.
A lunatic is not startling to himself, because he is quite serious;
that is what makes him a lunatic. A man who thinks he is
a piece of glass is to himself as dull as a piece of glass.
A man who thinks he is a chicken is to himself as common as a chicken.
It is only sanity that can see even a wild poetry in insanity.
Therefore, these wise old tales made the hero ordinary and
the tale extraordinary. But you have made the hero extraordinary
and the tale ordinary--so ordinary--oh, so very ordinary."
I saw him still gazing at me fixedly. Some nerve snapped in me
under the hypnotic stare. I leapt to my feet and cried, "In the name
of God and Democracy and the Dragon's grandmother--in the name of all
good things--I charge you to avaunt and haunt this house no more."
Whether or no it was the result of the exorcism, there is no doubt
that he definitely went away.
I find that there really are human beings who think fairy tales bad
for children. I do not speak of the man in the green tie, for him
I can never count truly human. But a lady has written me an earnest
letter saying that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even
if they are true. She says that it is cruel to tell children fairy
tales, because it frightens them. You might just as well say that
it is cruel to give girls sentimental novels because it makes them cry.
All this kind of talk is based on that complete forgetting
of what a child is like which has been the firm foundation
of so many educational schemes. If you keep bogies and goblins
away from children they would make them up for themselves.
One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg.
One small child can imagine monsters too big and black
to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly
and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic.
The child, to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he
continues to indulge in them even when he does not like them.
There is just as much difficulty in saying exactly where pure
pain begins in his case, as there is in ours when we walk of our
own free will into the torture-chamber of a great tragedy.
The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from
the universe of the soul.
. . . . .
The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable;
they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very
alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily
and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear
the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it--
because it is a fact. Fairy tales, then, are not responsible
for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear;
fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly;
that is in the child already, because it is in the world already.
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey.
What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea
of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known
the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination.
What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to
kill the dragon.
Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him
for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless
terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies
in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe
more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.
When I was a child I have stared at the darkness until the whole
black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller than heaven.
If there was one star in the sky it only made him a Cyclops.
But fairy tales restored my mental health, for next day I read
an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite
equal dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself
(of similar inexperience and even lower social status)
by means of a sword, some bad riddles, and a brave heart.
Sometimes the sea at night seemed as dreadful as any dragon.
But then I was acquainted with many youngest sons and little
sailors to whom a dragon or two was as simple as the sea.
Take the most horrible of Grimm's tales in incident and imagery,
the excellent tale of the "Boy who Could not Shudder," and you
will see what I mean. There are some living shocks in that tale.
I remember specially a man's legs which fell down the chimney
by themselves and walked about the room, until they were rejoined
by the severed head and body which fell down the chimney after them.
That is very good. But the point of the story and the point
of the reader's feelings is not that these things are frightening,
but the far more striking fact that the hero was not frightened at them.
The most fearful of all these fearful wonders was his own absence
of fear. He slapped the bogies on the back and asked the devils
to drink wine with him; many a time in my youth, when stifled with some
modern morbidity, I have prayed for a double portion of his spirit.
If you have not read the end of his story, go and read it;
it is the wisest thing in the world. The hero was at last taught
to shudder by taking a wife, who threw a pail of cold water over him.
In that one sentence there is more of the real meaning of marriage
than in all the books about sex that cover Europe and America.
. . . . .
At the four corners of a child's bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd and
St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making
him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone.
For the devils, alas, we have always believed in. The hopeful element in
the universe has in modern times continually been denied and reasserted;
but the hopeless element has never for a moment been denied.
As I told "H. N. B." (whom I pause to wish a Happy Christmas in its
most superstitious sense), the one thing modern people really do
believe in is damnation. The greatest of purely modern poets summed
up the really modern attitude in that fine Agnostic line--
"There may be Heaven; there must be Hell."
The gloomy view of the universe has been a continuous tradition;
and the new types of spiritual investigation or conjecture all begin
by being gloomy. A little while ago men believed in no spirits.
Now they are beginning rather slowly to believe in rather slow spirits.
. . . . .
Some people objected to spiritualism, table rappings, and such things,
because they were undignified, because the ghosts cracked jokes or
waltzed with dinner-tables. I do not share this objection in the least.
I wish the spirits were more farcical than they are. That they
should make more jokes and better ones, would be my suggestion.
For almost all the spiritualism of our time, in so far as it is new,
is solemn and sad. Some Pagan gods were lawless, and some Christian
saints were a little too serious; but the spirits of modern spiritualism
are both lawless and serious--a disgusting combination. The specially
contemporary spirits are not only devils, they are blue devils.
This is, first and last, the real value of Christmas; in so far
as the mythology remains at all it is a kind of happy mythology.
Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus; but it is the season
of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.
But if there is anyone who does not comprehend the defect in our
world which I am civilising, I should recommend him, for instance,
to read a story by Mr. Henry James, called "The Turn of the Screw."
It is one of the most powerful things ever written, and it is one
of the things about which I doubt most whether it ought ever to have
been written at all. It describes two innocent children gradually
growing at once omniscient and half-witted under the influence of
the foul ghosts of a groom and a governess. As I say, I doubt whether
Mr. Henry James ought to have published it (no, it is not indecent,
do not buy it; it is a spiritual matter), but I think the question
so doubtful that I will give that truly great man a chance.
I will approve the thing as well as admire it if he will write
another tale just as powerful about two children and Santa Claus.
If he will not, or cannot, then the conclusion is clear; we can
deal strongly with gloomy mystery, but not with happy mystery;
we are not rationalists, but diabolists.
. . . . .
I have thought vaguely of all this staring at a great red fire that
stands up in the room like a great red angel. But, perhaps, you have
never heard of a red angel. But you have heard of a blue devil.
That is exactly what I mean.
I have been standing where everybody has stood, opposite the great
Belfry Tower of Bruges, and thinking, as every one has thought
(though not, perhaps, said), that it is built in defiance of all decencies
of architecture. It is made in deliberate disproportion to achieve
the one startling effect of height. It is a church on stilts.
But this sort of sublime deformity is characteristic of the whole fancy
and energy of these Flemish cities. Flanders has the flattest and most
prosaic landscapes, but the most violent and extravagant of buildings.
Here Nature is tame; it is civilisation that is untamable.
Here the fields are as flat as a paved square; but, on the other hand,
the streets and roofs are as uproarious as a forest in a great wind.
The waters of wood and meadow slide as smoothly and meekly
as if they were in the London water-pipes. But the parish
pump is carved with all the creatures out of the wilderness.
Part of this is true, of course, of all art. We talk of wild animals,
but the wildest animal is man. There are sounds in music that are
more ancient and awful than the cry of the strangest beast at night.
And so also there are buildings that are shapeless in their strength,
seeming to lift themselves slowly like monsters from the primal mire,
and there are spires that seem to fly up suddenly like a startled bird.
. . . . .
This savagery even in stone is the expression of the special spirit
in humanity. All the beasts of the field are respectable; it is only
man who has broken loose. All animals are domestic animals; only man
is ever undomestic. All animals are tame animals; it is only we who
are wild. And doubtless, also, while this queer energy is common to
all human art, it is also generally characteristic of Christian art
among the arts of the world. This is what people really mean when
they say that Christianity is barbaric, and arose in ignorance.
As a matter of historic fact, it didn't; it arose in the most
equably civilised period the world has ever seen.
But it is true that there is something in it that breaks
the outline of perfect and conventional beauty, something that dots
with anger the blind eyes of the Apollo and lashes to a cavalry
charge the horses of the Elgin Marbles. Christianity is savage,
in the sense that it is primeval; there is in it a touch
of the nigger hymn. I remember a debate in which I had praised
militant music in ritual, and some one asked me if I could
imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band.
I said I could imagine it with the greatest ease; for Christ
definitely approved a natural noisiness at a great moment.
When the street children shouted too loud, certain priggish
disciples did begin to rebuke them in the name of good taste.
He said: "If these were silent the very stones would cry out."
With these words He called up all the wealth of artistic
creation that has been founded on this creed. With those words
He founded Gothic architecture. For in a town like this,
which seems to have grown Gothic as a wood grows leaves,
anywhere and anyhow, any odd brick or moulding may be carved off
into a shouting face. The front of vast buildings is thronged
with open mouths, angels praising God, or devils defying Him.
Rock itself is racked and twisted, until it seems to scream.
The miracle is accomplished; the very stones cry out.
But though this furious fancy is certainly a specialty of men among
creatures, and of Christian art among arts, it is still most notable
in the art of Flanders. All Gothic buildings are full of extravagant
things in detail; but this is an extravagant thing in design. All
Christian temples worth talking about have gargoyles; but Bruges
Belfry is a gargoyle. It is an unnaturally long-necked animal, like
a giraffe. The same impression of exaggeration is forced on the mind
at every corner of a Flemish town. And if any one asks,
"Why did the people of these flat countries instinctively raise
these riotous and towering monuments?" the only answer one can
give is, "Because they were the people of these flat countries."
If any one asks, "Why the men of Bruges sacrificed architecture
and everything to the sense of dizzy and divine heights?"
we can only answer, "Because Nature gave them no encouragement
to do so."
. . . . .
As I stare at the Belfry, I think with a sort of smile of some
of my friends in London who are quite sure of how children will
turn out if you give them what they call "the right environment."
It is a troublesome thing, environment, for it sometimes works
positively and sometimes negatively, and more often between the two.
A beautiful environment may make a child love beauty;
it may make him bored with beauty; most likely the two effects
will mix and neutralise each other. Most likely, that is,
the environment will make hardly any difference at all.
In the scientific style of history (which was recently fashionable,
and is still conventional) we always had a list of countries
that had owed their characteristics to their physical conditions.
The Spaniards (it was said) are passionate because their country
is hot; Scandinavians adventurous because their country is cold;
Englishmen naval because they are islanders; Switzers free
because they are mountaineers. It is all very nice in its way.
Only unfortunately I am quite certain that I could make up quite
as long a list exactly contrary in its argument point-blank
against the influence of their geographical environment.
Thus Spaniards have discovered more continents than Scandinavians
because their hot climate discouraged them from exertion.
Thus Dutchmen have fought for their freedom quite as
bravely as Switzers because the Dutch have no mountains.
Thus Pagan Greece and Rome and many Mediterranean peoples have
specially hated the sea because they had the nicest sea to deal with,
the easiest sea to manage. I could extend the list for ever.
But however long it was, two examples would certainly stand up in it
as pre-eminent and unquestionable. The first is that the Swiss,
who live under staggering precipices and spires of eternal snow,
have produced no art or literature at all, and are by far
the most mundane, sensible, and business-like people in Europe.
The other is that the people of Belgium, who live in a country
like a carpet, have, by an inner energy, desired to exalt their
towers till they struck the stars.
As it is therefore quite doubtful whether a person will go specially
with his environment or specially against his environment,
I cannot comfort myself with the thought that the modern
discussions about environment are of much practical value.
But I think I will not write any more about these modern
theories, but go on looking at the Belfry of Bruges. I would
give them the greater attention if I were not pretty well
convinced that the theories will have disappeared a long time
before the Belfry.
Several years ago, when there was a small war going on in South Africa
and a great fuss going on in England, when it was by no means so popular
and convenient to be a Pro-Boer as it is now, I remember making
a bright suggestion to my Pro-Boer friends and allies, which was not,
I regret to say, received with the seriousness it deserved.
I suggested that a band of devoted and noble youths, including ourselves,
should express our sense of the pathos of the President's and
the Republic's fate by growing Kruger beards under our chins.
I imagined how abruptly this decoration would alter the appearance
of Mr. John Morley; how startling it would be as it emerged from under
the chin of Mr. Lloyd-George. But the younger men, my own friends,
on whom I more particularly urged it, men whose names are in many cases
familiar to the readers of this paper--Mr. Masterman's for instance,
and Mr. Conrad Noel--they, I felt, being young and beautiful,
would do even more justice to the Kruger beard, and when walking
down the street with it could not fail to attract attention.
The beard would have been a kind of counterblast to the Rhodes hat.
An appropriate counterblast; for the Rhodesian power in Africa
is only an external thing, placed upon the top like a hat;
the Dutch power and tradition is a thing rooted and growing
like a beard; we have shaved it, and it is growing again.
The Kruger beard would represent time and the natural processes.
You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.
. . . . .
After making this proposal to my friends I hurriedly left town.
I went down to a West Country place where there was shortly afterwards
an election, at which I enjoyed myself very much canvassing for
the Liberal candidate. The extraordinary thing was that he got in.
I sometimes lie awake at night and meditate upon that mystery;
but it must not detain us now. The rather singular incident
which happened to me then, and which some recent events have
recalled to me, happened while the canvassing was still going on.
It was a burning blue day, and the warm sunshine, settling everywhere
on the high hedges and the low hills, brought out into a kind
of heavy bloom that HUMANE quality of the landscape which,
as far as I know, only exists in England; that sense as if
the bushes and the roads were human, and had kindness like men;
as if the tree were a good giant with one wooden leg;
as if the very line of palings were a row of good-tempered gnomes.
On one side of the white, sprawling road a low hill or down
showed but a little higher than the hedge, on the other the land
tumbled down into a valley that opened towards the Mendip hills.
The road was very erratic, for every true English road exists
in order to lead one a dance; and what could be more beautiful
and beneficent than a dance? At an abrupt turn of it I came upon
a low white building, with dark doors and dark shuttered windows,
evidently not inhabited and scarcely in the ordinary sense inhabitable--
a thing more like a toolhouse than a house of any other kind.
Made idle by the heat, I paused, and, taking a piece of red chalk
out of my pocket, began drawing aimlessly on the back door--
drawing goblins and Mr. Chamberlain, and finally the ideal
Nationalist with the Kruger beard. The materials did not permit
of any delicate rendering of his noble and national expansion
of countenance (stoical and yet hopeful, full of tears for man,
and yet of an element of humour); but the hat was finely handled.
Just as I was adding the finishing touches to the Kruger fantasy,
I was frozen to the spot with terror. The black door,
which I thought no more of than the lid of an empty box,
began slowly to open, impelled from within by a human hand.
And President Kruger himself came out into the sunlight!
He was a shade milder of eye than he was in his portraits, and he did
not wear that ceremonial scarf which was usually, in such pictures,
slung across his ponderous form. But there was the hat which filled
the Empire with so much alarm; there were the clumsy dark clothes,
there was the heavy, powerful face; there, above all, was the Kruger
beard which I had sought to evoke (if I may use the verb) from under
the features of Mr. Masterman. Whether he had the umbrella or not I
was too much emotionally shaken to observe; he had not the stone
lions with him, or Mrs. Kruger; and what he was doing in that dark
shed I cannot imagine, but I suppose he was oppressing an Outlander.
I was surprised, I must confess, to meet President Kruger
in Somersetshire during the war. I had no idea that he was in
the neighbourhood. But a yet more arresting surprise awaited me.
Mr. Kruger regarded me for some moments with a dubious grey eye,
and then addressed me with a strong Somersetshire accent.
A curious cold shock went through me to hear that inappropriate voice
coming out of that familiar form. It was as if you met a Chinaman,
with pigtail and yellow jacket, and he began to talk broad Scotch.
But the next moment, of course, I understood the situation.
We had much underrated the Boers in supposing that the Boer
education was incomplete. In pursuit of his ruthless plot
against our island home, the terrible President had learnt not
only English, but all the dialects at a moment's notice to win
over a Lancashire merchant or seduce a Northumberland Fusilier.
No doubt, if I asked him, this stout old gentleman could
grind out Sussex, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, and so on,
like the tunes in a barrel organ. I could not wonder if our plain,
true-hearted German millionaires fell before a cunning so penetrated
with culture as this.
. . . . .
And now I come to the third and greatest surprise of all
that this strange old man gave me. When he asked me,
dryly enough, but not without a certain steady civility
that belongs to old-fashioned country people, what I wanted
and what I was doing, I told him the facts of the case,
explaining my political mission and the almost angelic qualities
of the Liberal candidate. Whereupon, this old man became
suddenly transfigured in the sunlight into a devil of wrath.
It was some time before I could understand a word he said,
but the one word that kept on recurring was the word "Kruger,"
and it was invariably accompanied with a volley of violent terms.
Was I for old Kruger, was I? Did I come to him and want him
to help old Kruger? I ought to be ashamed, I was . . . and
here he became once more obscure. The one thing that he made
quite clear was that he wouldn't do anything for Kruger.
"But you ARE Kruger," burst from my lips, in a natural explosion
of reasonableness. "You ARE Kruger, aren't you?"
After this innocent CRI DE COEUR of mine, I thought at first
there would be a fight, and I remembered with regret that
the President in early life had had a hobby of killing lions.
But really I began to think that I had been mistaken, and that it
was not the President after all. There was a confounding sincerity
in the anger with which he declared that he was Farmer Bowles,
and everybody knowed it. I appeased him eventually and parted
from him at the door of his farmhouse, where he left me with a few
tags of religion, which again raised my suspicions of his identity.
In the coffee-room to which I returned there was an illustrated
paper with a picture of President Kruger, and he and Farmer Bowles
were as like as two peas. There was a picture also of a group
of Outlander leaders, and the faces of them, leering and triumphant,
were perhaps unduly darkened by the photograph, but they seemed
to me like the faces of a distant and hostile people.
I saw the old man once again on the fierce night of the poll,
when he drove down our Liberal lines in a little cart ablaze
with the blue Tory ribbons, for he was a man who would carry his
colours everywhere. It was evening, and the warm western light was
on the grey hair and heavy massive features of that good old man.
I knew as one knows a fact of sense that if Spanish and German
stockbrokers had flooded his farm or country he would
have fought them for ever, not fiercely like an Irishman,
but with the ponderous courage and ponderous cunning of the Boer.
I knew that without seeing it, as certainly as I knew without
seeing it that when he went into the polling room he put his
cross against the Conservative name. Then he came out again,
having given his vote and looking more like Kruger than ever.
And at the same hour on the same night thousands upon thousands
of English Krugers gave the same vote. And thus Kruger was
pulled down and the dark-faced men in the photograph reigned
in his stead.
CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XIV In Topsy-Turvy Land