A MISCELLANY OF MEN
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G. K. Chesterton >> A MISCELLANY OF MEN
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A MISCELLANY OF MEN
By G. K. CHESTERTON
CONTENTS
THE SUFFRAGIST
THE POET AND THE CHEESE
THE THING
THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS
THE NAMELESS MAN
THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA
THE VOTER AND THE TWO VOICES
THE MAD OFFICIAL
THE ENCHANTED MAN
THE SUN WORSHIPPER
THE WRONG INCENDIARY
THE FREE MAN
THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER
THE PRIEST OF SPRING
THE REAL JOURNALIST
THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT
THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY
THE FOOL
THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS
THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS
THE MYSTAGOGUE
THE RED REACTIONARY
THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS
THE MUMMER
THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY
THE NEW THEOLOGIAN
THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN
THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER
THE SULTAN
THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS
THE MAN ON TOP
THE OTHER KIND OF MAN
THE MEDIAEVAL VILLAIN
THE DIVINE DETECTIVE
THE ELF OF JAPAN
THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE
THE CONTENTED MAN
THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL
THE SUFFRAGIST
Rightly or wrongly, it is certain that a man both liberal and chivalric,
can and very often does feel a dis-ease and distrust touching those
political women we call Suffragettes. Like most other popular sentiments,
it is generally wrongly stated even when it is rightly felt. One part
of it can be put most shortly thus: that when a woman puts up her fists
to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not
afraid of her. He can be afraid of her speech and still more of her
silence; but force reminds him of a rusted but very real weapon of which
he has grown ashamed. But these crude summaries are never quite accurate
in any matter of the instincts. For the things which are the simplest so
long as they are undisputed invariably become the subtlest when once they
are disputed: which was what Joubert meant, I suppose, when he said, "It
is not hard to believe in God if one does not define Him." When the evil
instincts of old Foulon made him say of the poor, "Let them eat grass,"
the good and Christian instincts of the poor made them hang him on a lamp-
post with his mouth stuffed full of that vegetation. But if a modern
vegetarian aristocrat were to say to the poor, "But why don't you like
grass ?" their intelligences would be much more taxed to find such an
appropriate repartee. And this matter of the functions of the sexes is
primarily a matter of the instincts; sex and breathing are about the only
two things that generally work best when they are least worried about.
That, I suppose, is why the same sophisticated age that has poisoned the
world with Feminism is also polluting it with Breathing Exercises. We
plunge at once into a forest of false analogies and bad blundering
history; while almost any man or woman left to themselves would know at
least that sex is quite different from anything else in the world.
There is no kind of comparison possible between a quarrel of man and
woman (however right the woman may be) and the other quarrels of slave
and master, of rich and poor, or of patriot and invader, with which the
Suffragists deluge us every day. The difference is as plain as noon;
these other alien groups never came into contact until they came into
collision. Races and ranks began with battle, even if they afterwards
melted into amity. But the very first fact about the sexes is that they
like each other. They seek each other: and awful as are the sins and
sorrows that often come of their mating, it was not such things that made
them meet. It is utterly astounding to note the way in which modern
writers and talkers miss this plain, wide, and overwhelming fact: one
would suppose woman a victim and nothing else. By this account ideal,
emancipated woman has, age after age, been knocked silly with a stone axe.
But really there is no fact to show that ideal, emancipated woman was
ever knocked silly; except the fact that she is silly. And that might
have arisen in so many other ways. Real responsible woman has never been
silly; and any one wishing to knock her would be wise (like the street-
boys) to knock and run away. It is ultimately idiotic to compare this
prehistoric participation with any royalties or rebellions. Genuine
royalties wish to crush rebellions. Genuine rebels wish to destroy kings.
The sexes cannot wish to abolish each other; and if we allow them any
sort of permanent opposition it will sink into something as base as a
party system.
As marriage, therefore, is rooted in an aboriginal unity of instincts,
you cannot compare it, even in its quarrels, with any of the mere
collisions of separate institutions. You could compare it with the
emancipation of negroes from planters--if it were true that a white man
in early youth always dreamed of the abstract beauty of a black man. You
could compare it with the revolt of tenants against a landlord--if it
were true that young landlords wrote sonnets to invisible tenants. You
could compare it to the fighting policy of the Fenians-if it were true
that every normal Irishman wanted an Englishman to come and live with him.
But as we know there are no instincts in any of these directions, these
analogies are not only false but false on the cardinal fact. I do not
speak of the comparative comfort or merit of these different things: I
say they are different. It may be that love turned to hate is terribly
common in sexual matters: it may be that hate turned to love is not
uncommon in the rivalries of race or class. But any philosophy about the
sexes that begins with anything but the mutual attraction of the sexes,
begins with a fallacy; and all its historical comparisons are as
irrelevant and impertinent as puns.
But to expose such cold negation of the instincts is easy: to express or
even half express the instincts is very hard. The instincts are very
much concerned with what literary people call "style" in letters or more
vulgar people call "style" in dress. They are much concerned with how a
thing is done, as well as whether one may do it: and the deepest
elements in their attraction or aversion can often only be conveyed by
stray examples or sudden images. When Danton was defending himself
before the Jacobin tribunal he spoke so loud that his voice was heard
across the Seine, in quite remote streets on the other side of the river.
He must have bellowed like a bull of Bashan. Yet none of us would think
of that prodigy except as something poetical and appropriate. None of us
would instinctively feel that Danton was less of a man or even less of a
gentleman, for speaking so in such an hour. But suppose we heard that
Marie Antoinette, when tried before the same tribunal, had howled so that
she could be heard in the Faubourg St. Germain--well, I leave it to the
instincts, if there are any left. It is not wrong to howl. Neither is
it right. It is simply a question of the instant impression on the
artistic and even animal parts of humanity, if the noise were heard
suddenly like a gun.
Perhaps the nearest verbal analysis of the instinct may he found in the
gestures of the orator addressing a crowd. For the true orator must
always be a demagogue: even if the mob be a small mob, like the. French
committee or the English House of Lords. And "demagogue," in the good
Greek meaning, does not mean one who pleases the populace, but one who
leads it: and if you will notice, you will see that all the instinctive
gestures of oratory are gestures of military leadership; pointing the
people to a path or waving them on to an advance. Notice that long sweep
of the arm across the body and outward, which great orators use naturally
and cheap orators artificially. It is almost the exact gesture of the
drawing of a sword.
The point is not that women are unworthy of votes; it is not even that
votes are unworthy of women. It is that votes are unworthy of men, so
long as they are merely votes; and have nothing in them of this ancient
militarism of democracy. The only crowd worth talking to is the crowd
that is ready to go somewhere and do something; the only demagogue worth
hearing is he who can point at something to be done: and, if he points
with a sword, will only feel it familiar and useful like an elongated
finger. Now, except in some mystical exceptions which prove the rule,
these are not the gestures, and therefore not the instincts, of women.
No honest man dislikes the public woman. He can only dislike the
political woman; an entirely different thing. The instinct has nothing
to do with any desire to keep women curtained or captive: if such a
desire exists. A husband would be pleased if his wife wore a gold crown
and proclaimed laws from a throne of marble; or if she uttered oracles
from the tripod of a priestess; or if she could walk in mystical
motherhood before the procession of some great religious order. But that
she should stand on a platform in the exact altitude in which he stands;
leaning forward a little more than is graceful and holding her mouth open
a little longer and wider than is dignified--well, I only write here of
the facts of natural history; and the fact is that it is this, and not
publicity or importance, that hurts. It is for the modern world to judge
whether such instincts are indeed danger signals; and whether the hurting
of moral as of material nerves is a tocsin and a warning of nature.
THE POET AND THE CHEESE
There is something creepy in the flat Eastern Counties; a brush of the
white feather. There is a stillness, which is rather of the mind than of
the bodily senses. Rapid changes and sudden revelations of scenery, even
when they are soundless, have something in them analogous to a movement
of music, to a crash or a cry. Mountain hamlets spring out on us with a
shout like mountain brigands. Comfortable valleys accept us with open
arms and warm words, like comfortable innkeepers. But travelling in the
great level lands has a curiously still and lonely quality; lonely even
when there are plenty of people on the road and in the market-place.
One's voice seems to break an almost elvish silence, and something
unreasonably weird in the phrase of the nursery tales, "And he went a
little farther and came to another place," comes back into the mind.
In some such mood I came along a lean, pale road south of the fens, and
found myself in a large, quiet, and seemingly forgotten village. It was
one of those places that instantly produce a frame of mind which, it may
be, one afterwards decks out with unreal details. I dare say that grass
did not really grow in the streets, but I came away with a curious
impression that it did. I dare say the marketplace was not literally
lonely and without sign of life, but it left the vague impression of
being so. The place was large and even loose in design, yet it had the
air of something hidden away and always overlooked. It seemed shy, like
a big yokel; the low roofs seemed to be ducking behind the hedges and
railings; and the chimneys holding their breath. I came into it in that
dead hour of the afternoon which is neither after lunch nor before tea,
nor anything else even on a half-holiday; and I had a fantastic feeling
that I had strayed into a lost and extra hour that is not numbered in the
twenty-four.
I entered an inn which stood openly in the market-place yet was almost as
private as a private house. Those who talk of "public-houses" as if they
were all one problem would have been both puzzled and pleased with such a
place. In the front window a stout old lady in black with an elaborate
cap sat doing a large piece of needlework. She had a kind of comfortable
Puritanism about her; and might have been (perhaps she was) the original
Mrs. Grundy. A little more withdrawn into the parlour sat a tall,
strong, and serious girl, with a face of beautiful honesty and a pair of
scissors stuck in her belt, doing a small piece of needlework. Two feet
behind them sat a hulking labourer with a humorous face like wood painted
scarlet, with a huge mug of mild beer which he had not touched, and
probably would not touch for hours. On the hearthrug there was an
equally motionless cat; and on the table a copy of 'Household Words'.
I was conscious of some atmosphere, still and yet bracing, that I had met
somewhere in literature. There was poetry in it as well as piety; and
yet it was not poetry after my particular taste. It was somehow at once
solid and airy. Then I remembered that it was the atmosphere in some of
Wordsworth's rural poems; which are full of genuine freshness and wonder,
and yet are in some incurable way commonplace. This was curious; for
Wordsworth's men were of the rocks and fells, and not of the fenlands or
flats. But perhaps it is the clearness of still water and the mirrored
skies of meres and pools that produces this crystalline virtue. Perhaps
that is why Wordsworth is called a Lake Poet instead of a mountain poet.
Perhaps it is the water that does it. Certainly the whole of that town
was like a cup of water given at morning.
After a few sentences exchanged at long intervals in the manner of rustic
courtesy, I inquired casually what was the name of the town. The old
lady answered that its name was Stilton, and composedly continued her
needlework. But I had paused with my mug in air, and was gazing at her
with a suddenly arrested concern. "I suppose," I said, "that it has
nothing to do with the cheese of that name." "Oh, yes," she answered,
with a staggering indifference, "they used to make it here."
I put down my mug with a gravity far greater than her own. "But this
place is a Shrine!" I said. "Pilgrims should be pouring into it from
wherever the English legend has endured alive. There ought to be a
colossal statue in the market-place of the man who invented Stilton
cheese. There ought to be another colossal statue of the first cow who
provided the foundations of it. There should be a burnished tablet let
into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton
cheese, and survived. On the top of a neighbouring hill (if there are
any neighbouring hills) there should be a huge model of a Stilton cheese,
made of some rich green marble and engraven with some haughty motto: I
suggest something like 'Ver non semper viret; sed Stiltonia semper
virescit.'" The old lady said, "Yes, sir," and continued her domestic
occupations.
After a strained and emotional silence, I said, "If I take a meal here to-
night can you give me any Stilton?"
"No, sir; I'm afraid we haven't got any Stilton," said the immovable one,
speaking as if it were something thousands of miles away.
"This is awful," I said: for it seemed to me a strange allegory of
England as she is now; this little town that had lost its glory; and
forgotten, so to speak, the meaning of its own name. And I thought it
yet more symbolic because from all that old and full and virile life, the
great cheese was gone; and only the beer remained. And even that will be
stolen by the Liberals or adulterated by the Conservatives. Politely
disengaging myself, I made my way as quickly as possible to the nearest
large, noisy, and nasty town in that neighbourhood, where I sought out
the nearest vulgar, tawdry, and avaricious restaurant.
There (after trifling with beef, mutton, puddings, pies, and so on) I got
a Stilton cheese. I was so much moved by my memories that I wrote a
sonnet to the cheese. Some critical friends have hinted to me that my
sonnet is not strictly new; that it contains "echoes" (as they express
it) of some other poem that they have read somewhere. Here, at least,
are the lines I wrote :-
SONNET TO A STILTON CHEESE
Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;
England has need of thee, and so have I--
She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour,
League after grassy league from Lincoln tower
To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.
Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,
Like a tall green volcano rose in power.
Plain living and long drinking are no more,
And pure religion reading 'Household Words',
And sturdy manhood sitting still all day
Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;
While my digestion, like the House of Lords,
The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.
I confess I feel myself as if some literary influence, something that has
haunted me, were present in this otherwise original poem; but it is
hopeless to disentangle it now.
THE THING
The wind awoke last night with so noble a violence that it was like the
war in heaven; and I thought for a moment that the Thing had broken free.
For wind never seems like empty air. Wind always sounds full and
physical, like the big body of something; and I fancied that the Thing
itself was walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests of
beech.
Let me explain. The vitality and recurrent victory of Christendom have
been due to the power of the Thing to break out from time to time from
its enveloping words and symbols. Without this power all civilisations
tend to perish under a load of language and ritual. One instance of this
we hear much in modern discussion: the separation of the form from the
spirit of religion. But we hear too little of numberless other cases of
the same stiffening and falsification; we are far too seldom reminded
that just as church-going is not religion, so reading and writing are not
knowledge, and voting is not self-government. It would be easy to find
people in the big cities who can read and write quickly enough to be
clerks, but who are actually ignorant of the daily movements of the sun
and moon.
The case of self-government is even more curious, especially as one
watches it for the first time in a country district. Self-government
arose among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the
ancients) out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood.
The notion of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foes of
it seem to think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be consulted
as one consults an Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be asked a lot of
fancy questions, to see how he answers them. He and his fellows are to
be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives. They
shall decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the wheel, of the
spade or the spear. The men of the valley shall settle whether the valley
shall be devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; the men of
the town shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches or splendid
with spires. Of their own nature and instinct they shall gather under a
patriarchal chief or debate in a political market-place. And in case the
word "man" be misunderstood, I may remark that in this moral atmosphere,
this original soul of self-government, the women always have quite as
much influence as the men. But in modern England neither the men nor the
women have any influence at all. In this primary matter, the moulding of
the landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people are utterly
impotent. They stand and stare at imperial and economic processes going
on, as they might stare at the Lord Mayor's Show.
Round about where I live, for instance, two changes are taking place
which really affect the land and all things that live on it, whether for
good or evil. The first is that the urban civilisation (or whatever it
is) is advancing; that the clerks come out in black swarms and the villas
advance in red battalions. The other is that the vast estates into which
England has long been divided are passing out of the hands of the English
gentry into the hands of men who are always upstarts and often actually
foreigners.
Now, these are just the sort of things with which self-government was
really supposed to grapple. People were supposed to be able to indicate
whether they wished to live in town or country, to be represented by a
gentleman or a cad. I do not presume to prejudge their decision; perhaps
they would prefer the cad; perhaps he is really preferable. I say that
the filling of a man's native sky with smoke or the selling of his roof
over his head illustrate the sort of things he ought to have some say in,
if he is supposed to be governing himself. But owing to the strange
trend of recent society, these enormous earthquakes he has to pass over
and treat as private trivialities. In theory the building of a villa is
as incidental as the buying of a hat. In reality it is as if all
Lancashire were laid waste for deer forests; or as if all Belgium were
flooded by the sea. In theory the sale of a squire's land to a money-
lender is a minor and exceptional necessity. In reality it is a thing
like a German invasion. Sometimes it is a German invasion.
Upon this helpless populace, gazing at these prodigies and fates, comes
round about every five years a thing called a General Election. It is
believed by antiquarians to be the remains of some system of self-
government; but it consists solely in asking the citizen questions about
everything except what he understands. The examination paper of the
Election generally consists of some such queries as these: "I. Are the
green biscuits eaten by the peasants of Eastern Lithuania in your opinion
fit for human food? II. Are the religious professions of the President
of the Orange Free State hypocritical or sincere? III. Do you think
that the savages in Prusso-Portuguese East Bunyipland are as happy and
hygienic as the fortunate savages in Franco-British West Bunyipland? IV.
Did the lost Latin Charter said to have been exacted from Henry III
reserve the right of the Crown to create peers? V. What do you think of
what America thinks of what Mr. Roosevelt thinks of what Sir Eldon Gorst
thinks of the state of the Nile? VI. Detect some difference between the
two persons in frock-coats placed before you at this election."
Now, it never was supposed in any natural theory of self-government that
the ordinary man in my neighbourhood need answer fantastic questions like
these. He is a citizen of South Bucks, not an editor of 'Notes and
Queries'. He would be, I seriously believe, the best judge of whether
farmsteads or factory chimneys should adorn his own sky-line, of whether
stupid squires or clever usurers should govern his own village. But
these are precisely the things which the oligarchs will not allow him to
touch with his finger. Instead, they allow him an Imperial destiny and
divine mission to alter, under their guidance, all the things that he
knows nothing about. The name of selfgovernment is noisy everywhere: the
Thing is throttled.
The wind sang and split the sky like thunder all the night through; in
scraps of sleep it filled my dreams with the divine discordances of
martyrdom and revolt; I heard the horn of Roland and the drums of
Napoleon and all the tongues Of terror with which the Thing has gone
forth: the spirit of our race alive. But when I came down in the morning
only a branch or two was broken off the tree in my garden; and none of
the great country houses in the neighbourhood were blown down, as would
have happened if the Thing had really been abroad.
THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS
The man who thinks backwards is a very powerful person to-day: indeed, if
he is not omnipotent, he is at least omnipresent. It is he who writes
nearly all the learned books and articles, especially of the scientific
or skeptical sort; all the articles on Eugenics and Social Evolution and
Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it. But
especially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the
writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage. For
the man who thinks backwards is very frequently a woman.
Thinking backwards is not quite easy to define abstractedly; and, perhaps,
the simplest method is to take some object, as plain as possible, and
from it illustrate the two modes of thought: the right mode in which all
real results have been rooted; the wrong mode, which is confusing all our
current discussions, especially our discussions about the relations of
the sexes. Casting my eye round the room, I notice an object which is
often mentioned in the higher and subtler of these debates about the
sexes: I mean a poker. I will take a poker and think about it; first
forwards and then backwards; and so, perhaps, show what I mean.
The sage desiring to think well and wisely about a poker will begin
somewhat as follows: Among the live creatures that crawl about this star
the queerest is the thing called Man. This plucked and plumeless bird,
comic and forlorn, is the butt of all the philosophies. He is the only
naked animal; and this quality, once, it is said, his glory, is now his
shame. He has to go outside himself for everything that he wants. He
might almost be considered as an absent-minded person who had gone
bathing and left his clothes everywhere, so that he has hung his hat upon
the beaver and his coat upon the sheep. The rabbit has white warmth for
a waistcoat, and the glow-worm has a lantern for a head. But man has no
heat in his hide, and the light in his body is darkness; and he must look
for light and warmth in the wild, cold universe in which he is cast.
This is equally true of his soul and of his body; he is the one creature
that has lost his heart as much as he has lost his hide. In a spiritual
sense he has taken leave of his senses; and even in a literal sense he
has been unable to keep his hair on. And just as this external need of
his has lit in his dark brain the dreadful star called religion, so it
has lit in his hand the only adequate symbol of it: I mean the red flower
called Fire. Fire, the most magic and startling of all material things,
is a thing known only to man and the expression of his sublime
externalism. It embodies all that is human in his hearths and all that is
divine on his altars. It is the most, human thing in the world; seen
across wastes of marsh or medleys of forest, it is veritably the purple
and golden flag of the sons of Eve. But there is about this generous and
rejoicing thing an alien and awful quality: the quality of torture. Its
presence is life; its touch is death. Therefore, it is always necessary
to have an intermediary between ourselves and this dreadful deity; to
have a priest to intercede for us with the god of life and death; to send
an ambassador to the fire. That priest is the poker. Made of a material
more merciless and warlike than the other instruments of domesticity,
hammered on the anvil and born itself in the flame, the poker is strong
enough to enter the burning fiery furnace, and, like the holy children,
not be consumed. In this heroic service it is often battered and twisted,
but is the more honourable for it, like any other soldier who has been
under fire.
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