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John Buchan - "The Path of the King"

Alfred Tennyson - "Enoch Arden &c."

Arthur Conan Doyle - "The Parasite"

Herbert N. Casson - "The History of the Telephone"

A MISCELLANY OF MEN

G >> G. K. Chesterton >> A MISCELLANY OF MEN




But I cannot make out why, with his enthusiasm for heathen habits and
traditions, the Dean should wish to spread in the East the ideas which he
has found so dreadfully unsettling in the West. If some thousands of
years of paganism have produced the patience and industry that Dean Inge
admires, and if some thousand years of Christianity have produced the
sentimentality and sensationalism which he regrets, the obvious deduction
is that Dean Inge would be much happier if he were a heathen Chinese.
Instead of supporting Christian missions to Korea or Japan, he ought to
be at the head of a great mission in London for converting the English to
Taoism or Buddhism. There his passion for the moral beauties of paganism
would have free and natural play; his style would improve; his mind would
begin slowly to clear; and he would be free from all sorts of little
irritating scrupulosities which must hamper even the most Conservative
Christian in his full praise of sweating and the sack.

In Christendom he will never find rest. The perpetual public criticism
and public change which is the note of all our history springs from a
certain spirit far too deep to be defined. It is deeper than democracy;
nay, it may often appear to be non-democratic; for it may often be the
special defence of a minority or an individual. It will often leave the
ninety-and-nine in the wilderness and go after that which is lost. It
will often risk the State itself to right a single wrong; and do justice
though the heavens fall. Its highest expression is not even in the
formula of the great gentlemen of the French Revolution who said that all
men were free and equal. Its highest expression is rather in the formula
of the peasant who said that a man's a man for a' that. If there were
but one slave in England, and he did all the work while the rest of us
made merry, this spirit that is in us would still cry aloud to God night
and day. Whether or no this spirit was produced by, it clearly works
with, a creed which postulates a humanised God and a vividly personal
immortality. Men must not be busy merely like a swarm, or even happy
merely like a herd; for it is not a question of men, but of a man. A
man's meals may be poor, but they must not be bestial; there must always
be that about the meal which permits of its comparison to the sacrament.
A man's bed may be hard, but it must not be abject or unclean: there must
always be about the bed something of the decency of the death-bed.

This is the spirit which makes the Christian poor begin their terrible
murmur whenever there is a turn of prices or a deadlock of toil that
threatens them with vagabondage or pauperisation; and we cannot encourage
the Dean with any hope that this spirit can be cast out. Christendom
will continue to suffer all the disadvantages of being Christian: it is
the Dean who must be gently but firmly altered. He had absent-mindedly
strayed into the wrong continent and the wrong creed. I advise him to
chuck it.

But the case is more curious still. To connect the Dean with Confucian
temples or traditions may have appeared fantastic; but it is not. Dr.
Inge is not a stupid old Tory Rector, strict both on Church and State.
Such a man might talk nonsense about the Christian Socialists being
"court chaplains of King Demos" or about his own superb valour in defying
the democracy that rages in the front pews of Anglican churches. We
should not expect a mere old-fashioned country clergyman to know that
Demos has never been king in England and precious seldom anywhere else;
we should not expect him to realise that if King Demos had any chaplains
they would be uncommonly poorly paid. But Dr. Inge is not old-fashioned;
he considers himself highly progressive and advanced. He is a New
Theologian; that is, he is liberal in theology--and nothing else. He is
apparently in sober fact, and not as in any fantasy, in sympathy with
those who would soften the superior claim of our creed by urging the
rival creeds of the East; with those who would absorb the virtues of
Buddhism or of Islam. He holds a high seat in that modern Parliament of
Religions where all believers respect each other's unbelief.

Now this has a very sharp moral for modern religious reformers. When
next you hear the "liberal" Christian say that we should take what is
best in Oriental faiths, make quite sure what are the things that people
like Dr. Inge call best; what are the things that people like Dr. Inge
propose to take. You will not find them imitating the military valour of
the Moslem. You will not find them imitating the miraculous ecstasy of
the Hindoo. The more you study the "broad" movement of today, the more
you will find that these people want something much less like Chinese
metaphysics, and something much more like Chinese Labour. You will find
the levelling of creeds quite unexpectedly close to the lowering of wages.
Dr. Inge is the typical latitudinarian of to-day; and was never more so
than when he appeared not as the apostle of the blacks, but as the
apostle of the blacklegs. Preached, as it is, almost entirely among the
prosperous and polite, our brotherhood with Buddhism or Mohammedanism
practically means this--that the poor must be as meek as Buddhists, while
the rich may be as ruthless as Mohammedans. That is what they call the
reunion of all religions.



THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN


The middle classes of modern England are quite fanatically fond of
washing; and are often enthusiastic for teetotalism. I cannot therefore
comprehend why it is that they exhibit a mysterious dislike of rain.
Rain, that inspiring and delightful thing, surely combines the qualities
of these two ideals with quite a curious perfection. Our philanthropists
are eager to establish public baths everywhere. Rain surely is a public
bath; it might almost be called mixed bathing. The appearance of persons
coming fresh from this great natural lustration is not perhaps polished
or dignified; but for the matter of that, few people are dignified when
coming out of a bath. But the scheme of rain in itself is one of an
enormous purification. It realises the dream of some insane hygienist:
it scrubs the sky. Its giant brooms and mops seem to reach the starry
rafters and Starless corners of the cosmos; it is a cosmic spring-
cleaning.

If the Englishman is really fond of cold baths, he ought not to grumble
at the English climate for being a cold bath. In these days we are
constantly told that we should leave our little special possessions and
join in the enjoyment of common social institutions and a common social
machinery. I offer the rain as a thoroughly Socialistic institution. It
disregards that degraded delicacy which has hitherto led each gentleman
to take his shower-bath in private. It is a better shower-bath, because
it is public and communal; and, best of all, because somebody else pulls
the string.

As for the fascination of rain for the water drinker, it is a fact the
neglect of which I simply cannot comprehend. The enthusiastic water
drinker must regard a rainstorm as a sort of universal banquet and
debauch of his own favourite beverage. Think of the imaginative
intoxication of the wine drinker if the crimson clouds sent down claret
or the golden clouds hock. Paint upon primitive darkness some such
scenes of apocalypse, towering and gorgeous skyscapes in which champagne
falls like fire from heaven or the dark skies grow purple and tawny with
the terrible colours of port. All this must the wild abstainer feel, as
he rolls in the long soaking grass, kicks his ecstatic heels to heaven,
and listens to the roaring rain. It is he, the water drinker, who ought
to be the true bacchanal of the forests; for all the forests are drinking
water. Moreover, the forests are apparently enjoying it: the trees rave
and reel to and fro like drunken giants; they clash boughs as revellers
clash cups; they roar undying thirst and howl the health of the world.

All around me as I write is a noise of Nature drinking: and Nature makes
a noise when she is drinking, being by no means refined. If I count it
Christian mercy to give a cup of cold water to a sufferer, shall I
complain of these multitudinous cups of cold water handed round to all
living things; a cup of water for every shrub; a cup of water for every
weed? I would be ashamed to grumble at it. As Sir Philip Sidney said,
their need is greater than mine--especially for water.

There is a wild garment that still carries nobly the name of a wild
Highland clan: a elan come from those hills where rain is not so much an
incident as an atmosphere. Surely every man of imagination must feel a
tempestuous flame of Celtic romance spring up within him whenever he puts
on a mackintosh. I could never reconcile myself to carrying all umbrella;
it is a pompous Eastern business, carried over the heads of despots in
the dry, hot lands. Shut up, an umbrella is an unmanageable walking-
stick; open, it is an inadequate tent. For my part, I have no taste for
pretending to be a walking pavilion; I think nothing of my hat, and
precious little of my head. If I am to be protected against wet, it must
be by some closer and more careless protection, something that I can
forget altogether. It might be a Highland plaid. It might be that yet
more Highland thing, a mackintosh.

And there is really something in the mackintosh of the military qualities
of the Highlander. The proper cheap mackintosh has a blue and white
sheen as of steel or iron; it gleams like armour. I like to think of it
as the uniform of that ancient clan in some of its old and misty raids.
I like to think of all the Macintoshes, in their mackintoshes, descending
on some doomed Lowland village, their wet waterproofs flashing in the sun
or moon. For indeed this is one of the real beauties of rainy weather,
that while the amount of original and direct light is commonly lessened,
the number of things that reflect light is unquestionably increased.
There is less sunshine; but there are more shiny things; such beautifully
shiny things as pools and puddles and mackintoshes. It is like moving in
a world of mirrors.

And indeed this is the last and not the least gracious of the casual
works of magic wrought by rain: that while it decreases light, yet it
doubles it. If it dims the sky, it brightens the earth. It gives the
roads (to the sympathetic eye) something of the beauty of Venice.
Shallow lakes of water reiterate every detail of earth and sky; we dwell
in a double universe. Sometimes walking upon bare and lustrous pave-
ments, wet under numerous lamps, a man seems a black blot on all that
golden looking-glass, and could fancy he was flying in a yellow sky. But
wherever trees and towns hang head downwards in a pigmy puddle, the sense
of Celestial topsy-turvydom is the same. This bright, wet, dazzling
confusion of shape and shadow, of reality and reflection, will appeal
strongly to any one with the transcendental instinct about this dreamy
and dual life of ours. It will always give a man the strange sense of
looking down at the skies.



THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER


When, as lately, events have happened that seem (to the fancy, at least)
to test if not stagger the force of official government, it is amusing to
ask oneself what is the real weakness of civilisation, ours especially,
when it contends with the one lawless man. I was reminded of one
weakness this morning in turning over an old drawerful of pictures.

This weakness in civilisation is best expressed by saying that it cares
more for science than for truth. It prides itself on its "methods" more
than its results; it is satisfied with precision, discipline, good
communications, rather than with the sense of reality. But there are
precise falsehoods as well as precise facts. Discipline may only mean a
hundred men making the same mistake at the same minute. And good
communications may in practice be very like those evil communications
which are said to corrupt good manners. Broadly, we have reached a
"scientific age," which wants to know whether the train is in the time-
table, but not whether the train is in the station. I take one instance
in our police inquiries that I happen to have come across: the case of
photography.

Some years ago a poet of considerable genius tragically disappeared, and
the authorities or the newspapers circulated a photograph of him, so that
he might be identified. The photograph, as I remember it, depicted or
suggested a handsome, haughty, and somewhat pallid man with his head
thrown back, with long distinguished features, colourless thin hair and
slight moustache, and though conveyed merely by the head and shoulders, a
definite impression of height. If I had gone by that photograph I should
have gone about looking for a long soldierly but listless man, with a
profile rather like the Duke of Connaught's.

Only, as it happened, I knew the poet personally; I had seen him a great
many times, and he had an appearance that nobody could possibly forget,
if seen only once. He had the mark of those dark and passionate Westland
Scotch, who before Burns and after have given many such dark eyes and
dark emotions to the world. But in him the unmistakable strain, Gaelic
or whatever it is, was accentuated almost to oddity; and he looked like
some swarthy elf. He was small, with a big head and a crescent of coal-
black hair round the back of a vast dome of baldness. Immediately under
his eyes his cheekbones had so high a colour that they might have been
painted scarlet; three black tufts, two on the upper lip and one under
the lower, seemed to touch up the face with the fierce moustaches of
Mephistopheles. His eyes had that "dancing madness" in them which
Stevenson saw in the Gaelic eyes of Alan Breck; but he sometimes
distorted the expression by screwing a monstrous monocle into one of them.
A man more unmistakable would have been hard to find. You could have
picked him out in any crowd--so long as you had not seen his photograph.

But in this scientific picture of him twenty causes, accidental and
conventional, had combined to obliterate him altogether. The limits of
photography forbade the strong and almost melodramatic colouring of cheek
and eyebrow. The accident of the lighting took nearly all the darkness
out of the hair and made him look almost like a fair man. The framing
and limitation of the shoulders made him look like a big man; and the
devastating bore of being photographed when you want to write poetry made
him look like a lazy man. Holding his head back, as people do when they
are being photographed (or shot), but as he certainly never held it
normally, accidentally concealed the bald dome that dominated his slight
figure. Here we have a clockwork picture, begun and finished by a button
and a box of chemicals, from which every projecting feature has been more
delicately and dexterously omitted than they could have been by the most
namby-pamby flatterer, painting in the weakest water-colours, on the
smoothest ivory.

I happen to possess a book of Mr. Max Beerbohm's caricatures, one of
which depicts the unfortunate poet in question. To say it represents an
utterly incredible hobgoblin is to express in faint and inadequate
language the license of its sprawling lines. The authorities thought it
strictly safe and scientific to circulate the poet's photograph. They
would have clapped me in an asylum if I had asked them to circulate Max's
caricature. But the caricature would have been far more likely to find
the man.

This is a small but exact symbol of the failure of scientific
civilisation. It is so satisfied in knowing it has a photograph of a man
that it never asks whether it has a likeness of him. Thus declarations,
seemingly most detailed, have flashed along the wires of the world ever
since I was a boy. We were told that in some row Boer policemen had shot
an Englishman, a British subject, an English citizen. A long time
afterwards we were quite casually informed that the English citizen was
quite black. Well, it makes no difference to the moral question; black
men should be shot on the same ethical principles as white men. But it
makes one distrust scientific communications which permitted so startling
an alteration of the photograph. I am sorry we got hold of a
photographic negative in which a black man came out white. Later we were
told that an Englishman had fought for the Boers against his own flag,
which would have been a disgusting thing to do. Later, it was admitted
that he was an Irishman; which is exactly as different as if he had been
a Pole. Common sense, with all the facts before it, does see that black
is not white, and that a nation that has never submitted has a right to
moral independence. But why does it so seldom have all the facts before
it? Why are the big aggressive features, such as blackness or the Celtic
wrath, always left out in such official communications, as they were left
out in the photograph? My friend the poet had hair as black as an
African and eyes as fierce as an Irishman; why does our civilisation drop
all four of the facts? Its error is to omit the arresting thing--which
might really arrest the criminal. It strikes first the chilling note of
science, demanding a man "above the middle height, chin shaven, with gray
moustache," etc., which might mean Mr. Balfour or Sir Redvers Buller.
It does not seize the first fact of impression, as that a man is
obviously a sailor or a Jew or a drunkard or a gentleman or a nigger or
an albino or a prize-fighter or an imbecile or an American. These are
the realities by which the people really recognise each other. They are
almost always left out of the inquiry.,



THE SULTAN


There is one deep defect in our extension of cosmopolitan and Imperial
cultures. That is, that in most human things if you spread your butter
far you spread it thin. But there is an odder fact yet: rooted in
something dark and irrational in human nature. That is, that when you
find your butter thin, you begin to spread it. And it is just when you
find your ideas wearing thin in your own mind that you begin to spread
them among your fellow-creatures. It is a paradox; but not my paradox.
There are numerous cases in history; but I think the strongest case is
this. That we have Imperialism in all our clubs at the very time when we
have Orientalism in all our drawing-rooms.

I mean that the colonial ideal of such men as Cecil Rhodes did not arise
out of any fresh creative idea of the Western genius, it was a fad, and
like most fads an imitation. For what was wrong with Rhodes was not that,
like Cromwell or Hildebrand, he made huge mistakes, nor even that he
committed great crimes. It was that he committed these crimes and errors
in order to spread certain ideas. And when one asked for the ideas they
could not be found. Cromwell stood for Calvinism, Hildebrand for
Catholicism: but Rhodes had no principles whatever to give to the world.
He had only a hasty but elaborate machinery for spreading the principles
that he hadn't got. What he called his ideals were the dregs of a
Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant, but poisonous. That
the fittest must survive, and that any one like himself must be the
fittest; that the weakest must go to the wall, and that any one he could
not understand must be the weakest; that was the philosophy which he
lumberingly believed through life, like many another agnostic old
bachelor of the Victorian era. All his views on religion (reverently
quoted in the Review of Reviews) were simply the stalest ideas of his
time. It was not his fault, poor fellow, that he called a high hill
somewhere in South Africa "his church." It was not his fault, I mean,
that he could not see that a church all to oneself is not a church at all.
It is a madman's cell. It was not his fault that he "figured out that
God meant as much of the planet to be Anglo-Saxon as possible." Many
evolutionists much wiser had "figured out" things even more babyish. He
was an honest and humble recipient of the plodding popular science of his
time; he spread no ideas that any cockney clerk in Streatham could not
have spread for him. But it was exactly because he had no ideas to
spread that he invoked slaughter, violated justice, and ruined republics
to spread them.

But the case is even stronger and stranger. Fashionable Imperialism not
only has no ideas of its own to extend; but such ideas as it has are
actually borrowed from the brown and black peoples to whom it seeks to
extend them. The Crusading kings and knights might be represented as
seeking to spread Western ideas in the East. But all that our Imperialist
aristocrats could do would be to spread Eastern ideas in the East. For
that very governing class which urges Occidental Imperialism has been
deeply discoloured with Oriental mysticism and Cosmology.

The same society lady who expects the Hindoos to accept her view of
politics has herself accepted their view of religion. She wants first to
steal their earth, and then to share their heaven. The same Imperial
cynic who wishes the Turks to submit to English science has himself
submitted to Turkish philosophy, to a wholly Turkish view of despotism
and destiny.

There is an obvious and amusing proof of this in a recent life of Rhodes.
The writer admits with proper Imperial gloom the fact that Africa is
still chiefly inhabited by Africans. He suggests Rhodes in the South
confronting savages and Kitchener in the North facing Turks, Arabs, and
Soudanese, and then he quotes this remark of Cecil Rhodes: "It is
inevitable fate that all this should be changed; and I should like to be
the agent of fate." That was Cecil Rhodes's one small genuine idea; and
it is an Oriental idea.

Here we have evident all the ultimate idiocy of the present Imperial
position. Rhodes and Kitchener are to conquer Moslem bedouins and
barbarians, in order to teach them to believe only in inevitable fate.
We are to wreck provinces and pour blood like Niagara, all in order to
teach a Turk to say "Kismet "; which he has said since his cradle. We
are to deny Christian justice and destroy international equality, all in
order to teach an Arab to believe he is "an agent of fate," when he has
never believed anything else. If Cecil Rhodes's vision could come true
(which fortunately is increasingly improbable), such countries as Persia
or Arabia would simply be filled with ugly and vulgar fatalists in billy-
cocks, instead of with graceful and dignified fatalists in turbans. The
best Western idea, the idea of spiritual liberty and danger, of a
doubtful and romantic future in which all things may happen--this
essential Western idea Cecil Rhodes could not spread, because (as he says
himself) he did not believe in it.

It was an Oriental who gave to Queen Victoria the crown of an Empress in
addition to that of a Queen. He did not understand that the title of
King is higher than that of Emperor. For in the East titles are meant to
be vast and wild; to be extravagant poems: the Brother of the Sun and
Moon, the Caliph who lives for ever. But a King of England (at least in
the days of real kings) did not bear a merely poetical title; but rather
a religious one. He belonged to his people and not merely they to him.
He was not merely a conqueror, but a father--yes, even when he was a bad
father. But this sort of solid sanctity always goes with local
affections and limits: and the Cecil Rhodes Imperialism set up not the
King, but the Sultan; with all the typically Eastern ideas of the magic
of money, of luxury without uproar; of prostrate provinces and a chosen
race. Indeed Cecil Rhodes illustrated almost every quality essential to
the Sultan, from the love of diamonds to the scorn of woman.



THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS


The other day, in the town of Lincoln, I suffered an optical illusion
which accidentally revealed to me the strange greatness of the Gothic
architecture. Its secret is not, I think, satisfactorily explained in
most of the discussions on the subject. It is said that the Gothic
eclipses the classical by a certain richness and complexity, at once
lively and mysterious. This is true; but Oriental decoration is equally
rich and complex, yet it awakens a widely different sentiment. No man
ever got out of a Turkey carpet the emotions that he got from a cathedral
tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India there is the
presence of something stiff and heartless, of something tortured and
silent. Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers and
hunchbacked birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of their
colour the servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the vision
of a sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern. Certainly
no one ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happens to dislike it.
Or, again, some will say that it is the liberty of the Middle Ages in
the use of the comic or even the coarse that makes the Gothic more
interesting than the Greek. There is more truth in this; indeed, there
is real truth in it. Few of the old Christian cathedrals would have
passed the Censor of Plays. We talk of the inimitable grandeur of the
old cathedrals; but indeed it is rather their gaiety that we do not dare
to imitate. We should be rather surprised if a chorister suddenly began
singing "Bill Bailey" in church. Yet that would be only doing in music
what the mediaevals did in sculpture. They put into a Miserere seat the
very scenes that we put into a musichall song: comic domestic scenes
similar to the spilling of the beer and the hanging out of the washing.
But though the gaiety of Gothic is one of its features, it also is not
the secret of its unique effect. We see a domestic topsy-turvydom in
many Japanese sketches. But delightful as these are, with their fairy
tree-tops, paper houses, and toddling, infantile inhabitants, the
pleasure they give is of a kind quite different from the joy and energy
of the gargoyles. Some have even been so shallow and illiterate as to
maintain that our pleasure in medieval building is a mere pleasure in
what is barbaric, in what is rough, shapeless, or crumbling like the
rocks. This can be dismissed after the same fashion; South Sea idols,
with painted eyes and radiating bristles, are a delight to the eye; but
they do not affect it in at all the same way as Westminster Abbey. Some
again (going to another and almost equally foolish extreme) ignore the
coarse and comic in mediaevalism; and praise the pointed arch only for
its utter purity and simplicity, as of a saint with his hands joined in
prayer. Here, again, the uniqueness is missed. There are Renaissance
things (such as the ethereal silvery drawings of Raphael), there are even
pagan things (such as the Praying Boy) which express as fresh and austere
a piety. None of these explanations explain. And I never saw what was
the real point about Gothic till I came into the town of Lincoln, and saw
it behind a row of furniture-vans.

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