G. K. Chesterton The Defendant 1902

THE LIBRARY OF THEUNIVERSITY OFNORTH CAROLINA

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THE LIBRARY OF THEUNIVERSITY OFNORTH CAROLINA

ENDOWED BY THEDIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC

SOCIETIES

PR 1+1+53

1902

UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPELHILL

00022287339

This book is due at the LOUIS R. WILSON LIBRARY on thelast date stamped under "Date Due." If not on hold it may berenewed by bringing it to the library.

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THE DEFENDANT

Digitized by the Internet Archive

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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

http://www.archive.org/details/defendantOOches

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f/L s?THE DEFENDANTBY G. K. CHESTERTON > H-

11*2-AUTHOR OF 'THE WILD KNIGHT'AND 'GREYBEARDS AT PLAY'

SECOND EDITION

LONDON. MDCCCCIIR. BRIMLEY JOHNSON

The ' Defences ' of which this volume iscomposed have appeared in The Speaker,

and are here reprinted, after revision andamplification, by permission of the Editor.

Portions of ' The Defence of Publicity ' ap-peared in The Daily News.

October, 1901.

605228 C

CONTENTS

PACEIN DEFENCE OF A NEW EDITION - - ixINTRODUCTION ... - -1A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS - - 8A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS - - - ISA DEFENCE OF SKELETONS - - 27A DEFENCE OF PUBLICITY - - 34A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE - - 42A DEFENCE OF PLANETS - - 51A DEFENCE OF CHINA SHEPHERDESSES - 59A DEFENCE OF USEFUL INFORMATION - G6A DEFENCE OF HERALDRY - - - 7GA DEFENCE OF UGLY THINGS - - -82A DEFENCE OF FARCE - - - - 8 (JA DEFENCE OF HUMILITY - - 97A DEFENCE OF SLANG - - - - 105A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP - - - 112A DEFENCE OF DETECTIVE STORIES - - 118A DEFENCE OF PATRIOTISM - - - 124

IN DEFENCE OF A NEWEDITION

The re-issue of a series of essays so ephemeral,and even superfluous may seem at the firstglance to require some excuse ; probably thebest excuse is that they will have been com-pletely forgotten, and therefore may be readagain with entirely new sensations. I amnot sure, however, that this claim is so modestas it sounds, for I fancy that Shakespeareand Balzac, if moved to prayers, might notask to be remembered, but to be forgotten, andforgotten thus ; for if they were forgotten theywould be everlastingly re-discovered and re-read. It is a monotonous memory which keepsus in the main from seeing things as splendidas they are. The ancients were not wrongwhen they made Lethe the boundary of abetter land ; perhaps the only flaw in theirsystem is that a man who had bathed in theriver offorgetfulness icould be as likely as notto climb back upon the bank of the earth andfancy himself in Elysium.

If therefore, I am certain that most

x IN DEFENCE OF A NEW EDITION

sensible people have forgotten the existence ofthis bookI do not speak in modesty or inpride/ wish only to state a simple asomewhat beautiful fact In one respect thepassing of the period during which a book can.be considered current lias afflicted me withsome melancholy, for I had intended to writeanonymously in some daily paper a thoroughand crushing exposure of the work inspiredmostly by a certain artistic impatience of thetoo indulgent tone of the critiques and themanner in which a vast number of my mostmonstrous fallacies have passed unchallenged.I will not repeat that powerful article hen

,

for it cannot be necessary to do anything morethan warn the reader against the perfectlyindefensible line of argument adopted at theend of p. 28. / am also conscious that thetitle of the book is, strictly speaking, inac-

curate. It is a legal metaphor, and, speakinglegally, a defendant is not an enthusiast forthe character of King John or the domesticvirtues of the prairie-dog. He is one whodefends himself, a thing which the presentwriter, however poisoned his mind may bewith paradox, certainly never dreamed ofattempting.

Criticism upon the book considered asliterature, if it can be so considered, I should,of course, never dream of dismissingfirstly,because it is ridiculous to do so; and,

IN DEFENCE OF A NEW EDITION xi

secondly, because there was, in my opinion,much justice in such criticism.But there is one matter on which an author

is generally considered as having a rigid toexplain himself, since it has nothing to dowith capacity or intelligence, and that is thequestion of his morals.I am proud to say that a furious, uncom-

promising, and very effective attack was madeupon what was alleged to be the utter immor-ality of this book, by my excellent friendMr. C. F. G. Masterman, in the ' Speaker.'The tendency of that criticism was to theeffect that I was discouraging improvementand disguising scandals by my offensiveoptimism. Quoting the passage in which Isaid that ' diamonds were to be found in thedust-bin,

1 he said: ' There is no difficulty infinding good in what Immunity rejects. Thedifficulty is to find it in what humanityaccepts. The diamond is easy enough to findin the dust-bin. The difficulty is to find itin the drawing-room.' I must admit, for mypart, without the slightest shame, that I havefound a great many very excellent things indrawing-rooms. For example, I found Mr.Masterman in a drawing-room,. But Imerely mention this purely ethiccd attack inorder to state, in as few sentences as possible,my difference from the theory of optimism andprogress therein enunciated. At first sight

xii IN DEFENCE OF A NEW EDITION

it would seem that the pessimist encouragesimprovement. But in reality it is a singulartruth that the era in which pessimism has beencried from the house-tops is also that inwhich almost all reform has stagnated andfallen into decay. The reason of this is notdifficult to discover. No man ever did, andno man ever can, create or desire to make abad thing good or an ugly thing beautiful.There must be some germ of good to be loved,some fragment of beauty to be admired. Themother washes and decks out the dirty or care-less child, but no one can ask her to wash anddeck out a goblin icith a heart like hell. Xoone can kill the fatted calffor Mephistopheles.The cause which is blocking all progress to-day is the subtle scepticism which whispers ina million ears that things are not good enoughto" be worth improving. If the world is goodwe are revolutionaries, if the world is evil icemust be conservatives. These essays, futileas they are considered as serious literature,are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to

remind men that things must be loved firstand improved afterwards.

G. K. C.

THE DEFENDANT

INTRODUCTION

IN certain endless uplands, uplands likegreat flats gone dizzy, slopes that

seem to contradict the idea that there iseven such a thing as a level, and make usall realize that we live on a planet with asloping roof, you will come from time totime upon whole valleys filled with looserocks and boulders, so big as to be likemountains broken loose. The whole mightbe an experimental creation shattered andcast away. It is often difficult to believethat such cosmic refuse can have cometogether except by human means. Themildest and most cockney imaginationconceives the place to be the scene of somewar of giants. To me it is always as-sociated with one idea, recurrent and atlast instinctive. The scene was the sceneof the stoning of some prehistoric prophet,

1

2 THE DEFENDANT

a prophet as much more gigantic thanafter-prophets as the boulders are moregigantic than the pebbles. He spokesome wordswords that seemed shamefuland tremendousand the world, in terror,buried him under a wilderness of stones.The place is the monument of an ancientfear.

If we followed the same mood of fancv,it would be more difficult to imagine whatawful hint or wild picture of the universecalled forth that primal persecution, whatsecret of sensational thought lies buriedunder the brutal stones. For in our timethe blasphemies are threadbare. Pessi-mism is now patently, as it always wasessentially, more commonplace than piety.Profanity is now more than an affectationit is a convention. The curse againstGod is Exercise I. in the primer of minorpoetry. It was not, assuredly, for suchbabyish solemnities that our imaginaryprophet was stoned in the morning of theworld. If we weigh the matter in thefaultless scales of imagination, if we seewhat is the real trend of humanity, weshall feel it most probable that he wasstoned for saying that the grass was greenand that the birds sang in spring ; for themission of all the prophets from the begin-ning has not been so much the pointing

INTRODUCTION 3

out of heavens or hells as primarily thepointing out of the earth.

Religion has had to provide that longestand strangest telescope the telescopethrough which we could see the star uponwhich we dwelt. For the mind and eyesof the average man this world is as lost asEden and as sunken as Atlantis. Thereruns a strange law through the length ofhuman historythat men are continuallytending to undervalue their environment,to undervalue their happiness, to under-value themselves. The great sin of man-kind, the sin typified by the fall ofAdam, is the tendency, not towards pride,but towards this weird and horriblehumility.

This is the great fall, the fall by whichthe fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets themeadow, the clerk forgets the city, everyman forgets his environment and, in thefullest and most literal sense, forgets him-self. This is the real fall of Adam, and itis a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing thatmany truly spiritual men, such as GeneralGordon, have actually spent some hoursin speculating upon the precise location ofthe Garden of Eden. Most probably weare in Eden still. It is only our eyes thathave changed.The pessimist is commonly spoken of as

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the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly,because it requires some cheerfulness tocontinue in revolt, and secondly, becausepessimism appeals to the weaker side ofeverybody, and the pessimist, therefore,drives as roaring a trade as the publican.The person who is really in revolt is theoptimist, who generally lives and dies in adesperate and suicidal effort to persuadeall the other people how good they are.It has been proved a hundred times overthat if you really wish to enrage peopleand make them angry, even unto death,the right way to do it is to tell them thatthey are all the sons of God. JesusChrist was crucified, it may be remem-bered, not because of anything he saidabout God, but on a charge of saying thata man could in three days pull down andrebuild the Temple. Every one of thegreat revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley,have been optimists. They have beenindignant, not about the badness of exist-ence, but about the slowness of men inrealizing its goodness. The prophet whois stoned is not a brawler or a marplot.He is simply a rejected lover. He surfersfrom an unrequited attachment to thingsin general.

It becomes increasingly apparent, there-fore, that the world is in a permanent

INTRODUCTION 5

danger of being misjudged. That this isno fanciful or mystical idea may be testedby simple examples. The two absolutelybasic words ' good ' and ' bad,' descriptiveof two primal and inexplicable sensations,are not, and never have been, used properly.Things that are bad are not called goodby any people who experience them ; butthings that are good are called bad by theuniversal verdict of humanity.

Let me explain a little : Certain thingsare bad so far as they go, such as pain, andno one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself ; but a knife which cutsclumsily and with difficulty is called a badknife, which it certainly is not. It is onlynot so good as other knives to which menhave grown accustomed. A knife is neverbad except on such rare occasions as thatin which it is neatly and scientificallyplanted in the middle of one's back. Thecoarsest and bluntest knife which everbroke a pencil into pieces instead ofsharpening it is a good thing in so far asit is a knife. It would have appeared amiracle in the Stone Age. What we call abad knife is a good knife not good enoughfor us ; what we call a bad hat is a goodhat not good enough for us ; what we callbad cookery is good cookery not goodenough for us ; what we call a bad civiliza-

6 THE DEFENDANT

tion is a good civilization not good enoughfor us. We choose to call the great massof the history of mankind bad, not becauseit is bad, but because we are better. Thisis palpably an unfair principle. Ivorymay not be so white as snow, but thewhole Arctic continent does not make ivoryblack.Now it has appeared to me unfair that

humanity should be engaged perpetuallyin calling all those things bad which havebeen good enough to make other thingsbetter, in everlastingly kicking down theladder by which it has climbed. It hasappeared to me that progress should besomething else besides a continual parri-cide ; therefore I have investigated thedust-heaps of humanity, and found atreasure in all of them. I have found thathumanity is not incidentally engaged, buteternally and systematically engaged, inthrowing gold into the gutter anddiamonds into the sea. I have found thatevery man is disposed to call the greenleaf of the tree a little less green than itis, and the snow of Christmas a little lesswhite than it is ; therefore I have imaginedthat the main business of a man, howeverhumble, is defence. I have conceived thata defendant is chiefly required when

INTRODUCTION 7

worldlings despise the world that acounsel for the defence would not havebeen out of place in that terrible day whenthe sun was darkened over Calvary andMan was rejected of men.

A DEFENCE OF PENNYDREADFULS

ONE of the strangest examples of thedegree to which ordinary life is under-

valued is the example of popular literature,the vast mass of which we contentedlydescribe as vulgar. The boy's novelettemay be ignorant in a literary sense, whichis only like saying that a modern novel isignorant in the chemical sense, or theeconomic sense, or the astronomical sense

;

but it is not vulgar intrinsicallyit is theactual centre of a million flaming imagina-tions.

In former centuries the educated classignored the ruck of vulgar literature.They ignored, and therefore did not,properly speaking, despise it. Simpleignorance and indifference does not inflatethe character with pride. A man doesnot walk down the street giving a haughtytwirl to his moustaches at the thought ofhis superiority to some variety of deep-seafishes. The old scholars left the wholeunder-world of popular compositions in asimilar darkness.

A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS 9

To-day, however, we have reversed thisprinciple. We do despise vulgar composi-tions, and we do not ignore them. Weare in some danger of becoming petty inour study of pettiness ; there is a terribleCircean law in the background that if thesoul stoops too ostentatiously to examineanything it never gets up again. Thereis no class of vulgar publications aboutwhich there is, to my mind, more utterlyridiculous exaggeration and misconceptionthan the current boys' literature of thelowest stratum. This class of compositionhas presumably always existed, and mustexist. It has no more claim to be goodliterature than the daily conversation ofits readers to be fine oratory, or thelodging-houses and tenements they inhabitto be sublime architecture. But peoplemust have conversation, they must havehouses, and they must have stories. Thesimple need for some kind of ideal worldin which fictitious persons play an un-hampered part is infinitely deeper andolder than the rules of good art, and muchmore important. Every one of us in child-hood has constructed such an invisibledramatis persona?, but it never occurredto our nurses to correct the composi-tion by careful comparison with Balzac.In the East the professional story-teller

10 THE DEFENDANT

goes from village to village with a smallcarpet ; and I wish sincerely that anyonehad the moral courage to spread thatcarpet and sit on it in Ludgate Circus.But it is not probable that all the talesof the carpet-bearer are little gems oforiginal artistic workmanship. Literatureand fiction are two entirely differentthings. Literature is a luxury ; fiction isa necessity. A work of art can hardly betoo short, for its climax is its merit. Astory can never be too long, for its conclu-sion is merely to be deplored, like the lasthalfpenny or the last pipelight. And so,while the increase of the artistic consciencetends in more ambitious works to brevityand impressionism, voluminous industrystill marks the producer of the trueromantic trash. There was no end to theballads of Robin Hood ; there is no end tothe volumes about Dick Deadshot and theAvenging Nine. These two heroes aredeliberately conceived as immortal.But instead of basing all discussion of

the problem upon the common-sense recog-nition of this factthat the youth of thelower orders always has had and alwaysmust have formless and endless romanticreading of some kind, and then going onto make provision for its wholesomeness

we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic


abuse of this reading as a whole andindignant surprise that the errand-boysunder discussion do not read ' The Egoist

'

and 'The Master Builder.' It is thecustom, particularly among magistrates, toattribute half the crimes of the Metropolisto cheap novelettes. If some grimyurchin runs away with an apple, themagistrate shrewdly points out that thechild's knowledge that apples appeasehunger is traceable to some curiousliterary researches. The boys themselves,when penitent, frequently accuse thenovelettes with great bitterness, which isonly to be expected from young peoplepossessed of no little native humour. IfI had forged a will, and could obtainsympathy by tracing the incident to theinfluence of Mr. George Moore's novels,I should find the greatest entertainmentin the diversion. At any rate, it is firmlyfixed in the minds of most people thatgutter-boys, unlike everybody else in thecommunity, find their principal motivesfor conduct in printed books.Now it is quite clear that this objection,

the objection brought by magistrates, hasnothing to do with literary merit. Badstory writing is not a crime. Mr. HallCaine walks the streets openly, and cannotbe put in prison for an anticlimax. The

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objection rests upon the theory that thetone of the mass of boys' novelettes iscriminal and degraded, appealing to lowcupidity and low cruelty. This is the magis-terial theory, and this is rubbish.

So far as I have seen them, in connectionwith the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorestdistricts, the facts are simply these : Thewhole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenileliterature is concerned with adventures,rambling, disconnected and endless. Itdoes not express any passion of any sort,for there is no human character of any sort.It runs eternally in certain grooves of localand historical type : the medieval knight,the eighteenth-century duellist, and themodern cowboy, recur with the same stiffsimplicity as the conventional humanfigures in an Oriental pattern. I can quiteas easily imagine a human being kindlingwild appetites by the contemplation of hisTurkey carpet as by such dehumanized andnaked narrative as this.Among these stories there are a certain

number which deal sympathetically with theadventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates,which present in a dignified and romanticlight thieves and murderers like DickTurpinand Claude Duval. That is to say, they doprecisely the same thing as Scott's ' Ivan-hoe,' Scott's 'Rob Roy,' Scott's 'Lady of


the Lake,' Byron's ' Corsair,' Wordsworth's'Rob Roy's Grave,' Stevenson's ' Macaire,'Mr. Max Pemberton's ' Iron Pirate,' and athousand more works distributed systemati-cally as prizes and Christmas presents.Nobody imagines that an admiration ofLocksley- in ' Ivanhoe ' will lead a boy toshoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Rich-mond Park ; no one thinks that the in-cautious opening of Wordsworth at thepoem on Rob Roy will set him up for lifeas a blackmailer. In the case of our ownclass, we recognise that this wild life iscontemplated with pleasure by the young,not because it is like their own life, butbecause it is different from it. It might atleast cross our minds that, for whateverother reason the errand-boy reads ' TheRed Revenge,' it really is not because he isdripping with the gore of his own friendsand relatives.

In this matter, as in all such matters,we lose our bearings entirely by speakingof the ' lower classes ' when we meanhumanity minus ourselves. This trivialromantic literature is not especiallyplebeian : it is simply human. Thephilanthropist can never forget classes andcallings. He says, with a modest swagger,' I have invited twenty-five factory handsto tea.' If he said ' I have invited twenty-

14 THE DEFENDANT

five chartered accountants to tea,' every-one would see the humour of so simple aclassification. But this is what we havedone with this lumberland of foolish writ-ing : we have probed, as if it were somemonstrous new disease, what is, in fact,nothing but the foolish and valiant heartof man. Ordinary men will always besentimentalists : for a sentimentalist issimply a man who has feelings and doesnot trouble to invent a new way of express-ing them. These common and currentpublications have nothing essentially evilabout them. They express the sanguineand heroic truisms on which civilization isbuilt ; for it is clear that unless civilizationis built on truisms, it is not built at all.Clearly, there could be no safety for asociety in which the remark by the ChiefJustice that murder was wrong wasregarded as an original and dazzlingepigram.

If the authors and publishers of ' DickDeadshot,' and such remarkable works,were suddenly to make a raid upon theeducated class, were to take down thenames of every man, however distinguished,who was caught at a University ExtensionLecture, were to confiscate all our novelsand warn us all to correct our lives, weshould be seriously annoyed. Yet they


have far more right to do so than we ; forthey, with all their idiotcy, are normal andwe are abnormal. It is the modern litera-ture of the educated, not of the uneducated,which is avowedly and aggressively criminal.Books recommending profligacy and pessi-mism, at which the high-souled errand-boywould shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. If the dirtiest old owner ofthe dirtiest old bookstall in Whitechapeldared to display works really recommend-ing polygamy or suicide, his stock wouldbe seized by the police. These things areour luxuries. And with a hypocrisy soludicrous as to be almost unparalleled inhistory, we rate the gutter-boys for theirimmorality at the very time that we arediscussing (with equivocal German Profes-sors) whether morality is valid at all. Atthe very instant that we curse the PennyDreadful for encouraging thefts upon pro-perty, we canvass the proposition that allproperty is theft. At the very instantwe accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricityand indecency, we are cheerfully readingphilosophies which glory in lubricity andindecency. At the very instant that wecharge it with encouraging the young todestroy life, we are placidly discussingwhether life is worth preserving.

But it is we who are the morbid excep-

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tions ; it is we who are the criminal class.This should be our great comfort. Thevast mass of humanity, with their vastmass of idle books and idle words, havenever doubted and never will doubt thatcourage is splendid, that fidelity is noble,that distressed ladies should be rescued,and vanquished enemies spared. Thereare a large number of cultivated personswho doubt these maxims of daily life, justas there are a large number of persons whobelieve they are the Prince of Wales ; andI am told that both classes of people areentertaining conversationalists. But theaverage man or boy writes daily in thesegreat gaudy diaries of his soul, which wecall Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and bettergospel than any of those iridescent ethicalparadoxes that the fashionable change asoften as their bonnets. It may be a verylimited aim in morality to shoot a ' many-faced and fickle traitor,' but at least it is abetter aim than to be a many-faced andfickle traitor, which is a simple summaryof a good many modern systems from Mr.d'Annunzio's downwards. So long as thecoarse and thin texture of mere currentpopular romance is not touched by a paltryculture it will never be vitally immoral.It is always on the side of life. The poorthe slaves who really stoop under the


burden of life have often been mad,scatter-brained and cruel, but never hope-less. That is a class privilege, like cigars.Their drivelling literature will alwaysbe a ' blood and thunder ' literature, assimple as the thunder of heaven and theblood of men.

A DEFENCE OF EASH VOWS

IF a prosperous modern man, with a highhat and a frock-coat, were to solemnly

pledge himself before all his clerks andfriends to count the leaves on every thirdtree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the Cityon one leg every Thursday, to repeat thewhole of Mill's ' Liberty ' seventy-six times,to collect 300 dandelions in fields belong-ing to anyone of the name of Brown, toremain for thirty-one hours holding his leftear in his right hand, to sing the namesof all his aunts in order of age on the topof an omnibus, or make any such unusualundertaking, we should immediately con-clude that the man was mad, or, as itis sometimes expressed, was ' an artist inlife.' Yet these vows are not more extra-ordinary than the vows which in the MiddleAges and in similar periods were made,not by fanatics merely, but by the greatestfigures in civic and national civilization

by kings, judges, poets, and priests. Oneman swore to chain two mountains to-gether, and the great chain hung there, itwas said, for ages as a monument of that

A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS 19

mystical folly. Another swore that hewould find his way to Jerusalem with apatch over his eyes, and died looking forit. It is not easy to see that these twoexploits, judged from a strictly rationalstandpoint, are any saner than the actsabove suggested. A mountain is com-monly a stationary and reliable objectwhich it is not necessary to chain up atnight like a dog. And it is not easy atfirst sight to see that a man pays a veryhigh compliment to the Holy City bysetting out for it under conditions whichrender it to the last degree improbable thathe will ever get there.But about this there is one striking

thing to be noticed. If men behaved inthat way in our time, we should, as wehave said, regard them as symbols of the' decadence.' But the men who did thesethings were not decadent ; they belongedgenerally to the most robust classes ofwhat is generally regarded as a robustage. Again, it will be urged that if menessentially sane performed such insanities,it was under the capricious direction of asuperstitious religious system. This, again,will not hold water ; for in the purelyterrestrial and even sensual departmentsof life, such as love and lust, the medievalprinces show the same mad promises and

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performances, the same misshapen imagina-tion and the same monstrous self-sacrifice.Here we have a contradiction, to explainwhich it is necessary to think of the wholenature of vows from the beginning. Andif we consider seriously and correctly thenature of vows, we shall, unless I am muchmistaken, come to the conclusion that it isperfectly sane, and even sensible, to swearto chain mountains together, and that, ifinsanity is involved at all, it is a littleinsane not to do so.The man who makes a vow makes an

appointment with himself at some distanttime or place. The danger of it is thathimself should not keep the appointment.And in modern times this terror of one'sself, of the weakness and mutability ofone's self, has perilously increased, and isthe real basis of the objection to vows ofany kind. A modern man refrains fromswearing to count the leaves on everythird tree in Holland Walk, not because itis silly to do so (he does many sillier things),but because he has a profound convictionthat before he had got to the three hundredand seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree hewould be excessively tired of the subjectand want to go home to tea. In otherwords, we fear that by that time he willbe, in the common but hideously significant


phrase, another man. Now, it is thishorrible fairy tale of a man constantlychanging into other men that is the soul ofthe decadence. That John Paterson should,with apparent calm, look forward to beinga certain General Barker on Monday, Dr.Macgregor on Tuesday, Sir Walter Car-stairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg onThursday, may seem a nightmare ; but tothat nightmare we give the name of modernculture. One great decadent, who is nowdead, published a poem some time ago, inwhich he powerfully summed up the wholespirit of the movement by declaring that hecould stand in the prison yard and entirelycomprehend the feelings of a man about tobe hanged :

1 For he that lives more lives than oneMore deaths than one must die.'

And the end of all this is that madden-ing horror of unreality which descendsupon the decadents, and compared withwhich physical pain itself would have thefreshness of a youthful thing. The onehell which imagination must conceive asmost hellish is to be eternally acting aplay without even the narrowest anddirtiest greenroom in which to be human.And this is the condition of the decadent,of the aesthete, of the free-lover. To be

22 THE DEFENDANT

everlastingly passing through dangerswhich we know cannot scathe us, to betaking oaths which we know cannot bindus, to be defying enemies who we knowcannot conquer usthis is the grinningtyranny of decadence which is calledfreedom.

Let us turn, on the other hand, to themaker of vows. The man who made avow, however wild, gave a healthy andnatural expression to the greatness of agreat moment. He vowed, for example,to chain two mountains together, perhapsa symbol of some great relief, or love, oraspiration. Short as the moment of hisresolve might be, it was, like all greatmoments, a moment of immortality, andthe desire to say of it exegi monumentumcere perennhts was the only sentiment thatwould satisfy his mind. The modern aes-thetic man would, of course, easily see theemotional opportunity ; he would vow tochain two mountains together. But, then,he would quite as cheerfully vow to chainthe earth to the moon. And the wither-ing consciousness that he did not meanwhat he said, that he was, in truth, sayingnothing of any great import, would takefrom him exactly that sense of daringactuality which is the excitement of a vow.For what could be more maddening than


an existence in which our mother or auntreceived the information that we weregoing to assassinate the King or build atemple on Ben Nevis with the genial com-posure of custom ?The revolt against vows has been carried

in our day even to the extent of a revoltagainst the typical vow of marriage. It ismost amusing to listen to the opponents ofmarriage on this subject. They appear toimagine that the ideal of constancy was ayoke mysteriously imposed on mankind bythe devil, instead of being, as it is, a yokeconsistently imposed by all lovers on them-selves. They have invented a phrase, aphrase that is a black and white contradic-tion in two words ' free-love 'as if alover ever had been, or ever could be, free.It is the nature of love to bind itself, andthe institution of marriage merely paid theaverage man the compliment of taking himat his word. Modern sages offer to thelover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largestliberties and the fullest irresponsibility

;

but they do not respect him as the oldChurch respected him ; they do not writehis oath upon the heavens, as the recordof his highest moment. They give himevery liberty except the liberty to sell hisliberty, which is the only one that hewants.

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In Mr. Bernard Shaw's brilliant play' The Philanderer,' we have a vivid pictureof this state of things. Charteris is a manperpetually endeavouring to be a free-lover, which is like endeavouring to be amarried bachelor or a white negro. He iswandering in a hungry search for a certainexhilaration which he can only have whenhe has the courage to cease from wander-ing. Men knew better than this in oldtimesin the time, for example, of Shake-speare's heroes. When Shakespeare's menare really celibate they praise the un-doubted advantages of celibacy, liberty,irresponsibility, a chance of continualchange. But they were not such fools asto continue to talk of liberty when theywere in such a condition that they couldbe made happy or miserable by the movingof someone else's eyebrow. Sucklingclasses love with debt in his praise offreedom.

And he that's fairly out of bothOf all the world is blest.He lives as in the golden age,When all things made were common

;

He takes his pipe, he takes his glass,He fears no man or woman.'

This is a perfectly possible, rational andmanly position. But what have lovers to


do with ridiculous affectations of fearingno man or woman ? They know that inthe turning of a hand the whole cosmicengine to the remotest star may becomean instrument of music or an instrumentof torture. They hear a song older thanSuckling's, that has survived a hundredphilosophies. ' Who is this that lookethout of the window, fair as the sun, clearas the moon, terrible as an army withbanners VAs we have said, it is exactly this back-

door, this sense of having a retreat behindus, that is, to our minds, the sterilizingspirit in modern pleasure. Everywherethere is the persistent and insane attemptto obtain pleasure without paying for it.Thus, in politics the modern Jingoes practi-cally say, ' Let us have the pleasures ofconquerors without the pains of soldiers :let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race.'Thus, in religion and morals, the decadentmystics say : ' Let us have the fragrance ofsacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint ; let us sing hymns alternately tothe Virgin and Priapus.' Thus in love thefree-lovers say : ' Let us have the splendourof offering ourselves without the peril ofcommitting ourselves ; let us see whetherone cannot commit suicide an unlimitednumber of times.'

26 THE DEFENDANT

Emphatically it will not work. Thereare thrilling moments, doubtless, for thespectator, the amateur, and the aesthete

;

but there is one thrill that is known onlyto the soldier who fights for his own flag,to the ascetic who starves himself for hisown illumination, to the lover who makesfinally his own choice. And it is thistransfiguring self- discipline that makesthe vow a truly sane thing. It must havesatisfied even the giant hunger of the soulof a lover or a poet to know that in conse-quence of some one instant of decision thatstrange chain would hang for centuries inthe Alps among the silences of stars andsnows. All around us is the city of smallsins, abounding in backways and retreats,but surely, sooner or later, the toweringflame will rise from the harbour announc-ing that the reign of the cowards is overand a man is burning his ships.

A DEFENCE OF SKELETONS

SOME little time ago I stood amongimmemorial English trees that seemed

to take hold upon the stars like a broodof Ygdrasils. As I walked among theseliving pillars I became gradually awarethat the rustics who lived and died intheir shadow adopted a very curious con-versational tone. They seemed to be con-stantly apologizing for the trees, as if theywere a very poor show. After elaborateinvestigation, I discovered that theirgloomy and penitent tone was traceableto the fact that it was winter and all thetrees were bare. I assured them that Idid not resent the fact that it was winter,that I knew the thing had happenedbefore, and that no forethought on theirpart could have averted this blow ofdestiny. But I could not in any wayreconcile them to the fact that it waswinter. There was evidently a generalfeeling that I had caught the trees in akind of disgraceful deshabille, and that theyought not to be seen until, like the firsthuman sinners, they had covered them-

28 THE DEFENDANT

selves with leaves. So it is quite clearthat, while very few people appear to knowanything of how trees look in winter, theactual foresters know less than anyone. Sofar from the line of the tree when it is bareappearing harsh and severe, it is luxuriantlyindefinable to an unusual degree ; thefringe of the forest melts away like avignette. The tops of two or three hightrees when they are leafless are so softthat they seem like the gigantic brooms ofthat fabulous lady who was sweeping thecobwebs off the sky. The outline of aleafy forest is in comparison hard, grossand blotchy ; the clouds of night do notmore certainly obscure the moon thanthose green and monstrous clouds obscurethe tree ; the actual sight of the littlewood, with its gray and silver sea of life,is entirely a winter vision. So dim anddelicate is the heart of the winter woods,a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figurestepping towards us in the chequered twi-light seems as if he were breaking throughunfathomable depths of spiders' webs.But surely the idea that its leaves are

the chief grace of a tree is a vulgar one,on a par with the idea that his hair is thechief grace of a pianist. When winter,that healthy ascetic, carries his giganticrazor over hill and valley, and shaves all

A DEFENCE OF SKELETONS 29

the trees like monks, we feel surely thatthey are all the more like trees if theyare shorn, just as so many painters andmusicians would be all the more like menif they were less like mops. But it doesappear to be a deep and essential difficultythat men have an abiding terror of theirown structure, or of the structure of thingsthey love. This is felt dimly in theskeleton of the tree : it is felt profoundlyin the skeleton of the man.The importance of the human skeleton

is very great, and the horror with which itis commonly regarded is somewhat mys-terious. Without claiming for the humanskeleton a wholly conventional beauty, wemay assert that he is certainly not uglierthan a bull-dog, whose popularity neverwanes, and that he has a vastly morecheerful and ingratiating expression. Butjust as man is mysteriously ashamed ofthe skeletons of the trees in winter, so heis mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton ofhimself in death. It is a singular thingaltogether, this horror of the architectureof things. One would think it would bemost unwise in a man to be afraid of askeleton, since Nature has set curious andquite insuperable obstacles to his runningaway from it.One ground exists for this terror : a

30 THE DEFENDANT

strange idea has infected humanity thatthe skeleton is typical of death. A manmight as well say that a factory chimneywas typical of bankruptcy. The factorymay be left naked after ruin, the skeletonmay be left naked after bodily dissolution

;

but both of them have had a lively andworkmanlike life of their own, all thepulleys creaking, all the wheels turning, inthe House of Livelihood as in the Houseof Life. There is no reason why this crea-ture (new, as I fancy, to art), the livingskeleton, should not become the essentialsymbol of life.The truth is that man's horror of the

skeleton is not horror of death at all. Itis man's eccentric glory that he has not,generally speaking, any objection to beingdead, but has a very serious objection tobeing undignified. And the fundamentalmatter which troubles him in the skeletonis the reminder that the ground-plan of hisappearance is shamelessly grotesque. I donot know why he should object to this.He contentedly takes his place in a worldthat does not pretend to be genteel

a

laughing, working, jeering world. He seesmillions of animals carrying, with quite adandified levity, the most monstrous shapesand appendages, the most preposteroushorns, wings, and legs, when they are


necessary to utility. He sees the goodtemper of the frog, the unaccountablehappiness of the hippopotamus. He seesa whole universe which is ridiculous, fromthe animalcule, with a head too big for itsbody, up to the comet, with a tail too bigfor its head. But when it comes to thedelightful oddity of his own inside, hissense of humour rather abruptly desertshim.

In the Middle Ages and in the Renais-sance (which was, in certain times andrespects, a much gloomier period) this ideaof the skeleton had a vast influence infreezing the pride out of all earthly pompsand the fragrance out of all fleeting plea-sures. But it was not, surely, the meredread of death that did this, for thesewere ages in which men went to meetdeath singing ; it was the idea of thedegradation of man in the grinning ugli-ness of his structure that withered thejuvenile insolence of beauty and pride.And in this it almost assuredly did moregood than harm. There is nothing so coldor so pitiless as youth, and youth in aristo-cratic stations and ages tended to an im-peccable dignity, an endless summer ofsuccess which needed to be very sharplyreminded of the scorn of the stars. It waswell that such flamboyant prigs should be

32 THE DEFENDANT

convinced that one practical joke, at least,would bowl them over, that they wouldfall into one grinning man-trap, and notrise again. That the whole structure oftheir existence was as wholesomely ridicu-lous as that of a pig or a parrot they couldnot be expected to realize ; that birth washumorous, coming of age humorous, drink-ing and fighting humorous, they were fartoo young and solemn to know. But atleast they were taught that death washumorous.

There is a peculiar idea abroad that thevalue and fascination of what we callNature lie in her beauty. But the factthat Nature is beautiful in the sense thata dado or a Liberty curtain is beautiful, isonly one of her charms, and almost anaccidental one. The highest and mostvaluable quality in Nature is not herbeauty, but her generous and defiant ugli-ness. A hundred instances might be taken.The croaking noise of the rooks is, in itself,as hideous as the whole hell of sounds in aLondon railway tunnel. Yet it uplifts uslike a trumpet with its coarse kindlinessand honesty, and the lover in 'Maud ' couldactually persuade himself that this abomi-nable noise resembled his lady-love's name.Has the poet, for whom Nature means onlyroses and lilies, ever heard a pig grunting ?


It is a noise that does a man good

a

strong, snorting, imprisoned noise, break-ing its way out of unfathomable dungeonsthrough every possible outlet and organ. Itmight be the voice of the earth itself,snoring in its mighty sleep. This is thedeepest, the oldest, the most wholesomeand religious sense of the value of Naturethe value which comes from her immensebabyishness. She is as top-heavy, asgrotesque, as solemn and as happy as achild. The mood does come when we seeall her shapes like shapes that a babyscrawls upon a slatesimple, rudimentary,a million years older and stronger than thewhole disease that is called Art. Theobjects of earth and heaven seem to com-bine into a nursery tale, and our relationto things seems for a moment so simple thata dancing lunatic would be needed to dojustice to its lucidity and levity. Thetree above my head is flapping like somegigantic bird standing on one leg ; themoon is like the eye of a Cyclops. And,however much my face clouds with sombrevanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemp-tible contempt, the bones of my skullbeneath it are laughing for ever.

A DEFENCE OF PUBLICITY

IT is a very significant fact that theform of art in which the modernworld has certainly not improved upon theancient is what may roughly be called theart of the open air. Public monumentshave certainly not improved, nor has thecriticism of them improved, as is evidentfrom the fashion of condemning such alarge number of them as pompous. Aninteresting essay might be written on theenormous number of words that are usedas insults when they are really compli-ments. It is in itself a singular study inthat tendency which, as I have said, isalways making things out worse thanthey are, and necessitating a systematicattitude of defence. Thus, for example,some dramatic critics cast contempt upona dramatic performance by calling ittheatrical, which simply means that it issuitable to a theatre, and is as much acompliment as calling a poem poetical.Similarly we speak disdainfully of a certainkind of work as sentimental, which simplymeans possessing the admirable and essen-

A DEFENCE OF PUBLICITY 35

tial quality of sentiment. Such phrasesare all parts of one peddling and cowardlyphilosophy, and remind us of the dayswhen ' enthusiast ' was a term of reproach.But of all this vocabulary of unconsciouseulogies nothing is more striking than theword 'pompous.'

Properly speaking, of course, a publicmonument ought to be pompous. Pompis its very object ; it would be absurd tohave columns and pyramids blushing insome coy nook like violets in the woodsof spring. And public monuments havein this matter a great and much-neededlesson to teach. Valour and mercy andthe great enthusiasms ought to be a greatdeal more public than they are at present.We are too fond nowadays of committingthe sin of fear and calling it the virtue ofreverence. We have forgotten the oldand wholesome morality of the Book ofProverbs, ' Wisdom crieth without ; hervoice is heard in the streets.' In Athensand Florence her voice was heard in thestreets. They had an outdoor life of warand argument, and they had what moderncommercial civilization has never hadanoutdoor art. Religious services, the mostsacred of all things, have always been heldpublicly ; it is entirely a new and debasednotion that sanctity is the same as secrecy.

32

36 THE DEFENDANT

A great many modern poets, with themost abstruse and delicate sensibilities,love darkness, when all is said and done,much for the same reason that thieveslove it. The mission of a great spire orstatue should be to strike the spirit witha sudden sense of pride as with a thunder-bolt. It should lift us with it into theempty and ennobling air. Along the baseof every noble monument, whatever elsemay be written there, runs in invisibleletters the lines of Swinburne :

' This thing is God :To be man with thy might,To go straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live

out thy life in the light.'

If a public monument does not meet thisfirst supreme and obvious need, that itshould be public and monumental, it failsfrom the outset.

There has arisen lately a school ofrealistic sculpture, which may perhaps bebetter described as a school of sketchysculpture. Such a movement was rightand inevitable as a reaction from the meanand dingy pomposity of English Victorianstatuary. Perhaps the most hideous anddepressing object in the universefarmore hideous and depressing than one ofMr. H. G. Wells's shapeless monsters of


the slime (and not at all unlike them)isthe statue of an English philanthropist.Almost as bad, though, of course, notquite as bad, are the statues of Englishpoliticians in Parliament Fields. Each ofthem is cased in a cylindrical frock-coat,and each carries either a scroll or adubious-looking garment over the armthat might be either a bathing-towel or alight great-coat. Each of them is in anoratorical attitude, which has all the dis-advantage of being affected without evenany of the advantages of being theatrical.Let no one suppose that such abortionsarise merely from technical demerit. Inevery line of those leaden dolls is expressedthe fact that they were not set up withany heat of natural enthusiasm for beautyor dignity. They were set up mechani-cally, because it would seem indecorousor stingy if they were not set up. Theywere even set up sulkily, in a utilitarianage which was haunted by the thoughtthat there were a great many more sensibleways of spending money. So long as thisis the dominant national sentiment, theland is barren, statues and churches willnot growfor they have to grow, as muchas trees and flowers. But this moral dis-advantage which lay so heavily upon theearly Victorian sculpture lies in a modi-

38 THE DEFENDANT

fied degree upon that rough, picturesque,commonplace sculpture which has begunto arise, and of which the statue of Darwinin the South Kensington Museum and thestatue of Gordon in Trafalgar Square areadmirable examples. It is not enough fora popular monument to be artistic, like ablack charcoal sketch ; it must be striking

;

it must be in the highest sense of the wordsensational ; it must stand for humanity

;

it must speak for us to the stars ; it mustdeclare in the face of all the heavens thatwhen the longest and blackest cataloguehas been made of all our crimes and folliesthere are some things of which we men arenot ashamed.The two modes of commemorating a

public man are a statue and a biography.They are alike in certain respects, as, forexample, in the fact that neither of themresembles the original, and that both ofthem commonly tone down not only all aman's vices, but all the more amusing ofhis virtues. But they are treated in onerespect differently. We never hear any-thing about biography without hearingsomething about the sanctity of privatelife and the necessity for suppressing thewhole of the most important part of aman's existence. The sculptor does notwork at this disadvantage. The sculptor


does not leave out the nose of an eminentphilanthropist because it is too beautifulto be given to the public ; he does notdepict a statesman with a sack over hishead because his smile was too sweet tobe endurable in the light of day. But inbiography the thesis is popularly andsolidly maintained, so that it requires somecourage even to hint a doubt of it, thatthe better a man was, the more trulyhuman life he led, the less should be saidabout it.

For this idea, this modern idea thatsanctity is identical with secrecy, there isone thing at least to be said. It is for allpractical purposes an entirely new idea

;

it was unknown to all the ages in whichthe idea of sanctity really flourished. Therecord of the great spiritual movements ofmankind is dead against the idea thatspirituality is a private matter. The mostawful secret of every man's soul, its mostlonely and individual need, its most primaland psychological relationship, the thingcalled worship, the communication betweenthe soul and the last realitythis mostprivate matter is the most public spectaclein the world. Anyone who chooses towalk into a large church on Sunday morn-ing may see a hundred men each alonewith his Maker. He stands, in truth, in

40 THE DEFENDANT

the presence of one of the strangest spec-tacles in the world a mob of hermits.And in thus definitely espousing publicityby making public the most internalmystery, Christianity acts in accordancewith its earliest origins and its terriblebeginning. It was surely by no accidentthat the spectacle which darkened the sunat noonday was set upon a hill. Themartyrdoms of the early Christians werepublic not only by the caprice of theoppressor, but by the whole desire andconception of the victims.The mere grammatical meaning of the

word ' martyr ' breaks into pieces at ablow the whole notion of the privacy ofgoodness. The Christian martyrdoms weremore than demonstrations : they were ad-vertisements. In our day the new theoryof spiritual delicacy would desire to alterall this. It would permit Christ to becrucified if it was necessary to His Divinenature, but it would ask in the name ofgood taste why He could not be crucifiedin a private room. It would declare thatthe act of a martyr in being torn in piecesby lions was vulgar and sensational, though,of course, it would have no objection tobeing torn in pieces by a lion in one's ownparlour before a circle of really intimatefriends.


It is, I am inclined to think, a decadentand diseased purity which has inauguratedthis notion that the sacred object must behidden. The stars have never lost theirsanctity, and they are more shameless andnaked and numerous than advertisementsof Pears' soap. It would be a strange worldindeed if Nature was suddenly strickenwith this ethereal shame, if the trees grewwith their roots in the air and their loadof leaves and blossoms underground, if theflowers closed at dawn and opened atsunset, if the sunflower turned towardsthe darkness, and the birds flew, like bats,by night.

A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE

THERE are two equal and eternal waysof looking at this twilight world of

ours : we may see it as the twilight ofevening or the twilight of morning ; wemay think of anything, down to a fallenacorn, as a descendant or as an ancestor.There are times when we are almost crushed,not so much with the load of the evil aswith the load of the goodness of humanity,when we feel that we are nothing but theinheritors of a humiliating splendour. Butthere are other times when everythingseems primitive, when the ancient stars areonly sparks blown from a boy's bonfire,when the whole earth seems so young andexperimental that even the white hair ofthe aged, in the fine biblical phrase, islike almond-trees that blossom, like thewhite hawthorn grown in May. That it isgood for a man to realize that he is ' theheir of all the ages ' is pretty commonlyadmitted ; it is a less popular but equallyimportant point that it is good for himsometimes to realize that he is not onlyan ancestor, but an ancestor of primal

A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE 43

antiquity ; it is good for him to wonderwhether he is not a hero, and to experienceennobling doubts as to whether he is not asolar myth.The matters which most thoroughly

evoke this sense of the abiding childhoodof the world are those which are reallyfresh, abrupt and inventive in any age

;

and if we were asked what was the bestproof of this adventurous youth in thenineteenth century we should say, with allrespect to its portentous sciences andphilosophies, that it was to be found in therhymes of Mr. Edward Lear and in theliterature of nonsense. ' The Dong with theLuminous Nose,' at least, is original, as thefirst ship and the first plough were original.

It is true in a certain sense that some ofthe greatest writers the world has seen

Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sternehavewritten nonsense ; but unless we aremistaken, it is in a widely different sense.The nonsense of these men was satiric

that is to say, symbolic ; it was a kind ofexuberant capering round a discoveredtruth. There is all the difference in theworld between the instinct of satire, which,seeing in the Kaiser's moustaches some-thing typical of him, draws them continuallylarger and larger ; and the instinct ofnonsense which, for no reason whatever,

44 THE DEFENDANT

imagines what those moustaches would looklike on the present Archbishop of Canter-bury if he grew them in a fit of absence ofmind. We incline to think that no ageexcept our own could have understood thatthe Quangle - Wangle meant absolutelynothing, and the Lands of the Jumblieswere absolutely nowhere. We fancy thatif the account of the knave's trial in ' Alicein Wonderland ' had been published in theseventeenth century it would have beenbracketed with Bunyan's 'Trial of Faithful'as a parody on the State prosecutions ofthe time. We fancy that if ' The Dongwith the Luminous Nose ' had appeared inthe same period everyone would havecalled, it a dull satire on Oliver Cromwell.

It is altogether advisedly that we quotechiefly from Mr. Lear's 'Nonsense Rhymes.'To our mind he is both chronologically andessentially the father of nonsense ; we thinkhim superior to Lewis Carroll. In onesense, indeed, Lewis Carroll has a greatadvantage. We know what Lewis Carrollwas in daily life : he was a singularlyserious and conventional don, universallyrespected, but very much of a pedant andsomething ofa Philistine. Thus his strangedouble life in earth and in dreamlandemphasizes the idea that lies at the backof nonsensethe idea of escape, of escape


into a world where things are not fixedhorribly in an eternal appropriateness,where apples grow on pear-trees, and any-odd man you meet may have three legsLewis Carroll, living one life in which hewould have thundered morally against anyone who walked on the wrong plot of grass,and another life in which he would cheer-fully call the sun green and the moon blue,was, by his very divided nature, his onefoot on both worlds, a perfect type of theposition of modern nonsense. His Wonder-land is a country populated by insanemathematicians. We feel the whole is anescape into a world of masquerade ; we feelthat if we could pierce their disguises, wemight discover that Humpty Dumpty andthe March Hare were Professors andDoctors of Divinity enjoying a mentalholiday. This sense of escape is certainlyless emphatic in Edward Lear, because ofthe completeness of his citizenship in theworld of unreason. We do not know hisprosaic biography as we know LewisCarroll's. We accept him as a purelyfabulous figure, on his own description ofhimself

:

' His body is perfectly spherical,He weareth a runcible hat.'

While Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is

46 THE DEFENDANT

purely intellectual, Lear introduces quiteanother element the element of thepoetical and even emotional. Carrollworks by the pure reason, but this is notso strong a contrast ; for, after all, man-kind in the main has always regardedreason as a bit of a joke. Lear introduceshis unmeaning words and his amorphouscreatures not with the pomp of reason, butwith the romantic prelude of rich hues andhaunting rhythms.

' Far and few, far and few,Are the lands where the Jumblies live,'

is an entirely different type of poetry tothat exhibited in ' Jabberwocky.' Carroll,with a sense of mathematical neatness,makes his whole poem a mosaic of new andmysterious words. But Edward Lear, withmore subtle and placid effrontery, is alwaysintroducing scraps of his own elvish dialectinto the middle of simple and rationalstatements, until we are almost stunnedinto admitting that we know what theymean. There is a genial ring of common-sense about such lines as,

1 For his aunt Jobiska said "Every one knowsThat a Pobble is better without his toes,"

'

which is beyond the reach of Carroll. The


poet seems so easy on the matter that weare almost driven to pretend that we seehis meaning, that we know the peculiardifficulties of a Pobble, that we are as oldtravellers in the ' Gromboolian Plain ' ashe is.Our claim that nonsense is a new litera-

ture (we might almost say a new sense)would be quite indefensible if nonsensewere nothing more than a mere aestheticfancy. Nothing sublimely artistic hasever arisen out of mere art, any more thananything essentially reasonable has everarisen out of the pure reason. There mustalways be a rich moral soil for any greataesthetic growth. The principle of art forart's sake is a very good principle if itmeans that there is a vital distinctionbetween the earth and the tree that hasits roots in the earth ; but it is a very badprinciple if it means that the tree couldgrow just as well with its roots in the air.Every great literature has always beenallegoricalallegorical of some view of thewhole universe. The ' Iliad ' is only greatbecause all life is a battle, the ' Odyssey

'

because all life is a journey, the Book ofJob because all life is a riddle. There isone attitude in which we think that allexistence is summed up in the word

48 THE DEFENDANT

1 ghosts ' ; another, and somewhat betterone, in which we think it is summed up inthe words 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'Even the vulgarest melodrama or detectivestory can be good if it expresses somethingof the delight in sinister possibilitiesthehealthy lust for darkness and terror whichmay come on us any night in walkingdown a dark lane. If, therefore, nonsenseis really to be the literature of the future,it must have its own version of the Cosmosto offer ; the world must not only be thetragic, romantic, and religious, it must benonsensical also. And here we fancy thatnonsense will, in a very unexpected way,come to the aid of the spiritual view ofthings. Religion has for centuries beentrying to make men exult in the 'wonders'of creation, but it has forgotten that athing cannot be completely wonderful solong as it remains sensible. So long as weregard a tree as an obvious thing, naturallyand reasonably created for a giraffe to eat,we cannot properly wonder at it. It iswhen we consider it as a prodigious waveof the living soil sprawling up to the skiesfor no reason in particular that we take offour hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything has in fact anotherside to it, like the moon, the patroness of


nonsense. Viewed from that other side,a bird is a blossom broken loose from itschain of stalk, a man a quadruped beggingon its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hatto cover a man from the sun, a chair anapparatus of four wooden legs for a cripplewith only two.

This is the side of things which tendsmost truly to spiritual wonder. It issignificant that in the greatest religiouspoem existent, the Book of Job, theargument which convinces the infidel isnot (as has been represented by the merelyrational religionism of the eighteenth cen-tury) a picture of the ordered beneficenceof the Creation ; but, on the contrary,a picture of the huge and undecipherableunreason of it. ' Hast Thou sent the rainupon the desert where no man is V Thissimple sense of wonder at the shapes ofthings, and at their exuberant inde-pendence of our intellectual standards andour trivial definitions, is the basis ofspirituality as it is the basis of nonsense.Nonsense and faith (strange as the con-junction may seem) are the two supremesymbolic assertions of the truth that todraw out the soul of things with a syllogismis as impossible as to draw out Leviathanwith a hook. The well-meaning person

4

50 THE DEFENDANT

who, by merely studying the logical sideof things, has decided that ' faith is non-sense,' does not know how truly he speaks

;

later it may come back to him in the formthat nonsense is faith.

A DEFENCE OF PLANETS

A BOOK has at one time come undermy notice called ' Terra Firma : theEarth not a Planet.' The author was aMr. D. Wardlaw Scott, and he quotedvery seriously the opinions of a largenumber of other persons, of whom wehave never heard, but who are evidentlyvery important. Mr. Beach of Southsea,for example, thinks that the world isflat ; and in Southsea perhaps it is. Itis no part of my present intention, how-ever, to follow Mr. Scott's arguments indetail. On the lines of such argumentsit may be shown that the earth is flat,and, for the matter of that, that it is tri-angular. A few examples will suffice :One of Mr. Scott's objections was that if

a projectile is fired from a moving bodythere is a difference in the distance towhich it carries according to the directionin which it is sent. But as in practicethere is not the slightest difference which-ever way the thing is done, in the case ofthe earth ' we have a forcible overthrowof all fancies relative to the motion of the

42

52 THE DEFENDANT

earth, and a striking proof that the earthis not a globe.'

This is altogether one of the quaintestarguments we have ever seen. It neverseems to occur to the author, among otherthings, that when the firing and falling ofthe shot all take place upon the movingbody, there is nothing whatever to comparethem with. As a matter of fact, of course,a shot fired at an elephant does actuallyoften travel towards the marksman, butmuch slower than the marksman travels.Mr. Scott probably would not like to con-template the fact that the elephant, pro-perly speaking, swings round and hits thebullet. To us it appears full of a richcosmic humour.

I will only give one other example ofthe astronomical proofs :

1 If the earth were a globe, the distanceround the surface, say, at 45 degrees southlatitude, could not possibly be any greaterthan the same latitude north ; but since itis found by navigators to be twice the dis-tanceto say the least of itor doublethe distance it ought to be according tothe globular theory, it is a proof that theearth is not a globe.'

This sort of thing reduces my mind toa pulp. I can faintly resist when a mansays that if the earth were a globe cats

A DEFENCE OF PLANETS 53

would not have four legs ; but when hesays that if the earth were a globe catswould not have five legs I am crushed.

But, as I have indicated, it is not inthe scientific aspect of this remarkabletheory that I am for the moment inter-ested. It is rather with the differencebetween the flat and the round worlds asconceptions in art and imagination that Iam concerned. It is a very remarkablething that none of us are really Coperni-cans in our actual outlook upon things.We are convinced intellectually that weinhabit a small provincial planet, but wedo not feel in the least suburban. Men ofscience have quarrelled with the Biblebecause it is not based upon the trueastronomical system, but it is certainlyopen to the orthodox to say that if it hadbeen it would never have convinced any-body.

If a single poem or a single story werereally transfused with the Copernican idea,the thing would be a nightmare. Can wethink of a solemn scene of mountain still-ness in which some prophet is standing ina trance, and then realize that the wholescene is whizzing round like a zoetrope atthe rate of nineteen miles a second ?Could we tolerate the notion of a mightyKing delivering a sublime fiat and then

54 THE DEFENDANT

remember that for all practical purposeshe is hanging head downwards in space ?A strange fable might be written of a manwho was blessed or cursed with the Coper-nican eye, and saw all men on the earthlike tintacks clustering round a magnet.It would be singular to imagine how verydifferent the speech of an aggressive egoist,announcing the independence and divinityof man, would sound if he were seen hang-ing on to the planet by his boot soles.

For, despite Mr. Wardlaw Scott's horrorat the Newtonian astronomy and its con-tradiction of the Bible, the whole distinc-tion is a good instance of the differencebetween letter and spirit ; the letter of theOld Testament is opposed to the conceptionof the solar system, but the spirit hasmuch kinship with it. The writers of theBook of Genesis had no theory of gravita-tion, which to the normal person willappear a fact of as much importance asthat they had no umbrellas. But thetheory of gravitation has a curiouslyHebrew sentiment in ita sentiment ofcombined dependence and certainty, asense of grappling unity, by which allthings hang upon one thread. ' Thou hasthanged the world upon nothing,' said theauthor of the Book of Job, and in that


sentence wrote the whole appalling poetryof modem astronomy. The sense of thepreciousness and fragility of the universe,the sense of being in the hollow of a hand,is one which the round and rolling earthgives in its most thrilling form. Mr.Wardlaw Scott's flat earth would be thetrue territory for a comfortable atheist.Nor would the old Jews have any objec-tion to being as much upside down asright way up. They had no foolish ideasabout the dignity of man.

It would be an interesting speculationto imagine whether the world will everdevelop a Copernican poetry and a Coper-nican habit of fancy ; whether we shallever speak of ' early earth-turn ' instead of' early sunrise,' and speak indifferently oflooking up at the daisies, or looking downon the stars. But if we ever do, there arereally a large number of big and fantasticfacts awaiting us, worthy to make a newmythology. Mr. Wardlaw Scott, for ex-ample, with genuine, if unconscious, imagi-nation, says that according to astronomers,' the sea is a vast mountain of water mileshigh.' To have discovered that mountainof moving crystal, in which the fishes buildlike birds, is like discovering Atlantis : itis enough to make the old world young

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again. In the new poetry which we con-template, athletic young men will set outsturdily to climb up the face of the sea.If we once realize all this earth as it is, weshould find ourselves in a land of miracles :we shall discover a new planet at themoment that we discover our own. Amongall the strange things that men haveforgotten, the most universal and catas-trophic lapse of memory is that by whichthey have forgotten that they are living ona star.

In the early days of the world, thediscovery of a fact of natural history wasimmediately followed by the realization ofit as a fact of poetry. When man awokefrom the long fit of absent-mindednesswhich is called the automatic animal state,and began to notice the queer facts thatthe sky was blue and the grass green, heimmediately began to use those factssymbolically. Blue, the colour of the sky,became a symbol of celestial holiness

;

green passed into the language as indicatinga freshness verging upon unintelligence.If we had the good fortune to live in aworld in which the sky was green and thegrass blue, the symbolism would have beendifferent. But for some mysterious reasonthis habit of realizing poetically the facts


of science has ceased abruptly with scien-tific progress, and all the confoundingportents preached by Galileo and Newtonhave fallen on deaf ears. They painted apicture of the universe compared withwhich the Apocalypse with its falling starswas a mere idyll. They declared that weare all careering through space, clinging toa cannon-ball, and the poets ignore thematter as if it were a remark about theweather. They say that an invisible forceholds us in our own armchairs while theearth hurtles like a boomerang ; and menstill go back to dusty records to prove themercy of God. They tell us that Mr. Scott'smonstrous vision of a mountain of sea-waterrising in a solid dome, like the glass moun-tain in the fairy-tale, is actually a fact, andmen still go back to the fairy-tale. To whattowering heights of poetic imagery mightwe not have risen if only the poetizing ofnatural history had continued and man'sfancy had played with the planets asnaturally as it once played with theflowers ! We might have had a planetarypatriotism, in which the green leaf shouldbe like a cockade, and the sea an everlast-ing dance of drums. We might have beenproud of what our star has wrought, andworn its heraldry haughtily in the blind

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tournament of the spheres. All this,indeed, we may surely do yet ; for with allthe multiplicity of knowledge there is onething happily that no man knows : whetherthe world is old or young.

A DEFENCE OFCHINA SHEPHERDESSES

THERE are some things of which theworld does not like to be reminded,

for they are the dead loves of the world.One of these is that great enthusiasm forthe Arcadian life which, however much itmay now lie open to the sneers of realism,did, beyond all question, hold sway for anenormous period of the world's history,from the times that we describe as ancientdown to times that may fairly be calledrecent. The conception of the innocentand hilarious life of shepherds and shep-herdesses certainly covered and absorbedthe time of Theocritus, of Virgil, of Catul-lus, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Ariosto, ofShakespeare, and of Pope. We are toldthat the gods of the heathen were stoneand brass, but stone and brass have neverendured with the long endurance of theChina Shepherdess. The Catholic Churchand the Ideal Shepherd are indeed almostthe only things that have bridged theabyss between the ancient world and themodern. Yet, as we say, the world does

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not like to be reminded of this boyish en-thusiasm.But imagination, the function of the

historian, cannot let so great an elementalone. By the cheap revolutionary it iscommonly supposed that imagination is amerely rebellious thing, that it has itschieffunction in devising new and fantasticrepublics. But imagination has its highestuse in a retrospective realization. Thetrumpet of imagination, like the trumpetof the Resurrection, calls the dead out oftheir graves. Imagination sees Delphiwith the eyes of a Greek, Jerusalem withthe eyes of a Crusader, Paris with theeyes of a Jacobin, and Arcadia with theeyes of a Euphuist. The prime functionof imagination is to see our whole orderlysystem of life as a pile of stratified revolu-tions. In spite of all revolutionaries itmust be said that the function of imagina-tion is not to make strange things settled,so much as to make settled things strange

;

not so much to make wonders facts as tomake facts wonders. To the imaginativethe truisms are all paradoxes, since theywere paradoxes in the Stone Age ; to themthe ordinary copy-book blazes with blas-phemy.

Let us, then, consider in this light theold pastoral or Arcadian ideal. But first

CHINA SHEPHERDESSES 61

certainly one thing must be definitelyrecognised. This Arcadian art and litera-ture is a lost enthusiasm. To study it islike fumbling in the love-letters of a deadman. To us its flowers seem as tawdryas cockades ; the lambs that dance to theshepherd's pipe seem to dance with all theartificiality of a ballet. Even our ownprosaic toil seems to us more joyous thanthat holiday. Where its ancient exuber-ance passed the bounds of wisdom andeven of virtue, its caperings seem frozeninto the stillness of an antique frieze. Inthose gray old pictures a bacchanal seemsas dull as an archdeacon. Their very sinsseem colder than our restraints.

All this may be frankly recognised : allthe barren sentimentality of the Arcadianideal and all its insolent optimism. Butwhen all is said and done, something elseremains.Through ages in which the most arrogant

and elaborate ideals of power and civiliza-tion held otherwise undisputed sway, theideal of the perfect and healthy peasantdid undoubtedly represent in some shapeor form the conception that there was adignity in simplicity and a dignity inlabour. It was good for the ancient aristo-crat, even if he could not attain to inno-cence and the wisdom of the earth, to

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believe that these things were the secretsof the priesthood of the poor. It was goodfor him to believe that even if heaven wasnot above him, heaven was below him. Itwas well that he should have amid all hisflamboyant triumphs the never - extin-guished sentiment that there was some-thing better than his triumphs, the concep-tion that ' there remaineth a rest.'The conception of the Ideal Shepherd

seems absurd to our modern ideas. But,after all, it was perhaps the only trade ofthe democracy which was equalized withthe trades of the aristocracy even by thearistocracy itself. The shepherd ofpastoralpoetry was, without doubt, very differentfrom the shepherd of actual fact. Whereone innocently piped to his lambs, theother innocently swore at them ; and theirdivergence in intellect and personal cleanli-ness was immense. But the differencebetween the ideal shepherd who dancedwith Amaryllis and the real shepherd whothrashed her is not a scrap greater thanthe difference between the ideal soldierwho dies to capture the colours and thereal soldier who lives to clean his accoutre-ments, between the ideal priest who iseverlastingly by someone's bed and thereal priest who is as glad as anyone else toget to his own. There are ideal concep-


tions and real men in every calling; yet

there are few who object to the ideal con-ceptions, and not many, after all, whoobject to the real men.The fact, then, is this : So far from re-

senting the existence in art and literatureof an ideal shepherd, I genuinely regretthat the shepherd is the only democraticcalling that has ever been raised to thelevel of the heroic callings conceived by anaristocratic age. So far from objecting tothe Ideal Shepherd, I wish there were anIdeal Postman, an Ideal Grocer, and anIdeal Plumber. It is undoubtedly truethat we should laugh at the idea of anIdeal Postman ; it is true, and it provesthat we are not genuine democrats.

Undoubtedly the modern grocer, if calledupon to act in an Arcadian manner, ifdesired to oblige with a symbolic danceexpressive of the delights of grocery, orto perform on some simple instrumentwhile his assistants skipped around him,would be embarrassed, and perhaps evenreluctant. But it may be questionedwhether this temporary reluctance of thegrocer is a good thing, or evidence of agood condition of poetic feeling in thegrocery business as a whole. There cer-tainly should be an ideal image of healthand happiness in any trade, and its remote-

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ness from the reality is not the only im-portant question. No one supposes thatthe mass of traditional conceptions of dutyand glory are always operative, for example,in the mind of a soldier or a doctor ; thatthe Battle of Waterloo actually makes aprivate enjoy pipeclaying his trousers, orthat the ' health of humanity ' softens themomentary phraseology of a physiciancalled out of bed at two o'clock in themorning. But although no ideal obliteratesthe ugly drudgery and detail of any call-ing, that ideal does, in the case of thesoldier or the doctor, exist definitely in thebackground and makes that drudgeryworth while as a whole. It is a seriouscalamity that no such ideal exists in thecase of the vast number of honourabletrades and crafts on which the existenceof a modern city depends. It is a pitythat current thought and sentiment offernothing corresponding to the old concep-tion of patron saints. If they did therewould be a Patron Saint of Plumbers, andthis would alone be a revolution, for itwould force the individual craftsman tobelieve that there was once a perfect beingwho did actually plumb.When all is said and done, then, we

think it much open to question whetherthe world has not lost something in the


complete disappearance of the ideal of thehappy peasant. It is foolish enough tosuppose that the rustic went about all overribbons, but it is better than knowing thathe goes about all over rags and being in-different to the fact. The modern realisticstudy of the poor does in reality lead thestudent further astray than the old idyllicnotion. For we cannot get the chiaroscuroof humble life so long as its virtues seemto us as gross as its vices and its joys assullen as its sorrows. Probably at thevery moment that we can see nothing buta dull-faced man smoking and drinkingheavily with his friend in a pot-house, theman himself is on his soul's holiday,crowned with the flowers of a passionateidleness, and far more like the HappyPeasant than the world will ever know.

A DEFENCE OF USEFULINFORMATION

IT is natural and proper enough that themasses of explosive ammunition stored

up in detective stories and the replete andsolid sweet-stuff shops which are calledsentimental novelettes should be popularwith the ordinary customer. It is notdifficult to realize that all of us, ignorantor cultivated, are primarily interested inmurder and love-making. The really ex-traordinary thing is that the most appal-ling fictions are not actually so popular asthat literature which deals with the mostundisputed and depressing facts. Men arenot apparently so interested in murder andlove-making as they are in the number ofdifferent forms of latchkey which exist inLondon or the time that it would take agrasshopper to jump from Cairo to theCape. The enormous mass of fatuous anduseless truth which fills the most widely-circulated papers, such as Tit-Bits, ScienceSi/tings, and many of the illustratedmagazines, is certainly one of the most

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extraordinary kinds of emotional andmental pabulum on which man ever fed.It is almost incredible that these pre-posterous statistics should actually bemore popular than the most blood-curdlingmysteries and the most luxurious de-bauches of sentiment. To imagine it islike imagining the humorous passages inBradshaw's Railway Guide read aloud onwinter evenings. It is like conceiving aman unable to put down an advertisementof Mother Seigel's Syrup because hewished to know what eventually happenedto the young man who was extremely ill atEdinburgh. In the case of cheap detectivestories and cheap novelettes, we can mostof us feel, whatever our degree of educa-tion, that it might be possible to read themif we gave full indulgence to a lower andmore facile part of our natures ; at theworst we feel that we might enjoy them aswe might enjoy bull-baiting or gettingdrunk. But the literature of informationis absolutely mysterious to us. We canno more think of amusing ourselves withit than of reading whole pages of aSurbiton local directory. To read suchthings would not be a piece of vulgarindulgence ; it would be a highly arduousand meritorious enterprise. It is this factwhich constitutes a profound and almost

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unfathomable interest in this particularbranch of popular literature.

Primarily, at least, there is one ratherpeculiar thing which must in justice besaid about it. The readers of this strangescience must be allowed to be, upon thewhole, as disinterested as a prophet see-ing visions or a child reading fairy-tales.Here, again, we find, as we so often do,that whatever view of this matter ofpopular literature we can trust, we cantrust least of all the comment and censurecurrent among the vulgar educated. Theordinary version of the ground of thispopularity for information, which would begiven by a person of greater cultivation,would be that common men are chieflyinterested in those sordid facts thatsurround them on every side. A verysmall degree of examination will show usthat whatever ground there is for thepopularity of these insane encyclopaedias,it cannot be the ground of utility. Theversion of life given by a penny novelettemay be very moonstruck and unreliable,but it is at least more likely to containfacts relevant to daily life than compila-tions on the subject of the number of cows'tails that would reach the North Pole.There are many more people who are inlove than there are people who have any


intention of counting or collecting cows'tails. It is evident to me that the groundsof this widespread madness of informationfor information's sake must be sought inother and deeper parts of human naturethan those daily needs which lie so near thesurface that even social philosophers havediscovered them somewhere in that pro-found and eternal instinct for enthusiasmand minding other people's business whichmade great popular movements like theCrusades or the Gordon Riots.

I once had the pleasure of knowing aman who actually talked in private lifeafter the manner of these papers. Hisconversation consisted of fragmentarystatements about height and weight anddepth and time and population, and hisconversation was a nightmare of dulness.During the shortest pause he would askwhether his interlocutors were aware howmany tons of rust were scraped every yearoff the Menai Bridge, and how many rivalshops Mr. Whiteley had bought up sincehe opened his business. The attitude ofhis acquaintances towards this inex-haustible entertainer varied according tohis presence or absence between indiffer-ence and terror. It was frightful to thinkof a man's brain being stocked with suchinexpressibly profitless treasures. It was

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like visiting some imposing British Museumand finding its galleries and glass casesfilled with specimens of London mud, ofcommon mortar, of broken walking-sticksand cheap tobacco. Years afterwards Idiscovered that this intolerable prosaicbore had been, in fact, a poet. I learntthat every item of this multitudinous in-formation was totally and unblushinglyuntrue, that for all I knew he had made itup as he went along ; that no tons of rustare scraped off the Menai Bridge, and thatthe rival tradesmen and Mr. Whiteleywere creatures of the poet's brain. In-stantly I conceived consuming respect forthe man who was so circumstantial, somonotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar.With him it must have been a case of artfor art's sake. The joke sustained sogravely through a respected lifetime wasof that order of joke which is shared withomniscience. But what struck me morecogently upon reflection was the fact thatthese immeasurable trivialities, which hadstruck me as utterly vulgar and arid whenI thought they were true, immediatelybecame picturesque and almost brilliantwhen I thought they were inventions ofthe human fancy. And here, as it seemsto me, I laid my finger upon a fundamentalquality of the cultivated class which


prevents it, and will, perhaps, alwaysprevent it from seeing with the eyes ofpopular imagination. The merely educatedcan scarcely ever be brought to believethat this world is itself an interestingplace. When they look at a work of art,good or bad, they expect to be interested,but when they look at a newspaper ad-vertisement or a group in the street, theydo not, properly and literally speaking,expect to be interested. But to commonand simple people this world is a work ofart, though it is, like many great worksof art, anonymous. They look to life forinterest with the same kind of cheerfuland uneradicable assurance with which welook for interest at a comedy for which wehave paid money at the door. To the eyesof the ultimate school of contemporaryfastidiousness, the universe is indeed anill-drawn and over-coloured picture, thescrawlings in circles of a baby upon theslate of night ; its starry skies are a vulgarpattern which they would not have for awallpaper, its flowers and fruits have acockney brilliancy, like the holiday hat ofa flower-girl. Hence, degraded by art toits own level, they have lost altogetherthat primitive and typical taste of man

the taste for news. By this essential tastefor news, I mean the pleasure in hearing

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the mere fact that a man has died at theage of 110 in South Wales, or that thehorses ran away at a funeral in San Fran-cisco. Large masses of the early faithsand politics of the world, numbers of themiracles and heroic anecdotes, are basedprimarily upon this love of something thathas just happened, this divine institutionof gossip. When Christianity was namedthe good news, it spread rapidly, not onlybecause it was good, but also because itwas news. So it is that if any of us haveever spoken to a navvy in a train aboutthe daily paper, we have generally foundthe navvy interested, not in those strugglesof Parliaments and trades unions whichsometimes are, and are always supposed tobe, for his benefit ; but in the fact that anunusually large whale has been washed upon the coast of Orkney, or that some lead-ing millionaire like Mr. Harmsworth isreported to break a hundred pipes a year.The educated classes, cloyed and demoral-ized with the mere indulgence of art andmood, can no longer understand the idleand splendid disinterestedness of thereader of Pearson's Weekly. He stillkeeps something of that feeling whichshould be the birthright of menthe feel-ing that this planet is like a new houseinto which we have just moved our bag-


gage. Any detail of it has a value, and,with a truly sportsmanlike instinct, theaverage man takes most pleasure in thedetails which are most complicated, irrele-vant, and at once difficult and useless todiscover. Those parts of the newspaperwhich announce the giant gooseberry andthe raining frogs are really the modernrepresentatives of the

Documents

G. K. Chesterton The Defendant 1902