XIV. On Loneliness

by G.K. Chesterton

ONE of the finer manifestations of an indefatigable patriotism has taken the form of an appeal to the nation on the subject of Loneliness. This complains that the individual is isolated in England, in a sense unknown in most other countries, and demands that something should be done at once to link up all these lonely individuals in a chain of sociability. My first feeling, I confess, was an overwhelming desire to do a bolt, like an escaping criminal, before the gigantic drag-nets of this scheme for universal camaraderie had begun to sweep the country-side. My second thoughts and feelings were more just and sympathetic; but there remained in them a reflection that often does mingle with my reflections on contemporary hustle and publicity. It all seems to me very much behind the times.

I should have entirely agreed with the suggestion if he had made it thirty years ago. Nor is it I that have changed, but the world that has changed. But the world has changed so much, in the very direction that is desired, that I should not have imagined there was anything more to desire. It is now rather difficult in England to take a lonely walk, or to find a lonely road, or, for people living in a large circle of acquaintances, to spend a lonely evening. It is perfectly true that, not very long ago, the exaggeration in England was all the other way. English Society was largely paralysed by the combination of a gentility that was the dregs of aristocracy, and a Pharisaism that was the dregs of Puritanism. Even then the Puritanism could hardly be called Protestantism, in the sense of any personal or positive religion. It was simply the sour taste in the mouth left by the medicine, or poison, of seventeenth-century Calvinism. But it remained in the mouth, and even in the expression of the mouth. That mouth was well known to waiters, cabmen, porters, and all sorts of people, especially foreign people, and the mouth did undoubtedly express many things pride and vainglory and blindness and hardness of heart but especially hardness of hearing, and a resolution not to open it in anything resembling human conversation with other human beings But thirty years ago this stupid self sufficiency was not being blamed as the cause of loneliness. Thirty years ago it was being praised as the cause of Empire; as the strong Anglo-Saxon self-respect and self-reliance which had won the glorious battle for the Suez Canal, and explained our complete and marvellous success in Ireland. And when I suggested, in those days, that this was all nonsense, when I said that nobody can rule another race merely by shutting his own mouth and eyes and ears and heart to everything, I was derided in the sensational Press of those days as a Little Englander and a sentimental anarchist. Nevertheless, I thought then, and I think I was right in thinking then, that England suffered from the lack of that natural flow of intelligent talk and pleasant public manners that can be seen in the cities of the Continent. A café was a place where even strangers could talk; and a club was a place where even friends could not talk.

I remember throwing out a fanciful suggestion, partly for fun, but partly for the sake of symbolism, which might well form a part of the great Campaign Against Solitude. I suggested that it would be a good thing for those isolated Victorian households if they had a Human Library for circulating human beings instead of books. I suggested that Mudie’s Omnibus would call once a week, depositing two or three strangers at the door; who would be duly returned when they had been adequately studied. There was a list of rules, dealing with what should happen if somebody kept Miss Brown out too long, or returned Mr. Robinson in a damaged condition. I thought that the Human Circulating Library was a good notion in those days; and I still think it was a good notion — for those days. I think that an intermittent stream of strangers through the old Victorian home would have been a good thing — for the old Victorian home. But the difficulty nowadays is not even to keep the old Victorian home. It is to keep any sort of home at all. It is to get people to see how normal and necessary and enduring, in spite of all its Victorian abuses, is the idea of the family institution and possession. Large numbers of the new generation never go about except in nameless and nomadic crowds, and profess their readiness to live anyhow and for ever in huge homeless hostels and communal camps. In the middle of all this the advocate of the Campaign Against Solitude suddenly wakes up and cries aloud that he is in a wilderness. The jazz and the saxophones answer him, but he remains in his Victorian dream, following his Anti- Victorian vision. He may be in a wilderness, but it is certainly a howling wilderness. At any rate, it must be hard for him to believe that he is in a hermitage.

All this seems to me like a man coming to life in the middle of the Great War, and declaring that he can endure no longer the Quakerish dullness of the long peace of Queen Victoria. It is like a man appearing suddenly in the streets of Bolshevist Moscow, and shouting aloud that he is going to put an end to the superstitious autocracy by blowing up the Czar. His remarks are forcible and perhaps even justifiable in themselves; but they do not seem to be fitted with any exactitude into the circumstances around him. If English people really are still frightened of society and frozen into solitude, I am entirely on the side of the gentleman who wishes to make them more sociable. But I have a suspicion that what they are really likely to lose just now is not sociability, but solitude. And I am firmly and fanatically against their losing solitude. I am furiously and savagely opposed to being robbed of my own solitude. And it seems to me that the general trend of social life at present is rather to be a great deal too social, and to forget the real social uses of solitude.

That is the advantage, if I may say so, of having for a philosophy a religion instead of a fashion. Those whose faith is only fashion always make the world much worse than it is. They always make men more solitary when they are too solitary. They always make men more sociable when they are too sociable. But I do not worship either solitude or sociability, and I am in a position of intellectual independence for the purpose of judging when either tendency goes too far. Puritanism made a man too individual, and had its horrible outcome in Individualism. Paganism makes a man too collective, and its extreme outcome is in Communism. But I am neither a Puritan nor a Pagan, and I have lived just long enough to see the whole of England practically transformed from Puritanism to Paganism. It is not surprising if the cure for the first is not exactly the same as the cure for the second. But there could not be a better example of the balance of a permanent philosophy than the present merely temporary need to insist on the case for solitude.

What is the matter with the world to-day is that it is too much with us; too much with everybody. It will not leave a man long enough by himself for him to discover that he is himself. Therefore, we have a perpetual pouring of gifts from the State to the individual, but less and less given back by the individual to the State. This is hard on all humanity; but it is especially hard on the English. They are a nation of humorists, in the old sense; which is the very opposite of a nation of Society wits. Their wits have worked best upon poetry and leisurely fiction, which grow best in lives of quiet and detachment. And I do seriously think that Englishmen ought to make some fight for that right of ancient sanctuary, before it is broken down by the mere American herd-instinct. I have never been a Jingo, or uttered political boasts about the Splendid Isolation of England, but I would do a good deal to preserve the Splendid Isolation of the Englishman.

 
XV. On the Importance of Why We Do (or Don’t)

ON the whole, I am rather less interested in what people do than in why they do it. Of course, there are extremes which are exceptions. I daresay that if somebody suddenly smashed my hat over my eyes, as I walked down the street, I might feel a momentary and confused resentment against the act and even the actor, in spite of the fact that he might have acted from either friendly or unfriendly motives. He might be a proof-reader of, say, The Illustrated London News, maddened by years of boredom in having to read through my articles in that paper, and resolved to be revenged at last. But he also might be a social sympathizer who, knowing that a steel and concrete Temple of Progress, in the American manner, had been built in that street that morning, was resolved to spare me the shock of beholding it, and had with that object intervened, abruptly indeed, but with no little presence of mind. Yet even here the principle holds, for it would be much more worth while to have a quiet talk afterwards with either of those two interesting lunatics than to continue in the mere bewildered irritation arising from the thing having happened at all. Moreover, though the abstract attitude will be called unpractical, the motive does make all the difference to practicality, in the sense of probability. The man who hits me because I am approaching a Temple of Progress will not hit me when I am not approaching a Temple of Progress. And, normally speaking, I am happy to say, I am not. But nothing will turn aside the pursuing vengeance of the proof-reader, who will hit me wherever and whenever he can — and quite right too.

In short, the principle is much more reasonable than it sounds; and any number of examples could be given of it. I might be selfishly vexed to find I had been poisoned with prussic acid; and this apart from the mere detached detective interest of whether it was done by an enthusiastic Darwinian, sworn to kill every Anti-Darwinian, or merely by an enthusiastic Christian Scientist, sworn to prove that poisons do not kill. But if I retained my logical faculty while writhing in my last agonies, I should still contend that there was a difference between the fanatical poisoner and the faith-healer; and I should probably add (with my dying breath) that the faith-healer is much the more dangerous of the two. For the Darwinian would only murder the small intelligent minority which has sufficient intellectual independence not to be frightened of the name of Darwin; whereas the healer might murder everybody, with every intention of healing everybody. In short, the real reason of things is every bit as important as the things themselves; and that is what ought to be meant by being a rationalist. Unfortunately, a man who is in this real sense a rationalist is generally denounced for being a mystic.

For instance, there is an ever-increasing quarrel about the license or limits of what is called Sex Literature. Mr. James Douglas made a very vigorous and (as I think) a very just protest against various poisonous passions being poured out to all and sundry. He then proceeded to consider what should be done about it. He drew up a scheme for a sort of unofficial literary licensing committee. It was by no means a bad scheme; I for one might, after due consideration, be disposed to support it; and anyhow I am not here disposed to criticize it. But I am disposed to criticize some of the philosophical remarks with which Mr. Douglas seems to think he is supporting it, when he is in fact undermining it. I am true to my perverse test; I want to know from Mr. Douglas, not what is his practical scheme, but what is his theoretical reason for it. He has himself, as I have noted, fought an admirable fight for normal morality and the resistance to moral disease. But he is not quite theoretical enough to get a grip on the thing itself; and he defends it better than he defines it. For when he comes to the general ethical problem, he surrenders the ground suddenly to the enemy. He says that the practical problem of fixing decorum in a special society is very difficult, which is very true. But he adds that morality (apparently in the real sense of right and wrong) changes continually from age to age, which is the very devil.

Now, that is where the whole mistake and the whole mischief begin. If Mr. Douglas tells some decadent or other that morality changes from age to age, the decadent will reply, as indeed he does reply, ‘Yes, and I have the morality of the new age; you have the morality of the age that is passing; I am in advance of the times, you are behind the times. I am the Superman who is expected about the end of the twentieth century, you are a dusty old Victorian and ought to have died in the nineteenth.’ Mr. Douglas may think that the decadent is more likely to decay than he is; and that he is as lively and likely to survive as the other. But if everything is perpetually changing, it is impossible to prove it, or to test how fast it is changing or how far it has changed. The truth is that Mr. Douglas, who has denounced all such decadents far more furiously and flamboyantly than I have, has yet fallen back before them exactly where he ought to stand firm. It is not true that the idea of right and wrong changes. The particular concentration on a certain sort of right changes; the relative toleration of a certain sort of wrong changes. Men in medieval times tolerated more ruthless punishments; men in modern times tolerate more reckless and irresponsible financial speculation and control. But a medieval man did not think mercy a bad thing. A modern man does not think dishonesty a good thing. The proportions differ in practice; the ethical expression differs in emphasis; but virtue is virtue and vice is vice, in all ages and for all people, except a very few lunatics.

As it is about cruelty or commercial rapacity, so it is about the basic ideas of modesty and fidelity and sexual self-control. One age does differ from another in manner of expression, and may differ for the better or the worse; but precisely what does not really differ is fundamental morality. One age does differ from another about whether certain plain words that are used in the Bible shall be used in the drawing-room. But using fashionable words in the drawing-room is not morality. One age does differ from another about whether skirts are reasonably long or short; but fashionable skirts are not morality. The motive is morality, even when the motive happens to concern these trivial things. To insult our fellow-creatures with coarse words to which they are unaccustomed may be an immoral act; it may sometimes, under certain conditions, be a highly moral act. It entirely depends on why it is done. Now, so far as this fundamental and final morality is concerned, it leaves the modern problem still to be settled; but it provides some sort of firm basis on which it can be settled. We may even say that it ends where the controversy begins; but it does make it possible for the controversy to begin — and (what is not unimportant) for it to end. It is impossible for any controversy to end, it is impossible for any to begin, in a chaos of incalculable change. But, anyhow, there is a permanent ethic, and without it nobody will effect even a temporary reform.

 
XVI. On the Open Conspiracy

MR. H. G. WELLS believes that the world now wants a world peace; and apparently wants it more than anything else. The world has always wanted a world peace; and often wanted it very much; only (and this is the point) it certainly did not then, and it possibly may not now, want it more than any thing else. And it is to that distinction that Mr. Wells, as it seems to me, pays too little attention. Europe felt that need for unity so strongly that it four or five times attempted it and two or three times practically achieved it. And the queer thing is that when, for once in a way, it was achieved, Mr. Wells does not think much of the achievement. It was largely achieved in the material sphere by Pagan Rome; and Mr. Wells detests Pagan Rome. It was largely achieved in the moral sphere by Christian Rome; and Mr. Wells abominates Christi Rome. Its establishment was attempted by Charlemagne; and I do not think he thinks much of Charlemagne. Its establishment was re-attempted by Napoleon; and I know he foams with rage at the very name of Napoleon. He thus finds himself in a somewhat difficult relation to the whole Outline of History; perpetually affirming that a certain thing must be done and perpetually abusing everybody who ever tried to do it. St. Augustine said in jest, ‘Confound the people who said beforehand what I wanted to say.’ Mr. Wells seems to find it necessary to say seriously, ‘Confound the people who did beforehand what I want to do.’ Of course their work was unfinished as his is untried. But it is by eliminating theirs that he reaches his own alternative idea. He suggests that there is a third way of bringing about international unification; and it is this which he calls the Open Conspiracy.

I cannot say that this entirely convinces me as a thing likely to convince mankind. It seems to me that if we cannot get a general rule accepted, like that of the Rome of Augustus, we must get a general moral philosophy accepted, like that of the Rome of Gregory. That is, we must either submit to one common culture or we must agree on one common creed; that is the nearest we can ever get to making an authority that can really arbitrate and have its arbitration accepted. Even then we cannot make conflict impossible. But we can make controversy possible. We can make it rational to argue and debate, by agreeing on the first principles we debate on, and accepting a certain standard of values. Otherwise conflict will always be possible, because controversy is impossible. Suppose there is a Prussian who thinks that nothing matters except Prussia, and a Bolshevist who thinks that nothing matters except Bolshevism. It is utterly futile to ask that they should argue and not fight. What have they got to argue about? What have they got to argue with? Where is the argument supposed to begin and how is it supposed to end? The Junker can be told that his arrogance is bad internationalism; but he does not care what happens to internationalism. The Communist can be told that his internationalism would destroy patriotism; but he wants to destroy patriotism. There can be no sort of agreement, there can be no sort of argument, there can certainly be no sort of acceptable arbitration, between people whose fundamental values are different. I take the harsh and narrow sort of patriotism that was called Prussianism and the harsh and narrow form of Collectivism that is called Bolshevism, because they happen to be the two best modern examples of entirely separatist and self-existent new philosophies. It is perhaps worth noting that they are the two philosophies, belonging to the two great communities, which were never inside the system either of Pagan or of Christian Rome.

Anyhow, Mr. Wells faces fairly enough the fact that he wants something done which several people have tried to do; and that he cannot abide their way of doing it. He therefore has to sketch out some suggestion at least of his own way of doing it. And it is this which makes the book exceedingly interesting and not very convincing. He is certainly in no sense a rigid or rabid Socialist, after the fashion of a Bolshevist. He makes it clear that he has no belief in the crude Communist simplification; that he believes, as he expresses it, that the Russian Revolution was but a blundering side-issue and an accident on the flank of true progress.

I think it is true that Bolshevism is much weaker for having won. Utopia always wins best in what is, in another than the Wellsian sense, a War in the Air. When the heavenly kingdom becomes an earthly paradise, it sometimes tends to be a hell upon earth. But it sometimes tends to be what is even worse, or at least weaker: a very earthy imitation of the earth. So long as revolution is a failure, we all feel that it holds the promise of success. It is when it is a success that it is so often a failure. In any case, Mr. Wells leaves it on one side for a failure; if only because he does not like any of these definite solutions, old or new. He dislikes the Romans became they had a military grasp, and the Popes because they had a moral grasp, and even the Marxians because, like the Calvinists, they had at least a sort of logical grasp. It is his instinct that any sort of grasp is too grasping. It is associated in his mind with what I should call tyranny and he would probably miscall authority. And as he will not establish a universal order by grasping, he wishes to do it by groping. By a process which he frankly admits to be casual, sporadic, patchy, and even partly unconscious, there is to grow up a general tendency towards establishing a world control. But it seems to me that a good many other things might happen, if there is nothing to control the movement towards control. Ideas can be perverted only too easily even when they are strict ideas; I cannot see how we preserve them from perversion merely by making them loose ideas. A thing like the Catholic system is a system; that is, one idea balances and corrects another. A man like Mohammed or Marx, or in his own way Calvin, finds that system too complex, and simplifies everything to a single idea; but it is a definite idea. He naturally builds a rather unbalanced system with his one definite idea. But I cannot see why there should be a better chance for a man trying to build up a balanced system with one indefinite idea. And universality is not only an indefinite idea. Universality is also a narrow idea. It is all on one note; it is not the true harmony; which is the right proportion of the universal and the particular. ‘God is not infinity,’ said Coventry Patmore profoundly; ‘He is the synthesis of infinity and boundary.’

There are two other difficulties I feel in this glorification of world government. One is the very simple fact that the real difficulty of representative government is how to make it represent, even in the smallest of small nationalities, even in the nearest parish council. Why we should talk as if we should have more influence over rulers governing the whole earth from Geneva or Chicago I have never been able to see. Mr. Wells can spread himself in describing how ‘world controls’ would control us. He seems relatively vague about how we should control them. The other objection is less simple and would need a more atmospheric description; but it is even more real. Mr. Wells is driven to perpetual disparagement of patriotism and militant memories, and yet his appeal is always to the historic pride of man. Now nearly all normal men have in fact received their civilization through their citizenship; and to lose their past would be to lose their link with mankind. An Englishman who is not English is not European; a Frenchman who is not fully French is not fully human. Nations have not always been seals or stoppers closing up the ancient wine of the world; they have been the vessels that received it. And, as with many ancient vessels, each of them is a work of art.

 
XVII. On the Closed Conspiracy

IN a comparison of Socialism with the scheme of society going by the name of Distributism, an authoritative writer on such topics has very kindly remarked that, while Mr. Wells is working for an Open Conspiracy, there is much that is interesting in my experiment of a Closed Conspiracy. Indeed, Distributism is rather too open to be a conspiracy at all. It is comparatively easy to organize on behalf of mere organization. It is much harder to drill independent individuals to fight in defence of independence. Nothing can be less conspiratorial than a voice crying in the wilderness. And even when the wilderness begins to be dotted with hermits, they still retain some of the faults and eccentricities of hermits. Even when, in the course of history, the hermits are brigaded into brotherhoods of monks, something of the solitude and mysticism of the eremitical life lingers in the background. I am well aware of all these difficulties in any movement that springs from the liberty of the lonely human soul. Monks, though they call themselves the slaves of slaves, are never the slaves of masters. And a peasantry is never like a tenantry, or, for that matter, a trade union, individually bound to sacrifice liberty to loyalty. Wherever we have a peasantry, we shall have some pretty queer and crazy peasants. Wherever we have a Distributive State, we shall have some tolerably troublesome Distributists.

Nevertheless, the writer is correct in her use of the expression ‘closed’, in the sense that I do definitely, as a general principle, believe in Enclosures. I could not sum up my own political philosophy more compactly and completely than by saying that I do believe in Enclosures. Needless to say, I mean it in the old peasant sense of a man enclosing his own land; not in the more aristocratic and advanced sense of a man enclosing everybody else’s land. I believe, in the old Scriptural sense, that there is indeed a supreme supernatural and natural curse clinging to the man who removes his neighbour’s landmark. Of course, as the writer in question hints, this belief in Enclosure, or lines of division between this and that, rests on a more general theory of truth and falsehood than any particular principles about land or landmarks. There is in all that universal philosophy of Mr. H. G. Wells an assumption which he has never really tried to prove, and which I think it would be much easier to disprove. In all that Open Conspiracy there is the notion that the opening of all doors and windows is always an advantage; which is no more self-evidently true of a human civilization than it is of a house or a hospital. It is often highly desirable to let cool air into a room. But it is not always desirable to cool the room; it is not even always true that opening the window does cool the room. The men of the Mediterranean keep their rooms cool by shutting the windows and not by opening them. By this means they preserve the cold, refreshing air of the morning through the long, intolerant and intolerable heat of day. They turn their rooms into tanks of morning air, through hours when opening a window would be loosening the blast of a furnace. These things also are an allegory, and would explain many things that moderns do not understand about simplicity and the preservation of childhood. But, apart from any particular parable, it is obviously not common sense to say that good results from the mere mixing of anything with anything, the mere pouring in of any wind through any window, the mere pouring of any fluid into any flood.

Anyhow, some of us do disbelieve in that sort of unity. We do not think a picture will be a better picture because all the colours run, however freely and largely they run into each other. We do not believe that a dinner will always be a better dinner because all the liquors and liqueurs are successively poured into the soup; or that our taste and enjoyment will really be widened by mixing the coffee with the claret or the vermouth with the port. We believe in certain Enclosures, called ‘courses’, or appropriate selections from the carte des vins, being actually interposed to prevent all these separate pleasures from flowing into each other. We do not believe that every tennis-court should be flooded to turn it into a swimming-bath, and people be forced to play tennis only in the water (that the two sports may be unified and made one); we should not hesitate to erect artificial Enclosures, in the form of walls and partitions, around baths, bath-rooms, swimming-pools, and similar things, lest this one delight should end in a universal Deluge. We should not shrink even from marking out, on the grass or the ground, the severe and restricting limits of the tennis-court, discouraging enthusiasts from playing tennis all over the billiard-room and the progressive whist-party, lest one good custom should corrupt the world, as the first Lord Tennyson observed. In short, we have a curious notion, firmly fixed in our heads, that Enclosures do play a highly practical and profitable part in the real life of this world; and that the mere destruction of them is not the destruction of mere negative taboos, but the destruction of positive creations, positive achievements, positive arts and pleasures of life. And in the same way we think that a mere philosophy of unification, of mixing sex with sex or nation with nation or style with style, is altogether a paltry, sterile, and provincial simplification; no more truly intellectual than the act of a baby in mixing all the paints in a paint-box or stirring five or six things together with a spoon.

That is the principle behind the philosophy of Enclosures; and there is no space here to develop in detail the sociological application of it, that some of us call Distributism. Mr. H. G. Wells’s general philosophy, in such things, seems to be a mere desire for largeness, under the impression that it is enlargement. He has only got to get stuck firmly in the middle of a large crowd in order to learn that largeness may be the very opposite of enlargement. There is one thing that a man does in a reasonable degree want to have large — or, at any rate, to have larger. And that is elbow-room, which our pedantic political ancestors were in the habit of calling Freedom. I doubt whether the modern American advice to everybody to elbow his way has really resulted in more elbow-room. I do believe that many rude and simple social types were better in this respect, though I do not necessarily mean that they were better in every respect. And I believe that upon this alone could be founded that just and normal though now almost forgotten thing, the real defence of Private Property, which has no more to do with profiteering than with privateering. It is the essential principle that a man does not even own his own elbows unless he owns a room large enough for them, that he does not own his own legs unless he has liberty to stretch them; or own his own feet unless he owns the soil on which they stand.

 
XVIII. On Current Claptrap

IT is not often that we find the one book that ought to be written, written by the one man who ought to write it. The Abbé Dimnet is a distinguished French authority who has made a very lucid and most timely pronouncement on the Art of Thinking, for want of which the whole modern world was going mad. He suggests, with very sympathetic insight, that there is something not only accidental but needless about the vast amount of the dull claptrap that makes up current culture. It is not really because thinking is not a normal human function; but because so many have never been encouraged to discover how normal and human it is. Almost any man, he argues, may have a flash in which he feels ‘ “I am in a rut, I know, but if I would make the least effort, move only one line, say: henceforth I will talk no more nonsense, in an instant I could be outside the herd of the unthinking.” . . . A trifle, a mere nothing, the buzz of a fly or the bang of a door may be enough to disturb this mood and bring back commonplace thoughts in full force; but it is no less true that, during a few moments, we have been separated from a higher mental life only by a vision which we realized was within reach and by an effort which did not seem to be an exertion. All this amounts to saying that we have a natural belief in the existence of an Art of Thinking. Some men possess it; others not; but those who do not possess it must blame themselves’.

There lies on the table before me, side by side with this luminous and temperate statement of the French thinker, an invitation to join a movement for Peace and Progress Throughout the World, which a number of men more distinguished than myself seem to have already joined. And I cannot help feeling a faint curiosity, in reading the terms of such appeals, about whether these distinguished men and their friends ever have sat down suddenly and said, ‘I am in a rut, I know, but if I would make the least effort ...’ For it seems to me that what is the matter with the modern world, distinguished men and all, is that they have allowed their minds to be completely cluttered up with a lumber of language, some of it the legacy of old blunders, some of it suited to old conditions which no longer exist. There are any number of phrases which everybody speaks and nobody hears. There are any number of phrases which when they were used the first time may have meant something, and which are now used for the millionth time because they mean nothing. I will take one example out of a thousand, an example which happens to occur in the idealistic document of which I have spoken. I mean the expression about being ready to welcome ‘men of every race and creed’.

Now the modern tragedy of man is that he does not stop and start when he has used those words, and gaze at them with a wild surmise, and cry distractedly, ‘My God! what am I saying?’ For he really does not know what he is saying. He is classing together two things as if they were obviously in the same class, when they have obviously never been in the same category. This does not mean that a man may not feel fraternity or charity for men of every race and creed, as he may for men with every sort of heaven and hat, or with every type of truthfulness and trousers, or with every variety of saintly self- sacrifice and taste in tobacco. But the things have nothing particular to do with each other; there is no sort of reason why they should go together; and the phrase is based on the assumption that they must always go together. Race and creed are linked in the language, like pots and pans, or sticks and straws, or boots and shoes, or any other recognized grouping of things of the same type. But they are no more things of the same type than adenoids and algebra.

When we talk of somebody’s creed, we mean certain convictions which must have some relation to our own convictions: either in confirming them, or contradicting them, or agreeing or disagreeing with them in various degrees. We may not burn ourselves up with missionary zeal to convert a Mormon or a worshipper of Mumbo-Jumbo; but we do regard it as conceivable that he might be converted. And we do most probably think we know of something that would be an improvement on Mormonism or Mumbo-Jumbo. Anyhow, we know he holds his creed with his mind; and he might possibly change his mind. We do not expect the Ethiopian to change his skin. We do not expect the Chinaman to cease to be a Mongolian when he ceases to be a Confucian. It is as if we were to talk about having no prejudice of colour; and then to class a Red Indian with a Red Republican. It is as if we were to extend the same loving welcome to the Yellow Peril and the Yellow Press. It is simply a confusion; but it is one of a million confusions that are now making confusion worse confounded. I only take it as a small working model, because without a working model the modern mind cannot see how things work.

The welcome we offer to men of any belief must be in its nature different from that we offer to men of any blood. If only for the simple reason that, if a man may believe anything, he may believe in the badness of all blood except his own blood. You may associate with him and his race, simply considered as a race. But if it is a Chosen Race, he may not associate with you. His thoughts, whatever they are, must determine everything about his relations with you; whereas the colour of his skin may be in most relations quite irrelevant. I rather fancy that ‘colour’ and ‘creed’ have come to be associated by mere alliteration and have no more rational relation than whiskers and wisdom. If a Chinaman and I discuss Proportional Representation (which God forbid!) it is in the hope that one or other will at least be intellectually influenced; but not in the hope that I shall turn yellow or he will turn pink.

Now, if any one will pick up a paper or a page of modern writing, and look at it carefully, he will find it is a pastiche or mosaic of meaningless combinations of that sort. As a preliminary exercise, before the more subtle exercises of the French philosopher’s manual, I recommend this experiment. The catch words are generally, indeed, used more or less unconsciously, in the service of some false philosophy. In this case it is the base and servile creed that creeds are as inevitable and incurable as black faces or Eskimo skulls. It is the theory that we must all reconcile ourselves to thinking differently, because no thinking is any good and it is better not to think at all. It is out of that unmanly despair that such unthinking expressions arise; the thoughtless phrase out of the thoughtless philosophy. But there is, after all, nothing but a contradiction in terms in a thoughtless philosophy; and especially in a philosophy directed against thought. Fortunately, we can all think, whether we are red, black, or yellow; and that is the only true beginning of Peace and Progress throughout the World.

 
XIX. On Evil Euphemisms

SOMEBODY has sent me a book on Companionate Marriage; so called because the people involved are not married and will very rapidly cease to be companions. I have no intention of discussing here that somewhat crude colonial project. I will merely say that it is here accompanied with sub-titles and other statements about the rising generation and the revolt of youth. And it seems to me exceedingly funny that, just when the rising generation boasts of not being sentimental, when it talks of being very scientific and sociological — at that very moment everybody seems to have forgotten altogether what was the social use of marriage and to be thinking wholly and solely of the sentimental. The practical purposes mentioned as the first two reasons for marriage, in the Anglican marriage ser vice, seem to have gone completely out of sight for some people, who talk as if there were nothing but a rather wild version of the third, which may relatively be called romantic. And this, if you please, is supposed to be an emancipation from Victorian sentiment and romance.

But I only mention this matter as one of many, and one which illustrates a still more curious contradiction in this modern claim. We are perpetually being told that this rising generation is very frank and free, and that its whole social ideal is frankness and freedom. Now I am not at all afraid of frankness. What I am afraid of is fickleness. And there is a truth in the old proverbial connexion between what is fickle and what is false. There is in the very titles and terminology of all this sort of thing a pervading element of falsehood. Everything is to be called something that it is not; as in the characteristic example of Companionate Marriage. Every thing is to be recommended to the public by some sort of synonym which is really a pseudonym. It is a talent that goes with the time of electioneering and advertisement and newspaper headlines; but what ever else such a time may be, it certainly is not specially a time of truth.

In short, these friends of frankness depend almost entirely on Euphemism. They introduce their horrible heresies under new and carefully complimentary names; as the Furies were called the Eumenides. The names are always flattery; the names are also nonsense. The name of Birth- Control, for instance, is sheer nonsense. Everybody has always exercised birth-control; even when they were so paradoxical as to permit the process to end in a birth. Everybody has always known about birth-control, even if it took the wild and unthinkable form of self-control. The question at issue concerns different forms of birth-prevention; and I am not going to debate it here. But if I did debate it, I would call it by its name. The same is true of an older piece of sentiment indulged in by the frank and free: the expression ‘Free Love’. That also is a Euphemism; that is, it is a refusal of people to say what they mean. In that sense, it is impossible to prevent love being free, but the moral problem challenged concerns not the passions, but the will. There are a great many other examples of this sort of polite fiction; these respectable disguises adopted by those who are always railing against respectability. In the immediate future there will probably be more still. There really seems no necessary limit to the process; and however far the anarchy of ethics may go, it may always be accompanied with this curious and pompous ceremonial. The sensitive youth of the future will never be called upon to accept Forgery as Forgery. It will be easy enough to call it Homoeography or Script-Assimilation or something else that would suggest, to the simple or the superficial, that nothing was involved but a sort of socializing or unification of individual handwriting. We should not, like the more honest Mr. Fagin, teach little boys to pick pockets; for Mr. Fagin becomes far less honest when he becomes Professor Faginski, the great sociologist, of the University of Jena. But we should call it by some name implying the transference of something; I cannot at the moment remember the Greek either for pocket or pocket-handkerchief. As for the social justification of murder, that has already begun; and earnest thinkers had better begin at once to think about a nice inoffensive name for it. The case for murder, on modern relative and evolutionary ethics, is quite overwhelming. There is hardly one of us who does not, in looking round his or her social circle, recognize some chatty person or energetic social character whose disappearance, without undue fuss or farewell, would be a bright event for us all, Nor is it true that such a person is dangerous only because he wields unjust legal or social powers. The problem is often purely psychological, and not in the least legal; and no legal emancipations would solve it. Nothing would solve it but the introduction of that new form of liberty which we may agree to call, perhaps, the practice of Social Subtraction. Or, if we like, we can model the new name on the other names I have mentioned. We may call it Life-Control or Free Death; or anything else that has as little to do with the point of it as Companionate Marriage has to do with either marriage or companionship.

Anyhow, I respectfully refuse to be impressed by the claim to candour and realism put forward just now for men, women, and movements. It seems to me obvious that this is not really the age of audacity but merely of advertisement; which may rather be described as caution kicking up a fuss. Much of the mistake arises from the double sense of the word publicity. For publicity also is a thoroughly typical euphemism or evasive term. Publicity does not mean revealing public life in the interests of public spirit. It means merely flattering private enterprises in the interests of private persons. It means paying compliments in public; but not offering criticisms in public. We should all be very much surprised if we walked out of our front-door one morning and saw a hoarding on one side of the road saying, ‘Use Miggle’s Milk; It Is All Cream’, and a hoarding on the other side of the road inscribed, ‘Don’t Use Miggle’s Milk; It’s Nearly All Water’. The modern world would be much upset if I were allowed to set up a flaming sky-sign proclaiming my precise opinion of the Colonial Port Wine praised in the flaming sign opposite. All this advertisement may have some thing to do with the freedom of trade; but it has nothing to do with the freedom of truth. Publicity must be praise and praise must to some extent be euphemism. It must put the matter in a milder and more inoffensive form than it might be put, however much that mildness may seem to shout through megaphones or flare in headlines. And just as this sort of loud evasion is used in favour of bad wine and bad milk, so it is used in favour of bad morals. When somebody wishes to wage a social war against what all normal people have regarded as a social decency, the very first thing he does is to find some artificial term that shall sound relatively decent. He has no more of the real courage that would pit vice against virtue than the ordinary advertiser has the courage to advertise ale as arsenic. His intelligence, such as it is, is entirely a commercial intelligence and to that extent entirely conventional. He is a shop-keeper who dresses the shop-window; he is certainly the very reverse of a rebel or a rioter who breaks the shop-window. If only for this reason, I remain cold and decline the due reverence to Cornpanionate Marriage and the book which speaks so reverentially about the Revolt of Youth. For this sort of revolt strikes me as nothing except revolting; and certainly not particularly realistic. With the passions which are natural to youth we all sympathize; with the pain that often arises from loyalty and duty we all sympathize still more; but nobody need sympathize with publicity experts picking pleasant expressions for unpleasant things; and I for one prefer the coarse language of our fathers.

 
XX. On Encyclopaedias

ON turning my attention to the subject of Encyclopaedias, and generally to projects for providing general information, I am struck by certain rather neglected problems in the nature of information itself. There is considerable activity at present in the scattering of a certain sort of information. Any magazine or newspaper is likely to contain a sort of examination paper, trustingly accompanied by a crib. Sometimes the paper is so printed and arranged that the answers actually come before the questions. But all that is a matter of what is called ‘make-up’ and can safely be trusted to the hard headed, practical, successful men who have made-up the paper. Sometimes they seem to have made up the answers as well as the questions. But we all know the general character of the questions. On any such page of any such paper we may encounter the challenge: ‘At what date did a dentist suffer death for his theological opinions?’ or, ‘What deadly poison is a by-product of crushed strawberries?’ or, ‘What is the income of Mr. Henry Ford reckoned in ancient Greek drachmae?’ But pressing and practical as these questions are, for any one living an active modern life, there are difficulties connected with the correct answering of many of them: difficulties not always appreciated either by those who ask or these who answer.

Two general impressions from a study of such encyclopaedic knowledge strike me at the moment. One is that there are many more things that are mere matters of opinion, and much fewer things that are mere matters of fact, than many of these people suppose. Another is that even the best information is very seldom the latest information It is a commonplace that encyclopaedias tend too rapidly to get out of date It is said that a very valuable encyclopaedia was pressed upon the public some years ago, and it was only at the last moment that somebody mildly remonstrated against an article on French history, from which it would appear that Napoleon the Third is still on the throne of France. But that was when the matter was in the hands of a really brisk and bustling business man. And things managed by hustlers are always behind the times. Things are better than that now, being largely in the hands of educated people who can afford the time for a proper comprehension of the times. But even in the very latest and lightest forms of ephemeral journalism there is some tendency for this fossilization to take place; and even to take place rather rapidly. I do not say that in all cases the delay can be avoided. I do not say that in all cases the hustlers can be blamed. Sometimes the latest news would be too late. Sometimes it would be too libellous. But, knowing what I know, or what we all know, about the realities of England to-day, I cannot but think that most of the latest news describes the England of twenty years ago. Perhaps this is defensible and makes for stability and social continuity; but it does not exactly make for people knowing where they are.

I have just opened a magazine on a page full of these questions, and I am struck by the fact that I should myself give very different answers. It is even possible in some cases that the paper would not print my answers. But I am not now provoking controversy; I am merely pointing out that many things are controversial that are supposed to be non-controversial. And I am pointing out that in almost every case the change recorded is not really the last, but rather the last but one. On the page before me one question concerns the pawnbroker’s sign; another the date of the Eiffel Tower; the third the meaning of the Parliamentary term ‘Whip’. Now, modest as is my stock of knowledge, I knew that the three balls were originally the blazonry of the Lombard merchant princes. But I should not think it the chief point of the position that what had been the coat of arms of great lords had come down to be a dingy shop-sign for dirty moneylenders. I should reverse the argument, and point out that it is even more interesting to know that the dirty moneylenders are now once more being given titles and coats of arms. I should not merely point out that the Lombard princes had lost their escutcheon to people as humble as the pawn brokers; I should point out that the pawnbrokers may now again become as proud as the princes. That is the latest news; that is the real modern information; that is what is interesting about the present practical state of affairs. The other fact is interesting enough in its way; but it is merely ancient history, and even ancient heraldry. Or, again, it is reasonably interesting to know that the Eiffel Tower was put up at the time of the Paris Exhibition. But it is even more interesting to know that the Eiffel Tower was put up just before the time of the Panama Scandal; and that Eiffel himself got into very hot water, while many of his colleagues or co-workers fled the country or became bywords for fraud. For that story is a part of the really vital and important story of the modern war against political corruption; a struggle that has already had its sequel in Rome and may yet have its sequel in Paris. I do not know whether a reaction in Paris would knock down the Eiffel Tower; though I am sure I hope so. But I do know that there may be a culmination as sensational in the life of the country as the fall of the Eiffel Tower would be in the landscape. But this sort of thing, which might be called the inner history of the Eiffel Tower, is not generally the sort of history provided in this popular information. I do not say it can be, or ought to be; but I do say that it makes a difference to popular education that it is not.

And so it is with the third example, out of our own politics. The public is duly informed that a Whip is so called from the practice of whipping-in, as applied to the mobilizing of all available party votes, and the discipline that drives them into the right Lobby. But though this is still true, and still perhaps rather unfortunately true, it is by no means the most modern truth or the most modern misfortune. The Whip nowadays is not primarily the man who merely looks after the telling of votes passing into the right Lobby. The Whip nowadays is primarily the man who looks after the Party Fund, and conducts a number of highly dubious negotiations about it in the matter of titles and political concessions. This is the latest use of the office; this is the most recent meaning of the word. But because it is really recent it is not a part of what is called Information. Because it is the latest news it is not in the latest editions. Thus there arises, in connexion with this new popular game of ‘How Much Do You Know?’ a query not about how much the public knows but about how much the questioner knows. There is also, of course, the question of how much the questioner may think it tactful to tell of what he knows.

In the case of encyclopaedias, and similar works of reference, it is perfectly natural that the writers should avoid all that seems controversial or paradoxical, or can be regarded as a matter of opinion, to say nothing of whim. But, at the best, it is very difficult to mention even common facts apart from controversial feelings. Many things which most of the readers, and even the writers, of such a book would honestly suppose to be self-evident, are very disputable indeed to those who happen to be the disputants. The truth is that there did underlie the latter half of the nineteenth century, at least in this country, a vague common agreement in philosophy. But it is by no means true to-day that all philosophers agree with that agreement. Nor was it true before the nineteenth century, any more than after the century. It may be well to remember the real history of the word Encyclopaedia; and in the dawn of what destructive revolution it appeared in the world. The Encyclopaedists were no more impartial than the Bolshevists. They were a band of fighters determined to uproot and renew. And though the making of a dictionary sounds to us a mild occupation, Dr. Johnson was by no means a mild person, and sometimes almost made it a slang dictionary, when he had a chance of slinging abuse at the Whigs.

 
XXI. On Preaching

NO journalist will complain of the journalistic necessity of occasionally changing a title, or, especially, abbreviating a title. If I choose to head an article, An Inquiry into the Conditions of Mycenaean Civilization in the Heroic Epoch, with Special Reference to the Economic and Domestic Functions of Women Before and After the Conjectural Date of the Argive Expedition against Troy — if, I say, I choose to give my article some snappy little title like that, I really have no right to complain if (when I send it to the Chicago Daily Scoop) they alter the title to How Helen Did the Housekeeping. And even in milder cases the transformation is often unavoidable; especially if some thing intended for the serious book public has to be transferred to the more impetuous newspaper-reading public. But, however harmless the change may be, it is sometimes of a certain intellectual interest. For example, I myself was asked some time ago to write a sort of ethical essay on the theme If I Had Only One Sermon to Preach. When, in the course of events, it came to appear in a daily paper, it appeared under the title, If I Were a Preacher. I do not in the least complain of that; it was obviously a mere matter of space and simplification. All the same, there is a difference. ‘If I Had Only One Sermon to Preach’ presents the pleasing spectacle of myself gagged and rendered speechless for the greater part of my life. It consoles humanity with the prospect of my never talking at all for twenty or thirty years on end; it almost approaches to the ideal or Utopian condition of my being deaf and dumb. But it supposes that the gag is taken out of my mouth once and once only, and I am allowed a short space in which to offer the reflections of a taciturn lifetime. Taking the matter in this sense, I dealt directly with the most deadly moral danger in my experience of mankind: the danger of egoism and spiritual pride. If I had only one moment in which to shout one warning, I should shout that one, and thereafter for ever hold my peace.

But ‘If I Were a Preacher’ is quite a different idea. That presents, not the reassuring image of myself safely gagged and throttled until the inevitable hour shall come, but the menacing and unwelcome image of myself let loose to talk in a pulpit as long as I like, and to preach as a professional occupation. It offers, not the brief and salutary irritation of hearing me deliver one sermon, but the long vista of despair implied in my delivering an indefinite number of sermons. Above all, my own attitude would necessarily be entirely different in the two cases. Instead of concentrating what I really had to say in one address upon one text, I should have to proceed, like any other professional preacher, to search the Scriptures for more and more texts, and my mind for more and more sermons. And, though a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the unfair authority of the preacher (which is really much less illogical than the unfair anonymity of the pressman), it is true that in one sense the preacher has an advantage, or at least his congregation a disadvantage. While it might well be a beautiful sight to see the congregation gradually thinning away as my sermon proceeded from Fourthly to Fifthly, it is, as a matter of fact, unusual for people to rise in the front pews, with ostentatious yawns and in large numbers, and to walk out of the church to express their lack of enthusiasm for the sermon. Perhaps the best form of protest was that of the man who took off his boots and put them outside the pew, to indicate that he had had enough and was now retiring to rest. But humorists of that heroic type are very rare. The congregation is commonly kept in its place, by reverence or by convention; and in that sense everybody has to listen to the sermon. But nobody has to read this article unless he wants to; and I should not imagine that anybody ever did.

The distinction between being a preacher and having one sermon to preach is, however, of some practical interest in raising a point about preaching. I mean merely about the technical or professional aspect of preaching; which would naturally be considered by the man who was for some reason doomed to be a preacher. If I had originally written my article to fit that title, it would have been quite a different business. Preaching, in that sense, is no business of mine; but listening, or trying to listen, is the business of nearly everybody. And there really is something to be said about the probable or prefer able preliminaries of being a preacher; and even here, in another place and another connexion, it may possibly be worth while to say it. Anyhow, I propose to say it; principally because it would seem to be the exact opposite of what everybody is now saying. For the preacher, like everybody else, is receiving practical advice: and, as with everybody else, it is always exactly the wrong advice. He is told, of course, to eschew ‘creed and dogma’; which will soon, I imagine, be stereotyped and turned into one word, ‘creedanddogma’ so regularly and mechanically is it repeated. I could never discover what the journalists who use this form imagine that creeds and dogmas are. I could never understand what a prominent and successful journalist meant when he said that prayer had no sort of relation with any creed or dogma. He added that any agnostic could pray: one felt he was just about to add that any atheist could pray. What all this is supposed to mean, I have no idea. To any atheist, to any rational rationalist, it would be at once obvious that prayer does depend on two or three quite definite dogmas. First, it implies that there is an invisible being, who can hear our prayer without ordinary material communication; which is a dogma. Second, it implies that the being is benevolent and not hostile; which is also a dogma. Third, it implies that he is not limited by the logic of causation, but can act with reference to our action; which is a great thundering dogma. But I merely give this as a passing example of the first fallacy in the advice to preachers. The preacher is told to cast aside all systems and speak out of his own heart, or (in favour able cases) out of his own head. It does not seem to occur to these critics that they are making the priest or preacher much more important than he was before. They are demanding from him a genius and originality which cannot be expected from all the individual members of any profession. The poor ordinary parson is not allowed to teach what he has learnt, a certain system of religious thought. But he is expected, all by himself, to be a sort of compound of Savonarola and Swedenborg and M. Coué. All men are not born mesmerists or prose poets or persons of magnetic personality. But all men can expound a rational scheme of religion and morals, if there is one to expound.

The truth is that creed and dogma are the only things that make preaching tolerable. A system of thought can be explained by any reasonably thinking man; but it does not follow that the thinking man is a thinker. The case is very much the same as that of the medical authority of the general practitioner. We do not expect every ordinary G.P. to be a person like Pasteur or Lister or some great medical discoverer. But we do expect him to know the system he has been taught; the creed and dogma of his profession. To tell the priest to throw away theology and impress us with his personality, is exactly like telling the doctor to throw away physiology and merely hypnotize us with his glittering eye. People are very fond of making unjust complaints about preachers, as they are of making equally unjust com plaints about doctors. But they have not yet got so far as complaining of doctors because they know their business, and because they regard it as a science. And the preacher, even the very worst preacher, would be infinitely more empty and dreary than he is if he had never regarded theology as a science. What makes his preaching tolerable, at its worst, is that he is, after all, in some sense giving us the thoughts of great men like St. Paul or St. Augustine, or even Calvin, and not merely the thoughts of a small man unassisted by any tradition of greatness. I do not know what advice will be given to the preacher by most of the distinguished persons who will probably advise him. But a melancholy familiarity with most current thought, or thoughtlessness, leads me to advise him to listen to it, and then do the opposite.

 
XXII. On the Timid Thinkers

I SHOULD like to write a book under the general title of The Timid Thinkers. By this term I refer to those who are commonly called The Bold Thinkers. For what strikes me most about the sceptics, who are praised as daring and audacious, is that they dare not carry out any of their own acts of audacity. It is their peculiar feature that they are always starting something that is intended to be very striking, and then being willing to wound and yet afraid to strike. I do not mean that they are base enough to be merely afraid of our law; quite as often they are really afraid of their own lawlessness. But they are afraid; in the sense that they hardly ever venture to complete their own argument. Some of these men I admire, some I find rather tiresome, which is about as near as I get to really resenting them. But I think that what I say of them is true. They are emphatically not men who carry a destructive idea through to its logical consequences; they are men who throw it out like a firework, but do not really wait for it to work its full destruction like a bomb. It is typical that some types of thinkers are called suggestive thinkers. But it is easy enough to suggest something, and leave it to be found unworkable by other people; as it is easy for a little boy to ring a bell and run away. The little boy ringing the bell is doubtless in one sense a rebel defying authority. But he is not quite on a level with the paladins or heroes who blew the horn hung outside the giant’s castle; because they remained to thrash things out in a thoughtful manner with the giant.

Now there are a number of nihilistic phrases wandering about in the air to-day, but those phrases are never really developed into philosophies. If they were, those particular phrases would probably be found to develop into patently absurd philosophies. A man in the time of the Schopenhauer fashion would say, over the tea-cups, that life is not worth living, and he would go on to say something equally significant; as that Pingle’s rondeau in the Yellow Book was an immortal thing of jade and emerald; or that Jubb of the New English Art Club had erased the mistake called Michelangelo. But he would not go on to say, as a serious thesis, that prussic acid should be served out at tea-time instead of tea; or that hospitals should be blown up on the charge that they sometimes save people’s lives. In short, he would talk like a pessimist, but he would not think like a pessimist; above all, he would not complete his pessimistic thinking. Pessimism of that sort is now rather old-fashioned, but it was not full or final even when it was fashionable. And exactly the same suggestive or fragmentary character belongs to the other things that have been fashionable since. A man says to-day, over the cocktails, that he is a Boishevist and believes with Marx that men must be what their economic and material origins make them. He goes on to remark casually something suitable to the same social atmosphere; as that the music of the future must consist entirely of factory-hooters and gas-explosions, or that Mossky’s bust of Lady Smith is supreme in its lack of likeness and its collision of five geometric planes. But he will not go on to apply seriously his own line of logic; as that Lenin is no more to be admired than Stolypin, since both only did what they were materially fated to do. Men throw out these thoughts — if at that stage they can be called thoughts — but they do not think them out; and they soon grow tired of any thinking.

A great thinker spends half his life in explaining his theory and the other half in explaining it away. As a matter of fact, most of the advanced have thus retired; or those who strode forward stopped or stepped back. Even Mr. Bernard Shaw, who seems to grow more right every day, began so very wrong that he could not himself avoid putting himself right. He once denounced all general ideals for the testing of particular actions, and said that the only golden rule is that there is no golden rule. In theory he was purely opportunist; that is, in theory he was against all theories. But even in some of his earliest quarrels, such as that on Vivisection, he was not really opportunist at all. He was obviously acting on the general principle that the ideal of Mercy must overrule all opportunism. The good old golden rule was back in all its glory; and even frogs and guinea-pigs must profit by the universal commandment to do as we would be done by. Shaw has never carried through any Shavian philosophy; he has expanded, but at the expense of his theory not being extended. As for Wells, he has had so many theories that he would need to borrow the three hundred years of Methuselah from Shaw, in order to fulfil any of them. But, any how, he has not fulfilled any of them. Mr. Britling did not see it through: that is exactly what the Wellsian heroes do not do.

It is the same with nearly all the great men of the sceptical school. People talk of the pessimism of Thomas Hardy as ruthless; and in its artistic method it was ruthless, often at the expense of reason and probability. But if he changed spiritually, it was always towards feeling less of the ruthlessness and more of the ruth. I should be very much surprised to learn that Hardy, especially in later life, was really a pessimist at all. His theory, as a theory, is not very clear or complete; but I am sure he did not become more clear or more complete, in the sense of more convinced of a dogma of despair. Consciously or unconsciously, the tendency is almost always the other way. Hardy recoiled from the Hardy philosophy, just as Shaw recoiled from the Shaw philosophy, and most of the anarchs and atheists recoil from the anarchist and atheist philosophy. Much of their later ingenuity is employed in trying to mend with their wisdom what they have broken with their wit. It is so easy to say something to start with that sounds splendidly sensible, and so difficult afterwards to reconcile it with common sense. A man like Mr. Arnold Bennett will say that nobody should be praised or blamed, because temperamental tendencies are so inevitable. But a man like Mr. Arnold Bennett has no more intention than I have of really walking, in broad daylight, through the real world, without ever blaming or praising anybody. All this that calls itself Modern Thought is a series of false starts and belated stop pages. It starts by believing in nothing, and it ends by getting nowhere. But the point is that, even if it ever gets anywhere, it no longer even tries to get where it originally wanted to go.

The explanation, as I have said, is simple enough. Anybody can throw out a suggestion, in the sense of throwing away a suggestion. The brilliant books of Mr. H. G. Wells almost entirely consist of suggestions that he has thrown away. But it is very different if the idea comes back like a boomerang to the hand, and we do not always find it easy to handle. The negative writers of the nineteenth-century tradition were always creating a sensation by offering to abolish something, or (like Bakunin) to abolish everything. But that sort of generalization is only a sensation; it is not really a system. It is a facile triumph to reveal the great truth that all men are really quadrupeds. The difficulty is, as life goes on and love and friendship become more subtle or many-sided, to live a complete human existence while still going about on all fours. It is great fun to thrill the mob by saying it consists entirely of suicidal maniacs; the difficulty is what to do next, except commit suicide. What generally happens is that great men gradually grow sane; and, having begun ‘with the enjoyment of being extraordinary, end with the more mystical beatitude of becoming ordinary. They begin each with his own wild and generally inhuman philosophy; but by the end they have, in a sense somewhat different from that of the old phrase, joined the religion of all sensible men.

 
XXIII. On the Mythology of Scientists

W HAT I venture to criticize in certain men, whom some call scientists and I call materialists, is their perpetual use of Mythology. One half of what they say is so true as to be trite; the other half of what they say is so untrue as to be transparent. But they cover both their platitudes and their pretences by an elaborate parade of legendary and allegorical images. I read this in some remarks on Darwinism by one of the last surviving Darwinians: ‘Among the individuals of every species there goes on, as Malthus had realized, a competition or struggle for the means of life, and Nature selects the individuals which vary in the most successful direction.’ Now when men of the old religions said that God chose a people or raised up a prophet, at least they meant something; and they meant what they said. They meant that a being with a mind and a will used them in an act of selection. But who is Nature, and how does she, or he, or it, manage to select anything or anybody? All that the writer actually has to say is that some individuals do emerge when other individuals are extinguished. it hardly needed either Darwin or Darwinians to tell us that. But Nature selecting those that vary in the most successful direction means nothing whatever, except that the successful succeed. But this tautological truism is wrapped up in clouds of mythology, by the introduction of a mythical being whom even the writer regards as a myth. The reader is to be impressed and deluded by the vision of a vast stone goddess sitting on a mountain throne, and pointing at a particular frog or rabbit and saying, in tones of thunder, that this alone is to survive. All we know is that it does survive (for the moment), and then we pride ourselves on being able to repeat the mere fact that it does survive in half a hundred variegated and flowery expressions: as that it has survival value; or that it is naturally selected for survival; or that it survives because it is the fittest for survival; or that Nature’s great law of the survival of the fittest sternly commands it to survive. The critics of religion used to say that its mysteries were mummeries; but these things are in the special and real sense mummeries. They are things offered to a credulous congregation by priests who know them to be mummeries. It is impossible to prove that the priests know that there is no god in the shrine, or no truth in the oracle. But we know that the materialist knows that there is no such thing as a large fastidious lady, called Nature, who points a finger at a frog.

The particular case in which this mythological metaphor was used is of course another matter. It is, indeed, a matter which has involved at various times a great deal of this element of materialist mythology. To see what truth was really in it we should have to go back to the old Darwinian debate; which I have not the least intention of doing here. But I may observe, in passing, that this notion of Nature selecting things is specially incompatible with all that can really be said for their own case; and that the very name of natural selection is a most unnatural name for it. For it is their whole case that everything happened, in the ordinary human sense, by accident. We should rather call it coincidence; and some of us call it quite incredible coincidence. But, anyhow, the whole case for it is that one quadruped happened to have a longer neck, and happened to live at a moment when it was necessary to reach a taller tree or shrub. If these happenings happen to happen about a hundred times in succession, in exactly the same way, you can by that process turn some sort of sheep or goat into a giraffe. Whether this is probable or not is another question. But the whole Darwinian argument is that it is not a case of Nature selecting, any more than of God selecting, or any one else selecting, but a case of things falling out in that fashion. We are quite ready to discuss trees and giraffes in their place, without perpetual references to God. Could the materialists not so far control their rhetorical and romantic sentimentalism as to do it without perpetual reference to Nature? Shall we make a bargain: that we will for the moment leave out our theology, if they will leave out their mythology?

But the mythological habit is not entirely and exclusively confined to men of science, or even to materialists. This sort of mythology is rather generally scattered over the modern world. The popular form of the mythological is the metaphorical. Certain figures of speech are fixed in the modern mind, exactly as the fables of the gods and nymphs were fixed in the mind of pagan antiquity. It is astonishing to note how often, when we address a man with anything resembling an idea, he answers with some recognized metaphor, supposed to be appropriate to the case. If you say to him, ‘I myself prefer the principle of the Guild to the principle of the Trust,’ he will not answer you by talking about principles. He can be counted on to say, ‘You can’t put the clock back,’ with all the regularity of a ticking clock. This is a very extreme example of the mental break down that goes with a relapse into metaphor. For the man is actually understating his own case out of sheer love of metaphor. It may be that you can not put time back, but you can put the clock back. He would be in a stronger position if he talked about the abstraction called time; but an all-devouring appetite for figurative language forces him to talk about clocks. Of course, the real question raised has nothing to do with either clocks or time. It is the question of whether certain abstract principles, which may or may not have been observed in the past, ought to be observed in the future. But the point is here that even the man who means that we cannot reconstruct the past can hardly ever reconstruct his own sentence in any other form except this figurative form. Without his myth, or his metaphor, he is lost.

Another mass of metaphors is drawn from the phenomena of morning, or the fact that the sun rises; or, rather (I grovel in apology to the man of science), appears to rise. It is a perfectly natural metaphor for poets; or, indeed, for all men, in that aspect in which all men are mystics. That there is a mystery in these natural things, which the imagination understands more subtly than the reason, is true enough. Nor have I any contempt even for mythology considered as mythology. But when we want to know what somebody wants to do, when we ask a free-thinker what he thinks, and why he thinks it, it is a little tiresome to be told that he is waiting for the Dawn, or engaged at the moment in singing Songs Before Sunrise. One is tempted to retort that Dawn is not always an entirely cheerful thing, even for those who have exercised their free thought upon the conventional traditions of their own society. There is such a thing as being shot at Dawn.

I do not mean for a moment, of course, that we should do without myths and metaphors altogether. I am constantly using them myself, and shall continue to do so. But I think we ought all to be on our guard against depending on them as a substitute for reason. Perhaps it would be well to have a Fast Day, on which we undertook to abstain from every thing but abstract terms. Let us all agree that every Friday we will do without metaphors as without meat. I am sure it would be good for the intellectual digestion.

 
XXIV. On Change

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Taken from Come To Think of It, by G.K. Chesterton. 1931.
• G.K. Chesterton and the Return to Common Sense
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