This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Varied Types by G. K. Chesterton Author's Note These papers, with certain alterations and additions, are reprinted with the kind permission of the editors of The Daily News and The Speaker. G. K. Chesterton Kensington Chapter 1 Charlotte Bronte Objection is often raised against realistic biography, because it reveals so much that is important and even sacred about a man's life. The real objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about a man the precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts and insists on exactly those things in a man's life of which the man himself is wholly unconscious. This is his exact class in society, the circumstances of his ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things which do not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They do not occur to a man's mind, it may be said, with almost equal truth, that they do not occur in a man's life. A man no more thinks about himself as the inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton Villas, than he thinks about himself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man's name was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived. These are not sanctities, they are irrelevancies. A very strong case of this is the case of the Bronte's. The Bronte is in the position of the mad lady in a country village. Her eccentricities form an endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mild and bucolic circle, the literary world. The truly glorious gossips of literature, like Mr. Augustine Birrell or Mr. Andrew Lang, never tire of collecting all the glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and sidelights and sticks and straws, which will go to make a Bronte museum. They are the most personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and the limelight of biography has left few darkened corners in the dark old Yorkshire house. And yet the whole of this biographical investigation, though natural and picturesque, is not wholly suitable for the Bronte's. For the Bronte genius was, above all things, deputed to assert the supreme unimportance of externals. Up to that point truth had always been conceived as existing more or less in the novel of Manners. Charlotte Bronte electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older and more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person, good or bad, had any Manners at all. Her work represents the first great assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilization is a disguise as tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a bell mask. She showed that abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a manufacturer. Her heroine is the commonplace spinster with the dress of marino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that Charlotte Bronte, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her genius, was the first to take away from the heroine not only the artificial gold and diamonds of wealth and fashion, but even the natural gold and diamonds of physical beauty and grace. Instinctively she felt that the whole of the exterior must be made ugly, that the whole of the interior might be made sublime. She chose the ugliest of women in the ugliest of centuries and revealed within them all the hells and heavens of Dante. It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately said that the externals of the Bronte's life, though singularly picturesque in themselves, matter less than the externals of almost any other writer. It is interesting to know whether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the officers and women of fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces. It is interesting to know whether Dickens had ever seen a shipwreck or been inside a workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction is conveyed not always by adherence to the facts, but always by grasp of them. But the whole aim and purport and meaning of the work of the Bronte's is that the most futile thing in the whole universe is fact. Such a story as Jane Eyre is in itself so monstrous a fable that it ought to be excluded from a book of fairy tales. The characters do not do what they ought to do, nor what they would do, nor, it might be said, such is the insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct of Rochester is so primevaly and superhumanly catish that Bret Hart in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. Then resuming his usual manner he threw his boots at my head and withdrew. Does perhaps reach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester dresses up as an old gypsy has something in it which is really not to be found in any other branch of art except the end of the pantomime, where the Emperor turns into a pantaloon. Yet despite this vast nightmare of illusion and morbidity and ignorance of the world, Jane Eyre is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essential truth to life sometimes makes one catch one's breath, for it is not true to manners which are constantly false, or to facts which are almost always false. It is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would not matter a single straw if a Bronte story were a hundred times more moon-struck and improbable than Jane Eyre, or a hundred times more moon-struck and improbable than Wuthering Heights. It would not matter if George Reed stood on his head and Mrs. Reed rode on a dragon, if Fairfax Rochester had four eyes and St. John River's three legs. The story would still remain the truest story in the world. The typical Bronte character is indeed a kind of monster. Everything in him except the essential is dislocated. His hands are on his legs and his feet on his arms. His nose is above his eyes. But his heart is in the right place. The great and abiding truth for which the Bronte cycle of fiction stands is a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth, the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy.  She serves to show how futile it is of humanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting on evening dress every evening and having a box at the theater every first night. It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure. It is not the man of the world who appreciates the world. The man who has learnt to do all conventional things perfectly has at the same time learnt to do them prosaically.   He has that element of fear, which is one of the eternal ingredients of joy. This spirit is the central spirit of the Bronte novel. It is the epic of the exhilaration of the shy man. As such, it is of incalculable value in our time, of which the curse is that it does not take joy reverently, because it does not take it fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous governess of Charlotte Bronte, with the small outlook and the small creed, had more commerce with the awful and elemental forces which drive the world than a legion of lawless, minor poets. She approached the universe with real simplicity and consequently with real fear and delight. She was, so to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she had possessed herself of the only force which can prevent enjoyment being as black and barren as routine. The faculty of being shy is the first and the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of pleasure. Upon the hall, therefore, I think it may justifiably be said that the dark, wild youth of the Bronte's in their dark, wild Yorkshire home has been somewhat exaggerated as a necessary factor in their work and their conception. The emotions with which they dealt were universal emotions, emotions of the morning of existence, the spring-tide joy, and the spring-tide terror. Every one of us as a boy or girl has had some midnight dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in which there was, under whatever imbecile forms, all the deadly stress and panic of weathering heights. Every one of us has had a daydream of our own potential destiny, not one atom more reasonable than Jane Eyre, and the truth which the Bronte's came to tell us is the truth that many waters cannot quench love, that suburban respectability cannot touch or damp a secret enthusiasm. Clap him like every other earthly city is built upon a volcano. Thousands of people go to and fro in the wilderness of bricks and mortar, earning mean wages, professing a mean religion, wearing a mean attire.  But out of all these, silent ones suddenly became articulate and spoke a resonant testimony, and her name was Charlotte Bronte. Spreading around us upon every side today, like a huge and radiating geometrical figure, are the endless branches of the great city. There are times when we are almost stricken crazy, as well we may be, by the multiplicity of those appalling perspectives, the frantic arithmetic of that unthinkable population. But this thought of ours is in truth nothing but a fancy. There are no chains of houses, there are no crowds of men, the colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of these houses stands in the center of the world. There is no single house of all those millions, which has not seemed to someone at some time the heart of all things and the end of travel. End of Chapter 1 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Varied Types by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 2 William Morris and His School It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris should approximate to a public festival. For a while there have been many men of genius in the Victorian era, more despotic than he, there have been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious hunger for beauty, which has now for the first time become a serious problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that honorable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of workmanship, which give it a stronger and more bony structure. The time has passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant, to be described as the designer of wallpapers. If Morris had been a hatter instead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfully conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we should have suddenly found our frock coats trailing on the ground with the grandeur of a medieval rayament. If he had been a shoemaker, we should have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have invented some massing of the hair, worthy to be the crown of Venus. As an ironmonger, his nails would have had some noble pattern fit to be the nails of the cross. The limitations of William Morris, whatever they were, were not the limitations of common decoration. It is true that all his work, even his literary work, was in some sense decorative, had in some degree the qualities of a splendid wallpaper. His characters, his stories, his religious and political views had, in the most emphatic sense, length and breadth without thickness. He seemed really to believe that men could enjoy a perfectly flat felicity. He made no account of the unexplored and explosive possibilities of human nature, of the unnameable terrors, and the yet more unnameable hopes. So long as a man was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring consciousness that the chestnut color of his hair was relieved against the blue forest a mile behind, he would be serenely happy. So he would be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a decorative existence, if he were a piece of exquisitely colored cardboard. But although Morris took little account of the terrible solidity of human nature, took little account, so to speak, of human figures in the round, it is altogether unfair to represent him as a mere esthete. He perceived a great public necessity and fulfilled it heroically. The difficulty with which he grappled was one so immense that we shall have to be separated from it by many centuries before we can really judge of it. It was the problem of the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the most self-conscious of the centuries. Morris at least saw the absurdity of the thing. He felt it was monstrous that the modern man, who was preeminently capable of realizing the strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the esthetic and the colossal calm of the Hellenic God, should himself by a farcical bathos be buried in a black coat and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man, who desired to be an artist in raiment, should be condemned to be at best a black and white artist. It is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ugliness, which blights everything brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries. In all creative nature there is not perhaps anything so completely ugly as a pillar-box. Its shape is the most unmeaning of shapes, its height and thickness just neutralizing each other.  Yet there is no reason whatever why such hideousness should possess an object full of civic dignity. The treasure-house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of a thousand souls. If the old Greeks had had such an institution, we may be sure that it would have been surmounted by the severe but graceful figure of the God of letter-writing. If the medieval Christians had possessed it, it would have had an itch filled with the golden aureole of St. Roland of the postage stamps. As it is, there it stands, at all our street corners, disguising one of the most beautiful of ideas under one of the most preposterous of forms. It is useless to deny that the miracles of science may not have been such an incentive to art and imagination as were the miracles of religion. If men in the twelfth century had been told that the lightning had been driven for leagues underground, and had dragged at its destroying tail loads of laughing human beings, and if they had then been told that the people alluded to this pulverizing portent chirpally as the tupini tube, they would have called down the fire of heaven on us as a race of half-witted atheists. Probably they would have been quite right. This clear and fine perception of what may be called the anesthetic element in the Victorian era was undoubtedly the work of a great reformer. It requires a fine effort of the imagination to see an evil that surrounds us on every side. The manner in which Morris carried out his crusade may, considering the circumstances, be called triumphant. Our carpets began to bloom under our feet like the meadows in spring, and our hitherto prosaic stools and sofas seemed growing legs and arms at their own wild will. An element of freedom and rugged dignity came in with plain and strong ornaments of copper and iron. So delicate and universal had been the revolution in domestic art that almost every family in England has had its taste cunningly and treacherously improved. And if we look back at the early Victorian drawing-rooms, it is only to realize the strange but essential truth that art or human decoration has nine times out of ten in history made things uglier than they were before. From the coiffure of the Papuan savage to the wallpaper of a British merchant in 1830. But great and beneficent as was the aesthetic revolution of Morris, there was a very definite limit to it. It did not lie only in the fact that his revolution was in truth a reaction, though this was a partial explanation of his partial failure. When he was denouncing the dresses of modern ladies, upholstered like arm-chairs instead of being draped like women, as he forcefully expressed it, he would hold up for practical imitation the costumes and handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Further than this, retrogressive and imitative movement, he never seemed to go. Now the man of the time of Chaucer had many evil qualities, but there was at least one exhibition of moral weakness they did not give. They would have laughed at the idea of dressing themselves in the manner of the Bowman at the Battle of Sennlach, or painting themselves an aesthetic blue after the custom of the ancient Britons. They would not have called that a movement at all. Whatever was beautiful in their dress, or manners, sprang honestly and naturally out of the life they led, and preferred to lead. And it may surely be maintained that any real advance in the beauty of modern dress must spring honestly and naturally out of the life we lead, and prefer to lead. We are not altogether without hints and hopes of such change in the growing orthodoxy of rough and athletic costumes, but if this cannot be, it will be no substitute or satisfaction to turn life into an interminable, historical, fancy dress ball. But the limitation of Morris's work laid deeper than this. We may best suggest it by a method after his own heart. Of all the various works he performed, none perhaps was so splendidly and solidly valuable as his great protest for the fables and superstitions of mankind. He has the supreme credit of showing that the fairy tales contain the deepest truth of the earth, the real record of men's feeling for things. Trifling details may be inaccurate. Jack may not have climbed up, so tall a beanstalk, or killed so tall a giant, but it is not such things that make a story false. It is a far different class of things that makes every modern book of history as false as the father of lies, ingenuity, self-consciousness, hypocritical impartiality. It appears to us that of all the fairy tales, none contain so vital a moral truth as the old story existing in many forms of beauty and the beast. There is written, with all the authority of human scripture, the eternal and essential truth, that until we love a thing in all its ugliness we cannot make it beautiful. This was the weak point in William Morris as a reformer, that he sought to reform modern life and that he hated modern life instead of loving it.  But unless the poet can love this fabulous monster, as he is, can feel with some generous excitement his massive and mysterious joy to bear, his vast scale of his iron anatomy, and the beating of his thunderous heart, he cannot and will not change the beast into the fairy prince. Morris's disadvantage was that he was not honestly a child of the nineteenth century. He could not understand its fascination and consequently he could not really develop it. An abiding testimony to his tremendous personal influence in the aesthetic world is the vitality and recurrence of the arts and craft exhibitions which are steeped in his personality like a chapel in that of a saint. If we look round at the exhibits in one of these aesthetic shows we shall be struck by the large mass of modern objects that the decorative school leaves untouched. There is a noble instinct for giving the right touch of beauty to common and necessary things. But the things that are so touched are the ancient things, the things that always to some extent commended themselves to the lover of beauty. There are beautiful gates, beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful chairs, beautiful reading desks, but there are no modern things made beautiful. There are no beautiful lampposts, beautiful letter boxes, beautiful engines, beautiful bicycles. The spirit of William Morris has not seized hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful. And this was because with all his healthiness and energy he had not the supreme courage to face the ugliness of things. Beauty shrank from the beast, and the fairy tale had a different ending. But herein indeed lay Morris's deepest claim to the name of a great reformer, that he left his work incomplete. There is perhaps no better proof that a man is a mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant than that his work is done perfectly. A man like Morris draws attention to needs he cannot supply. In after years we may have perhaps a newer and more daring arts and crafts exhibition. In it we shall not decorate the armor of the twelfth century, but the machinery of the twentieth. A lamppost shall be wrought nobly in twisted iron, fit to hold the sanctity of fire. A pillar box shall be carved with figures, emblematical of the secrets of comrade ship, and the silence and honor of the state. Railway signals of all earthly things the most poetical. The colored stars of life and death shall be lamps of green and crimson, worthy of their terrible and faithful service. But if ever this gradual and genuine movement of our time towards beauty, not backwards but forwards, does truly come about, Morris will be the first prophet of it. Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honnesties of art, prophet of a merrier and wiser life. His full-blooded enthusiasm will be remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colors and proved that this painful greenish gray of the aesthetic twilight in which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the grayness of death, but the grayness of dawn. End of Chapter 2 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. Varied Types by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 3. Optimism of Byron Everything is against or appreciating the spirit in the age of Byron. The age that has just passed from us is always like a dream when we wake in the morning, and a thing incredible and centuries away. And the world of Byron seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman world where men were romantic and whiskers, ladies lived apparently in bowers, and the very word has the sound of a piece of stage scenery. Roses and nightingales recur in their poetry with the monotonous elegance of a wallpaper pattern.  But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word artificial. Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity and self-consciousness, as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermits, and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial. Vanity is a voice out of the abyss. The remarkable fact is, however, and it bears strongly on the present position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is remote and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it not savage or terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances of this. A fair one is the case of tropical plants and birds. When we see some of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equatorial woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature, silent explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some of the tropic birds with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks, we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humor of creation. We almost believe that they are toys out of a child's play box, artificially carved and artificially colored. So it is with the great convulsion of nature which was known as Byronism. The volcano is not an extinct volcano now. It is the dead stick of a rocket. It is the remains not of a natural, but of an artificial fire. But Byron and Byronism were something immeasurably greater than anything that is represented by such a view as this. Their real value and meaning are indeed little understood. The first of the mistakes about Byron lies in the fact that he is treated as a pessimist. True, he treated himself as such, but a critic can hardly have even a slight knowledge of Byron without knowing that he had the smallest amount of knowledge of himself that ever fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The real character of what is known as Byron's pessimism is better or study than any real pessimism ever could be. It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almost everything in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably extolled to the disadvantage of everything else. One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe has been declared to be alone capable of making life worth living. Books, love, business, religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion, money, simplicity, mysticism, hard work, a life close to nature, a life close to Belgrade Square are every one of them passionately maintained by somebody to be so good that they redeem the evil of an otherwise indefensible world. Thus while the world is almost always condemned in summary, it is always justified and indeed extolled in detail after detail. Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The work of giving thanks to heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously among them. Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the house of God to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind. Carlisle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogizes a life of labor in the fields. Omar Kayam is established in the cellar and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the blackest of pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment that he has written some shameless and terrible indictment of creation, his one pang of joy in the achievement joins in the universal chorus of gratitude with the scent of the wildflower and the song of the bird. Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as far as words and explanations go, founded upon his pessimism. He was adored by an overwhelming majority, almost every individual of which despised the majority of mankind. But when we come to regard the matter a little more deeply, we tend in some degree to cease to believe in this popularity of the pessimist. The popularity of pure and unadulterated pessimism is an oddity. It is almost a contradiction in terms. Men would no more receive the news of the failure of existence or the harmonious hostility of the stars with ardor or popular rejoicing than they would light bonfires for the arrival of cholera or dance the breakdown when they were condemned to be hanged. When the pessimist is popular, it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, but because he shows some things to be good. Men can only join in a chorus of praise, even if it is the praise of denunciation. The man who is popular must be optimistic about something, even if he is only optimistic about pessimism. And this was emphatically the case with Byron and the Byronists. Their real popularity was founded not upon the fact that they blamed everything, but upon the fact that they praised something. They heaped curses upon man, but they used man as a foil. The things they wished to praise by comparison were the energies of nature. Man was to them what talk and fashion were to Carlisle, what philosophical and religious quarrels were to Omar, what the whole race after practical happiness was to Schopenhauer. The thing which must be censured, in order that somebody else may be exalted. It was merely a recognition of the fact that one cannot write in white chalk except on a blackboard. Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital skepticism and depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in storms and stricken peaks and the lawless melancholy of the older earth, we may deduce with certainty of logic that he is very young and very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when seen in shadow. We see it again in the night that has just buried a gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black and yet at the same time powerfully and almost impossibly red. The sky seems black and yet at the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of the earth because amid all the cold and darkness their own hearts were flaming like their own firesides. Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and lamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in Mr. Aubrey Beardsley's allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with the pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial life. Byronism tended toward the desert. The new pessimism towards the restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality. The new pessimism is a revolt in its favor. The Byronic young man had an effectation of sincerity. The decadent, going a step deeper into the avenues of the unreal, has positively an effectation of effectation. And it is by their properties and their frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is sincere. In the lights and garlands and ribbons we read their indwelling despair. It was so indeed with Byron himself his really bitter moments were his frivolous moments. He went on year after year calling down fire upon mankind, summoning the deluge and the destructive sea and all the ultimate energies of nature, to sweep away the cities of the spawn of man. But through all this his subconscious mind was not that of a despairer on the contrary. There is something of a kind of lawless faith and thus parlaying with such immense and immemorial brutalities. It was not until the time in which he wrote Don Juan that he really lost this inward warmth and geniality and a sudden shout of hilarious laughter announced to the world that Lord Byron had really become a pessimist. One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his meter.  And all the time that Byron's language is of horror and emptiness his meter is a bounding, pastic water. He may arrange existence on the most deadly charges he may condemn it with the most desolating verdict. But he cannot alter the fact that on some walk in a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the blood alive in the body the lips may be caught repeating. Oh, there's not a joy the world can give. Like that it takes away when the glow of early youth declines and beauty's dull decay. Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast, but the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be passed. That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron. The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the unconscious optimists who are very often indeed the most uncompromising conscious pessimists because the exuberance of their nature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But the whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident and that unconscious being long disguised and buried under emotional artifices suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold hard political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality and at the time that he was dying he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of that buried and subconscious happiness which is in all of us and which may emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow or the spears of the enemy. Varied Types by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 4 Pope and the Art of Satire The general critical theory common in this and the last century is that it was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry. The classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that goes one may justifiably answer by asking anyone to try. It may be easier really to have wit than really in the boldest and most enduring sense to have imagination, but it is immeasurably easier to pretend to have imagination than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge in a sham rhapsody because it may be the triumph of a rhapsody to be unintelligible but a man cannot indulge in a sham joke because it is the ruin of a joke to be unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet but he can no more pretend to be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbits out of a hat without having learnt to be a conjuber. Therefore it may be submitted there was a certain discipline in the old antithetical couplet of Pope and his followers. If it did not permit of the great liberty of wisdom used by the minority of great geniuses neither did it permit of the great liberty of folly which is used by the majority of small writers. A prophet could not be a poet in those days perhaps but at least a fool could not be a poet. If we take for the sake of example such a lion as Pope's damn with faint praise ascent with civil deer the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written such a line perhaps but a minor poet could not. Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with such an idea as that expressed in Pope's line about man a being darkly wise and rudely great is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than the old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would really be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound. The one thing that he would really be would be longer instead of writing a being darkly wise and rudely great the contemporary poet in his elaborate ornamented books of verse would produce something like the following A creature of feature more dark more dark more dark than skies yea darkly wise yea darkly wise darkly wise as formless fate and if he be great if he be great then rudely great rudely great as a plow that plies and darkly wise and darkly wise Have we really learned to think more broadly or have we only learned to spread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poet might manufacture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope There is of course an idea in our time that the very antithesis of the typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality I shall have occasion more than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever been artificial but certainly antithesis is not artificial an element of paradox runs through the whole of existence itself it begins in the realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics in the two facts that we cannot imagine a space that is infinite and that we cannot imagine a space that is finite it runs through the inmost complications of divinity and that we cannot conceive that Christ in the wilderness was truly pure but we also conceive that he desired to sin it runs in the same manner through all the minor matters of morals so that we cannot imagine courage existing accepting conjunction with fear or magnanimity existing accepting conjunction with some temptation to meanness if Pope and his followers caught this echo of natural irrationality they were not any the more artificial their antithesis were fully in harmony with existence which is itself a contradiction in terms Pope was really a great poet he was the last great poet of civilization immediately after the fall of him and his school come Burns and Byron and the reaction towards the savage and the elemental but to Pope civilization was still an exciting experiment its parooks and ruffles were to him what feathers and bankals are to a South Sea islander the real romance of civilization and in all the forms of art which peculiarly belonged to civilization he was supreme in one especially he was supreme the great and civilized art of satire and in this we have fallen away utterly we have had a great revival in our time of the cults of violence and hostility Mr. Hensley and his young man have an infinite number of furious epithets with which to overwhelm anyone who differs from them it is not a placid or untroubled position to be Mr. Henley's enemy though we know that it is certainly safer than to be his friend and yet despite all this these people produce no satire political and social satire is a lost art like pottery and stained glass it may be worthwhile to make some attempt to point out a reason for this it may seem a singular observation to say that we are not generous enough to write great satire this however is approximately a very accurate way of describing the case to write great satire to attack a man so that he feels the attack and half acknowledges its justice it is necessary to have a certain intellectual magnanimity which realizes the merits of the opponent as well as his defects this is indeed only another way of putting the simple truths that in order to attack an army we must know not only its weak points but also its strong points England in the present season and spirit fails in satire for the same simple reason that it fails in war it despises the enemy in matters of battle and conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the idea an idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam that we can best trample on a people by ignoring all the particular merits which give them a chance of trampling upon us it has become a breach of etiquette to praise the enemy whereas when the enemy is strong every honest scout ought to praise the enemy it is impossible to vanquish an army without having a full account of its strength it is impossible to satirize a man without having a full account of his virtues it is too much the custom in politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhuman as utterly careless of his country as utterly cynical which no man ever was since the beginning of the world this kind of invective may often have a great superficial success it may hit the mood of the moment it may raise excitement and applause it may impress millions but there is one man among all those millions whom it does not impress whom it hardly ever touches that is the man against whom it is directed the one person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach he knows that such a description of him is not true he knows that he is not utterly unpatriotic or utterly self-seeking or utterly barbarous and revengeful he knows that he is an ordinary man and that he can count as many kindly memories as many humane instincts as many hours of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man but behind all this he has his real weaknesses the real ironies of his soul behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises the craven silences the sullen vanities the secret brutalities the unmanly visions of revenge it is to these that satire should reach if it is to touch the man at whom it is aimed and to reach these it must pass and salute a whole army of virtues if we turn to the great English satirists of the 17th and 18th century for example we find that they had this rough but firm grasp of the size and strength the value and the best points of their adversary Dryden before hewing atophell in pieces gives a splendid and spirit account of the insane valor and inspiring cunning bearing pilot and extremity who was more untrustworthy and calm than in storm and steered to near the rocks to boast his wit the whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of the Great Chastbury it would in many ways serve as a very sound and picturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill but here comes in very pointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and the ancient achievement of it the opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill, both liberal and conservative did not satirize him nobly and honestly as one of those great wits to madness near allied they represented him as a mere puppy a silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence supplied the lack of policy and character Churchill had grave and even gross faults a certain coarseness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness a certain lack of magnanimity a certain peculiar patrician vulgarity but he was much larger man than satire depicted him and therefore the satire could not and did not overwhelm him and here we have the cause of the failure of contemporary satire that it has no magnanimity that is to say, no patience it cannot endure to be told that its opponent has his strong points just as Mr. Chamberlain could not endure to be told that the Boers had a regular army it can be content with nothing except persuading itself that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly stupid that is that he is what he is not and what nobody else is if we take any prominent politicians of the day such for example as Sir William Harcourt we shall find that this is the point in which all his party invective fails the Tory satire at the expense of Sir William Harcourt is always desperately endeavouring to represent that he is inept that he makes a fool of himself that he is disagreeable and disgraceful and untrustworthy the defect of all this is that we all know that it is untrue everyone knows that Sir William Harcourt is not inept but is almost the ableist parliamentarian now alive everyone knows that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful but a gentleman of the old school who is on excellent social terms with his antagonists everyone knows that he is not untrustworthy but a man of unimpeachable honour who is much trusted above all he knows it himself and is therefore affected by the satire exactly as any one of us would be if we were accused of being black or keeping a shop for the receiving of stolen goods we might be angry at the libel but not at the satire for a man is angry at a libel because it is false but at a satire because it is true Mr. Henley and his young men are very fond of invective and satire if they wish to know the reason of their failure in these things they need only to turn to the opening of Pope's superb attack upon Addison the Henleyites idea of satirizing a man is to express a violent contempt for him and by the heat of this to persuade others and himself that the man is contemptible I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr. Gladstone by one of the young anarchic Tories which began by asserting that Mr. Gladstone was a bad public speaker if these people would, as I have said go quietly and read Pope's Atticus they would see how a great satirist approaches a great enemy peace to all such but were there one whose fires true genius kindles and fair fame inspires blessed with each talent and each art to please and born to write, converse and live with ease should such a man and then follows the torrent of that terrible criticism Pope was not such a fool as to try and make out that Addison was a fool he knew that Addison was not a fool and he knew that Addison knew it but hatred in Pope's case had become so great and I was almost going to say so pure that it illuminated all things as love illuminates all things he said what was really wrong with Addison and in calm and clear and everlasting colors he painted the picture of the evil of the literary temperament bear like the Turk no brother near the throne view him with scornful yet with jealous eyes and hate for arts that caused himself to rise like Cato give his little senate laws and sit attentive to his own applause while wits and templars every sentence raise and wonder with a foolish face of praise this is the kind of thing which really goes to the market which it aims it is penetrated with sorrow and a kind of reverence and it is addressed directly to a man this is no mock tournament to gain the applause of the crowd it is a deadly duel by the lonely seashore in current political materialism there is everywhere the assumption that without understanding anything of his case or his merits we can benefit a man practically without understanding his case and his merits we cannot even hurt him end of chapter 4 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org varied types by G.K. Chesterton section 5 Francis asceticism is a thing which in its very nature we tend in these days to misunderstand asceticism in the religious sense is the repudiation of the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the one joy, the religious joy but asceticism is not in the least confined to religious asceticism there is scientific asceticism which asserts that truth is alone satisfying there is aesthetic asceticism which asserts that art is alone satisfying there is amatory asceticism which asserts that love is alone satisfying there is even epicurean asceticism which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying alone satisfying. Wherever the matter of praising anything involves the statement that the speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germinescence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that love is enough, it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art, science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts, gloves, walking sticks, door knockers, railway stations, cathedrals, and any other thing one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When Omar Kayam says, A book averse underneath the bow, a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou, beside me singing in the wilderness, O wilderness where paradise eno. It is clear that he speaks fully as much aesthetically as he does aesthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more. The same thing was done by a medieval monk. Examples might of course be multiplied a hundredfold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our younger poet says, as the one thing certain, that from quiet home and first beginning out to the undiscovered ends there is nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends. Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact that all true joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism. But if in any case it should happen that a class or a generation lose the sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and self-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called amongst melancholy because they deny themselves the pleasures of liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a bank holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is however to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting the physique, if public ethics swung round an attitude of absolute contempt and indifference toward the feeling called sport, then it is easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state that in the dark days of Queen Victoria, young men at Oxford and Cambridge were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They were forbidden by fantastic monastic rules to indulge in wine or tobacco during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time before certain brutal fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at unearthly hours and running violently around fields for no object. Many men ruined their health in these dens of superstition. Many died there. All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an asceticism as much as the monastic rules. Men have overstrained themselves and killed themselves through English athleticism. There is one difference and one only. We do feel the love of sport. We do not feel the love of religious offices. We see only the price in the one case and only the purchase in the other. The only question that remains is what was the joy of the old Christian aesthetics of which their asceticism was merely the purchasing price. The mere possibility of the query is an extraordinary example of the way in which we miss the main points of human history. We are looking at humanity too close and see only the details and not the vast and dominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity and conceive it as a rise of self-abignation and almost of pessimism. It does not occur to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with joy was the universe itself, the only thing really worthy of enjoyment.  The endless forests stood up in their order. The lightning awoke, and the tree fell, and the sea gathered into mountains, and the ship went down, and all these disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy. This scheme of nature was not accurate or well-founded is perfectly tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We insist, however, upon treating this matter tale foremost. We insist that the ascetics were pessimists because they gave up three score years and ten for an eternity of happiness. We forget that the bare proposition of an eternity of happiness is, by its very nature, ten thousand times more optimistic than ten thousand pagan Saturnalias. Mr. Adderley's Life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring us out, nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has, rather, the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing, but we do not look in it for a portrait of the man, for the same reason that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman. Because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities, there is no outline because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line. This blaze of benediction, this conflict between lights has its place in poetry, not in biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance, in the more idealistic odes of Spencer. The design is sometimes almost indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white. It is natural, of course, that Mr. Adderley should see Francis, primarily as the founder of the Franciscan order. We suspect this was only one, perhaps a minor one of the things that he was. We suspect that one of the minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vast practical work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored. But this amazingly unworldly and almost maddeningly simple-minded infant was one of the most consistently successful men that ever fought with this bitter world. It is the custom to say that the secret of such men is their profound belief in themselves, and this is true, but not all the truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums are throng with men who believe in themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of his success was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack of this that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons. Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about their common relative, the water rat, as he was. He planned a visit to the emperor to draw his attention to the needs of his little sisters, the larks. He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their misfortune in being unable to give reign to their desire for holiness. It was an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often got round him as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had got round them and discovered the other side, the side of secret nobility. Conceiving of St. Francis as primarily the founder of the Franciscan Order, Mr. Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of the history of monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in the book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichaean ideal that underlies so much of Eastern monasticism and the ideal of self-discipline, which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But he does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider, the absorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism. For the excellent reason that, not being an outsider, he does not find it a problem at all. To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker, the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the Mountabanks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger. He was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious necessities. In his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he, who loved where all men were blind, seek to blind himself, where all men loved? Why was he a monk, and not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked. We have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also. So it was with the monks. The two great parties in human affairs are only the party which sees life black against white, and the party which sees white against black, the party which macerates and blackens itself with sacrifice, because the background is full of the blaze of an universal mercy, and the party which crowns itself with flowers and lights itself with bridal torches, because it stands against a black curtain of incalculable night. The revelers are old, and the monks are young. It was the monks who were the spin-thrifts of happiness, and we who are its misers. Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr. Adderley's book, the clear and tranquil life of the three vows had a fine and delicate effect on the genius of Francis, he was primarily a poet. The perfection of his literary instinct is shown in his naming the Fire Brother and the Water Sister. In the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the sermon to the fishes, that they alone were saved in the flood, in the amazingly minute and graphic dramatization of the life, disappointments, and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing. His genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided the weakness of Burns versus to animals, the occasional morbidity, bombast, and moralization on himself, the credit is surely due to a cleaner and more transparent life. The general attitude of St. Francis like that of his master embodied a kind of terrible common sense. The famous remark of the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, why not, impresses us as his general motto. He could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages, and all its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy under the rationality of that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid, even of the nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world was small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the reason that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives were to be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that the madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in it the features of a new friend. CHAPTER VI. Rostand. When Cyrano de Bergerac was published, it bore the subordinate types of the title of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception the hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power of a man's spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy into a comedy is not admitted. Nevertheless, almost all the primitive legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of the monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential disastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itself with a hyper-aesthetic view of tragedy and comedy, which is largely due to the influence of modern France, from which the great heroic comedies of Monsieur Rostand have come. The French genius has an instinct for remedying its own evil work, and France gives always the best cure for Frenchiness. The idea of comedy, which is held in England by the school which plays most attention to the technical niceties of art, is a view which renders such an idea as that of heroic comedy quite impossible. The fundamental conception in the minds of the majority of our younger writers is that comedy is par excellence, a fragile thing. It is conceived to be a conventional world of the most absolutely delicate and gim-rack description. Such stories, as Mr. Max Beerbaum's Happy Hippocrates, are conceptions which would vanish or fall into utter nonsense if viewed by one single degree too seriously. But great comedy, the comedy of Shakespeare or Stern, not only can be, but must be taken seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such comedies one laughs with the heroes and not at them. The humor which steeps the stories of false staff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and philosophic humor, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not superficial reading, it is not even strictly speaking light reading. Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they were the predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The modern writer of comedy is maybe said to boast of the brittleness of his characters. He seems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. When John Oliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious emotions, she named it, with the thinly disguised contempt for her own work, a sentimental comedy. The ground of this conception, of the artificiality of comedy, is a profound pessimism. Life in the eyes of these mournful buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing. Comedy must be as hollow as a grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even properly speaking a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over the eternal waters of bitterness. Cyrano de Bergerac came to us as the new decoration of an old truth, that merriment was one of the world's natural flowers and not one of its exotics. The gigantic-esque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, the Rabilasian puns and digressions were seen to be once more what they had been in Rabila, the mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado, as old and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong and hotly as it will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano, at his highest moment of happiness, Imiford des Giants. An essential aspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama in rhyme. There is nothing that affords so easily a point of attack for the dramatic realist as the conduct of a play in verse. According to his canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facing some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party playing about rhymes. In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculous that two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults should obligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat and convenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon the fact that few persons, if any today, understand what is meant by a poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays which are now written in England by the most advanced students of the drama follow exclusively the lines of Materlink and use verse and rhyme for the adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supreme appropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land of heroic comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers in which it is not difficult to imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is far more conceivable that men's speech should flower naturally into these harmonious forms when they are filled with the essential spirit of youth than when they are sitting gloomily in the presence of immemorial destiny. The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do speak it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing. It is conversation that is broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza like Cyrano de Bergerac speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. Rhymes answer each other as the sexes in flowers and in humanity answer each other. Men do not speak so, it is true, even when they are inspired or in love they talk in entities, but the poetic comedy does not misrepresent the speech one half so much as the speech misrepresents the soul. Monsieur Rustin showed even more than his usual insight when he called Cyrano de Bergerac a comedy despite the fact that strictly speaking it ends with disappointment and death. The essence of tragedy is the spiritual breakdown or decline, and in the great French play the spiritual sentiment mounts unceasingly until the last line. It is not the facts themselves, but our feeling about them that makes tragedy and comedy, and death is more joyful in Rostin than life in Materlink. The same apparent contradiction holds good in the case of the drama of La Agnion, now being performed with so much success. Although the hero is a weakling, the subject of fiasco, the end of premature death and a personal disillusionment, yet in spite of this theme, which might have been chosen for its depressing qualities, the unconquerable pain of the praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the poet's song swells so high that at the end it seems to drown all the weak voices of the characters in one crashing chorus of great things and great men. A multitude of matos might be taken from the play to indicate and illustrate not only its own spirit, but much of the spirit of modern life. When in the vision of the field of wagram the horrible voices of the wounded cry out, Les Corbets, the duke overwhelmed with a nightmare of hideous trivialities cries out, we sauntless aglays. That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the beginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy. When an ex-general of Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed the emperor, he cries la fatigue, and at that a veteran private of the great army, rushes forward and crying passionately, etnos pours out a terrible description of the life lived by the commoner soldier. Today, when pessimism is almost as much as symbol of wealth and fashion as jewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life in few other words but la fatigue, there might surely come a cry from the vast mass of common humanity from the beginning, etnos. It is this potentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of men that makes a function of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare is much a do about nothing as a great comedy because behind it is the whole pressure of that love of love, which is the youth of the world, which is common to all the young, especially to those who swear they will die bachelors and old maids. Loves, labors lost, is filled with the same energy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of our subject, since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyrically as naturally as the birds sing in pairing time. What the love of love is to Shakespearean comedies, that other and more mysterious human passion, the love of death, is too lagly on. Whether we shall ever have in England a new tradition of poetic comedy, it is difficult at present to say, but we shall assuredly never have it, until we realize that comedy is built upon everlasting foundations in the nature of things, that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb. Monsur Rostan, in his description of the Battle of Wegram, does not shrink from bringing about the dukesers the frightful voices of actual battle, of men torn by crows and suffocated with blood. But when the duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks them for their final word, they all cry together, viva l'imperor. Monsur Rostan perhaps did not know that he was writing in allegory. To me, that field of Wegram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear nothing but the voices of pain, the whole is one phonograph of horror. It is right that we should hear these things, it is right that not one of them should be silenced, but these cries of distress are not in life, as they are in modern art, the only voices. They are the voices of men, but not the voice of man. One question finally and seriously as to their conception of their destiny. Men have from the beginning of time, answered in a thousand philosophies and religions, with a single voice, and in a sense most sacred and tremendous. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Varied types by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter 7. Charles II There are a great many bonds which still connect us with Charles II. One of the idolist men of one of the idolist epics. Among other things Charles II represents one thing which is very rare and very satisfying. He was a real and consistent skeptic. Skepticism, both in its advantages and disadvantages, is greatly misunderstood in our time. There is a curious idea abroad that skepticism has some connection with such theories as materialism and atheism and secularism. This is of course a mistake. The true skeptic has nothing to do with these theories, simply because they are theories. The true skeptic is as much a spiritualist as he is a materialist. He thinks that the savage dancing round the African idol stands quite as good a chance of being right as Darwin. He thinks that mysticism is every bit as rational as rationalism. He has indeed the most profound doubts as to whether St. Matthew wrote his own gospel, but he has quite equally profound doubts as to whether the tree he is looking at is a tree and not a rhinoceros. This is the real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in the lives of great skeptics, which appear with special prominence in the life of Charles II. I mean, there is constant oscillation between atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day of judgment, for it is the assertion of a universal negative, for a man to say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that there are no insects in any of the stars. Thus it was with that wholesome and systematic skeptic Charles II when he took the sacrament according to the forms of the Roman Church in his last hour. He was acting consistently as a philosopher. The wafer might not be God. Similarly it might not be a wafer. To the genuine and poetical skeptic the whole world is incredible with its bulbous mountains and its fantastic trees. The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it. Transubstantiation might be a dream. But if it was it was assuredly a dream within a dream. Charles II sought to guard himself against hellfire because he could not think hell itself more fantastic than the world as it was revealed by science. The priest crept up the staircase, the doors were closed, the few of the faithful who were present touched themselves respectfully, and so with every circumstance of secrecy and sanctity, with the cross uplifted in the prayers poured out, was consummated the last great act of logical unbelief. The problem of Charles II consists in this, that he has scarcely a moral virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us morally. We feel that some other virtues have been dropped out in the lists made by all the saints and sages, and that Charles II was preeminently successful in these wild and unmentionable virtues. The real truth of this matter and the real relation of Charles II to the moral idea is worth somewhat more exhaustive study. It is a common place that the restoration movement can only be understood when considered as a reaction against puritanism. But it is insufficiently realized that the tyranny which hath frustrated all the good work of puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was not the fire of puritanism, the exaltation and sobriety, the frenzy of a restraint which passed away. That still burns in the heart of England, only to be quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is seldom remembered that the puritans were in their day emphatically intellectual bullies, that they relied swaggeringly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, that they bound omnipotence itself in the change of syllogism. The puritans fell through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life, through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical French Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they sought the lesson that men's wants have always been right and their arguments always wrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force. Those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of touching a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it. The tyranny of the puritans over the bodies of men was comparatively a trifle. Pikes, bullets, and confligations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralized human spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced for it is humanity on fire. Hatred can be genial, madness can be homely. The puritans fell not because they were fanatics, but because they were rationalists. When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, which means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration. The Restoration of which Charles II was a preeminent type was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that are left over and will always be left over by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merely account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accounts also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a nameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about it something mystical, like religion. It is everywhere understood and nowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because as the type of this movement he let himself float upon this new tide of politeness.  He could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the Ten Thousand Commandments. His name is unconnected with any great acts of duty or sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of those acts of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy which lie on the dim borderland between morality and art. Charles II, said Thackeray with unearing brevity, was a rascal, but not a snob. Unlike George IV, he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys strange statues not to be found in any moral textbook, and practices strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world. So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration that it was the revolt of something human, if only the debris of human nature. But more cannot be said. It was emphatically a fall and not an ascent, a recoil and not an advance, a sudden weakness, and not a sudden strain, that the bow of human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too far, that it overstrained the soul by stretching it to the height of an almost horrible idealism, makes the collapse of the Restoration infinitely more excusable. But it does not make it any the less a collapse. Nothing can efface the essential distinction that Puritanism was one of the world's great efforts after the discovery of the true order, whereas it was the essence of the Restoration that it involved no effort at all. It is true that the Restoration was not, as has been widely assumed, the most immoral epic of our history. Its vices cannot compare for a moment in this respect with a monstrous tragedies and almost suffocating secrecies and villainies of the court of James I. But the dram-drinking and no-slitting of the Saturnalia of Charles II seems at once more human and more detestable than the passions and poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appears ineffably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared with the Renaissance there is something cockney about the Restoration. Not only was it too indolent for great morality, it was too indolent even for great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even for the pursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a game of lawn tennis. It would have appeared to Charles II's poets quite as arduous to ride paradise lost as to regain paradise. All old and vigorous languages abound in images and metaphors which, though lightly and casually used, are in truth poems in themselves and poems of a high and striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so terribly significant as the phrase killing time. It is a tremendous and poetical image, the image of a kind of cosmic parasite. There are on the earth a race of revelers who do under all their exuberance fundamentally regard time as an enemy. Of these were Charles II and the men of the Restoration. Whatever may have been their merits, and we have said we think that they had merits, they can never have a place among the great representatives of the joy of life, for they belong to those lower Epicureans who kill time as opposed to those higher Epicureans who make time live. Of a people in this temper Charles II was the natural and rightful head. He may have been a pantomime king, but he was a king, and with all his geniality he let nobody forget it. He was not indeed the aimless flinure that has been represented. He was a patient and cunning politician who disguised his wisdom under so perfect a mask of holly that he not only deceived his allies and opponents, but has deceived almost all the historians that have come after him. But if Charles was, as he emphatically was, the only steward who really achieved despotism. It was greatly due to the temper of the nation and the age. Despotism is the easiest of all governments, at any rate for the governed. It is indeed a form of slavery, and it is the despot who is the slave. Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them, professionals to dance for them, and a professional to rule them. Almost all the faces in the portraits of that time look as it were like masks put on artificially, put on artificially with a paroch. A strange unreality broods over the period. Distracted as we are with civic mysteries and problems, we can afford to rejoice. Our tears are less desolate than their laughter. Our restraints are larger than their liberty. CHAPTER VIII Stevenson A recent incident has finally convinced us that Stevenson was, as we suspected, a great man. We knew from recent books that we have noticed, from the scorn of ephemera Critica and Mr. George Moore, that Stevenson had the first essential qualification of a great man, that of being misunderstood by his opponents. But from the book which Missers Chateau and Windress have issued in the same bindings as Stevenson's works, Robert Lewis Stevenson, by Mr. H. Bellews Baildon, we learn that he has the other essential qualifications, that of being misunderstood by his admirers. Miss Baildon has many interesting things to tell us about Stevenson himself, whom he knew at college, nor are his criticisms, by any means valueless, that upon the plays especially, Bo Austin is remarkably thoughtful and true. But it is a very singular fact, and goes far, as we say, to prove that Stevenson had that unfathomable quality which belongs to the great, that this admiring student of Stevenson can number and marshal all the master's work and distribute praise and blame with decision and even severity, without ever thinking for a moment of the principles of art and ethics, which would have struck us as the very things that Stevenson nearly killed himself to express. Mr. Baildon, for example, is perpetually lecturing Stevenson for his pessimism, surely a strange charge against a man who has done more than any modern artist to make men ashamed of their shame of life. But he complains that, in the master of Ballantry, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson gives evil a final victory over good. Now, if there was one point that Stevenson more constantly and passionately emphasized than any other, it was that we must worship good for its own value and beauty, without any reference whatever to victory or failure in space and time. Whatever we are intended to do, he said, we are not intended to succeed. That the stars in their courses fight against virtue, that humanity is in its nature a forlorn hope, this was the very spirit that through the whole of Stevenson work sounded a trumpet to all the brave. The story of Henry Dury is dark enough, but could anyone stand beside the grave of that sodden monomaniac and not respect him? It is strange that men should see sublime inspiration in the ruins of an old church, and see none in the ruins of a man. The author has most extraordinary ideas about Stevenson's tales of blood and spoil. He appears to think that they prove Stevenson to have had, we use Mr. Bailden's own phrase, a kind of homicidal mania. He, Stevenson, arrives pretty much at the paradox that one can hardly be better employed than in taking life. Mr. Bailden might as well say that Dr. Conan Doyle delights in committing inexplicable crimes, that Mr. Clark Russell is a notorious pirate, and that Mr. Wilkie Collins thought that one could hardly be better employed than in stealing moon stones and falsifying marriage registers. But Mr. Bailden is scarcely alone in this error. Few people have understood properly the goriness of Stevenson. Stevenson was essentially the robust schoolboy who draws skeletons and gibbets in his Latin grammar. It was not that he took pleasure in death, but that he took pleasure in life, in every muscular and emphatic action of life, even if it were an action that took the life of another. Let us suppose that one gentleman throws a knife at another gentleman and pins him to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to remark that there are in this transaction two somewhat varying personal points of view. The point of view of the man pinned is the tragic and moral point of view, and this Stevenson show clearly that he understood in such stories as the Master of Ballantry and Weir of Hermiston. But there is another view of the matter, that in which the whole act is an abrupt and brilliant explosion of bodily vitality, like breaking a rock with a blow of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred gate. This is the standpoint of romance, and it is the soul of Treasure Island and the wrecker. It was not indeed that Stevenson loved men less, but that he loved clubs and pistols more. He had in truth in the devouring universalism of his soul a positive love for inanimate objects, such as has not been known since St. Francis called the Son Brother and the Well Sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutch that Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that Billy Bones left at the Admiral Benbow, with the knife that Wicks drove through his own hand and the table. There is always in his work a certain clean cut angularity, which makes us remember that he was fond of cutting wood with an axe. Stevenson's new biographer, however, cannot make any allowance for this deep-rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputing something to Stevenson as a crime which Stevenson really professed as an object. He says of that glorious riot of horror the destroying angel in the dynamiter that it is highly fantastic and putting a strain on our credulity. This is rather like describing the travels of Baron Munchhausen as unconvincing. The whole story of the dynamiter is a kind of humorous nightmare, and even in that story the destroying angel is supposed to be an extravagant lie made up on the spur of the moment. It is a dream within a dream, and to accuse it of improbability is like accusing the sky of being blue. But Mr. Bailden, whether from hasty reading or natural difference of taste, cannot in the least comprehend that rich and romantic irony of Stevenson's London stories. He actually says of that portentous monument of humor, Prince Florizel of Bohemia, that, though evidently admired by his creator, he is to me on the whole rather an irritating presence. From this we are almost driven to believe, though desperately and against our will, that Mr. Bailden thinks that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously as if he were a man in real life. For ourselves Prince Florizel is almost our favorite character in fiction, but we willingly add the proviso that if we met him in real life we should kill him. The fact is that the whole mass of Stevenson's spiritual and intellectual virtue had been partly frustrated by one additional virtue, that of artistic dexterity. If he had chalked up his great message on a wall like Walt Whitman in large and straggling letters, it would have startled men like a blasphemy. But he wrote his light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copybook hand that everyone, supposed they must be copybook sentiments. He suffered from his versatility, not as is loosely said, by not doing every department well enough, but by doing every department too well. As a child, Cockney, Pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people could not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can play a fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he is called an admirable Christian. But if he does all three thoroughly well, he is apt to be regarded in the several departments as a common fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot black. This is what has happened in the case of Stevenson. If Dr. Jekyll, the master of Ballantry, the child's garden of verses, and across the plains, had been each of them one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyone would have seen that they were all parts of the same message. But by succeeding in the proverbial miracle of being in five places at once, he has naturally convinced others that he was five different people. But the real message of Stevenson was as simple as that of Muhammad, as moral as that of Dante, as confident as that of Whitman, and as practical as that of James Watt. The conception which unites the whole varied work of Stevenson was that romance, or the vision of the possibilities of things, was far more important than mere occurrences, that one was the soul of our life, the other the body, and that the soul was the precious thing. The germ of all his stories lies in the idea that every landscape or scrap of scenery has a soul, and that soul is a story. Standing before a stunted orchard with a broken stone wall, we may know as a mere fact that no one has been through it but an elderly female cook. But everything exists in the human soul, that orchard grows in our own brain, and there it is the shrine and theater of some strange chance between a girl and a ragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands for the conception that ideas are the real incidents that our fancies are our adventures. To think of a cow with wings is essentially to have met one, and this is the reason for his wide diversities of narrative. He had to make one story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as gray as a hoary monolith, for the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. It is quite inappropriate to judge the teller of tales, as the Samoans called him, by the particular novels he wrote, as one would judge Mr. George Moore by Esther Waters. These novels were only the two or three of his soul's adventures that he happened to tell, but he died with a thousand stories in his heart. 1 Robert Louis Stevenson A Life Study in Criticism by H. Bellis Baildon Chateau and Windus END OF CHAPTER VIII