Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 573
This business about Creative Evolution, noted in my book under the name and topic of Man and Superman, has since taken a much longer stride in the work called Back to Methuselah. It is a very long stride indeed, for the play lasts for two or three nights, as if to prepare its audience for the practice of living for two or three hundred years. Some have questioned whether so large a slice, however, should be claimed by Mr. Shaw out of our present practical life of three-score years and ten. The play contains some excellent dialogue, as do all the other plays; but it is very unequal, and, what is worse, ultimately unequal to its task. For, with numberless passages of wit, and some passages of eloquence, Bernard Shaw does fail to do either of the two things he is supposed to do. He fails to explain why this unaccountably and ever lastingly unfolding universe, this nothing changing into everything for no reason in particular — he does fail to show why this changing world should be, or should be supposed to be, always changing for the better. And he does most definitely fail to make us feel that it is changing for the better. He may like the notion of a world governed by ghostly Tertiaries, of bloodless Struldbugs who kill people for purely sociological considerations; but as a prospect of improvement for the normally complete human being, there is not much to choose between the Paradise of Shaw and the Inferno of Swift. There is nothing at all to choose between the Paradise of Shaw and the Inferno of Aldous Huxley. But Aldous Huxley is a younger man and therefore not so progressive and revolutionary. As Mr. Arnold Lunn has truly remarked, “Progress is dead; and Brave New World is its epitaph.”
But there is a deeper difficulty than any difference of taste about the chilly charms of an Earthly Paradise apparently situated at the North Pole. It is involved in this whole idea of endless evolutionary change, and it can perhaps best be considered under the particular myth or symbol of the Superman. An intimate disciple of Shaw said to me at the time of the earlier play, “Nietzsche is at least right in one sentence: Man is a thing that has to be surpassed.’ “ I replied, “ In one sense the remark is most Christian and orthodox; but unless you have a permanent standard of good, how do you know when he has been surpassed?” The disciple had apparently never thought of this. Or, to put it shortly, suppose six Supermen appear at once and stand in a row, all quite different and departing from the human type in quite contrary directions. Suppose one is a giant, braver but more brutal than men; another a Hindu saint, milder but more ascetic than men ; another a great poet of pleasure, more joyous but more selfish than men ; and so on through any number of quite contrary examples of superior beings beyond the easy imitation of man. How does the Evolutionist know which of these superior beings is superior to the other superior being? How can he possibly know unless he already has a fixed and unalterable ideal of a superior being; and if he has, then the whole metaphysic of mutability falls to pieces. There is something from the beginning which survives all changes to the end; and it is not enough that there is always a beyond, for beyond it there is no beyond.
Finally, there is a fundamental connection between these stark imaginations of strange births and radiant monsters taking the place of men, and those first fads which remain as mere provincial prejudices; even fads as farcical as that of teetotalism. They are connected by a cosmic conception, perhaps so large as to be almost unconscious, which separates men like Mr. Shaw from the older Christian tradition; against which they think they have rebelled, but of which they have never really thought, and indeed, never really heard. Perhaps the shortest way of stating it is this. The older Christian theology stands out against any such newer theory, and indeed against most other religions, in this definite and defiant feature: that it is the one and only philosophy that has refused to despair of Man.
Now Mr. Shaw’s evolutionism, and nearly everybody else’s, is absolutely rooted in a despair about Man. That is what is picturesquely symbolised by a rather vague and evasive enthusiasm about the Superman. What is really meant by the consolation of the beyond, and the expectation of a superior organism? It is simply that the actual animal called Man is to be treated almost as an extinct animal. He is a fossil walking the streets; he is himself a sort of appendix of the cosmos; a superfluous organ. He is one of those remarkable things in evolution which only survive to prove that they have no survival value. “Man is a thing that has to be surpassed.” Now it follows from this view of the cosmic disease as a sort of astral appendicitis, that the process of improvement must be that particular sort of simplification to which we give the name of Amputation. Things that have always been a part of the human being may be, for all anybody knows, obstacles to the formation of the new and name less and simplified superhuman being. Certainly a man is not a complete man without a nose; but, for anything anybody knows about supermen, they may be better without noses. Noses may be nests for germs; or the noise of the blowing of noses may disturb the delicate nervous organism of that Strong Man of the future, who is to be the master of us all, it will be remembered that Aunt Jobiska, in the rhymes of the learned Mr. Lear, took this view and reasoned in this fashion, saying that “everyone knows that a Pobble is better with out his toes.” Aunt Jobiska is a model evolutionist of this school of thought. It consists in first inventing an unknown figure, about which nobody can even imagine anything, such as a Pobble or a Superman, and then saying arbitrarily that he will not need something which everybody we know of needs very much indeed.
Thus, in the Shavian atmosphere, the philosopher is not trying to get rid of the troubles of men, he is trying to get rid of men because they are the troubles of the philosopher. It is due to Mr. Shaw’s unmatched directness and controversial courage, to say that he very early accepted this reversal of the normal order of means and ends. He most emphatically does not think that the Sabbath was made for Man. He most emphatically does think that Man was made for the Sabbath. And Man having now irrevocably broken the Sabbath, the Superman must create some other sort of Sabbath, even if it be to our eyes as wild as a Witch’s Sabbath. I mean that he did begin very early to say boldly that if the Communist hat would not fit the human head, we must cut off the head and carefully preserve the hat. He did and does hold that if men must really have beef and beer, then we must all set to work to breed a race of gigantic chameleons that can live on light and air. The growth of these dragons is the chief theme of Back to Methuselah. But Mr. Shaw did really take this queer view long before he went back to Methuselah. Where all normal socialists professed fraternity with the working classes, he wrote, “I have never had any feeling about the working-classes except a desire to abolish them, and replace them by sensible people.” It is needless to explain that sensible people are always people who prefer water to wine, cabbages to cutlets, materialism to miracles, and utter subjection to a centralised government to any traditions of human liberty.
Now against all this, as its chief enemy, though he may not know it, stands the old Catholic philosophy of Man. The first and last idea of it is Resurrection, that is the resurrection of the whole of man. It is, as I have said before, a mystical refusal to despair of the original prehistoric monster of that name. It is true that the older creed often demands amputation in the sense of asceticism, as in the text about cutting off the hand to enter Heaven. But the difference is instantly made vivid by the rest of the text, which declares that even such amputation is better than casting the whole body of man into Hell. But the Shavian evolutionist does really want to cast the whole body of man into Chaos. He wants to cast it into the melting-pot, and boil it to nothing, that a new and superior something may at last emerge. This is indeed much more than amputation, it is annihilation. At least it is so for those who still see a sanctity in Man as a potentially complete creature, even if we commonly see him as incomplete. I have concluded upon this point, because it is the crux of the controversy, in what I cannot pretend to be anything but a long series of controversies. Only I understand the crux better than when I began to controvert about it, ave crux, spes unica. We do not believe that man is a mass of mistakes that have to be shed until he has lost everything but shame in the very memory of his manhood. We think they are lower forms and fallen applications of his true powers and instincts, damaged by one great mystical mistake. We do not believe that all property is wrong, though we agree that much money-getting and all money-grabbing is wrong, because we believe that the primary human sense of individual and independent possession is perfectly right. We do not admit that all punishment is wrong, though we warmly agree that all tyranny and mere vindictiveness is wrong, because these are only low and morbid forms of something that is right, whether it be just expiation or even just indignation. We do not admit that all vows of constancy are wrong, though we fully admit that they may be treated wrongly, because we think that even the tragic tradition of them is the remains of the truth concerning a complete and triumphant human love. So the same clue runs through a hundred questions down to trivial questions like the mere forms of festivity or the mere externals of civilised habit. We do not want all fermented liquor abolished because some men are too drunken, any more than we want all clothes abolished because some women are too dressy. For we believe that all that is historic in humanity has its higher forms and its lower forms , and we refuse to prohibit the higher because we happen at some particular place or time to suffer from the lower. But this other school that calls itself Progressive is always Prohibitionist. Marriage must vanish for ever; property must vanish for everybody. The Prohibitionists hoped to produce a younger generation that had never tasted anything but water; the Nudists a generation that had never known any embarrassment in nakedness. For these thinkers there is never anything between abnormality and negation, between abomination and abolition. And it is in vain that we point out that the normal is not only possible but visible, and holds the centre of the stage; that in the central civilisations of the world the abnormalities and abominations have in fact been largely avoided. They are blind to the fact, staring them in the face, that the wine-drinking countries drink very little wine: that the beer-drinking countries drink a remarkably mild beer. For in their hearts they do not believe it is a question of turning human life from abuse to use; it is a question of finding a new use for human life; or rather making it useful to a life that is not human. They are not quite such lunatics as they look, or rather their lunacy is of a larger and more hopeful sort. They do not only want to cut off a man’s legs to cure him of lameness. They really believe that with the loss of his legs he will immediately grow wings — or possibly wheels. This is the great faith which stands facing the ancient faith in the Resurrection of Man, and this sketch is but a small skirmish in the great campaign between those two creeds.
We hear very much in these days of the true essence of true Christianity, and not only, though perhaps most often, from those who are not Christians. But if we really wish to know about it, there was something which is always essential to Christianity, and for a long time was even common to all forms of Christianity. If we will condescend to cast an eye backwards upon those words which are certainly old, and which many rather antiquated sceptics suppose to be antiquated — if we will look at the actual words Redemption and Resurrection and Salvation and the Image of God, we shall see in them quite simply staring us in the face, all that I have said here. It was religion that refused to despair of Man; it is scientific progress and evolution that are already despairing of him. And it is not the Superman but very truly and actually the Son of Man, Who comes in clouds of glory to judge the world.
THE END
APPRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
LITTLE DORRIT
REPRINTED PIECES
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
DAVID COPPERFIELD
CHRISTMAS BOOKS
TALE OF TWO CITIES
BARNABY RUDGE
THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER
SKETCHES BY BOZ
PICKWICK PAPERS
NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
OLIVER TWIST
OLD CURIOSITY SHOP
BARNABY RUDGE
AMERICAN NOTES
PICTURES FROM ITALY
MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT
CHRISTMAS BOOKS
DOMBEY AND SON
DAVID COPPERFIELD
CHRISTMAS STORIES
BLEAK HOUSE
CHILD’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND
HARD TIMES
LITTLE DORRIT
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
EDWIN DROOD
MASTER HUMPHREY’S CLOCK
REPRINTED PIECES
INTRODUCTION
These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries of the classics which are one of the real improvements of recent times. Thus they were harmless, being diluted by, or rather drowned in Dickens. My scrap of theory was a mere dry biscuit to be taken with the grand tawny port of great English comedy; and by most people it was not taken at all — like the biscuit. Nevertheless the essays were not in intention so aimless as they appear in fact. I had a general notion of what needed saying about Dickens to the new generation, though probably I did not say it. I will make another attempt to do so in this prologue, and, possibly fail again.
There was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin to realise that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed vulgar — all that is itself breaking up like a cloudland. And only the caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone. This, of course, is an old story in the case of a man reproached with any excess of the poetic. Again and again when the man of visions was pinned by the sly dog who knows the world,
“The man recovered of the bite, The dog it was that died.”
To call Thackeray a cynic, which means a sly dog, was indeed absurd; but it is fair to say that in comparison with Dickens he felt himself a man of the world. Nevertheless, that world of which he was a man is coming to an end before our eyes; its aristocracy has grown corrupt, its middle class insecure, and things that he never thought of are walking about the drawing-rooms of both. Thackeray has described for ever the Anglo-Indian Colonel; but what on earth would he have done with an Australian Colonel? What can it matter whether Dickens’s clerks talked cockney now that half the duchesses talk American? What would Thackeray have made of an age in which a man in the position of Lord Kew may actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Wardour Street? Nor does this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians who prided themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions; it applies to Anthony Trollope and, as much as any one, to George Eliot. For we have not only survived that present which Thackeray described: we have even survived that future to which George Eliot looked forward. It is no longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand that old world of gentility, of parliamentary politeness and the balance of the constitution. That world is rapidly ceasing to understand itself. It is vain to repeat the complaint of the old Quarterly Reviewers, that Dickens had not enjoyed a university education. What would the old Quarterly Reviewers themselves have thought of the Rhodes Scholarships? It is useless to repeat the old tag that Dickens could not describe a gentleman. A gentleman in our time has become something quite indescribable.
Now the interesting fact is this: That Dickens, whom so many considered to be at the best a vulgar enthusiast, saw the coming change in our society much more soberly and scientifically than did his better educated and more pretentious contemporaries. I give but one example out of many. Thackeray was a good Victorian radical, who seems to have gone to his grave quite contented with the early Victorian radical theory — the theory which Macaulay preached with unparalleled luminosity and completeness; the theory that true progress goes on so steadily through human history, that while reaction is indefensible, revolution is unnecessary. Thackeray seems to have been quite content to think that the world would grow more and more liberal in the limited sense; that Free Trade would get freer; that ballot boxes would grow more and more secret; that at last (as some satirist of Liberalism puts it) every man would have two votes instead of one. There is no trace in Thackeray of the slightest consciousness that progress could ever change its direction. There is in Dickens. The whole of Hard Times is the expression of just such a realisation. It is not true to say that Dickens was a Socialist, but it is not absurd to say so. And it would be simply absurd to say it of any of the great Individualist novelists of the Victorian time. Dickens saw far enough ahead to know that the time was coming when the people would be imploring the State to save them from mere freedom, as from some frightful foreign oppressor. He felt the society changing; and Thackeray never did.
As talking about Socialism and Individualism is one of the greatest bores ever endured among men, I will take another instance to illustrate my meaning, even though the instance be a queer and even a delicate one. Even if the reader does not agree with my deduction, I ask his attention to the fact itself, which I think a curiosity of literature. In the last important work of Dickens, that excellent book Our Mutual Friend, there is an odd thing about which I cannot make up my mind; I do not know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony. But it is this. In Our Mutual Friend is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian usurer. In an artistic sense I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a humbug as the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense there is no doubt at all that Dickens introduced the Jew with a philanthropic idea of doing justice to Judaism, which he was told he had affronted by the great gargoyle of Fagin. If this was his motive, it was morally a most worthy one. But it is certainly unfortunate for the Hebrew cause that the bad Jew should be so very much more convincing than the good one. Old Aaron is not an exaggeration of Jewish virtues; he is simply not Jewish, because he is not human. There is nothing about him that in any way suggests the nobler sort of Jew, such a man as Spinoza or Mr. Zangwill. He is simply a public apology, and like most public apologies, he is very stiff and not very convincing.
