Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 898
COME TO THINK OF IT
CONTENTS
Introduction
I. On Essays
II. On What We Would Do with Two Million (If We Had It)
III. On Boys
IV. On Literary Parallels
V. On a Censorship for Literature
VI. On Detective Story Writers
VIII. On the Classics
IX. On Psycho-analysis
X. On Egoists and Egoists
XI On Mr. Epstein
XII On ‘Who Killed John Keats?’
XIII. On Ingeland
XIV. On Loneliness
XV. On the Importance of Why We Do (or Don’t)
XVI. On the Open Conspiracy
XVII. On the Closed Conspiracy
XVIII. On Current Claptrap
XIX. On Evil Euphemisms
XX. On Encyclopaedias
XXI. On Preaching
XXII. On the Timid Thinkers
XXIII. On the Mythology of Scientists
XXIV. On Change
XXV. On Twilight Sleep
XXVII. On a Humiliating Heresy
XXVIII. On Original Sin
XXIX. On the New Religion Coming
XXX. On the Great God Namse
XXXI. On the Innocence of Macaulay
XXXII. On Jane Austen in the General Election
XXXIII. On Dictatorships
XXXIV. On Abolishing Sunday
XXXV. On Prohibition
XXXVI. On America
XXXVII. On Bigness and America
XXXVIII. On the American Revolt against Americanism
XXXIX. On Abraham Lincoln
XL. On Myself on Abraham Lincoln
XLI. On Foch
XLII. On Dickens and After
XLIII. On The King
Introduction
MOST of the essays printed here are republished by the kind permission of the Illustrated London News; and Mr. J. P. de Fonseka, who was kind enough to select and arrange them for me, reminds me of the coincidence that I began writing the ‘Note-Book’ in that paper exactly twenty-five years ago. I may thus be said to celebrate a sort of Silver Wedding of my association with that long- suffering periodical. A silver wedding is supposed to be commemorated by gifts of silver; but I fear these gifts are of no such precious quality, nor indeed are all gifts in that metal notably of good omen. The silver bullet that killed Dundee, according to the tradition that he was a wizard dealing with the devil, cannot be regarded as a festive form of wedding present; nor would the international agent or financier, widening his moral outlook beyond narrow national limitations, be gratified with the symbolic gift of thirty pieces of silver. To go about among the new nobility, thrusting silver spoons into their mouths, that they might hastily assume the air of having been born with them, might seem to have a hint of satire; and even to tell a modern author that he is an ornament of the Silver Age of Letters might leave him a little cold, if he imagined that he constituted a Golden Age in himself. And it is the more awkward, because these notes necessarily deal with these very subjects; I have taken a pot-shot at the Spiritualist, though not with a silver bullet, and had a dig at the plutocrat, though not with a silver spoon. I have ventured to criticize internationalism and the cosmopolitan financier, and even to write a little about writers, and men who are more worth writing about. Unfortunately my bullet is a very leaden bullet, and my wedding present to the paper or the reader is not thirty pieces of silver, but only these fifty pieces of lead.
Viewed in one aspect, however, the long association is certainly an occasion for congratulation as well as gratitude. If I have no pretence to the eloquence that was symbolized by a tongue of silver, it proves at least that the proof-readers and other readers of the Illustrated London News are equipped with nerves of steel. That the editor and the clientele of that paper have borne up under my writing for them every week, for twenty-five years, proves that the power of endurance and the unshaken patience of our race are less affected than some suppose by a new and nervous irritability. Who can say that our people have lost the resignation, the grim good humour, the stoical stubbornness that stiffened the squares at Waterloo, or preserved the unwearied discipline of Arctic and African exploration, when the sons of the bulldog breed are still capable of reading my opinions and remarks on literature steadily for a quarter of a century? I cannot be wrong in paying a tribute to the iron indifference with which they have stood up to so many of the leaden bullets; and indeed the military metaphor is, for a particular reason, not altogether inappropriate to the last stage of the story, even in its images of lead and iron. I am conscious that my articles have grown in a sense more militant and in a sense more simple; so simple that they may well appear self-evident to some of the more subtle. This is because there has indeed been a battle joined, between two long battle-lines, in which I am only a private soldier, and in which the orders or reports have to be delivered in a popular tongue. I am no longer an individual in an age of intellectual individualism — an individual whose perverse personal fancy insisted that grass is green or that God is different from the devil. Several books, with the brilliant help of Mr. E. V. Lucas, have been made of such fancies of mine. But now the public has divided itself much more clearly on these issues, turning them into general issues, and requiring a person in my position to take up a general defence. Journalism of the higher sort, in the days of my youth, was concerned, if anything, with Art; Journalism in these days is concerned, above everything, with Religion. I cheerfully admit that in one sense, in both cases, journalism is only concerned with journalism. But journalists in later days have discovered that the public is, or can be, tremendously interested in fundamental questions of faith and morals; almost as much interested as in horse-racing and murders. The old journalism lived in an atmosphere of art for art’s sake; analogous to the ordinary journalistic instinct for news for news’ sake. Just as the newspaper reporter could record that Hampstead Hairdresser Shoots Great-Aunt, without implying any ethical approval of the act (even if he never knew the aunt, as the story goes), just as he could announce Russian Trombone Player Jumps from Eiffel Tower, and reverently rejoice as a reporter, even though he duly wept as a Christian and a man — so also he could report, without reference to his own opinions on the matter, the striking fact of an author who did not believe in God, or the yet more startling fact of an author who did. It was enough that the public found such authors amusing, apart from whether it found them convincing; and this attitude was originally adopted alike towards Oscar Wilde and towards Bernard Shaw. But there began to be serious trouble, and a considerable cooling of approval, when it was gradually discovered that Mr. Bernard Shaw does really believe in Socialism or that I do really believe in Christianity.
Thus in the more open and general public dispute we have both of us had to fall back on a some what different style, more simple and serious, and possibly more didactic and heavy. Mr. Shaw writes in educational form his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism; having apparently despaired in his search for an Intelligent Man. And I have been driven desperately to something almost resembling a rational arrangement of ideas in the little book called The Outline of Sanity; though not (the reader will be relieved to hear) in the little book that now lies before him. Here everything is haphazard; but it is in a sense the hazard of war, since so many of these ragged fragments are fragments of larger controversies. Here everything is scrappy; but they are the scraps of a scrap. And the reason is, as I have said, that here and on higher planes, and for myself and more important people, the battle is joined; and it is not a fine preliminary flourish, but a fight to a finish. It was enough for our youth to show that our ideas were suggestive it is the task of our senility and second childhood to show that they are conclusive. But this is no more than a note of apology in the matter; and in such a place, and on so slight an occasion, the most conclusive thing I can do is to conclude.
G. K. CHESTERTON
I. On Essays
THERE are dark and morbid moods in which I am tempted to feel that Evil re-entered the world in the form of Essays. The Essay is like the Serpent, smooth and graceful and easy of movement, also wavering or wandering. Besides, I suppose that the very word Essay had the original meaning of ‘trying it on’. The serpent was in every sense of the word tentative. The tempter is always feeling his way, and finding out how much other people will stand. That misleading air of irresponsibility about the Essay is very disarming through appearing to be disarmed. But the serpent can strike without claws, as it can run without legs. It is the emblem of all those arts which are elusive, evasive, impressionistic, and shading away from tint to tint. I suppose that the Essay, so far as England at least is concerned, was almost invented by Francis Bacon. I can well believe it. I always thought he was the villain of English history.
It may be well to explain that I do not really regard all Essayists as wicked men. I have myself been an essayist; or tried to be an essayist; or pretended to be an essayist. Nor do I in the least dislike essays. I take perhaps my greatest literary pleasure in reading them; after such really serious necessities of the intellect as detective stories and tracts written by madmen. There is no better reading in the world than some contemporary essays, like those of Mr. E. V. Lucas or Mr. Robert Lynd. And though, unlike Mr. Lucas and Mr. Lynd, I am quite incapable of writing a really good essay, the motive of my dark suggestion is not a diabolic jealousy or envy. It is merely a natural taste for exaggeration, when dealing with a point too subtle to permit of exactitude. If I may myself imitate the timid and tentative tone of the true essayist, I will confine myself to saying that there is something in what I say. There is really an element in modern letters which is at once indefinite and dangerous.
What I mean is this. The distinction between certain old forms and certain relatively recent forms of literature is that the old were limited by a logical purpose. The Drama and the Sonnet were of the old kind; the Essay and the Novel are of the new. If a sonnet breaks out of the sonnet form, it ceases to be a sonnet. It may become a wild and inspiring specimen of free verse; but you do not have to call it a sonnet because you have nothing else to call it. But in the case of the new sort of novel, you do very often have to call it a novel because you have nothing else to call it. It is sometimes called a novel when it is hardly even a narrative. There is nothing to test or define it, except that it is not spaced like an epic poem, and often has even less of a story. The same applies to the apparently attractive leisure and liberty of the essay. By its very nature it does not exactly explain what it is trying to do, and thus escapes a decisive judgment about whether it has really done it. But in the case of the essay there is a practical peril; precisely because it deals so often with theoretical matters. It is always dealing with theoretical matters without the responsibility of being theoretical, or of propounding a theory.
For instance, there is any amount of sense and nonsense talked both for and against what is called medievalism. There is also any amount of sense and nonsense talked for and against what is called modernism. I have occasionally tried to talk a little of the sense, with the result that I have been generally credited with all the nonsense. But if a man wanted one real and rational test, which really does distinguish the medieval from the modern mood, it might be stated thus. The medieval man thought in terms of the Thesis, where the modern man thinks in terms of the Essay. It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that the modern man only essays to think — or, in other words, makes a desperate attempt to think. But it would be true to say that the modern man often only essays, or attempts, to come to a conclusion. Whereas the medieval man hardly thought it worth while to think at all, unless he could come to a conclusion. That is why he took a definite thing called a Thesis, and proposed to prove it. That is why Martin Luther, a very medieval man in most ways, nailed up on the door the theses he proposed to prove. Many people suppose that he was doing something revolutionary, and even modernist, in doing this. In fact, he was doing exactly what all the other medieval students and doctors had done ever since the twilight of the Dark Ages. If the really modern Modernist attempted to do it, he would probably find that he had never arranged his thoughts in the forms of theses at all. Well, it is quite an error to suppose, so far as I am concerned, that it is any question of restoring the rigid apparatus of the medieval system. But I do think that the Essay has wandered too far away from the Thesis.
There is a sort of irrational and indefensible quality in many of the most brilliant phrases of the most beautiful essays. There is no essayist I enjoy more than Stevenson; there is probably no man now alive who admires Stevenson more than I. But if we take some favourite and frequently quoted sentence, such as, ‘To travel hopefully is better than to arrive,’ we shall see that it gives a loophole for every sort of sophistry and unreason. If it could be stated as a thesis, it could not be defended as a thought. A man would not travel hopefully at all, if he thought that the goal would be disappointing as compared with the travels. It is tenable that travel is the more enjoyable; but in that case it cannot be called hopeful. For the traveller is here presumed to hope for the end of travel, not merely for its continuance.
Now, of course, I do not mean that pleasant paradoxes of this sort have not a place in literature; and because of them the essay has a place in literature. There is room for the merely idle and wandering essayist, as for the merely idle and wandering traveller. The trouble is that the essayists have become the only ethical philosophers. The wandering thinkers have become the wandering preachers, and our only substitute for preaching friars. And whether our system is to be materialist or moralist, or sceptical or transcendental, we need more of a system than that. After a certain amount of wandering the mind wants either to get there or to go home. It is one thing to travel hopefully, and say half in jest that it is better than to arrive. It is another thing to travel hopelessly, because you know you will never arrive.
I was struck by the same tendency in re-reading some of the best essays ever written, which were especially enjoyed by Stevenson — the essays of Hazlitt. ‘You can live like a gentleman on Hazlitt’s ideas,’ as Mr. Augustine Birrell truly remarked; but even in these we see the beginning of this inconsistent and irresponsible temper. For instance, Hazlitt was a Radical and constantly railed at Tories for not trusting men or mobs. I think it was he who lectured Walter Scott for so small a matter as making the medieval mob in Ivanhoe jeer ungenerously at the retreat of the Templars. Anyhow, from any number of passages, one would infer that Hazlitt offered himself as a friend of the people. But he offered himself most furiously as an enemy of the Public. When he began to write about the Public he described exactly the same many-headed monster of ignorance and cowardice and cruelty which the worst Tories called the Mob. Now, if Hazlitt had been obliged to set forth his thoughts on Democracy in the theses of a medieval schoolman, he would have had to think much more clearly and make up his mind much more decisively. I will leave the last word with the essayist; and admit that I am not sure whether he would have written such good essays.
