Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 899
II. On What We Would Do with Two Million (If We Had It)
MOST of us, I suppose, have played the parlour game of wondering what we should do with our money, on the fantastic supposition that we ever had any. On the surface, some of the answers to the question are simple enough. Philanthropists would give it to the deserving poor; Christians would give it to the undeserving poor. For the first thought of the Christians, if they really were Christians, would be that they themselves were examples of the undeserving rich. Pagans, if they really were pagans, would presumably enjoy it and have a jolly time; though in fact this is hardly ever done. It is obvious that the answer to the question is not really so simple as that. Something happens to people when they become rich; and what happens generally is that they worry on a large scale instead of worrying on a small one. They haggle with a hundred people, instead of haggling with two or three people. Then there are all sorts of other curious effects of illusion — and distortion. If you and I were suddenly left a legacy of two million a year from nowhere in particular, it is by no means certain what we should do first. It appears, by analogy, that we should begin by saying that we had gained every penny of our money by industry, sobriety, business methods, and abstention from alcohol. It appears that we should then go on to purchase something obviously worthless and idiotic, such as a peerage, or a priceless trinket or curiosity, in which we took no intelligent interest whatever. That is, at least, the way in which most millionaires do actually go on. We cannot imagine why they should waste their money in this way; but then you and I are still poor, virtuous, and intelligent. But, whatever be the solution of this riddle, it is worth while to note that there are ways of getting rid of wealth that have never been tried and might possibly be useful. One of them might be described (since it is now necessary to make any such suggestion in capital letters and call it a Slogan) as Pensioning Off the Pests.
Returning for a moment to the dreadful subject of the deserving poor, it might be thought obvious that the millionaire ought to give his money, or more probably leave his money, to particular people whom he knows to be making a good fight for their family and their honour. As a matter of fact, of course, the millionaire never does do even this. The millionaire leaves his money to other millionaires. God alone knows why. But the natural course would be to leave it to poorer people who would make a good use of it. But this view, though natural, is superficial. People of that kind would generally be happy enough, if their lives were not poisoned by people of another kind. My ideal millionaire, who would of course have hundreds of highly-paid spies investigating the domestic life of his neighbours, would soon discover an almost universal social truth. In almost every family or circle of friends there is somebody so selfish or so silly or so exacting as to devour the days and destroy the vitality of better people. It is generally a case of egoism; often a case of hysteria. But it is generally a rather subtle case; and the bonds that bind the egoist to the altruists are delicate and difficult to break. It is often an economic question; the problem of perpetually discussing the affairs and patching up the monetary difficulties of impossible people.
Now a really delicate and imaginative philanthropist would thread his way through life, selecting and settling such cases with munificent endowments which would satisfy even such persons. He would provide the Pest with a magnificent mansion, with a beautiful estate, situated at a considerable distance from the family. To Aunt Susan he would toss a luxuriant island in the Canaries. For Cousin James he would provide a romantic castle on a sublime but almost inaccessible slope of the Apennines. To the lady whom the world has always misunderstood, in spite of her prolonged explanations, he would give a huge sum of money on condition of her remaining in a charming villa in the neighbourhood of Cape Horn. To the gentleman with a series of financial projects, which he offers to his special friends as special favours, he would give a real gold-mine and have done with it, on the understanding that the gentleman should really devote himself to mining. A few of these fortunate disappearances, a few of these happy gaps in the family circle, would probably enable scores of sensible and kind-hearted people to enjoy their own lives and get on with their own jobs. For there are not many of these maniacs. What is astonishing is the power and range of their raging selfishness. Two or three really intelligent millionaires between them could dispose of the lot. Only there are not two or three intelligent millionaires. If they were intelligent, they would have something better to do than to become millionaires.
Among the minor advantages I would claim for my modest scheme is the fact that it would be a humane alternative to Murder; which seems otherwise likely to be on the increase. It always amuses me to read the modern attacks upon Marriage, and observe how exactly the same arguments could be used, and probably soon will be used, as apologies for Murder. If it is true that we may sometimes solve a social problem by breaking a vow, it is equally true that we might often solve it by cutting a throat. If the immediate relaxation of an individual strain justifies everything, then Aunt Susan is indeed in danger, and the life of Cousin James trembles in the balance. For it is not true that the claims of these people on other people are necessarily compulsory or legal or even economic. They are often psychological bonds that could really be only loosened by death. They arise quite as much from the unselfishness of the one party as from the selfishness of the other. They would be solved if a third party, a benevolent and altruistic assassin, stepped in and swiftly, let us hope painlessly, eliminated the difficulty.
Now we already hear on all sides the first whispers of an apology for taking life. In America, where things are seldom said in a whisper, the apology is not even apologetic. English people are naturally more good-natured; and it is highly characteristic of them that they propose to murder only out of good nature. The cases in which it is already defended here are cases of putting people out of their pain or ending incurable maladies. I think the doctrine very dangerous myself, but I am not discussing that particular doctrine here. Anybody must surely admit that it is naked murder if done upon the opinion of the murderer; and I am very doubtful about it, even from a humanitarian standpoint, if done with the consent of the murdered. Many a person sea-sick in the Channel has verified the famous description: that he is first afraid he will die and then afraid he won’t. A lady I knew, when asked by the steward if he could do anything for her, replied, ‘Nothing, except throw me overboard.’ But she lived afterwards to a happy and serene old age; and 1 think she was glad he had not carried out her instructions, or acted on the principles of the new scientific morality.
In short, if we are to have all this new moral pathology, it must be met with a new philanthropy, or it will be met with an unpleasantly new philosophy: a new moral philosophy, or, rather, immoral philosophy. If we are to insist, as do all the realistic novelists and rationalistic moralists, on a wild and exaggerated casuistry of hard cases, we must be prepared for men sooner or later settling those hard cases, as they have so often done in history, with poison and with poignards. For under the smooth legal surface of our society there are already moving very lawless things. We are always near the breaking- point when we care only for what is legal and nothing for what is lawful. Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft. I do not insist on my suggestion of a benevolent millionaire paying off those people who seem naturally designed to be murdered. But I do insist that they will be murdered, sooner or later, if we accept in every department the principle of the easiest way out.
III. On Boys
ONE of the old sayings repeated eternally by everybody, and rather especially by those who pride themselves on novelty and originality, is the statement that old people tend to be conservative, and that it is only the young who can really believe in change. And yet this saying seems to me to be rather less than a half-truth; so much less as to be very nearly two-thirds of a lie.
My own experience is this: that I was really much more conservative when I was a boy; though I admit that I was too conservative to be even conscious of how conservative I was. I mean that I was conservative in this sense — that I did not really believe that the fashion of this world could pass away. I had certain ideals of reforming it; and to a great extent I have the same ideals still. In so far as they have changed, it is not in the direction of being any more content with the corruption and oppression of the world. I was once what I called a Socialist; I am now what I call a Distributist. But the ideal of simplicity and small property is rather more unlike the existing condition than the ideal of Communism. It would change the world more, to turn it into what I want, than to turn it into what Mr. Philip Snowden wants. There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses. They are much nearer to each other than either is to my own ideal; of breaking up the big businesses into a multitude of small businesses. That would be really a change; but I am still ready for that change; and I see no reason to doubt that, when I am tottering on crutches at the age of ninety, I shall still be ready for that change. What I was not ready for, in my youth, was something quite real and entirely different. I did not know that the world itself changes, long before we can change it.
Take a commonplace example for convenience. I sympathized then and I sympathize still with various claims of Labour which arose especially in connexion with the Coal Mines and with the Railways. I do not think I have weakened in this; if anything, I think I was more doubtful and groping when I was young. But there was one thing that I never really doubted when I was young. And that was that Coal would continue to support England and enrich the capitalists of England. I thought of this unique wealth as one of the conditions of the case, which might be attacked in various ways, moderate, greedy, revolutionary, and so on. But I vaguely assumed that the coal would be there, as I assumed that the sea would be there. Yet these things also can change; and even the sea is not quite so significantly and satisfactorily there, since the alteration of the relations of ships and aeroplanes. I was accustomed to the two sides of the old argument about whether coal-owners were too rich; I never really looked forward to the new argument that coal-owners are too poor. I was accustomed to the talk of heaping up riches or dividing riches or justly distributing riches; but I had forgotten the old scriptural figure, that the riches themselves take to themselves wings and fly. In a word, I could not imagine change — the real fundamental changes of this earthly life — because I was too conservative, being a boy.
In the same way I knew all about the grumbling of railway-passengers against railway-porters, and in the same way about the grumbling of railway-porters against railway-directors. I sympathized more with the latter than with the former; and I do still. But when I was a boy, which was just before the motor car burst upon the world, I never dreamed of doubting that the railway-train dominated the whole future of the world. It was the latest great locomotive that man had invented. And that conservative spirit of childhood always makes the child think of the latest as the last. To talk, as some people are now talking, of whether railways will become obsolete, or whether steam can be superseded, of whether railway stock will always be as safe as it was — all this would have been to me a prophecy as unintelligible as some of those Old Testament visions that seem a medley of wheels and wings and clouds. Railways had been firmly established before I was born; I never dreamed of doubting that they would remain exactly the same after I died. They seemed to me simply the iron framework of England, and almost of existence; as if the embankments were built before the everlasting hills or the trains of Bradshaw followed their appointed circuit like the stars. If there is any old gentleman still alive who remembers the time when there were no railways, he probably feels quite differently; he feels as I feel about motoring. I do not feel in this cosmic and conservative way about motoring; but I think it probable that the young who are younger than motoring really do. If you talk to them of a future without motoring, of a coming time when petrol will be scarcer than coal and men will walk about on their feet for want of wheels to carry them, it will seem like an unthinkable nightmare of negation. It will seem what the amputation of all legs would seem to a population of pedestrians. But they also will learn in due course what they cannot conceive now, just as I have learnt in due course what I could not have conceived then that it is the world that alters even more than we who alter it.
Of course it is a comparatively slow alteration which to some muddle-headed evolutionists seems to make it more consoling, but in fact makes it much more dangerous. It may or may not be true that petrol will replace coal or cars replace railways. But nobody supposes that Waterloo Station fell in a heap of ruins when the first taxicab went across Waterloo Bridge, or that bats and owls nested in Clapham Junction when the first petrol pump was set up on the road to Clapham Common. The point is not whether the changes are as rapid and revolutionary as the young are supposed generally to expect. The point is that they are not the changes they were expecting. Above all, the point is that they are changes in the very material they propose to treat; not changes in the manner of treating it. It is not a question of a younger generation wishing to carve the Phrygian cap or the Tree of Liberty on a stone that has been marked out for decoration with the Crown or the Cross. It is a question of the stone crumbling away before it can be carved with any thing, because they have forgotten the air they breathe, and the sky and the weather of the world.
We are always being told nowadays to allow for the natural impulses and instincts of youth. Let us be careful to allow for this most profound instinct of youth: its innocent conservatism. Let us always remember that to the very young the world they see really seems to be eternal; and that, however much they may talk a current cant about novelty and mutability, they do not really expect the externals of their world to be profoundly altered by time. Notice, for instance, what is the very phrase used in defence of any novelty. Observe what is really said in praise of the Electric Toothpick or the Petrol Pea-shooter. We are always assured that the discovery ‘has come to stay’. We, who have lived long enough to understand the real value of life, know perfectly well that nothing of that sort has ever come to stay. It may do all sorts of other things; but there is one thing that it cannot do; and that is to stay. We shall show no irritation, please God, on being repeatedly introduced to the Hat of the Future and the Umbrella of the New Age and the Goloshes of the Good Time Coming. But the only thing we really have learnt from life is that the good time will be going as well as coming, and that, in the book of fashions, the Hat of the Future will be recorded as the Hat of the Past. It is now the custom to condemn youth as too frivolous. But youth is always too serious; and just now it is too serious about frivolity. The conservatism of youth is a good thing; and it is not even necessary to conserve it.
IV. On Literary Parallels
I HAVE a deep and hearty hatred of literary parallels; especially when they have a suggestion of literary plagiarisms. I object to the parallels on many grounds; but, among others, on the ground that they are never parallel. Or, if we may (with all respectful allowance for Mr. Einstein) put the matter as a mathematical paradox, we might say that the two lines of thought are indeed parallel because they never manage to meet. In almost all the cases I come across, the resemblance between one passage and another, suggested by the ingenious critic, is really not a resemblance at all, let alone an artificial or unusual or suspicious resemblance. There is no reason why two independent poets should not think of the same image or idea quite independently. Only when the critic produces it, it is not the same idea at all. The critic insists that one poet is ‘indebted’ to the other; and nobody need deny that, in a loose and general sense, it is natural for any poet to be in debt. But his general obligation to the culture of the past is not like his particular obligation to the landlady, or possibly to the publican. It is as likely as not that his idea was original even if it is really identical; and it is even more likely, when it is examined, that it will not be identical but quite individual. Everybody mentions Villon to prove the platitude that a poet can be a thief; but I protest when they prove his literary thieving by quoting ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ and then giving a list of all the poets who had previously mentioned snow.
To prove that even a good poet, as well as a good critic, can admit (or at least tolerate) this error, I will venture to remonstrate with Mr. Edmund Blunden, who can write good poetry as well as read it, upon a reading of his of the case of Keats and Horace. Mr. Blunden does not, indeed, fully endorse the alleged parallel; but he does not definitely dispute it; so that I, as very much minor poet, am goaded into doing it for him. For, indeed, the example strikes me as very illuminating, touching the hasty and misleading character of these assimilations. The suggestion is that in at least two phrases of the Ode to a Nightingale Keats echoes the Odes of Horace; which would be no very great crime; but is in fact, as it seems to me, a crime that was never committed. There is something about the mood of the critics who find comparisons, something eager and hasty and superficially satisfied, which prevents them, when considering two sayings of two poets, from really considering what the poets say. In this case the critic observes, ‘ “Hungry generations” appears to be a powerful and majestic translation of his (Horace’s) tempus edax, “devouring time “.’ Now it does not seem to me to be anything of the kind. Even if Keats had happened to use the expression ‘devouring time’, I should not have thought it necessary to suppose that he had ever even heard of the phrase tempus edax. It seems to me that any body, at any time, a poet as good as Mr. Blunden or a poet as minor as myself, might use the phrase ‘devouring time’. We might talk about devouring time as we might talk about barking dogs; because dogs do bark and time does devour. But, over and above this preliminary objection to parallels, there is a very particular objection to this parallel; that it is not, as I have said, a parallel at all. Keats did not mean that the hungry generations were hungry as time is hungry; that they ate towers and temples and ground crowns and sceptres in their teeth till they were crushed to dust. He meant the hunger as a human attribute; the hunger which, whether mystical or material, is in a sense the chief attribute of humanity. The point was that so many generations had rushed and trampled past, all eager for their own passing needs, and left the nightingale still singing as it had sung in the beginning. I do not see any real parallel between this and the idea of the dead destructiveness of time. And I would bet my boots, or my books, or whatever may be the more appropriate wager, that Keats never thought of any such parallel at all; and certainly had no need to look up an old Latin poet for the idea.
