Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 902
VIII. On the Classics
IN a moment of fine frenzy a young man has stood up and declared that ‘the study of Latin and Greek is not of much use in the battle of life’, and gone on to demand that the young should be instructed chiefly in the science of Health — that is, in the facts and the functions of the body. The young man in question will be gratified to know that I, for one, consistently neglected to do any work at the school in which I was supposed to be learning Latin and Greek, though I am not sure that the mere fact of idleness and ignorance can be said to have armed and drilled me for the battle of life. But, when I consider such armour or armament, some faint memories come to me from the learning that I neglected. There flits across my mind the phrase aes triplex, and I remember how Stevenson used it for a title to his essay defending a cheerful contempt for medical fussing; and how he cited the example of Dr. Johnson, who dreaded death and yet disdained any vigilance against disease; and whose ‘heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before the prospect of twenty-seven individual cups of tea’. It is, doubtless, terrible to think that Stevenson took his Stoical image of triple brass from a Latin poet; and still more terrible to think that Johnson would have approved of Stevenson for quoting the Latin poets. But though Stevenson and Johnson were superficially about as different as any two men could be in everything except in this weak ness for traditional scholarship, I do not think that either of them can be said to have come off so badly in fighting the battle of life.
The trouble about always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do it with out destroying the health of the mind. Health is the most unhealthy of topics. Those who support such hygienic culture always profess to be very practical, and compare their own healthy materialism with the visionary futilities of everybody connected with the classics from Julius Caesar to Johnson. But, in fact, it is in practice that their practical ideal breaks down. There is no difficulty about talking and writing in general terms of the facts of nature, or what are commonly called the God-given functions of man. It is when people really begin to teach these things, as if they were algebra or geography, that they discover a surprising number of difficulties — not to say diseases. Upon this point of practical application I will only mention one example out of the statement referred to above. The young man in question frankly admits that he would dislike having to read a list of hideous malformations or foul diseases to an infant school or a row of staring babies. He says that this might, doubtless, be inadvisable, and lead to morbid fears and fancies. Anyhow, he disapproves of such physiology in the nursery; every man has a sane spot somewhere. But he goes on to say that big boys, presumably towards the end of their school career, should have learnt to balance and appreciate such knowledge; and it is such knowledge which they ought above all things to know.
Now it seems to me that the argument is very much the other way. The period when many boys, we might almost say most boys, are capable of morbidly misusing a medical knowledge is exactly the period at which he proposes to give it to them. I imagine it would do, in comparison, precious little harm to a child of five. If you talk to a child about an aortic aneurism, he will not be frightened; he will only be bored. If you talk to a boy of fifteen or sixteen about it, and give only a few fragmentary hints of what it is like, he will very probably come to the rapid conclusion that he has got one. All that is necessary is to have odd sensations round the heart: and digestion, or indigestion, will do that at any time of life, but rather specially at the time when digestion is tried by unripe apples or cob-nuts before lunch. Youth is a period when the wildest external careless ness often runs parallel to the most gloomy and concentrated internal cares. An enormous number of normal youths are quite abnormal for a time. Their imagination is working inwards, and on nothing more commonly than on imaginary maladies. To throw a medical encyclopaedia at the head of a young man in this condition is simply to provide him with a handbook of One Thousand Ways of Going Mad. A doctor once told me that even among medical students there is a perceptible proportion of this medical mania; and they have all the correcting elements of a special vocation, of a scientific atmosphere, and of more complete and therefore more balanced knowledge. Ordinary people receiving an ordinary smattering of such knowledge are very likely indeed to find that little knowledge a dangerous thing.
But the essential truth is that those who talk to us about facts have not faced the chief fact of all and, indeed, the fact is also a paradox. Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit. Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit. Consider the huge accumulations of detail piled up by men who have some crazy hobby of believing that Herodotus wrote Homer or that the Great Pyramid was a prophecy of the Great War. Consider the concrete circumstances and connected narratives that can often be given at vast lengths and in laborious detail by men who suffer from a delusion of being persecuted, or being disinherited, or being the rightful King of England. These men are maddened by material facts; they are lunatics not by their fancies but by having learned too many facts. What they lack is proportion: a thing as invisible as beauty, as inscrutable as God. And when we thus realize the real problem of morbidity and medicine we may begin to catch a far-off glimpse of something distant, but not quite so dispensable as we had supposed; and find ourselves once more faintly conscious of the presence of the case for Classical Education, so useless in the battle of life.
What culture does, or ought to do, is to give a health of the mind that is parallel to the health of the body. It is ultimately a matter of intellectual instincts that are almost like bodily instincts. A sane man knows when something would drive him mad, just as a man standing up knows at what angle he would fall down. He does not have to calculate the angle with a mathematical instrument, or fall flat on his nose forty times in a series of scientific experiments. The body, like the mind, knows its own equilibrium. But it knows it better than the mind; because the problem is simpler, and the physical instincts are less paralysed by false teaching. Now the true teaching, which strengthens and steadies the mind so that it knows and rejects madness at sight, has, in fact, come down to us very largely from the culture of those great languages in which were written the works of the last Stoics and the first Saints, the Greek Testament and the Roman Law.
To be of the company of such men, to have the mind filled with such words, to remember the tone of their orators or the gesture of their statues, is to feel a steadying power upon the spirit and a love of large spaces and large ideas, rather than of little lunacies and secrecies. It is something that understands at once modesty and dignity; something that is never servility and never pride. It is the power in the mind that can keep order among the virtues, often almost as dangerous as the vices. No catalogue of facts will give it; yet we can hear it instantly in the sound of some random Roman verse. That is why the great men I have named, so different in their natures, felt that the classics did count somehow in the battle of life. When Johnson says, ‘The shepherd in Virgil became acquainted with love, and found him a native of the rocks,’ we know that his rage against Chesterfield will never go beyond a grand restraint; when Stevenson says, ‘We have heard perhaps too much of lesser matters. Here is the door, here is the open air. Itur in antiquam silvam,’ we know that for such a mind lunacies will always be lesser matters and sanity be like the open air.
IX. On Psycho-analysis
I DO not know anything about Dr. Freud, except that it is the fashion to call him the father of psycho-analysis. I do not know anything about psycho-analysis, except that it demands a great deal more than the Confessional was always abused for demanding. It is most probable that psycho analysis can do good; it is pretty certain that psycho-analysts can do harm. But all this has nothing to do with the wonderful portrait of Dr. Sigismund Freud exhibited by a devout follower in his admiring study of the prophet.
The devout follower writes: ‘The great desk is a veritable Olympus of pagan gods, statuettes from the Nile cast in green metal while the gods were still living among men, bronzes from Asia, masks and totems from the Kamerun.’
If he were a common fellow like you or I, he would be content that his totems should come from the Cameroons. But wonderful scientific progress can be made by substituting a K for a C, in reproducing a language that has neither one nor the other. These are Scholarship, and there are two more of them. Anyhow, the great man sits at his great desk; you will observe that even the desk has to be great. Any how, he sits there, for reasons best known to himself, surrounded by images of all the gods in whom he does not believe; though I rather fancy that one image is missing.
The portrait then continues: ‘The handsome little figures illustrate the master’s work in primitive religions and myths. He sits among them, lonely and aloof as they. This man among his gods has become one of them . . . a symbol.’
Passing over the dry and dusty old questions that an antiquated rationalist might advance, as to how they can be his gods if he only studies them as myths, or why they should be so lonely when they are all together, we may agree that the appeal to symbolism is somewhat deeper. The writer then startles us with a very serious question, which has just occurred to him.
‘Is Freud a forecast of the man of the future? Is he one of the race of Martians who will inherit the earth? He has purged his creed of all ideals and theories of life, be they social or religious. He is the scientist, filling his niche in life and demanding a similar perfection and limitation of function from all others. He is the mind-made Czar, stiff and arbitrary and categoric . . . victor and victim . . . the Robot of the intelligence.’
It might be suggested that, if he is a scientist, he will hardly join so confidently in the positive prediction that a race of Martians will inherit the earth. It might also be suggested that, if he is a Robot, it seems less simple and self-evident that he is a mind-made Czar; since a Robot is not a master but a servant, and is not in that sense mind-made, but machine made. But when the vision of this curiously complicated or confused animal is accompanied with the plain, practical, downright question : ‘Is Freud a forecast of the man of the future?’ I can only answer feebly: ‘I trust not. I imagine not.’
Now why do people write all this sort of nonsense in newspapers? The people who write it are almost certainly not so silly as they sound. If you meet them in Fleet Street and stand them a drink, they are quite sensible. What is the connecting thread of association, or intellectual instinct, that makes them feel that this is the sort of thing that represents the mood of the day, and must be written in the daily Press?
There are many ways of putting the rather difficult answer to that rather delicate question. One way of putting it is to say that a religious war is raging under the surface; which would be much better if it were raging on the surface. The journalist feels in a vague way that the mere name of Freud is, as he says, a symbol; that it stands for the materialistic side in that quarrel; and therefore any one sympathizing with that side will rejoice in this curious appeal to the mysticism of materialism. Therefore he talks about a man purging himself of ideals; though any man talking like that must certain1y be purging himself of a sense of humour. Therefore he entertains the weird idea that it is a compliment to a man to call him a Robot.
Thus, again, he is drugged and mesmerized into using throughout the article such sentences as this: ‘Freud’s negation of Free Will is as thorough as that of some old tragic Greek poet.’ Well, to begin with, there may be two words even about the Greek poet. I do not profess to know much about the historic problems of Hellenism. I do not even know very much about the Greek tragedies. But the psycho- analysts know nothing at all about the Greek tragedies. I gather this from the astounding fact that they talk about the Oedipus Complex, obviously without knowing who Oedipus was. Nobody familiar with the Greek play would ever have used that Greek parallel. It was the whole point of Oedipus that he did not have the Oedipus Complex. It was the whole point of him that he only knew certain things too late which our bright and breezy psycho-analysts would introduce us to much too early. Next, in so far as the old tragedy was a struggle between Fate and Free Will, it represented the defeat of Free Will and not the denial of Free Will. The struggle of man against the gods might be a hopeless struggle, but it was a struggle. It is the whole point of modern Determinism that there can be no struggle at all. In fact, the Pagans, like the Christians, had a notion of the distinction between the divine will and the human will; only that their view of the divine will was darker and more doubtful; and because they were Pagans they were tempted to be pessimists. Then, again, the whole business of Fate in the old tragedy is not so simple as it looks; one of the best Greek scholars I know said that a Greek tragedy often consisted of a lot of people doing the wildest and wickedest things in a frenzy of free will and personal perversity; and then the Chorus saying in a hollow voice, ‘It is Fate. It is Fate.’ He said he did not believe it was Greek fatalism, but only Greek irony.
But, however that may be, there is a final thing to add in answer to such Pagan parallels. In so far as there really was a tinge of irresponsibility and fatalism in the religion of the Greeks, it probably had a great deal to do with its ultimate failure before the religion of the Romans. For the Greeks were the obvious leaders of the march of mankind, and especially of the Mediterranean civilization; and to some extent it is true that what went wrong with them was their moral self-control and self-respect; so that the lordship of light and order, and the making of modern Europe, passed to the little Latin village on the Tiber. I know that the Greek tragedies were very great; so great that I doubt whether they were so fatalistic as shallow fatalists suggest. But perhaps the greatest of Greek tragedies was the tragedy of the Greeks.
Even in this one story of the father of psycho analysis I could find a dozen examples of this slipshod popular ‘science’. Freud is represented as saying that the human race will get through (whatever that may mean) ‘because development is an inevitable law of creation’. It is at least equally apparent that decay is an inevitable law of creation. Old Huxley would have hacked this sort of thing to pieces with a hatchet. There is doubtless a place for Freud’s scalpel as well as Huxley’s hatchet; but it would be a pity if science, by performing the most brilliant operations on the brain, should end by removing the brain altogether.
X. On Egoists and Egoists
MOST journalists abound in jokes on the subject of misprints — the fearful misprints that make nonsense and the far, far more fearful misprints that make sense. For only those which are reasonable can really be ruinous. There are, of course, those which are merely errors, due at the worst to carelessness and at the best, possibly, to malicious humour. The real peril appears when we have to do, not with carelessness and humour, but with carefulness and a lack of humour. The awful moment is when the intelligent interpreter decides that the sentence, as it stands, is nonsense, and proceeds to make it make sense. I was myself once felled to earth under such a blow. I wrote for a magazine story a sentence descriptive of the hero, which ran, ‘He talked a great deal about himself because he was not an egoist.’ I found it rendered on the printed page in the amended and blameless form, ‘He talked a great deal about himself because he was an egoist.’
To the obscure scribbler in the background, who merely writes the story, there is a difference. But I do not suppose it made much difference to the reader of the story, if there ever was a reader of the story. Anyhow, at some stage of the long, mechanical modern process of copying and printing and proof-reading, and so on, there must have been, I presume, a grave and careful character who thought it was obviously a mistake to say that a man talking of himself was not an egoist. He therefore made the reasonable and natural correction and said he was an egoist. As this is, by the whole depth of hell, the most hideous and infernal thing that a human being can be, it makes some little difference to the story considered as a story. But it was evidently supposed to improve the sense considered as the sense. Now, extraordinary as it may seem, I myself am under the impression that my original sentence was quite sensible. It is my experience that the egoist, or, at least, the really evil and poisonous sort of egoist, is not remarkable for talking a great deal about himself; or, indeed, for talking a great deal at all. The worst examples of the egoistic type are silent and watchful, and wait until they can say something which (as they think, and as others may possibly think) nobody could have said but themselves. But even when they do talk at large, it is not in the ordinary sense about themselves. They are much more likely to talk about a large number of different things, to show how wise and widely cultivated they are. Above all, the true egoist can generally be detected by this diabolic mark: that he is not only willing to talk on any subject, but on any side of any subject. He has no creed, no cause, no conception of truth which he thinks more important than himself. He is willing to talk like a Turk to show that he has travelled in Turkey; he is willing to talk like a Buddhist to show that he has studied Buddhism. But he will not forget himself in fighting for the Turks; he will not sacrifice himself to Buddhism like a Christian sacrificing himself to Christianity. In all his varied travels he has discovered all wonders except one most wonderful thing — something bigger than himself.
Now, simple and sincere men, however much they may seem to be talking about themselves, are almost always using their own experiences to illustrate some thing bigger and better. Such men were Johnson and Macaulay; such men in our own time are Mr. Belloc or Mr. Bernard Shaw. And the test of them is that, however pugnacious or paradoxical they may seem, we cannot imagine them seriously summing up on the side opposite to their own. We cannot imagine Johnson really labouring to convince his friends that the Whigs were right; or Macaulay really labouring to convince them that the Whigs were wrong. We cannot imagine Mr. Belloc using his own experiences to discredit Catholicism or Mr. Bernard Shaw using his to discredit Socialism. They are quite capable of enjoying the experiences, and enjoying the fun or glory of narrating the experiences; but there is always something beyond the experiences. Now, to the egoist the whole pleasure is in the experiences, because they are egoistic experiences. But, in all subtle and deep-seated cases, the more he enjoys them as egoistic experiences, the less he is likely merely to narrate them in an egoistic way. He cares far too much about the impressions he is creating; he does not want to be remembered, as the dogmatist is, as a man who talked at the top of his voice, or a man who talked all the time. That sort of error can only be made by a person who still retains a great deal of unconsciousness. And it is the point of the true egoist that he retains nothing but self-consciousness. We say in rebuke to the rude and shouting dogmatist, ‘You forget yourself.’ The rebuke is the supreme compliment.
