Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 992
There must have been multitudes of intellectuals, living on the tradition of Euripides or Lucian, who took even a bitter or mocking or pessimistic view of the gods; or simply thought there were no such things as gods in the world; but they would never have objected to gods as graven images. I never heard of any case of any heathen sceptics becoming iconoclasts; and going out and smashing the popular deities as a protest on behalf of abstract truth. They accepted the lyre of Apollo or the wand of Mercury, just as we still accept a Cupid on a Valentine or a nymph on a stone fountain. We may say that the cupid has been vulgarized and is no longer truly a god. We may say that the nymph has met the gorgon, and been turned to stone. And they may have known in their hearts that their religion was dead. But because it was dead, they had even less desire to make exhausting efforts to kill it. If Christianity were really one of the cults studied in comparative religion, if it were really, as its critics sometimes say, a thing made up of materials borrowed from Pagan ism, if it were really only the last myth or ritual of the long undying death of the Roman Empire, then there is no reason why its symbolism should not be used forever by anybody; as the symbolism of nymphs and cupids is still used forever by anybody. The real reason is that this religion does differ in one detail from all those ancient and beautiful religions. It is not dead. Everybody knows in his heart that it is not dead; and none better than those who want it to die.
The people arranging for the Peace Memorial of the League of Nations would not have the slightest objection to covering it with signs and symbols which were once religious. They would not object to a statue of Peace holding the olive branch like a statue of Minerva; they would not object to a symbolic figure of Sunrise which had the lyre or the horses of Apollo; they would not be annoyed if somebody conceived womanhood under the form of Diana hunting or manhood under the form of Hercules at rest. All these things are now really an allegory. And if Christians could accept so trifling a modernist modification of their view as to agree that Christianity is dead, they could safely go on using all their great historical and hagiological wealth of imagery and illustration; and nobody would object to ten thousand angels or a million martyrs or any number of crosses and haloes. But the ground of the resistance is that the whole modern comparison between the decline of Paganism and the decline of Christianity is false. Paganism, in the historic sense of Polytheism, did decline once and for all. Christianity has declined twenty times; but nobody who hated it was ever quite certain that it was dead. The rationalist historians of the nineteenth century found it easy to trace in a curve the rise and fall of a religion. They showed very lucidly, to their own satisfaction, that such a historical monstrosity was first a myth, and then a superstition, and then a tradition, and then an abstraction and an allegory. And what they wrote was largely true, if they had happened to be writing the history of Jupiter-Ammon. But as a history of post-Pagan Europe, commonly called Christendom, it is simply not true. It is not the story of something that ruled the whole world, as a pagan deity ruled the whole city. It is not the story of something which was lost when a man left his own city, and enlarged his mind by considering the gods of other cities. It did not begin by being so powerful as Paganism; it never came to being so impotent as Paganism. It was the story of some thing that was unsafe at its safest and living still at its lowest; something which is always coming out of the Catacombs and going back again; something that is never entirely acceptable when it appears; and never entirely forgotten when it disappears.
It is this utterly unique and even unnatural vigilance that can alone explain a difficulty like that raised about the graven image of Peace. It is that even in proclaiming political peace it proclaims spiritual war. Its things cannot be used as dead things to deck out any alien triumph; we will not be the skeleton at any pagan feast or the corpse for any scientific body-snatching. But, quite apart from our various individual views on such questions of philosophy, there remains a very practical problem of history. These mysteries are the background of the modern European’s past, just as those myths were the background of the most sceptical Pagan’s past. And the matter can be put to a perfectly practical test. If you had told one of the last Greek sculptors that he must not represent anything out of the great Greek myths, he would probably have answered, ‘What shall I represent?’ These things were the whole imagery of his imagination. If you tell an artist of the Christian culture, whatever his opinions, that he is to represent peace or charity or universal love by a familiar and obvious emblem — what is the poor devil to do? Pause and think of that point; for it is a perfectly practical point. What are the popular emblems of peace, if we are to cut out all that comes from myths or mysteries or the past?
ST GEORGE FOR ENGLAND
I AM informed on fairly good authority that the day upon which I write these words is St George’s Day. It is very characteristic of our country that we make far more fuss about St Patrick’s Day than we do about St George’s. It is a part of that curious elephantine modesty of the English in some matters: a modesty so heavy and helpless that foreigners mistake it for pride. It is true that within recent years there have been some signs in us of mere boasting. But even they are mainly glorifications of things that are not strictly ourselves; things that, as a general rule, we know nothing about — such as Australia. Even when the English do brag they seem to brag of anything except England. Something prevents us from becoming poetical and dithyrambic about ourselves. Some people will tell you that this is because we are so stern and practical, but that is all talk, and un-English talk at that. As a matter of fact, we are not nearly so practical as we were when we were much more dithyrambic. I do not know why it is, but the English really have got a certain kind of embarrassment and dislike of show; but whatever it is, it certainly is not because they are not sufficiently roman tic; their magnificent romantic literature can answer for that; for they are (I think) the only nation in the world whose absolutely first-class literature is rather romantic than classical. Sometimes I think that the Englishman is undemonstrative because he is much too romantic to be demonstrative. Like all sentimentalists, he is secretive. He does not tell you his feelings because they are too romantic to tell.
But the neglect of St George is an example of that lack of animated ritual which Irishmen or Italians in judging us mistake for a vital lack of romance. It may be urged by some that the neglect of St George (as compared, for instance, with St Patrick) may be easily explained by the fact that the historical St Patrick was a great man whose life is largely known and whose work can be definitely admired; whereas the historical St George is chiefly remarkable for having no history. We know nothing about his life and only one thing about his death, that he was martyred for the faith. For I suppose that everyone has realized that Gibbon, in identifying the saint with the fraudulent financier who was an Arian and bore the same name, was merely letting his anti-Christian enthusiasm run away with him and wallowing in the charming thought of a saint who rigged the market. To suppose that that amiable financier could ever have become the patron saint of England is to misunderstand the whole atmosphere not merely of the morals, but of the theology and hagiology of the early Church. I take it then that the historic St George, if there was one at all (to which I am extremely indifferent), was the Christian of whom we know nothing but his death.
But those who suggest that the remote and impersonal quality in the historic St George accounts for the English indifference to him know little of patron saints or of the essential nature of saint-worship. Saint-worship is not the same as hero-worship; it is a much less dangerous thing than hero-worship. For hero-worship generally means the absorption or transmutation of some part, at any rate, of one’s own original ideas of goodness under the heat and hypnotism of some strong personality. But saint-worship, especially when it is a worship of saints whom we know little or nothing about, is simply the worship of that tradition of goodness in which the saint’s name has been embalmed; and into that empty mould our own natural idealism can much more easily be poured. The invocation of saints is much less idolatrous than the invocation of historical heroes after the manner of Carlyle. For you can only admire the goodness of the saint, whereas you may come to admire the badness of the hero. You may get all kinds of dangerous bias and sophistry and bad advice from the man in history whom you know something about. You can get nothing but good advice from the man you know nothing about. Thus, to take the historical St George; if all we know about him is that he was killed for his opinions, that fact is, properly considered, so staggering that it might send us all singing into battle. Or take rather the legendary St George, who is (I need hardly say) very much more important than the real one. As it is, St George the dragon-slayer stands to I us simply and sufficiently as the symbol of courage. He does not stand in our minds connected with any of those silly epigrams which great men in their old age utter to misguided youth. St George never told anybody what was his ‘method’ or what was ‘the secret of his power’. He made no remarks, he merely killed the dragon. He did not say that the dragon was killed on Eton playing-fields. He did not say that he had never met a dragon with whom he couldn’t do a deal. He never called the death of the dragon inevitable; while he was fighting the dragon he had thoroughly discovered that it was not. He never said that the way to kill a dragon was to work hard in early youth, or to start with twopence a day, or to avoid: tobacco, or to know your own mind, or any of those inane tips. For St George knew very well what all real soldiers know; that the only way to be even approximately likely to kill a dragon is to give the dragon a heavy chance of killing you. And this method, which is the only one, is much too unpleasant to be talked about. You see, I am making a character of St George at my own will and fancy. That is the whole point and advantage of the unknown saint. That is why saint-worship is so much more free than hero-worship.
I think myself that something might be done by the English nation with the legend of St George and the Dragon. It has still a lingering hold on the people in some counties, where the mummers at Christmas or Easter still perform a rude drama in which the English champion overcomes the evil principle in single combat. In almost all these little ritual plays, so far as I have noticed, the same singular and picturesque episode occurs. I mean that when the arch-enemy (sometimes the Dragon, sometimes a Turkish Knight, sometimes some other alien figure) is thrown to the ground by St George, he always calls out for a doctor. A doctor is always provided by the Christian conqueror, and the fight recommences. This episode might be made to mean a great deal if any English poet philosophized the legend of St George, as Goethe philosophized the legend of Faust. For it is true that the chivalrous and Christian character (which St George typifies) fights under that disadvantage of the doctor. He has to contend at once against the mercilessness of his enemy and the mercifulness of himself. But again the legendary drama is right when it makes St George conquer. When modern cynics (utterly ignorant of courage and, therefore, utterly ignorant of war) say that we must be more brutal if we are to be efficient, they forget that the most brutal civilizations are the least efficient. Oriental nations that torture their captives are themselves captive. Savages that eat men do not seem to thrive on it. Our European civilization has faults enough, but it is on the whole the most merciful and it is on the whole the most strong. For the mind that can imagine sufferings is the same that can imagine a new gun.
THE NATIONAL ANTHEM
I SEE that there is a movement in many influential quarters for cutting out the best verse in the National Anthem. This is very typical of many of our ‘reforms’ that arise out of a sense of refinement and not out of a sense of right. When I say the best verse, I mean the one that confounds the tricks of all the enemies of the State. And I call it the best verse because, in a work that no one particularly praises or preserves for literary reasons, it is the most quaintly national, the most unique, the most sincere and vigorous, and by far the most democratic. One does not hold up ‘God Save the King’ as a poem like the ‘Mariners of England’, any more than one holds up the picture of John Bull as something beautiful and well-proportioned, like the St George of Donatello. The thing is a patriotic curiosity; and the most curious and patriotic part of it is exactly the part that these people want to cut out. And, ethically, it is excellent.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
may not be very good poetry, but it is very good, sound Christian morals. If there are any knavish tricks, I hope we all pray they may be frustrated. And as for confounding politics, a good many of us have been in sympathy with the idea ever since we made a study of the ways of the confounded politicians. The poem does not define the people denounced, except in so far that they are the enemies of the King, who is in all such symbolic songs made a symbol of the commonwealth. I happen to think that the King’s worst enemies often sit at his own Council-board, and that England’s worst invaders and destroyers often have the high places in the senate; but all this does not prevent me from singing the anthem with heartiness and relish.
What the refined people (confound their knavish tricks!) will not see is that, if you are loyal to anything and wish to preserve it, you must recognize that it has or might have enemies; and you must hope that the enemies will fail. The real insolence, if there were any, would lie in saying, ‘God save the King’ — in calling the Universal and Eternal to take care of a particular tribal chief on a trivial little island. But undoubtedly, if you have a right to ask God to save him, you have a right to ask God to frustrate those who seek to destroy him; the two sentences simply mean the same thing. The oblivion of so obvious a fact is only a part of that foolish forgetfulness of the real ethics of fighting which is equally perilous today, whether it takes its Jingo or its Pacifist form. Not only is the army the chief business of our processions; but processions seem to be considered the chief business of the army. From no point of view ought armaments to be ornaments. I have no respect for that chronic war-fever, or love of conquest, which (as the phrase goes) draws the sword and throws away the scabbard. But I have even less respect for that arrogant etiquette that keeps the scabbard when it has thrown away the sword. And among the results of this masquerade style of militarism is a neglect of the most naked and structural principles of fighting.
Nothing is baser in our time than the idea that we can have special enthusiasms for things, so long as they are secure, without pledging ourselves to uphold them if they are ever in peril. You cannot have a devotion that is not a boundary. You cannot have a boundary that is not a barricade. If you do not think mankind a sacred brother hood to be everywhere saluted and saved, then do not say so. But if you do say so, then you must certainly be ready to save it from sharks or tigers, from monsters or from microbes. If you do not think your nation a solid entity and a holy soil, then do not call it your nation. But if you do, you must admit that it might be as much hated by others as it is loved by you. If it is really individual, it is just as likely to be hated as it is to be loved.
There is another obvious moral ground upon which we should continue to ‘confound their politics’. The refined people (confound, &c.) seem to think that there is something unpleasant and profane about making a war religious. I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his quarrel before that invisible Court of Arbitration with which all religion is concerned. Unless he thinks he is vitally, eternally, cosmically in the right, he is wrong to fire off a pocket-pistol. If he does think he is in the right, he is surely justified in praying that the right may prevail. The separation between war and the Church, like the separation between business and the Chapel, would only mean that the religion would grow much too thin, while the cynicism would grow much too fat. It would be a good thing if religion thought a little more about this world — and if politics thought a little more about the other.
And lastly, no one seems to notice that this verse of the National Anthem (if my memory serves me right) is the only one that contains the popular note of comradeship as well as the popular note of conflict. I quote from memory, but I think the verse runs —
O Lord, our God, arise,
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks;
On Thee our hopes we fix:
God save us all.
It is the only verse that begins with something like fine Biblical diction, as of a whirlwind rising. It is the only verse that ends with a universal and democratic benediction. I do not wonder that the Moderns want it removed.
KING GEORGE IV
I HAVE just been reading what is not only a very excellent biography, but a very much-needed book. It. is a study of ‘George the Fourth’ by Mr Shane Leslie. It is in no sense what even shallow people would call a whitewashing of George IV, though it is the restoration of a blackened portrait. It has not the tone of an advocate for the defence any more than for the prosecution. But it is a criticism of the critics of George. And it is a very dam aging criticism too.
