Twelve Types by G.K. Chesterton
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It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almost
everything in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably
extolled to the disadvantage of everything else.
One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe has
been declared to be alone capable of making life worth living. Books,
love, business, religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion,
money, simplicity, mysticism, hard work, a life close to nature, a life
close to Belgrave Square are every one of them passionately maintained
by somebody to be so good that they redeem the evil of an otherwise
indefensible world. Thus while the world is almost always condemned in
summary, it is always justified, and indeed extolled, in detail after
detail.
Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The
work of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously
among them. Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the House
of God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind.
Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises a
life of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the cellar
and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the blackest of
pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment that he has
written some shameless and terrible indictment of Creation, his one pang
of joy in the achievement joins the universal chorus of gratitude, with
the scent of the wild flower and the song of the bird.
Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as far
as words and explanations go, founded upon his pessimism. He was adored
by an overwhelming majority, almost every individual of which despised
the majority of mankind. But when we come to regard the matter a little
more deeply we tend in some degree to cease to believe in this
popularity of the pessimist. The popularity of pure and unadulterated
pessimism is an oddity; it is almost a contradiction in terms. Men would
no more receive the news of the failure of existence or of the
harmonious hostility of the stars with ardour or popular rejoicing than
they would light bonfires for the arrival of cholera or dance a
breakdown when they were condemned to be hanged. When the pessimist is
popular it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, but
because he shows some things to be good. Men can only join in a chorus
of praise even if it is the praise of denunciation. The man who is
popular must be optimistic about something even if he is only optimistic
about pessimism. And this was emphatically the case with Byron and the
Byronists. Their real popularity was founded not upon the fact that they
blamed everything, but upon the fact that they praised something. They
heaped curses upon man, but they used man merely as a foil. The things
they wished to praise by comparison were the energies of Nature. Man was
to them what talk and fashion were to Carlyle, what philosophical and
religious quarrels were to Omar, what the whole race after practical
happiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing which must be censured in order
that somebody else may be exalted. It was merely a recognition of the
fact that one cannot write in white chalk except on a blackboard.
Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the
desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and
depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in
winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in
storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older
earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very young
and very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when
seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a
gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time
powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at
the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was
the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was
only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of the
earth because amid all the cold and darkness their own hearts were
flaming like their own firesides.
Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and
lamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in Mr
Aubrey Beardsley's allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with a
pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the
cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial
life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the
restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new
pessimism is a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had an
affectation of sincerity; the decadent, going a step deeper into the
avenues of the unreal, has positively an affectation of affectation. And
it is by their fopperies and their frivolities that we know that their
sinister philosophy is sincere; in their lights and garlands and ribbons
we read their indwelling despair. It was so, indeed, with Byron himself;
his really bitter moments were his frivolous moments. He went on year
after year calling down fire upon mankind, summoning the deluge and the
destructive sea and all the ultimate energies of nature to sweep away
the cities of the spawn of man. But through all this his sub-conscious
mind was not that of a despairer; on the contrary, there is something of
a kind of lawless faith in thus parleying with such immense and
immemorial brutalities. It was not until the time in which he wrote 'Don
Juan' that he really lost this inward warmth and geniality, and a sudden
shout of hilarious laughter announced to the world that Lord Byron had
really become a pessimist.
One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his
metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a
hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of
horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding 'pas de quatre.' He may
arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the
most desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk
in a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the blood
alive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating:
'Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
When the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dull decay;
'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast,
But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past.'
That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron.
The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the
unconscious optimists, who are very often, indeed, the most
uncompromising conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of their
nature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But the
whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident,
and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under emotional
artifices, suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold, hard,
political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at the
time that he was dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of
that buried and sub-conscious happiness which is in all of us, and which
may emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow or the spears
of the enemy.
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
The general critical theory common in this and the last century is that
it was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry. The
classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that goes,
one may justifiably answer by asking any one to try. It may be easier
really to have wit, than really, in the boldest and most enduring sense,
to have imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to have
imagination than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge in a sham
rhapsody, because it may be the triumph of a rhapsody to be
unintelligible. But a man cannot indulge in a sham joke, because it is
the ruin of a joke to be unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet:
he can no more pretend to be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbits
out of a hat without having learnt to be a conjuror. Therefore, it may
be submitted, there was a certain discipline in the old antithetical
couplet of Pope and his followers. If it did not permit of the great
liberty of wisdom used by the minority of great geniuses, neither did it
permit of the great liberty of folly which is used by the majority of
small writers. A prophet could not be a poet in those days, perhaps, but
at least a fool could not be a poet. If we take, for the sake of
example, such a line as Pope's
'Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,'
the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written
such a line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not.
Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with
such an idea as that expressed in Pope's line about Man:
'A being darkly wise and rudely great.'
Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than
that old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would
really be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound. The
one thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of writing
'A being darkly wise and rudely great,'
the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses,
would produce something like the following:--
'A creature
Of feature
More dark, more dark, more dark than skies,
Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise:
Darkly wise as a formless fate
And if he be great
If he be great, then rudely great,
Rudely great as a plough that plies,
And darkly wise, and darkly wise.'
Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learnt to
spread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poet
might manufacture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope.
There is, of course, an idea in our time that the very antithesis of
the typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have
occasion more than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever
been artificial. But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An element
of paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the
realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we
cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a
space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications of
divinity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ in the wilderness was
truly pure, unless we also conceive that he desired to sin. It runs, in
the same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that we
cannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear, or
magnanimity existing except in conjunction with some temptation to
meanness. If Pope and his followers caught this echo of natural
irrationality, they were not any the more artificial. Their antitheses
were fully in harmony with existence, which is itself a contradiction in
terms.
Pope was really a great poet; he was the last great poet of
civilisation. Immediately after the fall of him and his school come
Burns and Byron, and the reaction towards the savage and the elemental.
But to Pope civilisation was still an exciting experiment. Its perruques
and ruffles were to him what feathers and bangles are to a South Sea
Islander--the real romance of civilisation. And in all the forms of art
which peculiarly belong to civilisation, he was supreme. In one
especially he was supreme--the great and civilised art of satire. And
in this we have fallen away utterly.
We have had a great revival in our time of the cult of violence and
hostility. Mr Henley and his young men have an infinite number of
furious epithets with which to overwhelm any one who differs from them.
It is not a placid or untroubled position to be Mr Henley's enemy,
though we know that it is certainly safer than to be his friend. And
yet, despite all this, these people produce no satire. Political and
social satire is a lost art, like pottery and stained glass. It may be
worth while to make some attempt to point out a reason for this.
It may seem a singular observation to say that we are not generous
enough to write great satire. This, however, is approximately a very
accurate way of describing the case. To write great satire, to attack a
man so that he feels the attack and half acknowledges its justice, it is
necessary to have a certain intellectual magnanimity which realises the
merits of the opponent as well as his defects. This is, indeed, only
another way of putting the simple truth that in order to attack an army
we must know not only its weak points, but also its strong points.
England in the present season and spirit fails in satire for the same
simple reason that it fails in war: it despises the enemy. In matters of
battle and conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the idea (an
idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) that we can best trample on a
people by ignoring all the particular merits which give them a chance
of trampling upon us. It has become a breach of etiquette to praise the
enemy; whereas when the enemy is strong every honest scout ought to
praise the enemy. It is impossible to vanquish an army without having a
full account of its strength. It is impossible to satirise a man without
having a full account of his virtues. It is too much the custom in
politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhumane, as
utterly careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man ever
was since the beginning of the world. This kind of invective may often
have a great superficial success: it may hit the mood of the moment; it
may raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions. But there is
one man among all those millions whom it does not impress, whom it
hardly even touches; that is the man against whom it is directed. The
one person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man
whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach. He
knows that such a description of him is not true. He knows that he is
not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly barbarous
and revengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he can
count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hours
of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man. But behind
all this he has his real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul:
behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven
silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly
visions of revenge. It is to these that satire should reach if it is to
touch the man at whom it is aimed. And to reach these it must pass and
salute a whole army of virtues.
If we turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough but
firm grasp of the size and strength, the value and the best points of
their adversary. Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives a
splendid and spirited account of the insane valour and inspired cunning
of the
'daring pilot in extremity,'
who was more untrustworthy in calm than in storm, and
'Steered too near the rocks to boast his wit.'
The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of the
great Shaftesbury. It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound and
picturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill. But here comes in very
pointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and the
ancient achievement of it. The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill,
both Liberal and Conservative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly,
as one of those great wits to madness near allied. They represented him
as a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence supplied
the lack of policy and character. Churchill had grave and even gross
faults, a certain coarseness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness, a
certain lack of magnanimity, a certain peculiar patrician vulgarity. But
he was a much larger man than satire depicted him, and therefore the
satire could not and did not overwhelm him. And here we have the cause
of the failure of contemporary satire, that it has no magnanimity, that
is to say, no patience. It cannot endure to be told that its opponent
has his strong points, just as Mr Chamberlain could not endure to be
told that the Boers had a regular army. It can be content with nothing
except persuading itself that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly
stupid--that is, that he is what he is not and what nobody else is. If
we take any prominent politician of the day--such, for example, as Sir
William Harcourt--we shall find that this is the point in which all
party invective fails. The Tory satire at the expense of Sir William
Harcourt is always desperately endeavouring to represent that he is
inept, that he makes a fool of himself, that he is disagreeable and
disgraceful and untrustworthy. The defect of all this is that we all
know that it is untrue. Everyone knows that Sir William Harcourt is not
inept, but is almost the ablest Parliamentarian now alive. Everyone
knows that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful, but a gentleman of the
old school who is on excellent social terms with his antagonists.
Everyone knows that he is not untrustworthy, but a man of unimpeachable
honour who is much trusted. Above all, he knows it himself, and is
therefore affected by the satire exactly as any one of us would be if we
were accused of being black or of keeping a shop for the receiving of
stolen goods. We might be angry at the libel, but not at the satire; for
a man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because
it is true.
Mr Henley and his young men are very fond of invective and satire: if
they wish to know the reason of their failure in these things, they need
only turn to the opening of Pope's superb attack upon Addison. The
Henleyite's idea of satirising a man is to express a violent contempt
for him, and by the heat of this to persuade others and himself that the
man is contemptible. I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr Gladstone
by one of the young anarchic Tories, which began by asserting that Mr
Gladstone was a bad public speaker. If these people would, as I have
said, go quietly and read Pope's 'Atticus,' they would see how a great
satirist approaches a great enemy:
'Peace to all such! But were there one whose fires
True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires,
Blest with each talent, and each art to please,
And born to write, converse, and live with ease.
Should such a man--'
And then follows the torrent of that terrible criticism. Pope was not
such a fool as to try to make out that Addison was a fool. He knew that
Addison was not a fool, and he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred, in
Pope's case, had become so great and, I was almost going to say, so
pure, that it illuminated all things, as love illuminates all things. He
said what was really wrong with Addison; and in calm and clear and
everlasting colours he painted the picture of the evil of the literary
temperament:
'Bear like the Turk, no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise.
* * * * *
Like Cato give his little Senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause.
While wits and templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise.'
This is the kind of thing which really goes to the mark at which it
aims. It is penetrated with sorrow and a kind of reverence, and it is
addressed directly to a man. This is no mock-tournament to gain the
applause of the crowd. It is a deadly duel by the lonely seashore.
In current political materialism there is everywhere the assumption
that, without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we can
benefit a man practically. Without understanding his case and his
merits, we cannot even hurt him.
FRANCIS
Asceticism is a thing which in its very nature, we tend in these days to
misunderstand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation of
the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the
one joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confined
to religious asceticism: there is scientific asceticism which asserts
that truth is alone satisfying: there is aesthetic asceticism which
asserts that art is alone satisfying: there is amatory asceticism which
asserts that love is alone satisfying. There is even epicurean
asceticism, which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying.
Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the statement that the
speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ and
essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that 'love
is enough,' it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art,
science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts, gloves,
walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals and any
other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When Omar
Khayyam says:
'A book of verse beneath the bough
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou
Sitting beside me in the wilderness
O wilderness were Paradise enow.'
It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he does
aesthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more.
The same thing was done by a mediaeval monk. Examples might, of course,
be multiplied a hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our
younger poets says, as the one thing certain, that
'From quiet home and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends--
There's nothing worth the wear of winning
But laughter and the love of friends.'
Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true
joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism.
But if in any case it should happen that a class or a generation lose
the sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they
immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and
self-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called
the monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures of
liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a Bank
Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the
pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is,
however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English
athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if
science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting
the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute
contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is
easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state
that in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and
Cambridge were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They
were forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or
tobacco during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain
brutal fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at
unearthly hours and running violently around fields for no object. Many
men ruined their health in these dens of superstition, many died there.
All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an
asceticism, as much as the monastic rules. Men have over-strained
themselves and killed themselves through English athleticism. There is
one difference and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do not
feel the love of religious offices. We see only the price in the one
case and only the purchase in the other.
The only question that remains is what was the joy of the old Christian
ascetics of which their ascetism was merely the purchasing price. The
mere possibility of the query is an extraordinary example of the way in
which we miss the main points of human history. We are looking at
humanity too close, and see only the details and not the vast and
dominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive it
as a rise of self-abnegation and almost of pessimism. It does not occur
to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe
is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit
to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with
joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment.
The white daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stood
up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea
gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these
disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one
dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy.
That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectly
tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We
insist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost. We insist that
the ascetics were pessimists because they gave up threescore years and
ten for an eternity of happiness. We forget that the bare proposition
of an eternity of happiness is by its very nature ten thousand times
more optimistic than ten thousand pagan saturnalias.
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