Twelve Types by G.K. Chesterton
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Mr Adderley's life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring this
out; nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has rather
the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing,
but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason
that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman,
because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to
their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline,
because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line. This blaze of
benediction, this conflict between lights, has its place in poetry, not
in biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance,
in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is sometimes almost
indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white.
It is natural, of course, that Mr Adderley should see Francis primarily
as the founder of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this was only one,
perhaps a minor one, of the things that he was; we suspect that one of
the minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vast
practical work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for this
amazingly unworldly and almost maddeningly simple--minded infant was one
of the most consistently successful men that ever fought with this
bitter world. It is the custom to say that the secret of such men is
their profound belief in themselves, and this is true, but not all the
truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums are thronged with men who believe
in themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of his
success was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack of
this that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons.
Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about their
common relative, the water-rat, as he was. He planned a visit to the
Emperor to draw his attention to the needs of 'his little sisters the
larks.' He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their
misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. It
was an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often 'got round him,'
as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had
'got round' them, and discovered the other side, the side of secret
nobility.
Conceiving of St Francis as primarily the founder of the Franciscan
Order, Mr Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of the
history of Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in
the book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichaean
ideal that underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal of
self-discipline which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But
he does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider the
absorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reason
that not being an outsider he does not find it a problem at all.
To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the
position of St Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than
any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears.
He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take
pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell
from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet
this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we
think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most,
property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and
poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in
these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were
blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk, and
not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully
here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked;
we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find
that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also.
So it was with the monks. The two great parties in human affairs are
only the party which sees life black against white, and the party which
sees it white against black, the party which macerates and blackens
itself with sacrifice because the background is full of the blaze of an
universal mercy, and the party which crowns itself with flowers and
lights itself with bridal torches because it stands against a black
curtain of incalculable night. The revellers are old, and the monks are
young. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts of happiness, and we
who are its misers.
Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr Adderley's book, the clear and
tranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the
genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his
literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire 'brother,' and the
water 'sister,' in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the
sermon to the fishes 'that they alone were saved in the Flood.' In the
amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments
and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing,
his genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided
the weakness of Burns' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity,
bombast and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a
cleaner and more transparent life.
The general attitude of St Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a
kind of terrible common-sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in
'Alice in Wonderland'--'Why not?' impresses us as his general motto. He
could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The
pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages and all
its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of
that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like
the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the
nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world was
small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the reason
that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives were to
be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that the
madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in it
the features of a new friend.
ROSTAND
When 'Cyrano de Bergerac' was published, it bore the subordinate title
of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which
would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a
poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the
hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is
systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power
of a man's spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy
into a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive
legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have
a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain
optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of
the monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential
disastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itself
with a hyper-aesthetic view of tragedy and comedy which is largely due to
the influence of modern France, from which the great heroic comedies of
Monsieur Rostand have come. The French genius has an instinct for
remedying its own evil work, and France gives always the best cure for
'Frenchiness.' The idea of comedy which is held in England by the school
which pays most attention to the technical niceties of art is a view
which renders such an idea as that of heroic comedy quite impossible.
The fundamental conception in the minds of the majority of our younger
writers is that comedy is, 'par excellence,' a fragile thing. It is
conceived to be a conventional world of the most absolutely delicate and
gimcrack description. Such stories as Mr Max Beerbohm's 'Happy
Hypocrite' are conceptions which would vanish or fall into utter
nonsense if viewed by one single degree too seriously. But great comedy,
the comedy of Shakespeare or Sterne, not only can be, but must be, taken
seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with
more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such
comedies one laughs with the heroes and not at them. The humour which
steeps the stories of Falstaff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and
philosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not
superficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading.
Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they were
the predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The modern writer of
comedies may be said to boast of the brittleness of his characters. He
seems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. When John
Oliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious emotions, she
named it, with a thinly-disguised contempt for her own work, 'A
Sentimental Comedy.' The ground of this conception of the artificiality
of comedy is a profound pessimism. Life in the eyes of these mournful
buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow as
a grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properly
speaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over
the eternal waters of bitterness.
'Cyrano de Bergerac' came to us as the new decoration of an old truth,
that merriment was one of the world's natural flowers, and not one of
its exotics. The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, the
Rabelaisian puns and digressions were seen to be once more what they had
been in Rabelais, the mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado as
old and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong
and haughty as its will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano at
his highest moment of happiness. 'Il me faut des geants.' An essential
aspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama in
rhyme. There is nothing that affords so easy a point of attack for the
dramatic realist as the conduct of a play in verse. According to his
canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facing
some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party
playing 'bouts rimes.' In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculous
that two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults should
obligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat and
convenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon the
fact that few persons, if any, to-day understand what is meant by a
poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays which
are now written in England by the most advanced students of the drama
follow exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and use verse and rhyme for
the adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supreme
appropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land of
heroic comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers, in which it is not
difficult to imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is far
more conceivable that men's speech should flower naturally into these
harmonious forms, when they are filled with the essential spirit of
youth, than when they are sitting gloomily in the presence of immemorial
destiny. The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an
unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the
moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we
have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or
artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering
attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like
Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised
or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. Rhymes answer
each other as the sexes in flowers and in humanity answer each other.
Men do not speak so, it is true. Even when they are inspired or in love
they talk inanities. But the poetic comedy does not misrepresent the
speech one half so much, as the speech misrepresents the soul. Monsieur
Rostand showed even more than his usual insight when he called 'Cyrano
de Bergerac' a comedy, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, it ends
with disappointment and death. The essence of tragedy is a spiritual
breakdown or decline, and in the great French play the spiritual
sentiment mounts unceasingly until the last line. It is not the facts
themselves, but our feeling about them, that makes tragedy and comedy,
and death is more joyful in Rostand than life in Maeterlinck. The same
apparent contradiction holds good in the case of the drama of
'L'Aiglon,' now being performed with so much success. Although the hero
is a weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a premature death and a
personal disillusionment, yet, in spite of this theme, which might have
been chosen for its depressing qualities, the unconquerable paean of the
praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the poet's song swells so
high that at the end it seems to drown all the weak voices of the
characters in one crashing chorus of great things and great men. A
multitude of mottoes might be taken from the play to indicate and
illustrate, not only its own spirit, but much of the spirit of modern
life. When in the vision of the field of Wagram the horrible voices of
the wounded cry out, 'Les corbeaux, les corbeaux,' the Duke, overwhelmed
with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, 'Ou, ou sont les
aigles?' That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the
beginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy. When
an ex-General of Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed the
Emperor, he replies, 'La fatigue,' and at that a veteran private of the
Great Army rushes forward, and crying passionately, 'Et nous?' pours out
a terrible description of the life lived by the common soldier. To-day
when pessimism is almost as much a symbol of wealth and fashion as
jewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life in
few other words but 'la fatigue,' there might surely come a cry from the
vast mass of common humanity from the beginning 'et nous?' It is this
potentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of men that makes the
function of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare's 'Much Ado
about Nothing' is a great comedy, because behind it is the whole
pressure of that love of love which is the youth of the world, which is
common to all the young, especially to those who swear they will die
bachelors and old maids. 'Love's Labour Lost' is filled with the same
energy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of our
subject since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyrically
as naturally as the birds sing in pairing time. What the love of love is
to the Shakespearian comedies, that other and more mysterious human
passion, the love of death, is to 'L'Aiglon.' Whether we shall ever have
in England a new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at present
to say, but we shall assuredly never have it until we realise that
comedy is built upon everlasting foundations in the nature of things,
that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb.
Monsieur Rostand, in his description of the Battle of Wagram, does not
shrink from bringing about the Duke's ears the frightful voices of
actual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but when
the Duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks them for their final
word, they all cry together 'Vive l'Empereur!' Monsieur Rostand,
perhaps, did not know that he was writing an allegory. To me that field
of Wagram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear nothing
but the voices of pain; the whole is one phonograph of horror. It is
right that we should hear these things, it is right that not one of them
should be silenced; but these cries of distress are not in life as they
are in modern art the only voices, they are the voices of men, but not
the voice of man. When questioned finally and seriously as to their
conception of their destiny, men have from the beginning of time
answered in a thousand philosophies and religions with a single voice
and in a sense most sacred and tremendous, 'Vive l'Empereur.'
CHARLES II
There are a great many bonds which still connect us with Charles II.,
one of the idlest men of one of the idlest epochs. Among other things
Charles II. represented one thing which is very rare and very
satisfying; he was a real and consistent sceptic. Scepticism both in its
advantages and disadvantages is greatly misunderstood in our time. There
is a curious idea abroad that scepticism has some connection with such
theories as materialism and atheism and secularism. This is of course a
mistake; the true sceptic has nothing to do with these theories simply
because they are theories. The true sceptic is as much a spiritualist as
he is a materialist. He thinks that the savage dancing round an African
idol stands quite as good a chance of being right as Darwin. He thinks
that mysticism is every bit as rational as rationalism. He has indeed
the most profound doubts as to whether St Matthew wrote his own gospel.
But he has quite equally profound doubts as to whether the tree he is
looking at is a tree and not a rhinoceros.
This is the real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in
the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in
the life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between
atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and
fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the
most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day
of judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal negative; for a man
to say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that there
are no insects in any of the stars.
Thus it was with that wholesome and systematic sceptic, Charles II. When
he took the Sacrament according to the forms of the Roman Church in his
last hour he was acting consistently as a philosopher. The wafer might
not be God; similarly it might not be a wafer. To the genuine and
poetical sceptic the whole world is incredible, with its bulbous
mountains and its fantastic trees. The whole order of things is as
outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
Transubstantiation might be a dream, but if it was, it was assuredly a
dream within a dream. Charles II. sought to guard himself against hell
fire because he could not think hell itself more fantastic than the
world as it was revealed by science. The priest crept up the staircase,
the doors were closed, the few of the faithful who were present hushed
themselves respectfully, and so, with every circumstance of secrecy and
sanctity, with the cross uplifted and the prayers poured out, was
consummated the last great act of logical unbelief.
The problem of Charles II. consists in this, that he has scarcely a
moral virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us morally. We feel that
some of the virtues have been dropped out in the lists made by all the
saints and sages, and that Charles II. was pre-eminently successful in
these wild and unmentionable virtues. The real truth of this matter and
the real relation of Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth somewhat
more exhaustive study.
It is a commonplace that the Restoration movement can only be understood
when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it is
insufficiently realised that the tyranny which half frustrated all the
good work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was not the fire
of Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of a restraint,
which passed away; that still burns in the heart of England, only to be
quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is seldom remembered that
the Puritans were in their day emphatically intellectual bullies, that
they relied swaggeringly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, that
they bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism. The Puritans
fell, through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life,
through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never
satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical French
Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the lesson
that men's wants have always been right and their arguments always
wrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the
head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily
men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do
nothing to his head but hit it. The tyranny of the Puritans over the
bodies of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and
conflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the
tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human
spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved
and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial,
madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were
fanatics, but because they were rationalists.
When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, which
means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in
that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a
little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality
of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a
pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed
parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be
left over, by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merely
account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and
horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accounts
also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a
nameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about it
something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and
nowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as the
type of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide of
politeness. There was some moral and social value in his perfection in
little things. He could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the
ten thousand commandments. His name is unconnected with any great acts
of duty or sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of those
acts of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, which
lie on the dim borderland between morality and art. 'Charles II.,' said
Thackeray, with unerring brevity, 'was a rascal but not a snob.' Unlike
George IV. he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys
strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises
strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world.
So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that it was
the revolt of something human, if only the debris of human nature. But
more cannot be said. It was emphatically a fall and not an ascent, a
recoil and not an advance, a sudden weakness and not a sudden strength.
That the bow of human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too
far, that it overstrained the soul by stretching it to the height of an
almost horrible idealism, makes the collapse of the Restoration
infinitely more excusable, but it does not make it any the less a
collapse. Nothing can efface the essential distinction that Puritanism
was one of the world's great efforts after the discovery of the true
order, whereas it was the essence of the Restoration that it involved no
effort at all. It is true that the Restoration was not, as has been
widely assumed, the most immoral epoch of our history. Its vices cannot
compare for a moment in this respect with the monstrous tragedies and
almost suffocating secrecies and villainies of the Court of James I. But
the dram-drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia of Charles II.
seem at once more human and more detestable than the passions and
poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appears
inevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared with
the Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the Restoration. Not
only was it too indolent for great morality, it was too indolent even
for great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even for the
pursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a game
of lawn tennis. It would have appeared to Charles II.'s poets quite as
arduous to write 'Paradise Lost' as to regain Paradise.
All old and vigorous languages abound in images and metaphors, which,
though lightly and casually used, are in truth poems in themselves, and
poems of a high and striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so terribly
significant as the phrase 'killing time.' It is a tremendous and
poetical image, the image of a kind of cosmic parricide. There is on the
earth a race of revellers who do, under all their exuberance,
fundamentally regard time as an enemy. Of these were Charles II. and the
men of the Restoration. Whatever may have been their merits, and as we
have said we think that they had merits, they can never have a place
among the great representatives of the joy of life, for they belonged
to those lower epicureans who kill time, as opposed to those higher
epicureans who make time live.
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