Twelve Types by G.K. Chesterton
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G.K. Chesterton >> Twelve Types
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Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administered
to the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at the
present day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and for
mere men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be an
improvement on that of the great Florentine republican. It is such men
as these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to fear.
We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those which
awoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola--a hedonism that is more sick
of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that seeks
the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In many modern
works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly Renaissance sense of
the beauty of blood, the poetry of murder. The bankrupt and depraved
imagination does not see that a living man is far more dramatic than a
dead one. Along with this, as in the time of the Medici, goes the
falling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger for the strong man
which is unknown among strong men. The masterful hero is worshipped as
he is worshipped by the readers of the 'Bow Bells Novelettes,' and for
the same reason--a profound sense of personal weakness. That tendency to
devolve our duties descends on us, which is the soul of slavery, alike
whether for its menial tasks it employs serfs or emperors. Against all
this the great clerical republican stands in everlasting protest,
preferring his failure to his rival's success. The issue is still
between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of liberty and the
licence of slavery, between the perils of truth and the security of
silence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of pleasure. The
supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among us, men for
whom even nations and empires only exist to satisfy the moment, men to
whom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp and wintry
spring. They have an art, a literature, a political philosophy, which
are all alike valued for their immediate effect upon the taste, not for
what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their statuettes and
sonnets are rounded and perfect, while 'Macbeth' is in comparison a
fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their campaigns and
battles are always called triumphant, while Caesar and Cromwell wept for
many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell of no resistance,
the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole nature recoils
into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer merely a
cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.
This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent
his whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course.
Few men understood his object; some called him a madman, some a
charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even have
understood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving them
from a calamity of contentment which should be the end of joys and
sorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silent
danger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They also
are supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple.
Mr M'Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine works
of art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been much
exaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of
incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real moment
more real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's friend Michael
Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other, and
burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow
transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.
THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT
Walter Scott is a writer who should just now be re-emerging into his own
high place in letters, for unquestionably the recent, though now
dwindling, schools of severely technical and aesthetic criticism have
been unfavourable to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and if
there is one thing in which artists have improved since his time, it is
in consistency and equality. It would perhaps be unkind to inquire
whether the level of the modern man of letters, as compared with Scott,
is due to the absence of valleys or the absence of mountains. But in any
case, we have learnt in our day to arrange our literary effects
carefully, and the only point in which we fall short of Scott is in the
incidental misfortune that we have nothing particular to arrange.
It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if so, the matter
could be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers are
neglected by Providence. The ground of this neglect, in so far as it
exists, must be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment that, like
the beard of Polonius, he is too long. Yet it is surely a peculiar thing
that in literature alone a house should be despised because it is too
large, or a host impugned because he is too generous. If romance be
really a pleasure, it is difficult to understand the modern reader's
consuming desire to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure, it is
difficult to understand his desire to have it at all. Mere size, it
seems to me, cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in some
disproportion. If some of Scott's stories are dull and dilatory, it is
not because they are giants but because they are hunchbacks or cripples.
Scott was very far indeed from being a perfect writer, but I do not
think that it can be shown that the large and elaborate plan on which
his stories are built was by any means an imperfection. He arranged his
endless prefaces and his colossal introductions just as an architect
plans great gates and long approaches to a really large house. He did
not share the latter-day desire to get quickly through a story. He
enjoyed narrative as a sensation; he did not wish to swallow a story
like a pill that it should do him good afterwards. He desired to taste
it like a glass of port, that it might do him good at the time. The
reader sits late at his banquets. His characters have that air of
immortality which belongs to those of Dumas and Dickens. We should not
be surprised to meet them in any number of sequels. Scott, in his heart
of hearts, probably would have liked to write an endless story without
either beginning or close.
Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore, mysterious man. He will never
be understood until Romance is understood, and that will be only when
Time, Man, and Eternity are understood. To say that Scott had more than
any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these
days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises
from one fundamental mistake--the idea that romance is in some way a
plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the
outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have
grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life but
absolutely in the centre of it. The centre of every man's existence is a
dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like
toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege
and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
The boast of the realist (applying what the reviewers call his scalpel)
is that he cuts into the heart of life; but he makes a very shallow
incision if he only reaches as deep as habits and calamities and sins.
Deeper than all these lies a man's vision of himself, as swaggering and
sentimental as a penny novelette. The literature of candour unearths
innumerable weaknesses and elements of lawlessness which is called
romance. It perceives superficial habits like murder and dipsomania, but
it does not perceive the deepest of sins--the sin of vanity--vanity
which is the mother of all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin that
is not shared with any boon companion, or whispered to any priest.
In estimating, therefore, the ground of Scott's pre-eminence in romance
we must absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that romance or
adventure are merely materialistic things involved in the tangle of a
plot or the multiplicity of drawn swords. We must remember that it is,
like tragedy or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark and
elemental reason which we can never understand, this state of the soul
is evoked in us by the sight of certain places or the contemplation of
certain human crises, by a stream rushing under a heavy and covered
wooden bridge, or by a man plunging a knife or sword into tough timber.
In the selection of these situations which catch the spirit of romance
as in a net, Scott has never been equalled or even approached. His
finest scenes affect us like fragments of a hilarious dream. They have
the same quality which is often possessed by those nocturnal
comedies--that of seeming more human than our waking life--even while
they are less possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his daughter and the
old beggar crouching in a cranny of the cliff as night falls and the
tide closes around them, are actually in the coldest and bitterest of
practical situations. Yet the whole incident has a quality that can only
be called boyish. It is warmed with all the colours of an incredible
sunset. Rob Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with Bailie
Nicol Jarvie, draws no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of the
dazzling external acts upon which contemporary romance depends, yet that
plain and humorous dialogue is full of the essential philosophy of
romance which is an almost equal betting upon man and destiny. Perhaps
the most profoundly thrilling of all Scott's situations is that in
which the family of Colonel Mannering are waiting for the carriage which
may or may not arrive by night to bring an unknown man into a princely
possession. Yet almost the whole of that thrilling scene consists of a
ridiculous conversation about food, and flirtation between a frivolous
old lawyer and a fashionable girl. We can say nothing about what makes
these scenes, except that the wind bloweth where it listeth, and that
here the wind blows strong.
It is in this quality of what may be called spiritual adventurousness
that Scott stands at so different an elevation to the whole of the
contemporary crop of romancers who have followed the leadership of
Dumas. There has, indeed, been a great and inspiriting revival of
romance in our time, but it is partly frustrated in almost every case
by this rooted conception that romance consists in the vast
multiplication of incidents and the violent acceleration of narrative.
The heroes of Mr Stanley Weyman scarcely ever have their swords out of
their hands; the deeper presence of romance is far better felt when the
sword is at the hip ready for innumerable adventures too terrible to be
pictured. The Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time to eat his supper
except in the act of leaping from a window or whilst his other hand is
employed in lunging with a rapier. In Scott's heroes, on the other hand,
there is no characteristic so typical or so worthy of honour as their
disposition to linger over their meals. The conviviality of the Clerk of
Copmanhurst or of Mr Pleydell, and the thoroughly solid things they are
described as eating, is one of the most perfect of Scott's poetic
touches. In short, Mr Stanley Weyman is filled with the conviction that
the sole essence of romance is to move with insatiable rapidity from
incident to incident. In the truer romance of Scott there is more of the
sentiment of 'Oh! still delay, thou art so fair'; more of a certain
patriarchal enjoyment of things as they are--of the sword by the side
and the wine-cup in the hand. Romance, indeed, does not consist by any
means so much in experiencing adventures as in being ready for them. How
little the actual boy cares for incidents in comparison to tools and
weapons may be tested by the fact that the most popular story of
adventure is concerned with a man who lived for years on a desert
island with two guns and a sword, which he never had to use on an enemy.
Closely connected with this is one of the charges most commonly brought
against Scott, particularly in his own day--the charge of a fanciful and
monotonous insistence upon the details of armour and costume. The critic
in the 'Edinburgh Review' said indignantly that he could tolerate a
somewhat detailed description of the apparel of Marmion, but when it
came to an equally detailed account of the apparel of his pages and
yeomen the mind could bear it no longer. The only thing to be said about
that critic is that he had never been a little boy. He foolishly
imagined that Scott valued the plume and dagger of Marmion for Marmion's
sake. Not being himself romantic, he could not understand that Scott
valued the plume because it was a plume, and the dagger because it was a
dagger. Like a child, he loved weapons with a manual materialistic love,
as one loves the softness of fur or the coolness of marble. One of the
profound philosophical truths which are almost confined to infants is
this love of things, not for their use or origin, but for their own
inherent characteristics, the child's love of the toughness of wood, the
wetness of water, the magnificent soapiness of soap. So it was with
Scott, who had so much of the child in him. Human beings were perhaps
the principal characters in his stories, but they were certainly not the
only characters. A battle-axe was a person of importance, a castle had a
character and ways of its own. A church bell had a word to say in the
matter. Like a true child, he almost ignored the distinction between the
animate and inanimate. A two-handed sword might be carried only by a
menial in a procession, but it was something important and immeasurably
fascinating--it was a two-handed sword.
There is one quality which is supreme and continuous in Scott which is
little appreciated at present. One of the values we have really lost in
recent fiction is the value of eloquence. The modern literary artist is
compounded of almost every man except the orator. Yet Shakespeare and
Scott are certainly alike in this, that they could both, if literature
had failed, have earned a living as professional demagogues. The feudal
heroes in the 'Waverley Novels' retort upon each other with a
passionate dignity, haughty and yet singularly human, which can hardly
be paralleled in political eloquence except in 'Julius Caesar.' With a
certain fiery impartiality which stirs the blood, Scott distributes his
noble orations equally among saints and villains. He may deny a villain
every virtue or triumph, but he cannot endure to deny him a telling
word; he will ruin a man, but he will not silence him. In truth, one of
Scott's most splendid traits is his difficulty, or rather incapacity,
for despising any of his characters. He did not scorn the most revolting
miscreant as the realist of to-day commonly scorns his own hero. Though
his soul may be in rags, every man of Scott can speak like a king.
This quality, as I have said, is sadly to seek in the fiction of the
passing hour. The realist would, of course, repudiate the bare idea of
putting a bold and brilliant tongue in every man's head, but even where
the moment of the story naturally demands eloquence the eloquence seems
frozen in the tap. Take any contemporary work of fiction and turn to the
scene where the young Socialist denounces the millionaire, and then
compare the stilted sociological lecture given by that self-sacrificing
bore with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy's declaration of himself,
or Athelstane's defiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of human passion
upon which high words and great phrases are the resplendent foam is just
now at a low ebb. We have even gone the length of congratulating
ourselves because we can see the mud and the monsters at the bottom. In
politics there is not a single man whose position is due to eloquence in
the first degree; its place is taken by repartees and rejoinders purely
intellectual, like those of an omnibus conductor. In discussing
questions like the farm-burning in South Africa no critic of the war
uses his material as Burke or Grattan (perhaps exaggeratively) would
have used it--the speaker is content with facts and expositions of
facts. In another age he might have risen and hurled that great song in
prose, perfect as prose and yet rising into a chant, which Meg Merrilees
hurled at Ellangowan, at the rulers of Britain: 'Ride your ways, Laird
of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram--this day have ye
quenched seven smoking hearths. See if the fire in your ain parlour
burns the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack of seven cottar
houses. Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster for that. Ye may
stable your stirks in the sheilings of Dern-cleugh. See that the hare
does not couch on the hearthstane of Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey
Bertram.'
The reason is, of course, that these men are afraid of bombast and Scott
was not. A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, just
as a man will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. As the object
of all eloquence is to find the least common denominator of men's souls,
to fall just within the natural comprehension, it cannot obviously have
any chance with a literary ambition which aims at falling just outside
it. It is quite right to invent subtle analyses and detached
criticisms, but it is unreasonable to expect them to be punctuated with
roars of popular applause. It is possible to conceive of a mob shouting
any central and simple sentiment, good or bad, but it is impossible to
think of a mob shouting a distinction in terms. In the matter of
eloquence, the whole question is one of the immediate effect of
greatness, such as is produced even by fine bombast. It is absurd to
call it merely superficial; here there is no question of superficiality;
we might as well call a stone that strikes us between the eyes merely
superficial. The very word 'superficial' is founded on a fundamental
mistake about life, the idea that second thoughts are best. The
superficial impression of the world is by far the deepest. What we
really feel, naturally and casually, about the look of skies and trees
and the face of friends, that and that alone will almost certainly
remain our vital philosophy to our dying day.
Scott's bombast, therefore, will always be stirring to anyone who
approaches it, as he should approach all literature, as a little child.
We could easily excuse the contemporary critic for not admiring
melodramas and adventure stories, and Punch and Judy, if he would admit
that it was a slight deficiency in his artistic sensibilities. Beyond
all question, it marks a lack of literary instinct to be unable to
simplify one's mind at the first signal of the advance of romance. 'You
do me wrong,' said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to Rebecca. 'Many a law, many
a commandment have I broken, but my word, never.' 'Die,' cries Balfour
of Burley to the villain in 'Old Mortality.' 'Die, hoping nothing,
believing nothing--' 'And fearing nothing,' replies the other. This is
the old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was practised by the
great worthies of antiquity. The man who cannot appreciate it goes along
with the man who cannot appreciate beef or claret or a game with
children or a brass band. They are afraid of making fools of themselves,
and are unaware that that transformation has already been triumphantly
effected.
Scott is separated, then, from much of the later conception of fiction
by this quality of eloquence. The whole of the best and finest work of
the modern novelist (such as the work of Mr Henry James) is primarily
concerned with that delicate and fascinating speech which burrows deeper
and deeper like a mole; but we have wholly forgotten that speech which
mounts higher and higher like a wave and falls in a crashing peroration.
Perhaps the most thoroughly brilliant and typical man of this decade is
Mr Bernard Shaw. In his admirable play of 'Candida' it is clearly a part
of the character of the Socialist clergyman that he should be eloquent,
but he is not eloquent, because the whole 'G.B.S.' condition of mind
renders impossible that poetic simplicity which eloquence requires.
Scott takes his heroes and villains seriously, which is, after all, the
way that heroes and villains take themselves--especially villains. It is
the custom to call these old romantic poses artificial; but the word
artificial is the last and silliest evasion of criticism. There was
never anything in the world that was really artificial. It had some
motive or ideal behind it, and generally a much better one than we
think.
Of the faults of Scott as an artist it is not very necessary to speak,
for faults are generally and easily pointed out, while there is yet no
adequate valuation of the varieties and contrasts of virtue. We have
compiled a complete botanical classification of the weeds in the
poetical garden, but the flowers still flourish neglected and nameless.
It is true, for example, that Scott had an incomparably stiff and
pedantic way of dealing with his heroines: he made a lively girl of
eighteen refuse an offer in the language of Dr Johnson. To him, as to
most men of his time, woman was not an individual, but an
institution--a toast that was drunk some time after that of Church and
King. But it is far better to consider the difference rather as a
special merit, in that he stood for all those clean and bracing shocks
of incident which are untouched by passion or weakness, for a certain
breezy bachelorhood, which is almost essential to the literature of
adventure. With all his faults, and all his triumphs, he stands for the
great mass of natural manliness which must be absorbed into art unless
art is to be a mere luxury and freak. An appreciation of Scott might be
made almost a test of decadence. If ever we lose touch with this one
most reckless and defective writer, it will be a proof to us that we
have erected round ourselves a false cosmos, a world of lying and
horrible perfection, leaving outside of it Walter Scott and that
strange old world which is as confused and as indefensible and as
inspiring and as healthy as he.
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