Part 5

I wondered often, when I was in America, why I saw so many old or middle-aged husbands with girl-wives. People told me that the cost of living is so high in America that young men cannot afford to marry young girls, but must either marry older and richer women or refrain from marriage until they are middle-aged. Young women, so I was told, must marry the elderly and the bald, the slack and the flabby because, otherwise, they cannot hope for a good time until they are no longer of an age to enjoy it. I do not much esteem young women who refuse the great adventure of marriage with young, poor men in order that they may have a good time with unenthusiastic, tamed and middle-aged men, especially when I remember that a good time in such circumstances means only a fatly comfortable one, being well-fed, well-housed and well-clothed without ever having had the fun of fighting for such comforts. But I am not entirely convinced by the arguments which were put to me in explanation of this singular and unnatural conjunction of the young and the middle-aged. There may be truth in the statement that American girls marry elderly men for the comfort they receive, but I doubt whether the elderly men marry for that reason. I am very certain that such marriages are made because the men are romantic and will not believe that the young girl's "charming ways" will not be retained by her when she is no longer young. The plain and undeniable fact is that elderly men marry girls because they cannot believe that a girl who has foolish habits will not cease to have them when she is older. The romantic is a man who is everlastingly hoping for the best, everlastingly striving to obtain the best. A romantic realist is a man who, while striving for the best, knows that he may only obtain the worst. The sentimentalist is a man who removes himself from the region of reality and refuses to admit that there is a worst, who insists that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Mr. Arnold Bennett is a romantic realist, with a slight tendency towards sentimentalism.

IV

His romantic realism seems to plunge desperately into sentimentalism when he contemplates very old age and death. Dr. Johnson had a strange horror of death, "so much so, Sir," as he said to Boswell, "that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it." But he achieved quietness of mind when his end came and his last recorded words were of a benignant character. "God bless you, my dear!" he said to Miss Morris, forbidden by his faithful negro servant, Francis, to come nearer to his bed than the outer room. Mr. Bennett seldom, if ever, permits his very old people to die placidly. Their disappointments press hardly upon them, if they are not prevented from remembering them by senility or gross disease. Paralysis claims many of them. Age does not beautify them nor bring peace to them, nor do they face their end with undiminished heads. He is remarkably consistent in this view of old age and death, and perhaps it is natural that he should regard it so gloomily when one remembers how completely he is enthralled by youth. But his view is an unbalanced one.

Old age is not always graceless and crabbed and unlovely. Such an old man as Mr. Thomas Hardy has a grace and quietness and courage discoverable only in those who have endured many things but have not been conquered by them. Mr. Bennett, however, looks upon age as a calamity which must, indeed, happen to all of us, if we live long enough, but cannot possibly be mitigated.

He is able to detect the "young, slim, perhaps beautiful" girl in the "fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque" old woman, but he cannot so easily detect the gracious old man or woman in the boy and girl. I am oppressed sometimes by the thought that if Mr. Bennett had seen the "young, slim, perhaps beautiful" girl, his romantic nature would have let him down, yielding place to his cynicism, and he would have detected the coming wrinkles on her brow, would have seen that her eyes would grow dull, might even have pointed out her tendency to obesity. "Of course, I should!" Mr. Bennett may retort, "for I am a realist as well as a romantic, and in this case, I should have been right!" And so he would, but the trouble is that, while Mr. Bennett romantically and rightly sees the slim, perhaps beautiful girl in the fat old woman, he always realistically and wrongly sees the fat old woman in the slim young girl! I think that the spirit of "the Five Towns" is entirely responsible for the fact that Mr. Bennett never sees beauty in age. It is a harsh, acquisitive spirit, busy principally in the accumulation of material things (despite the fact that it produces lovely pottery) and inclined to measure a man's worth by the amount of his fortune. The leisurely and gracious things of life are not the immediate or even the ultimate concerns of life in "the Potteries," and old age is likely, in such places, to be harsh and acquisitive. When men and women, who have spent their activities entirely in money-making, reach the age at which they possess much money but are no longer able to employ themselves in its acquisition, they become crabbed, unlovely, mean, for they have no resources. You cannot derive pleasure from literature or music or painting or any other art when you bring to its consideration only the fag-end of your life. One has seen men who were notorious among their neighbours for their hard work--always engaged in their employment from early morning until late night--seldom, if ever, resting or taking holiday. One has seen these men, after they have retired from business, so helpless without their work to occupy their minds that they steadily declined into a condition of misery which brought about premature death! They lived for one thing, and when that thing was no longer available for them, they perished because they had no other resources and it was too late to acquire any! Mr. Bennett must have seen such men many times during his early years in "the Five Towns" and the pitiful spectacle so impressed his mind that old age has become to him a terrifying thing, a complete debâcle of the brain and energies. This life, this youth, is so wonderful, so full of romantic possibilities, that age and death seem to him merely obscene interruptions of an enthralling spectacle.

V

Once only, so far as I can discover, did he make a poem. It was published in _The English Review_ in the brave days when that magazine was edited by Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, and since it is singularly characteristic, as a poem ought to be, of its author's outlook on life, I quote it here in full. But first I must affirm my belief that _The English Review_, under the editorship of Mr. Hueffer, was the greatest magazine that this world has ever known. That is a tremendous title to claim for any magazine, but I doubt whether any one, familiar with great magazines, will seriously dispute it. The title of Mr. Bennett's poem is "Town and Country." Here it is:

God made the country, and man made the town. And so--man made the doctor, God the clown; God made the mountain, and the ants their hill, Where grinding servitudes each day fulfil. God doubtless made the flowers, while in the hive Unnatural bees against their passions strive. God made the jackass and the bounding flea; I render thanks to God that man made me. Let those who recognize God's shaping power Here but not there, in tree but not in tower, In lane and field, but not in street and square, And in man's work see nothing that is fair-- Bestir their feeble fancy to the old Conception of a "country" made by God; Where birds perceive the wickedness of strife Against the winds, and lead the simple life Nestless on God's own twigs; and squirrels, free From carking care, exist through February On nuts that God has stored. Let them agree To leave the fields to God for just a year, And then of God's own harvest make good cheer.

If one were a sentimentalist, one could describe that poem as a sign of a blankly materialistic mind, with a turn for blasphemy, but if one is what one ought to be, a romantic with a sense of reality, it will appear to be a confession of faith in God _and_ man.

VI

Mr. Bennett, of all the men of letters with whom I am acquainted, not even excluding Mr. Shaw, is the most generous and kindly to young people. Mr. Wells likes young people, but his interest in them is curiously impersonal. He likes youth in a lump, so to speak, rather than youth in the individual, just as he seems to love mankind more than he likes any man. But Mr. Bennett likes _you_, the youth, personally. He is happier on the whole with young people than he is with their elders, and he assiduously seeks their society. He is amused by their extravagances, but not to the extent of sneering at them. He likes youth to be dandiacal, to have an air, to be arrogant, but not to be ill-bred or pretentious or third-rate. In spite of his notable kindness, he can be merciless to humbugs, and stories are told of devastating things said by him to presumptuous persons and fools. The blunt speech of "the Five Towns" is native to his tongue, and he passes judgment without mincing his words. He has a dry sort of wit which is remarkably helped by a slight hesitation in his speech, and his general conversation, without being markedly distinguished, is entertaining and agreeable in a way that is very elusive when put upon paper. It is natural, perhaps, that a man who loves youth so much as he does should have a more potent sense of the present and of the future than of the past, and this accounts for the fact that his books and pictures are chiefly modern. I imagine that he has a greater number of books and pictures by young authors and painters than any other man of his calibre in England. He loves music, but is not "highbrow" about it, and he has a passion for dancing which threatens now to keep him jigging through ballrooms for the rest of his life. He paints quite charming water-colour pictures, and is so fond of the sea that the surest way in which any one can lose his friendship is to accompany him for a trip on his yacht and be sea-sick during it! He is a keen man of business, and he is full of contempt for the rather sloppy-minded man of letters who allows himself to be worsted in a bargain. Most men of quality are lonely men, oddly isolated in spirit, and Mr. Bennett is not an exception to the rule, but more than his compeers, I think, he is a companionable person in a small group, chiefly because of that romantic interest he has in all things, animate and inanimate. He has a wider knowledge of books than most men of letters. Most men of letters, indeed, are remarkably ignorant of books. And he has the courage, the supreme courage, to do what no other literary man I have ever met has the courage to do: he keeps a gramophone. He likes the savor of life, and life for him includes the pictures of Corot and the gramophone and French poetry and the novels of George Moore and newspapers and motor-cars and Balzac and Bernard Shaw and the right brand of French beans. How can such a man help being romantic!

G. K. CHESTERTON

I

There is a legend, much beholden to Shakespeare, that learning and leanness are akin to each other, while dull wits flourish in company with obesity. The curious submission sometimes made by Shakespeare to common prejudices and ignorance, glorified by the name of legend, caused him too often to forget the obligation of the aristocrat to think for himself, and remember only to think with the mob; and the singular fact about this forgetfulness of his is that when he chose to think with the mob, he nearly always did so when the mob was in the wrong. He preferred the judgment of the street to the judgment of informed minds when he wrote "Richard the Third," and allowed himself to malign that excellent and most capable prince and monarch. Richard was one of the ablest of the kings of England, but Shakespeare, forgetting his obligations to his own genius, portrays him as a pervert with a mania for blood. He yields to the common view in his references to fat men. Falstaff is fat and flighty and a coward, a drunkard, a braggart and a misleader of young princes, although the prototype of Sir John was himself a man of known courage. Cassius was deemed to think too much because he had a lean and hungry look. Julius Cæsar desired the society of fat men who, presumably, indulged but seldom in thought and never in any that could be called dangerous. Fat men are endowed with but one tolerable virtue: that of good nature; and if any fat men ever enters heaven, it will be because of his equable temper and in spite of his corpulence.

Mr. Chesterton is a fat man. There is a rumour in England that many Americans felt they had been defrauded of their money when they went to hear him lecture lately because he was hardly so fat as they had been led to believe! He certainly is not so bulky now, because of a serious illness, as he was when I first knew him, but in those days he was undeniably an enormous man. And in himself he is a complete refutation of the legend that fat men are dull men. Dr. Johnson was another fat man whose large flesh covered a large intellect. Dr. Johnson, indeed, was so able a man that, in spite of an incorrigibly lazy character, which kept him abed of mornings when he ought to have been improving the shining hour, he compiled a dictionary with little assistance which, so Frenchmen said, would have engaged the labours of forty French scholars for a long time.

These legends about men of wit and dull men need to be revised. There have been as many fat men of genius as there have been lean men of genius. There have been as many epicurean geniuses as there have been ascetic geniuses. My experience is that men of great mental energy are fonder of their food than many men with torpid minds; and some of the ablest men I know are excessively addicted to the pleasures of the table. Mr. Shaw is a fastidious feeder, with odd likes and dislikes, but no one could say that he is indifferent to what he eats. It is, I think, an ironic commentary on the legend that fat men are lacking in cleverness, that much the cleverest of those who oppose the opinions of the lean Mr. Shaw is the fat Mr. Chesterton.

Mr. Chesterton, was sent into the world by an All-Just God for the exclusive purpose of saying the opposite to Mr. Shaw. With the most complimentary intention I say that Mr. Chesterton's job in the world is, when Mr. Shaw speaks, to reply, "On the contrary!..." He has to restore the balance which Mr. Shaw very vigorously disturbs. Mr. Chesterton is considerably younger than Mr. Shaw, much younger than most people, on seeing him, imagine him to be. He was born in London in 1874. His book on Browning was published when he was twenty-nine, and "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" when he was thirty. The bulk of his work, and certainly the best of it, with the exception of the "Short History of England," was published before he was forty. The bulk, and certainly the best, of Mr. Shaw's work was published after he had passed his fortieth year. A critic comparing the two writers ought to remember that Mr. Shaw's work is mainly that of a mature man, whereas that of Mr. Chesterton is mainly the work of a young man.

II

Gilbert Keith Chesterton is commonly known as a writer of paradox. He is something of a paradox himself, for he is half-Scotch, half-French, and wholly English. This paradox is not any more startling than the fact that yellow and blue, when mixed together, become green. England is half-way between Scotland and France! He handles paradox very skilfully, but there are times when he imagines he is making a paradox and is only making a pun; and there are other times when he is merely making nonsense. He states in a book called "What's Wrong With the World" that "the prime truth of woman, the universal mother" is "that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." That is singular paradox! I can understand a prime truth which declares that a thing is worth doing, even if it be done badly, but I cannot understand a prime truth which seems to make a merit of bad workmanship.

Elsewhere in the same book, he says that "submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is servility." The proper commentary on that paradox can only be made by a soldier. I can assure Mr. Chesterton that the discipline of a weak man is the nearest approach to tyranny I know, and it flies to pieces in times of great distress. Your strong man can hold thoroughly frightened men to their manhood with a word and a wave of the hand, but your weak man demoralizes them with the fretful tyranny which he calls strength. The submission of strong men to a weak man may be called discipline, but it would be better named self-assurance. But in the field itself, when authority and strength are needed, that weak man is quietly pushed into the background, and the really strong man, although he may be a private soldier, takes command. One can, of course, pick holes in many of Mr. Chesterton's paradoxes in that manner, but it is profitless to do so. Our work now is to discover what is of value in his doctrine and to describe what is unsound in it.

Roughly, one may say that Mr. Chesterton stands for the common man against the very clever man. He believes more in the People than he believes in Particular Persons. As he himself would say, he trusts Man more than he trusts any man, a statement which reads better than it sounds. He believes in tradition, even in legend, which is the wisdom accumulated by Man, not out of his mind so much as out of his experience. He believes in the institution of private property, provided that the property is widely distributed. In other words, he believes in what is called Peasant Proprietorship. He does not believe in Progress as Mr. Wells, for example, believes in it, and he will tell you very emphatically that the common man was happier in the Middle Ages than he is to-day. There are times when it seems to me that Mr. Chesterton's "common man" is as mythical as the "average man" of the newspapers and the "economic man" of the economists; and I am very dubious about the happiness of the poor people of the Middle Ages. It would be foolish to carry one's doctrine too far, but if there is anything in this theory of Man deriving wisdom from experience, surely it is reasonable to suppose that human beings, having discovered a means of living which ensures some comfort and security to them, will not easily be deprived of it. Mr. Chesterton asks us to believe that the "common" man permitted the rich lord to rob him of his rights almost in ignorance of the fact that he was being robbed of them. It is just as probable that he was ignorant of them because he never had them.

Mr. Chesterton believes, too, in what he calls "the ancient and universal things" as against what he calls "the modern and specialist things." He has invented a theory which establishes man as the great specialist and woman as the great amateur, and he would keep woman out of the polling-booth, not because the vote is too good for her, but because it is not good enough. He demands that the woman shall stay in the home, not for the Teutonic reason that she is inferior to man and must work in a narrow area, but for the Chestertonic reason that she is capable of more varied work than man and can only find adequate range for her variety in the broad dominions of the home. "Women were not kept at home," he says, "in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept home in order to keep them broad." The effort must seem to many persons to have been a singularly unsuccessful one, but Mr. Chesterton will have none of this sophistry. "I do not even pause to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was a general servant," he asserts; discovering in her "generalness" a virtue where others would discover only a certainty of incompetence and muddle.

If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then, as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology and hygiene--I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborous, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

I have quoted that extensive passage because it is a good example of Mr. Chesterton's style and his thought. It is a mixture of soundness and unsoundness, in which the two things merge so imperceptibly that there is difficulty in distinguishing the one from the other. It is not easy to see why the stenographer, travelling to an office every morning at the same hour by the same underground railway, and typing more or less the same sort of letter for a specified number of hours before she returns every evening by the same underground railway to the home from which she set out in the morning, should be more broad-minded than the woman who stays at home performing a variety of jobs; and perhaps Mr. Chesterton is justified in his faith by the fact that the stenographer is most eager to escape from the office to the home by the way of marriage.

Nevertheless, I suspect that the home is not quite the broadening influence Mr. Chesterton declares it to be, and Mr. Chesterton himself provides me with the ground for my suspicion. To be Queen Elizabeth within a certain area may be enlarging for the mind. To be Whiteley (or Marshal Field, in America) within a certain area may be enlarging for the mind. To be Aristotle within a certain area may he enlarging for the mind. But to be Queen Elizabeth _and_ Whiteley _and_ Aristotle within a certain area is paralyzing for the mind. The stenographer who does one thing every day, has time to think of many things: the wife and mother who does many things every day has time to think of nothing. I do not believe that the stenographer, who accepts the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, regards the drudgery of them as an unparalleled opportunity for exhibiting her versatility; and I have observed that the people who are most keen on such "modern and specialist things" as labour-saving devices, are just those women who, in Mr. Chesterton's judgment, should be most reluctant to accept them.

III

His praise of the "ancient and universal things" at the expense of the "modern and specialist things" leads him to say that