Part 1

THE USES OF DIVERSITY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

CHARLES DICKENS ALL THINGS CONSIDERED TREMENDOUS TRIFLES ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS A MISCELLANY OF MEN THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE

THE USES OF DIVERSITY

A BOOK OF ESSAYS

BY G. K. CHESTERTON

METHUEN & CO. LTD 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON

_First Published in 1920_

CONTENTS

PAGE

ON SERIOUSNESS 1

LAMP-POSTS 7

THE SPIRITS 13

TENNYSON 18

THE DOMESTICITY OF DETECTIVES 24

GEORGE MEREDITH 30

THE IRISHMAN 34

IRELAND AND THE DOMESTIC DRAMA 39

THE JAPANESE 44

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 49

THE LAWLESSNESS OF LAWYERS 54

OUR LATIN RELATIONS 61

ON PIGS AS PETS 66

THE ROMANCE OF ROSTAND 71

WISHES 75

THE FUTURISTS 80

THE EVOLUTION OF EMMA 85

THE PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 91

THE HUMOUR OF KING HEROD 96

THE SILVER GOBLETS 101

THE DUTY OF THE HISTORIAN 106

QUESTIONS OF DIVORCE 112

MORMONISM 121

PAGEANTS AND DRESS 126

ON STAGE COSTUME 132

THE YULE LOG AND THE DEMOCRAT 138

MORE THOUGHTS ON CHRISTMAS 144

DICKENS AGAIN 149

TAFFY 154

“EGO ET SHAVIUS MEUS” 159

THE PLAN FOR A NEW UNIVERSE 164

GEORGE WYNDHAM 171

FOUR STUPIDITIES 177

ON HISTORICAL NOVELS 182

ON MONSTERS 186

THE USES OF DIVERSITY

THE USES OF DIVERSITY

On Seriousness ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I do not like seriousness. I think it is irreligious. Or, if you prefer the phrase, it is the fashion of all false religions. The man who takes everything seriously is the man who makes an idol of everything: he bows down to wood and stone until his limbs are as rooted as the roots of the tree or his head as fallen as the stone sunken by the roadside. It has often been discussed whether animals can laugh. The hyena is said to laugh: but it is rather in the sense in which the M.P. is said to utter “an ironical cheer.” At the best, the hyena utters an ironical laugh. Broadly, it is true that all animals except Man are serious. And I think it is further demonstrated by the fact that all human beings who concern themselves in a concentrated way with animals are also serious; serious in a sense far beyond that of human beings concerned with anything else. Horses are serious; they have long, solemn faces. But horsey men are also serious--jockeys or trainers or grooms: they also have long, solemn faces. Dogs are serious: they have exactly that combination of moderate conscientiousness with monstrous conceit which is the make-up of most modern religions. But, however serious dogs may be, they can hardly be more serious than dog-fanciers--or dog-stealers. Dog-stealers, indeed, have to be particularly serious, because they have to come back and say they have found the dog. The faintest shade of irony, not to say levity, on their features, would evidently be fatal to their plans. I will not carry the comparison through all the kingdoms of natural history: but it is true of all who fix their affection or intelligence on the lower animals. Cats are as serious as the Sphinx, who must have been some kind of cat, to judge by the attitude. But the rich old ladies who love cats are quite equally serious, about cats and about themselves. So also the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats, also crocodiles and beetles and all kinds of things; but they were all serious and made their worshippers serious. Egyptian art was intentionally harsh, clear, and conventional; but it could very vividly represent men driving, hunting, fighting, feasting, praying. Yet I think you will pass along many corridors of that coloured and almost cruel art before you see a man laughing. Their gods did not encourage them to laugh. I am told by housewives that beetles seldom laugh. Cats do not laugh--except the Cheshire Cat (which is not found in Egypt); and even he can only grin. And crocodiles do not laugh. They weep.

This comparison between the sacred animals of Egypt and the pet animals of to-day is not so far-fetched as it may seem to some people. There is a healthy and an unhealthy love of animals: and the nearest definition of the difference is that the unhealthy love of animals is serious. I am quite prepared to love a rhinoceros, with reasonable precautions: he is, doubtless, a delightful father to the young rhinoceroses. But I will not promise not to laugh at a rhinoceros. I will not worship the beast with the little horn. I will not adore the Golden Calf; still less will I adore the Fatted Calf. On the contrary, I will eat him. There is some sort of joke about eating an animal, or even about an animal eating you. Let us hope we shall perceive it at the proper moment, if it ever occurs. But I will not worship an animal. That is, I will not take an animal quite seriously: and I know why.

Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice. That is, both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience. Suppose a thousand black slaves were sacrificed to the blackbeetle; suppose a million maidens were flung into the Nile to feed the crocodile; suppose the cat could eat men instead of mice--it could still be no more than that sacrifice of humanity that so often makes the horse more important than the groom, or the lap-dog more important even than the lap. The only right view of the animal is the comic view. Because the view is comic it is naturally affectionate. And because it is affectionate, it is never respectful.

I know no place where the true contrast has been more candidly, clearly, and (for all I know) unconsciously expressed than in an excellent little book of verse called _Bread and Circuses_ by Helen Parry Eden, the daughter of Judge Parry, who has inherited both the humour and the humanity in spite of which her father succeeded as a modern magistrate. There are a great many other things that might be praised in the book, but I should select for praise the sane love of animals. There is, for instance, a little poem on a cat from the country who has come to live in a flat in Battersea (everybody at some time of their lives has lived or will live in a flat in Battersea, except, perhaps, the “prisoner of the Vatican”), and the verses have a tenderness, with a twist of the grotesque, which seems to me the exactly appropriate tone about domestic pets:

And now you’re here. Well, it may be The sun _does_ rise in Battersea Although to-day be dark; Life is not shorn of loves and hates While there are sparrows on the slates And keepers in the Park. And you yourself will come to learn The ways of London; and in turn Assume your Cockney cares Like other folk that live in flats, Chasing your purely abstract rats Upon the concrete stairs.

That is like Hood at his best; but it is, moreover, penetrated with a profound and true appreciation of the fundamental idea that all love of the cat must be founded on the _absurdity_ of the cat, and only thus can a morbid idolatry be avoided. Perhaps those who appeared to be witches were those old ladies who took their cats too seriously. The cat in this book is called “Four-Paws,” which is as jolly as a gargoyle. But the name of the cat must be something familiar and even jeering, if it be only Tom or Tabby or Topsy: something that shows man is not afraid of it. Otherwise the name of the cat will be Pasht.

But when the same poet comes accidentally across an example of the insane seriousness about animals that some modern “humanitarians” exhibit, she turns against the animal-lover as naturally and instinctively as she turns to the animal. A writer on a society paper had mentioned some rich woman who had appeared on Cup Day “gowned” in some way or other, and inserted the tearful parenthesis that “she has just lost a dear dog in London.” The real animal-lover instantly recognizes the wrong note, and dances on the dog’s grave with a derision as unsympathetic as Swift:

Dear are my friends, and yet my heart still light is, Undimmed the eyes that see our set depart, Snatched from the Season by appendicitis Or something quite as smart.

But when my Chin-Chin drew his latest breath On Marie’s outspread apron, slow and wheezily, I simply sniffed, I could not take _his_ death So Pekineasily....

... Grief courts these ovations, And many press my sable-suèded hand, Noting the blackest of Lucile’s creations Inquire, and understand.

It is that balance of instincts that is the essence of all satire: however fantastic satire may be, it must always be potentially rational and fundamentally moderate, for it must be ready to hit both to right and to left at opposite extravagances. And the two extravagances which exist on the edges of our harassed and secretive society to-day are cruelty to animals and worship of animals. They both come from taking animals too seriously: the cruel man must hate the animal; the crank must worship the animal, and perhaps fear it. Neither knows how to love it.

Lamp-Posts ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In contemplating some common object of the modern street, such as an omnibus or a lamp-post, it is sometimes well worth while to stop and think about why such common objects are regarded as commonplace. It is well worth while to try to grasp what is the significance of them--or rather, the quality in modernity which makes them so often seem not so much significant as insignificant. If you stop the omnibus while you stop to think about it, you will be unpopular. Even if you try to grasp the lamp-post in your effort to grasp its significance, you will almost certainly be misunderstood. Nevertheless, the problem is a real one, and not without bearing upon the most poignant politics and ethics of to-day. It is certainly not the things themselves, the idea and upshot of them, that are remote from poetry or even mysticism. The idea of a crowd of human strangers turned into comrades for a journey is full of the oldest pathos and piety of human life. That profound feeling of mortal fraternity and frailty, which tells us we are indeed all in the same boat, is not the less true if expressed in the formula that we are all in the same bus. As for the idea of the lamp-post, the idea of the fixed beacon of the branching thoroughfares, the terrestrial star of the terrestrial traveller, it not only could be, but actually is, the subject of countless songs.

Nor is it even true that there is something so trivial or ugly about the names of the things as to make them commonplace in all connexions. The word “lamp” is especially beloved by the more decorative and poetic writers; it is a symbol, and very frequently a title. It is true that if Ruskin had called his eloquent work “The Seven Lamp-Posts of Architecture” the effect, to a delicate ear, would not have been quite the same. But even the word “post” is in no sense impossible in poetry; it can be found with a fine military ring in phrases like “The Last Post” or “Dying at his Post.” I remember, indeed, hearing, when a small child, the line in Macaulay’s “Armada” about “with loose rein and bloody spur rode inland many a post,” and being puzzled at the picture of a pillar-box or a lamp-post displaying so much activity. But certainly it is not the mere sound of the word that makes it unworkable in the literature of wonder or beauty. “Omnibus” may seem at first sight a more difficult thing to swallow--if I may be allowed a somewhat gigantesque figure of speech. This, it may be said, is a Cockney and ungainly modern word, as it is certainly a Cockney and ungainly modern thing. But even this is not true. The word “omnibus” is a very noble word with a very noble meaning and even tradition. It is derived from an ancient and adamantine tongue which has rolled it with very authoritative thunders: _quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus_. It is a word really more human and universal than republic or democracy. A man might very consistently build a temple for all the tribes of men, a temple of the largest pattern and the loveliest design, and then call it an omnibus. It is true that the dignity of this description has really been somewhat diminished by the illogical habit of clipping the word down to the last and least important part of it. But that is only one of many modern examples in which real vulgarity is not in democracy, but rather in the loss of democracy. It is about as democratic to call an omnibus a bus as it would be to call a democrat a rat.

Another way of explaining the cloud of commonplace interpretation upon modern things is to trace it to that spirit which often calls itself science but which is more often mere repetition. It is proverbial that a child, looking out of the nursery window, regards the lamp-post as part of a fairy-tale of which the lamplighter is the fairy. That lamp-post can be to a baby all that the moon could possibly be to a lover or a poet. Now, it is perfectly true that there is nowadays a spirit of cheap information which imagines that it shoots beyond this shining point, when it merely tells us that there are nine hundred lamp-posts in the town, all exactly alike. It is equally true that there is a spirit of cheap science, which is equally cocksure of its conclusiveness when it tells us that there are so many thousand moons and suns, all much more alike than we might have been disposed to fancy. And we can say of both these calculations that there is nothing really commonplace except the mind of the calculator. The baby is much more right about the flaming lamp than the statistician who counts the posts in the street; and the lover is much more really right about the moon than the astronomer. Here the part is certainly greater than the whole, for it is much better to be tied to one wonderful thing than to allow a mere catalogue of wonderful things to deprive you of the capacity to wonder. It is doubtless true, to a definite extent, that a certain sameness in the mechanical modern creations makes them actually less attractive than the freer recurrences of nature; or, in other words, that twenty lamp-posts really are much more like each other than twenty trees. Nevertheless, even this character will not cover the whole ground, for men do not cease to feel the mystery of natural things even when they reproduce themselves almost completely, as in the case of pitch darkness or a very heavy sleep. The mere fact that we have seen a lamp-post very often, and that it generally looked very much the same as before, would not of itself prevent us from appreciating its elfin fire, any more than it prevents the child.

Finally, there is a neglected side of this psychological problem which is, I think, one aspect of the mystery of the morality of war. It is not altogether an accident that, while the London lamp-post has always been mild and undistinguished, the Paris lamp-post has been more historic because it has been more horrible. It has been a yet more revolutionary substitute for the guillotine--yet more revolutionary, because it was the guillotine of the mob, as distinct even from the guillotine of the Republic. They hanged aristocrats upon it, including (unless my memory misleads me) that exceedingly unpleasant aristocrat who promulgated the measure of war economy known as “Let them eat grass.” Hence it happened that there has been in Paris a fanatical and flamboyant political newspaper actually called _La Lanterne_, a paper for extreme Jacobins. If there were a paper in London called the _Lamp-Post_, I can only imagine it as a paper for children. As for my other example, I do not know whether even the French Revolution could manage to do anything with the omnibus; but the Jacobins were quite capable of using it as a tumbril.

In short, I suspect that Cockney things have become commonplace because there has been so long lacking in them a certain savour of sacrifice and peril, which there has been in the nursery tale, for all its innocence, and which there has been in the Parisian street, for all its iniquity.

The new wonder that has changed the world before our eyes is that all this crude and vulgar modern clockwork is most truly being used for a heroic end. It is most emphatically being used for the slaying of a dragon. It is being used, much more unquestionably than the lantern of Paris, to make an end of a tyrant. It was a cant phrase in our cheaper literature of late to say that the new time will make the romance of war mechanical. Is it not more probable that it will make the mechanism of war romantic? As I said at the beginning, the things themselves are not repulsively prosaic; it was their associations that made them so; and to-day their associations are as splendid as any that ever blazoned a shield or embroidered a banner. Much of what made the violation of Belgium so violent a challenge to every conscience lay unconsciously in the fact that the country which had thus become tragic had often been regarded as commonplace. The unpardonable sin was committed in a place of lamp-posts and omnibuses. In similar places has been prepared the just wrath and reparation; and a legend of it will surely linger even in the omnibus that has carried heroes to the mouth of hell, and even in the lamp-post whose lamp has been darkened against the dragon of the sky.

The Spirits ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The magazines continue to abound in articles about Spiritualism. Those articles which expose and explode Spiritualism are certainly calculated to make converts to that novel creed; but fortunately the balance is redressed by the articles which defend and expound Spiritualism, which will probably make any thoughtful convert hastily recant his conversion. I believe myself that nothing but advantage can accrue to Spiritualism from all criticisms founded on Materialism. I think there is a mystical minimum in human history and experience, which is at once too obscure to be explained and too obvious to be explained away. It may be admitted that a miracle is rarer than a murder; but they are made obscure by somewhat similar causes. Thus a medium will insist on a dark room; and a murderer is said to have a slight preference for a dark night. A medium is criticized for not submitting to a sufficient number of scientific and impartial judges; and a murderer seldom collects any considerable number of impartial witnesses to testify to his performance. Many supernatural stories rest on the evidence of rough unlettered men, like fishermen and peasants; and most criminal trials depend on the detailed testimony of quite uneducated people. It may be remarked that we never throw a doubt on the value of ignorant evidence when it is a question of a judge hanging a man, but only when it is a question of a saint healing him. Morbid and hysterical people imagine all sorts of ghosts and demons that do not exist. Morbid and hysterical people also imagine all sorts of crimes and conspiracies that do not exist. A great many spiritual communications may be auto-suggestions; and a great many apparent murders may be suicides. But there is a limit to the probability of self-destruction; so there is of self-deception.

Now I think it well worth while to concentrate our common sense, not on where these messages come from, or why they come, but simply on the messages. Let us consider the thing itself about which there is no doubt at all. Let us consider, not whether spirits can speak to us, or how they speak, but simply what they say, or are supposed to say. If spirits in heaven, or scoundrels on earth, or fiends somewhere else, have brought us a new religion, let us look at the new religion on its own merits. Well, this is the sort of thing the spirits are supposed to write down, and very possibly do write down:

“You make death an impenetrable fog, while it is a mere golden mist, torn easily aside by the shafts of faith, and revealing life as not only continuous but as not cut in two by a great change. I cannot express myself as I wish.... It is more like leaving prison for freedom and happiness. Not that your present life lacks joy; it is all joy, but you have to fight with imperfections. Here, we have to struggle only with lack of development. There is no evil--only different degrees of spirit.”

The interrogator, Mr. Basil King, who narrates his experiences in an interesting article in _Nash’s Magazine_, proceeds to ask whether the lack of development is due to the highly practical thing we call sin. To this the spirit replies: “They come over with the evil, as it were, cut out, and leaving blanks in their souls. These have by degrees to be filled with good.”

Now I will waive the point whether death is a mist or a fog or a front door or a fire-escape or any other physical metaphor; being satisfied with the fact that it is there, and not to be removed by metaphors. But what amuses me about the spirit is that for him it is both there and not there. Death is non-existent in one sentence, and of the most startling importance six sentences afterwards. The spirit is positive that our existence is _not_ cut in two by a great change, at the moment of death. But the spirit is equally positive, a little lower down, that the whole of our human evil is instantly and utterly cut out of us, and all at the moment of death. If a man suddenly and supernaturally loses about three-quarters of his ordinary character, might it not be described as “a great change”? Why does so enormous a convulsion happen at the exact moment of death, if death is non-existent and not to be considered? The Spiritualist is here contradicting himself, not only by making death very decidedly a great change, but by actually making it a greater change than Dante or St. Francis thought it was. A Christian who thinks the soul carries its sins to Purgatory makes life much more “continuous” than this Spiritualist, who says that death, and death alone, alters a man as by a blast of magic. The article bears the modest title of “The Abolishing of Death”; and the spirit does say that this is possible, except when he forgets and says the opposite. He seldom contradicts himself more than twice in a paragraph. But since he says clearly that death abolishes sin, and equally clearly that he abolishes death, it becomes an interesting speculation what happens next, and especially what happens to sin: a subject of interest to many of us.