Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 1066
It has often been said that signs and portents will accompany the advent of the Millennium, or the coming of the heavenly kingdom upon earth. Oliver Wendell Holmes demanded that certain miracles should precede that apocalypse; as that raspberries and strawberries should grow bigger downwards through the box; or that lawyers should take what they would give and doctors give what they would take. I would respectfully suggest that before peace, perfect peace, reigns in the United States of Europe, we shall probably have seen some strange things. We shall see that particular sort of pacifist in our country no longer content with being at peace with the same particular sort of pacifist in every other country. We shall see him do what is really needed to avert war: attempt to understand the patriots of the other country. We shall see Earl Russell explaining the ideals of Fascism as clearly and fairly and sympathetically as he would explain the ideals of Socialism. We shall see Mr H. G. Wells fighting o’er again the hundred battles of Napoleon, shouting the war-songs of the Revolutionary War, and beginning to realise how much of the modern world which he admires, and the European unity he values, are due to those who carried the Code Napoleon to the palaces of Vienna or Madrid. We shall see the Rev. Tooting himself, of whose soul no Christian must despair, sitting down to write some rousing and romantic record of the charging chivalry of Poland. It is barely possible that all this, at the moment, may appear slightly improbable. But it is the only way in which we shall ever have international peace, and the only way in which these men can work for international peace. What they are doing at present is to consolidate all the people of one particular philosophy against all the people of the opposite philosophy. They are drawing them up like two long lines of battle. It may be defensible to prepare for war; anyhow, the peacemakers of this school are preparing for it very thoroughly.
Salute to New York
I said to somebody, as I was leaving New York and looking back at its aerial towers, that it was very lovely. I found I had only conveyed the impression that it was a very lovely place to leave. These double meanings or misunderstandings are common in such cases, and the stranger in America often feels that, while his blame sounds like insolence, his praise sounds like insincerity; or at least like irony. I remembered that I had myself been criticised, first for whitewashing Main Street in defiance of the Menckenites, and afterwards for saying that American villages were unsightly as compared with English villages. The general tendency is, however, to overrate the subtlety of the wicked foreigner. I said the skyline of New York was beautiful, because it is; and I said the ruck of the villages are ugly, because they are. The whole labyrinthine plot of perfidious Albion being thus laid bare, it occurred to me that there really is a parallel between the case of the city and of the villages; and that it offered a good opportunity of explaining to some of the more quarrelsome persons something which they did not seem to know; I mean what the quarrel was all about.
The queer thing about New York is that it goes on being new. It is the only case in which the name has not come to mean the very opposite of what it says. Nova Scotia does not sound particularly novel or particularly Scottish. New Orleans sounds older than Old Orleans. And if you meet anywhere a progressive prophet announcing the New Religion or the New Theology, you may be sure that they are about as recent and revolutionary as the New Forest. But New York is unique. It is truly to be called a vision; because a vision means something that is hardly ever visible. It is the dwelling place of a Spirit; which men may like or dislike in all kinds of ways, but which does express itself in a particular art; in an architecture that is akin to aviation. It is built out of winged stones; its architecture is like the law of gravity turned upside down. And those starry heights, those palaces riding the air like rainbows, those pale opalescent spears piercing the sky, lighter than the very light of heaven, have a meaning and are a sign. They do stand for something which the stranger, if he is wise, will recognise; however many things he may find alien to his own civilisation, however many he may think evil for any civilisation. It is a spirit not easy to name without cant, but much more real than all the cant with which it is covered... Lift up your heads, O ye gates... Lift up your hearts, O ye people.... It is a sursum corda in the national soul that is not merely false or affected.
So that even all the old rant about the Starry Flag or the Bird of Freedom was right in its instinct for images exalted and far up in air; and a man in a sort of dream, grown dizzy with that dance of towers, may somewhere against the blinding sun, see suddenly the unblinded eagle.
Now suppose somebody said to me that New York was nothing but muck and money; that it might as well be carted away; that industrial capitalism is the same everywhere, I should tell him he was wrong. Industrialism began in England; but it never ended in anything like New York. The pilgrim approaching Pudsey does not behold palaces like rainbows. The traveller leaving Wigan does not look back on opalescent loveliness. The clerk in a poor suburb of Sheffield is not necessarily dizzy with stars and starry towers. This case is unique; it is a special spiritual expression; it probably could not be replaced. That is what I should say to them about New York. And that is what I said, to the protectors of rural England, about the English village.
The point was that a thing like English country life does not spring up merely out of living in the country. It does not spring up in America, or for that matter in Asia or Africa or a great part of Europe. It is the perfect artistic expression of something English, just as the best American architecture is the expression of something American. But you will not find the first in anything called a village or the second in anything called a city. And if you let it perish, you are like men who should look on at the ruin of the last Greek god or the last Christian cathedral.
The British Beech
I am happy to say that I live in Beaconsfield; I mean, of course, that I live in Bekonsfield. I believe that there are some people who live in Beaconsfield, but I do not know where it is, and I cannot imagine why anybody should live there. By the sound of it, I should suppose that it is in some Colony, and was probably named after Disraeli who ought to have called himself Earl of Hughenden if he had followed out his own rustic, rugged and feudal dreams and not been led astray by the temptation to pick up the abandoned coronet of Burke. Now about the origin of the name of this town there is some dispute; but about the pronunciation of the name, there is no dispute whatever. There is only knowledge as possessed by those who know; and the often invincible and therefore innocent ignorance of the world outside. I need hardly say that those who know are those who are now commonly called ignorant and uneducated people. When you have heard the name of your own town for twenty years on the tongues of hedgers, ditchers, rat-catchers, gamekeepers, poachers and village idiots, then you know absolutely for certain that it is the correct pronunciation. When the intellectual aristocracy comes down to such a place and pronounces it as it is spelt, you know for a simple fact that they are wrong. If you have any real education, you know that spelling was never in the past a great part of education; that it is now treated by these people as the whole of education; simply because it is the whole of their education; or the only education they have. It never occurs to them that, while Shakespeare would write his own name in two or three totally different but equally illegible scrawls, he trusted the whole great load of his glory to the sound of words, to be spoken by living men. In dealing therefore with a word like `Beaconsfield’, they do not know how to choose between the men who can speak and the men who can only spell. It was always pronounced right. Only it is still spelt wrong.
Subject to this philological parenthesis, it is true that some at least maintain that the name is derived from an old word for a beech tree. Certainly there could be no more appropriate name and no more symbolic and inspiring thing. For the beech tree has a special representative quality in all this rolling wooded landscape, which makes up the central and southern parts of Buckinghamshire; and through the county a real relation to the country. A Sussex man, himself boiling over with enthusiasm for Sussex, once said to me of the beech-woods about my Beaconsfield home, `This is really the most English part of England; I confess that compared with this, Sussex is a thing quite separate and apart.’
We have all heard about the British oak; and I am traditional enough not to quarrel with a tradition full of many heroic memories; of Nelson dying under the low oaken beams, or Collingwood scattering the acorns that they might grow into battleships. A modern naval enthusiast, by the way, would find it difficult to scatter screws and bolts in the hope that they would turn themselves into the war-machines of today. There is something in that parable of the organic and mechanic growth. But detaching my mind as much as possible, I am forced to feel that the oak has qualities less intimately national. The oak, dedicated to Jupiter of the Romans, has the jagged angular branches that are like the bolts of Jove. Its hard texture and rectangular corners belong almost to the logic of the Latins. If I were choosing an entirely English emblem, I should choose the beech-tree. It is equally strong and expressive of strength; but the smoothness is also expressive of a certain slowness that is akin to mercy and mildness. Its curves are of the gradual sort found in everything in these parts; in the slow speech of the rustics; in the gradual curves in the hills; even far away to the downs of Hampshire and Sussex, that are the only mountains of the South. They have a power like that of lazy waves that are lifted slowly; and allow villages to grow up in their hollows, only because they are too lazy to fall. There is nothing in them of the oak-blasting thunderbolts and very little of the oaks. But here especially, in this section of Bucks, the beeches surround and overshadow us and cover our home; so that it is no accident that has called this particular stretch of England the Home Counties.
Perhaps there is something profane and unhistorical in thus suggesting the belated substitution of the British Beech for the British Oak. And yet there is an important truth in this, if used as a literary symbol; even if we would never wish it to be actually used as a pictorial emblem. For much of the English error about England, which has misled us ever since our real origins were shut off by the obscurantism of the Reformation, is expressed in the undue emphasis on the oak and the neglect of the nobler qualities of the beech. The tendency to turn John Bull into a braggart, and from that into a bully, was only too readily represented by giving him a great oaken cudgel, supposed to be as invincible as the club of Hercules. It left out all the better elements in the native temperament; the humour, the good humour and especially the good nature. These would have been much better expressed in the smoothness that can co-exist with the strength of the beech. Moreover, noble as was the Nelson legend and all the earlier part of our maritime romance, the consideration of oaks only with reference to ships did turn English thoughts too exclusively outwards to the ends of the earth, and too little inwards to England. Thus Britannia became merely a statue to be seen from afar, rather than a real woman and mother, to be made happy in her own home. Hence the dangerous neglect of agriculture and internal economic conditions from which we are already suffering. The whole thing was altogether too emblematic. The British Oak was a thing like the British Lion; but lions are really rather rare in our Buckinghamshire lanes. On the other hand, the British Beech could not suggest anything except the British Pig. The swine feed on the beech-mast; and the pig is more realistic, even if he is growing almost equally rare. The return to a real England, with real pigs for real Englishmen, would be a return to the beech-woods; which still make this town like a home.
At least, they did until recently. I shall probably be told tomorrow that several beech-forests have been removed to enable a motorist temporarily deaf and blind to go from Birmingham to Brighton.
Public Monuments
I happened to have occasion recently to behold again the celebrated monument of King Victor Emmanuel in Rome, and it turned my thoughts backwards to monuments in general, and to the controversies about our own Cenotaph. They are, as I shall suggest in a moment, rather controversies about the place, the scale, and the formal use of the Cenotaph than controversies about the Cenotaph. It might be argued that the thing itself fulfils it own laws — and limitations. It may be unfair to complain that it is thin, when it is inherent in its intentional proportions to be thin. It may be unjust to object that it is naked and negative, when it was obviously meant to be naked and negative; it may be illogical to protest that it contains no symbol of any special spiritual significance, when it was obviously most carefully designed to contain nothing of the sort. But touching the emplacement and employment of the memorial, there is a great deal more to be said.
Nobody can complain that the Victor Emmanuel monument is too thin. Its thickness has the effect of a huge fortified wall which it is difficult to get round and unthinkable to get over. What is worse, this new Citadel actually bars the way to the old and real Citadel. The original rock of Rome, the high place from which the eagles flew, is practically overshadowed by this new wall of white marble. Victor Emmanuel of Savoy appears in the perspective of topography, if not precisely of history, as a considerably more important person than Julius Caesar. The road to the temple of Capitoline Jove, up which Caesar went with his roaring Triumphs, the place of the Capitol, where he met the end of the greatest human glory, seems no longer to dominate Rome, as I believe it did before the excited Liberals of the nineteenth century planned a mountain of marble that seemed ambitious to rise higher than the Seven Hills. And somehow, with all respect and sympathy, the purpose and the ambition seem hardly to fit. A particular Piedmontese prince, not without many virtues, and certainly not without most distressing difficulties, considerable as were, doubtless, his services to United Italy, does not now, in fact, bulk quite so big in history as Julius Caesar or even many a great Latin leader like Scipio or Marius. Its proportions in relation to the Capitol and the streets of Rome may yet need some explaining. It will probably be very difficult to convince our immediate posterity that it is not a monument to Mussolini.
Those whom in England we call Victorians, or, more properly, the men of the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, are more completely misunderstood by most modern writers than if they were Ancient Britons. They are now always represented as stodgy and slow and paralysed by mere caution. The fact is that in most ways they were far too impetuous and enthusiastic. As romantic love was almost their religion, so in other ways they worshipped things, worthy indeed, but without enough discrimination between the sort of love that is fleeting and the sort of love that is lasting. They fell in love with public heroes, instead of merely following them. It is true that some return of this passion has appeared in some parts of Europe which were always specially prone to it, but I doubt whether even now the idolatries are so great as the noble idolatries of the English Victorians, and certainly not so great in England. Even in England we hear much of new movements and a need for leadership. But, with the greatest possible respect to all concerned, I doubt whether any mob actually makes a god out of Sir Oswald Mosley, as the middle-class Victorian mobs made a huge heroic legend out of Garibaldi or General Gordon. Remember that Victorianism was much more affected by its romantic side than by the later claims made on its scientific side. It was much more really moved by Carlyle than by Mill, let alone Herbert Spencer. And it did largely accept, among the apparent decay of many forms of religion, the form of religion which Carlyle invented and called ‘Hero-Worship’. And it acted on this religion, which it did not always do in relation to the other religions. The trouble is that it acted much too swiftly and ardently. It acted with a blind impetuosity which was the very reverse of stodgy. The evidence for it can be seen in many eyesores that we call public monuments. It is true that in England this is as far as their rage and madness went. In Europe as a whole, a great part of the nineteenth century might be called, and was called, the age of revolutions. It is true that the Victorians in England prided themselves on not being destructive, but only constructive. But those who have gazed on certain sculptured memorials, dedicated to eternal fame, have sometimes been tempted to think that construction can be more devastating than destruction.
By the way, may I be here excused if I enter once more a protest against that most meaningless distinction? If a man cuts down a tree and makes a mast, is he destructive or constructive? The emotional effect depends entirely on whether you happen to want a woodland shade or a sea-voyage. Except some of the Manichee heretics who attacked the Early Church, an Albigensian or two, and perhaps some of the old Russian Nihilists, I know of no political group which admits that it is destroying for the sake of destroying. And all political groups, if they are doing anything (a large assumption), are constructing by means of destroying. Compare this journalese jargon with the shrewd proverbs of popular life. It must have been a French peasant, I think, who invented the much wiser phrase: `You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.’
