Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 904
I think the root of the real objection is this. The English Tories of this transition did not stand for any cause that can be loved for its own sake. All over Europe there was raging a great religious war, between real religions. The quarrel between the vision of the Republic, the inspiration of the French Revolution, on the one hand, and the local loyalties to the old anointed monarchies and religious customs on the other, was a conflict in which a man might fling himself with a flaming sincerity and simplicity on either side. It was, if you will, a quarrel between the Prophet and the Priest. It is a quarrel that is now, I am glad to say, largely reconciled; but at the time it was as genuine as that between a good Crusader and a high-minded Saracen.
A thing like that is a quarrel, but it is not a misunderstanding. The combatants understand each other; they fight each other because they understand each other. When the knights of the Crescent and the Cross crossed swords, it was not merely a case of cross purposes. When the Royalist and Republican came in conflict, it was a contradiction and not merely a collision. It belonged to what some call the world of medieval ideas; and I prefer to call the world of ideas. But the insular Toryism of the school of Pitt and Peel belongs merely to the world of modern interests, and especially of mercantile interests. The servants of that system could not throw themselves heartily into glorifying our ancient Christian past, for it would lead them back to the very last things they wanted to find — as they could see well enough, when they beheld a distinct prospect of Melrose Abbey through the Gothic gateway of Abbotsford.
It was all very well for an Irishman like Burke to throw in a word for the old chivalry of Europe; but most of his party dared not really commit themselves to recognizing the chivalry of Ireland, or even the chivalry of Spain. The Spaniards were their allies but not their friends; the Irish by this time were definitely their foes. Indeed, it is by that test that we can best judge the change that had come over Toryism. It happened in that tragic hour when the Tories lost for ever the old Cavalier sympathy with Ireland. In the early eighteenth century the greatest minds in English tradition sympathized with Irish tragedy. It was so with the great mind of Swift. It was so with the great mind of Johnson. It was not so with the very small minds of the period of Pitt and his Union — the men who denounced Ireland for its rebellion, but detested it for its loyalty.
These men were, it seems to me, cramped by something chilly and even craven in their whole political position. They were not generously on the side of either the old world or the new. They were, in the only too exact phrase, on the side of the Powers that be. The Jacobite and the Jacobin, at opposite extremes, were yet both on the side of the Powers that ought to be. The one looked back to divine right and the other forward to democratic right. But they both appealed to abstract justice: to the King who should enjoy his own again or the People that should rule itself. But the men I mean were sophists defending injustice, merely because it was strong enough to be unjust. In calling them hacks I do not mean that they had the excuse of poverty or ignorance. I mean they were servants of a master, not lieges of a king; flunkeys whose livery had long ceased to be a uniform.
XIII. On Ingeland
THE study called England which the Dean of St. Paul’s wrote not long ago has impressed me with the curious patchwork of truth and falsehood that is usually produced by his remarkable intelligence. There are few writers in whom the contrast between the two is so abrupt; few writers who in that sense put down their meaning so definitely in black and white In the matter of truth and error, he at least does not produce a mere arrangement in grey and white; he produces something as striking as a chess-board. There is no interval between the things he understands excellently and the things he refuses to understand at all. If we compare, for instance, the passage about the quality in early English literature with the passage a little later about the history of Irish politics, we should think that one was written by a philosopher and the other by a lunatic.
He writes indeed in a spirit of patriotism which amounts to a sort of cultivated prejudice; but it is a prejudice with which I sympathize. Some of the things that he says in praise of England are true without any reference to prejudice at all. Nothing could be better, for instance, than the passage in which he points out that the English are quite exceptionally free from vindictiveness. Perhaps he does not quite adequately distinguish between a readiness to forgive and a readiness to forget. But it is perfectly true that the English have given magnificent examples of both, and that they do really shine, among the nations of Christendom, with the truly Christian flame of charity. He is right again in saying that the English are not cruel; though that is not the same as saying that they have not tolerated cruelties. The truth is that the English have tolerated cruelties out of sheer good-nature. They have allowed abominable things to be done to their enemies and their subjects. But they have allowed them, not so much because they thought too badly of their enemies and their subjects as because they thought too well of their rulers and their representatives. The weakness of Dean Inge’s exposition is that he is always missing the point in cases of that kind, through a disposition to take a true compliment and treat it too much as a compliment and too little as a truth. Thus, he admits himself that the genuine kindliness of the English is a little difficult to reconcile with the ruthlessness of a penal code that survived into a comparatively humanitarian period. But he does not see that what he thinks is the contradiction is also the explanation. It is bound up with that optimism which is the temptation of the amiable, and with a consequent disposition to avoid terrible topics and turn a deaf ear to terrible tales.
But it is also bound up with another matter, which the Dean also succeeds in mentioning without fully understanding. He recognizes, as do all intelligent observers, that the English have a way of refusing to be influenced by logic; or, as some of us might say, of refusing to listen to reason. He says truly enough that England as a nation missed the meaning of most of the modern intellectual movements in Europe; and indeed, to judge by his description of them, the Dean seems to have missed the meaning of them himself. But, anyhow, he is quite right in saying that abstract theories and speculations have seldom taken any particular hold of the English. But he does not see that this again is the explanation of the anomaly of abuses like the penal code, and of the merciless laws of a merciful people. The English did not revolt earlier against the principle of certain ancient abuses, because they had no revolutionary principle to which to revolt. The softening of the old savagery in punishment has been almost entirely due to Rousseau and the French Revolution. But Rousseau did not change the world by being a sentimentalist; he only changed it by being a theorist. Kindly people in all times and places still feel compassion for evils; but it is only a new theory that can insist that they are not necessary evils.
There is another passage in which, in somewhat the same way, he manages to miss the point. He propounds the problem that the English who affect most people, even foreign people, as being simple and natural enough, considered as individuals, have yet been accused persistently, age after age, of being ‘perfidious’ in international politics. But though he propounds the problem he does not make any attempt to solve the problem. He seems quite content to say, like the very vulgarest sort of Jingo, that the legend of the perfidy of Englishmen must be a part of the malignity of foreigners. He falls in this connexion into one of two errors, to which a man of his reading and experience should be superior. He says that our foreign policy changes too frequently to be a conspiracy; though surely that alone might have created the idea that it was a breach of contract. But, as a fact, he is wrong. He is always praising aristocracy, or government by gentlemen, and he misses here one of the real arguments for it. England has, in fact, had a remarkably consistent foreign policy as compared with the revolutionary changes of the Continent. And this continuity was largely due to the old tradition of government by one traditional class. But it has extended itself throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. That is why Radicals grumbled at the policy of Gladstone in Egypt. And that is why Tories cheered aloud the policy of Snowden at the Hague.
But I believe the real cause of the charge of perfidy is something more creditable and more comprehensible. It arises from the very fact which the Dean has already noted and I have already admitted; the fact that the English are moved less by good reasons and more by good emotions. But emotions, whether good or bad, do not always last. What puzzles the foreigner about English public opinion is that it often seems to have changed entirely in a few years, without any apparent reason at all. It has changed as the mood of a man changes; and the Englishman is a very moody man. That is where he differs, as in so many essential things, from the American. Now, when the English are accused, as they have been age after age, of tiring of a war or an alliance, it is not through treachery and most certainly not through cowardice. It is simply through being bored; or, in other words, through having had a temperamental change, without any particular rules or theories to measure or correct it. I do not say that in many cases they may not have been right, and the obstinacy of more logical nations wrong. But that, I am convinced, is the real explanation of the charge of unreliability brought against our policy, in so far as it was ever a popular policy. It goes along with all the rest, and is therefore both a weakness and a strength.
I am so warmly at one with the Dean of St. Paul’s in pure sympathy with my own very sympathetic people, that I do not feel inclined to dwell on the one or two occasions when his really rabid and ridiculous prejudices appear. There is nothing to be said about his extraordinary reference to Ireland, except that it is perfectly obvious that he never read a line of Irish history in his life. But I know very well that his hatred of Ireland is not really even a hatred of Ireland. It is a hatred of something else, associated with Ireland, and something that I have no intention of bringing up here for discussion.
XIV. On Loneliness
ONE of the finer manifestations of an indefatigable patriotism has taken the form of an appeal to the nation on the subject of Loneliness. This complains that the individual is isolated in England, in a sense unknown in most other countries, and demands that something should be done at once to link up all these lonely individuals in a chain of sociability. My first feeling, I confess, was an overwhelming desire to do a bolt, like an escaping criminal, before the gigantic drag-nets of this scheme for universal camaraderie had begun to sweep the country-side. My second thoughts and feelings were more just and sympathetic; but there remained in them a reflection that often does mingle with my reflections on contemporary hustle and publicity. It all seems to me very much behind the times.
I should have entirely agreed with the suggestion if he had made it thirty years ago. Nor is it I that have changed, but the world that has changed. But the world has changed so much, in the very direction that is desired, that I should not have imagined there was anything more to desire. It is now rather difficult in England to take a lonely walk, or to find a lonely road, or, for people living in a large circle of acquaintances, to spend a lonely evening. It is perfectly true that, not very long ago, the exaggeration in England was all the other way. English Society was largely paralysed by the combination of a gentility that was the dregs of aristocracy, and a Pharisaism that was the dregs of Puritanism. Even then the Puritanism could hardly be called Protestantism, in the sense of any personal or positive religion. It was simply the sour taste in the mouth left by the medicine, or poison, of seventeenth-century Calvinism. But it remained in the mouth, and even in the expression of the mouth. That mouth was well known to waiters, cabmen, porters, and all sorts of people, especially foreign people, and the mouth did undoubtedly express many things pride and vainglory and blindness and hardness of heart but especially hardness of hearing, and a resolution not to open it in anything resembling human conversation with other human beings But thirty years ago this stupid self sufficiency was not being blamed as the cause of loneliness. Thirty years ago it was being praised as the cause of Empire; as the strong Anglo-Saxon self-respect and self-reliance which had won the glorious battle for the Suez Canal, and explained our complete and marvellous success in Ireland. And when I suggested, in those days, that this was all nonsense, when I said that nobody can rule another race merely by shutting his own mouth and eyes and ears and heart to everything, I was derided in the sensational Press of those days as a Little Englander and a sentimental anarchist. Nevertheless, I thought then, and I think I was right in thinking then, that England suffered from the lack of that natural flow of intelligent talk and pleasant public manners that can be seen in the cities of the Continent. A café was a place where even strangers could talk; and a club was a place where even friends could not talk.
I remember throwing out a fanciful suggestion, partly for fun, but partly for the sake of symbolism, which might well form a part of the great Campaign Against Solitude. I suggested that it would be a good thing for those isolated Victorian households if they had a Human Library for circulating human beings instead of books. I suggested that Mudie’s Omnibus would call once a week, depositing two or three strangers at the door; who would be duly returned when they had been adequately studied. There was a list of rules, dealing with what should happen if somebody kept Miss Brown out too long, or returned Mr. Robinson in a damaged condition. I thought that the Human Circulating Library was a good notion in those days; and I still think it was a good notion — for those days. I think that an intermittent stream of strangers through the old Victorian home would have been a good thing — for the old Victorian home. But the difficulty nowadays is not even to keep the old Victorian home. It is to keep any sort of home at all. It is to get people to see how normal and necessary and enduring, in spite of all its Victorian abuses, is the idea of the family institution and possession. Large numbers of the new generation never go about except in nameless and nomadic crowds, and profess their readiness to live anyhow and for ever in huge homeless hostels and communal camps. In the middle of all this the advocate of the Campaign Against Solitude suddenly wakes up and cries aloud that he is in a wilderness. The jazz and the saxophones answer him, but he remains in his Victorian dream, following his Anti- Victorian vision. He may be in a wilderness, but it is certainly a howling wilderness. At any rate, it must be hard for him to believe that he is in a hermitage.
All this seems to me like a man coming to life in the middle of the Great War, and declaring that he can endure no longer the Quakerish dullness of the long peace of Queen Victoria. It is like a man appearing suddenly in the streets of Bolshevist Moscow, and shouting aloud that he is going to put an end to the superstitious autocracy by blowing up the Czar. His remarks are forcible and perhaps even justifiable in themselves; but they do not seem to be fitted with any exactitude into the circumstances around him. If English people really are still frightened of society and frozen into solitude, I am entirely on the side of the gentleman who wishes to make them more sociable. But I have a suspicion that what they are really likely to lose just now is not sociability, but solitude. And I am firmly and fanatically against their losing solitude. I am furiously and savagely opposed to being robbed of my own solitude. And it seems to me that the general trend of social life at present is rather to be a great deal too social, and to forget the real social uses of solitude.
That is the advantage, if I may say so, of having for a philosophy a religion instead of a fashion. Those whose faith is only fashion always make the world much worse than it is. They always make men more solitary when they are too solitary. They always make men more sociable when they are too sociable. But I do not worship either solitude or sociability, and I am in a position of intellectual independence for the purpose of judging when either tendency goes too far. Puritanism made a man too individual, and had its horrible outcome in Individualism. Paganism makes a man too collective, and its extreme outcome is in Communism. But I am neither a Puritan nor a Pagan, and I have lived just long enough to see the whole of England practically transformed from Puritanism to Paganism. It is not surprising if the cure for the first is not exactly the same as the cure for the second. But there could not be a better example of the balance of a permanent philosophy than the present merely temporary need to insist on the case for solitude.
