Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 928
For certainly if Napoleon, or some revolutionary soldier nearly as competent as Napoleon (there may have been one or two others who could have proved competent), had not appeared to save the French Revolution from the invading forces of the aristocracies and autocracies, reaction would have shut down on the first republican hopes like a trap of iron, and all the democratic dreams that have since filled the intellect and imagination would have been utterly and perhaps finally destroyed. All that we call the modern world, with all its good and evil, was made by Napoleon; at any rate was made possible by Napoleon. And among the various products of that original revolutionary expansion was the particular theory of reconstruction which we call Socialism. I will leave Mr. Shaw to decide whether that particular product is to be classed among the good or evil products of the French Revolution. But surely nobody with historical sense can doubt that all these modern ideals of revolutionary improvement, with the purpose of social justice or equality, date from the great idealistic movement at the end of the eighteenth century. Now I take it as certain that if the Revolution had not become militant, and been successfully defended by a man of military genius, it would have been easily crushed by the old oligarchies and despotic systems; and, having been easily crushed, would have been easily forgotten. There would have remained no legend of revolutionary victory; and therefore, alas for human nature, very little of revolutionary heroism. There would probably have remained, for centuries afterwards, not a gleam of revolutionary hope. I am merely stating the historical and especially the practical probabilities. I do not discuss here how far the balance would have been for evil or good. We should doubtless have avoided many annoying forms of anarchical nonsense such as still manage to live on the tradition of the triumph of France. We should have been less troubled with some mistaken mob movements, and some much more poisonous secret societies. But we should have missed some good things as well. We should have missed social reform as the serious preoccupation of the nineteenth century, we should have missed Socialism, and we should have missed Shaw.
Now I can heartily respect, and even sympathize with, some jolly old English Tory who still regards Bonaparte as Boney. I can understand the genial reactionary, like Mr. Sapsea, who continues through all continental changes to drink the toast, ‘When the French come over, may we meet them at Dover.’ But I should hardly have thought of associating Mr. Sapsea with Mr. Shaw. And whatever may be the true story of the punishment of St. Helena, it seems rather hard on Napoleon that he should endure not only an eternal punishment, but a double punishment: one from all the reactionaries he defeated and the other from all the reformers he defended. It was the expansion of Napoleonic France that established everywhere the modern theories of civic right and equal opportunity; and the very name of that justice is the Code Napoleon. In the face of these facts, I naturally ask myself: Why does a man like Mr. Shaw hate Napoleon? Why does a man like Mr. Wells hate Napoleon? The only sincere answer is that it is the mark of the Nonconformist always to hate Napoleon.
It would take a long time to explain. A vague notion that a soldier is a naughty man; that he wears a cocked hat and sometimes even a cockade or a feather in it; that bodily fighting is always a blackguardly way of dealing with any position, however provocative; that soldiering is associated with canteens and cans; these and a thousand other things have created in the mind of the modern Puritan the mood of the modern Pacifist. We can all understand, and Napoleon himself would entirely understand, the higher sense in which it may be said that glory is vanity. But the Puritan always insists, not that glory is vanity, but that glory is infamy. He thinks this sort of action, this sort of ambition, not only the worst but the most horrible; he thinks there is no smell so foul as the smell of gunpowder. I think the smell of the hair-oil of hypocritical peace-mongering infinitely more offensive. Nobody will accuse Mr. Shaw’s work of smelling like that; but there does come from it sometimes, suddenly, this strange stale smell of the Puritan; and it is then that I can answer our old question: Do We Agree?
XXIX. On the Truth of Legends
I HAVE known all my life what is called the conflict between romance and realism, and I have always found that it was the realists who were romancing. I have found, in a fashion too curious to be a coincidence, that the romances were generally real after all. For instance, everybody knows how a boy is told that his boyish day-dreams are only day-dreams, and will not long survive in daylight; that his picturesque figures of the Red Indian or the Jolly Tar are only painted and pasteboard figures out of a toy-theatre, or melodramatic personalities out of a penny dreadful. It is taken for granted that he will begin by believing in them and end by disbelieving in them. In a number of solid historical cases, I myself began rather early to disbelieve them, and have come eventually to believe them. I seriously think that the popular sentiment that created those characters was often a tradition of truth, where the pedantic cynicism which destroyed them was often a much more deliberate perversion of truth. The tradition may have come down rather loosely and vaguely, through a long line of nurses and grandmothers. But the nurses and grandmothers were not paid to tell lies, and they did therefore, to a considerable and very valuable extent, tell the truth. The critics and historians were paid to tell lies though they may not have put the truth to themselves in quite so crude a fashion. They were academic officials of a certain academic system; achieving a fame which depended upon a fashion; successful or unsuccessful, according to the power of a theory; suiting themselves, consciously or unconsciously, to a certain school; and, when all is said, living by receiving salaries or selling books. They had not the disinterestedness or detachment of gossip. They were not merely mentioning the things they remembered, but remembering only the things they were supposed to mention. Their minds had formed a mechanical habit of recording only the things that were suited to the records, and writing only the records that were suited to the official record office. Some of them were stark liars; some of them, which is much more strange and uncanny, were honest men. But they were, at best, men telling untrue stories in the interest of the truth, or what they believed to be the truth. They were not ordinary people telling true stories, merely as stories that were curious because they were true. It is all the difference between the chronicler and the historian. And the difference is that the chronicler sometimes told fables; whereas the historian never tells fables, but only falsehoods. However this may be, I have known a curious number of cases in which mere sentimental gossip surrounded my childhood, and serious historical scholarship surrounded my manhood; and the sentimental gossip was right.
For instance, it was sentimental gossip that Mary Queen of Scots was very badly treated; or that Charles the First was to be pitied or even admired. I remember loving both the historical characters as legends, and then learning afterwards that the legends were entirely legendary. The historical realists of that time told me that the attraction of Mary Queen of Scots was merely that she was much prettier than Queen Elizabeth. They told me that the charm of the Cavalier consisted only in his wearing more picturesque clothes than the Puritan. Those who told me this were often learned, and those who had left me with the earlier impression were often ignorant; and I myself was unfathomably ignorant. I therefore believed what they told me; I proceeded to believe, to believe blindly, credulously, and in hopeless intellectual servitude; to believe in the much more fabulous fable, in the legend of the learned. I believed much more seriously — that is, much more superstitiously — in the school text-book than I had believed in the old wives’ tale. But the old wife was an old wife by the normal process of becoming a wife and growing old, and she employed the normal habit of talking to children about her childhood. But the schoolmaster was a professional schoolmaster; the schoolmaster was tied to his school; the schoolmaster was as much under discipline as the schoolboy.
In the case of Mary Queen of Scots or Charles the First, which I have mentioned, it is, of course, perfectly true that there are two sides to the story. What I complain of in the schoolmaster is that he always taught only one side of the story. So, it may be said, did the nursery story-teller. But her story was a story in the literary sense of a legend. His story was a story in the nursery sense of a lie. It was a lie in the very real sense that he was not merely reporting what he had heard, but very care fully selecting from what he had read. Of course, as I say, it is perfectly true that there is a case for the Calvinists who opposed Mary Stuart, or the later Calvinists who opposed Charles Stuart. Of course, it is arguable that Mary Stuart killed her husband, or that Charles Stuart broke his word. Of course, it is arguable that it was better for England that the Whigs should turn it into an aristocracy than that the Stuarts should turn it into an autocracy.
But that is not the point. The point is that the ignorant legend was much more true, as far as it went, than the learned legend as far as it went. To paint a portrait of Mary Queen of Scots as a lovely, unhappy, charming, and cultured lady, brutally baited by barbarous Puritans and tragically martyred by a jealous Tudor tyrant, is a process of portraiture very far from complete; but it is in its way true, even when it is not complete. To paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth as a prophetic lioness of Protestantism, upholding the Huguenots out of mere love of the Holy Scriptures, and brandishing a Bible to cow all the Papists of the world, is not a process of portraiture true but incomplete; it is simply completely untrue. It is contradicted by every fact in Elizabeth’s history, from her continuous invalidism or ill-health to her continuous intrigues about marrying Catholic princes. And the first truth, or half-truth, was a truth of tradition. The second lie, and complete lie, was a lie of scholarship. Similarly, the popular legend was not lying about the kind of atmosphere, or even the kind of glamour, surrounding King Charles and the Cavaliers. It may have been little more than a romance; the legend really recorded little more than a romance; but it was the real romance. It was not false when it represented the Cavalier with his goblet lifted and his sword drawn; ready to drink to the King, ready to die for the King. For thousands of such men did actually drink to him and did actually die for him. It was not romancing to say that the Royalist had a romantic loyalty. It would not have been romancing to say that the Puritan had a religious loyalty. He had a loyalty to the letter of Scripture, to the logic of Calvin, to the awful duty of spreading true religion.
But my schoolmasters did not tell me that the Puritan stood for religious loyalty, which is true. They told me that he stood for religious liberty, which is a lie of that mountainous and monstrous order which ignorant traditionalists call a Whopper. They were not concerned, like the traditionalists, with gathering up, however lazily, the loose fragments of a truth. They were concerned with covering up most carefully the most accidental glimpses of the truth; with so picking their words and arranging their sentences that no suspicion of the main truth of the matter should really penetrate to the reader. It is amazing to consider how carefully and how successfully they did cover up a truth so obvious and so enormous. There is, for instance, the perfectly simple fact, written in large letters across the history of two reigns and practically two revolutions, that the last Stuarts tried to establish religious toleration and the Puritans tried to prevent religious toleration. It would seem as impossible to hide so huge and simple an historic fact as to hide the fact that Nelson fought for England and Napoleon for France. Yet men like Macaulay and Green really did manage to hide it from a whole rising generation, the generation with which I myself originally rose. But, fortunately, I had learned some truths in my childhood before I began to learn lies in my boyhood. And all my subsequent knowledge has led me to prefer the pictures which honestly professed to be picturesque to the plans and diagrams which dishonestly pretended to be accurate.
XXX. On Experience
IT will be remarked that Experience, which was once claimed by the aged, is now claimed exclusively by the young. There used to be a system of morals and metaphysics that was specially known as the Experience Philosophy; but those who advanced it were grim rationalists and utilitarians who were already old in years, or, more commonly, old before their time. We all know that Experience now stands rather for the philosophy of those who claim to be young long after their time. But they preach something that may, in a sense, be called an Experience Philosophy, though some of the experiences seem to me the reverse of philosophical. So far as I can make it out, it consists of two dogmas first, that there is no such thing as right or wrong; and secondly, that they themselves have a right to experience. How they manage to have any rights if there is no such thing as right I do not know; nor do they. But perhaps the philosophy was best summed up in a phrase I saw recently in a very interesting and important American magazine, quoted from one of the more wild and fanciful of the American critics. I have not the text before me, but the substance of the remark was this. The critic demanded indignantly to know how many ordinary American novelists had any Experiences outside those of earning their bread, pottering about in a farm or a frame-house, helping to mind the baby, and so on. The question struck me as striking at the very root of all the rot and corruption and imbecility of the times.
On the face of it, of course, the whole question is rather a joke; only that these gay pleasure-seekers and revellers in the joy of life have seldom been known to see a joke. We might politely inquire exactly how much Experience is needed to equip a novelist to write novels? How many marks does he get for being vamped or for being intoxicated and which are the particular discreditable acts by which he can get credits? How many liaisons give him this singular rank as a literary liaison officer; and how many double lives does it take to constitute Life? Is it only after his fourth divorce that he may write his first novel? For my part, I do not see why the same principle should not be applied to all the other Ten Commandments as well as to that particular Commandment. It should surely be obvious that, if love affairs are necessary to the writing of this particular sort of love story, then it follows that crime is necessary to the writing of any kind of crime story. I have myself made arrangements (on paper) for no fewer than fifty-two murders in my time; they took the form of short stories; and I shall expose myself to the withering contempt of the young sages of Experience when I confess that I am not really a murderer, and have never yet committed an actual murder. And what about all the other forms of criminal Experience? Must a writer be a forger, and manufacture other men’s names before he is allowed to make his own? Must there be a journalistic apprenticeship in picking pockets as well as in picking brains; and have we to look to the establishment of an Academy of Anarchy, with the power of conferring degrees ? Novelists might proudly print after their names the letters indicating the degrees they had taken; such as F.Y.B., meaning ‘Five Years for Burglary’, or T.N.H., for ‘Twice Nearly Hanged’. Altogether it may be said that writers do not rob, but it may be fortunate that robbers do not write. It is possible that the wild and wicked criminal might, after all, make almost as good a novelist as the novelist.
It would also be easy enough to attack the fallacy upon the facts. Everybody who has any real experience knows that good writing would not necessarily come from people with many experiences. Some of the art which is closest to life has been produced under marked limitations of living. Its prestige has generally lasted longer than the splash made by sensational social figures. Jane Austen has already survived Georges Sand. Even the most modern critic, if he is really a critic, will admit that Jane Austen is really realistic, in a sense in which Georges Sand is only romantic. She was, indeed, a flaming, fashionable figure created entirely by the Romantic Movement; but Jane Austen did not belong to any movement; she does not move, but she stays. And, though I do not agree with the too common depreciation of Byron, it is true that all his somewhat excessive Experience, in the new or juvenile sense, has not prevented people feeling him to be the very reverse of realistic, and in some ways strangely unreal.
But there is, of course, a much deeper objection to the whole of this new sort of Experience Philosophy, which is quite sufficiently exposed in the very examples I quoted from the magazine. There are certainly all sorts of experiences, some great and some small. But the small ones are those which the critic imagines to be great, and the great ones are those that he contemptuously dismisses as small. There are no more universal affairs than those which he imagines to be little and local. There are no events more tremendous than those which he regards as trivial. There are no experiences more exciting than those which he dully imagines to be dull. To take his own example, a literary man who cannot see that a baby is marvellous could not see that anything was marvellous. He has certainly no earthly logical reason for regarding a movie vamp as marvellous. The movie vamp is only what happens to the baby when it goes wrong; but, from a really imaginative and intellectual standpoint, there is nothing marvellous about either of them, except what is already marvellous in the mere existence of the baby. But this sort of moralist or immoralist has a queer, half-baked prejudice to the effect that there is no good in anything until it has gone bad. It is supposed to be a part of Experience for the woman to be a vamp, but not for the woman to be a mother; although it stares us all in the face, as a stark fact of common sense, that child-bearing really is an experience, and a highly realistic experience, while the other sort of experiment may not really be an experience at all. It may be in the exact sense mere play-acting; and, as the game is now played, the main preoccupation is to prevent its ending with an addition to the cast of characters. Whatever happens, it must not be the means of bringing on the scene a new, breathing, thinking, conscious creature like a baby. That would not be Life.
