Chapters 10-12

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
contact LibriVox dot org. Alarms and Discoursions by G. K. Chesterton,

(00:24):
Chapters ten through twelve. Chapter ten, The Red Town. When
a man says that democracy is false because most people
are stupid, there are several courses which the philosopher may pursue.
The most obvious is to hit him smartly and with precision,

(00:47):
on the exact tip of the nose. But if you
have scruples, moral or physical about this course, you may
proceed to employ reason, which in this case has all
the savage solidity of a blow with the fist. It
is stupid to say that most people are stupid. It's
like saying most people are tall, when it is obvious

(01:09):
that tall can only mean taller than most people. It
is absurd to denounce the majority of mankind as below
the average of mankind. Should the man have been hammered
on the nose and brained with logic, and should he
still remain cold? A third course opens. Lead him by

(01:30):
the hand himself, half willing, towards some sunlit yet secret meadow,
and ask him who made the names of the common
wild flowers. They were ordinary people, so far as anyone knows,
who gave to one flower the name of the Star
of Bethlehem, and to another, a much commoner flower, the

(01:53):
tremendous title of the eye of Day. If you cling
to the snobbish notion that common people are prosaic, ask
any common person for the local names of the flowers,
names which vary not only from county to county, but
even from dale to dale. But curiously enough, the case

(02:14):
is much stronger than this. It will be said that
this poetry is peculiar to the country populace, and that
the dim democracies of our modern towns at least have
lost it for some extraordinary reason. They have not lost
it ordinary London slang is full of witty things said
by nobody in particular. True, the creed of our cruel

(02:37):
cities is not so sane and just as the creed
of the old countryside. But the people are just as
clever in giving names to their sins in the city
as in giving names to their joys in the wilderness.
One could not better sum up Christianity than by calling
a small, white, insignificant flower the Star of Bethlehem. But

(02:59):
then again, one not better sum up the philosophy deduced
from Darwinism than in the one verbal picture of having
your monkey up. Who first invented these violent felicities of language?
Who first spoke of a man being off his head?
The obvious comment on a lunatic is that his head

(03:19):
is off him. Yet the other phrase is far more
fantastically exact. There is about every madman a singular sensation
that his body has walked off and left the important
part of him behind. But the cases of this popular
perfection in phrase are even stronger when they are more vulgar.

(03:41):
What concentrated irony and imagination there is, for instance, in
the metaphor, which describes a man doing a midnight flitting
as shooting the moon. It expresses everything about the runaway,
his eccentric occupation, his improbable explanations, his furtive air as
of a hunter, his constant glances at the blank clock

(04:03):
in the sky. No, the English democracy is weak enough
about a number of things. For instance, it is weak
in politics, But there is no doubt that democracy is
wonderfully strong in literature. Very few books that the cultured
class has produced of late have been such good literature
as the expression painting the town red. Oddly enough, this

(04:28):
last Cockney epigram clings to my memory, for as I
was walking a little while ago around the corner near Victoria,
I realized for the first time that a familiar lamp
post was painted all over with a bright vermilion, just
as if it were trying, in spite of the obvious
bodily disqualification, to pretend that it was a pillar box.

(04:51):
I have since artificial explanations of these startling and scarlet objects,
but my first fancy was that some dissipated gentleman, on
his way home home at four o'clock in the morning,
had attempted to paint the town red and got only
as far as one lamp post. I began to make
a fairy tale about the man, And indeed this phrase

(05:12):
contains both a fairy tale and a philosophy. It really
states almost the whole truth about those pure outbreaks of
pagan enjoyment to which all healthy men have often been tempted.
It expresses the desire to have levity on a large scale,
which is the essence of such a mood. The rowdy
young man is not content to paint his tutor's door green,

(05:36):
he would like to paint the whole city scarlet. The
word which to us best recalls such gigantic esque idiocy
is the word mafeking. The slaves of that Saturnaia were
not only painting the town red, they thought they were
painting the map red, that they were painting the world red.

(05:57):
But indeed this imperial debauch has in it something worse
than mere larkiness, which is my present topic. It has
an element of real self flattery and of sin. The
Jingo who wants to admire himself is worse than the blackguard,
who only wants to enjoy himself. In a very old

(06:18):
ninth century illumination which I have seen, depicting the war
of the Rebel Angels in Heaven, Satan is represented as
distributing to his followers peacock feathers, the symbols of an
evil pride. Satan also distributed peacock feathers to his followers
on Mafeking Knight. But taking the case of ordinary pagan

(06:42):
recklessness and pleasure seeking, it is, as we have said,
well expressed in this image. First because it confays this
notion of filling the world with one private folly, and secondly,
because of the profound idea involved in the choice of color.
Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the

(07:02):
physical universe. It is the fiercest note. It is the
highest light. It is the place where the walls of
this world of ours where thinnest, and something beyond burns through.
It glows in the blood which sustains and in the
fire which destroys us, in the roses of our romance,

(07:24):
and in the awful cup of our religion. It stands
for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in first love.
Now the profligate is he who wishes to spread this
crimson of conscious joy over everything, to have excitement at
every moment, to paint everything red. He bursts a thousand

(07:46):
barrels of wine to incarnadine the streets, and sometimes, in
his last madness, he will butcher beasts and men to
dip his gigantic brushes in their blood. For it marks
the sacredness of red in nature, that it is secret
even when it is ubiquitous, like blood in the human body,

(08:07):
which is omnipresent yet invisible. As long as blood lives,
it is hidden. It is only dead blood that we see.
But the earlier parts of the rake's progress are very
natural and amusing. Painting the town red is a delightful thing.
Until it is done. It would be splendid to see
the cross of Saint Paul as red as the cross

(08:28):
of Saint George, and the gallons of red paint running
down the dome or dripping from the Nelson column. But
when it is done, when you have painted the town red,
an extraordinary thing happens. You cannot see any red at all.
I can see as any sort of vision, the successful

(08:50):
artist standing in the midst of that frightful city, hung
on all sides with the scarlet of his shame. And then,
when everything is red, he will long for a red
rose in a green hedge, and long in vain. He
will dream of a red leaf and be unable even
to imagine it. He has desecrated the divine color and

(09:12):
can no longer see it, though it is all around.
I see him, a single black figure against the red
hot hell that he is kindled, where spires and turrets
stand up like immobile flames. He is stiffened in a
sort of agony of prayer. Then the mercy of heaven

(09:34):
is loosened, and I see one or two flakes of snow,
very slowly begin to fall the furrows. As I see
the corn grow green all about my neighborhood, there rushes
on me for no reason, in particular a memory of

(09:57):
the winter. I say rushes, for that it is the
very word for the old sweeping lines of the plowfields.
From some accidental turn of a train journey or a
walking tour, I saw suddenly the fierce rush of the furrows.
The furrows are like arrows. They fly along an arc
of sky. They are like leaping animals. They vault an

(10:19):
inviolable hill and roll down the other side. They are
like battering battalions. They rush over a hill with flying
squadrons and carry it with a cavalry charge. They have
all the air of arabs sweeping a desert, of rockets,
sweeping the sky of torrents, sweeping a water course. Nothing

(10:41):
ever seems so living as those brown lines as they
shot sheer from the height of a ridge down to
their still whirl of the valley. They were swifter than arrows,
fiercer than arabs, more riotous and rejoicing than rockets. And
yet they were only thin straight lines, drawn with difficulty
like a diagram by painful and patient men. The men

(11:05):
that plowed tried to plow straight. They had no notion
of giving great sweeps and swirls to the eye, those
cataracts of cloven earth. They were done by the grace
of God. I had always rejoiced in them, but I
had never found any reason for my joy. There are
some very clever people who cannot enjoy the joy unless

(11:26):
they understand it. There are other and even cleverer people
who say that they lose the joy the moment they
do understand it. Thank God, I was never clever, and
I could always enjoy things when I understood them and
when I didn't. I can enjoy the Orthodox Tory though
I could never understand him. I can also enjoy the

(11:48):
Orthodox Liberal, though I understand him only too well. But
the splendor of furrowed fields is this that, like all
brave things, they are made straight, and therefore they bend.
In everything that bows gracefully, there must be an effort
at stiffness. Bows are beautiful when they bend only because

(12:12):
they try to remain rigid. And sword blades can curl
like silver ribbons only because they are certain to spring
straight again. But the same is true of every tough
curve of the tree trunk, of every strong backed bend
of the bow. There is scarcely any such thing as
nature as a mere droop of weakness. Rigidity yielding a

(12:35):
little like justice swayed by mercy is the whole beauty
of the earth. The cosmos is a diagram just bent
beautifully out of shape. Everything tries to be straight, and
everything just fortunately fails. The foil may curve in the lunge,
but there is nothing beautiful about beginning the battle with

(12:59):
the crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strong doctrine
may give a little in the actual fight with facts,
but that is no reason for beginning with a weak
doctrine or a twisted aim. Do not be an opportunist,
Try to be theoretic at all the opportunities Fate can
be trusted to do all the opportunist part of it.

(13:22):
Do not try to bend any more than the trees
try to bend. Try to grow straight, and life will
bend you. Alas I am giving the moral before the fable,
And yet I hardly think that otherwise you could see
all that I mean in the enormous vision of the
plowed hills. These great furrowed slopes are the oldest architecture

(13:43):
of man, The oldest astronomy was his guide, the oldest
botany his object. And for geometry, the mere word proves
my case. But when I looked at those torrents of
plowed parallels, that great rush of rigid lines, I seemed
to see the whole, huge achievement of democracy. Here was

(14:06):
mere equality. But equality seen in bulk is more superb
than any supremacy. Equality, free and flying, equality, rushing over
hill and dale, equality charging the world. That was the
meaning of those military furrows. Military in their identity, military
in their energy. They sculptured hill and dale with strong

(14:31):
curves merely because they did not mean to curve at all.
They made the strong lines of landscape with their stiffly
driven swords of the soil. It is not only nonsense,
but blasphemy to say that man has spoilt the countryside.
Man has created the country. It was his business as
the image of God. No hill covered with common scrub

(14:54):
or patches of purple heath could have been so sublimely
hilly as that ridge up to which the ranked furrows
rose like aspiring angels. No valley confused with needless cottages
and towns can have been so utterly valleyish as that
abyss into which the down rushing furrows raged like demons

(15:15):
into the swirling pit. It is the hard lines of
discipline and equality that mark out a landscape and give
it all its mold and meaning. It is because the
lines of the furrow are ugly and even that the
landscape is living and superb. As I think I have

(15:36):
remarked elsewhere, the republic is founded on the plow. The
philosophy of sight seeing. It would be really interesting to
know exactly why an intelligent person, by which I mean
a person with any sort of intelligence can and does

(15:57):
dislike sight seeing. Why does the idea of a charabank
full of tourists going to see the birthplace of Nelson
or the death scene of Simon de Montfort strike a
strange chill to the soul? I can tell quite easily
what this dim aversion to tourists and their antiquities does
not arise from, at least in my case, whatever my

(16:21):
other vices, and they are of course of allurid caste,
I can lay my hand on my heart and say
that it does not arise from a paltry contempt for
the antiquities, nor yet from the still more paltry contempt
for the tourists. If there is one thing more dwarfish
and pitiful than irreverence for the past, it is the

(16:43):
irreverence for the present, for the passionate and many colored
procession of life, which includes the Charabank among its many
chariots and triumphal cars. I know nothing so vulgar as
that contempt for vulgarity which sneers at the clerks on
a bank holiday or the cocknes on margate sands. The

(17:06):
man who notices nothing about the clerk except his Cockney
accent would have noticed nothing about Simon de Montfort accept
his French accent. Man who jeers at Jones for having
dropped an age might have jeered at Nelson for having
dropped an arm. Scorn springs easily to the essentially vulgar minded,
And it is as easy to gibe at Montfort as

(17:30):
a foreigner or at Nelson as a cripple, as to
gibe at the struggling speech and the mained bodies of
the mass of our comic and tragic race. If I
shrink faintly from this affair of tourists and tombs, it
is certainly not because I am superfane as to think
lightly either of the tombs or the tourists. I reverence

(17:52):
those great men who had the courage to die. I
reverence also these little men who have the courage to live.
Even if this be conceded, another suggestion may be made.
It may be said that antiquities and commonplace crowds are
indeed good things, like violets and geraniums, but they do

(18:12):
not go together. A billycock is a beautiful object. It
may be eagerly urged, but it is not in the
same style of architecture as the Eli Cathedral. It is
a dome, a small Rococo dome in the Renaissance manner,
and does not go with the pointed arches that assault
heaven like spears. A sharra bank is lovely, it may

(18:36):
be said, if placed upon a pedestal and worshiped for
its own sweet sake, but it does not harmonize with
the curve and outline of the old three decker on
which Nelson died. Its beauty is quiet of another source.
Therefore we will suppose our sage to argue antiquity and
democracy should be kept separate as inconsistent things. Things may

(18:59):
be inconsistent in time and space, which are by no
means inconsistent in essential value and idea. Thus, the Catholic
Church has water for the newborn and oil for the dying,
but she never mixes oil and water. This explanation is plausible,
but I do not find it adequate. The first objection

(19:21):
is that the same smell of bathos haunts the soul
in the case of all deliberate and elaborate visits to
beauty spots, even by persons of the most elegant position
or of the most protected privacy. Especially visiting the Colisseum
by moonlight always struck me as being vulgar, as visiting
it by limelight. One millionaire standing on the top of

(19:43):
Mount Blanc, one millionaire standing in the desert by the Sphinx,
one millionaire standing in the middle of Stonehenge is just
as comic as one millionaire is anywhere else, and that
is saying a good deal. On the other hand, if
the billy cock had come privately and naturally into Eli Cathedral,

(20:03):
no enthusiast forgot the carmony would think of objection to
the billycock so long, of course, as it was not
worn on the head. But there is indeed a much
deeper objection to this theory of the two incompatible excellencies
of antiquity and popularity. For the truth is that it
has been almost entirely the antiquities that have normally interested

(20:24):
the populace, and it has been almost entirely the populace
who have systematically preserved the antiquities. The oldest inhabitant has
always been a clod hopper I have never heard of
as being a gentleman. It is the peasants who preserve
all traditions of the sites, or the battles, or the
buildings of churches. It is they who remember, so far

(20:46):
as anyone remembers, the glimpses of fairies or the graver
wonders of saints. In the classes above them, the supernatural
has been slain by the supercilious. That is a true
and tremendous text in scripture which says that where there
is no vision, the people perish. But it is equally
true in practice that where there is no people, the

(21:08):
visions perish. The idea must be abandoned. Then that this
feeling of faint dislike towards popular sight seeing is due
to any inherent incompatibility between the ideas of special shrines
and trophies and the idea of large masses of ordinary men.
On a contrary, these two elements of sanctity and democracy

(21:30):
have been specially connected and alive throughout history. The shrines
and trophies were often put up by ordinary men. They
were always put up four ordinary men. To whatever things
the fastidious modern artists may choose to apply his theory
of specialist judgment and an aristocracy of taste, he must

(21:52):
necessarily find it difficult, really to apply it to such
historic and monumental art. Obviously, a public building is meant
to impress the public. The most aristocratic tomb is a
democratic tomb, because it exists to be seen. The only
aristocratic thing is the decaying corpse, not the undecaying marble.

(22:17):
And if the man wanted to be thoroughly aristocratic, he
should be buried in his own back garden. The chapel
of the most narrow and exclusive sect is universal outside,
even if it is limited inside. Its walls and windows
confront all points of the compass. And all quarters of

(22:37):
the cosmos. It may be small as a dwelling place,
but it is universal as a monument. If its sectarians
had really wished to be private, they should have met
in a private house. Whenever, and wherever we erect national
or municipal hall, pillar or statue, we are speaking to

(22:57):
the crowd like a demagogue. The statue of every statesman
offers itself for election as much as the statesman himself.
Every epithet on a church slab is put up for
the mob as much as a placcard in a general election.
And if we follow this track of reflection, we shall,

(23:20):
I think, find why it is that modern sightseeing jars
on something in us, something that is not a cattish
contempt for graves, nor an equally cattish contempt for cads.
For after all, there is many a churchyard which consists
mostly of dead cads. But that does not make it
less sacred or less sad. The real explanation I fancy

(23:46):
is this that these cathedrals and columns of triumph were
meant not for people more cultured and self conscious than
modern tourists, but for people much rougher and more casual.
Those leaps of livingstone, like frozen fountains, were so placed
and poised as to catch the eye of ordinary, inconsiderate

(24:06):
men going about their daily business. And when they are
so seen, they are never forgotten. The true way of
reviving the magic of our great ministers and historic civiulchers
is not the one which Ruskin was always recommending. It
is not to be more careful of historic buildings. Nay,
it is rather to be more careless of them. Buy

(24:29):
a bicycle in Maidstone, to visit in ant in Dover,
and you will see Canterbury Cathedral as it was built
to be seen. Go through London only as the shortest
way between Croydon and Hempstead, and the Nelson column will,
for the first time in your life remind you of Nelson.
You will appreciate Hereford Cathedral if you have come for cider,

(24:54):
not if you've come for architecture. You will re see
the place vendom if you have come on business, not
if you have come for art. Or It was for
the simple and laborious generations of men, practical, troubled about
many things, that our fathers reared those portents. There is

(25:15):
indeed another element, not unimportant, the fact that people have
gone to cathedrals to pray, but in discussing modern artistic
cathedral lovers, we need not consider this. End of Chapters
ten through twelve.