Chapters 13-15

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
visit LibriVox dot org. Alarms and Discoursions by G. K. Chesterton,

(00:25):
Section five, chapters thirteen through fifteen. A criminal head. When
men of science, or more often men who talk about science,
speak of studying history or human society scientifically, they always
forget that there are two quite distinct questions involved. It

(00:50):
may be that certain facts of the body go with
certain facts of the soul, but it by no means
follows that a grasp of such facts of the body
goes with the grasp of the things of the soul.
A man may show very learnedly that certain mixtures of
race make a happy community, but he may be quite wrong.

(01:11):
He generally is about what communities are happy. A man
may explain scientifically how a certain physical type involves a
really bad man, but he may be quite wrong. He
generally is about which sort of man is really bad.
Thus his whole argument is useless, for he understands only

(01:33):
one half of the equation. The drearier kind of don
may come to me and say celts are unsuccessful. Look
at Irishmen, for instance, to which I should reply. You
may know all about celts, but it is obvious that
you know nothing about Irishmen. The Irish are not in

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the least unsuccessful, unless it is unsuccessful to wander from
their own country over a great part of the earth,
in which case the English are unsuccessful too. A man
with a mumpy head may say to me, as a
kind of New Year greeting, fools have microcephalous skulls, or

(02:14):
what not, to which I shall reply. In order to
be certain of that, you must be a good judge
of both of the physical and of the mental fact.
It is not enough that you should know a microcephalous
skull when you see it. It is also necessary that
you should know a fool when you see him. And
I have a suspicion that you do not know a

(02:36):
fool when you see him, even after the most lifelong
and intimate of all forms of acquaintanceship. The trouble with
most sociologists, criminologists, et cetera, is that while their knowledge
of their own detail is exhaustive and subtle, their knowledge
of man and society to which these are to be

(02:57):
applied is quite exceptionally superficial and silly. They know everything
about biology, but almost nothing about life. Their ideas of history,
for instance, are simply cheap and uneducated. Thus, some famous
and foolish professor measured the skull of Charlotte Corday to

(03:17):
ascertain the criminal type. He had not historical knowledge enough
to know that if there is any criminal type, certainly
Charlotte Corday had not got it. The skull, I believe afterwards,
turned out not to be Charlotte Corday's at all, But
that is another story. The point is that the poor

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old man was trying to match Charlotte Corday's mind with
her skull, without knowing anything whatever about her mind. But
I came yesterday upon yet a more crude and startling example.
In a popular magazine, there is one of the usual
articles about criminology, about whether wicked men could be made

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good if their heads were taken to pieces. As by
far the wickedest men I know are much too rich
and powerful ever to submit to the process, the speculation
leaves me cold. I always notice with pain, however, a
curious absence of the portraits of living millionaires from set
galleries of awful examples. Most of the portraits in which

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we are called upon to remark the line of the nose,
of the curve of the forehead appear to be the
portraits of ordinary sad men who stole because they were hungry,
or killed because they were in a rage. The physical
peculiarity seems to vary infinitely. Sometimes that it is the
remarkable square head, Sometimes it is the unmistakable roundhead. Sometimes

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the learn to draw attention to the abnormal development, sometimes
to the striking deficiency of the back of the head.
I have tried to discover what is the invariable factor,
the one permanent mark of the s scientific criminal type.
After exhaustive classification, I have come to the conclusion that
it consists in being poor. But it was among the

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pictures in this article that I received the final shock
the enlightenment, which has left me in lasting possession of
the fact that criminologists are generally more ignorant than criminals.
Among the starved and bitter but quite human faces was
one head, neat but old fashioned, with the powder of
the eighteenth century and a certain almost primpertness in the dress,

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which marked the conventions of the upper middle class. About
seventeen ninety The face was lean and lifted stiffly up.
The eyes stared forward with a frightful sincerity. The lip
was firm, with heroic firmness, all the more pathetic because
of a force. Without knowing who it was, one could

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have guessed that it was a man in the manner
of Shakespeare's brutus, a man of piercingly pure intentions, prone
to use government as a mere machine for morality, very
sensitive to the charge of inconsistency, and a little too
proud of his own, clean, honorable life. I say, I
should have known this almost from the face alone, if

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I had not known who it was. But I did
know who it was. It was Robe Spear. And underneath
the portrait of this pale and too eager moralist were
written these remarkable words deficiency of ethical instincts, followed by
something to the effect that he knew no mercy, which
is certainly untrue, and by some nonsense about a retreating forehead,

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a peculiarity which he shared with Louis the sixteenth and
with half the people of his time and hours. Then
it was that I measured the staggering distance between the
knowledge and the ignorance of science. Then I knew that
all criminalogy might be worse than worthless because of its
utter ignorance of that human material of which it is

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supposed to be speaking. The man who could say that
Robespear was deficient in ethical instincts is a man utterly
to be disregarded in all calculations of ethics. He might
as well say that John Bunyan was deficient in ethical instincts.
You may say that Robespear was morbid and unbalanced, and

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you may say the same of Bunyan. But if these
two men were morbid and unbalanced, they were morbid and
unbalanced by feeling too much about morality, not by feeling
too little. He may say, if you like, that Robespear
was in a negative sort of way mad, But if
he was mad, he was mad on ethics. He had

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a company of keen and pugnacious men, intellectually impatient of
unreason and wrong, resolved that Europe should not be choked
up in every channel by oligarchies and state secrets that
already stank. The work was the greatest that was ever
given to men to do, except that which Christianity did

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in dragging Europe out of the abyss of barbarism after
the Dark Ages. But they did it, and no one
else could have done it. Certainly we could not do it.
We're not ready to fight all Europe on a point
of justice. We're not ready to fling our most powerful
class as mere refuse to the foreigner. We're not ready

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to shatter the great states at a stroke. We're not
ready to trust ourselves in an awful moment of utter
dissolution in order to make all things seem intelligible and
all men feel honorable. Henceforth, we are not strong enough
to be as strong as Danton. We are not strong

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enough to be as weak as Rope's spear. There is
only one thing, it seems, that we can do. Like
a mob of children, we can play games upon this
ancient battlefield. We can pull up the bones and skulls
of the tyrants and martyrs of that unimaginable war, and
we can chatter to each other childlessly and innocently about

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skulls that are imbecile and heads that are criminal. I
do not know whose heads are criminal, but I think
I know whose are imbecile. The wrath of the roses,
the position of the rose among flowers is like that

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of the dog. Among animals, it is so much that
both are domesticated, as that have some dim feeling that
they were always domesticated. There are wild roses and there
are wild dogs. I do not know the wild dogs.
Wild roses are very nice, but nobody ever thinks of
either of them if the name is abruptly mentioned in

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a gossip or a poem. On the other hand, there
are are tame tigers and tame cobras. But if one
says I have a cobra in my pocket, or there
is a tiger in the music room, the adjective tame
has to be somewhat hastily added. If one speaks of beast,
one thinks first of wild beasts, If of flowers, one

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thinks first of wild flowers. But there are two great exceptions,
caught so completely into the wheel of man's civilization, entangled
so unalterably with his ancient emotions and images, that the
artificial product seems more natural than the natural. The dog
is not a part of natural history, but of human history,

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and the real rose grows in a garden. All must
regard the elephant as something tremendous attained, and many, especially
in our great cultured centers regard every bull as presumably
a mad bull. In the same way we think of
most garden trees and plants as fierce creatures of the

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forest or morass, taught at last to endure the curb.
But with the dog and the rose, this instinctive principle
is reversed. With them, we think of the artificial as
the archtype, the earth born as the erratic exception. We
think vaguely of the wild dog as if he had

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run away like the stray cat, And we cannot help
fancying that the wonderful wild rows of our hedges has
escaped by jumping over the hedge. Perhaps they fled together,
the dog and the rose, a singular and on the whole,
in imprudent elopement. Perhaps the treacherous dog crept from the

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kennel and the rebellious rose from the flower bed, and
they fought their way out in company, one with teeth
and the other with thorns. Possibly this is why my
dog becomes a wild dog when he sees roses and
kicks them anywhere. Possibly this is why the wild rose
is called the dog ros. Possibly not, But there is

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in this degree of dim barbaric truths in the quaint
old world legend that I have just invented that in
these two cases, the civilized product is felt to be fiercer, nay,
even the wilder. Nobody seems to be afraid of a
wild dog. He is clasped among the jackals and the
servile beasts. The terrible cave canam is written over Man's creation.

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When we read beware the dog, it means beware of
the tame dog. For it is the tame dog that
is terrible. He is terrible in proportion as he is tame.
It is his loyalty and his virtues that are awful
to the stranger, even the stranger within your gates. Still
more to the stranger halfway over your gates. He is

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alarmed at such deafening and furious docility. He flees from
that great monster of mildness. While I have much the
same feeling. When I look at the roses, rank red
and thick and resolute round a garden, they seem to
be bold and even blustering. I hasten to say that

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I know even less about my own garden than about
anybody else's garden. I know nothing about roses, not even
their names. I know only the name rose, and rose
is in every sense of the word a Christian name.
It is Christian in the one, absolute and primortal sense
of Christian that it comes down from the age of Pagans.

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The rose can be seen and even smelts in Greek, Latin, Provincial, Gothic, Renaissance,
and Puritan poems. Beyond this mere word rose, which like
wine and other noble words, is the same in all
the tongues of white men, I know literally nothing. I've
heard the more evident and advertised names. I know there

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is a flower which calls itself the Glory of Dijon,
which I had supposed to be its cathedral. In any case,
to have produced a rose and a cathedral is to
have produced not only two very glorious and humane images,
but also, as I maintain, two very soldierly and defiant things.

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I also know there is a rose called Marshall Neil
note once more the military ring. And when I was
walking round my garden the other day, I spoke to
my gardener, an enterprise of no little valor, and asked
him the name of a strange, dark rose that had
somehow oddly taken my fancy. It was almost as if

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it reminded me of some turbid element in history. And
the soul it's red was not only swarthy but smoky.
There was something congested and wrathful about its color. It
was a once theatrical and sulky. The gardener told me
it was called Victor Hugo. Therefore it is that I

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feel all roses to have some secret power about them.
Even their names may mean something in connection with themselves
in which they differ from nearly all the sons of men.
But the rose itself is royal and dangerous. Long as
it has remained in the rich house of civilization, it
has never laid off its armor. A rose always looks

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like a medieval gentleman of Italy, with a cloak of
crimson and the sword. But the thorn is the sword
of the rose. And there is this real moral in
the matter that we have to remember that civilization, as
it goes on, ought not perhaps to grow more fighting,
but ought to grow more ready to fight. The more

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valuable and reposeful is the order we have to guard,
the more vivid it should be our ultimate sense of
vigilance and potential violence. And when I walk round a
summer garden. I can understand how those high mad lords
at the end of the Middle Ages, just before their
swords clashed, caught at roses for their instinctive emblems of

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empire and rivalry. For to me, any such garden is
full of the war of the Roses, the gold of Glastonbury.
One silver morning I walked into a small gray town
of Stone, like twenty other gray western towns, which happened

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to be called Glastonbury, and saw the magic thorn of
near two thousand years growing in the open air as
casually as any bush in my garden in Glastonbury. As
in all noble and humane things, the myth is more
important than the history. One cannot say anything stronger of

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the strange old tale of Saint Joseph and the Thorn
than that it dwarf Saint Dunstan. Standing among the actual
stones and shrubs, one thinks of the first century, and
not of the tenth. One's mind goes back beyond the
Saxons and beyond the greatest statesmen of the Dark Ages.
The tale that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain is

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presumably a mere legend, but it is not by any
means so incredible or preposterous a legend, as many modern
people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing is
quite comic and inconceivable, as if one said that what
Taylor went to Chicago, or that John Bunyan discovered the

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North Pole. We think of Palestine as little localized and
very private, of Christ's followers as poor folk a strict labis,
rooted to their towns or trades. And we think of
vast routes of travel and constant world communications as things

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of recent and scientific origin. But this is wrong, at
least the last part of it is. It is part
of that large and placid lie that the rationalists tell
when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism.
Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling

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cosmopolitan civilization. Long sea voyages were not so quick, but
were quite as incessant as today, And though in the
nature of things Christ had not many rich followers, it
is not unnatural to suppose that he had some. And
a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman

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citizen with a yacht that could visit Britain. The same
fallacy is employed with the same partisan motive in the
case of the Gospel of Saint John, which critics say
could not have been written by one of the first
few Christians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its plotonic tone.

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I am no judge of the philology, but every human
being is divinely appointed judge of the philosophy, and the
platonic tone seems to me to prove nothing at all.
Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians. It was
an open province of a polygot empire, overrun with all

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sorts of people of all kinds of education. To take
a rough parallel, suppose some great prophet arose among the
boors in South Africa. The prophet himself might be a
simple or unlettered man, but no one who knows the
modern world would be surprised if one of his closest
followers were a professor from Heidelberg or an ma from Oxford.

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All this is not urged here with any nons notion
of proving that the Tale of the Thorn is not
a myth. As I have said it probably is a myth.
It has urged with much more important object of pointing
out the proper attitude towards such myths. The proper attitude
is one of doubt and hope, and a kind of
light mystery. The tale is certainly not impossible, as it

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is certainly not certain, and through all the ages since
the Roman Empire and have fed their healthy fancies with
their historical imagination upon the very twilight condition of such tales.
But today real agnosticism has declined along with real theology.
People cannot leave a creed alone, although it is the

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essence of a creed to be clear by Neither can
they leave a legend alone, though it is the essence
of a legend to be vague. That sane half skepticism,
which was found in all rustics, in all ghost tales
and fairy tales, seems to be a lost secret. Modern
people must make scientifically certain that Saint Joseph did or

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did not go to Glastonbury, despite the fact that it
is now quite impossible to find out, and that it
does not, in a religious sense, very much matter. But
it is essential to feel that he may have gone
to Glastonbury. All songs, arts, and dedications, branching and blossoming

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like the thorn, are rooted in some such sacred doubt.
Taken thus not heavily like a problem, but lightly like
an old tale. The thing does lead one along the
road of very strange realities, And the thorn is found
growing in the heart of a very secret maze of
the soul. Something is really present in the place, some

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closer contact with the thing which covers Europe, but is
still a secret. Somehow, the gray town and the green
bush touch across the world, the strange small country of
the garden and the grave. There is verily some communion
between the thorn tree and the crown of thorns. A

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man never knows what tiny thing will startle him to
such ancestral and impersonal tears. Piles of superb masonry will
often pass like a common panorama. And on this gray
and silver morning, the ruined towers of the cathedral stood
about me, somewhat vaguely like gray clouds. But down in

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a hollow where the local antiquaries are making a fruitful excavation,
a magnificent old Ruffian with a pickaxe, whom I believe
to have been Saint Joseph of Arimathea, showed me a
fragment of the old vaulted roof which he had found
in the earth, and on the whitish gray stone there

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was just a faint brush of gold. This seemed to
piercing and sword like pathos, an unexpected fragrance of all
forgotten or desecrated things, in the bare survival of that
poor little pigment upon the imperishable rock. To the strong
shapes of the Roman and Gothic I had grown accustomed.

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But that weak touch of color was at once tawdry
and tender, like some popular keepsake. Then I knew that
all my fathers were men like me. For the columns
and arches were grave and told of the gravity of
the builders. But here was one touch of their gayety.

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I almost expected it to fade from the stone. As
I stared. It was as if men had been able
to preserve a fragment of a sunset. And then I
remembered how the artistic critics have always praised the grave
tints and the grim shadows of the crumbling cloisters and
abbey towers, and how they themselves often dress up like

(24:02):
Gothic ruins in the somber tones of dim gray walls
or dark green ivy. I remember how they hated almost
all primary things, but especially primary colors. I knew they
were appreciating, much more delicately and truly than I the
sublime skeletons and the mighty fungoids of the dead Glastonbury.

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But I stood for an instant, alive in the living Glastonbury,
gay with gold and colored like the toy book of
a child. The end of Chapters thirteen through fifteen