Chapters 16-18

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 Discursions by G. K. Chesterton,

(00:27):
Section six, chapters sixteen through eighteen. The Futurists. It was
a warm, golden evening fit for October. I was watching
with regret a lot of little black pigs being turned
out of my garden when the postman handed to me,

(00:47):
with perfunctory haste, which doubtless massed his emotion, the Declaration
of Futurism. If you ask me what futurism is, I
cannot tell you. Even the futurists themselves seem a little doubtful,
perhaps their waiting for the future to find out. But
if you ask me what its declaration is, I answer eagerly,

(01:09):
for I can tell you quite a lot about that.
It is written by an Italian named Marinetti in a
magazine which is called Poesia. It is headed Declaration of
Futurism in enormous letters. It is divided off with little
numbers and starts straight away like this one. We intend

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to glorify the love of danger, the custom of energy,
the strength of daring. Two, the essential elements of our
poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt. Three. Literature, having
up to now glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We

(01:53):
wish to exalt the aggressive movement, the feverish insomnia, running,
the perilous leap, the cuff and the blow. While I
am quite willing to exalt the cuff within reason, it
scarcely seems such an entirely new subject for literature as
the futurists imagine. It seems to me that even through
the slumber which fills the Siege of Troy, the Song

(02:16):
of Roland and the Orlando Furiouso, and in spite of
the thoughtful immobility which marks Pantagruel, Henry the Fifth and
Vallad of chevy Chase, there are occasional gleams of an
admiration for courage, a readiness to glorify the love of danger,
and even the strength of daring. I seem to remember

(02:37):
slightly differently spelt somewhere in literature. The distinction, however, seems
to be that the warriors of the past went in
for tournaments which were at least dangerous for themselves. While
the futurists go in for motor cars, which are mainly
alarming for other people. It is the futurist in his

(02:59):
motor who does the aggressive movement, but it is the
pedestrians who go in for the running and the perilous leap.
Section number four says, we declare that the splendor of
the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty,
the beauty of speed. A race automobile adorned with great
pipes like serpents with explosive breath, A race automobile which

(03:23):
seems to rush over exploding powder, is more beautiful than
the victory of samothrace. It is also much easier if
you have the money. It is quite clear, however, that
you cannot be a futurist at all unless you are
frightfully rich. Then follows this lucid and soul stirring sentence.
We will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel

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of which the ideal steering post traverses the Earth, impelled
itself around the circuit of its own orbit. What a
jolly song it would be, so hearty and with such
a simple swing in it. And imagine the futurists round
the fire in a tavern, trolling out in chorus some
ballad with that incomparable refrain, shouting over their swaying flagons

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some stretch words as these, a notion came into my
head as new as it was bright, that poems might
be written on the subject of a fight. No praise
was given to Lancelot, Achilles, Nap or Corbett. But we
will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel, of
which the ideal steering post traverses the Earth, impelled itself

(04:35):
around the circuit of its own orbit. Then these DIDs
should be supposed that futurism would be so weak as
to permit any democratic restraints upon the violence and levity
of the luxurious classes. There would be a special verse
in honor of the motors. Also, my fathers scaled the
mountains in their pilgrimage as far. But I feel full

(04:57):
of energy while sitting in a car, and natrol is
the perfect wine. I lick it and absorb it. So
we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel,
of which the ideal steering post traverses the Earth, impelled
itself around the circuit of its own orbit. Yes, it
would be a rollicking catch. I wish there were space

(05:19):
to finish the song, or to detail all the other
sections in the declaration. Suffice is to say that futurism
has gratifying dislike both of liberal politics and Christian morals.
I say gratifying, because, however, unfortunately the cross and the
cap of liberty have quarreled. They are always united in

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the feeble hatred of such silly meglomaniacs as these. They
will glorify war, the only true hygiene of the world, militarism, patriotism,
the destructive gesture of anarchism, the beautiful ideas which kill,
and the scorn of woman. They will destroy museums, libraries,
and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice. The

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proclamation ends with an extraordinary passage which I cannot understand
at all, all, about something that is going to happen
to mister Marinetti when he is forty. As far as
I can make out, he will then be killed by
other poets who will be overwhelmed with love and admiration
for him, and they will come against us from afar,

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from everywhere, leaping on the cadence of their first poems,
flawing the air with crooked fingers, and scenting at the
academy gates the good smell of our decaying minds. Well,
it is satisfactory to be told, however, obscurely, that this
sort of thing is coming to an end some day,
to be replaced by some other tomfoolery. And though I

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commonly refrain from clawing the air with crooked fingers, I
can assure mister Marinetti that this omission does not disqualify me,
and that I scent the good smell of his decaying mind.
All right, I think the only other point of futurism
is contained in this sense. It is in Italy that

(07:08):
we hurl this overthrowing and inflammatory declaration with which today
we found futurism, or we will free Italy from her
numberless museums which cover her with countless cemeteries. I think
that rather sums it up, the best way one would
think of freeing one's sell from a museum would be
not to go there. Mister Marinetti's fathers and grandfathers free

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Italy from prisons and torture chambers, places were people held
by force, they, being in bondage of moralism, attacked governments
as unjust, real governments with real guns. Such was their
utilitarian cowardice, that they would die in hundreds upon the
bayonets of Austria. I can well imagine why mister Marinetti,

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in his motor car does not wish to look back
at the past. If there was one thing that could
make him look smaller even than before, it is that
roll of dead men's drums, and that dream of Garibaldi
going by the old radical ghosts go by, more real
than the living men to assault. I know not what
ramparted city in hell. I. Meanwhile, the futurist stands outside

(08:19):
a museum in a warlike attitude, and defiantly tells the
official at the turnstile that he will never never come in.
There is a certain solid use in fools. It is
not so much that they rush in where angels fear
to tread, but rather that they let out what devils
intend to do. Some perversion of folly will float about,

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nameless and forby the whole society. Then some lunatic gives
it a name, and henceforth it is harmless. With all
really evil things. When the danger has appeared, the danger
is over. Now it may be hoped that the self
indulgent spraullers of Podiesia have put a name once and
for all to their philosophy, and a case of their philosophy.

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To put a name to it is to put an
end to it. Yet their philosophy has been very widespread
in our time. It could hardly have been pointed and
finished except by this perfect folly, the creed of which
please God, this is the flower and finish consists ultimately
in this statement that it is bold and spirited to

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appeal to the future. Now it is entirely weak and
half witted to appeal to the future. A brave man
ought to ask for what he wants, not for what
he expects to get. A brave man who wants atheism
in the future calls himself an atheist. A brave man

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who wants socialism a socialist, A brave man who wants
Catholicism a Catholic. But a weak minded man who does
not know what he wants in the future calls him
himself a futurist. They have driven all the pigs away,
all that they had driven away the prigs, and left
the pigs. The sky begins to droop with darkness, and

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all birds and blossoms to descend unfaltering into the healthy underworld,
where things slumber and grow. There was just one true
phrase of mister Marinetty about himself, the feverish insomnia. The
whole universe is pouring headlong to the happiness of the night.

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It is only the madman who has not the courage
to sleep. Dukes, the Duke de Chamberton Pomard was a
small but lively relic of a really aristocratic family, the
members of which were nearly all atheists up to the
time of the French Revolution, but since that event, beneficial

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in such various ways had been buried about. He was
a royalist, a nationalist, and a perfectly sincere patriot in
that particular style which consists of ceaselessly asserting that one's
country is not so much in danger as already destroyed.
He wrote cheery little articles for the Royalist press entitled

(11:18):
the End of France, or the Last Cry or what not,
and he gave the final touches to a picture of
the Kaiser riding across a pavement of prostrate Parisians with
a glow of patriotic exultation. He was quite poor, and
even his relations had no money. He walked briskly to

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all his meals at a little open cafe, and he
looked just like everybody else. Living in a country where
aristocracy does not exist, he had a high opinion of it.
He would yearn for the swords and the stately manners
of the Pomards before the revolution, most of whom who
had been in theory republicans. But he turned with a

(12:01):
more practical eagerness to the one country in Europe where
the tricolor has never flown and men have never been
roughly equalized before the state. The beacon and comfort of
his life was England, which all the europe sees clearly
as the one pure aristocracy that remains. He had moreover

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a mild taste for sport, and kept an English bulldog,
and he believed the English to be a race of bulldogs,
of heroic squires and hardy Yeoman vassals. Because he read
all this in English conservative papers written by exhausted little
Levantine clerks. But his reading was naturally, for the most part,

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in the French conservative papers, though he knew English well,
and it was in these that he first heard of
the horrible budget. There he read of the confiscatory revolution
planned by the Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Senate
mister Georges Lloyd. He also read how chivalrously Prince Arthur

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Balfour of Burleigh had defied that demagogue, assisted by Austin,
the Lord Chamberlain, and a gay and witty Walter Lang.
And being a brisk partisan and a capable journalist, he
decided to pay England a special visit and report to
his papers upon the struggle. He drove for an eternity

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and an open fly through beautiful woods, with a letter
of introduction in his pocket to one Duke who was
to introduce him to another duke. The endless and numberless
avenues of bewildering pine woods gave him a queer feeling
that he was driving through the countless corridors of a dream.
Yet the vast silence and freshness healed his irritations at

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modern ugliness and unrest. It seemed the background fit for
the return of chivalry. And such a forest a king
and all his court might lose themselves hunting, or a
knight errant might perish with no companion, but God the
castle itself. When he reached it was somewhat smaller than
he had expected, but he was delighted with its romantic

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and castellated outline. He was just about to alight when
somebody opened two enormous gates at the side, and the
vehicle drove briskly through. That is not the house, he
inquired politely of the driver. No, sir, said the driver,
controlling the corners of his mouth. The lodge, sir, indeed,
said the Duke Chamberton pomered. This is where the Duke's

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land begins. Oh, no, sir, said the man, quite in distress.
We've been in his grace's land all day. The Frenchman
thanked him and leant back in the carriage, feeling as
if everything were incredibly huge and vast, like Gulliver in
the country of the broading Nags. He got out in
front of a long facade of a somewhat severe building,

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and a little careless man and the shooting jacket knickerbockers
ran down the steps. He had a weak, fair mustache
and the dull blue, babyish eyes. His features were insignificant,
but his manner extremely pleasant and hospitable. This was the
Duke of Aylesbury, perhaps the largest landowner in Europe, and
known only as a horse breeder until he began to

(15:20):
write abrupt little letters about the budget. He led the
French Duke upstairs, taking trivialities in a hearty way, and
there presented him to another and more important English oligarch,
who got up from a writing desk with a slightly
senile jerk. He had a gleaming bald head and glasses.
The lower part of his face was masked with a

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short dark beard, which did not conceal the beaming smile,
not unmixed with sharpness. He stooped a little as he ran,
like some sedentary head clerk or cashier, And even without
the check book and papers on his desk, he would
have given the impression of a merchant to a man
of business. He was dressed in a light gray check jacket.

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He was the Duke of Windsor, the great Unionist statesman.
Between these two loose, amiable men, the little Galls stood
erect in his black frock coat with a monstrous gravity
of French ceremonial good manners. The stiffness led the Duke
of Windsor to put him at his ease like a tenant,
and he said, rubbing his hands. I was delighted with

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your letter. Delighted, I shall be very pleased if I
can give you her any details. My visit, said the Frenchman,
scarcely suffices for the scientific exhaustion of detail. I seek
only the idea, the idea that is always the immediate thing.
Quite so, said the other, rapidly, Quite so the idea.

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Feeling somehow that it was his turn, the English duke,
having done all that could be required of him, Palmard
had to say, I mean the idea of aristocracy. I
regard this as the last great battle for the idea. Aristocracy,
like any other thing, must justify itself to mankind. Aristocracy

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is good because it preserves a picture of human dignity
in the world, with that dignity is often obscured by
servile necessities. Aristocracy alone can keep a certain high reticence
of soul and body, a certain noble distance between the sexes.
The Duke of Aylesbury, who had a clouded recollection of

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having squirted soda water down the neck of a countess
on the previous evening, looked somewhat gloomy, as if lamenting
that theoretic spirit of the Latin race The elder duke
laughed heartily and said, well, well, you know, we English
are horribly practical with us. The great question is the
land out here in the country. Do you know this part? Yes, yes,

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cried the frenchman eagerly. I see what you mean, the country,
the old rustic life of humanity, a holy war upon
the bloated and filthy towns. What right have these anarchists
to attack your busy and prosperous country sides. Have they
not thriven under your management? Are not the English villages
always growing larger and gayer under the enthusiastic leadership of

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their encouraging squires. Have you not the Maypole? Have you
not merry England? The Duke of Aylesbury made a noise
in his throat and then said, very indistinctly, they all
go to London, all go to London, repeated Pamard, with
a blank stare. Why this time nobody answered, and pamar

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had to attack again. The spirit of aristocracy is essentially
opposed to the greed of the industrial cities. Yet in
France there are actually one or two nobles so vile
as to drive coal and gas trades and drive them hard.
The Duke of Windsor looked at the carpet. The Duke
of Aylesbury went and looked out of the window. At length.

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The latter said, that's rather stiff. You know, one has
to look after one's own business in town as well.
Do not say it, cried the little Frenchman, starting up.
I tell you all, Europe is one fight between business
and honor. If we do not fight for honor, who will.

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What other right have we, two poor legged sinners to
titles and quartered shields, except that we staggeringly support some
idea of giving things which cannot be demanded, in avoiding
things which cannot be punished. Our only claim is to
be a wall across Christendom against the jew peddlers and pawnbrokers,

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against the Goldsteins and the and the Duke of Aylesbury
swung round with his hands in his pockets. Oh, I say,
he said, you've been reading Lloyd George. Nobody but dirty
radicals can say a word against Goldstein. I certainly cannot permit,
said the elder Duke, rising rather shape the respected name

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of Lord Goldstein. He intended to be impressive, but there
was something in the Frenchman's eye that is not so
easily impressed. They are shown there that steel which is
the mind of France. Gentlemen, he said, I think I
have all the details. Now. You have ruled England for
four hundred years. By your own account, you have not

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made the countryside endurable to men. By your own account
you have helped the victory of vulgarity and smoke. And
by your own account you are hand in glove with
those very money grubbers and adventurers, whom gentlemen have no
other business but to keep at bay. I do not
know what your people will do, but my people would

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kill you. Some seconds afterward he had left the Duke's house,
and some hours afterward the Duke's estate the glory of Gray.
I suppose that taking this summer as a whole, people
will not call it an appropriate time for praising the

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English climate. But for my part, I will praise the
English climate till I die, even if I die of
the English climate. There is no weather so good as
English weather. They in a real sense, there's no weather
at all anywhere, but in England. In France you have
much sun and some rain. In Italy you have hot
winds and cold winds. In Scotland and Ireland you have

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rain either thick or thin. In America you have hells
of heat and cold, and in the tropics you have
sunstrokes buried by thunderbolts. But all these you have on
a broad and brutal scale, and you settle down into
contentment toward a spare. Only in our own romantic country

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do you have the strictly romantic thing called weather, beautiful
and changing as a woman. The great English landscape painters
neglected now, like everything that is English, have this setting
distinction that the weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures,
it is the subject of their pictures. They paint portraits

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of the weather, the weathers sat to constable, the weather
posed for Turner, and a deuce of a pose it was.
This cannot truly be said of the greatest of their
continental models, or rivals, poissan and clawed painted objects, ancient cities,
or perfect Arcadian shepherds through a clear medium of the climate.

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But in the English painters, weather is the hero, with
Turner and a Delphi hero taunting, flashing and fighting, melodramatic
but really magnificent. The English climate a tall and terrible
protagonist robed in rain and thunder and snow and sunlight
fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground. I admit

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the superiority of many other French things besides French art,
but I will not yield an inch on the superiority
of English weather and weather painting. Why the French have
not even got a word for weather, and you must
ask for the weather in French as if you were
asking for the time in English. Then again, variety of

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climates should always go with stability of abode. The weather
in the desert is monotonous, and as natural consequence, the
Arabs wander about, hoping it may be different somewhere. But
an englishman's house is not only his castle, it is
his ferry castle. Clouds and colors of every very dawn

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and eve are perpetually touching and turning it from clay
to gold, or from gold to ivory. There is a
line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden, which
is literally different on every one of three hundred and
sixty five days. Sometimes it seems as near as a hedge,
and sometimes as far as a faint and fiery evening cloud.

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The same principle, by the way, applies to the difficult
problem of wives. Variability is one of the virtues of
a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So
long as you have one good wife, you're sure to
have a spiritual harem. Now among the heresies that are
spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a

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gray day a colorless day. Gray is a color, and
can be a very powerful and pleasing color. There is
also an insulting style of speech about one gray day
just like another. You might as well talk about one
green tree just like another. A gray clouded sky is
indeed a canopy between us and the sun. So is

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a green tree, if it comes to that. But the
gray umbrellas differ as much as the green in their
style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day
may be gray like steel, another gray like dove's plumage.
One may seem gray like the deathly frost, and another
gray like the smoke of thebstantial kitchens. No things could

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seem further apart than the doubt of gray and the
decision of scarlet. A gray and red can mingle, as
they do in the morning clouds, and also in a
sort of warm, smoky stone of which they build the
little towns in the west Country. In those towns, even
the houses that our holy gray have a blow in them,

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as if their secret firesides were such furnaces of hospitality,
as faintly to transfuse the walls, like walls of cloud
and wandering in those Westland parts. I did once really
find a signpost pointing up a steep, crooked path to
a town that was called Clouds. I did not climb

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up to it. I feared that either the town would
not be good enough for the name, or I should
not be good enough for the town. Anyhow, the little
hamlets of the warm gray stone have a geniality which
is not achieved by all the artistic scarlet of the suburbsbs,
as if it were better to warm one's hands at
the ashes of Glastonbury than at the painted flames of Croydon. Again,

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the enemies of gray, those astute, daring and evil minded men,
are fond of bringing forward the argument that colors suffer
in gray weather, and that strong sunlight is necessary to
all the hues of heaven and earth. Here again, there
are two words to be said, and it is essential
to distinguish. It is true the sun is needed to

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burnish and bring into bloom the tertiary and dubious colors,
the colors of peat, pea soup, impressionist sketches, brown velvet coats, olives,
gray and blue slates, the complexions of vegetarians, the tints
of volcanic rock, chocolate, cocoa, mud, soot, slime, old boots.

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The delicate shades of these do need the sunlight to
bring out the faint beauty that often clings to them.
But if you have a healthy negro taste in color,
if you choke your garden with poppies and geraniums, if
you paint your house sky blue and scarlet, if you wear,
let us say, a golden top hat and a crimson
front coat, you will not only be visible on the

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grayest day, but you will notice that your costume and
environment produce a certain singular effect. You will find I
mean that rich colors actually look more luminous on a
gray day, because they are seen against a somber background
and seem to be burning with a luster of their
own against the dark sky. All flowers look like fireworks.

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There's something strange about them at once vivot in secret
like flowers traced in a fire in the phantasmal garden
of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the
high light of the picture, and its brightness kills all
the bright blue flowers. But on a gray day the
larkspur looks like fall in heaven. The red daisies are

(27:57):
really the red lost eyes of day, and the sunflower
is the vice regent of the sun. Lastly, there is
this value about the color that men call colorless, that
it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average
of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation
and promise. Gray is the color that always seems on

(28:20):
the eve of changing to some other color, of brightening
into blue, or blanching into white, or bursting into green
and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the
indefinite hope that is in doubt itself. And when there
is gray weather in our hills or gray hairs in
our head, perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.

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The end of chapter sixteen through eighteen