Chapters 22-24

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
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,

(00:26):
Section eight, chapters twenty two through twenty four, The Wings
of Stone. The preceding essay is about a half built
house on my private horizon. I wrote it sitting in
a garden chair, and as though it was a week ago,

(00:47):
I have scarcely moved since then to speak of. I
do not see why I should not go on writing
about it. Strictly speaking, I have moved. I have even
walked across a field field of turf, all fiery in
our early summer sunlight, and study the early angular red skeleton,

(01:07):
which has turned golden in the sun. It is odd
that the skeleton of a house is cheerful when the
skeleton of a man is mournful, since we only see
it after the man is destroyed. At least we think
the skeleton is mournful. The skeleton himself does not seem
to think so. Anyhow. There is something strangely primary and

(01:30):
poetic about this sight of the scaffolding and main lines
of a human building. It is a pity that there
is no scaffolding around a human baby. One seems to
see domestic life as the daring and ambitious thing that
it is when one looks at those open staircases and
empty chambers, those spirals of wind, and open halls of sky.

(01:55):
Ibsen said that the art of domestic drama was merely
to knock one wall out of the four wall of
a drawing room. I find the drawing room even more
impressive when all four walls are knocked out. I have
never understood what people mean by domesticity being tame. It
seems to me one of the wildest of adventures. But

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if you wish to see how high and harsh and
fantastic an adventure it is, consider only the actual structure
of a house itself. A man may march up in
a rather bored way to bed, but at least he
is mounting to a height from which he could kill himself.
Every rich, silent, padded staircase, with banisters of oak, stair

(02:39):
rods of brass, and busts and set tees on every landing,
Every such staircase is truly only an awful and naked
ladder running up to the infinite to a deadly height.
The millionaire who sums up inside the house is really
doing the same thing as the tiler or roof mender
who climbs up outside the house. They are both mounting

(03:01):
up into the void. They are both making an escalade
of the intense inane. Each is a sort of domestic mountaineer.
He is reaching a point from which mere idle falling
will kill a man, and life is always worth living
while men feel that they may die. I cannot understand

(03:25):
people at present making such a fuss about flying ships
and aviation, when men ever since Stonehenge and the Pyramids
have done something so much more wild than flying. A
grasshopper can go astonishingly high up into the air. His
biological limitation and weakness is that he cannot stop there.

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Hosts of unclean birds and crapulous insects can pass through
the sky, but they cannot pass any communication between it
and the earth. But the army of man has advanced
vertically into infinity and has not been cut off. It
can establish outposts in the ether and yet keep hoping

(04:06):
behind it. It's erect an insolent road. It would be
grand as in Jeweles verne to fire a cannonball at
the moon. But would it not be grander to build
a railway to the moon. Yet every building of brick
or wood is a hint of that high railroad. Every
chimney points to some star, and every tower is a

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tower of babel. Man rising on these awful and unbroken
wings of stone seems to me more majestic and more
mystic than man fluttering for an instant on wings of
canvas and sticks of steel. How sublime, and indeed almost
dizzy is the thought of these veiled ladders on which

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we all live like climbing monkeys. Many, a black coated
clerk in a flat may comfort himself for his somber
garb by reflecting that he is like some lonely rook
in an immemorial elm. Many, a wealthy bachelor on the
top floor of a pile of mansions, should look forth

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at morning and try, if possible, to feel like an
eagle whose nest just clings to the edge of some
awful cliff. How sad that the word giddy is used
to imply wantonness or levity. It should be a high
compliment to a man's exalted spirituality and the imagination to
say that he is a little giddy. I strolled slowly

(05:35):
back across the stretch of turf by sunset a field
of the cloth of gold, as I do near my
own house. Its huge size began to horrify me, and
when I came to the porch of it, I discovered
with an incredulity as strong as despair, that my house
was actually bigger than myself. A minute or two before,

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there might well have seemed to be a monstrous and
mythical competition about which of the two should swallow the other.
But I was Jonah. My house was the huge and
hungry fish, And even as its jaws darkened and closed
about me, I had again this dreadful fancy, touching the
dizzy altitude of all the works of man. I climbed

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the stairs, stubbornly, planting each foot with savage care, as
if ascending a glacier. When I got to a landing,
I was wildly believed, and waved my hat. The very
word landing has about it the wild sound of someone
washed up by the sea. I climbed each flight like
a ladder in a naked sky. The walls all round

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me failed and faded into infinity. I went up the
ladder to my bedroom, as Montrose went up the ladder
to the gallows. Sick utuur at astro. Do you think
this is a little fantastic, even little fearful and nervous?
Believe me, it is only one of the wild and
wonderful things that one can learn by stopping at home.

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Three kinds of men. Roughly speaking, there are three kinds
of people in this world. The first kind of people
are people. They are the largest and probably the most
valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we
sit down on, the clothes we wear, the houses we

(07:33):
live in, and indeed, when we come to think of it,
we probably belong to this class ourselves. The second class
may be called for convenience of the poets. They are
often a nuisance to their families, but generally speaking a
blessing to mankind. The third class is that of the
professors or intellectuals, sometimes described as the thoughtful people, and

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these are obliged and a desolation both to their families
and also to mankind. Of course, the classification sometimes overlaps.
Like all classification, some good people are almost poets, and
some bad poets are almost professors, but the division follows
lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly.

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It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes
of earnest reflection and research. The class cold people to
which you and die with no little pride attach ourselves,
has certain casual yet profound assumptions which are cold commonplaces,
as that children are charming, or twilight is sad and sentimental,

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or that one man fighting three is a fine sight.
Now these feelings are not crude, They are not even simple.
The charm of children is very subtle. It is even
complex to the incent of being almost kind tradictory. It is,
at its very plainest mingled of a regard for hilarity
and a regard for helplessness. The sentiment of twilight in

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the vulgarists drawing Room's song or the Coarsest pair of Sweethearts,
is so far as it goes, a subtle sentiment. It
is strangely balanced between pain and pleasure. It might also
be called pleasure tempting pain. The plunge of impatient chivalry
by which we all admire a man fighting odds is

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not at all easy to define separately. It means many
things pity, dramatic surprise, a desire for justice, a delight
in experiment, and the indeterminate. The ideas of the mob
are really very subtle ideas, but the mob does not
express them subtly. The fact it does not express them

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at all, except on those occasions not only too rare,
when it indulges in insurrection and massacre. Now this accounts
for the otherwise unreasonable fact of the existence of poets.
Poets are those who share these popular sentiments, but can
so express them that they prove themselves the strange and

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delicate things that they really are. Poets draw out the
shy refinement of the rebel, where the common man covers
the queerest emotions by saying rum, little kid. Victor Hugo
will write Lard dadtre grand power, where the stockbroker will
only say abruptly, evenings closing in Now, mister Yates will

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write into the Twilight, where the navy can only mutter
something about pluck and being precious. Game. Homer will show
you the hero and Rags in his own hall, defying
the princess at their banquet. The poets carry the popular
sentiments to a keener and more splendid pitch. But let
it always be remembered that it is the popular sentiments

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that they are carrying. No man ever wrote any good
poetry to show the childhood wish shocking, or that twilight
was gay and farcical, or that a man was contemptible
because he had crossed his single sword with free The
people who maintain this are the professors or the prigs.
The poets are those who rise above the people by

(11:16):
understanding them. Of course, most of the poets wrote in
prose Rabelais, for instance, and Dickens. The prigs rise above
the people by refusing to understand them, by saying that
all their dim, strange preferences are prejudices and superstitions. The
prigs make the people feel stupid. The poets make the

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people feel wiser than they could have imagined that they were.
There are many weird elements in his situation. The oddis
of all, perhaps is the faith of the two factors.
In practical politics, the poets who embrace and admire the
people are often pelted with stones and crucified. The prigs
who despise the people are often loaded with lands in crime.

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In the House of Commons, for instance, there are quite
a number of prigs, but comparatively few poets. There are
no people there at all. By poets, as I have said,
I do not mean people who write poetry, or indeed
people who write anything. I mean such people as having
culture and imagination use them to understand and share the

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feelings of their fellows, as against those who use them
to rise to what they call a higher plane. Crudely,
the poet differs from the mob by his sensibility. The
professor differs from the mob by his insensibility. He has
not sufficient finesse and sensitiveness to sympathize with the mob.

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His only notion is coarsely to contradict it, to cut
across it, in accordance with some egoistical plan of his own,
to tell himself that whatever the ignorance say, they are
probably wrong. He forgets that ignorance often has the exquisite
intuitions of innocence. Let me take one example which may

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mark out the outline of the contention. Open the nearest
comic paper, and let your eyes rest lovingly upon a
joke about a mother in law. Now the joke has
presented for the populace, who will probably be a simple joke.
The old lady will be tall and stout, the hen
pecked husband will be small and cowering. But for all that,
a mother in law is not a simple idea, she

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is a very subtle idea. The problem is not that
she is big and arrogant. She is frequently little and
quite extraordinarily nice. The problem with the mother in law
is that she is like the twilight, half one thing
and half another. Now, this twilight truth, this fine and
even tender embarrassment, might be rendered as it really is

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by a poet. Only here the poet would have to
be some very penetrating and sincere novelist, like George Meredith
or mister H. G. Wells, whose Anne Veronica I have
just been reading with delight. I would trust the fine
poets and novelists, because they follow the fairy clue given
them in comic cuts. But suppose the professor appears, and

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suppose he says, as he almost certainly will, a mother
in law is merely a fellow citizen. Considerations of sex
should not interfere with comradeship. Regard for age should not
influence the intellect. A mother in law is merely another mind.
We should free ourselves from these tribal hierarchies and degrees. Now,

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when the professor says this, as he always does, I
say to him, Sir, you are coarser than comic cuts.
You are more vulgar and blundering than the most elephantine
music hall artist. You are blinder and grosser than the mob.
These vulgar knockabouts have at least got hold of a
social shade and real mental distinction, though they can only

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express it clumsily. You are so clumsy that you cannot
get hold of it at all. If you really cannot
see that the bridegroom's mother and the bride have any
reason for constraint or diffidence, then you are neither polite
nor humane. You have no sympathy in you for the
deep and doubtful hearts of human folk. It is better

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even to put the difficulty as the vulgar put it,
than to be pertly unconscious of the difficulty altogether. The
same question might be considered well enough in the old
proverb that two is company and three is none. This
proverb is the truth, but popularly, that is it is

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the truth put wrong. Certainly, it is untrue that three
is no company. Three is splendid company. Three is the
ideal number for pure comradeship, as in the Three Musketeers.
But if you reject the proverb altogether, if you say
that two and three are the same sort of company,
if you cannot see that there is a wider abyss
between two and three than between three and three million,

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then I regret to inform you that you belong to
the third class of human beings, that you shall have
no company either of two or three, but shall be
alone in a howling desert till you die. The steward
of the Chiltern hundreds. The other day, on a stray

(16:32):
spur of the Chiltern Hills, I climbed up upon one
of those high, abrupt, windy churchyards from which the dead
seemed to look down upon all the living. It was
a mountain of ghosts, as Olympus was a mountain of gods.
In that church lay the bones of great Puritan lords
of a time when most of the power of England

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was Puritan, even of the established church. And below these
uplifted bones lay the huge and hollow valleys of the
English countryside, where the motors went by every now and
then like meteors, where stood out in white squares and
oblongs in the checkered forest, many of the country seats,

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even of those same families, now dulled with wealth or
decayed with Toryism. And looking over that deep green prospect,
on that luminous yellow evening, a lovely and austere thought
came into my mind, the thought as beautiful as the
green wood, and as grave as the tombs. The thought

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was this, that I should like to go into Parliament
quarrel with my party except the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds,
and then refused to give it up. We are so
proud in England of our crazy constitutional anomalies that I
fancy that very few readers indeed will need to be

(17:55):
told about the steward of the Chiltern Hundreds. But in
case there should be here or there one happy man
who has never heard of such twisted Tom Fooley's, I
will rapidly remind you what this legal fiction is. As
it is quite voluntary, sometimes even an eager affair to
get into Parliament, you would naturally suppose there would also

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be a voluntary matter to get out again. You would
think your fellow members would be indifferent or even relieved
to see you go, especially as by another exercise of
the shrewd illogical old English common sense, they have carefully
built the room too small for the people who have
to sit in it. But not so, my Pippins. As

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it says in the Iliad, if you are merely a
member of Parliament, lord knows why you can't resign. But
if you are a minister of the Crown, lord knows
why you can. It is necessary to get into the
ministry in order to get out of the house, and
they have to give you some office that doesn't exist

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or that nobody else wants, and thus unlock the door.
So you go to the Prime Minister, concealing your air
of fatigue, and say it has been the ambition of
my life to be steward of the Chiltern hundreds. The
Prime Minister then replies, I can imagine no man more
fitted both morally and mentally for that high office. He

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then gives it to you, and you hurriedly leave, reflecting
how the republics of the continent reel anarchically to and
fro for lack of a little solid English directness and simplicity. Now,
the thought that struck me like a thunderbolt as I
sat on the Chiltern slope, was that I would like
to get the Prime Minister to give me the Chiltern Hundreds,

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and then startle and disturb him by showing the utmost
interest in my work. I should profess a general knowledge
of my duties, but wish to be instructed in the details.
I should ask to see the Understeward, and the under Understeward,
and all the fine staff of experienced permanent officials who
are the glory of this department. And indeed, my enthusiasm

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would not be wholly unreal, For as far as I
can recollect, the original duties of a steward of the
Chiltern Hundreds were to put down the outlaws and brigands
in that part of the world. Well, there are a
great many outlaws and brigands in that part of the
world still, And though their methods have so largely altered
as to require a corresponding alteration in the tactics of

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this steward, I do not see why an energetic and
public spirited steward should not nab them. Yet, for the
robbers have not vanished from the old high Forest to
the west of the Great city. The thieves have not vanished,
they have grown so large that they are invisible. You
do not see the word Asia written across a map

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of that neighborhood, nor do you see the word thief
written across the countrysides of England, though it is really
written in equally large letters. I know men governing despotically
great stretches of that country, whose every step in life
has been such that a slip would have sent them
to Dartmoor. But they trod along the high, hard wall

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between right and wrong, the wall as sharp as the
sword edge, as softly and craftly and lightly as a cat.
The vastness of their silent violence itself obscured what they
were at. If they seem to stand for the rights
of property, it is really because they have so often
invaded them. And if they do not break the laws,

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it is only because they make them. But after all,
we only need a steward of the Chiltern Hundreds who
really understands cats and thieves. Men hunt one animal differently
from another, and the rich could catch swindlers dexterously as
they catch otters or antler deer, if they were really

(21:54):
at all keen upon doing it. But then they never
have an uncle with antlers, nor a personal friend who
is an When some of the great lords that lie
in the churchyard behind me went out against their foes
in those deep woods beneath, I wager they had bows
against the bows of the outlaws, and spears against the
spears of the robber knights. They knew what they were about.

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They fought the evil lures of their age with the
weapons of their age. If the same common sense were
applied to commercial law in forty eight hours, it would
be all over with the American trusts and the African
Forward Finance. But it will not be done for the
governing class either does not care or cares very much
for the criminals. And as for me, I had a

(22:41):
defensive opportunity of being Constable of Beaconsfield with grossly inadequate powers.
But I fear I shall never really be steward of
the Chiltern hundreds end of chapters twenty two through twenty
four s