Chapters 25-27

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,
Section nine, chapters twenty five through twenty seven, The Field

(00:31):
of Blood. In my daily paper this morning I read
the following interesting paragraphs, which take my mind back to
in England, which I do not remember, and which therefore
perhaps I admire. Nearly sixty years ago, on September fourth,

(00:51):
eighteen fifty, the Australian General Haynau, who had gained an
unenviable fame through the world by his ferocious methods in
suppressing the Hungarian Revolution in eighteen forty nine, while on
a visit to this country, was belaboured in the streets
of London by the draymen of Messrs Berkley, Perkins and Company,

(01:14):
whose brewery he had just inspected in company of an adjutant.
Popular delight was so great that the government of the
time did not dare to prosecute the assailants, and the General,
the woman flogger, as he was called by the people,
had to leave these shores without remedy. He returned to

(01:35):
his own country and settled upon his estate at Sezerkes,
which is close to the commune above mentioned. By his will,
the estate passed to his daughter, after whose death it
was to be presented to the commune. This daughter had
just died, but the communal council, after much deliberation, as

(01:57):
declined to accept the gift and ordered them that the
estate should be left to fall out of cultivation and
be called the Bloody Meadow. Now that is an example
of how things happen under an honest, democratic impulse. I
do not dwell, especially on the earlier part of the story.
Though the earlier part of the story is astonishingly interesting.

(02:18):
It recalls the days when Englishmen were potential lighters, that is,
potential rebels. It is not for lack of agonies of
intellectual anger. The Sultan and the late King Leopold have
been denounced as hardly as General Hano, but I doubt
if they would have been physically thrashed in the London streets.

(02:39):
It is not the tyrants that are lacking, but the draymen. Nevertheless,
it is not upon the historic heroes of Berkley Perkinson
country that I build all my hope. Fine as it was.
It was not a full and perfect revolution a Brewer's
Draymond beating an eminent European general with a stick, though, oh,

(03:00):
a singularly bright and pleasing vision is not a complete one.
Only when the Brewer's Draymond beats the Brewer with a stick,
shall we see the clear and radiant sunrise of British
self government. The fund will really start when we begin
to thump the oppressors of England as well as the
oppressors of Hungary. It is, however, a definite decline in

(03:23):
the spiritual character of Draymond that now they can thump
neither one nor the other. But as I have already suggested,
my real quarrel is not about the first part of
the extract, but about the second. Whether or no the
Draymen of Berkley and Perkins have degenerated, the commune which

(03:44):
includes Caesakries has not degenerated. By the way, the commune
which includes Sisserkes is called Kisserkes. I trust that this
frank of Owl will excuse me from the necessity of
mentioning either of these places again by name. The commune
is still capable of performing direct democratic actions if necessary,

(04:08):
with a stick. I say with a stick, not with sticks,
for that is the whole argument about democracy. A people
is a soul, and if you want to know what
a soul is, I can only answer that it is
something that can sin and that can sacrifice itself. A
people can commit theft, A people can confess theft. A

(04:29):
people can repent of theft. That is the idea of
the republic. Now, most modern people have got into their
heads the idea that democracies are dull, drifting things, a
mere black swarm or slide of clerks to their accustomed doom.
In most modern novels and essays, it is insisted, by

(04:50):
a way of contrast, that a walking gentleman may have
adventures as he walks. It is insisted that an aristocrat
can commit crimes because an aristocrat always cultivates liberty. But
in truth, the people can have adventures, as Israel did
crawling through the desert to the promised land. A people

(05:11):
can do heroic deeds, a people can commit crimes. The
French people did both in the Revolution. The Irish people
have done both in their much purer and more honorable progress.
But the real answer to this aristocratic argument, which seeks
to identify democracy with a drab utilitarianism may be found

(05:33):
in action such as that of the Hungarian commune, whose
name I declined to repeat. This commune did just one
of those acts that proved that a separate people has
a separate personality. It threw something away. A man can
throw a banknote into the fire, a man can fling
a sack of corn into the river. The bank note

(05:56):
may be burnt as the satisfaction of some scruple. The
corn may be destroyed as a sacrifice to some god.
But whenever there is sacrifice, we know there is a
single will. Men may be disputatious and doubtful, may divide
by very narrow majorities in their debate about how to
gain wealth, but men have to be uncommonly unanimous in

(06:20):
order to refuse wealth. It wants a very complete committee
to burn a bank note in the office grate. It
needs a highly religious tribe really to throw corn into
the river. This self denial is the test and definition
of self government. I wish I could feel certain that

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any English county council or parish council would be single
enough to make that strong gesture of a romantic refusal,
could say no rent shall be raised from this spot.
No grain shall grow in this spot, no goods shall
come of this spot. It shall remain sterile for a sign.

(07:03):
But I am afraid they might answer, like the eminent
sociology in the story, that it was a wisk of
spice the strangeness of luxury. It is an English misfortune
that what is called public spirit is so often a

(07:25):
very private spirit, the legitimate but strictly individual ideals of
this or that person who happens to have the power
to carry them out. When these private principles are held
by a very rich people, the result is often the
blackest and most repulsive kind of despotism, which is benevolent despotism. Obviously,

(07:49):
it is the public which ought to have public spirit,
But in this country, and at this epoch, this is
exactly what it has not got. We shall have a
public wash house and a public kitchen long before we
have a public spirit. In fact, if we had a
public spirit, we might very probably do without the other things.

(08:12):
But if England were properly and naturally governed by the English,
one of the first results would probably be this that
our standard of excess or defect in property would be
changed from that of the plutocrat to that of the
moderately needy man. That is, while property might be strictly respected,

(08:33):
everything that is necessary to a clerk would be felt
and considered on quite a different plane from anything which
is a very great luxury to a clerk. This sane
distinction of sentiment is not instinctive at present, because our
standard of life is that of the governing class, which
is eternally turning luxuries into necessities as fast as pork

(08:58):
is turned into sausages, and which cannot remember the beginning
of its needs and cannot get to the end of
its novelties. Take for the sake of argument the case
of the motor. Doubtless, the duke now feels it as
necessary to have a motor as to have a roof,
and in a little while he may feel it equally

(09:20):
necessary to have a flying ship. But this does not prove,
as the reactionary skeptics always argue, that a motor really
is just as necessary as a roof. It only proves
that a man can get used to an artificial life.
It does not prove that there is no natural life
for him to get used to. In the broad's eye

(09:41):
view of common sense, there abides a huge disproportion between
the need for a roof and the need for an aeroplane,
and no rush of inventions can ever alter it. The
only difference is that things are now judged by the
abnormal needs, when they might be judged merely by the
normal needs. The best aristocrat sees the situation from an aeroplane.

(10:05):
The good citizen, in his loftiest moments, goes no further
than seeing it from the roof. It is not true
that luxury is merely relative. It is not true that
it is only an expensive novelty which we may afterwards
come to think a necessity. Luxury has a firm philosophical meaning,

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and where there is a real public spirit, luxury is
generally allowed for, sometimes rebuked, but always recognized instantly to
the healthy soul. There is something in the very nature
of certain pleasures which warns us that they are exceptions,
and that if they become the rules, they will become
very tyrannical rules. Take a harassed seamstress out of the

(10:49):
harrow road and give her one lightning hour in a
motor car, and she will probably feel it is as splendid,
but strange, rare, and even terrible. But this is not
as the relative as say, merely because she's never been
in a car before. She has never been in the
middle of a Somerset cowslip meadow before. But if you

(11:10):
put her there, she does not think it terrifying or extraordinary,
but merely pleasant and free and a little lonely. She
does not think the motor monstrous because it is new.
She thinks it is monstrous because she has eyes in
her head. She thinks it is monstrous because it is monstrous.
That is her mother's and grandmothers, and the whole race

(11:33):
by whose life she lives have had, as a matter
of fact, a roughly recognizable model of living. Sitting in
a green field was a part of it. Traveling as
quick as a cannon ball was not. And we should
not look down on the seamstress because she mechanically emits
a short, sharp scream whenever the motor begins to move.

(11:53):
On the contrary, we ought to look up to the
seamstress and regard her cry as a kind of mystic
omen or revelation of nature, as the old Goths used
to consider the howls emitted by chance females when annoyed
for that ritual yell is really a mark of moral health,
of sweat response to the stimulations and changes of life.

(12:16):
The seamstress is wiser than all the learned ladies precisely
because she can still feel that a motor is a
different sort of thing from a meadow. By the accident
of her economic imprisonment, it is even possible that she
may have seen more of the former than the latter,
But this has not shaken her Cyclopean's sagacity as to

(12:37):
which is the natural thing and which the artificial. If
not for her at least for humanity as a whole,
there is little doubt about which is the more normally attainable.
It is considerably cheaper to sit in a meadow and
see motors go by than to sit in a motor
and see meadows go by. To me personally, at least,

(13:01):
it would never seem needful to own a motor any
more than to own an avalanche. An avalanche, if you
have luck, I am told, is very swift, successful, and
thrilling way of coming down a hill. It is distinctly
more stirring, say, than a glacier, which moves an inch
in a hundred years. But I do not divide these
pleasures either by excitement or convenience, but by the nature

(13:24):
of the thing itself. It seems human to have a
horse or a bicycle, because it seems human to potter about.
And men cannot work horses, nor can bicycles work men
enormously far of their ordinary haunts and affairs. But about motoring,
there is something magical, like going to the moon, And
I say the things should be kept exceptional and felt

(13:46):
as something breathless and bizarre. My ideal hero would own
his horse, but would have the moral courage to hire
his motor. Fairy tales are the only sound guide books
to life. I like the fairy prince to ride on
a white pony out of his father's stables, which are
of ivory and gold. But if in the course of

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his adventures he finds it necessary to travel on a
flaming dragon, I think he ought to give the dragon
back to the witch at the end of the story.
It is a mistake to have dragons about the place,
for there is truly an air of something weird about luxury.
And it is by this that healthy human nature has
always smelt and suspected it. All romances that deal in

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extreme luxury, from the Arabian Nights to the novels Weta
end ISRAELI have, it may be noted a singular air
of dream and occasionally a nightmare. In such imaginative debauches,
there is something as occasional as intoxication. If that is
still countered, occasional life in those preposterous palaces would be

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an agony of dullness. It is clear we are meant
to visit them only as in a flying vision. And
what is true of the old freaks of wealth flavor
and fierce, color and smell, I would say also of
the new freak of wealth, which is speed. I should
say to the Duke when I entered his house at
the head of an armed mob, I do not object

(15:15):
to your having exceptional pleasures, if you have them exceptionally.
I do not mind your enjoying the strange and alien
energies of science, if you feel them strange an alien,
and not your own. But in condemning you under the
seventh section of the eighth Decree of the Republic to
hire a motor car twice a year at Margate, I

(15:39):
am not the enemy of your luxuries, but rather the
protector of them. That is what I should say to
the Duke. As to what the Duke would say to me,
that is another matter, and may well be deferred the
triumph of the donkey. Doubtless the unsympathetic might state my

(16:03):
doctrine that one should not own a motor like a horse,
but rather use it like a flying dragon, in the
simpler form that I will always go motoring in somebody
else's car. My favorite modern philosopher, mister W. W. Jacobs,
describes a similar case of spiritual delicacy misunderstood. I have
not the book at hand, but I think that Job

(16:25):
Brown was reproaching Bill Chambers for wasteful drunkenness, and Henry
Walker spoke up for Bill and said he scarcely ever
had a glass, but what some one else paid for it?
And there was an unpleasantness all round. Then, being less
sensitive than Bill Chambers or whoever it was, I will
risk this rude perversion of my meaning and concede that

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I was in a motor car yesterday, and the motor
car most certainly was not my own, and the journey,
though it contained nothing that especially unusual on such journeys,
had running through it a strain of the grotesque which
was at once wholesome and humiliating. The symbol of that
influence was that ancient symbol of the humble and humorous,

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a donkey. When I first saw the donkey, I saw
him in the sunlight as the unearthly gargoyle that he is.
My friend had met me in his car, I repeat firmly,
in his car, at the little painted station in the
middle of the warm, wet woods and hop fields of
that western country. He proposed to drive me first to

(17:33):
his house beyond the village, before starting a longer spin
of adventure. And we rattled through those rich green lanes,
which have in them something singularly analogous to fairy tales,
whether the lanes produced the fairies, or as I believed,
the fairies produced the lanes. All around in the glimmering
hop yard stood those little hop kilns, like stunted and

(17:57):
slanting spires. They looked like dwarfish churches, in fact, rather
like many modern churches I could mention churches, all of
them small, in each of them, a little crooked in
his elfin atmosphere. We swung round a sharp corner, and
half way up a steep white hill, we saw what
looked at first like a tall, black monster against the sun.

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It appeared to be a dark and dreadful woman, walking
on wheels and waving long ears like a bat's. A
second glance told me that she was not the local
witch in a state of transition. She was only one
of the million tricks of perspective. She set up in
a small wheel cart drawn by a donkey. The donkey's
ears were set just behind her head, and the whole

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was black against the light. Perspective is really the comic
element in everything. It has a pompous Latin name, but
it is incurably gothic and grotesque. One simple proof of
this is that it is always left out of all
dignified and decorative art. There is no perspective in the
Elgin marbles, and even the essentially angular angles in medieval

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stained glass. Almost always, as it says in Patience, contrive
to look both angular and flat. There is something intrinsically
disproportionate and outrageous in the idea of the distant objects
dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer objects swelling enormously and intolerably.

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There is something frantic in the notion that one's own
father by walking a little way can be changed by
a blast of magic to a pigmy. There is something
farcical in the fancy that nature keeps one's uncle in
an infinite number of sizes, according to where he is
to stand. All soldiers in retreat turn into tin soldiers,

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all bears in route into toy bears, as if on
the ultimate horizon of the world, everything was sardonically doomed
to stand up laughable and little against heaven. It was
for this reason that the old woman and her donkey
struck us at first, when seen from behind, as one
black grotesque. I afterwards had the chance of seeing the

(20:16):
old woman, the cart, and the donkey fairly in flank
and in all their length. I saw the old woman
and the donkey the saunt as they might have appeared
heraldically on the shield of some heroic family. I saw
the old woman and the donkey dignified, decorative, and flat,
as they might have marched across the Elgin marbles. Seen

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thus under an equal light, there was nothing especially ugly
about them. The cart was long and sufficiently comfortable, The
donkey was stolid and sufficiently respectable. The old woman was lean,
but sufficiently strong and even smiling in a sour, rustic manner.
But seen from behind, they looked like one black, monstrous animal.

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The dark donkey cars seemed like dreadful wings, and the tall,
dark back of the woman, erect like a tree, seemed
to grow taller and taller till one could almost screen.
Then we went by her with a blasting roar, like
a railway train, and fled from her over the brow
of the hill to my friend's home. There we paused

(21:25):
only for my friend to stock the car with some
kind of picnic paraphernalia, and so started again, as it
happened by the way we had come. Thus it fell
that we went shattering down that short, sharp hill again
before the poor old woman and her donkey had managed
to crawl to the top of it. And seeing them
under a different light, I saw them very differently. Black

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against the sun they had seen comic, but bright against
the greenwood and gray cloud they were not comic but tragic,
For there are not a few things that seem fantastic
in the twilight, and in the sunlighter sad I saw
that she had a grand gone to mask of ancient
honor and endurance, and wide eyes sharpened to two shining points,

(22:11):
as if looking for that small hope on the horizon
of human life. I also saw that her cart contained carrots.
Don't you feel, broadly speaking, a beast, I asked my friend,
when you go so easily and so fast? For we
had crashed by so that the crazy cart must have
thrilled in every stick of it. My friend was a

(22:34):
good man and said yes, But I don't think it
would do her any good if I went slower. No,
I assented, after reflection, perhaps the only pleasure we can
give to her, or any one else, is to get
out of their sight. Very soon. My friend availed himself
of this advice. In no Niggard's spirit, I felt as

(22:55):
if we were fleeing for our lives, in throttling fear
after some fright full atrocity. In truth, there is only
one difference left between the secrecy of the two social classes.
The poor hide themselves in darkness, and the rich hide
themselves in distance. They both hide. As we shot like

(23:16):
a lost boat over a cataract, down into a whirlpool
of white roads. Far below, I saw afar a black
dot crawling like an insect. I looked again. I could
hardly believe it. There was the slow old woman with
her slow old donkey, still toiling along the main road.
I asked my friend to slacken, but when he said,

(23:36):
of the car, she's wantin to go, I knew it
was all up with him. But when you have called
a thing female, you have yielded to it utterly. We
passed the old woman with a shot that must have
shaken the earth. If her head did not reel, and
her heart quail, I know not what they were made of.
And when we had fled perilously on in the gathering dark,

(24:00):
burning hamlets behind us, I suddenly called out, why what
asses we are? Why it is she that is brave,
she and the donkey. We are safe enough, We are
artillery and plate armor. And she stands up to us
with matchwood and a snail. If you had grown old
in a quiet bellley and people began firing cannonballs as

(24:23):
big as cabs at you in your seventieth year, wouldn't
you jump? And she never moved an eyelid. Oh, we
go very fast and very far nodell. As I spoke,
came a curious noise, and my friend, instead of going fast,
began to go very slow. Then he stopped. He got out,

(24:45):
and then he said, I left the step knee behind.
The gray moss came out of the wood, and the
yellow stars came out to crowner tas my friend, with
the lucidity of despair, explained to me, on the sound
of scientific principles, of course, that nothing would be any
good at all. We must sleep the night in the lane,

(25:07):
except in the very unlikely event of someone coming to
carry a message to some town. Twice I thought I
heard some tiny sound of such approach, and it died
away like wind in the trees, and the motorist was
already asleep when I heard it renewed, and realized something
certainly was approaching. I ran up to the road, and

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there it was. Yes, it and she thrice said, she
come once comic, and once tragic, and once heroic. And
when she came again, it was as if in pardon
on a pure errand of prosaic pity and relief. I
am quite serious. I do not want you to laugh.
It is not the first time a donkey has been

(25:50):
received seriously, nor one riding a donkey with respect. The
end of chapters twenty five through twenty seven