Chapters 28-30

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 ten, chapters twenty eight through thirty The Wheel. In
a quiet and rustic, though fairly famous church in my neighborhood,
there is a window supposed to represent an angel on
a bicycle. It does definitely and indisputably represent a nude

(00:50):
youth sitting on a wheel. But there is enough complication
in the wheel and sanctity I suppose in the youth
to warrant this working description. It is a thing of
Florid Renaissance outline, and belongs to the highly pagan period
which introduced all sorts of objects into ornament. Personally, I

(01:11):
can believe in the bicycle more than in the angel.
Men they say are now imitating angels in their flying machines.
That is not in any other respect that I have
heard of. So perhaps the angel on the bicycle, if
he is an angel, and if it is a bicycle,
was avenging himself by imitating man. If so, he showed

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that high order of intellect which is attributed to angels
in medieval books, though not always, perhaps in the medieval pictures.
For wheels are the mark of a man quite as
much as wings are the mark of an angel. Wheels
are the things that are as old as mankind, and
yet strictly peculiar to man, that are prehistoric but not

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pre human. A distinguished psychologist who is well acquainted with
physiology has told me that parts of himself are certainly levers,
while other parts are probably pulleys, but that after feeling
himself carefully all over, he cannot find a wheel anywhere.

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The wheel as a mode of movement is a purely
human thing. On the ancient astortion of Adam, which, like
much of the rest of his costume, has not yet
been discovered, the heraldic emblem was a wheel pissaunt as
a mode of progress, I say it is unique. Many

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modern philosophers, like my friend before mentioned, are ready to
find links between man and beast, and to show that
man has been, in all things the blind slave of
his mother Earth. Some of a very different kind are
even eager to show it, especially if it can be
te twisted to the discredit of religion. But even the

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most eager scientists have often admitted in my hearing that
they would be surprised as some kind of cow approached them,
moving solemnly on four wheels, wings, fins, flappers, claws, hoofs, webs, trotters,
and all these the fantastic families of the earth come
against us and close around us, fluttering and flapping and

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rustling and galloping and lumbering and thundering. But there is
no sound of wheels. I remember dimly, if indeed I
remember aright, that in some of those dark prophetic pages
of scripture that seem of cloudy purple and dusky gold,
there is a passage in which the seer beholds a

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violent dream of wheels. Perhaps this was, indeed the symbolic
declaration of the spiritual supremacy of man. Whatever the birds
may do above, or the fishes beneath his ship, man
is the only thing to steer, the only thing to
be conceived as steering. He may make the birds his

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friends if he can. He may make the fishes as
gods if he chooses. But most certainly he will not
believe a bird at the mast head, and is hardly
likely that he will even permit a fish at the helm.
He is, as Swinburne says, helmsman and chief, and he

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is literally the man at the wheel. The wheel is
an animal that is always standing on its head. Only
it does it so rapidly that no philosopher has ever
found out which is its head, or, if the phrase
be felt as more exact, it is an animal that

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is always turning head over heels and progressing. By this principle, fish,
I think turn head over heels, supposing them for the
sake of argument to have heels. I have a dog
who nearly did it, and I did it once myself
when I was very small. It was an accident, and

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as delightful novelist mister de Morgan would say, it never
can happen again. Since then, no one has accused me
of being upside down, except mentally, and I rather think
that there is something to be said for that, especially
as typified by the rotary symbol. A wheel is the
sublime paradox. One part of it is always going forward,

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the other part always going back. Now, this as it happens,
is highly similar to the proper condition of any human
soul or any political state. Every sane soul or state
looks at once backwards and forwards, and even goes backwards
to come on. But those intost in revolt as I am,

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I only say meekly that one cannot have a revolution
without revolving. The wheel, being a logical thing, has reference
to what is behind as well as what is before.
It has as every society should have a part that
perpetually leaps helplessly at the sky, and a part that
perpetually bows down its head into the dust. Why should

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people be so scornful of us who stand on our heads.
Bowing down one's head in the dust is a very
good thing, the humble beginning of all happiness. When we
have bowed our heads in the dust for a little time,
the happiness comes. And then, leaving our heads in the
humble and revered position, we kick up our heels behind

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in the air. That is the true origin of standing
on one's head, and the ultimate defense of paradox. The
wheel humbles itself to be exalted. Only it does it
a little quicker than I do. Five hundred and fifty five.

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Life is full of a ceaseless shower of small coincidences,
too small to be worth mentioning except for a special purpose.
Often too trifling even to be noticed any more than
we notice one snowflake falling on another. It is this
that lends a frightful plausibility to all's false doctrines and
evil fads. There are always such crowds of accidental arguments

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for anything. If I said suddenly that historical truth is
generally told by red haired men, I have no doubt
that ten minutes reflection, in which I decline to indulge,
would provide me with a handsome list of instances in
support of it. I remember a riotous argument about Bacon
and Shakespeare, in which I offered, quite at random, to

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show that Lord Roseberry had written works of mister W. B. Yates.
No sooner had I said the words, than a torrent
of coincidences rushed upon my mind. I pointed out, for instance,
that mister yates chief work was the Secret Rose. This
may easily be paraphrased as the quiet or modest Rose,

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and so of course as the Primrose. A second after
I saw the same suggestion in the combination of Rose
and Bury. If I had pursued the matter, who knows,
but I might have been a raving maniac. By this time.
We trip over these trivial repetitions and exactitudes at every turn.

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Only they are too trivial even for conversation. A man
named Williams did walk into a strange house and murder
a man named William's son. It sounds like a sort
of infanticide. A journalist of my acquaintance did move quite
unconsciously from a place called Overstrand to a place called
over Roads. When he had made this escape, he was

(09:02):
very properly pursued by a voting card from Battersea, on
which the political agent named to Burn asked him to
vote for political candidate named Burns. And when he did so,
another coincidence happened. After and when he did so, another
coincidence happened to him, rather a spiritual than a material coincidence,

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a mystical thing, a matter of a magic number. For
a sufficient number of reasons. The man I know went
up to vote in Battersea in a drifting and even
dubious frame of mind. As the train slid through swampy
woods and sullen skies, there came into his empty mind
those idle and yet awful questions which come when the

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mind is empty. Fools make cosmic systems out of them,
Knaves make profane poems out of them, men try to
crush them like ugly lust. Religion is only the responsible
reinforcement of common courage and common sense. Religion only sets

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up the normal mode of health against the hundred moods
of disease. But there is this about such ghastly empty enigmas,
that they always have an answer to the obvious answer,
the reply offered by daily reason. Suppose a man's children
have gone swimming. Suppose he is suddenly throttled by the

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senseless fear that they are drowned. The obvious answer is
only one man in a thousand has his children drowned.
But a deeper voice, deeper being as deep as hell, answers,
and why should not you be the thousandth man? What
is true a tragic gout is also true of trivial doubt.

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The voter's guardian devil said to him, if you don't
vote to day, you can do fifteen things which will
quite certainly do some good somewhere. Please a friend, please,
a child, Please a maddened publisher. And what good do
you expect to do by voting? You don't think your
man will get in by one vote. Do you to this?

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He knew the answer of common sense. But if everybody
said that, nobody would get in at all. And then
there came that deeper voice from hades. But you are
not settling what everybody shall do, but what one person,
on one occasion shall do. If this afternoon you went
your way about more sulid things, how would it matter?

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And who would ever know? Yet, somehow the voter drove
on blindly through the blackening London roads and found somewhere
a tedious polling station and recorded his tiny vote. The
politician for whom the voter had voted got in by
five hundred and fifty five votes. The voter read this

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the next morning at breakfast, being in a mortury and
expansive mood, and found something very fascinating, not merely in
the fact of the majority, but even in the form
of it. There was something symbolic about the three exact figures.
One felt it might be a sort of motto or
cipher in the Great Book of Seals and cloudy symbols.

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There is just such a thundering repetition. Six hundred and
sixty six was the mark of the beasts. Five hundred
and fifty five is the mark of the man, the triumphant,
tribune and citizen. A number so symmetrical as that really
rises out of the region of science into the region
of art. It is a pattern like the egg and

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dart ornament, or the Greek key. One might edge of
all paper or fringe a robe with a recurring decimal.
And while the voter luxuriated in this light exactitude of
the numbers, a thought crossed his mind, and he almost
leapt to his feet. Why good heavens, he cried, I
won that election, and it was won by one vote.

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But for me it would have been the despicable broken back,
disjointed inharmonious figure five hundred and fifty four. The whole
artistic point would have vanished. The mark of the man
would have disappeared from history. It was I who, with
masterful hand, seized the chisel and carved the hero glyph

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complete and perfect. I clutched the trembling hand of destiny
when it was about to make a dull square four,
and forced it to make a nice, curly five. Why
but for me, the cosmos would have lost a coincidence.
After this outburst, the voter sat down and finished his

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breakfast Ethan done. Perhaps you do not know where Ethan
Doo is, nor do I, nor does anybody that is
where the somewhat somber fund begins. I cannot even tell

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you for certain whether it is the name of a forest,
or a town, or a hill. I can only say
that in any case, it is of the kind that
floats and is unfixed. If it is a forest, it
is one of those forests that march with a million legs,
like the walking trees that were the doom of Macbeth.

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If it is a town, it is one of those
towns that vanish, like a city of tents. If it
is a hill, it is a flying hill, like the
mountain to which faith lends wings over a vast, dim
region of England. This dark name of Ethan Dune floats
like an eagle doubtful where to swoop and strike. And

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indeed there were dark birds of prey enough or Ethan
Dune wherever it was. But now Ethan Dune itself has
grown my own, as dark and drifting as the black
drifts of the birds. And yet without this word that
you cannot fit with a meaning, and hardly with a memory,
you would be sitting in a very different chair this moment,

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and looking at a very different tablecloth. As a practical
modern phrase, I do not commend it if my private
critics and correspondents in whom I delight should happen to
address me G. K. Chesterton post restante Ethan done. I
fear their letters would not come to hand. If two
hundred commercial travelers should agree to discuss a business matter

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at Ethandune from five to five fifteen, I am afraid
they would grow old in the district as white haired wanderers.
To put it plainly, Ethandune is anywhere and nowhere in
the Western Hills. It is an English mirage. And yet
but for this doubtful thing, you would have probably no

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daily news on Saturday, and certainly no church on Sunday.
I do not say that either of these two things
is a benefit, but I do say that they are customs,
and that you would not possess them except through this mystery.
You would not have Christmas puddings, nor probably any puddings.
You would not have Easter eggs, probably not poached eggs,

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I strongly suspect not scrambled eggs. And the best historians
are decidedly doubtful about curried eggs. To cut a long
story short, the longest of all stories, you would not
have any civilization, far less any Christian civilization. And if,
in some moment of gentle curiosity you wish to know

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why you are the polished, sparkling, rounded and wholly satisfactory
citizen which you obviously are, then I can give you
no more definite answer, geographical or historical, but only toll
in your ears. The tone of the uncaptured name ethan doone.

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I will try to state quite sensibly why it is
as important as it is. And yet even that is
not easy. If I were to state the mere fact
from history books, numbers of people would think it equally
trivial and remote, like some war of the picks and scans.
The point perhaps might be put this way. There is

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a certain spirit in the world which breaks everything off short.
There may be magnificence in the smashing, but the thing
is smashed. There may be a certain splendor, but the
splendor is sterile. It abolishes all future splendors. I mean
to take a working example, York minister covered with flames

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might happen to be quite as beautiful as York minister
covered with carvings, But the carvings produce more carvings. The
flames produce nothing but a little black heat. When any
act has this cul de sac quality, it matters little
whether it is done by book or sword, by a
clumsy battle axe or chemical bond. The case is the

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same with ideas. The pessimist may be proud figure when
he curses all the stars. The optimist may be an
even prouder figure when he blesses them all. But the
real test is not in the energy, but in the effect.
When the optimist has said all things are interesting, we
are left free. We can be interested as much or

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as little as we please. But when the pessimist says
no things are interesting, it may be a very witty remark,
but it is the last witty remark that can be
made on the subject. He has burnt his cathedral, he
has had his blaze, and the rest is ashes. The skeptic,

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like bees, give their one sting and die. The pessimist
must be wrong because he says the last word. Now,
this spirit that denies and that destroys had at one
period of history a dreadful epoch of military superiority. They
did burn York minister, or at least places of the

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same kind. Roughly speaking, from the seventh century to the
tenth a dense tide of darkness, of chaos, and brainless
cruelty poured on these islands and on the western coasts
of the continent, which well nigh cut them off from
all the white man's culture forever. And this is the

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final human test. That the very chiefs of that vague
age were remembered or forgotten according to how they had
resisted this almost cosmic raid. Nobody thought of the modern
nonsense about races. Everybody thought of the human race and
its highest achievements. Arthur was a celt and may have

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been a fabulous celt, but he was a fable on
the right side. Charlemagne may have been a Gaul or
a Goth, but he was not a barbarian. He fought
for the tradition against the barbarians the Nilists, and for
this reason, also for this reason, in the last resort

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only we called the Saddus, and in some ways the
least successful of the Wessex kings, by the title of
Alfred the Great. Alfred was defeated by the barbarians again
and again. He defeated the Barbarians again and again, but
his victories were almost as vain as his defeats. Fortunately,

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he did not believe in the time, spirit, or the
trend of things, or any such modern rubbish, and therefore
kept pegging away. But while his failures and his fruitless
successes have names still in use, such as Wilton, Basing
and Dashdown, vast epic battle which really broke the Barbarian

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has remained without a modern place or name, except that
it was near Chippenheim where the Danes gave up their
swords and were baptized. No one can pick out certainly
the place where you and I were saved from being
savages forever. But the other day, under a wild sunset

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and moonrise, I passed the place which is best reputed
as Ethan done a high, grim upland partly bare and
partly shaggy, like that savage and sacred spot. In those
great imaginative lines about the demon Lover and the waning moon,
the darkness, the red wreck of sunset, the yellow and

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lurid moon, the long fantastic shadows actually created that sense
of monstrous incident, which is the dramatic side of landscape
the bare gray slopes seemed to rush down hill like
routed hosts. The dark clouds drove across like riven banners,
and the moon was like a golden dragon, like the

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golden Dragon of Wessex. As we crossed the tilt of
the torn heath, I saw suddenly between myself and the
moon a black, shapeless pile higher than a house. The
atmosphere was so intense that I really thought of a
pile of dead Danes, with some phantom conqueror on the
top of it. Fortunately I was crossing these ways with

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a friend who knew more history than I, and he
told me that this was a barrow older than Alfred,
older than the Romans, older perhaps than the Britons, and
no man knew whether it was a wall, or a
trophy or a tomb. Ethan Doone is still a drifting name,

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but it gave me a queer emotion to think that
soared in hand. As the Danes poured with the torrents
of their blood down to Chippenham, the Great King may
have lifted up his head and looked at that oppressive shape,
suggestive of something and yet suggestive of nothing. He may

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have looked at it as we did, and understood it
as little as we The end of chapters twenty eight
through thirty