Chapters 31-33

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,

(00:26):
Section eleven, chapters thirty one through thirty three The Flat Free.
Some time ago, a subtropical dinner was given by some
South African millionaire. I forget his name, and so very
likely does he. The humor of this was so subtle

(00:47):
and haunting that it has been imitated by another millionaire
who has given a North Pole dinner in a grand hotel,
on which he managed to spend gigantic sums of money.
You do not know how he did it. Perhaps they
had silver for snow and great sapphires for lumps of ice. Anyhow,
it seems to have cost rather more to bring the

(01:09):
Pole to London than to take Perri to the Pole.
All this, one would say, does not concern us. We
do not want to go to the Pole or to
the hotel. I for one cannot imagine which would be
the more dreary and disgusting, the real North Pole or
the sham one. But as a mere matter of psychology,

(01:31):
that mary pastime. There is a question that is not unentertaining.
Why is it that all this scheme of ice and
snow leaves us cold? Why is it that you and
I feel we would do on the whole rather spend
the evening with two or three stable boys in the
pothouse than take part in that pallid antarctic joke. Why

(01:53):
does the modern millionaire jest bore a man to death
with the mere thought of it that it does born
man to death? I take for granted, and she'll do
so until somebody writes to me in cold ink and
tells me that he really thinks it is funny. Now,
it is not a sufficient explanation to say that the
joke is silly. All jokes are silly. That is what

(02:17):
they are for. If you ask some sincere elemental person,
a woman, for instance, what she thinks of a good
sentence from Dickens, she will say that it is too silly.
When mister Weller Senior assured mister Weller Junior that the
circumvented was a more tender word than circumscribed, the remark

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was at least as silly as it was sublime. It
is in vain, then, to object to senseless jokes. The
very definition of a joke is that it need have
no sense except that one wild and supernatural sense, which
we call the sense of humor. Humor is meant, in
a literal sense, to make a game of man, that is,

(03:01):
to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him
like game. It is meant to remind us human beings
that we have things about us as ungainly and ludicrous
as the nose of the elephant or the neck of
the giraffe. If laughter does not touch a sort of
fundamental folly, it does not do its duty in bringing

(03:22):
us back to an enormous and original simplicity. Nothing has
been worse than the modern notion that a clever man
can make a joke without taking part in it, without
sharing in the general absurdity that such a situation creates.
It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes.

(03:43):
Joking is undignified. That is why it is so good
for one soul. Do not fancy you can be a
detached wit and avoid being of buffoon. You cannot. If
you are the court jester, you must be the court fool.
Whatever it is therefore that wearies us in these wealthy

(04:04):
jokes like the North Pole Dinner. It is not merely
that men make fools of themselves. When Dickens describes mister Chuckster,
Dickens was strictly speaking making a fool of himself, for
he was making a fool out of himself. And every
kind of real lark, from acting a charade to making
a pun, does consist in restraining one's nine hundred and

(04:27):
ninety nine serious selves and letting the fool lose. The
dulness of the millionaire's joke is much deeper. It is
not silly at all. It is solely stupid. It does
not consist in ingenuity limited, but merely of inanity expanded.

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There is a considerable difference between a witch making a
fool of himself and a fool making a wit of himself.
The true explanation I fancy may be stated that us
we can all remember it. In the case of the
really inspiriting parties and fooleries of our youth, the only
real fund is to have limited materials and a good idea.

(05:11):
This explains the perennial popularity of impromptu private theatricals. These
fascinate because they give such a scope for invention and
variety with a most domestic restriction of machinery. A teboposey
may have to do for an admiral's cocked hat. It
all depends on whether the amateur actor can swear like

(05:32):
an admiral. A hearth rug may have to do for
a bear's fur. It all depends on whether the wearer
is a polished and versatile man of the world and
can front like a bear. A clergyman's hat, to my
own private and certain knowledge, can be punched and thumped
into an exact shape of a policeman's helmet. It all

(05:52):
depends on the clergyman. I mean, it depends on his permission.
His imprimater is nahil obstinate. Clergymen can be policemen. Drugs
can rage like wild animals. Tea cozies can smell of
the sea, if only there is at the back of
them all one bright and amusing idea. What is really

(06:14):
funny about Christmas charades in any average home is that
there is a contrast between commonplace resources and one comic idea.
What is deadly dull about the millionaire banquet is that
there is a contrast between colossal resources and no idea.
That is the abyss of inanity. In such feasts it

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may be literally called a yawning abyss. The abyss the
vast chasm between the money power employed and the thing
it is employed on. To make a big joke out
of a broomstick, a barrow, and an old hat, that
is great. But to make a small joke out of
mountains of emeralds and tons of gold, surely that is humiliating.

(07:00):
The North Pole is not a very good joke to
start with. An icicle hanging on one's nose is a
simple sort of humor In any case. If a set
of spontaneous mummers got the effect cleverly with cut crystals
from the early Victorian chandelier, there might really be something
suddenly funny in it. But what should we say of
hanging diamonds on a hundred human noses merely to make

(07:23):
that precious joke about icicles? What can be more abject
than the union of elaborate and research arrangements with an
old and obvious point. The clown with its red hot
poker and the string of sausages is all very well
in his way, But think of a string of pates

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de fougass sausages at a guinea apiece. Think of a
red hot poker cut out of a single ruby. Imagine
such fantasticalities of expense with such a tameness than staleness
of design. We may even admit the practical joke if
it is domestic and simple. We may concede that apple

(08:09):
pie beds and butter slides are sometimes useful things for
the education of Pampa's persons living the higher life. But
imagine a man making a butter slide and telling everybody
was made with the most expensive butter. Picture an apple
pie bed of purple and cloth of gold. It is
not hard to see that such schemes would lead simultaneously

(08:32):
to a double boredom, weariness of the costly and complex
method and of the meager and trivial thought. This is
the true analysis. I think of that chill and tedium
that strikes to the soul of any intelligent man when
he hears of such elephantine pranks. That is why we
should feel that freak dinners would not even be freakish.

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That is why we feel that expensive arctic feasts would
probably be a frost. If it be said that such
things do no harm I hasten, in one sense at
least to agree. Far from it. They do good. They
do good in the most vital manner of modern times.
For they prove and print in huge letters the truth

(09:15):
which our society must learn or perish. They prove that
wealth in society as now constituted, does not tend to
get into the hands of the thrifty or the capable,
but actually tends to get into the hands of wastrels
and imbeciles. And it proves that the wealthy class of
the day is quite as ignorant about how to enjoy

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itself as about how to rule other people. That it
cannot make its government govern or its education educate, we
may take as the trifling weakness of oligarchy. But pleasure
we do look to see in such a class, and
it has surely come to its decrepitude when it cannot
make its pleasure please the garden of the sea. One

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sometimes hears from persons of the chillier type of the
culture the remark that plain country people do not appreciate
the beauty of the country. This is an error rooted
in the intellectual pride of mediocrity, and it is one
of the many examples of a truth in the idea
that extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the mob,

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one must either be on a level with it, as
I am, or be really high up like the saints.
It is roughly the same with aesthetics. Slang and rude
dialect can be relished by a really literary taste, but
not by a merely bookish taste. And when these cultivated
cranks say that Rustics do not talk of nature in

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an appreciative way, they really mean that they do not
talk in a bookish way. They do not talk bookishly
about clouds or stones, or pigs or slugs or horses
or anything you please. They talk piggishly about pigs and sluggishly,
i suppose about slugs, and are refreshingly horsy about horses.

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They speak in a stony way of stones, and they
speak in a cloudy way of clouds. And this is
surely the right way. And if by any chance, a simple,
intelligent person from the country comes in contact with any
aspect of nature unfamiliar and arresting, such a person's comment
is always worth remark. It is sometimes an epigram, and

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at worst it is never a quotation. Consider, for instance,
what waste of words imitation and ambiguity the ordinary educated
person in the big towns could pour out on the
subject of the sea. A country girl I know, in
the country of Buckingham, had never seen the sea in

(11:57):
her life until the other day, when she was asked
for she thought of it. She said, it was like Cauliflowers.
Now that is a piece of pure literature, vivid, entirely
independent and original and perfectly true. I had always been
haunted with an analogious kinship which I could never locate.
Cabbages always remind me of the sea, and the sea

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always reminds me of cabbages. It is partly, perhaps the
veined mingling of violet and green, as in the sea.
A purple that is almost dark red may mix with
a green that is almost yellow, and still thee the
blue sea as a whole. But it is more the
grand curves of the cabbage that curl over cavernously like waves.

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And it is partly again that dreamy repetition, as of
a pattern that made two great poets Eschless and Shakespeare
use a word like multitudinous of the ocean. But just
where my fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young woman rushed so
to speak to my imaginative rescue Haliflowers are twenty times

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better than cabbages, for they show the wave breaking as
well as curling, and the efflorescence of the branching foam,
blind of bubbling and opaque. Moreover, the strong lines of
life are suggested. The arches of the rushing waves have
all the rigid energy of green stalks, as if the
whole sea or one great green plant with one immense

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white flower rooted in the abyss. Now, a large number
of delegate and superior persons would refuse to see the
force in the kitchen garden comparison, because it is not
connected with any of the ordinary maritime sentiments. As stated
in books and songs, the esthetic amateur would say that
he knew what large and philosophical thoughts he ought to have.

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By the bound of steep. He would say that he
was not a greengrocer who would think first of greens,
to which I should reply, like Hamlet apropos of a
parallel profession, I would you you are so honest a man.
The mention of Hamlet reminds me by the way that
besides the girl who had never seen the sea. I
knew a girl who had never seen a stage play.

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She was taken to Hamlet, and she said it was
very sad. There is another case of going to the
primortal point, which is overlaid by learning and secondary impressions.
We are so used to thinking of Hamlet as a
problem that we sometimes quite forget that it is a tragedy.
Just as we are so used to thinking of the

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sea as vast and vague that we scarcely notice when
it is white and green. But there is another quarrel
involved in which the young gentleman of our culture comes
into violent collision with the young lady of the cauliflowers.
The first essential of the merely bookless view of the
sea is that it is boundless and gives the sentiment

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of infinity. Now it is quite certain I think that
the cauliflower as simile was partly created by exactly the
opposite impression, impression of boundary and a barrier. The girl
thought of it as a field of vegetables, even as
a yard of vegetables. The girl was right. The ocean
only suggests infinity when you cannot see it. A sea.

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Miss may seem endless, but it is not a sea,
so far from being vague and vanishing. The sea is
the one hard straight line in nature. It is the
one plain limit, the only thing that God has made
that really looks like a wall compared to the sea.
Not only sun and cloud are chaotic and doubtful, but

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solid mountains and standing forests may be said to melt
and fade and flee in the presence of that lonely
iron line. The old naval phrase that the seas are
England's bulwarks is not a frigid or artificial metaphor. He
came into the head of some genuine sea dog when
he was genuinely looking at the sea. Or The edge

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of the sea is like the edge of a sword.
It is sharp, military, and decisive. It really looks like
a bolt or bar, and not like a mere expansion.
It hangs in heaven, gray or green or blue, changing
in color, but changeless in form, behind all the slippery

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contours of the land and all the savage softness of
the forests, like the scales of God held even it
hangs a perpetual minder of that divine reason and justice
which abides behind all compromises and all legitimate variety, the
one straight line, the limit of the intellect, the dark

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and ultimate dogma of the world. The sentimentalist sentimentalism is
the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean. These were,
I think the exact words of a distinguished American visitors
at the Guildhall, and may Heaven forgive me if I

(17:02):
do him wrong. It was spoken in illustration of the
folly of supporting Egyptian and other Oriental nationalism, and it
has tempted me to some reflections on the first word
of the sentence. The sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man
who wants to eat his cake and have it. He
has no sense of honor about ideas. He will not

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see that one must pay for an idea as for
anything else. He will not see that any worthy idea,
like an honest woman, can only be one on its
own terms and with its logical chain of loyalty. One
idea attracts him, another idea really inspires him, a third

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idea flatters him, a fourth idea pays him. He will
have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem,
no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other.
The sentimentalist is a philosophic profit who tries to capture
every mental duty without reference to its rival duties, who

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will not even be off with the old love before
he is on with a new. Thus, if a man
were to say, I love this woman, but I may
someday find my affinity in some other woman, he would
be a sentimentalist. He would be saying I will leave
my wedding cake and keep it. Or if a man
should say, I am a republican believing in the equality

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of citizens, but when the government has given me my peerage,
I can do infinite good as a kind of landlord
and wise legislator, then that man would be a sentimentalist.
He would be trying to keep at the same time
the classic austerity of equality and also the vulgar excitement
of an aristocrat. Or if a man should say, I

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am in favor of religious equality, but I must preserve
the Protestant succession, he would be a sentimentalist of a
grocer and more improbable kind. This is the essence of
the sentimentalist, that he seeks to enjoy every idea without
its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence. Now it

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would really be hard to find a worse case of
this inconsequent sentimentalism than the theory of the British Empire
advanced by mister Roosevelt himself in his attack on sentimentalists
for the imperial theory. The Roosevelt and Kipling theory of
our relation to Eastern races is simply one of eating
the Oriental cake, I suppose the Sultana cake, and at

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the same time leaving it alone. Now there are two
sane attitudes of a European statesman towards Eastern peoples, and
there are only two. First, he may simply say that
the less we have to do with them, the better.
That whether they are lower than us or higher, they
are so catastrophically different that the more we go our

(19:58):
way and they go theirs, the better for all parties concerned.
I will confess to some tenderness for this view. There
is much to be said for letting that calm immemorial
life of slave and sultan, temple and palm tree go
on as it has always flowed. The best reason of all,
the reason that affects me most finely, is that if

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we left the rest of the world alone, we might
have some time for attending to our own affairs, which
are urgent to the point of excruciation. All history points
to this that intensive cultivation in the long run triumphs
over the widest extensive cultivation, or in other words, that
making one's own fields superior is far more effective than

(20:44):
reducing other people's fields to inferiority. If you cultivate your
own garden and grow an especially large cabbage, people will
probably come to see it, whereas the life of one's
selling small cabbages round the whole district is often forlorn. Now,
the imperial pioneer is essentially a commercial traveler, and a

(21:07):
commercial traveler is essentially a person who goes to see
people because they don't want to see him. As long
as empires go about urging their ideas on others, I
always have a notion that the ideas are no good.
If they were really so splendid, they would make the
country preaching them a wonder of the world. That is

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the true ideal. A great nation ought not to be
a hammer, but a magnet. Men went to the medieval
Sabonne because it was worth going to. Men went to
old Japan because only there could they find the unique
and exquisite old Japanese art. Nobody will ever go to
modern Japan, nobody worth bothering about. I mean, because modern

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Japan has made the huge mistake of going to the
other people, becoming a common empire. The mountain has condescended
to Muhammad and us forth. Muhammad will whistle for it
when he wants. That is my political theory, that we
should make England worth copying instead of telling everybody to
copy her. But it is not the only possible theory.

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There is another view of our relations to such places
as Egypt and India, which is entirely tenable. It may
be said we Europeans are the heirs of the Roman Empire.
When all is said, we have the largest freedom, the
most exact science, the most solid romance. We have a deep,
though undefined obligation to give as we have received from God,

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because the tribes of men are truly thirsting for these things.
As for water, all men really want clear laws, we
can give clear laws. All men really want hygiene, we
can give hygiene. We're not merely imposing Western ideas, we
are simply fulfilling human ideas. For the first time, on

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this line, I think it is possible to justify the
forts of Africa and the railroads of Asia. But on
this line we must go much further. If it is
our duty to give our best, there can be no
doubt about what is our best. The great thing our
Europe has made is the citizen, the idea of the

(23:19):
average man, free and full of honor, voluntarily invoking on
his own sin the just vengeance of his city. All
else we have done is mere machinery. For that. Railways
exist only to carry the citizen. Forts only to defend him,
Electricity only to light him, medicine only to heal him.

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Popularism the idea of the people alive and patiently feeding history,
that we cannot give, for it exists everywhere east and west.
But democracy, the idea of the people fighting and governing,
That is the only thing we have to give. Those

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are the two roads, but between them weakly wavers the sentimentalist,
that is, the imperialist of the Roosevelt school. He wants
to have it both ways, to have the splendors of
success without the perils. Europe may enslave Asia because it
is flattering, but Europe must not free Asia because that

(24:24):
is responsible. It tickles his imperial taste that the Hindus
should have European hats. It is too dangerous if they
have European heads. He cannot leave Asia Asiatic, yet he
dares not contemplate Asia as European. Therefore, he proposes to
have in Egypt railway signals but not flags, dispatched boxes

(24:49):
but not ballot boxes. In short, the Sentimentalist decides to
spread the body of Europe without the soul. End of
chapters thirty one through thirty three.