Chapters 34-36

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 Discursions by G. K. Chesterton,

(00:25):
Section twelve, chapters thirty four through thirty six, The White Horses.
It is within my experience, which is very brief and
occasional in this manner, that it is not really at
all easy to talk in a motor car. This is unfortunate,

(00:46):
first because as a whole it prevents me from motoring,
and second because at any given moment it prevents me
from talking. The difficulty is not wholly due to the
physical conditions, though these are distinctly unconversing Fitzgerald's Omar, being
a pessimist was probably rich, and being a lazy fellow,

(01:07):
was almost certainly a motorist. If any doubt could exist
on the point, it is enough to say that, in
speaking of the foolish prophets, Omar has defined the difficulties
of colloquial motoring with a precision which cannot be accidental.
Their words to wind are scattered, and their mouths are

(01:28):
stopped with dust. From this follows not as many of
the cut and dried. Philosophers would say a savage silence
and mutual hostility, but rather one of those rich silences
that make the mass and bulk of all friendship, the
silence of men rowing the same boat or fighting in

(01:48):
the same battle line. It happened that the other day
I hired a motor car because I wanted to visit,
in very rapid succession the battle places and hiding places
of Alfred the Great. And for a thing of this sort,
a motor is really appropriate. It is not, by any

(02:09):
means the best way of seeing the beauty of the country.
You see beauty better by walking, and best of all,
by sitting still. But it is a good method in
any enterprise that involves a parody of the military or
governmental quality, anything which needs to know quickly the whole
contour of a country, or the rough relative position of

(02:30):
men in towns. On such a journey like jagged lightning,
I sat from morning till night by the side of
the chauffeur, and we scarcely exchanged a word to the hour.
By the time the yellow stars came out in the
villages and the white stars in the skies, I think
I understood his character and I fear he understood mine.

(02:54):
He was a Cheshire Man with a sour, patient, humorous face.
He was modest, though a North countryman, and genial though
an expert. He spoke when he spoke at all, with
a strong Northland accent, and he evidently was new to
the beautiful South Country, as was clear both from his
approval and his complaints. But though he came from the North,

(03:18):
he was agricultural and not commercial in origin. He looked
at the land rather than the towns, even if he
looked at it with somewhat more sharp and utilitarian eye.
His first remark for some hours was uttered when we
were crossing the more coarse and desolate heights of Salisbury Plain.
He remarked that he had always thought that Salisbury Plain

(03:41):
was a plain. This alone showed that he was new
to the vicinity. But he also said, with a critical frown,
A lot of this land ought to be good land enough.
Why don't they use it? He was then silent for
some more hours. At an abrupt angle of the slow
hopes that lead down from what is called, with no

(04:02):
little humor, Salisbury Plain, I suddenly saw, as by accident,
something I was looking for, That is something I did
not expect to see. We are all supposed to be
trying to walk into heaven, but we should be uncommonly
astonished if we suddenly walked into it. As I was
leaving Salisbury Plain, to put it roughly, I lifted up

(04:23):
my eyes and saw the white horse of Britain. One
or two truly fine poets of the Tory and Protestant type,
such as Swinburne and mister Rudyard Kipling, have eulogized England
under the image of white horses, meaning the white maned
breakers of the Channel. This is right and natural enough.

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The true philosophical Tory goes back to ancient things because
he thinks they will be anarchic things. It would startle
him very much to be told that there are white
horses of artifice in England that may be older than
those wild white horses of the elements. Yet it is
truly so. Nobody knows how old are those strange green

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and white hieroglyphs, those straggling quadrupeds of chalk that stand
out on the sides of so many of the southern downs.
They are possibly older than Saxon, and older than Roman times.
They may well be older than British, older than any
recorded times. They may go back, for all we know,

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to the first faint seeds of human life on this planet.
Men may have picked a horse out of the grass
long before they scratched a horse on a vase or
a pot, or masked and masked any horse out of clay.
This may be the oldest human art before building or graving,
and if so, it may have first happened in another

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geological age, before the sea bursts through the narrow straits
of Dover. The white horse may have begun in Berkshire
when there were no white horses at Folkeston or new Haven.
That rude but evident white outline that I saw across
the valley may have begun when Britain was not an island.

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We forget that there are many places where art is
older than nature. We took a long detour through somewhat
easier roads till we came to a breach or chasm
in the valley, from which we saw our friend the
white horse. Once more, at least we thought it was
our friend, the white horse, But after a little inquiry

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we discovered, to our astonishment that it was another friend
and another horse. Along the leaning flanks of the same
fair valley. There was, it seemed, another white horse, as
rude and as clean, as ancient and as modern as
the first. This, at least, I thought, must be the
aboriginal white horse of Alfred, which I had always heard

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associated with his name. And yet before we had driven
into the wattage and seen King Alfred's quaint gray statue
in the sun, we had seen yet a third white horse.
And the third white horse was so hopelessly unlike a
horse that we were sure that it was genuine, the
final and original white horse. The white horse of the

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White Horse Vale has that big, babyish quality that truly
belongs to our remotest ancestors. It really has the prehistoric
preposterous quality of Zulu or New Zealand native drawings. This
at least was surely made by our fathers when they
were barely men, long before they were civilized men. But

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why was it made? Why did barbarians take so much
trouble to make a horse nearly as big as a hamlet,
a horse who could bear no hunter, who could drag
no loaths. What was this titanic subconscious instinct for spoiling
a beautiful green slope? With a very ugly white quadruped.

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What for the manner of that is this whole hazardous
fancy of humanity ruling the earth, which may have begun
with white horses, which may by no means end with
twenty horse power cars. As I rolled away out of
that country, I was still cloudily considering how ordinary men,
ever came to want to make such strange chalk horses,

(08:28):
when my chauffeur startled me by speaking for the first
time for nearly two hours. He suddenly let go one
of the handles and pointed at a gross green bulk
of down that happened to swell above us. That would
be a good place, he said. Naturally, I referred to

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his last speech of some hours before, and supposed that
he meant it would be promising for agriculture. As a fact,
it was quite unpromising, and this made me suddenly understand
the quiet ardor in his eye. All of a sudden
I saw what he really meant. He really meant that
this would be a splendid place to pick out another

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white horse. He knew no more than I did why
it was done, but he was in some unthinkable prehistoric
tradition because he wanted to do it. He became so
acute and sensibility that he could not bear to pass
in a broad, breezy hill of grass on which there
was not a white horse. He could hardly keep his

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hands off the hills. He could hardly leave any of
the living grass alone. Then I left off wondering why
this primitive man made so many white horses. I left
off troubling in what sense the ordinary eternal man had
sought to scar or deface the hills. I was content

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to know that he did want it, for I had
seen him wanting it the long bow. I find myself
still sitting in front of the last book by mister H. G. Wells.
I say, stunned with admiration. My family says, sleepy with fatigue.

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I still feel vaguely all the things in mister Wells's
book which I agree with, and I still feel vividly
the one thing that I deny. I deny that biology
can destroy the sense of truth, which alone can even desire. Biology,
no truth which I find can deny that I am
seeking the truth. My mind cannot find anything which denies

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my mind. But what is all this? This is no
sort of talk for a genial essay. Let us change
the subject. Let us have a romance, or a fable
or a fairy tale. Come, let us tell each other stories.
There once was a king who was very fond of
listening to stories. Like the king in the Arabian Nights.

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The only difference was that, unlike that cynical Oriental, this
king believed all the stories that he heard. It is hardly
necessary to add that he lived in England. His face
had not the swarthy secrecy of the Tyrant of the
Thousand Tales. On the contrary, his eyes were as big
and innocent as two blue mounds, and when his yellow

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beard turned totally white, he seemed to be growing younger.
Above him hung still his heavy sword and horn to
remind men that he had been a tall hunter and
warrior in his time. Indeed, with that rusted sword he
had wrecked armies. But he was one of those who
will never know the world even when they conquer it.

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Besides his love of this old Chaucirian pastime of telling tales,
he was, like many old English kings, specially interested in
the art of the bow. Gathered around him great archers
of the stature of Ulysses and robin hood, and to
four of these he gave the whole government of his kingdom.

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They did not mind governing his kingdoms, but they were
sometimes a little bored with the necessity of telling him stories.
None of their stories were true, but the king believed
all of them, and this became very depressing. They created
the most preposterous romances, and could not get the credit
of creating them. Their true ambition was sent empty away.

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They were praised as archers, but they desired to be
praised as poets. They were trusted as men, but they
would rather have been admired as literary men. At last,
in an hour of desperation, they formed themselves into a
club or conspiracy, with the object of inventing some story

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which even the king could not swallow. They called it
the League of the long Bow. Thus the chance catching
themselves by a double bond to their motherland of England,
which has been steadily celebrated since the Norman conquest for
its heroic archery and for the extraordinary credulity of its people.

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At last, it seemed to the four archers that their
hour had come. The king commonly sat in a green
curtained chamber which opened by four doors, and was surmounted
by four turrets. Summoning his champions to him. On an
april evening, he sent out each of them by a
separate door, telling him to return a morning with the
tale of his journey. Every champion bowed low and girding

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on great armor, as four awful adventures retired to some
part of the garden to think of a lie. They
did not want to think of a lie which would
deceive the king. Any lie would do that. They wanted
to think of a lie so outrageous that it could
not deceive him, and that was a serious matter. The

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first archer who returned was a dark, quiet, clever fellow,
very dexterous in small matters of mechanics. He was more
interested in the science of the bow than in the
sport of it. Also, he would only shoot at a mark,
for he thought it cruel to kill beasts and birds,
and atrocious to kill men. When he left the King,

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he had gone out into the wood and tried all
sorts of tiresome experiments about the bending of branches and
the impact of arrows. When even he found it tiresome,
he returned to the house of the four turrets and
narrated his adventure. Well, said the king, what have you
been shooting? Arrows? Answered the archer, So I suppose, said

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the king, smiling. But I mean, I mean, what wild
things have you shot? I have shot nothing but arrows,
answered the bowman, obstinately. When I went on out to
the plain, I saw in a crescent the black army
of the Tartars, the terrible art whose bows are of
bended steel, and their bolts as big as javelins. They

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spied me afar off, and the shower of their arrow
shot out the sun and made a rattling roof above me.
You know, I think it wrong to kill a bird,
or worm, or even a tartar. But such is the
precision and rapidity of perfect science, that with my own
arrows I split every arrow as it came against me.

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I struck every flying shaft as if it were a
flying bird. Therefore, Sire, I may say truly that I
shot nothing but arrows. The King said, I know how
clever you engineers are with your fingers. The archer said, oh,
and went out. The second archer, who had curly hair

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and was pale, poetical, and rather effeminate, had merely gone out.
Into the garden and stared at the moon. When the
moon had become too wide, a blank and watery even
for his own wide, blank and watery eyes, he came
in again, and when the King said, what have you
been shooting, he answered with great volubility, I have shot

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a man. Not a man from Tartary, not a man
from Europe, Asia, Africa or America, not a man on
this earth at all. I have shot the man in
the moon. Shot the man in the moon, repeated the King,
with something like mild surprise. It is easy to prove it,
said the archer, with hysterical haste. Examine the moon through

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this particularly powerful telescope, and you will no longer find
any trace of a man there. The King glued his
big blue, idiotic eye to the telescope for about ten minutes,
and then said, you are right, As you have often
pointed out, scientific truths can only be tested by the senses.

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I believe you. And the second archer went out, and,
being of a more emotional temperament, burst into tears. The
third archer was a savage, brooding sort of man with
tangled hair and greamy eyes, and he came in without
any preface saying, I have lost all my arrows. They

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have turned into birds. Then, as he saw that they
all shared at him, he said, well, you know, everything
changes on earth. Mud turns into marigolds, Eggs turn into chickens.
One can even breed dogs into quite different shapes. While
I shot my arrows at the awful eagles that clashed
their wings round the himalayas, great golden eagles, as big

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as elephants, which snapped the tall trees by perching on them.
My arrows fled so far over mountains and valleys that
they turned slowly into fowls in their flight. See here,
And he threw down a dead bird and laid an
arrow beside it. Can you see they are the same structure.
The straight shaft is the backbone, the sharp point is

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the beak. The feather is the rudimentary plumage. It is
merely modification and evolution. After a silence, the king nodded
gravely and said, yes, of course, everything is evolution. At
this the third archer suddenly and violently left the room,
and was heard in some distant part of the building

(18:23):
making extraordinary noises, either of sorrow or of mirth. The
fourth archer was a stunted man with a face as
dead as wood, but with wicked little eyes close together
and very much alive. His comrades dissuaded him from going in,
because they said that they had soared up into the

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seventh heaven of living lies, and that there was literally
nothing which the old man would not believe. The face
of the little archer became a little more wooden as
he forced his way in, and when he was inside
he looked round with blinking bewilderment. Ha the last said
the king heartily, welcome back again. There was a long pause,

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and then the snuntser archer said, what do you mean
by again? I have never been here before. The King
stared for a few seconds and said, I sent you
out from this room with the four doors last night.
After another pause, the little man slowly shook his head.
I never saw you before, he said, simply, you never

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sent me out from anywhere. I only saw your four
turrets in the distance, and strayed in here by accident.
I was born in an island in the Greek archipelago.
I am by profession an auctioneer, and my name is punk.
The king sat on his throne for seven long instants
like a statue. And then there awoke in his mild

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and ancient eyes an awful thing, the complete conviction of untruth.
Every one has felt it who has found the child
obstinately false. He rose to his height and took down
the heavy sword above him, plucked it out, naked, and
then spoke, I will believe your mad tales about the

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exact machinery of arrows, for that is science. I will
believe your mad tales about traces of life in the moon,
for that is science. I will believe your mad tales
about jellyfish turning at the gentleman, and everything turning into anything,
for that is science. But I will not believe you
when you tell me what I know to be untrue.

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I will not believe you when you say that you
did not set forth under my authority and out of
my house. The other three may conceivably have told the truth,
but this last man has certainly lied. Therefore I will
kill him. And with that the old and gentle king
ran at the man with uplifted sword, but he was
arrested by the roar of happy laughter, which told the

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world that there is, after all something which an Englishman
will not Swallow, the modern scrooge. Mister Vernon Smith of
Trinity and the social settlement Tooting, author of a Higher
London and the Boig system at work, came to the conclusion,

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after looking through his select and even severe library, that
dickens Christmas Carol was a very suitable thing to be
read to charwomen. Had they been men, they would have
been forcibly subjected to Browning's Christmas Eve with exposition. But
schiffl respared the charwomen, and Dickens was funny and could

(21:37):
do no harm. His fellow worker Wimpole would read things
like three men in a boat to the poor. But
Vernon Smith regarded this as the sacrifice of principle, or
what was the same thing to him of dignity. He
would not encourage them in their vulgarity. They should have
nothing from him that was not literature. Still Dickens's it

(22:00):
was literature, after all, not literature of a high order,
of course, not thoughtful or purposeful literature, but literature quite
fitted for charwomen on Christmas Eve. He did not, however,
let them absord Dickens without due antidotes or warning and criticism.
He explained that Dickens was not a writer of the
first rank, since he lacked the high seriousness of Matthew Arnold.

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He also feared that they would find the characters of
Dickens terribly exaggerated. But they did not, possibly because they
were meeting them every day. For among the poor there
are still exaggerated characters. They do not go to the
universities to be universified. He told charwomen with progressive brightness

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that a mad, wicked, old miser like Scrooge would be
really quite impossible now. But as each of the charwomen
had an uncle or a grandfather or a father in
law who was exactly like Scrooge, his cheerfulness was not share. Indeed,
the lecture as a whole lacked something of his firm
and elastic touch, And toward the end he found himself

(23:08):
rambling and in a sort of abstraction, talking to them
as if they were his fellows. He caught himself saying
quite mystically that a spiritual plane, by which he meant
his plane, always looked to those on the sensual, For
the Dickens plane not merely austere, but desolate, he said,

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quoting Bernard Shaw, that we could all go to heaven
as we can all go to a classical concert, but
if we did, it would bore us. Realizing that he
was taking his flock far out of their depths, he
added somewhat hurriedly, and was soon receiving that generous applause
which is part of the profound ceremonialism of the working classes.

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As he made his way to the door, three people
stopped him and answered him hardly enough, but with an
air of hurry which he would not have dreamed to
sh showing to people of his own class. One was
a little schoolmistress, who told him with a sort of
feverish meekness that she was troubled because an ethical lecturer
had said that Dickens was not really progressive, but she

(24:13):
thought he was progressive, and surely he was progressive of
what being progressive was. She had no more notion than
a whale. The second person implored him for a subscription
to some soup kitchen or cheap meal, and his refined
features sharpened for this, like literature, was a matter of
principle with him. Quite the wrong method, he said, shaking

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his head and pushing past nothing any good but the
boy's system. The third stranger, who was mail caught him
on the step as he came out into the snow
and starlight, and asked him point blank for money. It
was a part of Vernon Smith's principles that all such
persons are prosperous impostors, and like a true mystic, he

(24:58):
held to his principles in defiance of his five senses,
which told him that the night was freezing. The man
very thin and weak. If you come to the settlement
between four and five on Friday week, he said, inquiries
will be made. The man stepped back into the snow
with an odd, ungraceful gesture as of apology. He had

(25:19):
frosty silver hair, and his lean face, though in shadow,
seemed to wear something like a smile. As Vernon Smith
stepped briskly into the street, the man stooped down as
if to do up his boot lace. It was, however,
guiltless of any such dandyism, and as the young philanthropist stood,
pulling on his gloves with some particularity, a heavy snowball

(25:42):
was suddenly smashed into his face. He was blind for
a black instant, and then as some of the snow fell,
saw faintly, as in a dim mirror of ice or
dreamy crystal, the lean man, bowing with the elegance of
a dancing master and saying amiably a Christmas box. When
he had quite cleared his face of snow, the man

(26:05):
had vanished for three burning minutes. Cyril Vernon Smith was
nearer to the people and more their brother, than he
had been in his whole high stepping, pedantic existence. For
if he did not love a poor man, he hated one.
And you never really regard a laborer as you're equal

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to you can quarrel with him, dirty cad, he muttered,
filthy fool, mucking with snow like a beastly baby. When
will they be civilized by the very state of the
street is a disgrace and a temptation to such tom pooles.
Why isn't all this snow cleared away and the street
made decent To the eye of efficiency, There was indeed

(26:50):
something to complain of in the conditions of the road.
Snow was banked up on both sides in white walls,
and toward the other the darker end of the street
even rose into a chaos of low, colorless hills. By
the time he reached them, he was nearly knee deep
and was in a far from philanthropic frame of mind.
Solitude of the little streets was as strange as their

(27:12):
white obstruction. And before he had plowed his way much further,
he was convinced that he had taken a wrong turning
and fallen upon some formless suburb unvisited before. There was
no light in any of the low, dark houses, no
light in anything but the blank, emphatic snow. He was
a modern and morbid hellish isolation hit and held him. Suddenly,

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anything human would have relieved the strain, if it had
been only the leap of a garreteur. Then a tender
human touch came, indeed, for another snowball struck him and
made a star on his back. He turned with a
fierce joy and ran after a boy escaping, ran with
dizzy and violent speed. He knew not for how long

(27:59):
he wanted the boy. He did not know whether he
loved or hated him. He wanted humanity, he did not
know whether he loved or hated it. As he ran,
he realized that the landscape around him was changing in shape,
though not in color. The houses seemed to dwindle and
disappear in hills of snow, as if buried the snow

(28:19):
seemed to rise in tattered outlines of crag and cliff
and crest. That he thought of nothing of all these
impossibilities until the boy turned to bay. When he did,
he saw the child was queerly beautiful, with gold red
hair and a face as serious as complete happiness. And
when he spoke to the boy, his own question surprised him,

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for he said, for the first time in his life,
what am I doing here? And the little boy, with
very grave eyes, answered, I suppose you are dead. He
had also for the first time a doubt of his
spiritual destiny. He looked round on a towering landscape of
frozen peaks and plains and said, is this hell? And

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the child stared but did not answer. He knew it
was heaven. All over that colossal country, white as the world.
Round the pole, little boys were playing, rolling each other
down dreadful slopes, crushing each other under falling cliffs, For
heaven is a place where one can fight forever without herding.

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Smith suddenly remembered how happy he had been as a child,
rolling about on the safe sand hills around Conway, right
above Smith's head, higher than the Cross of Saint Paul,
but curving over him like the hanging blossom of a harebell.
Was a cavernous crag of snow. A hundred feet below him,

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like a landscape seen from a balloon, lay snowy flats
as white and as far away. He saw a little
boy's stagger with many catastrophic slides to that toppling peak,
and seizing another little boy by the the leg, sent
him flying away down to the distant silver plains. There
he sank and vanished in the snow as if in

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the sea, but coming up again like a diver, rushed
madly up the steep, once more rolling before him a
great gathering snowball, gigantic at last, which he hurled back
at the mountain crest, and brought both the boy and
the mountain down in one avalanche to the level of
the vale. The other boy also sank like a stone,

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and also rose again like a bird. But Smith had
no leisure to concern himself with this, for the collapse
of that celestial crest had left him standing solitary in
the sky on a peak like a church spire. He
could see the tiny figures of the boys in the
valley below, and he knew by their attitudes that they

(30:50):
were eagerly telling him to jump. Then, for the first
time he knew the nature of faith, as he had
just known the fierce nature of chair. Or rather for
the second time, for he remembered one moment when he
had known faith before. It was when his father had
taught him to swim, and he had believed he could

(31:11):
float on water, not only against reason, but what is
so much harder against instinct. Then he had trusted water,
Now he must trust air. He jumped. He went through air,
and then through snow with the same bliding swiftness. But
as he buried himself and slid snow like a bullet,

(31:34):
he seemed to learn a million things, and to learn
them all too fast. He knew that the whole world
is a snowball, and that all the stars are snowballs.
He knew that no man will be fit for heaven
till he loves solid whiteness, as the little boy loves
a ball of snow. He sank, and he sank, and

(31:55):
he sank, and then, as usually happens in such cases,
woke up with this start in the street. True, he
was taken up for a common drunk. But if you
properly appreciate his conversion. You will appreciate that he did
not mind, since the crime of drunkenness is infinitely less

(32:15):
than that of spiritual pride, of which he had really
been guilty, and of Section twelve, Chapters thirty seven through
thirty nine,