Chapters 37-39

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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visit LibriVox dot org. Alarms and Discursions by G. K. Chesterton,

(00:27):
Section thirteen, chapters thirty seven through thirty nine. The high Plains.
By high plains, I do not mean table lands. Table
Lands do not interest one very much. They seem to
involve the bore of a climb without the pleasure of

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a peak. Also, they are vaguely associated with Asia and
those enormous armies that eat up everything like locusts, as
did the army of Xerxes, with emperors from nowhere, spreading
their battalions everywhere, with the white elephants and the painted horses,
the dark engines, and the dreadful mounted bowmen of the

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moving empires of the East, with all that evil insolence,
in short, that rolled into Europe in the youth of Nero, and,
after having been battered about and abandoned by one Christian
nation after another, turned up in England with Disraeli and
was christened, or rather paganed imperialism. Also, it may be

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necessary to explain I do not mean high plains such
as the theosophists and the higher thought centers talk about.
They spell theirs differently, but I will not have theirs
in any spelling. They I know, are always expounding how
this or that person is on a lower plain, while they,

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the speakers, are on a higher plain. Some times they
will almost tell you what plane, as in five nine
nine four or plain f subplane three O four. I
do not mean this sort of height either. My religion
says nothing about such plains, except that all men are
on one plane, and that by no means a higher one.

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They are saints, indeed, in my religion. But a saint
only means a man who really knows he is a sinner.
Why then, should I talk of the plains as high?
I do it for a rather singular reason, which I
will illustrate by a parallel. When I was at school
learning all the Greek I have ever forgotten, I was
puzzled by the phrase oinon milan, that is black wine,

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which continually occurred. I asked what it meant, and many
most interesting and convincing answers were given. It was pointed
out that we know little of the actual liquid drunk
by the Greeks, that the analogy of modern Greek wines
may suggest that it was dark and sticky, perhaps the
sort of syrup always taken with water. That archaic language

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about color is always a little dubious, as where Homer
speaks of the wine dark sea, and so on. I
was very properly satisfied, and never thought of the matter again,
until one day, having a decanter of claret in front
of me, I happen to look at it. I then
perceived that they called wine black because it is black,

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very thin, diluted, or held up abruptly against a flame.
Red wine is red, but seen in body in most
normal shades and semi lights, red wine is black, and
therefore was called so. On the same principles, I call
the plains high because the plains always are high. They

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are always as high as we are. We talk of
climbing mountain crest and looking down at the plain, but
the phrase is an illusion of our arrogance. It is
impossible even to look down at the plain, for the
plain itself rises as we rise. It is not merely
true that the higher we climb, the wider and wider
is spread out below us the wealth of the world.

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It is not merely that devil, or some other respectable
guide for tourists takes us to the top of an
exceedingly high mountain and shows us all the kingdoms of
the earth. It is more than that, in our real
feeling of it. It is that, in a sense, the
whole world rises with us, roaring, and accompanies us to
the crest, like some clangang chorus of eagles. The plains

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rise higher and higher like swift gray walls piled up
against invisible invaders. And however high a peak you climb,
the plain is still as high as the peak. The
mountain tops are only noble because from them we are
privileged to behold the plains. So the only value in
any man being superior is that he may have superior

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admiration for the level and the common If there is
any profit in a place craggy and precipitous, it is
only because from the veil it is not so easy
to see all the beauty of the veil, because when
actually in the flats, one cannot see their sublime and
satisfying flatness. If there is any value in being educated

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or imminent, which is doubtful enough, it is only because
the best instructed man may feel most swiftly and certainly
the splendor of the ignorant and the simple, the full
magnificence of that mighty human army in the plains. The
general goes up to the hill to look at his soldiers,
not to look down at his soldiers. He withdraws himself,

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not because his regiment is too small to be touched,
but because it is too mighty to be seen. The
chief climbs with submission, or goes higher with great humility,
since in order to take a bird's eye view of everything,
he must become small and distant like a bird. The
most marvelous of those mystical cavaliers who wrote intricate and

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exquisite Verse in England in the seventeenth century, I mean
Henry Vaughan put the matter in one line, intrinsically immortal
and practically forgotten, Oh, Holy hope and high humility. That
adjective high is not only one of the sudden and
stunning inspirations of literature, it is also one of the

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greatest and gravest definitions of moral science. However far aloft
a man may go, he is still looking up not
only at God, which is obvious, but in a manner
at men, also seeing more and more all that is
towering and mysterious in the dignity and destiny of the
lonely House of Adam. I wrote some part of these

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rambling remarks on a high ridge of rock and turf,
overlooking a stretch of the Central Counties. The rise was
slight enough in reality, but the immediate ascent had been
so steep and sudden that one could not avoid the
fancy that, on reaching the summit, one would look down
at the stars. But one did not look down at
the stars, but rather up at the cities, seeing as

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high in heaven the palace town of Alfred like a
lit sunset cloud, and away in the void spaces like
a planet in eclipse Salisbury. So it may be hoped,
until we die, you and I will always look up,
rather than down, at the labors and the habitations of
our race. We will lift up our eyes to the

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valleys from whence cometh our help. For from every special eminence,
and beyond every sublime landmark, it is good for our
souls to see only vaster and vaster visions of that
dizzy and divine level, and to behold from our crumbling
turrets the tall plains of equality the chorus. One of

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the most marked instances of the decline of true popular
sympathy is the gradual disappearance in our time of the
habit of singing in chorus. Even when it is done nowadays,
it is done tentatively and sometimes inaudibly, apparently upon some
preposterous principle which I have never clearly grasped, that singing
is an art. In the new aristocracy of the drawing room,

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a lady is actually asked whether she sings. In the
old democracy of the dinner table, a man was simply
told to sing, and he had to do it. I
like the atmosphere of those old banquets. I like to
think of my ancestors, middle aged to a venerable gentleman,
all sitting round the table and explaining that they would
never forget old days or friends with a rumpty iddity idy,

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or letting it be known that they would die for
England's glory with their two roiled growl, et cetera. Vices
of that society which sometimes I fear rendered The narrative
portions of the song almost as cryptic and inarticulate as
the chorus were displayed with a more human softening than
the same vices in the saloon bars of our own time.

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I greatly prefer mister Richard Swiveller to mister Stanley Orthuris.
I prefer the man who exceeded in rosy wine, in
order that the wing of friendship might never molt a feather,
to the man who exceeds quite as much in whiskeys
and sodas, but declares all the time that he's for
number one, and that you don't catch him paying for

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other men's drinks. The old men of pleasure, with their
tuile orrell, at least God some social and communal virtue
aut of pleasure. The new men of pleasure, without the
slightest vestige of a terral orral, are simply hermits of
irreligion instead of religion anchor writes of atheism, and they
might as well be drugging themselves with hashish or opium

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in a wilderness. But the chorus of the old songs
had another use besides this obvious one of asserting the
popular element in the arts. The chorus of a song,
even of a comic song, has the same purpose as
the chorus of a Greek tragedy. It reconciles men to
the gods. It connects this one particular tale with the

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cosmos and the philosophy of common things. Thus we constantly
find in the old ballads, especially the pathetic ballads, some
refrain about the grass growing green, or the birds singing,
or the woods being merry in spring. These are windows
opened in the house of tragedy, momentary glimpses of larger
and quieter scenes of more ancient and enduring landscapes. Many

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of the country's songs describing crime and death have refrains
of a startling joviality like cock crow, just as if
the whole company were coming in with a shout of
protest against so somber a view of exist distance. There
is a long and gruesome ballad called the Berkshire Tragedy,
about a murder committed by a jealous sister, for the

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consummation of which a wicked miller is hanged, and the
course which should come in a kind of burst, runs it,
I'll be true to my love, if my love will
be true to me. The very reasonable arrangement here suggested
is introduced, I think, as a kind of throwback to
the normal, the reminder that even the Berkshire tragedy does

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not fill the whole of Berkshire. The poor young lady
is drowned, and the wicked miller to whom we may
have been affectionately attached, is hanged. But still a ruby
kindles in the vine, and many a garden by the
water blows. Not that Omar's type of hedonistic resignation is
at all the same as the breezy impatience of the
Berkshire refrain, but they are alike in so far as

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they gaze out beyond the particular complication to more open
plains of peace. The chorus of the ballad looks past
the drowning made and the miller's gibbet, and seize the
lanes full of lovers. This use of the chorus to
humanize and dilute dark story is strongly opposed to the
modern view of art. Modern art has to be what

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is called intense. It is not easy to define being intense,
but roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at
a time, and saying it wrong. Modern tragic writers have
to write short stories. If they wrote long stories, as
the Man said of philosophy, cheerfulness would creep in such stories.

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Are like stings, brief but purely painful, and doubtless they
bore some resemblance to some lives lived under our successful
scientific civilization, lives which tend in any case to be
painful and in many cases to be brief. But when
the artistic people passed beyond the poignant anecdote and began
to write long books full of poignancy, then the reading

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public began to rebel and to demand the recall of Romance.
The long books about the black poverty of cities became
quite insupportable. The Berkshire tragedy had a chorus, but the
London tragedy had no chorus. Therefore, people welcomed the return
of adventurous novels about alien places and times, the trenchant

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and swordlike stories of Stevenson. But I am not narrowly
on the side of the Romantics. I think the glimpses
of the gloom of our civilization ought to be recorded.
I think that the bewilderments of the solitary and skeptical
soul ought to be preserved, if it be only for
the pity, yes and the admiration of the happier time.

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But I wish that there were some way in which
the chorus could enter. I wish that at the end
of each chapter of stiff agony or insane terror, the
choir of humanity could come in with a crash of
music and tell both reader and daughter that this is
not the whole of human experience. Let them go on
recording hard scenes or hideous questions, but let there be

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a jolly refrain. Thus we might read, as Honora laid
down the volume of Ibsen and went wearily to her window,
she realized that life must be to her not only harsher,
but colder than it was to the comfortable and weak,
with her chyral or rail, et cetera. Or again, the

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young Kurt smiled grimly as he listened to his great
grandmother's last words. He knew only too well that since
Fogg's discovery of the hereditary hairiness of Goat's religion stood
on a very different basis from that which it had
occupied in his childhood with his rump bidy, rumpiddy and
so on. Or we might read Urial may Bloom stared

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gloomily down at his sandals as he realized for the
first time how senseless and antisocial are all ties between
man and woman, how each must go his way or
her way without any attempt to arrest the headlong separation
of their souls and ned would come in one deafening
chorus of everlasting humanity. But I'll be true to my love,

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if my love will be true to me. In the
records of the first majestic and yet fantastic developments to
the Foundations of Saint Francis of ASSISI is an account
of a certain blessed brother, Giles. I have forgotten most
of it, but I remember one fact that certain students
of theology came to ask him whether he believed in
free will, and if so, how could he reconcile it

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with necessity. On hearing the question, Saint Francis's follower reflected
a little while, and then seized the fiddle and began
capering and dancing about the garden, playing a wild tune
and generally expressing a violent and invigorating indifference. The tune
is not recorded, but it is the eternal chorus of
mankind that modifies all the arts and mocks all the individualism,

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like the laughter and thunder of some distant sea. A
romance of the Marshes. In books as a whole. Marshes
are described as desolate and colorless, great fields of clay

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or sedge, vast horizons of draba gray. But this, like
many other literary associations, is a piece of poetical injustice.
Monotony has nothing to do with the place. Monotony, either
in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality
of a person. There are no dreary sides. There are

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only dreary side seers. It is a matter of taste,
that of personality, whether marshes are monotonous, but it is
a matter of fact and science that they are not monochrome.
The tops of high mountains, I am told, are all white.
The depths of primeval caverns, I am also told, are
all dark. The sea will be gray or blue for

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weeks together. And the desert, I have been led to believe,
is the color of sand. The North Pole, if we
found it, would be white with cracks of blue and
endless space. If we went there would, I suppose, be
black with white spots. If any of these were counted
of a monotonous color, I could well understand it. But

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on the contrary, they are always spoken of as if
they had the gorgeous and chaotic colors of a cosmic kaleidoscope. Now,
exactly where you can find colors like those of a
tulip garden or a stained glass window is in those
sunken and sodden lands which are always called dreary. Of course,
the great tulip gardens did arise in Holland, which is

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simply one immense marsh There is nothing in Europe so
truly tropical as marshes. Also, now I come to think
of it, there are a few places so agreeably marshy
as tropics. At any rate. Swamp and fenlands in England
are always especially rich in gay grasses or gorgeous fungoids,
and seem sometimes as glorious as the transformation scene, but

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also as unsubstantial. In these splendid scenes, it is always
very easy to put your foot through the scenery. You
may sink up to your armpits, but you will sink
up to your armpits and flowers. I do not deny
that I myself am of a sort that sinks, except
in the matter of spirits. I saw in the West

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Conties recently a swampy field of great richness, and promise,
if I had stepped on it. I have no doubt
at all that I should have vanished that eons. Hence
the complete fossil of a fat fleet street journalist would
be found in that compressed clay. I only claim that
it would be found in some attitude of energy, or

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even of joy. But the last point is the most
important of all. For as I imagine myself sinking up
to the neck in what looked like solid green field,
I suddenly remember that this very thing must have happened
to certain inter pirates quite a thousand years ago. For
as it happened, the flat finland in which I nearly

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sunk was the fenland round the island of Athelne, which
is now an island in the fields and no longer
in the waters. But on the abrupt hillock a stone
still stands to say that this was that embattled island
in the Parrot, where King Alfred held his last fort
against the foreign invaders in that war that nearly washed

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us as far from civilization as the Solomon Islands. Here
he defended the island called Athelne, as he afterwards did
his best to defend the island called England. For the
hero always defends an island, the thing be leaguered and
surrounded like the Troy of Hector, and the highest and
largest humanitarian can only rise to defending the tiny island

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called the Earth. One approaches the island of Thelne along
along a low road like an interminal wlad, a white
string stretched across the flats and lined with those dwarfish
trees that are elvish in their very dullness. At one
point of the journey, I cannot conceive why one is
arrested by a toll gate at which one has to

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pay threepence. Perhaps it is a distorted tradition of those
dark ages. Perhaps Alfred, with his superious science of comparative civilizations,
had calculated the economics of Denmark down to the halfpenny.
Perhaps a day sometimes came with twopence, sometimes even with
twopence halfpenny, after the sack of many cities, even with

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twopence three farthings, but never with threepence. Whether or no
it was a permanent barrier to the barbarians, it was
only a temporary barrier to me. I discovered three large
and complete coppers in various parts of my person, and
I passed on along that strangely monotonous and strangely fascinating path.

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It is not merely fanciful to field that the place
expresses itself appropriately as the place where the great Christian
King hid himself from the heathen. Though a marsh land
is always open, it is still curiously secret. Fens, like deserts,
are large things very apt to be mislaid. These flats
feared to be overlooked in a double sense. The small

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trees crouched, and the whole plains seemed lying on its face,
as men do when shells burst. The little path ran
fearlessly forward, but it seemed to run on all fours.
Everything in that strange countryside seemed to be lying low,
as if to avoid the incessant and rattling rain of
the Danish arrows. There were indeed hills of no inconsiderable

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height quite within call. But those pools and flats of
the Old Parrot seemed to separate themselves like a central
and secret sea, And in the midst of them stood
up the rock of the theelne as isolate as it
was to Alfred. And all across this recumbent and almost
crawling country that ran the glory of the low wet lands,

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grass lustrous and living, like the plumage of some universal bird,
the flowers as gorgeous as bonfires, and the weeds more
beautiful than the flowers. Once stooped to stroke the grass,
as if the earth were all one kind beast that
could feel. Why does no decent person write an historical

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novel about Alfred and his fort de Nathelny in the
Marshes of the Parrot. Not a very historical novel. Not
about his truth telling, please, or his founding the British
Empire or the British Navy or the Navy League, or
whichever it was he founded. Not about the Treaty of
Wedmore and whether it ought, as an imminent historian says

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to be called the Pact of Chippenham. But an aboriginal
romance for boys, about the bare, bald, beatific fact that
a great hero held his fort at an island in
a river. An island is fine enough in all conscience
or piratic unconsciousness, But an island in the river sounds
like the beginning of the greatest adventure story on Earth.

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Robinson Crusoe is really a great tale. But think of
Robinson Crusoe's feelings if he could have actually seen England
and Spain from his inaccessible isle. Treasure island is a
spirit of genius. But what treasure could an island contain?
To compare with Alfred, and then consider the further elements

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of juvenile romance In an island that was more of
an island than it looked Athelne was masked with marshes,
many a heavy harnessed Viking may have started bounding across
a meadow, only to find himself submerged in a sea.
I feel the full fictitious splendor spreading round me. I

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see glimpses of a great romance that will never be written.
I see a sudden shaft quivering one of the short trees.
I see a red haired man waiting madly among the
tall gold flowers of the marshes, leaping onward and lurching lower.
I see another shaft quivering in his throat. I cannot
see any more, because, as I have delicately suggested, I

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am a heavy man. This mysterious marshland does not sustain me,
and I sink into its depths with a bubbling groan.
End of Section thirteen, Chapters thirty seven through thirty nine,
end of G. K. Chesterton's Alarms and Discoursions