The
following short story by G.K.Chesterton, is taken from the book ‘Tremendous Trifles’
copyright 1909, and published in the USA. This ‘sketch’ with others, was
originally published in the ‘Daily News’, and in his preface to the book, the
author invites his readers to become ‘ocular athletes’, writing their own
interpretation of everyday sights and experiences. He even suggests that “anyone
else may do it better (than he), if anyone else will only try.” It is revealing that the author’s damning conclusion
- ‘wicked wealth and lying journalism’- in
this story written more than a century ago, could equally identify with much,
if not most, of the news media today.
'A Glimpse of my Country'
Whatever is
it that we are all looking for? I fancy that it is quite close. When I was a
boy, I had a fancy that Heaven or Fairyland or whatever I called it, was immediately
behind my own back, and that this was why I could never manage to see it,
however often I twisted and turned to take it by surprise. I had a notion of a man perpetually spinning
round on one foot like a teetotum in the effort to find that world behind his
back which continually fled from him. Perhaps this is why the world goes round.
Perhaps the world is always trying to look over its shoulder and catch up the
world which always escapes it, yet without which it cannot be itself.
In any case, as I have said, I think
that we must always conceive of that which is the goal of all our endeavours as
something which is in some strange way near.
Science boasts of the distance of its stars; of the terrific remoteness
of the things of which it has to speak.
But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost
menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the
Kingdom of Heaven is “At Hand”; and Looking-glass Land is only through the
looking-glass. So I for one, should
never be astonished if the next twist of a street led me to the heart of that
maze in which all the mystics are lost. I should not be at all surprised if I
turned one corner in Fleet Street and saw a queer looking window, turned
another corner and saw a yet queerer -looking lamp; I should not be surprised
if I turned a third corner and found myself in Elfland.
I should not be surprised at this; but
I was surprised the other day at something more surprising. I took a turn out
of Fleet Street and found myself in England.
. . . . . .
The singular shock experienced
perhaps requires explanation. In the
darkest or the most inadequate moments of England there is one thing that
should always be remembered about the very nature of our country. It may be
shortly stated by saying that England is not such a fool as it looks. The types
of England, the externals of England, always misrepresent the country. England is an oligarchical country, and it
prefers that its oligarchy should be inferior to itself.
The speaking in the House of
Commons, for instance, is not only worse than the speaking was, it is worse
than the speaking is, in all or almost all other places, in small debating
clubs or casual dinners. Our countrymen
probably prefer this solemn futility in the higher places of the national life.
It may be a strange sight to see the blind leading the blind; but England
provides a stranger one, for England shows us the blind leading the people who
can see. And this again is an under-statement of the case. For the English
political aristocrats not only speak worse than many other people; they speak
worse than themselves. The ignorance of
statesmen is like the ignorance of judges, an artificial and affected thing. If you have the good fortune really to talk
with a statesman, you will be constantly startled with his saying quite
intelligent things. It makes one nervous
at first. And I have never been
sufficiently intimate with such a man to ask him why it was a rule of his life
in Parliament to appear sillier than he was.
It is the same with the voters. The average man votes below himself; he votes
with half a mind or with a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself
as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart,
his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when
sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet.
If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep
into his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs, they should be in his ears
when he makes the mystical cross. But as it is, the difficulty with English
democracy at all elections is that it is something less than itself. The
question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The
point is that only a minority of the voter votes.
. . . . . . .
This is the tragedy of England; you
cannot judge it by its foremost men. Its
types do not typify. And on the occasion
of which I speak I found this to be so, especially of that old intelligent
middle- class which I had imagined had almost vanished from the world. It seemed to me that all the main
representatives of the middle -class had gone off in one direction or in the
other; they had either set out in pursuit of the Smart Set or they had set out
in pursuit of the Simple Life. I cannot say which I dislike more myself; the
people in question are welcome to have either of them, or as is more likely, to
have both, in hideous alternations of disease and cure. But all the prominent
men who plainly represent the middle- class have adopted either the single eyeglass
of Mr. Chamberlain or the single eye of Mr. Bernard Shaw.
The old class that I mean has no
representative. Its food was plentiful; but
it had no show. Its food was plain; but it had no fads. It was serious about politics; and when it
spoke in public it committed the solecism of trying to speak well. I thought that this old earnest political
England had practically disappeared. And
as I say, I took one turn out of Fleet Street and I found a room full of it.
. . . . . . .
At the top of the room was a chair
in which Johnson had sat. The club was a club in which Wilkes had spoken, in a
time when even the ne’er-do-weel was virile. But all these things by themselves
might be merely archaism. The
extraordinary thing was that this hall had all the hubbub, the sincerity, the
anger, the oratory of the eighteenth century.
The members of this club were of all shades of opinion, yet there was
not one speech which gave me that jar of unreality which I often have in
listening to the ablest men uttering my own opinion. The Toryism of this club was like the Toryism
of Johnson, a Toryism that could use humour and appealed to humanity. The democracy of this club was like the
democracy of Wilkes, a democracy that can speak epigrams and fight duels; a
democracy that can face things out and endure slander; the democracy of Wilkes,
or, rather, the democracy of Fox.
One thing especially filled my soul
with the soul of my fathers. Each man speaking, whether he spoke well or ill,
spoke as well as he could from sheer fury against the other man. This is the greatest of our modern descents,
that nowadays a man does not become more rhetorical as he becomes more
sincere. An eighteenth- century speaker,
when he got really and honestly furious, looked for big words with which to
crush his adversary. The new speaker looks
for small words to crush him with. He
looks for little facts and little sneers.
In a modern speech the rhetoric is put into the merely formal part, the
opening to which nobody listens. But
when Mr. Chamberlain, or a Moderate, or one of the harder kinds of Socialists,
becomes really sincere, he becomes Cockney.
“The destiny of the Empire”, or “The destiny of humanity”, do well
enough for mere ornamental preliminaries, but when the man becomes angry and
honest, then it is a snarl, “Where do we come in?” or “It’s your money they
want.”
The men in this eighteenth century
club were entirely different; they were quite eighteenth century. Each one rose to his feet quivering with
passion, and tried to destroy his opponent, not with sniggering, but actually
with eloquence. I was arguing with them
about Home Rule; at the end I told them why the English aristocracy really
disliked an Irish Parliament; because it would be like their club.
. . . . . . .
I came out again into Fleet Street
at night, and by a dim lamp I saw pasted up some tawdry nonsense about Wastrels
and how London was rising against something that London had hardly heard
of. Then I suddenly saw, as in one
obvious picture, that the modern world is an immense and tumultuous ocean, full
of monstrous and living things. And I
saw that across the top of it is spread a thin, a very thin, sheet of ice, of
wicked wealth and of lying journalism.
And as I stood there in the darkness
I could almost fancy that I heard it crack.
(Ack. ‘A Glimpse of
my Country’ from “Tremendous Trifles” by G.K.Chesterton, copyright 1909,
published in the USA.)
