A Miscellany of Men. Гилберт Кит Честертон

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       G. K. Chesterton

      A Miscellany of Men

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664655981

Table of Contents

       THE SUFFRAGIST

       THE POET AND THE CHEESE

       THE THING

       THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS

       THE NAMELESS MAN

       THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA

       THE VOTER AND THE TWO VOICES

       THE MAD OFFICIAL

       THE ENCHANTED MAN

       THE SUN WORSHIPPER

       THE WRONG INCENDIARY

       THE FREE MAN

       THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER

       THE PRIEST OF SPRING

       THE REAL JOURNALIST

       THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT

       THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY

       THE FOOL

       THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS

       THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS

       THE MYSTAGOGUE

       THE RED REACTIONARY

       THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS

       THE MUMMER

       THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY

       THE NEW THEOLOGIAN

       THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN

       THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER

       THE SULTAN

       THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS

       THE MAN ON TOP

       THE OTHER KIND OF MAN

       THE MEDIAEVAL VILLAIN

       THE DIVINE DETECTIVE

       THE ELF OF JAPAN

       THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE

       THE CONTENTED MAN

       THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL

THE SUFFRAGIST

       Table of Contents

      Rightly or wrongly, it is certain that a man both liberal and chivalric, can and very often does feel a dis-ease and distrust touching those political women we call Suffragettes. Like most other popular sentiments, it is generally wrongly stated even when it is rightly felt. One part of it can be put most shortly thus: that when a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her. He can be afraid of her speech and still more of her silence; but force reminds him of a rusted but very real weapon of which he has grown ashamed. But these crude summaries are never quite accurate in any matter of the instincts. For the things which are the simplest so long as they are undisputed invariably become the subtlest when once they are disputed: which was what Joubert meant, I suppose, when he said, “It is not hard to believe in God if one does not define Him.” When the evil instincts of old Foulon made him say of the poor, “Let them eat grass,” the good and Christian instincts of the poor made them hang him on a lamppost with his mouth stuffed full of that vegetation. But if a modern vegetarian aristocrat were to say to the poor, “But why don't you like grass?” their intelligences would be much more taxed to find such an appropriate repartee. And this matter of the functions of the sexes is primarily a matter of the instincts; sex and breathing are about the only two things that generally work best when they are least worried about. That, I suppose, is why the same sophisticated age that has poisoned the world with Feminism is also polluting it with Breathing Exercises. We plunge at once into a forest of false analogies and bad blundering history; while almost any man or woman left to themselves would know at least that sex is quite different from anything else in the world.

      There is no kind of comparison possible between a quarrel of man and woman (however right the woman may be) and the other quarrels of slave and master, of rich and poor, or of patriot and invader, with which the Suffragists deluge us every day. The difference is as plain as noon; these other alien groups never came into contact until they came into collision. Races and ranks began with battle, even if they afterwards melted into amity.