The Uses of Diversity. Гилберт Кит Честертон

pursue the intellectual sport. Now you will probably be broadly right about the man in Islington whom you have never seen or heard of, because you will begin at the right end—the human end. The man in Islington is at least a man. The soul of the man in Islington is certainly a soul. He also has been bewildered and broadened by youth; he also has been tortured and intoxicated by love; he also is sublimely doubtful about death. You can think about the soul of that nameless man who is a mere number in Islington High Street. But you do not think about the soul of your next-door neighbour. He is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours. Now, all these are the wrong ends of a man; and a man, like many other things in this world, such as a cat-o’-nine-tails, has a large number of wrong ends, and only one right one. These adjuncts are all tails, so to speak. A dog is a sort of curly tail to a man; a substitute for that which man so tragically lost at an early stage of evolution. And though I would rather myself go about trailing a dog behind me than tugging a pianola or towing a rose-garden, yet this is a matter of taste, and they are all alike appendages or things dependent upon man. But besides his twenty tails, every man really has a head, a centre of identity, a soul. And the head of a man is even harder to find than the head of a Skye terrier, for man has nine hundred and ninety-nine wrong ends instead of one. It is no question of getting hold of the sow by the right ear; it is a question of getting hold of the hedgehog by the right quill, of the bird by the right feather, of the forest by the right leaf. If we have never known the forest we shall know at least that it is a forest, a thing grown grandly out of the earth; we shall realize the roots toiling in the terrestrial darkness, the trunks reared in the sylvan twilight.

      But to find the forest is to find the fringe of the forest. To approach it from without is to see its mere accidental outline ragged against the sky. It is to come close enough to be superficial. The remote man, therefore, may stand for manhood; for the glory of birth or the dignity of death. But it is difficult to get Mr. Brown next door (with whom you have quarrelled about the creepers) to stand for these things in any satisfactorily symbolic attitude. You do not feel the glory of his birth; you are more likely to hint heatedly at its ingloriousness. You do not, on purple and silver evenings, dwell on the dignity and quietude of his death; you think of it, if at all, rather as sudden. And the same is true of historical separation and proximity. I look forward to the same death as a Chinaman; barring one or two Chinese tortures, perhaps. I look back to the same babyhood as an ancient Phœnician; unless, indeed, it were one of that special Confirmation class of Sunday-school babies who were passed through the fire to Moloch. But these distant or antique terrors seem merely tied on to the life: they are not part of its texture. Babylonian mothers (however they yielded to etiquette) probably loved their children; and Chinamen unquestionably reverenced their dead. It is far different when two peoples are close enough to each other to mistake all the acts and gestures of everyday life. It is far different when the Baptist baker in Islington thinks of Irish infancy, passed amid Popish priests and impossible fairies. It is far different when the tramp from Tipperary thinks of Irish death, coming often in dying hamlets, in distant colonies, in English prisons or on English gibbets. There childhood and death have lost all their reconciling qualities; the very details of them do not unite, but divide. Hence England and Ireland see the facts of each other without guessing the meaning of the facts. For instance, we may see the fact that an Irish housewife is careless. But we fancy falsely that this is because she is scatter-brained; whereas it is, on the contrary, because she is concentrated—on religion, or conspiracy, or tea. You may call her inefficient, but you certainly must not call her weak. In the same way, the Irish see the fact that the Englishman is unsociable; they do not see the reason, which is that he is romantic.

      This seems to me the real value of such striking national sketches as those by Lady Gregory and Mr. Synge, which I saw last week. Here is a case where mere accidental realism, the thing written on the spot, the “slice of life,” may, for once in a way, do some good. All the signals, all the flags, all the declaratory externals of Ireland we are almost certain to mistake. If the Irishman speaks to us, we are sure to misunderstand him. But if we hear the Irishman talking to himself, it may begin to dawn on us that he is a man.

      Ireland and the Domestic Drama

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      In a sense so gigantic that it would have staggered the statesman who once used the phrase, we have called in the new world to redress the balance of the old. The new world has found new worlds to conquer; it has new tasks not only drastic but delicate, not only political but psychological. Among the things which America may yet help us to achieve is one about which I feel strongly and even painfully—the reconciliation, a thousand times thwarted but now a thousand times more necessary, between the English and the Irish. The triangular table of such a peace conference need not, and perhaps had better not, be found in any public building. Rather it should be found in every public house and even in every private house. The change should come through something which is far nobler and more eternal than diplomacy or politics; talk. It should come through the only real public opinion, which is always uttered in private; the public opinion that is a mass of private opinions. A famous Irishman said of the Irish that they were too poetical to be poets, but that they were the greatest talkers since the Greeks. My personal memory does not stretch back to the greatest period of Greece; and perhaps the best talker I ever knew was an Irishman, who is now living in America and (I will confidently affirm) talking in America. It may be true that he is too poetical to be a poet; anyhow, he is not too poetical to be the father of a poet. He is Mr. J. B. Yeats, the father of Mr. W. B. Yeats; and he has lately been persuaded to write and print some of the good things he has said all his life—first in the form of a book of letters, and later of a book of essays, Essays Irish and American, published by Mr. Fisher Unwin. But my real satisfaction, in the social and political sense, is to know not that he has written a little, but that he has spoken much; for out of such seemingly lost and wasted words come the real international understandings.

      There was a type of detachment during the late war, not to be confused with what I can only call the view of the vulgar peacemonger. It was not the patronizing pacifism of the gentleman who took a holiday in the Alps and said he was “above the struggle”; as if there were any Alp from which the soul can look down on Calvary. There is, indeed, one mountain among them that might be very appropriate to so detached an observer—the mountain named after Pilate, the man who washed his hands. The isolation I mean is far removed from such impudence. The defence of this detachment is that it is not really detached; it was not indifference, but indignation. It was not without foundation; it was only without proportion. Indeed, the real case against it was that while its expression was largely cynical, its motive was largely sentimental. Such was the irritation of Mr. Bernard Shaw; such was the irritation of many Irishmen much more national than Mr. Bernard Shaw. Their irritation can be analysed in a simple phrase; it annoyed them that the men who were wrong should be right. It annoyed them that all the snobs and sneaks of our corrupt parliamentarianism should free the world by accident. In the quarrel with Prussia, they could not really doubt—they did not really doubt—that England was right. But they did doubt whether England had any right to be right.

      It is a view I think self-stultifying and even suicidal. For the great work will be remembered and the meaner workers forgotten; and it is madness to praise the Persians on the eve of Marathon because one has quarrelled with some silly archon at Athens, whose very name will be lost in a few years. But it is not a treasonable, far less a treacherous view; and its anger is the same as the popular anger it arouses. This is the Irish mood which common sense and common sympathy must deal with; and this is the peculiar value of real Irish intellectual detachment like that of Mr. Yeats. First of all, a man like Mr. Yeats is so genuinely detached that he can be definite and clear in his sympathy with the Allies. He would be capable of the supreme impartiality of seeing that England could be right although she had been wrong; and even that Ireland could be wrong although she had been wronged. But all the time he would play with a perennial fount of satire and insight on the fundamental spiritual facts that falsify the English position in Ireland. He would make us feel that we were only right in one thing because we were so wrong in many things.