The Case for the Ephemeral by G.K. Chesterton


                   -=[ THE CASE FOR THE EPHEMERAL ]=-


[Excerpted from ALL THINGS CONSIDERED by G. K. Chesterton; an etext
in progress, from an edition by John Lane Company, New York, 1909.]

I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can
love them, and I do.  Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this
book.  It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or
rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they
stand.  They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were
handed in the moment before it was too late, and I do not think the
commonwealth would have been shaken to its foundations if they had been
handed in the moment after.  They must go out now, with all their
imperfections on their head, or rather on mine; for their vices are too
vital to be improved with a blue pencil, or with anything I can think
of, except dynamite.

Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I
had no time to make them flippant.  It is so easy to be solemn; it is
so hard to be frivolous.  Let any honest reader shut his eyes for a few
moments, and approaching the secret tribunal of his soul, ask himself
whether he would really rather be asked in the next two hours to write
the front page of the TIMES, which is full of long leading articles, or
the front page of TIT-BITS, which is full of short jokes.  If the reader
is the fine conscientious fellow I take him for, he will at once reply
that he would rather on the spur of the moment write ten TIMES articles
than one TIT-BITS joke.  Responsibility, a heavy and cautious
responsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody can
do it.  That is why so many tired, elderly, and wealthy men go in for
politics.  They are responsible, because they have not the strength of
mind left to be irresponsible.  It is more dignified to sit still than
to dance the Barn Dance.  It is also easier.  So in these easy pages I
keep myself on the whole on the level of the TIMES:  it is only
occasionally that I leap upwards almost to the level of TIT-BITS.

I resume the defence of this indefensible book.  These articles have
another disadvantage arising from the scurry in which they were written;
they are too long-winded and elaborate.  One of the great disadvantages
of hurry is that it takes such a long time. If I have to start for
Highgate this day week, I may perhaps go the shortest way.  If I have
to start this minute, I shall almost certainly go the longest.  In these
essays (as I read them over) I feel frightfully annoyed with myself for
not getting to the point more quickly; but I had not enough leisure to
be quick. There are several maddening cases in which I took two or three
pages in attempting to describe an attitude of which the essence could
be expressed in an epigram; only there was no time for epigrams. I do
not repent of one shade of opinion here expressed; but I feel that they
might have been expressed so much more briefly and precisely.  For
instance, these pages contain a sort of recurring protest against the
boast of certain writers that they are merely recent.  They brag that
their philosophy of the universe is the last philosophy or the new
philosophy, or the advanced and progressive philosophy.  I have said
much against a mere modernism.  When I use the word "modernism," I am
not alluding specially to the current quarrel in the Roman Catholic
Church, though I am certainly astonished at any intellectual group
accepting so weak and unphilosophical a name.  It is incomprehensible
to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might
as well call himself a Thursdayite.  But apart altogether from that
particular disturbance, I am conscious of a general irritation expressed
against the people who boast of their advancement and modernity in the
discussion of religion. But I never succeeded in saying the quite clear
and obvious thing that is really the matter with modernism.  The real
objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness.
It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some
mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or
particularly "in the know."  To flaunt the fact that we have had all the
last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that
we have had all the last bonnets from Paris.  To introduce into
philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed's antiquity is like
introducing a sneer at a lady's age. It is caddish because it is
irrelevant.  The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear
to be a month behind the fashion.

Similarly I find that I have tried in these pages to express the real
objection to philanthropists and have not succeeded.  I have not seen
the quite simple objection to the causes advocated by certain wealthy
idealists; causes of which the cause called teetotalism is the strongest
case.  I have used many abusive terms about the thing, calling it
Puritanism, or superciliousness, or aristocracy; but I have not seen and
stated the quite simple objection to philanthropy; which is that it is
religious persecution.  Religious persecution does not consist in
thumbscrews or fires of Smithfield; the essence of religious persecution
is this: that the man who happens to have material power in the State,
either by wealth or by official position, should govern his
fellow-citizens not according to their religion or philosophy, but
according to his own.  If, for instance, there is such a thing as a
vegetarian morality, then I say in the emphatic words of the arrogant
French marquis before the French Revolution, "Let them eat grass."
Perhaps that French oligarch was a humanitarian; most oligarchs are.
Perhaps when he told the peasants to eat grass he was recommending to
them the hygienic simplicity of a vegetarian restaurant.  But that is
an irrelevant, though most fascinating, speculation.  The point here is
that if a nation is really vegetarian let its government force upon it
the whole horrible weight of vegetarianism.  Let its government give the
national guests a State vegetarian banquet.  Let its government, in the
most literal and awful sense of the words, give them beans.  That sort
of tyranny is all very well; for it is the people tyrannising over all
the persons.  But "temperance reformers" are like a small group of
vegetarians who should silently and systematically act on an ethical
assumption entirely unfamiliar to the mass of the people.  They would
always be giving peerages to greengrocers.  They would always be
appointing Parliamentary Commissions to enquire into the private life of
butchers.  Whenever they found a man quite at their mercy, as a pauper
or a convict or a lunatic, they would force him to add the final touch
to his inhuman isolation by becoming a vegetarian. All the meals for
school children will be vegetarian meals.  All the State public houses
will be vegetarian public houses. There is a very strong case for
vegetarianism as compared with teetotalism.  Drinking one glass of beer
cannot by any philosophy be drunkenness; but killing one animal can, by
this philosophy, be murder.  The objection to both processes is not that
the two creeds, teetotal and vegetarian, are not admissible; it is
simply that they are not admitted.  The thing is religious persecution
because it is not based on the existing religion of the democracy.  These
people ask the poor to accept in practice what they know perfectly well
that the poor would not accept in theory.  That is the very definition
of religious persecution.  I was against the Tory attempt to force upon
ordinary Englishmen a Catholic theology in which they do not believe.
I am even more against the attempt to force upon them a Mohamedan
morality which they actively deny.

Again, in the case of anonymous journalism I seem to have said a great
deal without getting out the point very clearly.  Anonymous journalism
is dangerous, and is poisonous in our existing life simply because it is
so rapidly becoming an anonymous life.  That is the horrible thing about
our contemporary atmosphere.  Society is becoming a secret society.  The
modern tyrant is evil because of his elusiveness.  He is more nameless
than his slave.  He is not more of a bully than the tyrant of the past;
but he is more of a coward.  The rich publisher may treat the poor poet
better or worse than the old master workman treated the old apprentice.
But the apprentice ran away and the master ran after him. Nowadays it is
the poet who pursues and tries in vain to fix the fact of responsibility.
It is the publisher who runs away.  The clerk of Mr. Solomon gets the
sack; the beautiful Greek slave of the Sultan Suliman also gets the sack;
or the sack gets her.  But though she is concealed under the black waves
of the Bosphorus, at least her destroyer is not concealed.  He goes
behind golden trumpets riding on a white elephant. But in the case of
the clerk it is almost as difficult to know where the dismissal comes
from as to know where the clerk goes to.  It may be Mr. Solomon or Mr.
Solomon's manager, or Mr. Solomon's rich aunt in Cheltenham, or Mr.
Solomon's rich creditor in Berlin.  The elaborate machinery which was
once used to make men responsible is now used solely in order to shift
the responsibility.  People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we in
this age are not suffering from the pride of tyrants.  We are suffering
from the shyness of tyrants; from the shrinking modesty of tyrants.
Therefore we must not encourage leader-writers to be shy; we must not
inflame their already exaggerated modesty.  Rather we must attempt to
lure them to be vain and ostentatious; so that through ostentation they
may at last find their way to honesty.

The last indictment against this book is the worst of all. It is simply
this:  that if all goes well this book will be unintelligible gibberish.
For it is mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their
nature accidental and incapable of enduring.  Brief as is the career of
such a book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of
the philosophies that it attacks.  In the end it will not matter to us
whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It
will matter to us greatly on which side we fought.
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