V
But he helps us to keep a balance. His service to us is that when we are inclined to run frantically after the superman, he reminds us of the existence of the common man. If he were not so well-padded with flesh, I should describe him as the skeleton at a feast of supermen, reminding them that even a superman can be a fool.
There are times indeed, when his faith in the common man undergoes a sea-change, and he utters sentiments that might be spoken by Mr. H. L. Mencken, who cannot abide the common mind. In one of his essays, Mr. Chesterton says, "I certainly would much rather share my apartments with a gentleman who thought he was God than with a gentleman who thought he was a grasshopper." So would Nietzsche. But I doubt whether the Early Christians would have approved his preference. They, who were ready to pronounce all flesh to be grass, would not have found anything incompatible with their faith in a gentleman who regarded himself as a grasshopper. They would certainly have considered his rival in misapprehension to be a blasphemer. And if Mr. Chesterton would fail to find pleasure in the company of a man who believed himself to be that interesting but monotonous insect, how much less pleasure would he derive from sharing his apartments with a man who believed not only himself, but all men, to be worms?
He is personally the most kindly and agreeable of men, in whom the one virtue commonly ascribed to fat men, that of good nature, is most highly developed. His anger is almost completely impersonal. His pardon is on the heels of his condemnation. The sins of jealousy and hatred are unknown to him, and he seems to be without the power of resenting spiteful things done to himself. He said to me on one occasion, "Arnold Bennett says I'm an imbecile!" in the tone of a man who was not in the least annoyed by the statement, but puzzled by the fact that any man should call another one an offensive name. We are all children of the one God, in his belief, even if some of us are Jews, and in some mystical manner he contrives, in his anger, to discriminate between the human being and the thing which the human being does. If ever he is moved to slay a sweater or an international financier or a Prohibitionist, he will do so entirely without prejudice to that person's right to be called a child of God. It is a tribute to the charm of his character and the equability of his temper that his stoutest admirers are those who most vigorously combat his opinions, and that most of his friends are men who do not share any of his views, except perhaps the only view that matters, the view that an ill deed must be exposed and a wrong put right. He is Don Quixote in the body of Sancho Panza.