Let there be no alarm, however, that I shall talk about such nightmares, or any of my own tales; like Shaw, I am egoistic about things that matter. Mr. Skimpole says that while Shaw and I agree that the world should be adapted to the man, “Chesterton includes our present institutions among the parts of a man’s soul which cannot be altered.” Now there is here a potential mistake, which I will not apologize for taking more seriously than any fancy about the figures in my very amateurish romances.
I need not say I do not mind being called fat; for deprived of that jest, I should be almost a serious writer. I do not even mind being supposed to mind being called fat. But being supposed to be contented, and contented with the present institutions of modern society, is a mortal slander I will not take from any man.
Whatever are the institutions I defend, they are not primarily those of the present. They have been attempted in the past; and I hope they may be achieved in the future; but they are not present, but conspicuous by their absence. Mr. Skimpole truly says that I defend domesticity and piety and patriotism, but these are not the typical institutions of to-day.
The typical institutions of to-day are a Divorce Court cutting up families with the speed of a sausage machine; a Science which preaches the destiny without the divinity of Calvinism; and a Finance that crosses all frontiers with the same enlightened indifference that is shown by cholera.
These are the institutions of the instant, and even Mr. Skimpole has realized them as those of the immediate future. In a somewhat innocent passage he says that “it is of no use for Shaw to point out” to me the hope of a cosmopolitan future; “that Internationalism, social class-feeling, and Imperialism all point the same way he refuses to see.”
It is indeed useless for Shaw to point out to me that I should follow the lead of these things; since I happen to detest Imperialism, disbelieve in Internationalism and distrust “social class-feeling,” so far as I know what it means. I am well aware that an Imperial Chancellor in Berlin, an international money-lender in Johannesburg, and an anarchist spy in Petrograd, are “all pointing the same way”; and that is why I feel pretty safe in going the other.
I warmly apologize to Mr. Skimpole for writing a personal explanation instead of a review of his book, which contains many things well worth writing and reviewing; notably the shrewd remark about Shaw’s style; in which what is a paradox in spirit is seldom an epigram in form. It takes our breath away rather by taking itself for granted than by defining itself like a defiance. But I fancy Mr. Skimpole will sympathize with me if I am primarily concerned with his convictions, as he is with mine, and as we both are with Shaw’s.
And he has gone to the vital point in emphasizing this matter of the things permanent in man. When I say that religion and marriage and local loyalty are permanent in humanity, I mean that they recur when humanity is most human; and only comparatively decline when society is comparatively inhuman.
They have declined in the modern world. They may return through the war; but anyhow, where we have the small farm and the free man and the fighting spirit, there we shall have the salute to the soil and the roof and to the altar.
To take a more casual case: I believe that when men are happy, they sing; not only at the piano but at the plough, or at least in the intervals of ploughing; at their work and in their walks abroad. I am well aware that modern men do not sing in the street very much. I am well aware that cosmopolitan money-lenders never sing, but die with all their music in them. I know that the Song of the Happy Meat-Contractor is not one of “our present institutions.”