This and That and the Other

by Hilaire Belloc

There are many fixed human types, and every one of them has a name. There is the Priest, there is the Merchant, there is the Noble—and there is the Pedant. Each of these types are known by a distinctive name, and to most men they call up a clear image, but because they are types of mankind they are a little too complicated for definition. Nevertheless I will have a try at the Pedant.

The essence of the Pedant is twofold, first that he takes his particular science for something universal, second, that he holds with the Grip of Faith certain set phrases in that science which he has been taught. I say "with the Grip of Faith"; it is the only metaphor applicable; he has for these phrases a violent affection. Not only does he not question them, but he does not know that they can be questioned. When he repeats them it is in a fixed and hierarchic voice. When they are denied he does not answer, but flies into a passion which, were he destined to an accession of power, might in the near future turn to persecution.

Alas! that the noblest thing in man should be perverted to such a use; for Faith when it is exercised upon those unprovable things which are in tune with things provable, illuminates and throws into a right perspective everything we know. But the Faith of the Pedant!...

The Pedant crept in upon the eclipse of our religion; his reign is therefore brief. Perhaps he is also but a reflection of that vast addition to material knowledge which glorified the last century. Perhaps it is the hurry, and the rapidity of our declining time, which makes it necessary for us to accept ready-made phrases and to act on rules of thumb good or bad. Perhaps it is the whirlpool and turmoil of classes which has pitchforked into the power of the Pedant whole groups of men who used to escape him. Perhaps it is the Devil. Whatever it is it is there.

You see it more in England than in any other European country. It runs all through the fibre of our modern literature and our modern comment, like the strings of a cancer. Come, let us have a few examples.

There is "the Anglo-Saxon race." It does not exist. It is not there. It is no more there than Baal or Moloch or the Philosopher's Stone, or the Universal Mercury. There never was any such race. There were once hundreds and hundreds of years ago a certain number of people (how many we do not know) talking a local German dialect in what is now Hampshire and Berkshire. To this dialect historians have been pleased to give the name of Anglo-Saxon, and that is all it means. If you pin your Pedant down to clear expression, saying to him, "Come, now, fellow, out with it! What is this Anglo-Saxon race of yours?" you find that he means a part (and a part only) of such people in the world as habitually speak the English language, or one of its dialects: that part only which in a muddy way he sympathises with; that part which is more or less of his religion, and more or less conformable to his own despicable self. It does not include the Irish, it does not include the negroes of the United States, but it does include a horde of German Jews, and a mixed rabble of every origin under the sun sweating in the slums of the New World.

Why then you may ask, and you may well ask, does the man use the phrase "Anglo-Saxon" at all?

The answer is simple. It smacks—or did originally smack—of learning. Among the innumerable factors of modern Europe one, and only one, was the invasion of the Eastern part of this island (and only the Eastern part) by pirates from beyond the North Sea. The most of these pirates (but by no means all) belonged either to a loose conglomeration of tribes whom the Romans called Saxones, or to a little maritime tribe called Angles. True, the full knowledge of that event is a worthy subject of study; there is a good week's reading upon it in original authorities, and I can imagine a conscientious man who would read slowly and make notes, spending a fortnight upon the half dozen contemporary sources of knowledge we possess upon these little barbarian peoples. But, Lord! what a superstructure the Pedant has raised upon that narrow base!

Then there is "alcohol"; what "alcohol" does to the human body, and the rest of it; to read the absurd fellows one would imagine that this stuff "alcohol" was something you could see and handle; something with which humanity was familiar, like Beef, Oak, Sand, Chalk, and the rest. Not a bit of it. It does not exist any more than the "Anglo-Saxon race" exists. It is a chemical extraction. And in connection with it you have something very common to all such folly, to wit, gross insufficiency even in the line to which its pedantry is devoted. For this chemical abstraction of theirs may be expressed in many forms and it is only in one of these forms that they mouth out their interminable and pretentious dogmas. Humanity, healthy European humanity that is, the jolly place called Christendom, has drunk from immemorial time wine and beer and cider. It has been noticed (also from immemorial time) that if a man drank too much of any of these things he got drunk, and that if he got drunk often his health and capacity declined. There is the important fact which humanity has never missed, and without which the rhodomontades of the Pedant would have no foothold. It is because his pretended knowledge relates to a real evil with which humanity is acquainted that people listen to him at all on the subject. He ill requites their confidence! He exploits and bamboozles them to the top of their bent. He terrifies the weak victims (and the weaker witnesses) of drunkenness and often, I am sorry to say, picks their pockets as well. I can call to mind as I write more than one Pedant who by harping on this word "alcohol" has got very considerable sums out of the public. Well, it is the public's fault! Vult decipi et decipiatur. And a murrain on it—also a quinsy!