UNDER the title “Good Stories Spoilt by Great Authors” a considerable essay might be written. In fact, it shall be written. It shall be written now. The mere fact that some fable has passed through a master mind does not imply by any means that it must have been improved. Eminent men have misappropriated public stories, as they have misappropriated public stores. It is always supposed (apparently) that anyone who borrows from the original brotherhood of men is not bound to pay back. It is supposed that if Shakespeare took the legend of King Lear, or Goethe the legend of Faust, or Wagner the legend of Tannhäuser, they must have been very right and the legends ought to be grateful to them. My own impression is that they were sometimes very wrong and that the legends might sue them for slander. Briefly, it is always assumed that the poem that somebody made is vastly superior to the ballad that everybody made. For my part I take the other view. I prefer the gossip of the many to the scandal of the few. I distrust the narrow individualism of the artist, trusting rather the natural communism of the craftsmen. I think there is one thing more important than the man of genius—and that is the genius of man.
Let me promptly, in a parenthetical paragraph, confess that I cannot get Shakespeare into this theory of mine. As far as I can see, Shakespeare made all his stories better; and as far as I can see, he hardly could have made them worse. He seems to have specialised in making good plays out of bad novels. If Shakespeare were alive now I suppose he would make a sweet springtime comedy out of an anecdote in a sporting paper. I suppose he would make a starry and awful tragedy out of one of the penny novelettes. But as Shakespeare does not support my argument I propose to leave him out of my article.
In the instances of Milton, however, I think my case can be stoutly maintained; only that Milton’s story, being Scriptural, is not perhaps so safe to dogmatise about. In one sense Milton spoiled Eden as much as the snake did. He made a magnificent poem and yet missed the poetical point. For in “Paradise Lost” (if I remember right) Milton substitutes for the primal appetite for a strange fruit an elaborate psychological and sentimental motive. He makes Adam eat the fruit deliberately, “not deceived”, with the object of sharing Eve’s misfortune. In other words, he makes all human wickedness originate in an act of essential goodness, or, at the worst, of a very excusable romanticism. Now all our meannesses did not begin in magnanimity; if we are cads and blackguards (as we are) it is not because our first ancestor behaved like a husband and a gentleman. The story, as it stands in the Bible, is infinitely more sublime and delicate. There all evil is traced to that ultimate unreasoning insolence which will not accept even the kindest conditions; that profoundly inartistic anarchy that objects to a limit as such. It is not indicated that the fruit was of attractive hue or taste; its attraction was that it was forbidden. In Eden there was a maximum of liberty and a minimum of veto; but some veto is essential even to the enjoyment of liberty. The finest thing about a free meadow is the hedge at the end of it. The moment the hedge is abolished it is no longer a meadow but a waste, as Eden was after its one limitation was lost. This Bible idea that all sins and sorrows spring from a certain fever of pride, which cannot enjoy unless it controls, is a much deeper and more piercing truth than Milton’s mere suggestion that a gentleman got entangled by his chivalry to a lady. Genesis, with sounder commonsense, makes Adam after the Fall lose his chivalry in a rather marked and startling manner.
The same theory of deterioration might be urged in the case of Goethe and the Faust legend. I do not speak, of course, of the poetry in detail, which is above any criticism. I speak of the outline of Goethe’s Faust—or, rather, of the outline of the first part; the second part has no outline, like Mr. Mantalini’s Countesses. Now the actual story of Faust, Mephistopheles and Margaret seems to me infinitely less exalted and beautiful than the old story of Faust, Mephistopheles and Helen. I had the pleasure of seeing in Yorkshire the old wooden puppet play Faustus that has since been performed in London; and the Yorkshire dolls were much more living than some of the London actors. The marionettes were trying to express themselves as men; there were times, alas! When eminent actors tried to express themselves as marionettes; but that is not the true objection. The true objection is this: that, in the medieval play Faust is damned for doing a great sin; swearing loyalty to eternal evil that he may possess Helen of Troy, the supreme bodily beauty. The old Faust is damned for doing a great sin; but the new Faust is saved for doing a small sin; Goethe’s Faust is not intoxicated and swept away by the intolerable sweetness of some supernatural lady. Goethe’s Faust, so soon as he is made a young man, promptly and really becomes a young rascal. He gets at once into a local intrigue—I will not say into a local entanglement because (as in most similar cases) only the woman is entangled. But surely there is something of the bad side of Germany, there is something of the vulgar sentimentalist, in this hotch-potch of seduction and salvation! The man ruins the woman; the woman, therefore saves the man; and that is the moral, die ewige Weiblichkeit. Somebody who else has had the pain; and so his cruelty shall finally be the same as his kindness. Personally, I prefer the puppet play; where Faustus is finally torn by clack devils and dragged down to hell. I find it less depressing.
Again, the same principle, as far as I can make out, marks Wagner’s version of Tannhäuser—or rather, his perversion of Tannhäuser. This great legend of the early Middle Ages, plainly and properly told, is one of the most tremendous things in human history or fable. Tannhäuser, a great knight, committed a terrible transcendental sin that cut him off from all the fellowship of sinners. He became the lover of Venus herself, the incarnation of pagan sensuality. Coming out of those evil caverns to the sun, he strayed to Rome and asked the Pope if such as he could repent and be saved. The Pope answered in substance, that there are limits to everything. A man so cut off from Christina sanity (he said) could no more repent than the Pope’s stick cut from a tree could grow leaves again. Tannhäuser went away in despair and descended again into the caverns of eternal death, only after he had gone the Pope looked at his stick one fine morning and saw that it was sprouting leaves. To me that tale is one terrific clash of Agnosticism and Catholicism. Wagner, I believe, made Tannhäuser return repentant for the second time. If that is not spoiling a story, I do not know what is.
Lastly (to take a much smaller case), I have noticed all over Europe discussions about the morals of the play Salome which Wilde wrote in French. I do not see anything practically immoral about the play, though much that is morbid and turgid. What strikes me most about Wilde’s Salome is that it is startling inartistic. It spoils the whole point of a particularly artistic incident. The brilliant bitterness of the old Bible story consists in the complete innocence and indifference of the dancing girl. A subtle despot was plotting a statesmanlike clemency; a secretive Queen was plotting savage vengeance. A dancer (a mere child, I always fancied) was the daughter of the vengeful Queen and danced before the diplomatic despot. In riotous relaxation he asked the little girl to name any present she liked. Bewildered with such a fairy-tale benevolence, the girl ran to ask her mother what she should choose; the patient and pitiless Queen saw her chance and asked for the death of her enemy. In place of this strong, ironic tale of a butterfly used as a hornet, Salome has some sickly and vulgar business of the dancer being in love with the Prophet. I am not sure about its being bad morality; for its morality is its effect on mankind. But I know it is bad art; for its art is its effect on me.
~G.K. Chesterton: in Lunacy & Letters
THE DIFFICULTY of explaining “why I am a Catholic” is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, “It is the only thing that . . .” As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws; and so on.
Or I might treat the matter personally and describe my own conversion; but I happen to have a strong feeling that this method makes the business look much smaller than it really is. Numbers of much better men have been sincerely converted to much worse religions. I would much prefer to attempt to say here of the Catholic Church precisely the things that cannot be said even of its very respectable rivals. In short, I would say chiefly of the Catholic Church that it is catholic. I would rather try to suggest that it is not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world; that it is indeed larger than the world. But since in this short space I can only take a section, I will consider it in its capacity of a guardian of the truth.
The other day a well-known writer, otherwise quite well-informed, said that the Catholic Church is always the enemy of new ideas. It probably did not occur to him that his own remark was not exactly in the nature of a new idea. It is one of the notions that Catholics have to be continually refuting, because it is such a very old idea. Indeed, those who complain that Catholicism cannot say anything new, seldom think it necessary to say anything new about Catholicism. As a matter of fact, a real study of history will show it to be curiously contrary to the fact. In so far as the ideas really are ideas, and in so far as any such ideas can be new, Catholics have continually suffered through supporting them when they were really new; when they were much too new to find any other support. The Catholic was not only first in the field but alone in the field; and there was as yet nobody to understand what he had found there.
Thus, for instance, nearly two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, in an age devoted to the pride and praise of princes, Cardinal Bellarmine and Suarez the Spaniard laid down lucidly the whole theory of real democracy. But in that age of Divine Right they only produced the impression of being sophistical and sanguinary Jesuits, creeping about with daggers to effect the murder of kings. So, again, the Casuists of the Catholic schools said all that can really be said for the problem plays and problem novels of our own time, two hundred years before they were written. They said that there really are problems of moral conduct; but they had the misfortune to say it two hundred years too soon. In a time of tub-thumping fanaticism and free and easy vituperation, they merely got themselves called liars and shufflers for being psychologists before psychology was the fashion. It would be easy to give any number of other examples down to the present day, and the case of ideas that are still too new to be understood. There are passages in Pope Leo’s Encyclical on Labor [Rerum Novarum], which are only now beginning to be used as hints for social movements much newer than socialism. And when Mr. Belloc wrote about the Servile State, he advanced an economic theory so original that hardly anybody has yet realized what it is. A few centuries hence, other people will probably repeat it, and repeat it wrong. And then, if Catholics object, their protest will be easily explained by the well-known fact that Catholics never care for new ideas.
Nevertheless, the man who made that remark about Catholics meant something; and it is only fair to him to understand it rather more clearly than he stated it. What he meant was that, in the modern world, the Catholic Church is in fact the enemy of many influential fashions; most of which still claim to be new, though many of them are beginning to be a little stale. In other words, in so far as he meant that the Church often attacks what the world at any given moment supports, he was perfectly right . The Church does often set herself against the fashion of this world that passes away; and she has experience enough to know how very rapidly it does pass away. But to understand exactly what is involved, it is necessary to take a rather larger view and consider the ultimate nature of the ideas in question, to consider, so to speak, the idea of the idea.
Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The truth about the Catholic attitude towards heresy, or as some would say, towards liberty, can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled from knowledge which, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel.
There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them.
On this map of the mind the errors are marked as exceptions. The greater part of it consists of playgrounds and happy hunting-fields, where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes; not to mention any number of intellectual battle-fields in which the battle is indefinitely open and undecided. But it does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheer precipice. By this means, it does prevent men from wasting their time or losing their lives upon paths that have been found futile or disastrous again and again in the past, but which might otherwise entrap travelers again and again in the future. The Church does make herself responsible for warning her people against these; and upon these the real issue of the case depends. She does dogmatically defend humanity from its worst foes, those hoary and horrible and devouring monsters of the old mistakes. Now all these false issues have a way of looking quite fresh, especially to a fresh generation. Their first statement always sounds harmless and plausible. I will give only two examples. It sounds harmless to say, as most modern people have said: “Actions are only wrong if they are bad for society.” Follow it out, and sooner or later you will have the inhumanity of a hive or a heathen city, establishing slavery as the cheapest and most certain means of production, torturing the slaves for evidence because the individual is nothing to the State, declaring that an innocent man must die for the people, as did the murderers of Christ. Then, perhaps, you will go back to Catholic definitions, and find that the Church, while she also says it is our duty to work for society, says other things also which forbid individual injustice. Or again, it sounds quite pious to say, “Our moral conflict should end with a victory of the spiritual over the material.” Follow it out, and you may end in the madness of the Manicheans, saying that a suicide is good because it is a sacrifice, that a sexual perversion is good because it produces no life, that the devil made the sun and moon because they are material. Then you may begin to guess why Catholicism insists that there are evil spirits as well as good; and that materials also may be sacred, as in the Incarnation or the Mass, in the sacrament of marriage or the resurrection of the body.
Now there is no other corporate mind in the world that is thus on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong. The policeman comes too late, when he tries to prevent men from going wrong. The doctor comes too late, for he only comes to lock up a madman, not to advise a sane man on how not to go mad. And all other sects and schools are inadequate for the purpose. This is not because each of them may not contain a truth, but precisely because each of them does contain a truth; and is content to contain a truth. None of the others really pretends to contain the truth. None of the others, that is, really pretends to be looking out in all directions at once. The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present. Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists. Thus, when the world went Puritan in the seventeenth century, the Church was charged with pushing charity to the point of sophistry, with making everything easy with the laxity of the confessional. Now that the world is not going Puritan but Pagan, it is the Church that is everywhere protesting against a Pagan laxity in dress or manners. It is doing what the Puritans wanted done when it is really wanted. In all probability, all that is best in Protestantism will only survive in Catholicism; and in that sense all Catholics will still be Puritans when all Puritans are Pagans.
Thus, for instance, Catholicism, in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the Origin of Species, because it goes back to an origin before that Origin; because it is more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It also knows where most of the theories of Evolution go to. It knows there were many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels, and that the others were only eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory; and that the latter is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up. It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism. The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God.
Every moment increases for us the moral necessity for such an immortal mind. We must have something that will hold the four corners of the world still, while we make our social experiments or build our Utopias. For instance, we must have a final agreement, if only on the truism of human brotherhood, that will resist some reaction of human brutality. Nothing is more likely just now than that the corruption of representative government will lead to the rich breaking loose altogether, and trampling on all the traditions of equality with mere pagan pride. We must have the truisms everywhere recognized as true. We must prevent mere reaction and the dreary repetition of the old mistakes. We must make the intellectual world safe for democracy. But in the conditions of modern mental anarchy, neither that nor any other ideal is safe. just as Protestants appealed from priests to the Bible, and did not realize that the Bible also could be questioned, so republicans appealed from kings to the people, and did not realize that the people also could be defied. There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.
~G.K. Chesterton
The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 3: Where All Roads Lead; The Catholic Church and Conversion; Why I Am a Catholic; The Thing; The Well and the Shallows; The Way of the Cross.
