s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

He says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his
street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because
it is alive. He can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his
own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing to
be stared at; if he stares at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. He is forced to flee,
in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals  of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately
different from himself. The street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering. He has to soothe
and quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles. These creatures are indeed
very different from himself. But they do not put their shape or colour or custom into a decisive
intellectual competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy his principles and assert their
own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do seek to do this. The camel does not contort
his features into a fine sneer because Mr. Robinson has not got a hump; the cultured gentleman at
No. 5 does exhibit a sneer because Robinson has not got a dado. The vulture will not roar with
laughter because a man does not fly; but the major at No. 9 will roar with laughter because a man
does not smoke. The complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbours is that they will not,
as we express it, mind their own business. We do not really mean that they will not mind their own
business. If our neighbours did not mind their own business they would be asked abruptly for their
rent, and would rapidly cease to be our neighbours. What we really mean when we say that they
cannot mind their own business is something much deeper. We do not dislike them because they
have so little force and fire that they cannot be interested in themselves. We dislike them because
they have so much force and fire that they can be interested in us as well. What we dread about our
neighbours, in short, is not the narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden
it. And all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character. They are not aversions to
its feebleness (as is pretended), but to its energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise
humanity for its weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.
Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly
reasonable and excusable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when
it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness
has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most
unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the
fastidious, has a description somewhere  a very powerful description in the purely literary sense
 of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their
common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is
almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche s aristocracy has about it all the sacredness
that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure theinnumerable faces, the
incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the
sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every
man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like
a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the
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Heretics Gilbert K. Chesterton
incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an
aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth.
It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour. Hence
he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and
indifferent as the rain. He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is why the old religions and
the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one s duty towards
humanity, but one s duty towards one s neighbour. The duty towards humanity may often take the
form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty may be a hobby; it may even
be a dissipation. We may work in the East End because we are peculiarly fitted to work in the East
End, or because we think we are; we may fight for the cause of international peace because we are
very fond of fighting. The most monstrous martyrdom, the most repulsive experience, may be the
result of choice or a kind of taste. We may be so made as to be particularly fond of lunatics or
specially interested in leprosy. We may love negroes because they are black or German Socialists
because they are pedantic. But we have to love our neighbour because he is there  a much more
alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of humanity which is actually
given us. Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an
accident.
Doubtless men flee from small environments into lands that are very deadly. But this is natural
enough; for they are not fleeing from death. They are fleeing from life. And this principle applies
to ring within ring of the social system of humanity. It is perfectly reasonable that men should seek
for some particular variety of the human type, so long as they are seeking for that variety of the
human type, and not for mere human variety. It is quite proper that a British diplomatist should
seek the society of Japanese generals, if what he wants is Japanese generals. But if what he wants
is people different from himself, he had much better stop at home and discuss religion with the
housemaid. It is quite reasonable that the village genius should come up to conquer London if what
he wants is to conquer London. But if he wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically
hostile and also very strong, he had much better remain where he is and have a row with the rector.
The man in the suburban street is quite right if he goes to Ramsgate for the sake of Ramsgate  a
difficult thing to imagine. But if, as he expresses it, he goes to Ramsgate  for a change, then he
would have a much more romantic and even melodramatic change if he jumped over the wall into
his neighbours garden. The consequences would be bracing in a sense far beyond the possibilities
of Ramsgate hygiene. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]