"Twelve Types,"

 by G. K. Chesterton (London: A. L. Humphreys).

One of the most brilliant of living essayists of the younger school is Mr. G. K. Chesterton. In airiness and ease the flights of literary fancy he has brought together under the above title may not compare with Andrew Lang's best efforts, or with Stevenson's, which, perhaps, they more nearly resemble. But Mr. Chesterton yields to no recent writer in originality and suggestiveness, and if the twelve types he has selected for critical study are not likely to be unfamiliar to any person at all decently read, the author may fairly claim to have introduced the reader to a mode of treatment which is certainly not common. It would be extraordinary if essays dealing with such diverse characters as Savonarola, Charles II., St. Francis of Assisi, Pope, Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Carlyle, Charlotte Bronte, William Morris, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rostand, and Tolstoi were equal to one another in power throughout, but there is not one from which the reader will not draw some profit and pleasure, or which does not bear the stamp of a thoughtful and vigorous mind. Thus Mr. Chesterton takes Savonarola out of the category of theologians pure and simple. The great teacher of Italy, we are told, "was making war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which all creation fall. He was preaching that severity which is the sign manual of youth and hope. He lived at a time when, following eagerly, though blindly, the phantom of an extinct civilisation, the citizens of Florence had gathered about them the little fragments of what might seem a Greek city—its architecture and sculpture, its Platonic banquets, and Aristophanic revelry. He set himself to combat the profligacy of a day when men were parodying the old liturgies with the borrowed phrases of Pagan philosophy, or polluting Italian morals, with exotic mysteries, which could scarcely be whispered in a confessional. He transformed a vicious and effeminate people into an austere and simple society; he replaced tyranny by the most popular institutions; and he governed Florence without giving any orders, and without having as much as a single soldier under him. "Men like Savonarola," says Mr. Chesterton, "are the witnesses to the tremendous psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and civilisation potentially the end of man."

The misfortune, which Mr. Chesterton does not seem to see, is that men, like Savonarola in the effort to spiritualise society, are apt to think that human virtue is bound up with conformity to the standard of an idyllic past. Savonarola, like the Puritans of England, craved for an earthly commonwealth, of which Christ should be King. The younger and more impressible citizens of Florence were constituted a moral police, who enforced sumptuary laws in the streets, or entered fearlessly into private houses. Country merrymakings assumed the form of devotional processions, or meetings, where crucifixes and pictures were something more than religious ornaments. The marriage feast had nothing left of a secular character—it was purely sacramental, and (as Gibbon tells us was the case among the early Christians of Rome) often followed by vows of chastity between husband and wife. Savonarola, indeed, looked forward to the day when such unions would cease altogether, and Florence become one vast monastery. Presently, the irresistible logic of his convictions carried him yet another step backwards towards a visionary past. All the secular progress of his day, the first promise of the new morning of thought, was anathema, and must be shut out of the church. So a pyre was erected in the great square of the city, and upon it the noblest works of the greatest masters laid—the dangerous love poems of Petrarch, the impure novels of Boccaccio, and the fresh flowers and voluptuous forms of the pictures where Venus and Cupid had supplanted the saints. Perhaps Europe has never since witnessed the deliberate offering up of so costly a holocaust; and yet not one of the governing party shrank from the sacrifice. But Savonarola's triumph was of short duration. His Commonwealth vanished before the touch of time, just as that did which was founded by the English Puritans, and which was intended by many of its founders less as an assertion of the political rights of the people than as an expression of mediæval religion in its highest form.

The attempt to impose upon a nation the ordinances of a self-denying asceticism is foredoomed to failure, whether it be made by a Savonarola in the interests of religion, or by a John Ruskin in the interests of art. For a buried past there is no day of resurrection, and we can no more recall the blank cheerlessness of a time when the aesthetic sense was undeveloped than we can think of stopping the industrial machinery because it is pleasanter to breathe the ambrosial air of glade and meadow than the blackened and dust-laden atmosphere of a city. The aim of the true reformer should be not to abolish but to make the best of our civilisation. It can hardly be said that William Morris, to whom Mr. Chesterton devotes one of the most impressive of his essays, had a full grasp of the problem. For his "glorious, if not conquering, fight against the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the most self-conscious of centuries," he merits nothing but praise. His limitation is chiefly apparent in his inability to apprehend anything excepting by his one sense —that of beauty. What charmed him in the noble legends and the noble fancies with which he dealt in his poetry, was the way in which they lent themselves to the purposes of art—their beauty as beauty. Reading his verse is like living in the dreamland of a syren's isle, a place where it is always afternoon. Fair women and brave men pass before us in stately show, and we seem to see them in the half-light of some cloistered isle. It is all a piece of tapestry—a splendid collection of detached episodes. The mediæval era was to Morris an age of gold; as though selfishness and misery did not exist then as much as, perhaps more than, now. He appeared to think a child-like simplicity indispensable to virtuous living. His socialism was not a protest against an unjust distribution of wealth, but merely a sense of beauty working in an economic medium. He saw that the masses are not, and under existing conditions cannot be ruled by artistic perceptions. He saw that unless those conditions were radically changed, and the means were provided for ensuring to all who would work the means of a decent livelihood, his passionate appeals to handicraftsmen to show themselves artists in every stroke of their work, must fall upon deaf ears. He spoke in a dialect strange to the ears not merely of political economists, but of ordinary men, and the result is that his prophetic message has largely miscarried. What will preserve his memory, Mr. Chesterton thinks, are his services as a reformer of the aesthetic taste of his countrymen:—

If ever the gradual and genuine movement of our time towards beauty—not backwards, but forwards—does truly come about, Morris will be the first prophet of it. Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art, prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colors, and proved that this painful greenish grey of the aesthetic twilight in which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the greyness of death, but the greyness of dawn.

The falsehood of extremes was never more strikingly exemplified than in the teachings of Carlyle and Tolstoi, which furnish material for two of Mr. Chesterton's most instructive essays. The blunder of both writers was identical, though it led them to opposite conclusions. The means by which a principle is asserted are gradually confused with the principle itself, until at last they become inextinguishable. Carlyle saw that righteousness was furthered by earnestness, and in dwelling upon the need for earnestness he got at last to look upon it as an end in itself, so that to his mind to be earnest was to be righteous. Earnestness is another name for strength of character, which expressed in action usually takes the form of force. It is easy to understand that a mind carried away as Carlyle's was, would gradually come to see virtue in tyranny and vice in subjection, and so we find Carlyle defending negro slavery and extolling despotism. "In an "Occasional discourse on the nigger question," published in "Fraser's Magazine" in 1849, we find him urging sharp measures to compel Quashee, "up to the ears in pumpkin," to labor for the enrichment of the white planter in the West Indies. Governor Eyre who, in the mild language of Mr. Justice Blackburn, had adopted the "unreasonable course" of keeping up martial law in Jamaica for a period of thirty days after an armed insurrection had been put down, taking during that period, as Mill said, "hundreds of innocent lives by military violence," and flogging men and women in batches, becomes in the eyes of Carlyle "a just, humane, and valiant man." Democracy, as one might expect, is to such a mind "utterly evil," and the proper position of the masses is one of enslavement to the "best man," who should have the power to "beat them" if they will not toil, and shoot them if they still refuse. The error which Carlyle made springs from a defect in his logical faculty, which, as Bagehot showed, is by no means uncommon. For as, according to the lastnamed authority, there are people constitutionally incapable of belief where their reason is unconvinced, and thereby compelled through "the make of their mind" to remain outside ecclesiastical organisations, so there are minds on which no argument based on mere logic can make any impression. The same infirmity is exhibited in another way by Tolstoi. Wrong is inevitably associated with force, therefore force is wrong — so wrong that resistance, even to wrongdoing, becomes a vice. "The theory of Christian duty enunciated by Tolstoi," says Mr. Chesterton, "is that we should never conquer by force, but always, if we can, conquer by persuasion." Interpreting the Scriptures in the light of the ordinary dictionary, and assuming that "resist" means withstand, that "not" means negation, denial, refusal, or prohibition, and that "evil" means something injurious, pernicious, having bad qualities of a moral kind, the Tolstoians have come to believe that the famous exhortation, "resist not evil," means that no step should be taken to prevent mischief or wrong being done. That people can be found in thousands attaching an everyday meaning to the language of Christ, and rejecting the interpretations which it undergoes in the pulpit, is to Mr. Chesterton the most Tremendous tribute ever paid in the world's history to the vitality of an ancient creed. Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were cloven asunder, or the sun did stand still at midday. We are faced with the phenomenon that a ste of revolutionists whose contempt for all the ideals of family and nation would evoke horror in a thieves' kitchen, who can rid themselves of those elementary instincts of the man and the gentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilization, cannot rid themselves of the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdotes written in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it something stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in its presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees the immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the way of a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that the dark sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may indeed, contain in themselves the revolutions of which we have only begun to dream.

No church, says Mr. Chesterton, could keep its congregation together if it offered the tribute Tolstoi pays to Christianity. "The Christianity of Tolstoi is, when we come to consider it, one of the most thrilling and dramatic incidents in our modern civilisation. It represents a tribute to the Christian religion more sensational than the breaking of seals or the falling of stars." This is not the place to discuss the accuracy or otherwise of Tolstoi's interpretation of the Gospels; but a word may be said as to the strange meaning Tolstoi and Carlyle attach to the term "force." It is regarded by both as in itself a moral or an immoral quality, whereas it is, of course, entirely without ethical significance. Where a child is killed by a blow from an axe the same degree of force may have been employed, whether the blow be accidental or deliberate. To form an opinion as to the culpability of the deed we have to look behind the force to the state of mind which directed its use, and where intention is absent, there is no culpability. If force as force were immoral, morality would require the stoppage of all human exertion, muscular or other. If, however, intention be everything, then force might justly be used to prevent the commission of a wrong, and we should be justified in effecting the "conquest" of an intending murderer by something more than persuasion. The inference deduced from so much of Carlyle's teaching that all force is right is, however, no more defensible than Tolstoi's doctrine of inflexible non-resistence. The force that would have stayed an Armenian massacre hardly comes within the same category as that employed by Carlyle's favorite hero when he plunged Europe into war in order to effect the wanton subjugation of Silesia.

Advertiser (Adelaide, SA :), 20 December 1902, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4908823