[Extract from Chesterton's Book "Heretics" (1907)]

On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family

The family may fairly be considered, one would think, an ultimate

human institution. Every one would admit that it has been

the main cell and central unit of almost all societies hitherto,

except, indeed, such societies as that of Lacedaemon, which went

in for "efficiency," and has, therefore, perished, and left not

a trace behind. Christianity, even enormous as was its revolution,

did not alter this ancient and savage sanctity; it merely reversed it.

It did not deny the trinity of father, mother, and child.

It merely read it backwards, making it run child, mother, father.

This it called, not the family, but the Holy Family,

for many things are made holy by being turned upside down.

But some sages of our own decadence have made a serious attack

on the family. They have impugned it, as I think wrongly;

and its defenders have defended it, and defended it wrongly.

The common defence of the family is that, amid the stress

and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one.

But there is another defence of the family which is possible,

and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not peaceful

and not pleasant and not at one.

It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of

the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires

and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state,

the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook.

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world.

He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences

of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose

our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.

Thus in all extensive and highly civilised societies groups come

into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut

out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery.

There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is

really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together

because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended

from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck

of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan.

But the men of the clique live together because they have the same

kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual

coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.

A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society

is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery

for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual

from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises.

It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for

the prevention of Christian knowledge.

We can see this change, for instance, in the modern transformation

of the thing called a club. When London was smaller, and the parts

of London more self-contained and parochial, the club was what it

still is in villages, the opposite of what it is now in great cities.

Then the club was valued as a place where a man could be sociable.

Now the club is valued as a place where a man can be unsociable.

The more the enlargement and elaboration of our civilization goes

on the more the club ceases to be a place where a man can have

a noisy argument, and becomes more and more a place where a man

can have what is somewhat fantastically called a quiet chop.

Its aim is to make a man comfortable, and to make a man comfortable

is to make him the opposite of sociable. Sociability, like all

good things, is full of discomforts, dangers, and renunciations.

The club tends to produce the most degraded of all combinations--

the luxurious anchorite, the man who combines the self-indulgence

of Lucullus with the insane loneliness of St. Simeon Stylites.

If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live,

we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world

than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically

modern person to escape from the street in which he lives.

First he invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate.

Then he invents modern culture and goes to Florence.

Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuctoo. He goes

to the fantastic borders of the earth. He pretends to shoot tigers.

He almost rides on a camel. And in all this he is still essentially

fleeing from the street in which he was born; and of this flight

he is always ready with his own explanation. 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 the

innumerable 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 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.

Now, exactly as this principle applies to the empire, to the nation

within the empire, to the city within the nation, to the street

within the city, so it applies to the home within the street.

The institution of the family is to be commended for precisely

the same reasons that the institution of the nation, or the

institution of the city, are in this matter to be commended.

It is a good thing for a man to live in a family for the same reason

that it is a good thing for a man to be besieged in a city.

It is a good thing for a man to live in a family in the same sense that it

is a beautiful and delightful thing for a man to be snowed up in a street.

They all force him to realise that life is not a thing from outside,

but a thing from inside. Above all, they all insist upon the fact

that life, if it be a truly stimulating and fascinating life,

is a thing which, of its nature, exists in spite of ourselves.

The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner,

that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined

themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos,

that perhaps the family is not always very congenial.

Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial.

It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many

divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say,

like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms,

is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy.

It is exactly because our brother George is not interested in our

religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant,

that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the commonwealth.

It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical

ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity.

The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family,

are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind.

Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable,

like mankind Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind.

Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.

Those who wish, rightly or wrongly, to step out of all this,

do definitely wish to step into a narrower world. They are

dismayed and terrified by the largeness and variety of the family.

Sarah wishes to find a world wholly consisting of private theatricals;

George wishes to think the Trocadero a cosmos. I do not say,

for a moment, that the flight to this narrower life may not be

the right thing for the individual, any more than I say the same

thing about flight into a monastery. But I do say that anything

is bad and artificial which tends to make these people succumb

to the strange delusion that they are stepping into a world

which is actually larger and more varied than their own.

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common

variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house

at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside.

And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that

he was born.

This is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family. It is

romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is everything

that its enemies call it. It is romantic because it is arbitrary.

It is romantic because it is there. So long as you have groups of men

chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian atmosphere.

It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men.

The element of adventure begins to exist; for an adventure is,

by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us,

not a thing that we choose. Falling in love has been often

regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident.

In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves,

something of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true.

Love does take us and transfigure and torture us. It does break our

hearts with an unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music.

But in so far as we have certainly something to do with the matter;

in so far as we are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some

sense jump into it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some

extent even judge--in all this falling in love is not truly romantic,

is not truly adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure

is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born.

There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap.

There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before.

Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us,

like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is,

in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue.

When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do

step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has

its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us,

into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step

into the family we step into a fairy-tale.

This colour as of a fantastic narrative ought to cling

to the family and to our relations with it throughout life.

Romance is the deepest thing in life; romance is deeper even

than reality. For even if reality could be proved to be misleading,

it still could not be proved to be unimportant or unimpressive.

Even if the facts are false, they are still very strange.

And this strangeness of life, this unexpected and even perverse

element of things as they fall out, remains incurably interesting.

The circumstances we can regulate may become tame or pessimistic;

but the "circumstances over which we have no control" remain god-like

to those who, like Mr. Micawber, can call on them and renew

their strength. People wonder why the novel is the most popular

form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books

of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple;

it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a book of science.

Life may sometimes appear, and with a much greater legitimacy,

as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. Our existence

may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament.

Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a

recognisable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery

alphabet of every sunset is written, "to be continued in our next."

If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish a philosophical

and exact deduction, and be certain that we are finishing it right.

With the adequate brain-power we could finish any scientific

discovery, and be certain that we were finishing it right.

But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest

or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right.

That is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which

is partly mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine.

The narrative writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes

in the last chapter but one. He can do it by the same divine

caprice whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows himself,

and to hell afterwards if he chooses. And the same civilisation,

the chivalric European civilisation which asserted freewill in the

thirteenth century, produced the thing called "fiction" in the eighteenth.

When Thomas Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man,

he created all the bad novels in the circulating libraries.

But in order that life should be a story or romance to us,

it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be

settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be

a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama,

it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama

may be written by somebody else which we like very little.

But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain

every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing

the next act. A man has control over many things in his life;

he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel.

But if he had control over everything, there would be so much

hero that there would be no novel. And the reason why the lives

of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they

can choose the events. They are dull because they are omnipotent.

They fail to feel adventures because they can make the adventures.

The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities

is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us

to meet the things we do not like or do not expect. It is vain for

the supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings.

To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings.

To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings,

hence to be born into a romance. Of all these great limitations

and frameworks which fashion and create the poetry and variety

of life, the family is the most definite and important.

Hence it is misunderstood by the moderns, who imagine that romance would

exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty.

They think that if a man makes a gesture it would be a startling

and romantic matter that the sun should fall from the sky.

But the startling and romantic thing about the sun is that it does

not fall from the sky. They are seeking under every shape and form

a world where there are no limitations--that is, a world where there

are no outlines; that is, a world where there are no shapes.

There is nothing baser than that infinity. They say they wish to be,

as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe

as weak as themselves.