[Extract from Chesterton's Book "Heretics" (1907)
Slum Novelists and the Slums
Odd ideas are entertained in our time about the real nature of the doctrine
of human fraternity. The real doctrine is something which we do not,
with all our modern humanitarianism, very clearly understand,
much less very closely practise. There is nothing, for instance,
particularly undemocratic about kicking your butler downstairs.
It may be wrong, but it is not unfraternal. In a certain sense,
the blow or kick may be considered as a confession of equality:
you are meeting your butler body to body; you are almost according
him the privilege of the duel. There is nothing, undemocratic,
though there may be something unreasonable, in expecting a great deal
from the butler, and being filled with a kind of frenzy of surprise
when he falls short of the divine stature. The thing which is
really undemocratic and unfraternal is not to expect the butler
to be more or less divine. The thing which is really undemocratic
and unfraternal is to say, as so many modern humanitarians say,
"Of course one must make allowances for those on a lower plane."
All things considered indeed, it may be said, without undue exaggeration,
that the really undemocratic and unfraternal thing is the common
practice of not kicking the butler downstairs.
It is only because such a vast section of the modern world is
out of sympathy with the serious democratic sentiment that this
statement will seem to many to be lacking in seriousness.
Democracy is not philanthropy; it is not even altruism or social reform.
Democracy is not founded on pity for the common man; democracy is
founded on reverence for the common man, or, if you will, even on
fear of him. It does not champion man because man is so miserable,
but because man is so sublime. It does not object so much
to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king,
for its dream is always the dream of the first Roman republic,
a nation of kings.
Next to a genuine republic, the most democratic thing
in the world is a hereditary despotism. I mean a despotism
in which there is absolutely no trace whatever of any
nonsense about intellect or special fitness for the post.
Rational despotism--that is, selective despotism--is always
a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary
man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no
brotherly respect for him at all. But irrational despotism
is always democratic, because it is the ordinary man enthroned.
The worst form of slavery is that which is called Caesarism,
or the choice of some bold or brilliant man as despot because
he is suitable. For that means that men choose a representative,
not because he represents them, but because he does not.
Men trust an ordinary man like George III or William IV.
because they are themselves ordinary men and understand him.
Men trust an ordinary man because they trust themselves.
But men trust a great man because they do not trust themselves.
And hence the worship of great men always appears in times
of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of great men until
the time when all other men are small.
Hereditary despotism is, then, in essence and sentiment
democratic because it chooses from mankind at random.
If it does not declare that every man may rule, it declares
the next most democratic thing; it declares that any man may rule.
Hereditary aristocracy is a far worse and more dangerous thing,
because the numbers and multiplicity of an aristocracy make it
sometimes possible for it to figure as an aristocracy of intellect.
Some of its members will presumably have brains, and thus they,
at any rate, will be an intellectual aristocracy within the social one.
They will rule the aristocracy by virtue of their intellect,
and they will rule the country by virtue of their aristocracy.
Thus a double falsity will be set up, and millions of the images
of God, who, fortunately for their wives and families, are neither
gentlemen nor clever men, will be represented by a man like Mr. Balfour
or Mr. Wyndham, because he is too gentlemanly to be called
merely clever, and just too clever to be called merely a gentleman.
But even an hereditary aristocracy may exhibit, by a sort of accident,
from time to time some of the basically democratic quality which
belongs to a hereditary despotism. It is amusing to think how much
conservative ingenuity has been wasted in the defence of the House
of Lords by men who were desperately endeavouring to prove that
the House of Lords consisted of clever men. There is one really
good defence of the House of Lords, though admirers of the peerage
are strangely coy about using it; and that is, that the House
of Lords, in its full and proper strength, consists of stupid men.
It really would be a plausible defence of that otherwise indefensible
body to point out that the clever men in the Commons, who owed
their power to cleverness, ought in the last resort to be checked
by the average man in the Lords, who owed their power to accident.
Of course, there would be many answers to such a contention,
as, for instance, that the House of Lords is largely no longer
a House of Lords, but a House of tradesmen and financiers,
or that the bulk of the commonplace nobility do not vote, and so
leave the chamber to the prigs and the specialists and the mad old
gentlemen with hobbies. But on some occasions the House of Lords,
even under all these disadvantages, is in some sense representative.
When all the peers flocked together to vote against Mr. Gladstone's
second Home Rule Bill, for instance, those who said that the
peers represented the English people, were perfectly right.
All those dear old men who happened to be born peers were at that moment,
and upon that question, the precise counterpart of all the dear old
men who happened to be born paupers or middle-class gentlemen.
That mob of peers did really represent the English people--that is
to say, it was honest, ignorant, vaguely excited, almost unanimous,
and obviously wrong. Of course, rational democracy is better as an
expression of the public will than the haphazard hereditary method.
While we are about having any kind of democracy, let it be
rational democracy. But if we are to have any kind of oligarchy,
let it be irrational oligarchy. Then at least we shall be ruled by men.
But the thing which is really required for the proper working of democracy
is not merely the democratic system, or even the democratic philosophy,
but the democratic emotion. The democratic emotion, like most elementary
and indispensable things, is a thing difficult to describe at any time.
But it is peculiarly difficult to describe it in our enlightened age,
for the simple reason that it is peculiarly difficult to find it.
It is a certain instinctive attitude which feels the things
in which all men agree to be unspeakably important,
and all the things in which they differ (such as mere brains)
to be almost unspeakably unimportant. The nearest approach to it
in our ordinary life would be the promptitude with which we should
consider mere humanity in any circumstance of shock or death.
We should say, after a somewhat disturbing discovery, "There is a dead
man under the sofa." We should not be likely to say, "There is
a dead man of considerable personal refinement under the sofa."
We should say, "A woman has fallen into the water." We should not say,
"A highly educated woman has fallen into the water." Nobody would say,
"There are the remains of a clear thinker in your back garden."
Nobody would say, "Unless you hurry up and stop him, a man
with a very fine ear for music will have jumped off that cliff."
But this emotion, which all of us have in connection with such
things as birth and death, is to some people native and constant
at all ordinary times and in all ordinary places. It was native
to St. Francis of Assisi. It was native to Walt Whitman.
In this strange and splendid degree it cannot be expected,
perhaps, to pervade a whole commonwealth or a whole civilisation;
but one commonwealth may have it much more than another commonwealth,
one civilisation much more than another civilisation.
No community, perhaps, ever had it so much as the early Franciscans.
No community, perhaps, ever had it so little as ours.
Everything in our age has, when carefully examined, this fundamentally
undemocratic quality. In religion and morals we should admit,
in the abstract, that the sins of the educated classes were as great as,
or perhaps greater than, the sins of the poor and ignorant.
But in practice the great difference between the mediaeval
ethics and ours is that ours concentrate attention on the sins
which are the sins of the ignorant, and practically deny that
the sins which are the sins of the educated are sins at all.
We are always talking about the sin of intemperate drinking,
because it is quite obvious that the poor have it more than the rich.
But we are always denying that there is any such thing as the sin of pride,
because it would be quite obvious that the rich have it more than the poor.
We are always ready to make a saint or prophet of the educated man
who goes into cottages to give a little kindly advice to the uneducated.
But the medieval idea of a saint or prophet was something quite different.
The mediaeval saint or prophet was an uneducated man who walked
into grand houses to give a little kindly advice to the educated.
The old tyrants had enough insolence to despoil the poor,
but they had not enough insolence to preach to them.
It was the gentleman who oppressed the slums; but it was the slums
that admonished the gentleman. And just as we are undemocratic
in faith and morals, so we are, by the very nature of our attitude
in such matters, undemocratic in the tone of our practical politics.
It is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic
state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor.
If we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with us.
With us the governing class is always saying to itself, "What laws shall
we make?" In a purely democratic state it would be always saying,
"What laws can we obey?" A purely democratic state perhaps there
has never been. But even the feudal ages were in practice thus
far democratic, that every feudal potentate knew that any laws
which he made would in all probability return upon himself.
His feathers might be cut off for breaking a sumptuary law.
His head might be cut off for high treason. But the modern laws are almost
always laws made to affect the governed class, but not the governing.
We have public-house licensing laws, but not sumptuary laws.
That is to say, we have laws against the festivity and hospitality of
the poor, but no laws against the festivity and hospitality of the rich.
We have laws against blasphemy--that is, against a kind of coarse
and offensive speaking in which nobody but a rough and obscure man
would be likely to indulge. But we have no laws against heresy--
that is, against the intellectual poisoning of the whole people,
in which only a prosperous and prominent man would be likely to
be successful. The evil of aristocracy is not that it necessarily
leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of sad ones;
the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the hands
of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never suffer.
Whether what they inflict is, in their intention, good or bad,
they become equally frivolous. The case against the governing class
of modern England is not in the least that it is selfish; if you like,
you may call the English oligarchs too fantastically unselfish.
The case against them simply is that when they legislate for all men,
they always omit themselves.
We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our
efforts to "raise" the poor. We are undemocratic in our government,
as is proved by our innocent attempt to govern them well.
But above all we are undemocratic in our literature, as is
proved by the torrent of novels about the poor and serious
studies of the poor which pour from our publishers every month.
And the more "modern" the book is the more certain it is to be
devoid of democratic sentiment.
A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem
a simple and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great
mass of modern fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed;
most of our realists and sociologists talk about a poor man as if
he were an octopus or an alligator. There is no more need to study
the psychology of poverty than to study the psychology of bad temper,
or the psychology of vanity, or the psychology of animal spirits.
A man ought to know something of the emotions of an insulted man,
not by being insulted, but simply by being a man. And he ought to know
something of the emotions of a poor man, not by being poor, but simply
by being a man. Therefore, in any writer who is describing poverty,
my first objection to him will be that he has studied his subject.
A democrat would have imagined it.
A great many hard things have been said about religious slumming
and political or social slumming, but surely the most despicable
of all is artistic slumming. The religious teacher is at least
supposed to be interested in the costermonger because he is a man;
the politician is in some dim and perverted sense interested in
the costermonger because he is a citizen; it is only the wretched
writer who is interested in the costermonger merely because he is
a costermonger. Nevertheless, so long as he is merely seeking impressions,
or in other words copy, his trade, though dull, is honest.
But when he endeavours to represent that he is describing
the spiritual core of a costermonger, his dim vices and his
delicate virtues, then we must object that his claim is preposterous;
we must remind him that he is a journalist and nothing else.
He has far less psychological authority even than the foolish missionary.
For he is in the literal and derivative sense a journalist,
while the missionary is an eternalist. The missionary at least
pretends to have a version of the man's lot for all time;
the journalist only pretends to have a version of it from day to day.
The missionary comes to tell the poor man that he is in the same
condition with all men. The journalist comes to tell other people
how different the poor man is from everybody else.
If the modern novels about the slums, such as novels of Mr. Arthur
Morrison, or the exceedingly able novels of Mr. Somerset Maugham,
are intended to be sensational, I can only say that that is a noble
and reasonable object, and that they attain it. A sensation,
a shock to the imagination, like the contact with cold water,
is always a good and exhilarating thing; and, undoubtedly, men will
always seek this sensation (among other forms) in the form of the study
of the strange antics of remote or alien peoples. In the twelfth century
men obtained this sensation by reading about dog-headed men in Africa.
In the twentieth century they obtained it by reading about pig-headed
Boers in Africa. The men of the twentieth century were certainly,
it must be admitted, somewhat the more credulous of the two.
For it is not recorded of the men in the twelfth century that they
organized a sanguinary crusade solely for the purpose of altering
the singular formation of the heads of the Africans. But it may be,
and it may even legitimately be, that since all these monsters have faded
from the popular mythology, it is necessary to have in our fiction
the image of the horrible and hairy East-ender, merely to keep alive
in us a fearful and childlike wonder at external peculiarities.
But the Middle Ages (with a great deal more common sense than it
would now be fashionable to admit) regarded natural history at bottom
rather as a kind of joke; they regarded the soul as very important.
Hence, while they had a natural history of dog-headed men,
they did not profess to have a psychology of dog-headed men.
They did not profess to mirror the mind of a dog-headed man, to share
his tenderest secrets, or mount with his most celestial musings.
They did not write novels about the semi-canine creature,
attributing to him all the oldest morbidities and all the newest fads.
It is permissible to present men as monsters if we wish to make
the reader jump; and to make anybody jump is always a Christian act.
But it is not permissible to present men as regarding themselves
as monsters, or as making themselves jump. To summarize,
our slum fiction is quite defensible as aesthetic fiction;
it is not defensible as spiritual fact.
One enormous obstacle stands in the way of its actuality.
The men who write it, and the men who read it, are men of the middle
classes or the upper classes; at least, of those who are loosely termed
the educated classes. Hence, the fact that it is the life as the refined
man sees it proves that it cannot be the life as the unrefined man
lives it. Rich men write stories about poor men, and describe
them as speaking with a coarse, or heavy, or husky enunciation.
But if poor men wrote novels about you or me they would describe us
as speaking with some absurd shrill and affected voice, such as we
only hear from a duchess in a three-act farce. The slum novelist gains
his whole effect by the fact that some detail is strange to the reader;
but that detail by the nature of the case cannot be strange in itself.
It cannot be strange to the soul which he is professing to study.
The slum novelist gains his effects by describing the same grey mist
as draping the dingy factory and the dingy tavern. But to the man
he is supposed to be studying there must be exactly the same difference
between the factory and the tavern that there is to a middle-class
man between a late night at the office and a supper at Pagani's. The
slum novelist is content with pointing out that to the eye of his
particular class a pickaxe looks dirty and a pewter pot looks dirty.
But the man he is supposed to be studying sees the difference between
them exactly as a clerk sees the difference between a ledger and an
edition de luxe. The chiaroscuro of the life is inevitably lost;
for to us the high lights and the shadows are a light grey.
But the high lights and the shadows are not a light grey in that life
any more than in any other. The kind of man who could really
express the pleasures of the poor would be also the kind of man
who could share them. In short, these books are not a record
of the psychology of poverty. They are a record of the psychology
of wealth and culture when brought in contact with poverty.
They are not a description of the state of the slums. They are only
a very dark and dreadful description of the state of the slummers.
One might give innumerable examples of the essentially
unsympathetic and unpopular quality of these realistic writers.
But perhaps the simplest and most obvious example with which we
could conclude is the mere fact that these writers are realistic.
The poor have many other vices, but, at least, they are never realistic.
The poor are melodramatic and romantic in grain; the poor all believe
in high moral platitudes and copy-book maxims; probably this is
the ultimate meaning of the great saying, "Blessed are the poor."
Blessed are the poor, for they are always making life, or trying
to make life like an Adelphi play. Some innocent educationalists
and philanthropists (for even philanthropists can be innocent)
have expressed a grave astonishment that the masses prefer shilling
shockers to scientific treatises and melodramas to problem plays.
The reason is very simple. The realistic story is certainly
more artistic than the melodramatic story. If what you desire is
deft handling, delicate proportions, a unit of artistic atmosphere,
the realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama.
In everything that is light and bright and ornamental the realistic
story has a full advantage over the melodrama. But, at least,
the melodrama has one indisputable advantage over the realistic story.
The melodrama is much more like life. It is much more like man,
and especially the poor man. It is very banal and very inartistic when a
poor woman at the Adelphi says, "Do you think I will sell my own child?"
But poor women in the Battersea High Road do say, "Do you think I
will sell my own child?" They say it on every available occasion;
you can hear a sort of murmur or babble of it all the way down
the street. It is very stale and weak dramatic art (if that is all)
when the workman confronts his master and says, "I'm a man."
But a workman does say "I'm a man" two or three times every day.
In fact, it is tedious, possibly, to hear poor men being
melodramatic behind the footlights; but that is because one can
always hear them being melodramatic in the street outside.
In short, melodrama, if it is dull, is dull because it is too accurate.
Somewhat the same problem exists in the case of stories about schoolboys.
Mr. Kipling's "Stalky and Co." is much more amusing (if you are
talking about amusement) than the late Dean Farrar's "Eric; or,
Little by Little." But "Eric" is immeasurably more like real
school-life. For real school-life, real boyhood, is full of the things
of which Eric is full--priggishness, a crude piety, a silly sin,
a weak but continual attempt at the heroic, in a word, melodrama.
And if we wish to lay a firm basis for any efforts to help the poor,
we must not become realistic and see them from the outside.
We must become melodramatic, and see them from the inside.
The novelist must not take out his notebook and say, "I am
an expert." No; he must imitate the workman in the Adelphi play.
He must slap himself on the chest and say, "I am a man."
