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Solutions to Chapter 8

1. Determine the output of the following code when the input is (a) –1, (b) 0, and (c) 12XY

try {
number = Integer.parseInt(
JOptionPane.showInputDialog(null, "input"));
if (number != 0) {
throw new Exception("Not Zero");
}
} catch (NumberFormatException e) {
System.out.println("Cannot convert to int");
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Error: " + e.getMessage());

a) Error: Not Zero

b) no output
c) Cannot convert to int

2. Determine the output of the following code when the input is (a) –1, (b) 0, and (c) 12XY.
This is the same question as Exercise 1, but the code here has the finally clause.

try {
number = Integer.parseInt(
JOptionPane.showInputDialog(null, "input"));
if (number != 0) {
throw new Exception("Not Zero");
}
} catch (NumberFormatException e) {
System.out.println("Cannot convert to int");
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Error: " + e.getMessage());
} finally {
System.out.println("Finally Clause Executed");
}

a) Error: Not Zero

Finally Clause Executed
b) Finally Clause Executed
c) Cannot convert to int
Finally Clause Executed

3. Why is the following code not a good use of the assertion?

public void compute(int size) {

assert size > 0;
//computation code comes here
 }

We should throw an exception because the argument is invalid instead of using an assertion.
Remember: use assertions to detect internal errors and use exceptions to notify the client
programmers of the misuse of our class.

4. Modify the following code by adding the assert statement. The value of gender is either
MALE or FEMALE if the program is running correctly.

switch (gender) {
case MALE: totalFee = tuition + parkingFee;
break;
case FEMALE: totalFee = tuition + roomAndBoard;
break;
}

We can add a control flow invariant as follows:

switch (gender) {
case MALE: totalFee = tuition + parkingFee;
break;
case FEMALE: totalFee = tuition + roomAndBoard;
break;
default: assert false:
"Value of gender " +
"is invalid. Value = " +
gender;
}

5. Modify the following method by adding the assert statement. Assume the variable factor is
a data member of the class.

public double compute(double value) {

return (value * value) / factor;
}

We can add a precondition assertion as follows:

public double compute(double value) {

assert factor != 0 :
"Serious Error – factor == 0, which will lead "
"to a division by zero";
return (value * value) / factor;
}

6. Modify the getInput method of the InputHandler class from Section 8.7 so that the
method will throw an exception when an empty string is entered for the name, room, or
password. Define a new exception class EmptyInputException.
 public void getInput( ) {
throws new EmptyInputException
name = JOptionPane.showInputDialog(null, "Enter Name:");
if (name.trim().equals(""))
throw new EmptyInputException("Name should not be empty");
room = JOptionPane.showInputDialog(null, "Enter Room No.:");
if (room.trim().equals(""))
throw new EmptyInputException("Room should not be empty");
pwd = JOptionPane.showInputDialog(null, "Enter Password:");
if (pwd.trim().equals(""))
throw new EmptyInputException("Password should not be
empty");
}

class EmptyInputException extends Exception {

private static final String DEFAULT_MESSAGE = "Empty input
string";

public EmptyInputException (String msg) {

super(msg);
}
}

7. The user module of the keyless entry system in Section 8.7 does not include any logic to
terminate the program. Modify the program so it will terminate when the values Admin,
X123, and $maTrix%TwO$ are entered for name, room, and password, respectively.

This only requires changing the validate method in Ch8EntranceMonitor, and possibly
adding some new constants.
See Ch8EntranceMonitor.java

Development Exercises
8. In the sample development, we developed the user module of the keyless entry system. For
this exercise, implement the administrative module that allows the system administrator to
add and delete Resident objects and modify information on existing Resident objects. The
module will also allow the user to open a list from a file and save the list to a file. Is it
proper to implement the administrative module by using one class? Wouldn’t it be a better
design if we used multiple classes with each class doing a single well-defined task?

The solution here splits the problem into two classes, one to handle functionality and one to
handle the interface.
See files AdminHandler.java and Ch8EntranceAdmin.java

9. Write an application that maintains the membership lists of five social clubs in a dormitory.
The five social clubs are the Computer Science Club, Biology Club, Billiard Club, No Sleep
Club, and Wine Tasting Club. Use the Dorm class to manage the membership lists.
Members of the social clubs are Resident objects of the dorm. Use a separate file to store
the membership list for each club. Your program should be able to include a menu item for
each social club. When a club is selected, open a ClubFrame frame that will allow the user
to add, delete, or modify members of the club. The program can have up to five ClubFrame
frames opened at the same time. Make sure you do not open multiple instances of
ClubFrame for the same club.

See files ClubFrame.java, ClubKeeper.java, Dorm.java, DormAdmin.java, and

Resident.java
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Uses of
Diversity: A book of essays
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
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are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: The Uses of Diversity: A book of essays

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release date: August 4, 2019 [eBook #60057]

Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE USES OF

DIVERSITY: A BOOK OF ESSAYS ***
THE USES OF DIVERSITY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Charles Dickens
All Things Considered
Tremendous Trifles
Alarms and Discursions
A Miscellany of Men
The Ballad of the White Horse
 THE
USES OF DIVERSITY
A BOOK OF ESSAYS
BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

METHUEN & CO. LTD

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1920

 CONTENTS
PAGE
On Seriousness 1
Lamp-Posts 7
The Spirits 13
Tennyson 18
The Domesticity of Detectives 24
George Meredith 30
The Irishman 34
Ireland and the Domestic Drama 39
The Japanese 44
Christian Science 49
The Lawlessness of Lawyers 54
Our Latin Relations 61
On Pigs as Pets 66
The Romance of Rostand 71
Wishes 75
The Futurists 80
The Evolution of Emma 85
The Pseudo-Scientific Books 91
The Humour of King Herod 96
The Silver Goblets 101
The Duty of the Historian 106
Questions of Divorce 112
Mormonism 121
Pageants and Dress 126
On Stage Costume 132
The Yule Log and the Democrat 138
More Thoughts on Christmas 144
Dickens again 149
Taffy 154
“Ego et Shavius Meus” 159
The Plan for a New Universe 164
George Wyndham 171
Four Stupidities 177
On Historical Novels 182
On Monsters 186

THE USES OF DIVERSITY

THE USES OF DIVERSITY
 On Seriousness

I
donot like seriousness. I think it is irreligious. Or, if you prefer the
phrase, it is the fashion of all false religions. The man who takes
everything seriously is the man who makes an idol of everything:
he bows down to wood and stone until his limbs are as rooted as the
roots of the tree or his head as fallen as the stone sunken by the
roadside. It has often been discussed whether animals can laugh.
The hyena is said to laugh: but it is rather in the sense in which the
M.P. is said to utter “an ironical cheer.” At the best, the hyena utters
an ironical laugh. Broadly, it is true that all animals except Man are
serious. And I think it is further demonstrated by the fact that all
human beings who concern themselves in a concentrated way with
animals are also serious; serious in a sense far beyond that of
human beings concerned with anything else. Horses are serious;
they have long, solemn faces. But horsey men are also serious—
jockeys or trainers or grooms: they also have long, solemn faces.
Dogs are serious: they have exactly that combination of moderate
conscientiousness with monstrous conceit which is the make-up of
most modern religions. But, however serious dogs may be, they can
hardly be more serious than dog-fanciers—or dog-stealers. Dog-
stealers, indeed, have to be particularly serious, because they have
to come back and say they have found the dog. The faintest shade
of irony, not to say levity, on their features, would evidently be fatal
to their plans. I will not carry the comparison through all the
kingdoms of natural history: but it is true of all who fix their affection
or intelligence on the lower animals. Cats are as serious as the
Sphinx, who must have been some kind of cat, to judge by the
attitude. But the rich old ladies who love cats are quite equally
serious, about cats and about themselves. So also the ancient
Egyptians worshipped cats, also crocodiles and beetles and all kinds
of things; but they were all serious and made their worshippers
serious. Egyptian art was intentionally harsh, clear, and
conventional; but it could very vividly represent men driving,
hunting, fighting, feasting, praying. Yet I think you will pass along
many corridors of that coloured and almost cruel art before you see
a man laughing. Their gods did not encourage them to laugh. I am
told by housewives that beetles seldom laugh. Cats do not laugh—
except the Cheshire Cat (which is not found in Egypt); and even he
can only grin. And crocodiles do not laugh. They weep.
This comparison between the sacred animals of Egypt and the pet
animals of to-day is not so far-fetched as it may seem to some
people. There is a healthy and an unhealthy love of animals: and the
nearest definition of the difference is that the unhealthy love of
animals is serious. I am quite prepared to love a rhinoceros, with
reasonable precautions: he is, doubtless, a delightful father to the
young rhinoceroses. But I will not promise not to laugh at a
rhinoceros. I will not worship the beast with the little horn. I will not
adore the Golden Calf; still less will I adore the Fatted Calf. On the
contrary, I will eat him. There is some sort of joke about eating an
animal, or even about an animal eating you. Let us hope we shall
perceive it at the proper moment, if it ever occurs. But I will not
worship an animal. That is, I will not take an animal quite seriously:
and I know why.
Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice. That is,
both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience.
Suppose a thousand black slaves were sacrificed to the blackbeetle;
suppose a million maidens were flung into the Nile to feed the
crocodile; suppose the cat could eat men instead of mice—it could
still be no more than that sacrifice of humanity that so often makes
the horse more important than the groom, or the lap-dog more
important even than the lap. The only right view of the animal is the
comic view. Because the view is comic it is naturally affectionate.
And because it is affectionate, it is never respectful.
I know no place where the true contrast has been more candidly,
clearly, and (for all I know) unconsciously expressed than in an
excellent little book of verse called Bread and Circuses by Helen
Parry Eden, the daughter of Judge Parry, who has inherited both the
humour and the humanity in spite of which her father succeeded as
a modern magistrate. There are a great many other things that
might be praised in the book, but I should select for praise the sane
love of animals. There is, for instance, a little poem on a cat from
the country who has come to live in a flat in Battersea (everybody at
some time of their lives has lived or will live in a flat in Battersea,
except, perhaps, the “prisoner of the Vatican”), and the verses have
a tenderness, with a twist of the grotesque, which seems to me the
exactly appropriate tone about domestic pets:
And now you’re here. Well, it may be
The sun does rise in Battersea
Although to-day be dark;
Life is not shorn of loves and hates
While there are sparrows on the slates
And keepers in the Park.
And you yourself will come to learn
The ways of London; and in turn
Assume your Cockney cares
Like other folk that live in flats,
Chasing your purely abstract rats
Upon the concrete stairs.
That is like Hood at his best; but it is, moreover, penetrated with a
profound and true appreciation of the fundamental idea that all love
of the cat must be founded on the absurdity of the cat, and only
thus can a morbid idolatry be avoided. Perhaps those who appeared
to be witches were those old ladies who took their cats too seriously.
The cat in this book is called “Four-Paws,” which is as jolly as a
gargoyle. But the name of the cat must be something familiar and
even jeering, if it be only Tom or Tabby or Topsy: something that
shows man is not afraid of it. Otherwise the name of the cat will be
Pasht.
But when the same poet comes accidentally across an example of
the insane seriousness about animals that some modern
“humanitarians” exhibit, she turns against the animal-lover as
naturally and instinctively as she turns to the animal. A writer on a
society paper had mentioned some rich woman who had appeared
on Cup Day “gowned” in some way or other, and inserted the tearful
parenthesis that “she has just lost a dear dog in London.” The real
animal-lover instantly recognizes the wrong note, and dances on the
dog’s grave with a derision as unsympathetic as Swift:
Dear are my friends, and yet my heart still light is,
Undimmed the eyes that see our set depart,
Snatched from the Season by appendicitis
Or something quite as smart.

But when my Chin-Chin drew his latest breath

On Marie’s outspread apron, slow and wheezily,
I simply sniffed, I could not take his death
So Pekineasily....

... Grief courts these ovations,

And many press my sable-suèded hand,
Noting the blackest of Lucile’s creations
Inquire, and understand.
It is that balance of instincts that is the essence of all satire:
however fantastic satire may be, it must always be potentially
rational and fundamentally moderate, for it must be ready to hit
both to right and to left at opposite extravagances. And the two
extravagances which exist on the edges of our harassed and
secretive society to-day are cruelty to animals and worship of
animals. They both come from taking animals too seriously: the
cruel man must hate the animal; the crank must worship the animal,
and perhaps fear it. Neither knows how to love it.
 Lamp-Posts

I
ncontemplating some common object of the modern street, such
as an omnibus or a lamp-post, it is sometimes well worth while to
stop and think about why such common objects are regarded as
commonplace. It is well worth while to try to grasp what is the
significance of them—or rather, the quality in modernity which
makes them so often seem not so much significant as insignificant.
If you stop the omnibus while you stop to think about it, you will be
unpopular. Even if you try to grasp the lamp-post in your effort to
grasp its significance, you will almost certainly be misunderstood.
Nevertheless, the problem is a real one, and not without bearing
upon the most poignant politics and ethics of to-day. It is certainly
not the things themselves, the idea and upshot of them, that are
remote from poetry or even mysticism. The idea of a crowd of
human strangers turned into comrades for a journey is full of the
oldest pathos and piety of human life. That profound feeling of
mortal fraternity and frailty, which tells us we are indeed all in the
same boat, is not the less true if expressed in the formula that we
are all in the same bus. As for the idea of the lamp-post, the idea of
the fixed beacon of the branching thoroughfares, the terrestrial star
of the terrestrial traveller, it not only could be, but actually is, the
subject of countless songs.
Nor is it even true that there is something so trivial or ugly about the
names of the things as to make them commonplace in all
connexions. The word “lamp” is especially beloved by the more
decorative and poetic writers; it is a symbol, and very frequently a
title. It is true that if Ruskin had called his eloquent work “The Seven
Lamp-Posts of Architecture” the effect, to a delicate ear, would not
have been quite the same. But even the word “post” is in no sense
impossible in poetry; it can be found with a fine military ring in
phrases like “The Last Post” or “Dying at his Post.” I remember,
indeed, hearing, when a small child, the line in Macaulay’s “Armada”
about “with loose rein and bloody spur rode inland many a post,”
and being puzzled at the picture of a pillar-box or a lamp-post
displaying so much activity. But certainly it is not the mere sound of
the word that makes it unworkable in the literature of wonder or
beauty. “Omnibus” may seem at first sight a more difficult thing to
swallow—if I may be allowed a somewhat gigantesque figure of
speech. This, it may be said, is a Cockney and ungainly modern
word, as it is certainly a Cockney and ungainly modern thing. But
even this is not true. The word “omnibus” is a very noble word with
a very noble meaning and even tradition. It is derived from an
ancient and adamantine tongue which has rolled it with very
authoritative thunders: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab
omnibus. It is a word really more human and universal than republic
or democracy. A man might very consistently build a temple for all
the tribes of men, a temple of the largest pattern and the loveliest
design, and then call it an omnibus. It is true that the dignity of this
description has really been somewhat diminished by the illogical
habit of clipping the word down to the last and least important part
of it. But that is only one of many modern examples in which real
vulgarity is not in democracy, but rather in the loss of democracy. It
is about as democratic to call an omnibus a bus as it would be to call
a democrat a rat.
Another way of explaining the cloud of commonplace interpretation
upon modern things is to trace it to that spirit which often calls itself
science but which is more often mere repetition. It is proverbial that
a child, looking out of the nursery window, regards the lamp-post as
part of a fairy-tale of which the lamplighter is the fairy. That lamp-
post can be to a baby all that the moon could possibly be to a lover
or a poet. Now, it is perfectly true that there is nowadays a spirit of
cheap information which imagines that it shoots beyond this shining
point, when it merely tells us that there are nine hundred lamp-posts
in the town, all exactly alike. It is equally true that there is a spirit of
cheap science, which is equally cocksure of its conclusiveness when
it tells us that there are so many thousand moons and suns, all
much more alike than we might have been disposed to fancy. And
we can say of both these calculations that there is nothing really
commonplace except the mind of the calculator. The baby is much
more right about the flaming lamp than the statistician who counts
the posts in the street; and the lover is much more really right about
the moon than the astronomer. Here the part is certainly greater
than the whole, for it is much better to be tied to one wonderful
thing than to allow a mere catalogue of wonderful things to deprive
you of the capacity to wonder. It is doubtless true, to a definite
extent, that a certain sameness in the mechanical modern creations
makes them actually less attractive than the freer recurrences of
nature; or, in other words, that twenty lamp-posts really are much
more like each other than twenty trees. Nevertheless, even this
character will not cover the whole ground, for men do not cease to
feel the mystery of natural things even when they reproduce
themselves almost completely, as in the case of pitch darkness or a
very heavy sleep. The mere fact that we have seen a lamp-post very
often, and that it generally looked very much the same as before,
would not of itself prevent us from appreciating its elfin fire, any
more than it prevents the child.
Finally, there is a neglected side of this psychological problem which
is, I think, one aspect of the mystery of the morality of war. It is not
altogether an accident that, while the London lamp-post has always
been mild and undistinguished, the Paris lamp-post has been more
historic because it has been more horrible. It has been a yet more
revolutionary substitute for the guillotine—yet more revolutionary,
because it was the guillotine of the mob, as distinct even from the
guillotine of the Republic. They hanged aristocrats upon it, including
(unless my memory misleads me) that exceedingly unpleasant
aristocrat who promulgated the measure of war economy known as
“Let them eat grass.” Hence it happened that there has been in Paris
a fanatical and flamboyant political newspaper actually called La
Lanterne, a paper for extreme Jacobins. If there were a paper in
London called the Lamp-Post, I can only imagine it as a paper for
children. As for my other example, I do not know whether even the
French Revolution could manage to do anything with the omnibus;
but the Jacobins were quite capable of using it as a tumbril.
In short, I suspect that Cockney things have become commonplace
because there has been so long lacking in them a certain savour of
sacrifice and peril, which there has been in the nursery tale, for all
its innocence, and which there has been in the Parisian street, for all
its iniquity.
The new wonder that has changed the world before our eyes is that
all this crude and vulgar modern clockwork is most truly being used
for a heroic end. It is most emphatically being used for the slaying of
a dragon. It is being used, much more unquestionably than the
lantern of Paris, to make an end of a tyrant. It was a cant phrase in
our cheaper literature of late to say that the new time will make the
romance of war mechanical. Is it not more probable that it will make
the mechanism of war romantic? As I said at the beginning, the
things themselves are not repulsively prosaic; it was their
associations that made them so; and to-day their associations are as
splendid as any that ever blazoned a shield or embroidered a banner.
Much of what made the violation of Belgium so violent a challenge to
every conscience lay unconsciously in the fact that the country which
had thus become tragic had often been regarded as commonplace.
The unpardonable sin was committed in a place of lamp-posts and
omnibuses. In similar places has been prepared the just wrath and
reparation; and a legend of it will surely linger even in the omnibus
that has carried heroes to the mouth of hell, and even in the lamp-
post whose lamp has been darkened against the dragon of the sky.
 The Spirits

T
he magazines continue to abound in articles about Spiritualism.
Those articles which expose and explode Spiritualism are
certainly calculated to make converts to that novel creed; but
fortunately the balance is redressed by the articles which defend and
expound Spiritualism, which will probably make any thoughtful
convert hastily recant his conversion. I believe myself that nothing
but advantage can accrue to Spiritualism from all criticisms founded
on Materialism. I think there is a mystical minimum in human history
and experience, which is at once too obscure to be explained and
too obvious to be explained away. It may be admitted that a miracle
is rarer than a murder; but they are made obscure by somewhat
similar causes. Thus a medium will insist on a dark room; and a
murderer is said to have a slight preference for a dark night. A
medium is criticized for not submitting to a sufficient number of
scientific and impartial judges; and a murderer seldom collects any
considerable number of impartial witnesses to testify to his
performance. Many supernatural stories rest on the evidence of
rough unlettered men, like fishermen and peasants; and most
criminal trials depend on the detailed testimony of quite uneducated
people. It may be remarked that we never throw a doubt on the
value of ignorant evidence when it is a question of a judge hanging
a man, but only when it is a question of a saint healing him. Morbid
and hysterical people imagine all sorts of ghosts and demons that do
not exist. Morbid and hysterical people also imagine all sorts of
crimes and conspiracies that do not exist. A great many spiritual
communications may be auto-suggestions; and a great many
apparent murders may be suicides. But there is a limit to the
probability of self-destruction; so there is of self-deception.
Now I think it well worth while to concentrate our common sense,
not on where these messages come from, or why they come, but
simply on the messages. Let us consider the thing itself about which
there is no doubt at all. Let us consider, not whether spirits can
speak to us, or how they speak, but simply what they say, or are
supposed to say. If spirits in heaven, or scoundrels on earth, or
fiends somewhere else, have brought us a new religion, let us look
at the new religion on its own merits. Well, this is the sort of thing
the spirits are supposed to write down, and very possibly do write
down:
“You make death an impenetrable fog, while it is a mere golden
mist, torn easily aside by the shafts of faith, and revealing life as not
only continuous but as not cut in two by a great change. I cannot
express myself as I wish.... It is more like leaving prison for freedom
and happiness. Not that your present life lacks joy; it is all joy, but
you have to fight with imperfections. Here, we have to struggle only
with lack of development. There is no evil—only different degrees of
spirit.”
The interrogator, Mr. Basil King, who narrates his experiences in an
interesting article in Nash’s Magazine, proceeds to ask whether the
lack of development is due to the highly practical thing we call sin.
To this the spirit replies: “They come over with the evil, as it were,
cut out, and leaving blanks in their souls. These have by degrees to
be filled with good.”
Now I will waive the point whether death is a mist or a fog or a front
door or a fire-escape or any other physical metaphor; being satisfied
with the fact that it is there, and not to be removed by metaphors.
But what amuses me about the spirit is that for him it is both there
and not there. Death is non-existent in one sentence, and of the
most startling importance six sentences afterwards. The spirit is
positive that our existence is not cut in two by a great change, at
the moment of death. But the spirit is equally positive, a little lower
down, that the whole of our human evil is instantly and utterly cut
out of us, and all at the moment of death. If a man suddenly and
supernaturally loses about three-quarters of his ordinary character,
might it not be described as “a great change”? Why does so
enormous a convulsion happen at the exact moment of death, if
death is non-existent and not to be considered? The Spiritualist is
here contradicting himself, not only by making death very decidedly
a great change, but by actually making it a greater change than
Dante or St. Francis thought it was. A Christian who thinks the soul
carries its sins to Purgatory makes life much more “continuous” than
this Spiritualist, who says that death, and death alone, alters a man
as by a blast of magic. The article bears the modest title of “The
Abolishing of Death”; and the spirit does say that this is possible,
except when he forgets and says the opposite. He seldom
contradicts himself more than twice in a paragraph. But since he
says clearly that death abolishes sin, and equally clearly that he
abolishes death, it becomes an interesting speculation what happens
next, and especially what happens to sin: a subject of interest to
many of us.
Mr. Basil King asked the spirit, who had told him that animals are
human, whether it is wrong to destroy animal life. It may be
remarked that the questions Mr. King asks are always much more
acute than the answers he gets. The answer about the killing of
animals is this: “You can never destroy life. Life is the absolute
power which overrules all else. There can be no cessation. It is
impossible.” And that is all; and for a man considering whether he
shall or shall not kill a tom-cat, it does not seem very helpful.
Logically, if it means anything, it would seem to mean that you may
do anything to the cat, for its nine lives are really an infinite series.
In short, you can kill it because you cannot kill it. But it is obvious
that if a man relies on this reason for killing his cat, it is an equally
good reason for killing his creditor. Creditors also are immortal (a
solemn thought); creditors also pass through a golden mist torn
easily aside by the shafts of faith, and have all the evil of their souls
(including, let us hope, their avarice) cut out of them with the axe of
death, without noticing anything in particular. In short, Mr. Basil
King, when he asks a reasonable question about a real moral
question, the relations of man and the animals, gets no reply except
a hotch-potch of words which might mean anarchy and may mean
anything. From beginning to end the spirit never answers any real
question on which the real religions of mankind have been obliged to
legislate and to teach. The only practical deduction would be that it
is no disadvantage to have sinned in this life; as in the other case
that it is no disgrace to kill either a creditor or a cat. If it means
anything, it means that; and if it is spirits and not spifflications, the
spirits mean that: and I do not desire their further acquaintance.
 Tennyson

I
havebeen glancing over two or three of the appreciations of
Tennyson appropriate to his centenary, and have been struck with
a curious tone of coldness towards him in almost all quarters.
Now this is really a very peculiar thing. For it is a case of coldness to
quite brilliant and unquestionable literary merit. Whether Tennyson
was a great poet I shall not discuss. I understand that one has to
wait about eight hundred years before discussing that; and my only
complaint against the printers of my articles is that they will not wait
even for much shorter periods. But that Tennyson was a poet is as
solid and certain as that Roberts is a billiard-player. That Tennyson
was an astonishingly good poet is as solid and certain as that
Roberts is an astonishingly good billiard-player. Even in these
matters of art there are some things analogous to matters of fact. It
is no good disputing about tastes—partly because some tastes are
beyond dispute. If anyone tells me that
There is fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate;
or that
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
is not fine poetry, I am quite prepared to treat him as I would one
who said that grass was not green or that I was not corpulent. And
by all common chances Tennyson ought to be preserved as a
pleasure—a sensuous pleasure if you like, but certainly a genuine
one. There is no more reason for dropping Tennyson than for
dropping Virgil. We do not mind Virgil’s view of Augustus, nor need
we mind Tennyson’s view of Queen Victoria. Beauty is unanswerable,
in a poem as much as in a woman. There were Victorian writers
whose art is not perfectly appreciable apart from their enthusiasm.
Kingsley’s Yeast is a fine book, but not quite so fine a book as it
seemed when one’s own social passions were still yeasty. Browning
and Coventry Patmore are justly admired, but they are most admired
where they are most agreed with. But “St. Agnes’ Eve” is an
unimpeachably beautiful poem, whether one believes in St. Agnes or
detests her. One would think that a man who had thus left
indubitably good verse would receive natural and steady gratitude,
like a man who left indubitably good wine to his nephew, or
indubitably good pictures to the National Portrait Gallery.
Nevertheless, as I have said, the tone of all the papers, modernist or
old-fashioned, has been mainly frigid. What is the meaning of this?
I will ask permission to answer this question by abruptly and even
brutally changing the subject. My remarks must, first of all, seem
irrelevant even to effrontery; they shall prove their relevance later
on. In turning the pages of one of the papers containing such a light
and unsympathetic treatment of Tennyson, my eye catches the
following sentence: “By the light of modern science and thought, we
are in a position to see that each normal human being in some way
repeats historically the life of the human race.” This is a very typical
modern assertion; that is, it is an assertion for which there is not
and never has been a single spot or speck of proof. We know
precious little about what the life of the human race has been; and
none of our scientific conjectures about it bear the remotest
resemblance to the actual growth of a child. According to this theory,
a baby begins by chipping flints and rubbing sticks together to find
fire. One so often sees babies doing this. About the age of five the
child, before the delighted eyes of his parents, founds a village
community. By the time he is eleven it has become a small city state,
the replica of ancient Athens. Encouraged by this, the boy proceeds,
and before he is fourteen has founded the Roman Empire. But now
his parents have a serious set-back. Having watched him so far, not
only with pleasure, but with a very natural surprise, they must
strengthen themselves to endure the spectacle of decay. They have
now to watch their child going through the decline of the Western
Empire and the Dark Ages. They see the invasion of the Huns and
that of the Norsemen chasing each other across his expressive face.
He seems a little happier after he has “repeated” the Battle of
Chalons and the unsuccessful Siege of Paris; and by the time he
comes to the twelfth century, his boyish face is as bright as it was of
old when he was “repeating” Pericles or Camillus. I have no space to
follow this remarkable demonstration of how history repeats itself in
the youth; how he grows dismal at twenty-three to represent the
end of Mediævalism, brightens because the Renaissance is coming,
darkens again with the disputes of the later Reformation, broadens
placidly through the thirties as the rational eighteenth century, till at
last, about forty-three, he gives a great yell and begins to burn the
house down, as a symbol of the French Revolution. Such (we shall
all agree) is the ordinary development of a boy.
Now, seriously, does anyone believe a word of such bosh? Does
anyone think that a child will repeat the periods of human history?
Does anyone ever allow for a daughter in the Stone Age, or excuse a
son because he is in the fourth century B.C. Yet the writer who lays
down this splendid and staggering lie calmly says that “by the light
of modern science and thought we are in a position to see” that it is
true. “Seeing” is a strong word to use of our conviction that icebergs
are in the north, or that the earth goes round the sun. Yet anybody
can use it of any casual or crazy biological fancy seen in some
newspaper or suggested in some debating club. This is the rooted
weakness of our time. Science, which means exactitude, has become
the mother of all inexactitude.
This is the failure of the epoch, and this explains the partial failure of
Tennyson. He was par excellence the poet of popular science—that
is, of all such cloudy and ill-considered assertions as the above. He
was the perfectly educated man of classics and the half-educated
man of science. No one did more to encourage the colossal blunder
that the survival of the fittest means the survival of the best. One
might as well say that the survival of the fittest means the survival of
the fattest. Tennyson’s position has grown shaky because it rested
not on any clear dogmas old or new, but on two or three temporary,
we might say desperate, compromises of his own day. He grasped at
Evolution, not because it was definite, but because it was indefinite;
not because it was daring, but because it was safe. It gave him the
hope that man might one day be an angel, and England a free
democracy; but it soothed him with the assurance that neither of
these alarming things would happen just yet. Virgil used his verbal
felicities to describe the eternal idea of the Roman Imperium.
Tennyson used his verbal felicities for the accidental equilibrium of
the British Constitution. “To spare the humble and war down the
proud,” is a permanent idea for the policing of this planet. But that
freedom should “slowly broaden down from precedent to precedent”
merely happens to be the policy of the English upper class; it has no
vital sanction; it might be much better to broaden quickly. One can
write great poetry about a truth or even about a falsehood, but
hardly about a legal fiction. The misanthropic idea, as in Byron, is
not a truth, but it is one of the immortal lies. As long as humanity
exists, humanity can be hated. Wherever one shall gather by
himself, Byron is in the midst of him. It is a common and recurrent
mood to regard man as a hopeless Yahoo. But it is not a natural
mood to regard man as a hopeful Yahoo, as the Evolutionists did, as
a creature changing before one’s eyes from bestial to beautiful, a
creature whose tail has just dropped off while he is staring at a far-
off divine event. This particular compromise between contempt and
hope was an accident of Tennyson’s time, and, like his liberal
conservatism, will probably never be found again. His weakness was
not being old-fashioned or new-fashioned, but being fashionable. His
feet were set on things transitory and untenable, compromises and
compacts of silence. Yet he was so perfect a poet that I fancy he will
still be able to stand, even upon such clouds.
 The Domesticity of Detectives

I
have just been entertaining myself with the last sensational story
by the author of The Yellow Room, which was probably the best
detective tale of our time, except Mr. Bentley’s admirable novel,
Trent’s Last Case. The name of the author of The Yellow Room is
Gaston Leroux; I have sometimes wondered whether it is the
alternative nom de plume of the writer called Maurice Leblanc who
gives us the stories about Arsène Lupin, the gentleman burglar.
There would be something very symmetrical in the inversion by
which the red gentleman always writes about a detective, and the
white gentleman always writes about a criminal. But I have no
serious reason to suppose the red and white combination to be
anything but a coincidence; and the tales are of two rather different
types. Those of Gaston the Red are more strictly of the type of the
mystery story, in the sense of resolving a single and central mystery.
Those of Maurice the White are more properly adventure stories, in
the sense of resolving a rapid succession of immediate difficulties.
This is inherent in the position of the hero; the detective is always
outside the event, while the criminal is inside the event. Some would
express it by saying that the policeman is always outside the house
when the burglar is inside the house. But there is one very French
quality which both these French writers share, even when their
writing is very far from their best. It is a spirit of definition which is
itself not easy to define. To say it is scientific will only suggest that it
is slow. It is much truer to say it is military; that is, it is something
that has to be both scientific and swift. It can be seen in much
greater Frenchmen, as compared with men still greater who were
not Frenchmen. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, for instance, both
wrote fairy-tales of science; Mr. Wells has much the larger mind and
interest in life; but he often lacks one power which Jules Verne
possesses supremely—the power of going to the point. Verne is very
French in his rigid relevancy; Wells is very English in his rich
irrelevance. He is there as English as Dickens, the best passages in
whose stories are the stoppages, and even stopgaps. In a truly
French tale there are no stoppages; every word, however dull, is
deliberate, or directed towards the end. The comparison could be
carried further back among the classics. The romance of Dumas may
seem a mere riot of swords and feathers; it is often spoken of as a
mere revel in adventure and variety; the madness of romance. But it
is not a mere riot, but rather a military revolution, and even a
disciplined revolution; certainly, a very French revolution. It is not a
mere mad revel, but a very gorgeous and elaborate banquet planned
by a great cook; a very French cook. Scott was a greater man than
Dumas; and a greater novelist on the note of the serious humours of
humanity. But he was not so great a story-teller, because he had less
of something that can only be called the strategy of the soldier. The
Three Musketeers advance like an army; with their three servants
and their one ally, they march, manœuvre, deploy, wheeling into
positions and almost making patterns. They are always present
wherever their author wants them; which is by no means true of all
the characters of all the novelists. Dumas, and not Scott, ought to
have written the life of Napoleon; Dumas was much nearer to
Napoleon, in the fact that there was most emphatically method in his
madness. Nobody ever called Scott mad; and certainly nobody could
ever call him methodical. He was as incapable of the conspiracy
which carried off General Monk in a box as Dumas was incapable of
the curse of Meg Merrilies or the benediction of Di Vernon. But there
is eternally present in the Frenchman something which may truly be
called presence of mind. There to be an artist is not to be absent-
minded, however harmless or happy the holidays of the mind may
be. Art is to have the intellect and all its instruments on the spot and
ready to go to the point; as when, but a little while ago, a great
artist stood by the banks of the Marne and saved the world with one
gesture of living logic—the sword-thrust of the Latin.
But though the strategy of the French story is allied to the strategy
by which the French army has always affected the larger matters of
mankind, I doubt whether such a story ought to deal with such
matters. I mentioned at the beginning M. Gaston Leroux’s last
mystery story because I think I know why it is not anything like so
good as his first mystery story. The truth is that there are two types
of sensational romance between which our wilder sensationalists
seem to waver; and I think they are generally at their strongest in
dealing with the first type, and at their weakest in dealing with the
second. For the sake of a convenient symbol, I may call them
respectively the romance of the Yellow Room and the romance of
the Yellow Peril. We might say that the great detective story deals
with small things; while the small or silly detective story generally
deals with great things. It deals with diabolical diplomatists darting
about between Vienna and Paris and Petrograd; with vast
cosmopolitan conspiracies ramifying through all the cellars of
Europe; or worse and most widespread of all, occult and mystical
secret societies from China or Tibet; the vast and vague Oriental
terrorism which I call for convenience here the Yellow Peril. On the
other hand, the good detective story is in its nature a good domestic
story. It is steeped in the sentiment that an Englishman’s house is
his castle; even if, like other castles, it is the scene of a few quiet
tortures or assassinations. In other words, it is concerned with an
enclosure, a plan or problem set within certain defined limits. And
that is where the French writer’s first story was a model for all such
writers; and where it ought to have been, but has not been a model
for himself. The point about the Yellow Room is that it was a room;
that is, it was a box, like the box in which Dumas kidnapped General
Monk. The writer dealt with the quadrate or square which Mrs. Battle
loved; the very plan of the problem looked like a problem in the
Fourth Book of Euclid. He posted four men on four sides of a space
and a murder was done in the middle of them; to all appearance, in
spite of them; in reality, by one of them. Now a sensational novelist
of the more cosmopolitan sort could, of course, have filled the story
with a swarm of Chinese magicians who had the power of walking
through brick walls, or of Indian mesmerists who could murder a
man merely by meditating about him on the peaks of the Himalayas;
or merely by so human and humdrum a trifle as a secret society of
German spies which had made a labyrinth of secret tunnels under all
the private houses in the world. These romantic possibilities are
infinite; and because they are infinite they are really unromantic.
The real romance of detection works inwards towards the household
gods, even if they are household devils. One of the best of the
Sherlock Holmes stories turns entirely on a trivial point of
housekeeping: the provision of curry for the domestic dinner. Curry
is, I believe, connected with the East; and could have been made
the excuse for infinities of sham occultism and Oriental torments.
The author could have brought in a million yellow cooks to poison a
yellow condiment. But the author knew his business much better;
and did not let what is called infinity, and should rather be called
anarchy, invade the quiet seclusion of the British criminal’s home. He
did not let the logic of the Yellow Room be destroyed by the
philosophy of the Yellow Peril. That is why I lament the fact that the
ingenious French architect of the original Yellow Room seems to
have made an outward step in this direction; not, indeed, towards
the plains of Tibet, but towards the hardly less barbaric plains of
Germany. His last book, Rouletabille Chez Krupp, concerns the
manufacture of a torpedo big enough to smash a town; and an
object of that size may be a sensation, but will not long be a secret.
It may be inevitable that a French patriot should now write even his
detective stories about the war; but I do not think this method will
ever make the French mystery story what the war itself has been—a
French masterpiece; Gesta Dei per Francos.
 George Meredith

T
he death of George Meredith was the real end of the Nineteenth
Century, not that empty date that came at the close of 1899.
The last bond was broken between us and the pride and peace
of the Victorian age. Our fathers were all dead. We were suddenly
orphans: we all felt strangely and sadly young. A cold, enormous
dawn opened in front of us; we had to go on to tasks which our
fathers, fine as they were, did not know, and our first sensation was
that of cold and undefended youth. Swinburne was the penultimate,
Meredith the ultimate end.
It is not a phrase to call him the last of the Victorians: he really is
the last. No doubt this final phrase has been used about each of the
great Victorians one after another from Matthew Arnold and
Browning to Swinburne and Meredith. No doubt the public has
grown a little tired of the positively last appearance of the
Nineteenth Century. But the end of George Meredith really was the
end of that great epoch. No great man now alive has its peculiar
powers or its peculiar limits. Like all great epochs, like all great
things, it is not easy to define. We can see it, touch it, smell it, eat
it; but we cannot state it. It was a time when faith was firm without
being definite. It was a time when we saw the necessity of reform
without once seeing the possibility of revolution. It was a sort of
exquisite interlude in the intellectual disputes: a beautiful, accidental
truce in the eternal war of mankind. Things could mix in a mellow
atmosphere. Its great men were so religious that they could do
without a religion. They were so hopefully and happily republican
that they could do without a republic. They are all dead and deified;
and it is well with them. But we cannot get back into that well-
poised pantheism and liberalism. We cannot be content to be merely
broad: for us the dilemma sharpens and the ways divide.
Of the men left alive there are many who can be admired beyond
expression; but none who can be admired in this way. The name of
that powerful writer, Mr. Thomas Hardy, was often mentioned in
company with that of Meredith; but the coupling of the two names is
a philosophical and chronological mistake. Mr. Hardy is wholly of our
own generation, which is a very unpleasant thing to be. He is shrill
and not mellow. He does not worship the unknown God: he knows
the God (or thinks he knows the God), and dislikes Him. He is not a
pantheist: he is a pandiabolist. The great agnostics of the Victorian
age said there was no purpose in Nature. Mr. Hardy is a mystic; he
says there is an evil purpose. All this is as far as possible from the
plenitude and rational optimism of Meredith. And when we have
disposed of Mr. Hardy, what other name is there that can even
pretend to recall the heroic Victorian age? The Roman curse lies
upon Meredith like a blessing: “Ultimus suorum moriatur”—he has
died the last of his own.
The greatness of George Meredith exhibits the same paradox or
difficulty as the greatness of Browning; the fact that simplicity was
the centre, while the utmost luxuriance and complexity was the
expression. He was as human as Shakespeare, and also as affected
as Shakespeare. It may generally be remarked (I do not know the
cause of it) that the men who have an odd or mad point of view
express it in plain or bald language. The men who have a genial and
everyday point of view express it in ornate and complicated
language. Swinburne and Thomas Hardy talk almost in words of one
syllable; but the philosophical upshot can be expressed in the most
famous of all words of one syllable—damn. Their words are common
words; but their view (thank God) is not a common view. They
denounce in the style of a spelling-book; while people like Meredith
are unpopular through the very richness of their popular sympathies.
Men like Browning or like Francis Thompson praise God in such a
way sometimes that God alone could possibly understand the praise.
But they mean all men to understand it: they wish every beast and
fish and flying thing to take part in the applauding chorus of the
cosmos. On the other hand, those who have bad news to tell are
much more explicit, and the poets whose object it is to depress the
people take care that they do it. I will not write any more about
those poets, because I do not profess to be impartial or even to be
good-tempered on the subject. To my thinking, the oppression of the
people is a terrible sin; but the depression of the people is a far
worse one.
But the glory of George Meredith is that he combined subtlety with
primal energy: he criticized life without losing his appetite for it. In
him alone, being a man of the world did not mean being a man
disgusted with the world. As a rule, there is no difference between
the critic and ascetic except that the ascetic sorrows with a hope
and the critic without a hope. But George Meredith loved
straightness even when he praised it crookedly: he adored innocence
even when he analysed it tortuously: he cared only for
unconsciousness, even when he was unduly conscious of it. He was
never so good as he was about virgins and schoolboys. In one
curious poem, containing many fine lines, he actually rebukes people
for being quaint or eccentric, and rebukes them quaintly and
eccentrically. He says of Nature, the great earth-mother, whom he
worshipped:
... She by one sure sign can read,
Have they but held her laws and nature dear;
They mouth no sentence of inverted wit.
More prizes she her beasts than this high breed
Wry in the shape she wastes her milk to rear.
That is the mark of the truly great man: that he sees the common
man afar off, and worships him. The great man tries to be ordinary,
and becomes extraordinary in the process. But the small man tries to
be mysterious, and becomes lucid in an awful sense—for we can all
see through him.
 The Irishman

T
he other day I went to see the Irish plays, recently acted by real
Irishmen—peasants and poor folk—under the inspiration of Lady
Gregory and Mr. W. B. Yeats. Over and above the excellence of
the acting and the abstract merit of the plays (both of which were
considerable), there emerged the strange and ironic interest which
has been the source of so much fun and sin and sorrow—the
interest of the Irishman in England. Since we have sinned by
creating the Stage Irishman, it is fitting enough that we should all be
rebuked by Irishmen on the stage. We have all seen some obvious
Englishman performing a Paddy. It was, perhaps, a just punishment
to see an obvious Paddy performing the comic and contemptible part
of an English gentleman. I have now seen both, and I can lay my
hand on my heart (though my knowledge of physiology is shaky
about its position) and declare that the Irish English gentleman was
an even more abject and crawling figure than the English Irish
servant. The Comic Irishman in the English plays was at least given
credit for a kind of chaotic courage. The Comic Englishman in the
Irish plays was represented not only as a fool, but as a nervous fool;
a fussy and spasmodic prig, who could not be loved either for
strength or weakness. But all this only illustrates the fundamental
fact that both the national views are wrong; both the versions are
perversions. The rollicking Irishman and the priggish Englishman are
alike the mere myths generated by a misunderstanding. It would be
rather nearer the truth if we spoke of the rollicking Englishman and
the priggish Irishman. But even that would be wrong too.
Unless people are near in soul they had better not be near in
neighbourhood. The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to
love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same
people. And there is a real human reason for this. You think of a
remote man merely as a man; that is, you think of him in the right
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