Fancies Versus FadsChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
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Fancies Versus Fads
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
English essays -- 20th century
Which raises the interesting question of where they will go to. Now, as
a matter of fact, every thinking person wants to stop the tide of
evolution at some particular mark in his own mind. If I were to propose
that people should wear no clothes at all, the lady might be shocked.
But I should have as much right as anyone else to say that she was
obviously an individual with an unprogressive mind. If I were to propose
that this reform should be imposed on people by force, she would be
justly indignant. But I could answer her with her own argument--that
there had always been unprogressive people, and would be till Doomsday.
If I then proposed that people should not only be stripped but skinned
alive, she might, perhaps, see several moral objections. But her own
argument would still hold good, or as good as it held in her own case;
and I could say that evolution would not stop and the skinning would go
on. The argument is quite as good on my side as on hers; and it is
worthless on both.
Of course, it would be just as easy to urge people to progress or evolve
in exactly the opposite direction. It would be as easy to maintain that
they ought to go on wearing more and more clothes. It might be argued
that savages wear fewer clothes, that clothes are a mark of
civilization, and that the evolution of them will go on. I am highly
civilized if I wear ten hats, and more highly civilized if I wear twelve
hats. When I have already evolved so far as to put on six pairs of
trousers, I must still hail the appearance of the seventh pair of
trousers with the joy due to the waving banner of a great reform. When
we balance these two lunacies against each other, the central point of
sanity is surely apparent. The man who headed his inquiry “Have Women
Gone Far Enough?” was at least in a real sense stating the point
rightly. The point is that there _is_ a “far enough.” There is a point
at which something that was once neglected becomes exaggerated;
something that is valuable up to that stage becomes undesirable after
that stage. It is possible for the human intellect to consider clearly
at what stage, or in what condition, it would have enough complication
of clothes, or enough simplification of clothes, or enough of any other
social element or tendency. It is possible to set a limit to the pagoda
of human hats, rising for ever into infinity. It is possible to count
the human legs, and, after a brief calculation, allot to them the
appropriate number of trousers. There is such a thing as the
miscalculation of making hats for a hydra or boots for a centipede, just
as there are such things as bare-footed friars or the Hatless Brigade.
There are exceptions and exaggerations, good and bad; but the point is
that they are not only both good and bad, but they are good and bad in
opposite directions. Let a man have what ideal of human costume or
custom he likes. That ideal must still consist of elements in a certain
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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