Fancies Versus FadsChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
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Fancies Versus Fads
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
English essays -- 20th century
slowly diminished distance between himself and his wife at the
dinner-table. But he was working up to something that he really wished
to say, something which was well worth saying, but which few seem to
have thought worth hearing. He suggests that he gradually lost the
loathing for humanity with which the Yahoo parallel had inspired him,
that although men are in many ways petty and animal, he came to feel
them to be normal and tolerable; that the sense of their unworthiness
now very seldom returns; and indeed that there is only one thing that
revives it. If one of these creatures exhibits Pride----.
That is the voice of Swift, and the cry arraigning aristocracy. It is
natural for a monkey to collect nuts, and it may be pardonable for John
Churchill to collect guineas. But to think that John Churchill can be
proud of his heap of guineas, can convert them into stars and coronets,
and can carry that calm and classic face disdainful above the
multitude! It is natural for she-monkeys to be mated somehow; but to
think that the Duchess of Yarmouth is proud of being the Duchess of
Yarmouth! It may not be surprising that the nobility should have
scrambled like screaming Yahoos for the rags and ribbons of the
Revolution, tripping up and betraying anybody and everybody in turn,
with every dirty trick of treason, for anything and everything they
could get. But that those of them who had got everything should then
despise those who had got nothing, that the rich should sneer at the
poor for having no part of the plunder, that this oligarchy of Yahoos
should actually feel superior to anything or anybody--that does move the
prophet of the losing side to an indignation which is something much
deeper and nobler than the negative flippancies that we call blasphemy.
Swift was perhaps more of a Jeremiah than an Isaiah, and a faulty
Jeremiah at that; but in this great climax of his grim satire he is none
the less a seer and a speaker of the things of God; because he gives the
testimony of the strongest and most searching of human intellects to the
profound truth of the meanness and imbecility of pride.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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