Fancies Versus FadsChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
General
Fancies Versus Fads
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
English essays -- 20th century
What is true of the political is equally true of the professional
ambition. Much of the mere imitation of masculine tricks and trades is
indeed trivial enough; it is a mere masquerade. The greatest of Roman
satirists noted that in his day the more fast of the fashionable ladies
liked to fight as gladiators in the amphitheatre. In that one statement
he pinned and killed, like moths on a cork, a host of women prophets and
women pioneers and large-minded liberators of their sex in modern
England and America. But besides these more showy she-gladiators there
are also multitudes of worthy and sincere women who take the new (or
rather old) professions seriously. The only disadvantage is that in many
of those professions they can only continue to be serious by ceasing to
be sincere. But the simplicity with which they first set out is an
enormous support to old and complex and corrupt institutions. No modest
person setting out to learn an elaborate science can be expected to
start with the assumption that it is not worth learning. The young lady
will naturally begin to learn Law as gravely as she begins to learn
Greek. It is not in that mood that she will conceive independent doubts
about the ultimate relations of Law and Justice. Just as the
Suffragettes are already complaining that the realism of industrial
revolution interferes with their new hobby of voting, so the lady
lawyers are quite likely to complain that the realism of legal reformers
interferes with their new hobby of legalism. We are suffering in every
department from the same cross-purposes that can be seen in the case of
any vulgar patent medicine. In Law and Medicine, we have the thing
advertised in the public press instead of analysed by the public
authority. What we want is not the journalistic Portia but the
theatrical Portia; who is also the real Portia. We do not want the woman
who will enter the law court with the solemn sense of a lasting
vocation. We want a Portia; a woman who will enter it as lightly, and
leave it as gladly as she did.
The same thing is true of a fact nobler than any fiction; the story, so
often quoted, of the woman who won back mediæval France. Joan of Arc was
a soldier; but she was not a normal soldier. If she had been, she would
have been vowed, not to the war for France, but to any war with
Flanders, Spain or the Italian cities to which her feudal lord might
lead her. If she were a modern conscript, she would be bound to obey
orders not always coming from St. Michael. But the point is here that
merely making all women soldiers, under either system, could do nothing
at all except whitewash and ratify feudalism or conscription. And both
feudalism and conscription are much more magnanimous things than our
modern system of police and prisons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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