What's Wrong with the WorldChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Philosophy
What's Wrong with the World
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Social problems
very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness
there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate soul into
the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession of
the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that
are common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and
comic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.
The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as the word
“affinity.” There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all the members,
men and women, call each other “Comrade.” I have no serious emotions,
hostile or otherwise, about this particular habit: at the worst it is
conventionality, and at the best flirtation. I am convinced here only
to point out a rational principle. If you choose to lump all flowers
together, lilies and dahlias and tulips and chrysanthemums and call
them all daisies, you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word
daisy. If you choose to call every human attachment comradeship, if
you include under that name the respect of a youth for a venerable
prophetess, the interest of a man in a beautiful woman who baffles him,
the pleasure of a philosophical old fogy in a girl who is impudent and
innocent, the end of the meanest quarrel or the beginning of the most
mountainous love; if you are going to call all these comradeship, you
will gain nothing, you will only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and
universal and open; but they are only one kind of flower. Comradeship is
obvious and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection;
it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who
has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is
impersonal. There is a pedantic phrase used in debating clubs which is
strictly true to the masculine emotion; they call it “speaking to the
question.” Women speak to each other; men speak to the subject they are
speaking about. Many an honest man has sat in a ring of his five
best friends under heaven and forgotten who was in the room while he
explained some system. This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are
all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf. Men
are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No one remembers after
a really good talk who has said the good things. Every man speaks to a
visionary multitude; a mystical cloud, that is called the club.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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