THE COMIC CONSTABLE

Some little time ago a small, strange incident occurred to me which is not without its application to the history and quality of this country. I was sitting quietly in rustic retirement, endeavouring to feel as bucolic as possible, when I was summoned to the telephone, not perhaps the most bucolic of institutions. Nor, indeed, was it the voice of any other ale house gaffer that addressed me through the instrument, but the voice of a man I know on one of the big London dailies.

He said, "We hear you've been made Constable of Beaconsfield."

I said, "Then your hearing is defective."

He said after a pause. "Well, but haven't you been made Constable of Beaconsfield?" "Why, of course not," I said. "Have you been made Pope of Rome? Am I a person whom any sane men (except perhaps the criminals) would want to have for a constable?"

"Well," replied my friend doubtfully, "It's down in the `Daily Gazette', anyhow. `Mr. G. K. Chesterton has been nominated as a Parish Constable of Beaconsfield.'"

"And a jolly good joke, too," I answered. "I thought you had a more vivid and vulgar sense of humour."

"We may take it, then, that the thing is a hoax?" said the inquisitor. "You may indeed," I said, "and apparently a successful one." I then hung up the receiver and went back and tried to feel bucolic again.

When I had tried for three minutes the telephone rang again. A well-known weekly illustrated paper had important business with me.

"We hear," said a grave voice, "that you are now Parish Constable of Beaconsfield, and any experiences of yours in that capacity"

"I am not Parish Constable of Beaconsfield," I cried in a tearful rage, "nor am I Senior Wrangler, nor Gold Stick in Waiting, nor the Grand Lama, nor the Living Skeleton, nor the Derby Favourite, nor the Queen of Love and Beauty at an approaching tournament. Has the human race lost all notion of a joke?"

I went back somewhat impatiently to my bucolic efforts; and then another bell rang, this time the front-door bell. I was informed that the representative of yet a third paper (an illustrated daily this time) had come down all the way from London with a camera to photograph me as a Parish Constable. I do not know whether he thought to find me in some flamboyant uniform, with feathers and epaulettes, or whether he merely wished to snapshot the new and rapturous expression of my face after receiving the appointment. Anyhow, I told him he was welcome to photograph me as much as he chose in the character of "The Man Who is not Parish Con stable of Beaconsfield." He photographed me in a number of highly unconstabulary attitudes (calculated in themselves to refute the slander), and then he went away.

It happened that about a quarter of an hour afterwards a local Beaconsfield acquaintance dropped in for ten minutes' talk, and to him I recounted with mingled entertainment and fury how all these experienced journalists had been taken in by a joke that seemed to me as obvious as anything in a comic paper. "I suppose," I said, "that whenever Punch playfully suggests I caused the earthquake at San Francisco by sitting down in Beaconsfield, I shall have to write to The Times about it, and clear my character."

My local friend listened with interest to the farce, laughed at the inquiring newspaper, was amiably amused at the disappointed photographer, and at the end said very quietly and casually. "All the same, you know, you are nominated as a Parish Constable of Beaconsfield."

I turned, stiff with astonishment; I saw the shocking sincerity in his eyes,

"But this is madness," I cried, "It must be a joke."

"If it is," he said, apologetically, "it is a joke written up on the church door."

My wits were scattered to the four winds; I collected them with difficulty. I could not fancy that those who go to a modern parish church would permit such a thing as a practical joke in the porch. It was no time for half measures, but rather for desperate ones. It was clearly necessary to go to church.

My friend and I walked to the stone entrance of that strong and fine building, and there, sure enough, stood in cold print the openly crazy statement that some five men, including Mr. G. K. Chesterton, had been nominated as Parish Constables, and that objections to them would be entertained. Unless Englishmen have lost their historic fire, those objections should be prompt and overwhelming. On the way back my friend fortified and consoled me by describing the institution which had thus forcibly descended on me like an extinguisher. I have since received a letter from a kind correspondent including much the same technicalities, for which I am very grateful; but at the time the explanation was a little confusing. The only thing I clearly remember out of the tangle of rules is this; that I must not go officially beyond the bounds of my Constablewick, "except in hot pursuit of a fugitive." I may be enticed to toss myself over a spiked wall into Middlesex; but only if a fleet-footed burglar has tossed himself over it before my eyes. I may be observed any day leaping across the Thames into Berkshire, but only when some panting bigamist has leapt it just before me. I can most earnestly and even austerely promise that on ordinary occasions I shall permit myself no such impetuous trespass.

But we will not dwell upon the duties, because there are no duties; nor upon the salary, because there is no salary; nor upon the uniform (the only thing I really regret) because, alas! there is no uniform. But if we consider the thing itself, and why so wild a joke ever came to be possible as the present writer being a constable, we may find ourselves facing some rather curious and interesting elements in the old life of England. The institution of the Parish Constable dates from the time when there was no official and efficient police; but when there was a great deal of incidental local sentiment and local self-government. In short, the Parish Constable belongs to another age, when there was not really such a thing as a constable, but when there was such a thing as a parish. The very form of his appointment breathes of a somewhat breezier age; for (as in my own case) he is not even asked if he will stand. This suggests the jolly time when there was no nonsense about wanting to serve your country; no buying of peerages by breeding cattle; no climbing into rich idleness by means of `polite work'.

Doubtless it is august and dignified to be a constable. So it is august and dignified to be a juryman; for to be a juryman is to be a judge, but in nothing is the jury system more medieval (that is, more human) than in the fact that it takes for granted that every good man will primarily care more for his babies or his bullocks than for the codes and thrones of legality; and that, therefore, he must be summoned to a jury. That is perhaps what Christ meant when he described the Kingdom of Heaven as sending into the highways and byeways, and compelling them to come in; perhaps He meant that if you want the simple and modest mortal you must call him. However this may be with the Kingdom of Heaven, it is assuredly so with the Kingdom of Earth. The other method leaves us open to that offensive class which comes without being called, the vulgarly and basely ambitious, who are already destroying England.

The other element in the case is so very long that I will here make it very short. The Parish Constable, nominated by a District Council, is one of the very few reminders of a certain natural notion of self-government which modern science and modern discipline have made very difficult to retain. For the present I will put it merely in this way: What would any six streets in Hoxton or Whitechapel give if they could elect (however indirectly) the policeman who should stand at the street corner?

CAPONE'S PAL

I HAVE sometimes shocked the conventions of our time by defending Private Property; and pointing out that Private Property has really been destroyed by Private Enterprise. In connection with this paradox, that our common conscience does really disapprove of a thief, I came upon a very curious case the other day; an actual incident which I will leave to speak for itself. It seemed to me to combine amusement with instruction.

I had wandered out of a famous Spanish port and found myself in a sort of seaside suburb. I could not speak the language; but Latins are so intelligent that they do without language. I turned, as I had done twenty times, into a little cafe, which was empty, except for a sturdy man on a stool, with his broad back to me; and he jumped down with a kind of alertness which is neither Spanish nor English. He was evidently the proprietor, and he spoke English fluently, but with a blended accent I could not define; till I realized that he was not a Spaniard speaking English, but a Spaniard speaking American. Some accident of talk led me to admit that I followed the low trade of literature; whereupon he leapt into new life and proclaimed that he also had written a book. He showed me the book. It seemed to me on a hasty glance, rather a good book, written with spirit and humour; but it was simply his own memoirs as a gunman and a gangster under A1 Capone. It was a perfectly honest record of dishonesty; and described robbing and racketeering without any of the cant that excuses capitalism. Still, there was something warming to a melodramatic mind in being alone with a gunman. He was dark and brooding and suddenly broke off to say, "I shan't write another book."

"No," I said applauding warmly, "keeping a bar is much better than writing a book. Many an Englishman has wished he kept a pub instead of keeping a publisher."

And at this he was transfigured into tremendous and vibrant vitality. He shouted till the tavern shook with the crimes of his publisher. He said that his publisher had cheated him at every turn. He said he had to rush round the world to see that all his publishers and translators were not doing him out of his well-earned money. I think it quite likely that they were. I also have no illusions about publishing or other phases of modern plutocracy. But I thought it was faintly ironical. I reminded him of Byron's saying that Barrabas was a publisher.

"In short," I said firmly, "it was sheer robbery."

"Sure," he said with explosive emphasis; and we parted excellent friends. "It was just Robbery!"

ON LOSING ONE'S HEAD

WHEN I was a little boy I had an imagination, though this has long been washed out of me by the wordy abstractions of politics and journalism. For imagination, real imagination, is never a vague thing of vistas. Real imagination is always materialistic; for imagination consists of images, generally graven images. There is a mad literalism about imagination; and when I had it I turned everything that any one mentioned into a concrete body and a staring shape. Thus, I would hear grown-up people using ordinary proverbs and figures of speech; pale, worn-out proverbs, battered and colourless figures of speech. But every one of these phrases sprang out for me as fierce and vivid as a motto written in fireworks. For some reason I had a particularly graphic visual concept in the case of nautical metaphors. Thus, when I heard that my uncle on a sea voyage "had got his sea legs" I pictured the most horrible bodily transformations in my uncle. Had my uncle now got four legs? Or had it been necessary for his two original and (to my eye) unobjectionable legs to be amputated by the ship's doctor? Did the new legs arrive as a sort of extra luggage, or did they loathsomely grow upon him, like hair or fungoids, with all the awful unnaturalness of Nature? I pictured my uncle's sea legs as two green and glittering members, covered with scales like fishes, and bearing some resemblance to the two fish tails with which exuberant Renaissance artists sometimes provided Tritons and mermaids. Again when I heard (in some seafaring connection) that "the Captain kept his weather eye open," I assumed with faultless infantile logic that he kept the other one quite shut. And in some dreams I rather pictured the Captain's weather eye as being some separate and eccentric kind of eye, like that of a Cyclops; an eye of blue sky or lightning that opened suddenly in his hat or his coat-tails and blazed through black fantastic tempests; a strange star of the storm.

But there were many cases, even among more terrestrial and commonplace metaphors, where the material metaphor photographed itself on my fancy. One of them was the phrase about a man "Losing his heart." A man, considered as a material envelope, seemed so securely done up that how the heart could get out of the body was a problem analogous to that of how the apple could get into the dumpling. Perhaps, I mused, the phrase about a man having his heart in his mouth might throw some light on the somewhat revolting phrase, which spoke of a man with his heart in his boots; where there was clearly no thoroughfare. From this my childish taste turned with a certain relief to the easier and more popular picture of a man losing his head; which seemed the sort of thing that might happen to anybody. Indeed, by this dream of symbolic decapitation I was much haunted in infancy and am not infrequently inspired and comforted even to this day. Whatever other metaphors may mean, this metaphor of the lost head has some primary and poetic meaning; and I have written many bad poems, bad fairy tales, and bad apologues in my industrious attempt to find it out and declare it. The connection between the animal and intellectual meaning of it became close and even confused. I vaguely thought of Charles I as having lost his head equally in both senses; which is not perhaps wholly untrue. When I read of the miracle of St. Dennis, who carried his head in his hand, it seemed to me quite a soothing and graceful proceeding, like a gentleman carrying his hat in his hand. St. Dennis did not lose his head anyhow; he carried it in his hand so as not to lose it; as ladies do their ridiculous handbags.

Indeed, this drifting and dancing dream of decapitation, in which kings and saints figured with gothic fantasticality, had a kind of allegory in the core of it. The separation of body and head is a sort of symbol of that separation of body and soul which is made by all the heresies and the sophistries, which are the nightmares of the mind. The mere materialist is a body that has lost its head; the mere spiritualist is a head that has mislaid its body. Under the same symbol can be found the old distinction between the sinner and the heretic about which theology has uttered many paradoxes, more profitable to study than some modern people fancy. For there is one kind of man who takes off his head and throws it in the gutter, who dethrones and forgets the reason that should be his ruler and witness; and the horrible headless body strides away over cities and sanctuaries, breaking them down and treading them into mire and blood. He is the criminal; but there is another figure equally sinister and strange. This man forgets his body, with all its instinctive honesties and recurrent sanities and laws of God; he leaves his body working in the fields like a slave; and the head goes away to think alone. The head, detached and dehumanized, thinks faster and faster like a clock gone mad; it is never heated by any generous blood, never softened by any healthy fatigue, never checked or warned by any of the terrible tocsins of instinct. The head thinks because it cannot do anything else; because it cannot feel or doubt or know. This man is the heretic; and in this way all the heresies were made. The anarchist goes off his head and the sophist goes off his body; I will not renew the old dispute about which is the worse amputation; but I should recommend the prudent reader to avoid both.

THE SPICE OF LIFE**

FORGIVE ME if I begin by enacting the part which I have played at so many dinner-parties, I mean the part of' the skeleton at the feast. Pardon me if the first few words that reach you resemble a hollow voice from the tomb. For the truth is that the very title of this series makes me feel a little funereal. When I was asked to speak on the Spice of Life, I am sorry to say that the first thought that crossed my perverse and morbid mind was that spices, as spices, are quite as much associated with death as with life. Corpses embalmed and preserved were always swathed amid spices; mummies also, I suppose. I am no Egyptologist to decide the point. But even if they were, you would hardly go sniffing round a mummy in the British Museum, drawing deep breaths and saying, "This is indeed the spice of life." Egypt was almost a civilization organized as a funeral procession; it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the living lived to serve the dead. And yet I suppose that an actual Egyptian walking about alive, was in no hurry to be spiced. Or take a homelier scene nearer home. Suppose you are chased by a mad bull; we will not debate which animal enjoys more of the spice of life; but both at the moment will give unmistakable signs of life. But the quadruped must wait until he is killed and cut up into cold beef, before he can have the pride and privilege of being spiced beef. In short, I want you to remember first of all that there has been in history, not only the spice of life, but something else that may fairly be called the spice of death. And I mention it first because it is a sort of parable; and there are a good many things in the modern world that seem to me to be dead, not to say damned, and yet are considered very spicy.

I will not dwell on this morbid parallel. Heaven forbid that I should suggest that some ladies are rather like mummies walking about, with very beautiful faces painted on the mummy-cases: or that some young gentlemen going the pace exhibit all the culture and selective subtlety of mad bulls. I am concerned with a much more important question at the back of this one. It seems to me that a great many people, whom I am far from calling mummies or mad bulls, are at this moment paying rather too much attention to the spice of life, and rather too little attention to life. Do not misunderstand me. I am very fond of spiced beef and all the spices; I always dread that the Puritan reformers will suddenly forbid mustard and pepper as they did malt and hops; on the absurd ground that salt and mustard are as unnecessary as music. But while I resist the suggestion that we must eat beef without mustard, I do recognize that there is now a much deeper and more subtle danger that men may want to eat mustard without beef. I mean that they may lose their appetite; their appetite for beef and bread and cheese and the broad daylight of life; and depend entirely on spices and condiments. I have even been blamed for defending the spices of life against what was called the Simple Life. I have been blamed for making myself a champion of beer and skittles. Fortunately, if I was a champion of skittles, there was never any danger of my being a champion at skittles. But I have played ordinary games like skittles, always badly; but all healthy people will agree that you never enjoy a game till you enjoy being beaten at the game. I have even played golf in Scotland before Arthur Balfour brought it to England and it became a fashion and then a religion. I have been since inhibited by a difficulty in regarding a game as a religion, and the horrid secret of my failure is that I never could quite see the difference between cricket and golf, as I played them when I was a boy, and puss-in-the-corner and honey-pots as I played them when I was a child. Perhaps those nursery games are now forgotten; anyhow, I will not reveal what good games they were, lest they should become fashionable. If once they were taken seriously in that most serious world, the world of Sport, enormous results will follow. The shops will sell a special Slipper for Hunt-the-Slipper, or a caddy will follow the player with a bag full of fifteen different slippers. Honey-pots will mean money-pots; and there will be a `corner' in puss-in-the-corner.

Anyhow, I have enjoyed like everybody else those sports and spices of life. But I am more and more convinced that neither in your special spices nor in mine, neither in honeypots nor quart-pots, neither in mustard nor in music, nor in any other distraction from life, is the secret we are all seeking, the secret of enjoying life. I am perfectly certain that all our world will end in despair, unless there is some way of making the mind itself, the ordinary thought we have at ordinary times, more healthy and more happy than they seem to be just now, to judge by most modern novels and poems. You have to be happy in those quiet moments when you remember that you are alive; not in those noisy moments when you forget. Unless we can learn again to enjoy life, we shall not long enjoy the spices of life. I once read a French fairytale that expressed exactly what I mean. Never believe that French wit is shallow; it is the shining surface of French irony, which is unfathomable. It was about a pessimist poet who decided to drown himself; and as he went down to the river, he gave away his eyes to a blind man, his ears to a deaf man, his legs to a lame man, and so on, up to the moment when the reader was waiting for the splash of his suicide; but the author wrote that this senseless trunk settled itself on the shore and began to experience the joy of living: la joie de vivre. The joy of being alive. You have to go deep, and perhaps to grow old, to know how true that story is.

If I were to ask myself where and when I have been happiest, I could of course give the obvious answers, as true of me as of everybody else; at some dance or feast of the romantic time of life; at some juvenile triumph of debate; at some sight of beautiful things in strange lands. But it is much more important to remember that I have been intensely and imaginatively happy in the queerest because the quietest places. I have been filled with life from within in a cold waiting-room in a deserted railway junction. I have been completely alive sitting on an iron seat under an ugly lamppost at a third-rate watering place. In short, I have experienced the mere excitement of existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as ditch-water. And by the way, is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun. Even that proverbial phrase will prove that we cannot always trust what is proverbial, when it professes to describe what is prosaic. I doubt whether the fifteen gushing fountains to be found in your ornamental garden contain creatures so amusing as those the miscroscope reveals; like the profiles of politicians in caricature. And that is only one example out of a thousand, of the things in daily life we call dull that are not really so dull after all. And I am confident that there is no future for the modern world, unless it can understand that it has not merely to seek what is more and more exciting, but rather the yet more exciting business of discovering the excitement in things that are called dull.

What we have to teach the young man of the future, is how to enjoy himself. Until he can enjoy himself, he will grow more and more tired of enjoying everything else. What we have to teach him is to amuse himself. At this moment he is more and more dependent upon anything which he thinks will amuse him. And, to judge by the expression of his face, it does not amuse him very much. When we consider what he receives, it is indeed a most magnificent wonder and wealth and concentration of amusement. He can travel in a racingcar almost as quick as a cannon-ball; and still have his car fitted up with wireless from all the ends of the earth. He can get Vienna and Moscow; he can hear Cairo and Warsaw; and if he cannot see England, through which he happens to be travelling, that is after all a small matter. In a century, no doubt, his car will travel like a comet, and his wireless will hear the noises in the moon. But all this does not help him when the car stops; and he has to stand stamping about in a line, with nothing to think about. All this does not help him even when the wireless stops and he has to sit still in a silent car with nothing to talk about. If you consider what are the things poured into him, what are the things he receives, then indeed they are colossal cataracts of things, cosmic Niagaras that have never before poured into any human being are pouring into him. But if you consider what comes out of him, as a result of all this absorption, the result we have to record is rather serious. In the vast majority of cases, nothing. Not even conversation, as it used to be. He does not conduct long arguments, as young men did when I was young. The first and startling effect of all this noise is silence. Second, when he does have the itch to write or say something, it is always an itch in the sense of an irritation.

Everything has its better and baser form; and there is irritation and irritation. There is a great deal of difference between the irritation of Aldous Huxley and the irritation of some nasty little degenerate in a novel by Aldous Huxley. But honestly I do not think I am unfair to the whole trend of the time, if I say that it is intellectually irritated; and therefore without that sort of rich repose in the mind which I mean, when I say that a man when he is alone can be happy because he is alive. For instance, a man of genius of the same generation, for whom I have a very special admiration, is Mr. T. S. Eliot. But nobody will deny that there was a sense in which, originally, even his inspiration was irritation. He began with pure pessimism; he has since found much finer and more subtle things; but I hardly think he has found repose. And it is just here that I will have the effrontery to distinguish between his generation and mine. It used to be thought impudent for a boy to criticize an old gentleman, it now requires far more sublime impudence for an older man to criticize a younger. Yet I will defend my own idea of the spiritual spice of life against even the spirituality that finds this ordinary life entirely without spice. I know very well that Mr. Eliot described the desolation he found more than the desolation he felt. But I think that `The Waste Land' was at least a world in which he had wandered. And as I am describing the recent world, I may as well describe it as he has described it, in `The Hollow Men'though nobody would describe him as a hollow man. This is the impression of many impressions.

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

Now forgive me if I say, in my old-world fashion, that I'm damned if I ever felt like that. I recognize the great realities Mr. Eliot has revealed; but I do not admit that this is the deepest reality. I am ready to admit that our generation made too much of romance and comfort, but even when I was uncomfortable I was more comfortable than that. I was more comfortable on the iron seat. I was more happy in the cold waiting-room. I knew the world was perishable and would end, but I did not think it would end with a whimper, but if anything with a trump of doom. It is doubtless a grotesque spectacle that the great-grandfathers should still be dancing with indecent gaiety, when the young are so grave and sad; but in this matter of the spice of life, I will defend the spiritual appetite of my own age. I will even be so indecently frivolous as to break into song, and say to the young pessimists:

Some sneer; some snigger; some simper; In the youth where we laughed and sang, And they may end with a whimper But we will end with a bang.