GK Chesterton: Thank you for the daffodil
Thomas Carlyle
By: Ali Ismail
0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)
aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk
WHEN THE WEST FINALLY CHANGES ITS TUNE ...
We do a compare and contrast study of two leading men of letters
It is now over 15 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and it will not be long before the various Western powers decide collectively what their policies towards the third world are going to be during the long post-Soviet era.
It has already been established that the independence granted to the colonies in Africa, Asia and elsewhere were given under the immense duress of a looming super-power that offered equality with the white man.
India was given its independence, not because of the influences of Jawalalal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, but because some leaflets, printed and published in Moscow, were brought to the authorities of the Raj after they had been distributed throughout the length and breadth of India. They offered the Indian people Soviet assistance in their independence struggle (Swaraj) and were written in Hindi and in English.
The great bugbear has gone, so whither Western man? It would be a great mistake to simply assume that because policies towards us have not changed dramatically for more than a decade and a half after the red flag was torn off the Kremlin, this state of affairs will surely continue.
One thing is tolerably certain. That is that whatever is done will be done unitedly by the West as a whole. The days of internecine warfare among European peoples are largely over during our lifetimes and may never return.
The problem for them is that there is an extremely wide range of opinion about the matter in hand, which is ourselves. At one end stand the out and out liberals who want equal treatment of the third world to be enacted to the spirit and the letter of the formal and informal laws indefinitely. At the other end stand the massed ranks of white supremacists, separatists and exclusivists who want no truck with us. In the middle ground stand the moderate people with their moderate approaches.
I submit that it is this divergence between the various shades of Western public opinion, which accounts for the long delay before a fresh post-Soviet policy is arrived at. What I am prepared to predict, however, is that the ongoing situation will not be allowed to continue for longer than absolutely necessary and that when a change in direction is settled upon everybody, including your local neighbourhood tramp, will know about it.
However, it is not for my pen to dwell upon so grand a subject for long. I leave the deep discussion thereof to weightier minds writing in weightier journals. What I am modestly presuming to do, gentle reader, is to illustrate the divergences which affect the European peoples by doing something most of us stopped doing as soon as we left full time education. I am going to compare and contrast two prominent shapers of Western public opinion from the past.
Both men are largely forgotten and ignored nowadays but during their lifetimes they were household names. They are Thomas Carlyle and GK Chesterton.
First of Thomas Carlyle. The first thing I want to let you know is that during my schooldays a hostile (towards me) English literature master once warned our class that Thomas Carlyle was a bad influence because he taught that bullying was good because it was good for the bully. Be that as it may, the fact remains that this 19th Century (1795-1881) Scottish essayist was a major opinion leader in his day and doubtless influenced early British policies in India (including what is now Bangladesh and Pakistan) throughout his working life.
Having researched him a bit I have to confess that to date I have not discovered a recommendation of bullying for its own sake. Nevertheless, there is evidence aplenty that he did advocate dealing with the black man, ourselves not excluded, with a firm hand on account of our many supposed inborn characteristics, which make it necessary for a superior intelligence to guide our actions.
The point that our ancestors were carrying on tolerably well before certain individuals turned up in sailing ships and persuaded them that they had a crying need for external guidance appears to be a point that Carlyle hurried past.
When Thomas Carlyle is remembered today it is usually in the context of his having been a student and chronicler of the French Revolution, which had occurred shortly before his birth. Charles Dickens read most carefully his history of the French Revolution and it formed, in large measure, the source material for one of his greatest achievements, A Tale of Two Cities.
The French Revolution is at this time a subject of great interest because the powers that be have decided that the events which led to that happening should be understood thoroughly if the present day working classes and the third world are not do follow suit and overturn the apple cart, as it were.
The part of his works that has the most direct bearing on us is his notorious An Occasional Discourse on the N***** Question, which, however politically incorrect now, may return to fashion again.
Opening at random, here is a sample of that piece of writing: “None of you, my friends, have been in Demerara lately, I apprehend. May none of you go till matters mend there a little. Under the sky there are uglier sights than perhaps were seen hitherto. Dead corpses, the rotting body of a brother man, whom fate or unjust men have killed, this is not a pleasant spectacle; but what say you to the dead soul of a man, in a body which still pretends to be vigorously alive, and can drink rum? An idle white gentleman is not pleasant to me; though I confess the real work for him is not easy to find, in these our epochs; and perhaps he is seeking, poor soul, and may find at last. But what say you to an idle black gentleman, with his rum-bottle in his hand, (for a little additional pumpkin you can have red herrings and rum in Demerara,) rum- bottle in his hand, no breeches on his body, pumpkin at discretion, and the fruitfullest region of the earth going back to jungle round him? Such things the sun looks down upon in our fine times; and I, for one, would rather have no hand in them.”
GK Chesterton (1874-1936) is nowadays so forgotten that he is best remembered by some as the cousin of the man who founded the National Front on 7th February 1967 – AK Chesterton.
In his day, as stated above, he was the country’s leading journalist and those who know of him sometimes say that that his was the best mind of the 20th Century, even though he never went to college.
It was one of GK Chesterton’s newspaper articles, read by the young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, that led the latter to devote the rest of his life to Swaraj.
Throughout his working life in which he produced a prodigious number of newspaper articles, non-fiction works and fiction in poetry and prose, Chesterton was the advocate of the common man against the intelligensia. He was the forerunner of our George Gale of Daily Mail (and previously of LBC radio) fame.
Like George Gale, whilst he was the host of LBC’s ‘phone in morning programme during the 1970s, Chesterton took on all comers in debate and nearly always won.
Chesterton debated many of the celebrated intellectuals of his time: George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow. According to contemporary accounts, Chesterton usually emerged as the winner of these contests, however, the world has immortalized his opponents and forgotten him, and now we hear only one side of the argument, and we are enduring the legacies of socialism, relativism, materialism, and scepticism. Ironically, all of his opponents regarded Chesterton with the greatest affection. George Bernard Shaw said: "The world is not thankful enough for Chesterton."
It is now over 15 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and it will not be long before the various Western powers decide collectively what their policies towards the third world are going to be during the long post-Soviet era.
It has already been established that the independence granted to the colonies in Africa, Asia and elsewhere were given under the immense duress of a looming super-power that offered equality with the white man.
India was given its independence, not because of the influences of Jawalalal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, but because some leaflets, printed and published in Moscow, were brought to the authorities of the Raj after they had been distributed throughout the length and breadth of India. They offered the Indian people Soviet assistance in their independence struggle (Swaraj) and were written in Hindi and in English.
The great bugbear has gone, so whither Western man? It would be a great mistake to simply assume that because policies towards us have not changed dramatically for more than a decade and a half after the red flag was torn off the Kremlin, this state of affairs will surely continue.
One thing is tolerably certain. That is that whatever is done will be done unitedly by the West as a whole. The days of internecine warfare among European peoples are largely over during our lifetimes and may never return.
The problem for them is that there is an extremely wide range of opinion about the matter in hand, which is ourselves. At one end stand the out and out liberals who want equal treatment of the third world to be enacted to the spirit and the letter of the formal and informal laws indefinitely. At the other end stand the massed ranks of white supremacists, separatists and exclusivists who want no truck with us. In the middle ground stand the moderate people with their moderate approaches.
I submit that it is this divergence between the various shades of Western public opinion, which accounts for the long delay before a fresh post-Soviet policy is arrived at. What I am prepared to predict, however, is that the ongoing situation will not be allowed to continue for longer than absolutely necessary and that when a change in direction is settled upon everybody, including your local neighbourhood tramp, will know about it.
However, it is not for my pen to dwell upon so grand a subject for long. I leave the deep discussion thereof to weightier minds writing in weightier journals. What I am modestly presuming to do, gentle reader, is to illustrate the divergences which affect the European peoples by doing something most of us stopped doing as soon as we left full time education. I am going to compare and contrast two prominent shapers of Western public opinion from the past.
Both men are largely forgotten and ignored nowadays but during their lifetimes they were household names. They are Thomas Carlyle and GK Chesterton.
First of Thomas Carlyle. The first thing I want to let you know is that during my schooldays a hostile (towards me) English literature master once warned our class that Thomas Carlyle was a bad influence because he taught that bullying was good because it was good for the bully. Be that as it may, the fact remains that this 19th Century (1795-1881) Scottish essayist was a major opinion leader in his day and doubtless influenced early British policies in India (including what is now Bangladesh and Pakistan) throughout his working life.
Having researched him a bit I have to confess that to date I have not discovered a recommendation of bullying for its own sake. Nevertheless, there is evidence aplenty that he did advocate dealing with the black man, ourselves not excluded, with a firm hand on account of our many supposed inborn characteristics, which make it necessary for a superior intelligence to guide our actions.
The point that our ancestors were carrying on tolerably well before certain individuals turned up in sailing ships and persuaded them that they had a crying need for external guidance appears to be a point that Carlyle hurried past.
When Thomas Carlyle is remembered today it is usually in the context of his having been a student and chronicler of the French Revolution, which had occurred shortly before his birth. Charles Dickens read most carefully his history of the French Revolution and it formed, in large measure, the source material for one of his greatest achievements, A Tale of Two Cities.
The French Revolution is at this time a subject of great interest because the powers that be have decided that the events which led to that happening should be understood thoroughly if the present day working classes and the third world are not do follow suit and overturn the apple cart, as it were.
The part of his works that has the most direct bearing on us is his notorious An Occasional Discourse on the N***** Question, which, however politically incorrect now, may return to fashion again.
Opening at random, here is a sample of that piece of writing: “None of you, my friends, have been in Demerara lately, I apprehend. May none of you go till matters mend there a little. Under the sky there are uglier sights than perhaps were seen hitherto. Dead corpses, the rotting body of a brother man, whom fate or unjust men have killed, this is not a pleasant spectacle; but what say you to the dead soul of a man, in a body which still pretends to be vigorously alive, and can drink rum? An idle white gentleman is not pleasant to me; though I confess the real work for him is not easy to find, in these our epochs; and perhaps he is seeking, poor soul, and may find at last. But what say you to an idle black gentleman, with his rum-bottle in his hand, (for a little additional pumpkin you can have red herrings and rum in Demerara,) rum- bottle in his hand, no breeches on his body, pumpkin at discretion, and the fruitfullest region of the earth going back to jungle round him? Such things the sun looks down upon in our fine times; and I, for one, would rather have no hand in them.”
GK Chesterton (1874-1936) is nowadays so forgotten that he is best remembered by some as the cousin of the man who founded the National Front on 7th February 1967 – AK Chesterton.
In his day, as stated above, he was the country’s leading journalist and those who know of him sometimes say that that his was the best mind of the 20th Century, even though he never went to college.
It was one of GK Chesterton’s newspaper articles, read by the young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, that led the latter to devote the rest of his life to Swaraj.
Throughout his working life in which he produced a prodigious number of newspaper articles, non-fiction works and fiction in poetry and prose, Chesterton was the advocate of the common man against the intelligensia. He was the forerunner of our George Gale of Daily Mail (and previously of LBC radio) fame.
Like George Gale, whilst he was the host of LBC’s ‘phone in morning programme during the 1970s, Chesterton took on all comers in debate and nearly always won.
Chesterton debated many of the celebrated intellectuals of his time: George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow. According to contemporary accounts, Chesterton usually emerged as the winner of these contests, however, the world has immortalized his opponents and forgotten him, and now we hear only one side of the argument, and we are enduring the legacies of socialism, relativism, materialism, and scepticism. Ironically, all of his opponents regarded Chesterton with the greatest affection. George Bernard Shaw said: "The world is not thankful enough for Chesterton."
This is how Chesterton’s essay In Defence of Penny Dreadfuls begins: “One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that the modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically - it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.
“In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep-sea fishes. The old scholars left the whole under-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness.”
Despite his egregious cousin’s political performances, the probability is that GK Chesterton would, were he alive today and with his views unchanged, be glad that our homeland countries are at least nominally self-governing. Perhaps, if he had his way, he would allow them to be truly self-governing as well but that is pushing the envelope somewhat.
Despite his egregious cousin’s political performances, the probability is that GK Chesterton would, were he alive today and with his views unchanged, be glad that our homeland countries are at least nominally self-governing. Perhaps, if he had his way, he would allow them to be truly self-governing as well but that is pushing the envelope somewhat.
While our fates are being decided above our heads by the overlords of this world I have given you, I trust, a mere glimpse of the divergences of the viewpoints with which they are contending.
THE END
This article was published in the 4th August 2006 issue of the Bangla Mirror, the first English language weekly for the United Kingdom's Bangladeshis - read all over the world, from the Arctic to the Antarctic
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