Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

None of the activities that really matter can be pursued in a merely professional capacity; for instance, the emergence of the professional politician marks the decline of democracy, since in a true democracy politics should be the privilege and duty of every citizen. When love becomes professional, it is prostitution. You need to provide evidence of professional training even to obtain the modest position of street-sweeper or dog-catcher, but no one questions your competence when you wish to become a husband or a wife, a father or a mother — and yet these are full-time occupations of supreme importance, which actually require talents bordering on genius.

Besides his description of his father, Chesterton made many other statements in praise of the amateur. These are justly famous and some have virtually become proverbs. For instance, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Or again, “Just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.”

He further developed the contrast between the amateur and the professional into a comparison between the universalist and the specialist, and he applied this particular insight to an issue that was always of great concern to him: the condition of women. Thus he made the point that the man must be, to a certain extent, a specialist — out of necessity, he finds himself confined in a narrow professional pursuit, since he must do one thing well enough to earn the daily bread — whereas the woman is the true universalist: she must do a hundred things for the safe-guarding and management of the home. The modern fad of denouncing the narrowness of domesticity provoked Chesterton’s anger: “When domesticity is called drudgery all the difficulty arises from a double meaning of the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge building the cathedral of Amiens, or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar.” And then Chesterton goes on to survey the range of tasks within the household that require in turn, or simultaneously, the talents and initiative of a statesman, a diplomat, an economist, an educationist, a philosopher, and he concludes:

I can understand how all this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. A woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task, I will never pity her for its smallness.

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A first paradox which Chesterton presents for us today is the fact that he is both widely popular and relatively neglected; on the contemporary intellectual and literary scene, he appears to be simultaneously present and absent.

His presence is manifested in many ways. First, on a superficial level, just consider the number of his witticisms which have been completely absorbed into our daily speech as proverbial sayings — we find them constantly quoted in newspapers and magazines, we use them all the time; sometimes we are not even aware that they were originally coined by him.

His striking images could, in turn, deflate fallacies or vividly bring home complex principles. His jokes were irrefutable; he could invent at lightning speed surprising short-cuts to reach the truth. Thus, for instance, to those who said, “My country, right or wrong,” he would reply, “My mother, drunk or sober.” Or again, on democracy: “Democracy is like blowing your nose: you may not do it well, but you ought to do it yourself.”

On the difficult problem of original sin and man’s fall from innocence, one of his comments shed an unusual, yet illuminating light: “If you wanted to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky, you would slap him on the back and say, ‘Be a man.’ No one who wished to dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth explorer would slap him on the back and say, ‘Be a crocodile.’”

The baroque eccentricity of such images led shallow critics to overlook the depth and seriousness of his thought, and he was constantly accused of being frivolous. But what is frivolity and what is seriousness? Chesterton explained:

A man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels, or lambs with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous, for he is taking one mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. But a man who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious view of the universe. The more widely different the topics talked of, the more serious and universal must be the philosophy which talks of them. The mark of the light and thoughtless writer is the harmony of his subject matter. The mark of the thoughtful writer is his apparent diversity.

Reading Chesterton today, one is constantly amazed by the uncanny accuracy of so many of his analyses, by the prophetic quality of so many of his warnings — some of which were issued as early as the beginning of the twentieth century. There is a timeliness, an immediacy, an urgency in his writing, which none of his famous contemporaries can match. (How much of the social commentary of Bernard Shaw or H.G. Wells still bears scrutiny today?)

I would like to provide quickly a series of random samples, suggesting both the wide range of Chesterton’s observations and the sharp relevance which so many of these still present for us now.

On politics (from a portrait he made of an important statesman of his time): “He had about the fundamentals of politics and ethics this curious quality of vagueness, which I have found so often in men holding high responsibilities. For public men all seem to become hazier as they mount higher… I think I could say with some truth that politicians have no politics .”

The truth of this striking insight is confirmed to us every day. The other day I happened to be reading the newly published memoirs of J.-F. Revel, Le Voleur dans la maison vide . Revel, who held for a while the portfolio of cultural affairs in François Mitterrand’s shadow cabinet (when the latter was still leader of the Opposition in France), paints a portrait of this consummate political acrobat, which appears cruelly true and verifies in its paradoxical conclusion the accuracy of Chesterton’s observation.

Revel wrote, “The trouble with Mitterrand was that he had no interest in politics ”—Mitterrand was so totally absorbed, all the time, with cunning political manoeuvres and manipulations, he was possessed with such an obsessive passion for political means , that he could no longer care for political ends . His exclusive concern was how to obtain and how to retain political power — but he never reflected on the question: political power for what purpose ? (Paul Hasluck’s The Chance of Politics is another recent book which offers further illustrations of this same phenomenon.)

On the Church, in its relation to the world and its times: “The Church is the only thing that can save a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of one’s own time. We do not want a Church that will move with the world. We want a Church that will move the world.”

This utterance reminds me of a remarkable dialogue between Louis Massignon and Pope Pius XII. Massignon was a great Orientalist scholar (specialising in the study of ancient Islamic mysticism) and he was also a personal friend of the Pope. When the first war between Israel and the Arabs broke out, he urged the Pope to issue a solemn statement to ensure the protection of the Holy Places in Jerusalem. The Pope was hesitant: neither the Jews nor the Arabs were likely to pay attention to his words, and he objected: “Who would listen?” To which Massignon made this superb reply: “You are the Pope: you do not write in order to be read — you write in order to state the truth.” (Massignon died in 1962; it is a pity he did not live to know the pontificate of John Paul II.)