THE ARROWS OF DESIRE

New Zealand Tablet, 6 May 1920, Page 18

THE ARROWS OF DESIRE

(By G. K. Chesterton, in the New Witness.) 1 have recently given myself a present of a toy bow and arrows; and started happily to lose all my arrows in the trees and the tops of houses, in a way that brings back all the paradise of boyhood. But in the course of losing them I have learnt something of . the sort that I did not learn in boyhood I have been interested to notice a certain quality in the very nature even of such amateur archery. A quality belongs to the bow, which belongs to a number of things our fathers used in that best period of civilisation when it was not too civilised. Its shortest description is a sense of liberty, its more exact definition is a power of indefinite mastery and manipulation of degree. That is, one can not only do a thing, but do it more or less, down to the finest shade of -indifference. 1 have noticed the same thing about another of the older and more natural implements; a quill pen, which is both lighter and more flexible than a steel pen. Wc have all heard that things of the West are reversed in the East, so that their very writing runs backwards, and it is said that the Japanese can w rite with a paint brush, as Europeans can draw with a pen. But writing with a quill suggests something of the freedom of writing with a paint brush. And the quill comes from the same sort of flying wildfowl, the types of freedom, from which, come the feathers of the arrows. You can launch an arrow lightly or heavily; you can send it so that it seems to go like a thunderbolt or so as to alight, by comparison, like a falling leaf. At least you can do it with a boy’s bow; and in the former case I can feel as if I were the Angel of Death and in the latter enact the more congenial character of the God of Love. You cannot do this with fire-arms; which are after all modern machines, and therefore have something in them that goes beyond the purpose of man their maker. You cannot fire off a cannon, at a wealthy neighbor walking down the street, so that the cannon-ball alights on the tip of his nose and bounds harmlessly away. You can do something like this with a toy arrow; and it is my intention to try. For instance, I do not believe in political assassination; and 1 am sorry it lias broken out again in Ireland. If Lord .French had been killed, I should have felt bound in some sense to respect him, as a soldier who had dic'd doing what he thought his duty. And Lord French has played the fool far too much lately to deserve to die like that. But I might have tickled him up with my toy arrows, to the universal satisfaction of the Commonwealth. I do not want Mr. Lloyd George to be shot; but I should like him shot a, little. And you cannot shoot a man a little with a rifle .or a revolver. You can, as the phrase goes, wing him; if one can even metaphorically conceive a politician as, clad with wings. But that is only a local hurt, not a . lesser , hurt; it .does not give the pistol the fine levity of the pea-shooter. I want the Prime Minister not really murdered, but rather murdered. And the nearest approach to that could ho managed with a toy bow and arrows. In short, the gun, as compared .with the bow, may very well be taken as a typo, of what may bo called German civilisation. It even bears a certain resemblance to German strategy. For the point is that when the cannonball lias left the cannon, and is once on its way towards the Prime Minister, 1 have no more control over the cannon-ball; it will travel to the full extent .of . a fixed mechanical range, not specially fitted to, the * individual case. I cannot pat the Prime Minister with the cannonball, or strike him with the cannon-ball, or merely give him a good hard , knock with the cannon-ball. I cannot change my mind at the last moment and let it swerve in its course to take in Mr. Montagu and Sir Auckland Gecldes. Perfection in this purpose can only be obtained by some weapon even simpler than the bow; the sword or even the stick. But just as the gun would launch the missile, so the German strategic school launched the whole military assault. It went like clockwork; and it could not mend itself any more than clockwork. Opposed to it was that other spirit, at once more subtle and more simple, which watches and waits for opportunity, which modifies itself for the occasion and is not ashamed of changing its mind. A machine cannot change its mind; because it has no mind-to change. What Joffro meant by nibbling the Germans is very much what I mean by tickling the Prime Minister. For those to whom civilisation does not mean merely complexity, that is clockwork, the very highest civilisation always consists in a certain artistic mastery of degree, a power over proportion, vested in personality. In less pedantic words, the highest flower of tho highest civilisation is liberty. By our contention, the fruit of - which that is the flower is property.

The point " about property, in its ; smaller ; and saner sense, is that matter is subject to just this infinite modification of treatment a modification much too delicate for definition. I cannot receive directions from an official, or report to an official, or even be responsible to an official, about exactly what I want to do with my little bow and arrows. I can accept certain rigid but exceptional rules laid down in . the form of vetoes; as that I must not shoot the Baptist minister even through the hat, for fear of shooting him through the head, or at any rate in the eye. But I cannot explain to the Baptist minister, and still less to the policeman, why I wish sometimes to shoot an arrow far into the air and let it fall in exactly the same place (which it seldom does) and why I sometimes rejoice in the very thought that it will never return at all. I can accept a negative rule that I must not break my neighbor’s windows; but I cannot explain the exact risk I run of breaking ray own windows, or why it is gratifying to have very nearly broken them. And if I cannot break my own windows for the mere whim of shooting a toy arrow, then I live no longer in a free country. Of course it will be answered that my bow is only a toy; and that even social reform does not propose to interfere with toys. 1 am not so sure of this! for I should never be surprised if the anti-militarists succeeded in forbidding children to play with soldiers; or even if my little bow were held suggestive of the long bow of my medieval and romantic exaggerations of history. But I have also a more solid and serious answer; which is this, that the evil trend of social reform is proved in the very fact that I have to fall back on the example of a toy. It is a trifle, and the citizen is not allowed any liberty or lordship except over trifles. In a healthy state many things better worth doing, even than playing the fool, would proceed from the personal initiative of the citizen. At present everything proceeds to the. citizen; and is accepted by him, when it is not merely imposed upon him. He is not the archer, but the target; the mark for every shaft of official folly or educational faddism. In a healthy state his force would be centrifugal as well as centripetal; and he would scatter something better than a boy’s arrows. As it is, we might very well see the day when the citizen is not allowed tools, but only allowed toys. Lest he should develop the stubborn individualism of the peasant, he will perhaps bo forbidden a spade and wateringpot in his own garden, and only allowed a spade and pail at the seaside; that hygienic resort. Lest woman be again degraded by the horrors of domesticity, she may be forbidden to have a house, and only allowed to have a doll’s house. It would not be the only way in which the State is treating us as if we were all infants. But considering what the State does, even to infants, I think it much more likely that it will not allow the adults to own anything at all. With the gloom and gravity of a defeated general who gives up his sword, I shall give up my little bow and arrows. Meanwhile, I am still allowed to play with it in the garden, much to my gratification ; for to my taste a winter garden is even more fascinating than a summer one. The trees are a more delicate tracery, : the skies have a more subtle color; and a soft and yet mighty wind is bending all those slender trees into the curves of countless bows, with a sound as of countless bow-strings. With the sweep of the lines and the light thunder of the sound, there drifts back into my memory that glorious dream of • Mr. Arthur Machen, where an army of dead archers cried

‘•‘Array” around the white horse of our paladin and patron. I could fancy that the last birds darting here and there were bolts flying above a battle; and that the very forests were bowed in giant resistance all around me. like the bending of the bows of England.