Cannibalism and Chivalry

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 29, 27 July 1922, Page 9

Cannibalism and Chivalry

(By G. K. Chesterton, in the New Witness.)

A distinguished lady has just returned from a visit to a very interesting community, such as the most enlightened and experimental sociologists love to study. It has already experimented in many of the innovations still only tentatively advocated in the newspapers; for instance, it is a society in which women propose. Nearly everything about it strikes the same modern note; we are told that tho flappers, or very : young women, have a considerable emotional experience, and that degree of progress which some call precocity. It is true that when the precocious lady has proposed to the more or less complacent gentleman, other things sometimes follow. Sometimes the gentleman hits the lady on the head with a club. Sometimes he even eats her. But from an enlarged point of view, I am not sure that this last detail ought to militate against the claim of the society to be truly modern. We know that the mark of modern emancipation is the elimnation of artificial boundaries; why not the artificial boundary between one kind of cold meat and another? We know it means tho enlarging of our Bibles and prayer books till they contain all the Scriptures and litanies of all the religions of the world. Why not the enlargement of our cookery books and bills of fare, until they cover all the varied customs of the various tribes of the world? We know it specialises in the idea of assimilation, or the digestion of different systems into a substantial unity; and where could there be a more perfect example of assimilation than anthropophagy? The very word contains the Green substance of the word philanthropy. Indeed the word philanthropy, by a, slight extension of its meaning, might be used as a euphemism for cannibalism. I once saw an ethical hymn book, full of religious poems purged of the irrelevant expletive "God." In this an old and familiar hymn reappeared in the form, "Nearer, mankind, to thee, nearer to thee." It always suggested to me the conditions of a suffocating crush in the Tube. But I am not sure that the expedient of cannibalism does not more aptly represent tho idea of the hymn, or even solve the problem of the Tube. It seems o to be tho most effective and economical way m which many could be combined in one; and we could unite tho assimilation of substance with the amplification of space. Nothing stands in the way of this reform except one of these sentimental prejudices or superstitious fears, which we are more and more shedding in every other department of life.

Anyhow, what interests me at the moment about the account of the Cannibal Islands given by the intrepid lad? explorer is not the second point about cannibalism but the first point about courtship. It is perhaps the more practical and immediately relevant of the two. Progress goes step by step; and we shall probably sec ladies obtain the privilege of proposing before they obtain the further privilege of being eaten. And the fact that the women who asked tho men to marry them are also the women who allow the men to brain them interests me very much in a larger connection. It interests me very much; but it does not surprise me at all. The two things seem to me to go together quite naturally and even inevitably. I think I should always have argued in the abstract that it must bo so. Describe to me some remote or imaginary Utopia in which a man has a harem so literally like a herd of cattle that he can even knock a wife on the head and eat her; and I think I could have deduced from that fact alone that the woman proposed to the man as in the' most advanced novels of the Suffragettes. - '

In those novels and the newspapers that review them it always seems to be assumed that the custom of letting the proposal come from the man indicates in some way the greater despotism, or at least the greater dignity of the man. In itself it obviously indicates the exact opposite. The despot does not;, crave an audience with his. subject, or beg a boon of his subject.' The subject craves the audience from the despot, and begs tho boon of the despot. The King does not petition the people; the people petition the King. In short, it is certain that the custom, as it has existed in moderately^ recent European history ,; at least,. is a part of the chivalric idea of a certain kind of dignity belonging to the woman which does not belong to the man. Now it is perfectly consistent to say .that the chivalric

notion is all moonshine. It is •perfectly consistent to say that any notion of a special female dignity is all moonshine. Some of us may content ourselves with answering that Diana is not so easily defeated, and that moonshine has to all appearance come to (stay. But it is perfectly logical, on certain premises, to deny the dignity of Diana. It is quite tenable that women would have been happier if they had always been entitled to propose. It is also very tenable indeed that women would have been happier if they had always been in a. harem. The method meets hundreds of the most pressing modern problems, from the proportions of the sexes to the burden of reproduction. And for that matter I cannot see that it is untenable that they would have been happier if they had always been eaten; 'considering how much more comfortable and contented are most of the creatures whom we keep for eating compared with the numerous human beings whom we never provide with enough to eat.

All this is quite tenable, and upon certain first principles quite logical; and in the same sense it is quite logical to say that all forms of ceremonial respect paid to women as such are absurd. What is not tenable or logical, or even intelligent, is to deny the difference between a thing being absurd and a thing being meant to be absurd. It is one thing to say that we ought not to look up to an idol, and another to say that we look up to it because we look down on it. A man may say that he is of so detached and rational a spirit that a man on a throne is no more impressive to him than a man in a pillory. He may be per- , fectly sincere; and it might almost be worth while to test his sincerity by putting-him in the pillory. But if he says .that people put a man on a throne because they meant to put him in a pillory, then the test has had a clearer scientific result and he may well be put in a straight waistcoat. He may say that a mitre is like a dunce's cap in a sense that the bishop is a fool, but not in the sense that the congregation meant to make a fool of him; if he seriously says that," we have not to look far for the fool. It may be silly that the Lord Mayor of London should be encumbered with a great golden chain; but it would hardly be more sensible to go about saying: "In London they chain up the Lord Mayor, and exhibit him like a bear or a monkey, to the derision of the mob." It may be silly that he should travel in a great coach; but it would not be sensible to say that he is dragged in a cage or box as a captive of the coachman. And the same elementary sanity which teaches us that the mayor is not dragged at the chariot wheels of his own coachmen, or that the mitre is not put on the bishop as an extinguisher to make him invisible to the multitude, ought to tell us that the custom of the man coming to the woman instead of the woman to the man is meant to increase the prestige of the woman; corresponding as it does to numberless other ceremonial relations of the same sort. Of course it is always possible, in this as in numberless other things, to confuse the living issue by all sorts of hazy conjectures about evolution. The thing may not have been exactly like this in remote or prehistoric conditions when nobody knows what .it was like. It may have been and may be still (indeed it certainly is) complicated by. other social ideals and necessities that do give a superiority to the male for certain purposes and on certain occasions. But the instinct which most civilised Europeans feel against the reversal of parts in this matter, except for special causes or in special circumstances, , is quite certainly, so far as it goes, the instinct of chivalry. It is quite certainly not merely the instinct of barbaric domination. And the proof of this fact, which is already obvious a priori, is to be found in the very interesting experience of the lady traveller which I quoted at the beginning of this article. The place where the woman does really make the proposal is exactly the place where she is really put in the pot. It "is perhaps worth while to make a note on this very natural fact, because most of the current ideas on all these matters of sexual dignity and sexual difference seem to be in an almost unlimited chaos. It .is not so much that I 'disagree with them as "that, I can never exactly discover what it is with which I have to agree or disagree. I know what I myself think; and it is something exceedingly dull and commonplace, because it is what the whole- commonsense of Christendom thinks and has generally thought. ;. I think women should have a certain place of dignity

specially preserved for them by the manners of civilisation, because their highest function is one which in its nature requires protection and ; a certain degree of' withdrawal from extreme activities and competitions. There are a great many exceptions to this rule; and I am quite ready to make allowance for the exceptions, but not to allow them to disprove the rule. I am most emphatically not prepared to treat women, or men either, merely as individuals', as if there were no such thing as families. That is what I think; but what the reformers who rebuke me think I have never been able to discover. Sometimes they seem to be protesting against my unchivalrous conduct in wishing to insult woinen with chivalry. Sometimes they seem to suggest that I am in favor of hitting women because I explain why they should not bo hit. " Sometimes I am told to pity the toil and tragedy of the lonely working woman; sometimes I am told it is pitiless to thwart her when she rushes on such a tragedy or sells herself into the slavery of.such a toil. I am perfectly ready to pity everybody in the tangle and muddle of the modern world; but the person I pity most is the philosopher or historian whose duty it shall be to describe this modern movement in anything like logical or intelligible words; or to tell posterity what these people really wanted and what they were really driving at.