The Everlasting Man
PERHAPS MEDICAL MEN do not talk much about “alternatives” today, but not many years ago they were much concerned with this breed of drugs. The name sufficiently defines their supposed action in “altering” the ways of some forward organ and bringing it back to normal paths. Mr. Chesterton’s book is a powerful ‘‘alternative,” and the drug which is its most active ingredient is the reductio ad absurdum. How many mental constitutions will be benefited by partaking of the medicine exhibited, none can say, but no one can study this book without feeling that its powerful argument and close reasoning, as well as its brilliant flashes of wit, ought to be effective in the case of intelligent and impartial persons. “What is the disease?” may be asked after this exordium. An example will explain, and it shall not be one given by Mr. Chesterton, but one taken from a book written by a man who has contributed largely to the advancement of prehistoric studies. It gives his idea of early man.
Man’s voice at that time was probably not an articulate voice, but a jabber, a shout, a roar. A shriek or groan of pain is heard—a shout of alarm or a roar of fury. Loud hilarious sounds as of strange laughing are heard; and quick, jabbering, threatening sounds of quarreling. Coughing is heard, but no sound of fear, or hate, or love is expressed in articulate words.
Further on he says a great deal about the hairy individuals who cannot talk; in fact their color, their contours and their entire life story are detailed as if they were a living race of savages on some Pacific isle. Will it be believed that all this story is built upon a few bones and a few stones shaped by the hand of man? That is the kind of fancy set down as fact which Mr. Chesterton attacks in the first part of his book. His sample quotation is from some worthy who tells the world that prehistoric man “wore no clothes”—a strange fancy to draw from the same sources—stones and bones—and regardless of the fact that clothes can hardly have been expected to survive for thousands of years as these harder substances have. What is really known about these earliest men is that they had skulls at least as large as, and often larger than our own; that they could and did make admirably shaped implements out of flint, which proves that they had the hands of trained artisans, and that they believed in a future life since they buried their dead with food, implements and red ochre, all for use in the future life—the last probably that the deceased might parade there sufficiently adorned. Mr. Chesterton declares that the kind of rubbish which he attacks arises from the habit of thinking that early man was a recently evolved animal and reading into his remains what might be imagined to be the activities of such a being. His “alternative” is to say—"Come, let us think of him as an animal and see how what we know of him tallies with that idea.”
Let us first of all abstract from disjecta membra, like the Trinil skull whose one-time possessor has received the resounding name of Pithecanthropus erectus. That fragment boldly described by most writers in the English language as belonging to a man, is equally boldly declared to be no more than that of an ape by most writers in the German language; and as something betwixt and between by most writers in the French language. Since all these cohorts consist of men of real fame it must be obvious to any impartial observer that the bone of contention in question is not one upon which should be built—as have been built—towers of pretentious information nor ‘‘reconstructions,” in which, as Mr. Chesterton remarks, “every hair of his head is numbered.”
Setting aside such things and coming to what is known as occurring in sufficient masses to justify a legitimate opinion, the facts mentioned above appear. Animals, were they? Well, as the author asks, were monkeys ever known to inter their dead—still more, to inter them ceremonially—still more, to bury nuts with them for their use in the forests of the hereafter?
Where again is a monkey, or any other animal, found making the faintest attempt at delineating his fellow creatures? Nowhere of course, yet the successors of the early men under discussion adorned the caves of Spain and of South France with pictures of the animals of their period which excite the admiration of modern artists; and their envy, when they consider the very inadequate outfit with which these early craftsmen were provided. And as Mr. Chesterton well says, art is “the signature of man,” his hallmark and nothing else.
To talk of an animal in this connection is ridiculous nonsense; or to suppose that people capable of such ideas as the immortality of the soul, and of such works as those of the cave artists, were half beasts, incapable of talking to one another, is so preposterous that one cannot imagine such an idea occurring to any instructed mind. When one adopts the author’s plan and looks at man as an animal, all the picture is out of drawing, for man is always man, “and there’s an end on’t.”
I must leave the consideration of the greater part of the first section of the book merely by saying that in the description and analysis of so-called primitive religions, philosophies, devil-worships—the pantheons of Greece and Rome and the later “mystery” religions, which hung like clouds round the dawn and early light of Christianity—the reader will find matter so interesting and so admirably dealt with as to captivate the mind and fill the imagination. Throughout this and the second part of the book there is constant evidence of what someone has said about the author—that he has an unrivaled power of seeing the obvious. To the superficial reader that may seem to be anything but a compliment, but it is about as high as one can well be paid, since it should be clear to all who think that a very large proportion of writers wholly fail to see the simple explanations which lie right beneath their noses in their frantic search for the unusual.
The author’s piercing obviousness is displayed in his treatment of the mystery of the Holy Trinity; the Oxford Movement; and comparative anatomy—surely diverse subjects.
Little space is left to speak of part two, incomparably the more important, since it deals with the second Man. The first man, of the earth earthy, was a cave-dweller as we know. One often forgets that the second Man, of the heavens heavenly, began His career on earth in a cave and that is the striking thought with which Mr. Chesterton commences his study. I am sure that no one who reads this study, especially the chapter entitled The Strangest Story, will quarrel with the statement that no more arresting account in brief of the Gospel has ever been set down in print.
The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the Gospels does indeed utter in words of almost heart-breaking beauty His pity for our broken hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words which He utters…. The popular imagery carries a great deal to excess the sentiment of “gentle Jesus meek and mild.”... While the art may be insufficient, I am not sure that the instinct is unsound. In any case there is something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner of a street or coming out into the spaces of a market-place, to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure as it turned upon a generation of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite.
Mr. Chesterton has, it seems to this reviewer, who is tolerably familiar with his writings, given us the best thing that he has yet produced—for his reception into the Church seems to have implanted in him a new assurance, and in his sayings, a new pungency. It is a book which no thinking man can afford to neglect. It will undoubtedly run into further editions and the opportunity of the next should be taken to correct the over-numerous misprints and omissions of short words which disfigure the present one, and to add an index.
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