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a man who is not clever. And when we know that we know English history.
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Heretics Gilbert K. Chesterton
This new aristocratic fiction must have caught the attention of everybody who has read the best
fiction for the last fifteen years. It is that genuine or alleged literature of the Smart Set which
represents that set as distinguished, not only by smart dresses, but by smart sayings. To the bad
baronet, to the good baronet, to the romantic and misunderstood baronet who is supposed to be a
bad baronet, but is a good baronet, this school has added a conception undreamed of in the former
years the conception of an amusing baronet. The aristocrat is not merely to be taller than mortal
men and stronger and handsomer, he is also to be more witty. He is the long man with the short
epigram. Many eminent, and deservedly eminent, modern novelists must accept some responsibility
for having supported this worst form of snobbishness an intellectual snobbishness. The talented
author of Dodo is responsible for having in some sense created the fashion as a fashion. Mr.
Hichens, in the Green Carnation, reaffirmed the strange idea that young noblemen talk well;
though his case had some vague biographical foundation, and in consequence an excuse. Mrs.
Craigie is considerably guilty in the matter, although, or rather because, she has combined the
aristocratic note with a note of some moral and even religious sincerity. When you are saving a
man s soul, even in a novel, it is indecent to mention that he is a gentleman. Nor can blame in this
matter be altogether removed from a man of much greater ability, and a man who has proved his
possession of the highest of human instinct, the romantic instinct I mean Mr. Anthony Hope. In
a galloping, impossible melodrama like The Prisoner of Zenda, the blood of kings fanned an
excellent fantastic thread or theme. But the blood of kings is not a thing that can be taken seriously.
And when, for example, Mr. Hope devotes so much serious and sympathetic study to the man called
Tristram of Blent, a man who throughout burning boyhood thought of nothing but a silly old estate,
we feel even in Mr. Hope the hint of this excessive concern about the oligarchic idea. It is hard for
any ordinary person to feel so much interest in a young man whose whole aim is to own the house
of Blent at the time when every other young man is owning the stars.
Mr. Hope, however, is a very mild case, and in him there is not only an element of romance,
but also a fine element of irony which warns us against taking all this elegance too seriously. Above
all, he shows his sense in not making his noblemen so incredibly equipped with impromptu repartee.
This habit of insisting on the wit of the wealthier classes is the last and most servile of all the
servilities. It is, as I have said, immeasurably more contemptible than the snobbishness of the
novelette which describes the nobleman as smiling like an Apollo or riding a mad elephant. These
may be exaggerations of beauty and courage, but beauty and courage are the unconscious ideals
of aristocrats, even of stupid aristocrats.
The nobleman of the novelette may not be sketched with any very close or conscientious attention
to the daily habits of noblemen. But he is something more important than a reality; he is a practical
ideal. The gentleman of fiction may not copy the gentleman of real life; but the gentleman of real
life is copying the gentleman of fiction. He may not be particularly good-looking, but he would
rather be good-looking than anything else; he may not have ridden on a mad elephant, but he rides
a pony as far as possible with an air as if he had. And, upon the whole, the upper class not only
especially desire these qualities of beauty and courage, but in some degree, at any rate, especially
possess them. Thus there is nothing really mean or sycophantic about the popular literature which
makes all its marquises seven feet high. It is snobbish, but it is not servile. Its exaggeration is based
on an exuberant and honest admiration; its honest admiration is based upon something which is in
some degree, at any rate, really there. The English lower classes do not fear the English upper
classes in the least; nobody could. They simply and freely and sentimentally worship them. The
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Heretics Gilbert K. Chesterton
strength of the aristocracy is not in the aristocracy at all; it is in the slums. It is not in the House of
Lords; it is not in the Civil Service; it is not in the Government offices; it is not even in the huge
and disproportionate monopoly of the English land. It is in a certain spirit. It is in the fact that when
a navvy wishes to praise a man, it comes readily to his tongue to say that he has behaved like a
gentleman. From a democratic point of view he might as well say that he had behaved like a viscount.
The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies,
on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor.
It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.
The snobbishness of bad literature, then, is not servile; but the snobbishness of good literature
is servile. The old-fashioned halfpenny romance where the duchesses sparkled with diamonds was
not servile; but the new romance where they sparkle with epigrams is servile. For in thus attributing
a special and startling degree of intellect and conversational or controversial power to the upper
classes, we are attributing something which is not especially their virtue or even especially their
aim. We are, in the words of Disraeli (who, being a genius and not a gentleman, has perhaps
primarily to answer for the introduction of this method of flattering the gentry), we are performing
the essential function of flattery which is flattering the people for the qualities they have not got.
Praise may be gigantic and insane without having any quality of flattery so long as it is praise of
something that is noticeably in existence. A man may say that a giraffe s head strikes the stars, or
that a whale fills the German Ocean, and still be only in a rather excited state about a favourite
animal. But when he begins to congratulate the giraffe on his feathers, and the whale on the elegance
of his legs, we find ourselves confronted with that social element which we call flattery. The middle
and lower orders of London can sincerely, though not perhaps safely, admire the health and grace
of the English aristocracy. And this for the very simple reason that the aristocrats are, upon the
whole, more healthy and graceful than the poor. But they cannot honestly admire the wit of the
aristocrats. And this for the simple reason that the aristocrats are not more witty than the poor, but
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