All Things Considered | Page 3

seem to have said a great
deal without getting out the point very clearly. Anonymous journalism
is dangerous, and is poisonous in our existing life simply because it is
so rapidly becoming an anonymous life. That is the horrible thing about
our contemporary atmosphere. Society is becoming a secret society.
The modern tyrant is evil because of his elusiveness. He is more
nameless than his slave. He is not more of a bully than the tyrants of
the past; but he is more of a coward. The rich publisher may treat the
poor poet better or worse than the old master workman treated the old
apprentice. But the apprentice ran away and the master ran after him.
Nowadays it is the poet who pursues and tries in vain to fix the fact of
responsibility. It is the publisher who runs away. The clerk of Mr.
Solomon gets the sack: the beautiful Greek slave of the Sultan Suliman
also gets the sack; or the sack gets her. But though she is concealed
under the black waves of the Bosphorus, at least her destroyer is not
concealed. He goes behind golden trumpets riding on a white elephant.
But in the case of the clerk it is almost as difficult to know where the
dismissal comes from as to know where the clerk goes to. It may be Mr.
Solomon or Mr. Solomon's manager, or Mr. Solomon's rich aunt in
Cheltenham, or Mr. Soloman's rich creditor in Berlin. The elaborate
machinery which was once used to make men responsible is now used
solely in order to shift the responsibility. People talk about the pride of
tyrants; but we in this age are not suffering from the pride of tyrants.
We are suffering from the shyness of tyrants; from the shrinking
modesty of tyrants. Therefore we must not encourage leader-writers to
be shy; we must not inflame their already exaggerated modesty. Rather
we must attempt to lure them to be vain and ostentatious; so that
through ostentation they may at last find their way to honesty.
The last indictment against this book is the worst of all. It is simply this:
that if all goes well this book will be unintelligible gibberish. For it is

mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their nature
accidental and incapable of enduring. Brief as is the career of such a
book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of the
philosophies that it attacks. In the end it will not matter to us whether
we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will
matter to us greatly on what side we fought.

COCKNEYS AND THEIR JOKES
A writer in the Yorkshire Evening Post is very angry indeed with my
performances in this column. His precise terms of reproach are, "Mr. G.
K. Chesterton is not a humourist: not even a Cockney humourist." I do
not mind his saying that I am not a humourist--in which (to tell the
truth) I think he is quite right. But I do resent his saying that I am not a
Cockney. That envenomed arrow, I admit, went home. If a French
writer said of me, "He is no metaphysician: not even an English
metaphysician," I could swallow the insult to my metaphysics, but I
should feel angry about the insult to my country. So I do not urge that I
am a humourist; but I do insist that I am a Cockney. If I were a
humourist, I should certainly be a Cockney humourist; if I were a saint,
I should certainly be a Cockney saint. I need not recite the splendid
catalogue of Cockney saints who have written their names on our noble
old City churches. I need not trouble you with the long list of the
Cockney humourists who have discharged their bills (or failed to
discharge them) in our noble old City taverns. We can weep together
over the pathos of the poor Yorkshireman, whose county has never
produced some humour not intelligible to the rest of the world. And we
can smile together when he says that somebody or other is "not even" a
Cockney humourist like Samuel Johnson or Charles Lamb. It is surely
sufficiently obvious that all the best humour that exists in our language
is Cockney humour. Chaucer was a Cockney; he had his house close to
the Abbey. Dickens was a Cockney; he said he could not think without
the London streets. The London taverns heard always the quaintest
conversation, whether it was Ben Johnson's at the Mermaid or Sam
Johnson's at the Cock. Even in our own time it may be noted that the
most vital and genuine humour is still written about London. Of this

type is the mild and humane irony