The Defendant | Page 2

it in what humanity
accepts. The diamond is easy enough to find in the dust-bin. The
difficulty is to find it in the drawing-room.' I must admit, for my part,
without the slightest shame, that I have found a great many very
excellent things in drawing-rooms. For example, I found Mr.
Masterman in a drawing-room. But I merely mention this purely ethical

attack in order to state, in as few sentences as possible, my difference
from the theory of optimism and progress therein enunciated. At first
sight it would seem that the pessimist encourages improvement. But in
reality it is a singular truth that the era in which pessimism has been
cried from the house-tops is also that in which almost all reform has
stagnated and fallen into decay. The reason of this is not difficult to
discover. No man ever did, and no man ever can, create or desire to
make a bad thing good or an ugly thing beautiful. There must be some
germ of good to be loved, some fragment of beauty to be admired. The
mother washes and decks out the dirty or careless child, but no one can
ask her to wash and deck out a goblin with a heart like hell. No one can
kill the fatted calf for Mephistopheles. The cause which is blocking all
progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears
that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is
good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be
conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious
literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that
things must be loved first and improved afterwards.
G. K. C_.
* * * * *
THE DEFENDANT
INTRODUCTION
In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes
that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a level,
and make us all realize that we live on a planet with a sloping roof, you
will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with loose rocks
and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose. The whole
might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It is often
difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come together
except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination
conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it is
always associated with one idea, recurrent and at last instinctive. The
scene was the scene of the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, a

prophet as much more gigantic than after-prophets as the boulders are
more gigantic than the pebbles. He spoke some words--words that
seemed shameful and tremendous--and the world, in terror, buried him
under a wilderness of stones. The place is the monument of an ancient
fear.
If we followed the same mood of fancy, it would he more difficult to
imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth that
primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried under
the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare.
Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more
commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation--it
is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of
minor poetry. It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that
our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. If we
weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what is
the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he was
stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in
spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not
been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the
pointing out of the earth.
Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope--the
telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt.
For the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden
and as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length
of human history--that men are continually tending to undervalue their
environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves.
The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the
tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible
humility.
This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox
forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his
environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself.
This is