The Defendant | Page 3

the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange
thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have

actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of
the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our
eyes that have changed.
The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not.
Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and
secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody,
and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican.
The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives
and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other
people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that
if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto
death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of
God. Jesus Christ was crucified, it may be remembered, not because of
anything he said about God, but on a charge of saying that a man could
in three days pull down and rebuild the Temple. Every one of the great
revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have
been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the
slowness of men in realizing its goodness. The prophet who is stoned is
not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a rejected lover. He suffers
from an unrequited attachment to things in general.
It becomes increasingly apparent, therefore, that the world is in a
permanent danger of being misjudged. That this is no fanciful or
mystical idea may be tested by simple examples. The two absolutely
basic words 'good' and 'bad,' descriptive of two primal and inexplicable
sensations, are not, and never have been, used properly. Things that are
bad are not called good by any people who experience them; but things
that are good are called bad by the universal verdict of humanity.
Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as
pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself;
but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife,
which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which
men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare
occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the
middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke

a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as
it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What
we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we
call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad
cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad
civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to
call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad,
but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory
may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not
make ivory black.
Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged
perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good
enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the
ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress
should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have
investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of
them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but
eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter
and diamonds into the sea. I have found that every man is disposed to
call the green leaf of the tree a little less green than it is, and the snow
of Christmas a little less white than it is; therefore I have imagined that
the main business of a man, however humble, is defence. I have
conceived that a defendant is chiefly required when worldlings despise
the world--that a counsel for the defence would not have been out of
place in that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary and
Man was rejected of men.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS
One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is
undervalued is the example of