My relations with the readers of this page have been
long and pleasant, but--perhaps for that very reason--
I feel that the time has come when I ought to confess
the one great crime of my life. It happened a long time ago;
but it is not uncommon for a belated burst of remorse
to reveal such dark episodes long after they have occurred.
It has nothing to do with the orgies of the Anti-Puritan League.
That body is so offensively respectable that a newspaper,
in describing it the other day, referred to my friend
Mr. Edgar Jepson as Canon Edgar Jepson; and it is believed
that similar titles are intended for all of us. No; it is
not by the conduct of Archbishop Crane, of Dean Chesterton,
of the Rev. James Douglas, of Monsignor Bland, and even of that
fine and virile old ecclesiastic, Cardinal Nesbit, that I wish
(or rather, am driven by my conscience) to make this declaration.
The crime was committed in solitude and without accomplices.
Alone I did it. Let me, with the characteristic thirst
of penitents to get the worst of the confession over, state it
first of all in its most dreadful and indefensible form.
There is at the present moment in a town in Germany (unless he
has died of rage on discovering his wrong), a restaurant-keeper
to whom I still owe twopence. I last left his open-air restaurant
knowing that I owed him twopence. I carried it away under his
nose, despite the fact that the nose was a decidedly Jewish one.
I have never paid him, and it is highly improbable that I ever shall.
How did this villainy come to occur in a life which has been,
generally speaking, deficient in the dexterity necessary for fraud?
The story is as follows--and it has a moral, though there
may not be room for that.
. . . . .
It is a fair general rule for those travelling on the Continent that
the easiest way of talking in a foreign language is to talk philosophy.
The most difficult kind of talking is to talk about common necessities.
The reason is obvious. The names of common necessities vary completely
with each nation and are generally somewhat odd and quaint.
How, for instance, could a Frenchman suppose that a coalbox would
be called a "scuttle"? If he has ever seen the word scuttle
it has been in the Jingo Press, where the "policy of scuttle"
is used whenever we give up something to a small Power like Liberals,
instead of giving up everything to a great Power, like Imperialists.
What Englishman in Germany would be poet enough to guess that the Germans
call a glove a "hand-shoe." Nations name their necessities by nicknames,
so to speak. They call their tubs and stools by quaint, elvish,
and almost affectionate names, as if they were their own children!
But any one can argue about abstract things in a foreign language who has
ever got as far as Exercise IV. in a primer. For as soon as he can
put a sentence together at all he finds that the words used in abstract
or philosophical discussions are almost the same in all nations.
They are the same, for the simple reason that they all come
from the things that were the roots of our common civilisation.
From Christianity, from the Roman Empire, from the mediaeval Church,
or the French Revolution. "Nation," "citizen," "religion," "philosophy,"
"authority," "the Republic," words like these are nearly the same
in all the countries in which we travel. Restrain, therefore,
your exuberant admiration for the young man who can argue with six
French atheists when he first lands at Dieppe. Even I can do that.
But very likely the same young man does not know the French for a
shoe-horn. But to this generalisation there are three great exceptions.
(1) In the case of countries that are not European at all, and have
never had our civic conceptions, or the old Latin scholarship.
I do not pretend that the Patagonian phrase for "citizenship"
at once leaps to the mind, or that a Dyak's word for "the Republic"
has been familiar to me from the nursery. (2) In the case of Germany,
where, although the principle does apply to many words such as "nation"
and "philosophy," it does not apply so generally, because Germany
has had a special and deliberate policy of encouraging the purely
German part of its language. (3) In the case where one does not know
any of the language at all, as is generally the case with me.
. . . . .
Such at least was my situation on the dark day on which I committed
my crime. Two of the exceptional conditions which I have mentioned
were combined. I was walking about a German town, and I knew no German.
I knew, however, two or three of those great and solemn words which
hold our European civilisation together--one of which is "cigar."
As it was a hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort
of beer-garden, and ordered a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the
lager, and paid for it. I smoked the cigar, forgot to pay for it,
and walked away, gazing rapturously at the royal outline of the
Taunus mountains. After about ten minutes, I suddenly remembered
that I had not paid for the cigar. I went back to the place of
refreshment, and put down the money. But the proprietor also had
forgotten the cigar, and he merely said guttural things in a tone
of query, asking me, I suppose, what I wanted. I said "cigar," and
he gave me a cigar. I endeavoured while putting down the money to
wave away the cigar with gestures of refusal. He thought that my
rejection was of the nature of a condemnation of that particular cigar,
and brought me another. I whirled my arms like a windmill,
seeking to convey by the sweeping universality of my gesture
that my rejection was a rejection of cigars in general,
not of that particular article. He mistook this for the ordinary
impatience of common men, and rushed forward, his hands
filled with miscellaneous cigars, pressing them upon me.
In desperation I tried other kinds of pantomime, but the more
cigars I refused the more and more rare and precious cigars
were brought out of the deeps and recesses of the establishment.
I tried in vain to think of a way of conveying to him the fact
that I had already had the cigar. I imitated the action
of a citizen smoking, knocking off and throwing away a cigar.
The watchful proprietor only thought I was rehearsing
(as in an ecstasy of anticipation) the joys of the cigar
he was going to give me. At last I retired baffled:
he would not take the money and leave the cigars alone.
So that this restaurant-keeper (in whose face a love of money
shone like the sun at noonday) flatly and firmly refused
to receive the twopence that I certainly owed him; and I took
that twopence of his away with me and rioted on it for months.
I hope that on the last day the angels will break the truth
very gently to that unhappy man.
. . . . .
This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud,
and the moral of it is this--that civilisation is founded
upon abstractions. The idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed
by physical motions at all, because it is an abstract idea.
And civilisation obviously would be nothing without debt.
So when hard-headed fellows who study scientific sociology
(which does not exist) come and tell you that civilisation
is material or indifferent to the abstract, just ask yourselves
how many of the things that make up our Society, the Law,
or the Stocks and Shares, or the National Debt, you would be
able to convey with your face and your ten fingers by grinning
and gesticulating to a German innkeeper.