AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

except that one student wrote in the middle of his blank notebook, “Darwin
did a lot of harm.” I am not at all certain that he was wrong; but it was
something of a simplification of my reasons for being agnostic about the
agnostic deductions, in the debates about Lamarck and Mendel. A debate
about the history of religion with a very famous sceptic; who, when I tried to
talk about Greek cults or Asiatic asceticism, appeared to be unable to think of
anything except Jonah and the Whale. But it is the curse of this comic career
of lecturing that it seems to bring on the lighted stage nothing except
comedies; and I have already said that I do not think America takes them any
more seriously than I do. The real American commentary was serious and
sound; and none more so than that of an industrial master of machinery, who
said to me, “People must go back to the farm.”
I had pottered about in France ever since my father took me there as a boy;
and Paris was the only foreign capital I knew. I owe it to him that I was at least
a traveller and not a tripper. The distinction is not snobbish; indeed it is one
rather of epoch than education; half the trouble about the modern man is that
he is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.
The traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to see. A
true traveller in a primitive epic or folk-tale did not pretend to like a beautiful
princess because she was beautiful. It is still true of a poor sailor; of a tramp;
in short, of a traveller. Thus he need form no opinion of Paris newspapers; but
if he wanted to, he would probably read them. The tripper never reads them,
calls them rags, and knows as much about the rags as the chiffonnier who
picks them up with a spike. I will give only one case, since it recalls my
connection with a very early controversy. All England came to two great
moral conclusions about a man called Zola; or rather about two men both
called Zola. The first was merely a filthy Frenchman; a pornographer we jailed
by proxy even in his publisher. The second was a hero and martyr for the truth,
presumably tortured by the Inquisition--just like Galileo. The truth concerned
the Dreyfus Case; and as a journalist behind the scenes I soon found out the
truth was not so simple. Déroulède said, “Dreyfus may or may not be guilty;
but France is not guilty.” I say Dreyfus may have been innocent, but
Dreyfusards were not always innocent; even when they were English editors.
It was my first awful eye-opener about our press propaganda. I am not talking
of the conclusion but of the methods of the Dreyfusards. A quite independent
intelligent Scot, an Oxford friend of Oldershaw, told me they had practically
proposed forgery, by falsifying the size of handwriting. But the only point here
is Zola, who was first nasty and then noble; even in his very pictures, his brow
grew loftier and his neck less thick. Now I would not go to either extreme
about poor Zola; but I happened to be in Paris on the day of his funeral at the
Pantheon. Paris was fiercely divided; and I bought one of the fanatical rags in
a cafe, in which Maurice Barrès, a pretty detached littérateur, gave his reasons