AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

sick of Shaw.”
But a large section of the Intelligentsia seemed wholly devoid of
Intelligence. As was perhaps natural, those who pontificated most pompously
were often the most windy and hollow. I remember a man with a long beard
and a deep booming voice who proclaimed at intervals, “What we need is
Love,” or, “All we require is Love,” like the detonations of a heavy gun. I
remember another radiant little man who spread out his fingers and said,
“Heaven is here! It is now!” which seemed a disturbing thought under the
circumstances. There was an aged, aged man who seemed to live at one of
these literary clubs; and who would hold up a large hand at intervals and
preface some fairly ordinary observation by saying, “A Thought.” One day
Jepson, I think, goaded beyond endurance, is said to have exploded with the
words, “But, good God, man, you don’t call that a thought, do you?” But that
was what was the matter with not a few of these thinkers. A sort of
Theosophist said to me, “Good and evil, truth and falsehood, folly and wisdom
are only aspects of the same upward movement of the universe.” Even at that
stage it occurred to me to ask, “Supposing there is no difference between good
and bad, or between false and true, what is the difference between up and
down?”
Now there was one thing that I began to note, as I noted on that minor
occasion of the debate on Nietzsche. All that clique, in praising the Ibsenite
and Shavian drama, was of course very contemptuous of the old Victorian
drama. It sneered steadily at the stock types of old farces; at the drawling
guardmen and grotesque grocers of Caste or Our Boys. But there was one old
farcical type that had become far more false; and that was the comic curate of
The Private Secretary: the simpleton who “did not like London” and asked for
a glass of milk and a Bath-Bun. And many of the sceptics in that highly
scientific world had not, by any means, outgrown the Victorian joke about the
curate. Having myself been trained, first on the farce about the curate, and
then on the scepticism about the priest, I was quite ready to believe that a
dying superstition was represented by such feeble persons. As a fact, I found
that they were very often by far the ablest and most forcible persons. In debate
after debate I noticed the same thing happen that I have already noted in the
debate on Nietzsche. It was the farcical curate, it was the feebleminded
clergyman, who got up and applied to the wandering discussion at least some
sort of test of some sort of truth; who showed all the advantages of having
been tolerably trained in some sort of system of thinking. Dreadful seeds of
doubt began to be sown in my mind. I was almost tempted to question the
accuracy of the anticlerical legend; nay, even the accuracy of the farce of The
Private Secretary. It seemed to me that the despised curates were rather more
intelligent than anybody else; that they, alone in that world of intellectualism,
were trying to use their intellects. For that reason I begin such adventures with