Guy Thorne

“ Fletcher, the historian preferred to Froude by certain people! I do not wish to give pain to any one in the world, much less to one who has given me so much pleasure. But even at the cost of that, I would ask gentlemen who are reading history at Oxford, and gentlemen who are sending their sons to read history at Oxford, to pause and reflect before they entrust grave interests and momentous personal issues to the mercies of such writers as Mr. Fletcher, to the direction of the historian manqué. ”

“ If fools must gamble, why are they not allowed to do it apart from such a fine and splendid thing as Sport? I would far rather see a nasty little Casino established in every town, where fools might lose what they can’t afford in the hope of winning what they won’t work for, than see them tempting athletes and spoiling the game.
Of two evils choose the least—a make-shift maxim, but sound in its way!
Very few dwellers in the South and West of England are aware of the extraordinary interest taken in the Midlands and the North in pigeon-flying. ”

“ I don’t in the least agree with most of the aims of what is known as the Labour Party. My reading, education, and experience have taught me that Socialism is the dream of an impossibility, and that the witness of history, the experience of nations, and the laws of God are all hostile to it alike. There has never yet been a continuing Commonwealth in which all men were equal inasmuch as they were State officials. ”

“ It is the more cheering to know that an honest effort to render the Incarnation increasingly credible to the man in the street is not without reward. It is as difficult for me to disbelieve in the fact that Christ was God as it is difficult for Mr. Blatchford to believe it. Where one man sees a landscape the other sees only a map. But there are, nevertheless, a great many people who deny the Catholic Faith because, while they desire to retain the name of Christians, they are unwilling to accept the obligations of Christianity. ”

“ To amplify my statement I will say—and in a moment I will endeavour to prove—that if the idle, vicious, hopeless and sullen scoundrels who act as a drag upon the wheel of the Commonwealth, who have been allowed too long to clog social progress, were removed, the whole problem would be solved.
I beg you to listen carefully to me while I tell you how the Unemployables have created the problem of the Unemployed, how they are throttling charitable enterprise, how they are making economic methods of relief impossible, how they are destroying the present and the future of the honest working man. ”

“ When the genius of the Empire was set up for a universal Deity and men were bidden as good citizens to burn their few grains of incense before the statue of the reigning Emperor—the representative of an ordered and moral state—we know what happened. You cannot make an abstraction alive and deify Government. Laws, which have the sanction only of expediency, do but furnish mankind with exercise in evasion. ”

“ For my own part, I believe that idleness is the greatest of all sins, the chief of all crimes. It is not those offences against the law of God and the ordinance of man that we punish which are always the worst. I may be wrong, but I give it as my opinion that sloth is the prime sin of all those lusts and iniquities that war against the soul and destroy manhood. I believe that the thief who works, the drunkard who works, the liar who works, the adulterer who works, may often be a better man than the boneless, bloodless idler who is neither thief, drunkard, liar, or adulterer. ”

“ I have already said something of the terror the Life of Froude excited. In a swift moment pretensions were exposed, lies were shown to be lies, and people began to read Froude. Mr. Paul made it quite plain that the accusations of dishonesty against Froude were utter fabrications. Mr. Paul, himself a learned historian, an artist and a man of letters, has gone into the charges seriatim, and triumphantly disproved them. No one can ever make them again. They are lies, they have been proved once and for ever to be lies. ”

“ It is a far cry from football to golf. At first glance any one would say that of all games golf is the most free from any taint of attendant excess in drink. This is not so. The evil is less widespread, just as the game claims fewer adherents; the class of men who can afford golf is not a class with many temptations to drunkenness; women play the game and their presence is a safeguard. But the evil exists nevertheless, and this is the measure of it.
In the famous clubs, where all the great players go, drinking to excess is an unknown thing, of course. ”

“ Art is the essential part of fiction, but it is not destroyed because it is employed as the handmaid of an ethical standpoint.
But this truth is no reason for “answering back” the critics who do not appreciate it. Nothing is [Pg 300] quite true—except The Incarnation—a naïve statement you may call it, but as a corollary of the epigram, true too! It is better, by far, to realize that modern criticism is most valuable from the purely literary point of view, and yet that the purely literary point of view is only one side of the model the artist must study before he learns how to draw. ”

“ On the one side of the workhouse gate are poverty and incessant misery, with insufficient food to eat. On the other side are warmth and light, complete freedom from care, and abundance of food to eat, with no necessity whatever to earn the day’s food by labour. All the prizes are to the unfit; all the effort and misery are to the laborious. If the honourable working man loses his employment through some change in industrial organization or through the growth of foreign competition, he finds it too often [Pg 240] impossible to struggle back to his feet. ”

“ One has said enough to outline—I hope vividly and strongly—how Sport is being spoilt by gambling.
Sport, thank goodness, is not yet retrograde owing to this curse. But it may be. Let us all remember that progress is merely the power of seeing new beauties. The more Sport progresses unhindered by gambling, the sooner will it take its high place in life and fulfil its noble destiny. ”

“ There is religion in Pickwick!—we read of the Christmas of Dingley Dell. In Les Misérables, that huge epic novel, Victor Hugo has drawn more than one saint of God, has made Christianity the motive of his drama.
It is so in life, be certain that it is and always will be. Christianity is the central thing, the only important thing, and the attempt to minimize its importance and influence is as the chirping of a linnet on the roadside as some stately procession passes by. ”

“ There is, I believe, only one creed which can make the capitalist unselfish and the sons of labour satisfied, which will tell men that wealth means responsibility and that there is dignity in toil, which will teach the rich man to order himself lowly and reverently to those who are his betters and to hurt nobody by word or deed, which will teach the labourer that his chief need is not other men’s wealth, but the “carrière ouverte aux talents” and the determination to do his duty in that state of life, whatever it may be, unto which God shall call him. ”

“ Each man must do his work with such tools as have come in his way. The Mission preacher will use his magnetic power, the artist whose skill it is to build or to paint, will make his appeal to the love of order and beauty, the musicians will meet the heart through the ear. May not the writer of fiction use his psychological training and his knowledge of many sides of human life to create a story which shall set men thinking about the old doctrines which he believes to have lost none of their regenerating power? ”

“ There are people—I know plenty of them—who suppose that when a book is spoken of as having stopped selling, a generality is intended, that merely a falling off of the initial demand has occurred. Error. When a book—a novel—stops selling, it stops with a definiteness of an engine when the fire goes out. It stops with a suddenness that is appalling, and thereafter not a copy, not one single, solitary copy is sold. And do not for an instant suppose that ever after the interest may be revived. A dead book can no more be resuscitated than a dead dog. ”

“ It is the sense of proportion.
Nothing is more necessary than “proportion” in the consideration of such a question as this, a subject of supreme importance in modern sporting life; yet to-day the sense of proportion has been lost by sportsmen and adherents of sport alike. Long ago Plato pointed out that we shall never have perfect men until we have perfect circumstances, and it is the people who condemn a good thing because of its occasional misuse who destroy their own case. ”

“ In connection with the Betting Question, the mind at once turns to horse-racing. There is much to be said in this regard, and I intend to treat of this branch of sport later on in my statement. But I propose to begin with other instances of the evil. Evil it undoubtedly is. The massive harmony which the body and mind sound in correlation under the influences of true sport, is made discordant by it.
Like the youth of a nation, sportsmen are, in a sense, the trustees of posterity, and we must unite not only to recognize the fact but to crush the evil. ”

“ But apparently a grain of incense is a more terrible thing to them than the murder of an existing if unborn personality. We can only judge by their public utterances, but we have yet to learn that as a body their lordships have spent a thousandth part of the time over this supreme question of national morality that they have devoted to the suppression of things disapproved of by Lady Wimborne and her league. The spectacle of disproportionate interest and action is melancholy, and indicative of incapacity to observe the real dangers to be faced. ”

“ No sportsman ever takes a puritanical view of betting. It is the sort of person who thinks vaccination immoral, and whose conversation is like a glass of still lemonade, who thinks that a wager is a sin. This is a fault. I believe that I am voicing the point of view of the sportsman—which is simply the conviction of the sensible man—when I say that there is [Pg 186] absolutely no harm in an ordinary wager. You put what you can afford to lose upon the result of a horse-race or a football match. If you win you are rather pleased and you have hurt no one. ”

“ A novel is simply this: it is a certain portion of the lives of certain people imagined by the author and seen through his temperament. Very well then; let me proceed to prove that the modern nonsense which would have people believe that Christianity in fiction is against the canons of art, is simply a lie.
The life of every single human being in England is punctuated and impinged upon by Christianity. As I pointed out in my first essay, the usual modern novel never mentions—never even mentions!—Sunday. Yet on Sunday, the shops, factories, theatres and public-houses close. ”

“ Our conceptions of the world and its meaning are more radically changed than our conceptions of the material universe, when the sun instead of the earth becomes its centre. Every view of history, every theory of our duty, must be radically transformed by contact with that Stupendous Mystery. Whether you accept or reject the special tenets of the Athanasian Creed is an infinitesimal trifle. You are bound to assume that every religion which does not take this dogma into account is without true vital force. ”

“ To say that monogamy is the natural evolution of humanity, that chastity in the young unmarried man is a product of civilization, that a high conception of a man’s duty to posterity will keep him from harlotry, is simply to show ignorance of history, of human nature, and of the world as it is. A man who talks now-a-days about the respect of marriage being a Teutonic contribution to the evolution of civilized society, is behind the times. ”

“ Boxing is no longer a national sport, which goes on everywhere and, as a matter of course, under the full sunlight. It has sunk into a local amusement or a located disgrace. And it has sunk simply and solely because of gambling.
Wrestling, that worthy and ancient English sport, has almost ceased to exist. I have had a cottage in Cornwall for some years and it is my privilege to know many of the champions of the past in this chief old home of the game. ”

“ And those of us who are capable of taking a broad and comprehensive view of affairs must allow that the sport-hating Puritan has at least got some reason for his distorted point of view.
He can say, and with perfect justice, that betting has killed professional sculling.
He can point out, and no one can deny it, that even the quiet, but highly-skilled game of bowls is permeated with the gambling spirit, that owing to the large sums put up as prizes and wagered upon results, the temptation to players in a public contest is enormous. ”

“ A great league is to be formed of English men and women. Great names will be at the head of it, it is to be national. I have already pointed out to you that even the revelations of the census have not stirred the ordinary person. His patriotism has not been roused, and, you may be certain—as I am certain—that no question of national expediency on this point will stir the ordinary person, who is either indifferent or actually engaged in helping England’s decadence by the restriction of his own family. ”

“ The poor man, to whom a good degree means a knife with which he will open the world’s oyster, suffers more greatly than the wealthier man. But both suffer, and both have a right to expect that in paying money for a genuine article they shall certainly obtain it.
The object of this essay, therefore, is to awaken the majority upon the whole matter, more especially that portion of the majority that designs to read history. The power lies in your hands. It is only by your acquiescence that the scandal continues, and it is the money of you and your parents which runs the machine. ”

“ I read last week When it was Dark and wish each of my children to have a copy, as it will show them what the Christian Faith means to the world. I still hold to the simple faith of my childhood taught me by my dear parents, which carried each through a peaceful death-bed. Our Heavenly Father, the King of kings and the only Ruler of princes, sacrificed His beloved Son for His people, and allowed His cruel death, knowing that in the future the thought of His terrible sufferings would touch the hearts of most and often keep them from sinning. ”

“ John writes to young men, ‘because ye are strong and have overcome the wicked one.’ Professor Huxley, ‘that man has had a liberal education who has been so trained that his body is the ready servant of his will; whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will the servant of a tender conscience, who has learned to love all beauty and to hate all vileness, to respect others as himself.’ To me that judgment seems a manly one which pronounces the corruption of a wife by a husband a viler thing than the gratification of lust in the common stews. ”

“ I say this much, not because I have any dislike for this nice little periodical, but in order to point out that in answering its editor’s remarks [Pg 303] about me, I am not endeavouring to become known to the world, and to advertise myself by the endeavour to link my name to its editor’s.
There is a certain sort of hurried and sporadic writing which is not criticism, but is irresponsible nonsense set down to fill a page no less than to gratify a prejudice.
It’s all give and take in literary polemics. People are always going for one in the press, and very often with perfect justice. ”

“ The working man has, I know, his sick club, his benefit society, to which he must subscribe. If he is a member of a Trades Union there again is another claim upon his purse. But all working men are not members of Trades Unions. The greater the skill of the trained mechanic, for example, the more the disfavour with which he regards the Trades Unions. It is a splendid thing to be a member of a great and powerful organization which has for its object to ensure that every man shall be paid a living wage. ”

“ I admit that such a method would be inhuman, immoral and unchristian, if we were to treat the hopeless social failure as a criminal pure and simple. Let us make his life as happy as he chooses to make it; treat him as a criminal if he won’t work in the colony, comfort and pet him if he will. ”