August 10, 1916 
LAiND & WATER 
31 
The Old and New Tables 
By G. K. Chesterton 
WHEN a witty writer of this country put a 
sort of pun into the very title of " The Im- 
portance of being Earnest," I do not know 
whether he noticed that Ernest is a German 
name ; and its meaning something of a key to the German 
nature. There is rather a horrible irony in the associa- 
tion of ideas ; for in nothing are certain large and diseased 
patches of Prussian culture more truly to be described 
as " earnest '' than in their study of the same writer 
in his most despicable and even damnable aspect. They 
have not even, as he had, as the dregs of virtue, the 
decency to be flippant. They are earnestly evil ; for 
there is something infinitely lower than the love of sin ; 
and that is the reverence for sin. But oven in directions 
more human and tolerable the drixe of the North German 
nature is the same. 
Earnestness is an eagerness without liveliness ; a 
thirst for new things without any of the simple emotions 
of novelty ; without wonder, without laughter and with- 
out thanks. This dry-throated avidity has an intensity 
of its own ; and many have been magnetised by such a 
fanaticism of fact. Professor Ernest Haeckel is pro- 
foundly convinced of the importance of being earnest ; 
and not a little of the importance of being Haeckel. 
The almost hypnotic power which he exercised at one 
period over very simple and somewhat solid men, such 
as Mr. Joseph McCabe and Mr. Robert Blatchford, was 
largely due to this narrowness, concentration and even 
deficiency. It seems easier to mesmerise with one eye ; 
and the professor would claim, and in the narrow sense 
would claim truly, that it is a single eye. He was indeed 
unscrupulously disposed to wink the other eye when 
he showed the remarkable similarity of two embryo 
animals by putting side by side facsimile pictures of the 
same animal. But he winked seriously, not to say 
solemnly, as a German should ; and even when he was 
making fools of his readers he was not making fun of 
them. It would be a blunder in psychology to suppose 
that such sharp practice, especially when so clumsily 
performed, is akin to duplicity in the sense of com- 
plexity. In his methods of argument he may be sonic- 
thing worse than a sophist ; but it is due to him to say 
that in his essential intelligence he is nothing but a bigot. 
There is a satiric symbol in the fact that his philosophy 
is called Monism. His very universe has a single eye — 
like Polyphemus. His world is onc-idcacd and therefore 
one-sided. It is a philosophy for a man on a desert 
island ; when it is not one for a man in a p.iddcd cdi. 
Turks and Germans 
The soul of Christendom is perpetually in peril from 
certain things, which may be called visions or monsters, 
which dwell in the wild places upon its borderlands. 
They are best defined by calling them the insaric simpli- 
cities. One of them came out of the Eastern deserts witli 
the Mohammedanism 'of Omar or Otliman. Another has 
come out of the northern wilderness with the Monism 
of men like Haeckel. Certainly the Mohammedan was 
very much the more noble negation of the two ; its sense 
of human dignity has been rtiuch higher than anything 
revealed by the antics of the North Gcnnan professors. 
The Turks have in certain essential matters v.-orsc morals 
than Christians in war; but they have better manners 
than (iermans in peace.. Nevertheless the general des- 
cription which I have given of these recurrent enemies 
of Christendom remains and applies to them all. They 
are too simple to be sane. They do not understand 
liberty : or that margin of legitimate varieties and com- 
plexities which is allowed to the vitality of high civilisa- 
tion. The Moslem cannot see the difference between 
a statue and an idol. The Materialist cannot see the 
difference between a legend and a lie. A man like Pro- 
fessor Haeckel regards the traditional imagery of things 
like St. George and the Dragon as a lie and not ;i. legend ; 
and it is the justNemesis of sucli narrowness that his own 
'apse, as in the case of the duplicated diagram, is not a 
legend but a lie. For him there is nothing beyond mere 
fact except mere falsehood — and he tells it. Mr. Bcl!oc 
noted an equally abrupt transition between dull truth 
and demented mendacity in the German versions of the 
events of the campaign. The German seems to think he 
is safe from all charges of misrepresentation so long as 
he does not lie in round numbers. So long as he is careful 
to state that ninety-seven pigs out of a hundred ha\e 
wings, or that not more than eighty-three and a-half 
per cent, of the moon is made of green cheese, he feels 
sure he will be acquitted of any kind of exaggeration.. 
But the point of these explosions of quite frantic fiction 
was, as Mr. Bclloc remarked, that they occurred in a 
process which, up to that point, had been ono of plodding 
and prosaic exactitude. There was no edge of exaggera- 
tion or even of conjecture ; but a rigid alternation of 
facts told in order and lies told to order ; with a mono- 
tonous docility which was not even conscious of the. 
monstrosity it had brought forth. 
Nietzsche and Haeckel 
This insane simplicity, hox'.cver, is clearest where 
it is maddest ; and its High German form has been set 
forth more \ividly than in the dull extravagance of 
Haeckel and the mere journalists of Germany. It can 
nowhere in (ierman literature be found better expressed 
than in the epigrams of the prose poet Nietzsche, and 
nowhere better in Nietzsche perhaps than in the passage, 
the precise words of which I forget, which makes it the 
prophet's business to break the ancient tables of the law ; 
and suggests a vision of new and more terrible tables, 
the very laws of a higher lawlessness. One would be 
disposed to say superficially and somewhat satirically 
that in the pixsent struggle it is rather the new tables 
that have been broken ; and none more than those of 
Haeckel and the calculators of which I have spoken. 
They were there, with all their mechanical facts and more 
mechanical lies, with all their ponderous doubling of gains 
and halving of losses ; their tiresome transformation of' 
Saul's thousands into David's ten thousands. Assuredly 
their tables are little more than multiplication tables. 
The authors of such researches and records are certainly 
unworthy to live in the same lunatic asylum with 
Nietzsche. And if their tables have been broken, it must 
have been in that other and more undignified sense of the 
sohiintiif tabulae risii. But in Nietzsche's phrase there 
is a meaning which if more morbid is more profound ; 
and which can at least claim to be in some sense the 
primary cause of the greatest war of this planet ; which 
can boast that its particular lunatic asylum has let looso' 
a homicidal maniac whom half humanity has turned out 
to pursue. 
In the particular case of Prussia, which has caused 
this unprecedented convulsion, the unbalanced simpli- 
fication, or monomania, which haunts the deserts and 
the barbarians, has taken a special and unique form. The 
moral quality in most barbaric invasions is merely 
insufficient, or over-obvious, or too literal in its' 
leaning on some particular fact. Thus the Moslems 
took with an impatient simplicity the problems of 
art and wine. The psychological case of the Prussian 
savage was more ' subtle e\en when it was more 
stupid. What \'isited the northern barbarian like 
a sort of vision was a particular reversal or inversion of 
thought not at all easy to describe. It was a trick or 
slip in the mind, somewhat like that of a man in a dream 
who can at once be himself and somebody else. It is 
more like the philosophic inconsistency of the man in 
Mr. VV. W. Jacobs' delightful story; the man who is 
supposed to be dead but is only drunk, and turns up 
in that condition to collect the subscriptions for his 
tombstone. It might be calki[j\ turn, or twist, for look- 
ing forward to yesterday as it it were to-morrow ; it 
really was an ilhision that something very old and obvious 
was something very new and original. It is a recognised 
feature of impudence that it tries to teach its grand- 
mother ; but it is only by a slight confusion of thought 
that a man can claim to have begotten his grandmother. 
