Now, one of these four or five paradoxes which should
be taught to every infant prattling at his mother’s
knee is the following: That the more a man looks
at a thing, the less he can see it, and the more a
man learns a thing the less he knows it. The
Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is
trained should be the man who is trusted would be
absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that
a man who studied a thing and practiced it every day
went on seeing more and more of its significance.
But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less
of its significance. In the same way, alas! we
all go on every day, unless we are continually goading
ourselves into gratitude and humility, seeing less
and less of the significance of the sky or the stones.
. . . . .
Now it is a terrible business to mark a man out for
the vengeance of men. But it is a thing to which
a man can grow accustomed, as he can to other terrible
things; he can even grow accustomed to the sun.
And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even
the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers,
detectives, and policemen, is not that they are wicked
(some of them are good), not that they are stupid
(several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply
that they have got used to it.
Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock;
all they see is the usual man in the usual place.
They do not see the awful court of judgment; they
only see their own workshop. Therefore, the instinct
of Christian civilisation has most wisely declared
that into their judgments there shall upon every occasion
be infused fresh blood and fresh thoughts from the
streets. Men shall come in who can see the court
and the crowd, and coarse faces of the policeman and
the professional criminals, the wasted faces of the
wastrels, the unreal faces of the gesticulating counsel,
and see it all as one sees a new picture or a play
hitherto unvisited.
Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided,
that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a
thing too important to be trusted to trained men.
It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks
men who know no more law than I know, but who can
feel the things that I felt in the jury box.
When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system
discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up
specialists. But when it wishes anything done
which is really serious, it collects twelve of the
ordinary men standing round. The same thing was
done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
The Wind and the Trees
I am sitting under tall trees, with a great wind boiling
like surf about the tops of them, so that their living
load of leaves rocks and roars in something that is
at once exultation and agony. I feel, in fact,
as if I were actually sitting at the bottom of the
sea among mere anchors and ropes, while over my head
and over the green twilight of water sounded the everlasting
rush of waves and the toil and crash and shipwreck
of tremendous ships. The wind tugs at the trees
as if it might pluck them root and all out of the
earth like tufts of grass. Or, to try yet another
desperate figure of speech for this unspeakable energy,
the trees are straining and tearing and lashing as
if they were a tribe of dragons each tied by the tail.
