"GKChesterton-TheSuperstitionOfDivorce" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chesterton G.K)

myself only found Englishmen Ч in the derivative attempt to conceal the
fact that Balzac was a Christian writer. I began to read Balzac long
after I had read the admirers of Balzac; and they had never given me a
hint of this truth. I had read that his books were bound in yellow and
"quite impudently French"; though I may have been cloudy about why being
French should be impudent in a Frenchman. I had read the truer
description of "the grimy wizard of the Comedie humaine," and have lived
to learn the truth of it; Balzac certainly is a genius of the type of
that artist he himself describes, who could draw a broomstick so that
one knew it had swept the room after a murder. The furniture of Balzac
is more alive than the figures of many dramas. For this I was prepared;
but not for a certain spiritual assumption which I recognised at once as
a historical phenomenon. The morality of a great writer is not the
morality he teaches, but the morality he takes for granted. The Catholic
type of Christian ethics runs through Balzac's books, exactly as the
Puritan type of Christian ethics runs through Bunyan's books What his
professed opinions were I do not know, any more than I know
Shakespeare's; but I know that both those great creators of a
multitudinous world made it, as compared with other and later writers,
on the same fundamental moral plan as the universe of Dante. There can
be no doubt about it for any one who can apply as a test the truth I
have mentioned; that the fundamental things in a man are not the things
he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain. But here and
there Balzac does explain; and with that intellectual concentration Mr.
George Moore has acutely observed in that novelist when he is a
theorist. And the other day I found in one of Balzac's novels this
passage; which, whether or no it would precisely hit Mr. George Moore's
mood at this moment, strikes me as a perfect prophecy of this epoch, and
might also be a motto for this book: "With the solidarity of the family
society has lost that elemental force which Montesquieu defined and
called 'honour.' Society has isolated its members the better to govern
them, and has divided in order to weaken."

Throughout our youth and the years before the War, the current criticism
followed Ibsen in describing the domestic system as a doll's house and
the domestic woman as a doll. Mr. Bernard Shaw varied the metaphor by
saying that mere custom kept the woman in the home as it keeps the
parrot in the cage; and the plays and tales of the period made vivid
sketches of a woman who also resembled a parrot in other particulars,
rich in raiment, shrill in accent and addicted to saying over and over
again what she had been taught to say. Mr. Granville Barker, the
spiritual child of Mr. Bernard Shaw, commented in his clever play of
"The Voysey Inheritance" on tyranny, hypocrisy and boredom, as the
constituent elements of a "happy English home." Leaving the truth of
this aside for the moment, it will be well to insist that the
conventionality thus criticised would be even more characteristic of a
happy French home. It is not the Englishman's house, but the Frenchman's
house that is his castle. It might be further added, touching the
essential ethical view of the sexes at least, that the Irishman's house
is his castle; though it has been for some centuries a besieged castle.