Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels онлайн

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This will not appeal to persons who have not been taught by Gilbert K. Chesterton the art of lucid thinking. The fact that a man is in prison is unimportant; it is a mere symptom or consequence of the terrible thing which is the matter with him. For his presence there is simply evidence that he put himself, or got himself, outside the law. In pursuit of money, or a woman, or what not sort of game he has cut himself off from the community of mankind and it will be a miracle if he can get back into it. The mere fact that he has committed a crime is very little one way or the other, almost meaningless in itself. If he is “outside” and so cut off in mind and spirit and imagination from all his fellows, what is to them a crime will bear to him no immoral aspect whatever. For what is a crime? Something that we agree must not go unpunished. Something that “we” agree. But the man “outside” is not one of us any longer if he ever was.

At the risk of seeming to digress we must endeavor to make this very clear, for otherwise The Prisoner will be, in its real import, lost on the reader. Human nature being what it is there is no way to prevent a man getting “outside” if the bent takes him. There are many ways in which we try to keep every one in the fellowship—for society is essentially a spiritual alliance and with a creed so broad that we make laws simply to state what is not in that creed, the whole creed itself being entirely beyond our powers of expression. But there is no sure way to keep men from getting “outside” the fellowship. And once they have got outside the real problem is to get them back in. They can get back in only voluntarily and of their own free will, and only by binding themselves to the law. Law, not laws. What they must accept is the inexpressible creed of fellowship and their acceptance of that carries with it an acceptance of the things barred by it, the things we make laws about.