"A single jewel"

“THE universe is a single jewel and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel of the cosmos it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and price; for there cannot be another one.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy.

Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) image of a small part of space in the center of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field within the constellation Fornax, showing the deepest optical view in space, released on Sept. 25, 2012.

"The only real aim of education"

"THERE was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to God; so that even now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes the woman—she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run. To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

~G.K. Chesterton: What's Wrong With the World, XIV. "Folly and Female Education."

Artwork: Little Artist, by Eugeni Balakshin (1962, Russian). Source:
Children in Art History: http://iamachild.wordpress.com/

"Frightful female privilege"

"NOTHING can ever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father. No one, staring at that frightful female privilege, can quite believe in the equality of the sexes. Here and there we read of a girl brought up like a tom-boy; but every boy is brought up like a tame girl. The flesh and spirit of femininity surround him from the first like the four walls of a house; and even the vaguest or most brutal man has been womanized by being born. Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery; but nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belong to such a monster as man that was born of a man."

~G.K. Chesterton: What's Wrong With the World.

Motherhood, by Etienne Adolphe Piot (1850–1910, French).
Source: Children in Art History, http://iamachild.wordpress.com/

"We are created"

“ONE of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.”

~G.K. Chesterton: The Boston Sunday Post, Jan. 16, 1921.
 

Creation of Adam, by Michelangelo Buonarroti; Fresco, 1510. Cappella Sistina, Vatican.

The Human Tree (poem)

MANY have Earth's lovers been,
Tried in seas and wars, I ween;
Yet the mightiest have I seen:
Yea, the best saw I.
One that in a field alone
Stood up stiller than a stone
Lest a moth should fly.

Birds had nested in his hair,
On his shoon were mosses rare,
Insect empires flourished there,
Worms in ancient wars;
But his eyes burn like a glass,
Hearing a great sea of grass
Roar towards the stars.

From them to the human tree
Rose a cry continually:
`Thou art still, our Father, we
Fain would have thee nod.
Make the skies as blood below thee,
Though thou slay us, we shall know thee.
Answer us, O God!

`Show thine ancient fame and thunder,
Split the stillness once asunder,
Lest we whisper, lest we wonder
Art thou there at all?'
But I saw him there alone,
Standing stiller than a stone
Lest a moth should fall.

~G.K. Chesterton

"The divinity of Christ"

 

"BUT ABOVE ALL, it is true of the most tremendous issue; of that tragedy which has created the divine comedy of our creed. Nothing short of the extreme and strong and startling doctrine of the divinity of Christ will give that particular effect that can truly stir the popular sense like a trumpet; the idea, of the king himself serving in the ranks like a common soldier. By making that figure merely human we make that story much less human. We take away the point of the story which actually pierces humanity; the point of the story which is quite literally the point of a spear. It does not especially humanize the universe to say that good and wise men can die for their opinions; any more than it would be any sort of uproariously popular news in an army that good soldiers may easily get killed. It is no news that King Leonidas is dead any more than that Queen Anne is dead; and men did not wait for Christianity to be men, in the full sense of being heroes. But if we are describing, for the moment, the atmosphere of what is generous and popular and even picturesque, any knowledge of human nature will tell us that no sufferings of the sons of men, or even of the servants of God, strike the same note as the notion of the master suffering instead of his servants. And this is given by the theological and emphatically not by the scientific deity. No mysterious monarch, hidden in his starry pavilion at the base of the cosmic campaign, is in the least like that celestial chivalry of the Captain who carries his five wounds in the front of battle."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Everlasting Man.

 

 

The Ghent Altarpiece: God Almighty, Jan van Eyck;

Oil on wood, 1426-27. Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent.

On Art

"ART is a language, and not a secret language."
—Illustrated London News, Oct. 3, 1908.

"EVERY form of art has a soul of its own. It has a certain psychological effect which differs from the impression produced by another kind."
—Daily News, April 9, 1901.

"A WORK of art is like a prayer."
—Daily News, June 7, 1901.

"IN our time we find a great deal of religion in art. In former ages we found a great deal of art in religion. Religion was the orthodoxy of those days: art has become almost the only orthodoxy of these. They permitted art and literature because they glorified God."
—Daily News, Jan. 2, 1902.

"THE province of art may be said to be to discover what are the main lines of our pleasure, and to fix them firmly in the mind. It recreates for us the vanished sensation, and hunts the flying happiness."
—Daily News, Feb. 7, 1902.

"IF Art is crowned queen, the first who will suffer will be the artists. This new tyranny will be of necessity a tyranny of the critics, who are many, not merely of the creators, who are few."
—Daily News, Nov. 19, 1904.

"MEN do not produce art in order to become joyful. They are joyful, and therefore they produce art. Men do not dance in order to be happy. They dance because they are happy…Art is not the mother, but the child of beauty."
—Daily News, April 8, 1905.

"ALL art is a thing of glimpses."
—Daily News, May 26, 1906.

"MUCH is said nowadays against the cult of pleasure, not without reason; and it is possible to make far too much of the cult of art. It is only fair to count this truth on the other side; that there is a certain candour about the worlds of impressions and sensations that there is not always in
the world of theories and of laws; and that in this sense it is not only possible to dispute about tastes, but they are things about which men dispute with least hypocrisy and sophistry."
—Introduction to The New World of the Theatre.

"THERE are two senses in which an artist may work to awaken wonder. One is the basest and vulgarist kind of art; the other is the highest and noblest kind of art. The former is meant to make us wonder at the artist; the latter is meant to make us wonder at the world."
—New Witness, Mar. 12, 1920.

"EVERY great artist in his heart scorns art, as compared with the greatness of God and man."
—Shakespeare and the Germans.

~G.K. Chesterton

(Quotes from Gilbert Magazine, Vol. 13, Num. 8; July/Aug. 2010; Art: Battleground for the Soul of Man. http://tinyurl.com/caux8s9 )

The Art of Painting, by Johannes Vermeer; Oil on canvas, 1665-67.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.