"The appreciation of being"

“GREAT TRUTHS can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.”
-- Illustrated London News, Sept. 30, 1933.

"SEEING TRUTH must mean the appreciation of being by some mind capable of appreciating it. But in a general sense there has entered that primeval world of pure actuality, the division and dilemma that brings the ultimate sort of war into the world; the everlasting duel between Yes and No. This is the dilemma that many sceptics have darkened the universe and dissolved the mind solely in order to escape. They are those who maintain that there is something that is both Yes and No. I do not know whether they pronounce it Yo."
-- St. Thomas Aquinas, VII. 'The Permanent Philosophy.'

~G.K. Chesterton 

"An atheistic literary style"

“AN INTERESTING ESSAY might be written on the possession of an atheistic literary style. There is such a thing. The mark of it is that wherever anything is named or described, such words are chosen as suggest that the thing has not got a soul in it. Thus they will not talk of love or passion, which imply a purpose and a desire. They talk of the “relations” of the sexes, as if they were simply related to each other in a certain way, like a chair and a table. Thus they will not talk of the waging of war (which implies a will), but of the outbreak of war – as if it were a sort of boil. Thus they will not talk of masters paying more or less wages, which faintly suggests some moral responsibility in the masters: they will talk of the rise and fall of wages, as if the thing were automatic, like the tides of the sea. Thus they will not call progress an attempt to improve, but a tendency to improve. And thus, above all, they will not call the sympathy between oppressed nations sympathy; they will call it solidarity. For that suggests brick and coke, and clay and mud, and all the things they are fond of.”

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, Dec. 7, 1912.

Ballade of Kindness to Motorists

O MOTORISTS, motorists, run away and play,
I pardon you. Such exercise resigned,
When would a statesman see the woods in May?
How could a banker woo the western wind?
When you have knocked a dog down I have pined,
When you have kicked the dust up I have sneezed,
These things cone from your absence—well, of Mind—
But when you get a puncture I am pleased.

I love to see you sweating there all day
About some beastly hole you cannot find;
While your poor tenants pass you in a dray,
Or your sad clerks bike by you at a grind,
I am not really cruel or unkind;
I would not wish you mortally diseased,
Or deaf or dumb or dead or mad or blind,
But when you get a puncture I am pleased.

What slave that dare not smile when chairs give way?
When smart boots slip, having been lately shined?
When curates cannon with the coffee tray?
When trolleys take policemen from behind?
When kings come forth in public, having dined,
And palace steps are a trifle greased?—
The joke may not be morbidly refined,
But when you get a puncture I am pleased.

Envoi

Prince of the Car of Progress Undefined,
On to your Perfections unappeased!
Leave your dead past with its dead children lined;
But when you get a puncture I am pleased.


~G.K. Chesterton: The Coloured Lands.

"The modern world is..."

“THE modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.”

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, May 29, 1926.
 

London traffic jam (1901)

"War is a dreadful thing"

"WAR is a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and unanswerably -- numbers and an unnatural valour. One does discover the two urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are ready to be dead."

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

On German Responsibility

“IF the German Emperor was not responsible for war, or if he is anyhow now responsible for government, the proper inference is plain enough—that we should turn our attention to those Germans who now are responsible for government, and consider how far they were formerly responsible for war…. It might be held that it was not so much William Hohenzollern as the Deutscher Kaiser who followed the armies across Belgium and waited in a white uniform at Nancy for the triumph that never came. But it was certainly Herr Scheidemann, as well as a mere member of the Reichstag, who followed the armies into Belgium to whitewash with hypocritical sophistries the most wicked oppression of modern history. It was certainly not necessary for an irresponsible professor of Socialism to go entirely out of his way to excuse and eulogise the chief act of Prussianism. He was not acting as a Socialist, and he was certainly not acting as a Pacifist. But, above all, if he was really acting as democrat, the fact is far from reassuring about the spirit and future of German democracy. If he was really representing those whom he was supposed to represent, we can only deduce that German popular feeling was then, and probably is now, as ambitious and aggressive as German autocratic or aristocratic feeling. If he does not trouble about representing anybody, it is useless to refer us to an improved popular sentiment which he is supposed to represent. The menace to mankind seems to remain the same, whether he was a democrat then or whether he is an oligarch now. But, in any case, I imagine nobody will say that Scheidemann was a medieval, or that he merely professed to be the voice of God. Scheidemann was a modern, and modestly professed to be the voice of Humanity. And the highly practical fact we have to face, if we are not to involve the world in another hideous calamity, is the very simple fact that it is just as easy to massacre men in the name of Man as to burn churches in the name of God. It is as feasible to decree inhumanity in humanitarian language as to decree sacrilege in sacred language. What the deeds of these men will be may remain to be seen. Since they thought such things as the invasion of Belgium consistent with Socialism in opposition, I cannot conceive why they should not think them consistent with Socialism in power.”

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, May 10, 1919.

"His vices were his virtues"

"MEN DID WICKED THINGS in all parts of the world, including the most Christian parts of the world. But they seldom thought they were behaving like Christians. A man broke treaties, trampled on enemies, or betrayed friends, because he was ready to be contemned; he did not expect to be respected. The notion of his being actually admired as a strong man, merely because he behaved like a selfish man, is a notion so new that I can myself remember it rising steadily, like a new religion, in the late Victorian time. I can myself recall the transition in literary fashions from the dull but decent morality of Macaulay to the picturesque but barbarous mysticism of Carlyle. The school of Macaulay would balance the virtues and vices of William Rufus or Warren Hastings; but for the school of Carlyle his vices were his virtues. These great men of letters had long been dead when the process began to penetrate everywhere; but the forms it took everywhere were the more clearly the fashion because they were both variegated and vulgar. We had the praise of the colonial and commercial expansionist, of the imaginative imperial financier—a kind of pawnbroker who not only received stolen goods, but bribed the policeman to steal them. We had plays and novels about the strong-minded employer of labour, who seemed to think himself astonishingly virile because he could manage to starve a man in a siege, when he would never venture to hit him in a fight."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, Dec. 15, 1917.

G.K.C.