"Life is too large for us as it is"

"WE read a good novel not in order to know more people, but in order to know fewer.  Instead of the humming swarm of human beings, relatives, customers, servants, postmen, afternoon callers, tradesmen, strangers who tell us the time, strangers who remark on the weather, beggars, waiters, and telegraph-boys--instead of this bewildering human swarm which passes us every day, fiction asks us to follow one figure (say the postman) consistently through his ecstasies and agonies. That is what makes one impatient with that type of pessimistic rebel who is always complaining of the narrowness of his life and demanding a larger sphere.  Life is too large for us as it is: we have all too many things to attend to. All true romance is an attempt to simplify it, to cut it down to plainer and more pictorial proportions. What dullness there is in our life arises mostly from its rapidity; people pass us too quickly to show us their interesting side. By the end of the week we have talked to a hundred bores; whereas, if we had stuck to one of them, we might have found ourselves talking to a new friend, or a humorist, or a murderer, or a man who had seen a ghost."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Inside of Life ("The Glass Walking Stick").

On Original Sin

ONCE upon a time when Mr. H. G. Wells was setting forth on his varied and splendid voyage from Utopia to Utopia, he announced as a sort of watchword or war-cry that the new world would have nothing to do with the idea of Original Sin. He did not specially speak, and, indeed, there was no reason for him to speak, about his other beliefs or unbeliefs. He had not then compared the Trinity to a dance; but neither had he called adoring multitudes to the shrine of the Invisible King. But, standing at the end of the great scientific nineteenth century, he thought it time to announce that the one doctrine he did not believe in was Original Sin. Standing at the beginning of the still more scientific twentieth century, Mr. Aldous Huxley calmly announces that the one doctrine he does believe in is Original Sin. He may be a sceptic or a heretic about many things, but on that point he is quite orthodox. He may not hold many theological dogmas, but about this dogma he is quite dogmatic. There is one fragment of the ancient creed which he not only clings to, but declares to be necessary to all clear minds of the new generation. And that is the very fragment which Mr. Wells threw away thirty years ago, as something that would never be needed any more. The stone that the builder of Utopia rejected . . .

It is not a mere verbal coincidence that original thinkers believe in Original Sin. For really original thinkers like to think about origins. That should be obvious even to the negative thinkers of the nineteenth-century tradition, who for two or three generations claimed all originality, all novelty, all revolutionary change of thought for a book called The Origin of Species. But it is even more true of moral discovery than of material discovery; and it is even more true of the twentieth-century reaction than of the nineteenth-century revolution. Men who wish to get down to fundamentals perceive that there is a fundamental problem of evil. Men content to be more superficial are also content with a superficial fuss and bustle of improvement. The man in the mere routine of modern life is content to say that a modern gallows is a relatively humane instrument or that a modern cat-o’-nine tails is milder than an ancient Roman flagellum. But the original thinker will ask why any scourge or gibbet was ever needed, or ever even alleged to be needed? And that brings the original thinker back to original sin. For that is not affected as a universal thing by whether we approve or disapprove of the particular things. Whether we call it infamous tyranny or inevitable restraint, there is some sort of sin either in the scourger or the scourged.

Nevertheless, I often feel that the original thinker is not quite original enough. I mean that he does not get quite so near to the truth as the old tradition could take him. I say it without arrogance, for many of us owe the truth as much to tradition as to originality. But I am often struck by the fact that original thinkers originate trains of thought, but do not finish them. It is the great trouble with the advanced that they will not advance any further. Now, Mr. Aldous Huxley sees very clearly that medieval religion was more realistic than modern idealism and optimism. He says that the latest scientific view is more like the old Catholic view than was the intervening illusion of the Romantic Movement. But he adds that the scientific view of man necessitates a sort of original sin, if it be only the residuum of his animal ancestry.

Now, that is exactly where I should like him to advance a step further; and he does not. For sin, whatever else it is, is not merely the dregs of a bestial existence. It is something more subtle and spiritual, and is in some way connected with the very supremacy of the human spirit. Mr. Huxley must know well enough that this is so with the most execrable sins, such as often figure in his own admirable satires. It is not merely a matter of letting the ape and tiger die, for apes are not Pharisees, nor are tigers prigs. The elephant does not turn up his long nose at everything with any superior intention; and the totally unjust charge of hypocrisy might well be resented by any really sensitive and thin-skinned crocodile. The giraffe might be called a highbrow, but he is not really supercilious about his powers of Uplift. Man has scattered his own vices as well as virtues very arbitrarily among the animals, and there may be no more reason to accuse the peacock of pride than to accuse the pelican of charity.

The worst things in man are only possible to man. At least we must confine their existence to men, unless we are prepared to admit the existence of demons. There is thus another truth in the original conception of original sin, since even in sinning man originated something. His body may have come from animals, and his soul may be torn in pieces by all sorts of doctrinal disputes and quarrels among men. But, roughly speaking, it is quite clear that he did manufacture out of the old mud or blood of material origins, with whatever mixture of more mysterious elements, a special and a mortal poison. That poison is his own recipe; it is not merely decaying animal matter. That poison is most poisonous where there are fine scientific intellects or artistic imaginations to mix it. It is just as likely to be at its best — that is, at its worst — at the end of a civilization as at the beginning. Of this sort are all the hideous corruptions of culture; the pride, the perversions, the intellectual cruelties, the horrors of emotional exhaustion. You cannot explain that monstrous fruit by saying that our ancestors were arboreal; save, indeed, as an allegory of the Tree of Knowledge. The poison can take the form of every sort of culture — as, for instance, bacteria-culture. But the poison itself has always been there. Indeed it is as old as any memory of man. Wherefore, we have to posit of it that it also was of the human source and fountain head, that it was in the beginning, or, as the old theology affirms, original.

I suggest, therefore, with great respect, that it is not even now a case of having to admit that the old religion had come very near to the truths of the most modern science. It is rather a case of the most modern science having come very near to the truths of the old religion — but not quite near enough.

~G.K. Chesterton: Come To Think Of It.

"The Incarnation"

"HERE I am only giving an account of my own growth in spiritual certainty. But I may pause to remark that the more I saw of the merely abstract arguments against the Christian cosmology the less I thought of them. I mean that having found the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, I then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation and found them to be common nonsense."

~G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.

"The danger at present"

“ANYONE who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.”

~G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America. (1922)

A Christmas Carol

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast,
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world's desire.)

The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee,
His hair was like a crown.
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.

~G.K. Chesterton

The Blunders of Our Parties

THE PARTY SYSTEM was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides. It was not sportsmanlike that one side should have a rich accumulation of rubbish, while the other was left with nothing but the bare truth. It was not fair play that one combatant should be clad in a shining armour of shams and lies, while the other was handicapped by the nakedness of truth. The game could not be played properly unless the various pieces of nonsense and hypocrisy were most carefully and equitably distributed. There must be no corner in claptrap, no arrogant privilege in absurdity. Each competitor carried weights of about the same degree of gravity and inconvenience; each was loaded with some leaden stupidity or other which he was forbidden to drop. To drop it would be to gain an unfair advantage over an opponent still chivalrously staggering under his own lump of silliness. Thus it will be noted that these dead weights seldom have anything to do with the original ideals or aims of the two combatants. Thus the Tory or traditionalist had to profess to the last a perfectly meaningless and morbid hatred of Catholic and agricultural Ireland. Thus the Liberal or champion of liberty had to make an exception in favour of a superstitious and savage taboo against popular drink like beer. I was not so much that he thought it unfair to deprive the Tory of the popularity. It was one of the Tory’s recognized perquisites that he should have as much of the support of the public as he could get from the support of the public-house. In the same way, the Tory squire felt it would be a trick unworthy of a gentleman to go in for such a dishing of the Whigs as a decent treatment of the Irish. It was his duty as a good fellow to go on governing badly and give his critics a chance. This may seem a rather extraordinary arrangement; but it really was something like the arrangement between the two parties.

That was the superficial or sporting character of the Party system—a thing of the same kind as the Dark Blue and Light Blue passions aroused at the Boat-Race. But now that the formal structure of the two-party system has been thrown out of balance and superseded, it become an intensely interesting matter to note whether anything like a real principle had existed behind it or has remained after it. And it must be said in fairness that there was a deeper sort of difference and that it really has remained. Just as there are real differences between shades of blue, though they are both blue, or real differences between Oxford and Cambridge, though they are both genteel playgrounds, there was, after all, something behind the attitude of the Tory to his opponent, whether Liberal or Labour. It is interesting, and might be stated somewhat thus.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have the two great types—the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

In history the whole business of the Tories was to defend the actions of the Whigs. An old Unionist orating about Ulster would probably be surprised to be called a revolutionist. Yet even by his own account he would be taking his stand on the principles of the Revolution—meaning the Revolution of 1688. In short, the tory of two or three years ago existed in order to defend what the Tory of two hundred years ago was trying to prevent. And as it was with the Whig Revolution, so it has been exactly with the Industrial Revolution. When the average conservative or Constitutionalist stands up to defend Capitalism he is defending the deplorable result of the very latest blunder of the Radicals. It was the Radicals who made the Industrial Revolution, with its sweating and its slums, its millionaires and millions of wage-slaves. But as soon as the Progressive has done this happy thing, it instantly becomes the duty of the Conservative to prevent it from being undone. Capitalism is simply the chaos following the failure of Individualism. But those very traditionalists who never fell into the error of Individualism at all are forbidden to point out that Individualism has failed. The Manchester policy has been accepted so abjectly as something that succeeded that its conquered enemies did not even dare to see that it had failed. It becomes the duty of the Tory to defend the Radical triumph even when it ends in defeat. Rather in the same way, it is incredible but true that some people still go on talking about German efficiency, though they have staring them in the face exactly what it was the Germans effected. So the respectable person considers it a sort of Bolshevism to talk about the collapse of Capitalism. But if Bolshevism were to blow up the whole City with dynamite, hurling the cross of St. Paul across the Thames and sending the Monument flying beyond the hills of Highgate, it would then become the duty of the respectable Conservative to conserve these fragments in the precise places where they had fallen, and to resist any revolutionary attempt to put them back in their proper place.

Now if there is one thing more than another of which I am convinced, it is that what we want is to put things in the right place, however long they have been in the wrong place. I am convinced that the curse of the last two or three centuries has always fallen in this fashion and followed this course. It has always hqappened that impatient people precipitated the Deluge; and then custom and caution froze it into a sort of permanent Ice Age and endless Arctic Circle. It always happened that men moved when they might have stood still; and then immediately stood still when they really ought to have moved. The spirit of innovation always went far enough to get into a mess; and then the spirit of stability returned incongruously and told them to remain in the mess. Something of the sort may be noted, for the hundredth time, in the curious deadlock that seems to exist in Bolshevist Russia—or rather, in the Russia that is supposed to be Bolshevist. It looks as if Russia might remain for an indefinite time in the queer congested compromise of decayed Communism and alien Capitalism, and servile or conscript labour and defiant peasant proprietorship, into which indescribable patchwork that society has settled down after the Revolution. It has had the energy to jump into the fire and not the energy to jump out again. It may be a little more comfortable, but hardly more comprehensible, because the fire itself now largely consists of ashes. But it is not only in Russia that everything is choked up with the ashes of burnt-out things. In a less conspicuously chaotic fashion, the same is true of the recent history of the more orderly civilization of the West. There also a lumber of dead revolutions lies like a load on top of us. There also we are oppressed with old novelties. It would be alright if the innovators really had new ideas they had adopted recently, and the traditionalists really had old ideas that they treasured still. But the reactionary is only clinging to revolutions of which even the revolutionist is weary. He is mere a man one generation behind in the general disillusion about the last discovery. The only sort of reform proposed is one which Conservatives will treat as a convention as soon as it is established; and which reformers are already treating as a convention even before it is established. It is true in a sense to say that things will  be worse before they are better. But it is truer still to say that we shall have to go even further back before we can get any further forward.

~G.K. Chesterton: The Illustrated London News, April 19, 1924.

"I am the Immaculate Conception"

FOUR years after these potentates had their regrettable difference, while the Bishop still frowned and the parish priest feared to believe, little knots of poor peasants began to gather round a strange starved child before a crack in the rocks, from whence was to spring a strange stream and almost a new city; the rocks she had heard resound with a voice crying, “I am the Immaculate Conception. . . .”

“Good Lord, how little wealthy people know!”

~G.K. Chesterton: 'The Strange Talk of Two Victorians' (The Common Man).

Immaculate Conception, by Juan Antonio Frias y Escalante.

Oil on canvas, 1663; Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest.