Poem: A Second Childhood

When all my days are ending
And I have no song to sing,
I think I shall not be too old
To stare at everything;
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing.

Wherein God's ponderous mercy hangs
On all my sins and me,
Because He does not take away
The terror from the tree
And stones still shine along the road
That are and cannot be.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for wine,
But I shall not grow too old to see
Unearthly daylight shine,
Changing my chamber's dust to snow
Till I doubt if it be mine.

Behold, the crowning mercies melt,
The first surprises stay;
And in my dross is dropped a gift
For which I dare not pray:
That a man grow used to grief and joy
But not to night and day.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for lies;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Enormous night arise,
A cloud that is larger than the world
And a monster made of eyes.

Nor am I worthy to unloose
The latchet of my shoe;
Or shake the dust from off my feet
Or the staff that bears me through
On ground that is too good to last,
Too solid to be true.

Men grow too old to woo, my love,
Men grow too old to wed:
But I shall not grow too old to see
Hung crazily overhead
Incredible rafters when I wake
And find I am not dead.

A thrill of thunder in my hair:
Though blackening clouds be plain,
Still I am stung and startled
By the first drop of the rain:
Romance and pride and passion pass
And these are what remain.

Strange crawling carpets of the grass,
Wide windows of the sky:
So in this perilous grace of God
With all my sins go I:
And things grow new though I grow old,
Though I grow old and die.

~G.K. Chesterton

Poem: Eternities

I cannot count the pebbles in the brook.
Well hath He spoken: 'Swear not by thy head,
Thou knowest not the hairs,' though He, we read,
Writes that wild number in His own strange book.

I cannot count the sands or search the seas,
Death cometh, and I leave so much untrod.
Grant my immortal aureole, O my God,
And I will name the leaves upon the trees.

In heaven I shall stand on gold and glass,
Still brooding earth's arithmetic to spell;
Or see the fading of the fires of hell
Ere I have thanked my God for all the grass.

~G.K. Chesterton

"Where there is anything there is God"

"SO, later on, when I was on the Daily News, I defended, against the dramatic critic, the dramatic merit of a later play, which is full of good things; the play [by Yeats] called "Where There Is Nothing There Is God." But I was all groping and groaning and travailing with an inchoate and half-baked philosophy of my own, which was very nearly the reverse of the remark that where there is nothing there is God. The truth presented itself to me, rather, in the form that where there is anything there is God. Neither statement is adequate in philosophy; but I should have been amazed to know how near in some ways was my Anything to the Ens of St. Thomas Aquinas."

~G.K. Chesterton: Autobiography, Ch. VI.

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Poem: The Great Minimum

It is something to have wept as we have wept,
It is something to have done as we have done,
It is something to have watched when all men slept,
And seen the stars which never see the sun.

It is something to have smelt the mystic rose,
Although it break and leave the thorny rods,
It is something to have hungered once as those
Must hunger who have ate the bread of gods.

To have seen you and your unforgotten face,
Brave as a blast of trumpets for the fray,
Pure as white lilies in a watery space,
It were something, though you went from me to-day.

To have known the things that from the weak are furled,
Perilous ancient passions, strange and high;
It is something to be wiser than the world,
It is something to be older than the sky.

In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,
And fatted lives that of their sweetness tire,
In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,
It is something to be sure of a desire.

Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;
Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
Let thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning. It is something to have been.

~G.K. Chesterton

"A holy family of child, mother and father"

"THIS triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilisations which disregard it. Most modern reformers are merely bottomless sceptics, and have no basis on which to rebuild; and it is well that such reformers should realise that there is something they cannot reform...."

"From its first days in the forest this human group had to fight against wild monsters; and so it is now fighting against these wild machines. It only managed to survive then, and it will only manage to survive now, by a strong internal sanctity; a tacit oath or dedication deeper than that of the city or the tribe. But though this silent promise was always present, it took at a certain turning point of our history a special form which I shall try to sketch in the next chapter. That turning point was the creation of Christendom by the religion which created it. Nothing will destroy the sacred triangle; and even the Christian faith, the most amazing revolution that ever took place in the mind, served only in a sense to turn that triangle upside down. It held up a mystical mirror in which the order of the three things was reversed; and added a holy family of child, mother and father to the human family of father, mother and child."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Superstition of Divorce, V. The Story of the Family.

The Two Trinities, by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.
Oil on canvas, 1675-82;  National Gallery, London.

Christmas and Salesmanship

“I TAKE a grim and gloomy pleasure in reminding my fellow hacks and hired drudges in the dreadful trade of journalism that the Christmas which is now over ought to go on for the remainder of the twelve days. It ought to end on the Twelfth Night, on which occasion Shakespeare has himself assured us that we ought to be doing What we Will. But one of the queerest things about our own topsy-turvy time is that we all hear such a vast amount about Christmas just before it comes, and suddenly hear nothing at all about it afterwards. My own trade, the tragic guild to which I have already alluded, is trained to begin prophesying Christmas somewhere about the beginning of autumn; and the prophecies about it are like prophecies about the Golden Age and the Day of Judgment combined. Everybody writes about what a glorious Christmas we are going to have. Nobody, or next to nobody, ever writes about the Christmas we have just had. I am going to make myself an exasperating exception in this matter. I am going to plead for a longer period in which to find out what was really meant by Christmas; and a fuller consideration of what we have really found. There are any number of legends, even of modern legends, about what happens before Christmas; whether it is the preparation of the Christmas tree, which is said to date only from the time of the German husband of Queen Victoria, or the vast population of Father Christmases who now throng the shops almost as quickly as the customers. But there is no modern legend of what happens just after Christmas; except a dismal joke about indigestion and the arrival of the doctor. I am the more moved to send everybody and after-Christmas greeting, or, if I had the industry, an after-Christmas card; and in truth there is a craven crowd who escape by falling back upon New Years cards. But I should like to examine this problem of after-Christmas custom and festivity a little more closely.

Of course it is a mark of a commercial community that it thus advertises in Advent. The whole object of such a system is to deliver the goods. When once they are delivered there is a deadly silence; at least as an absence of any burst of joy over the creation of new things; a comparative silence about morning stars singing together or the shouting of the sons of God. In other word, when we have delivered the goods, it is not now quite certain that anybody has looked on them and seen that they are good. And the immense importance of announcement everywhere diminishes the corresponding importance of appreciation. I know that in the commercial case there are sometimes proofs of appreciation. I know that nobles ladies and actresses (I hope this is the right order of precedence) do write testimonials about their pleasure in consuming some sort of soap; and that leading literary men are found to declare that they would have been practically half-witted but for some particular training of the mind. But, taking modern announcements and advertisements and assertions as a whole, there is no comparison between the bulk of promises and the bulk of acknowledgements. Everybody knows the advertisements, but few could quote the acknowledgments. This all the more obvious in the case of Christmas, because Christmas is still rightly recognised as a feast of children. Perhaps it is natural that telling a little boy that he is going to have some toffee should be more explicit and explanatory than the little boy himself when he is actually eating the toffee; when he is stuffed and stuck to his chair with toffee; and is in no mood to symbolize gratitude except by greed. One would not ask of him even a lyric cry that might become a hymn of thanksgiving; still less a piece of perfect prose analyzing his own impressions. Little boys should be seen and not heard. In other words, they come to buy toffee, not to praise it. So long as no excessive noises are made in the mastication of that confection, we will excuse the youth from any long oratorical exercises in the way of returning thanks. And a certain amount of this natural disproportion between thrills and thanks is to be allowed for among all young people. The dreary agonies through which many a little boy must be going at this moment, in order to write three lines of thanks to his grandmother who gave him the toffee, is in itself no reflection on the toffee. Gratitude, being nearly the greatest of human duties, is also nearly the most difficult. And as grown-up people hardly ever think of being grateful for the sun and moon and their own souls and bodies, it is easy to excuse the immature for finding it difficult to say thank you for a bag of sweets. Only, as I say, when all these allowances have been made, there is still a disproportion between the promises of any such great symbolic feast and the strange fulfilment of the promise. And it is connected with a certain commercial habit of certain people promising everything or anything, so that the other people have a tendency to thank them for nothing. There is a sort of silence about the absorption of many modern things, as compared with the loud shouts that heralded their arrival.

I cannot help suspecting that in this there is a snag about what is enthusiastically called the Art of Salesmanship. I do not say that salesmanship cannot be an art; nor do I say that it has become too artful. Yet it is not its foes but its friends who are always hinting that it does not mean making people buy what they do not want. A transaction of that sort would fully explain the happy noises of the opening negotiations as compared with the silence afterwards. It is the triumph of the salesman that he has made the customer realize that he has long needed an electric tooth-brush or a self starting pencil, which he has never heard of before. But it is not always the triumph of the customer when he rightly and gravely considers them afterwards. And it does seem to me that our civilisation is in some degree out of joint, at the precise point of this juncture between the fierce and eager supply and the somewhat faint and wavering demand. There is such an impressive pressure of praise and recommendation, on the one side and such a lack of reaction either of protest or praise on the other, that I doubt whether the consumer is contributing enough constructive criticism to the State. After all, the original foundation of all trade is the ideas came from the consumer; and that he really did know what he wanted to consume. The dreams and visions of the consumer were then embodied and, as it were, incarnated, in the crafts and arts which fulfilled them. Of course, the craftsmen and the artists did something in detail which the consumer could not do so for himself; but the consumer had done something not in detail but in design. In a sense, he was the architect and they were the builders. But if the architect is to be covered with a totally different sort of building, and told that this is what he really wanted without knowing it, then he is not being housed, but buried. My only point at the moment is that, when all is said, he is now rather silent in his tomb.

I know there is a great difficulty in organising any expression of those who have really got what they liked; chiefly because it would involve the alarming alternative of their expressing themselves about what they did not like. I suppose there never has been a really convincing advertisement of Smith’s Soap or testimonial to Tomkinson’s Tea. For the one really thrilling assertion about Smith’s Soap would be that it is much better than Brown’s Soap; and the one quite convincing commendation of Tomkinson’s Tea would be a testimonial saying “What a relief it was after the absolutely filthy taste of Wilkinson’s Tea.” And this is forbidden by all commercial custom; and I rather fancy even by the law of the land. I do not say for a moment that it would be easy to get a real record of the reception of good things, especially when they are really good; and if the modern world were in that mood, I fancy there would be a longer period of appreciation, and perhaps even some final festival of thanks after the festival of Christmas. Puritans in America established Thanksgiving Day in order to avoid Christmas Day. It would be a real Anglo-American reconciliation to combine the two; and have a Thanksgiving Day for the turkey we had eaten at Christmas.

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News,’ Dec. 28, 1935.

 

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The Humour of King Herod

IF I SAY that I have just been very much amused with a Nativity play of the fourteenth century it is still possible that I may be misunderstood. What is more important, some thousand years of very heroic history will be misunderstood too. It was one of the Coventry cycle of mediaeval plays, loosely called the Coventry Mysteries, similar to the Chester Mysteries and the Towneley Mysteries.

And I was not amused at the blasphemy of something badly done, but at a buffoonery uncommonly well done. But, as I said at the time, the educated seem to be very ignorant of this fine mediaeval fun. When I mentioned the Coventry Mystery many ladies and gentlemen thought it was a murder in the police news. At the best, they supposed it to be the title of a detective story. Even upon a hint of history they could only recall the story of Godiva; which might be called rather a revelation than a mystery.

Now I always read police news and I sometimes write detective stories; nor am I at all ashamed of doing either. But I think the popular art of the past was perhaps a little more cheerful than that of the present. And in seeing this Bethlehem drama I felt that good news might perhaps be as dramatic as bad news; and that it was possibly as thrilling to hear that a child is born as to hear that a man is murdered.

Doubtless there are some sentimental people who like these old plays merely because they are old. My own sentiment could be more truly stated by saying that I like them because they are new. They are new in the imaginative sense, making us feel as if the first star were leading us to the first child.

But they are also new in the historical sense, to most people, owing to that break in our history which makes the Elizabethans seem not merely to have discovered the new world but invented the old one. Nobody could see this mediaeval play without realizing that the Elizabethan was rather the end than the beginning of a tradition; the crown and not the cradle of the drama.

Many things that modern critics call peculiarly Elizabethan are in fact peculiarly mediaeval. For instance, that the same stage could be the place where meet the extremes of tragedy and comedy, or rather farce. That daring mixture is always made a point of contrast between the Shakespearean play and the Greek play or the French classical play. But it is a point of similarity, or rather identity, between the Shakespearean play and the miracle play.

Nothing could be more bitterly tragic than the scene in this Nativity drama, in which the mothers sing a lullaby to the children they think they have brought into safety the moment before the soldiers of Herod rush in and butcher them screaming on the stage. Nothing could be more broadly farcical than the scene in which King Herod himself pretends that he has manufactured the thunderstorm.

In one sense, indeed, the old religious play was far bolder in its burlesque than the more modern play. Shakespeare did not express the unrest of King Claudius by making him fall over his own cloak. He did not convey his disdain for tyranny by letting Macbeth appear with his crown on one side. This was partly no doubt an improvement in dramatic art; but it was partly also, I think, a weakening of democratic satire.

Shakespeare's clowns are philosophers, geniuses, demigods; but Shakespeare's clowns are clowns. Shakespeare's kings may be usurpers, murderers, monsters; but Shakespeare's kings are kings. But in this old devotional drama the king is the clown. He is treated not so much with disdain as with derision; not so much with a bitter smile as with a broad grin. A cat may not only look at a king but laugh at a king; like the mythical Cheshire cat, an ancient cat as terrible as a tiger and grinning like a gargoyle. But that Cheshire cat has presumably vanished with the Chester Mysteries, the counterpart of these Coventry Mysteries; it has vanished with the age and art of gargoyles.

In other words, that popular simplicity that could see wrongful power as something pantomimically absurd, a thing for practical jokes, has since been sophisticated by a process none the less sad because it is slow and subtle. It begins in the Elizabethans in an innocent and indefinable form. It is merely the sense that, though Macbeth may get his crown crookedly, he must not actually wear it crooked. It is the sense that, though Claudius may fall from his throne, he must not actually fall over his footstool.

It ended in the nineteenth century in many refined and ingenuous forms; in a tendency to find all fun in the ignorant or criminal classes; in dialect or the dropping of aitches. It was a sort of satirical slumming. There was a new shade in the comparison of the coster with the cat; a coster could look at a king and might conceivably laugh at a king; but most contemporary art and literature, was occupied in laughing at the coster.

Even in the long lifetime of a good comic paper like Punch we can trace the change from jokes against the palace to jokes against the public-house. The difference is perhaps more delicate; it is rather that the refined classes are a subject for refined comedy; and only the con1mon people a subject for common farce. It is correct to call this refinement modern; yet it is not quite correct to call it contemporary. All through the Victorian time the joke was pointed more against the poor and less against the powerful; but the revolution which ended the long Victorian peace has shaken this Victorian patronage. The great war which has brought so many ancient realities to the surface has re-enacted before our eyes the Miracle Play of Coventry.

We have seen a real King Herod claiming the thunders of the throne of God, and answered by the thunder not merely of human wrath but of primitive human laughter. He has done murder by proclamations, and he has been answered by caricatures. He has made a massacre of children, and been made a figure of fun in a Christmas pantomime for the pleasure of other children. Precisely because his crime is tragic, his punishment is comic; the old popular paradox has returned.

~G.K. Chesterton: The Uses of Diversity.

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