On Paradoxes

THERE ARE two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren; the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death. I see everywhere among the young men who have imitated Mr. Shaw a strange tendency to utter epigrams which deny the possibility of further life and thought. A paradox may be a thing unusual, menacing, even ugly — like a rhinoceros. But, as a live rhinoceros ought to produce more rhinoceri, so a live paradox ought to produce more paradoxes. Nonsense ought to be suggestive; but nowadays it is abortive. The new epigrams are not even fantastic finger-posts on a wild road: they are tablets, each set into a brick wall at the end of a blind alley. So far as they concern thought at all, they cry to men, ‘Think no more’, as the voice says ‘Sleep no more’ to Macbeth. These rhetoricians never speak except to move the closure. Even when they are really witty (as in the case of Mr. Shaw), they commonly commit the one crime that cannot be forgiven among free men. They say the last word.

I will give such instances as happen to lie before me. I see on my table a book of aphorisms by a young Socialist writer, Mr. Holbrook Jackson; it is called Platitudes in the Making, and curiously illustrates this difference between the paradox that starts thought and the paradox that prevents thought. Of course, the writer has read too much Nietzsche and Shaw, and too little of less groping and more gripping thinkers. But he says many really good things of his own, and they illustrate perfectly what I mean here about the suggestive and the destructive nonsense.

Thus in one place he says, ‘Suffer fools gladly: they may be right’. That strikes me as good; but here I mean specially that it strikes me as fruitful and free. You can do something with the idea; it opens an avenue. One can go searching among one’s more solid acquaintances and relatives for the fires of a concealed infallibility. One may fancy one sees the star of immortal youth in the somewhat empty eye of Uncle George; one may faintly follow some deep rhythm of nature in the endless repetitions with which Miss Bootle tells a story; and in the grunts and gasps of the Major next door may hear, as it were, the cry of a strangled god. It can never narrow our minds, it can never arrest our life, to suppose that a particular fool is not such a fool as he looks. It must be all to the increase of charity, and charity is the imagination of the heart.

I turn the next page, and come on what I call the barren paradox. Under the head of ‘Advices’, Mr. Jackson writes, ‘Don’t think — do.’ This is exactly like saying, ‘Don’t eat — digest.’ All doing that is not mechanical or accidental involves thinking; only the modern world seems to have forgotten that there can be such a thing as decisive and dramatic thinking. Everything that comes from the will must pass through the mind, though it may pass quickly. The only sort of thing the strong man can ‘do’ without thinking of something like falling over a doormat. This is not even making the mind jump; it is simply making it stop. I take another couple of cases at random. ‘The object of life is life.’ That affects me as ultimately true; always presuming the author is liberal enough to include eternal life. But even if it is nonsense, it is thoughtful nonsense.On another page I read, ‘Truth is one’s own conception of things’. That is thoughtless nonsense.

A man would never have had any conception of things at all unless he had thought they were things and there was some truth about them. Here we have the black nonsense, like black magic, that shuts down the brain. ‘A lie is that which you do not believe’. That is a lie; so perhaps Mr. Jackson does not believe it.

~G.K. Chesterton: The Illustrated London News, March 11, 1911.

Poem: An Alphabet

A  is an Agnostic dissecting a frog,

B  was a Buddhist who had been a dog,

C  was a Christian, a Christist I mean,

D  was the Dog which the Buddhist had been,

E  is for Ethics that grow upon trees,

F  for St. Francis who preached to the fleas,

G  is for God which is easy to spell,

H  is for Haeckel and also for Hell,

I  is for Incas now commonly dead,

J  is for Jesuit under the bed,

K  is the letter for Benjamin Kidd,
The Angels and Devils said don’t but he did

L  Louis the Ninth who unlike the Eleventh,
Was a much better man than King Edward the Seventh.

M  is for Man, by the way, what is Man?

N  is for Nunquam who’ll tell if he can,

O  is for Om about which I won’t trouble you,

P  for the Pope and P.W.W. (1)

Q  is the Quaker quiescent in quod,

R  is for Reason, a primitive God, 

S  is for Superman, harmless but fat,

T  is a Theosophist losing his hat,

U  the Upanishads, clever but slight,

V  is a Virtuous Man Killing Beit, (2) 

W  is for Wesley who banged with his fist,

X  for King Xerxes, a monotheist,

Y  is for You who depraved as you are,
Are Lord of Creation and Son of a Star.

Z  Zarathustra who couldn’t take stout,
He made war on the weak and they banged him out.


~G.K. Chesterton

 +++

(1) P.W.W. was P.W. Wilson, a colleague of Chesterton’s on The Daily News.

(2) Alfred Beit was a Hamburg-born financier (reputedly the world’s richest man) whose wealth came from South Africa and whom Chesterton loathed. He is the subject of this clerihew by Bentley:

"Mr Alfred Beit
Screamed suddenly in the night.
When they asked him why
He made no reply."

The Ballad of the White Horse (excerpt)

UP across windy wastes and up
Went Alfred over the shaws,
Shaken of the joy of giants,
The joy without a cause.

In the slopes away to the western bays,
Where blows not ever a tree,
He washed his soul in the west wind
And his body in the sea.

And he set to rhyme his ale-measures,
And he sang aloud his laws,
Because of the joy of the giants,
The joy without a cause.

The King went gathering Wessex men,
As grain out of the chaff
The few that were alive to die,
Laughing, as littered skulls that lie
After lost battles turn to the sky
An everlasting laugh.

The King went gathering Christian men,
As wheat out of the husk;
Eldred, the Franklin by the sea,
And Mark, the man from Italy,
And Colan of the Sacred Tree,
From the old tribe on Usk.

The rook croaked homeward heavily,
The west was clear and warm,
The smoke of evening food and ease
Rose like a blue tree in the trees
When he came to Eldred’s farm.

But Eldred’s farm was fallen awry,
Like an old cripple’s bones,
And Eldred’s tools were red with rust,
And on his well was a green crust,
And purple thistles upward thrust,
Between the kitchen stones.

But smoke of some good feasting
Went upwards evermore,
And Eldred’s doors stood wide apart
For loitering foot or labouring cart,
And Eldred’s great and foolish heart
Stood open like his door.

A mighty man was Eldred,
A bulk for casks to fill,
His face a dreaming furnace,
His body a walking hill.

In the old wars of Wessex
His sword had sunken deep,
But all his friends, he signed and said,
Were broken about Ethelred;
And between the deep drink and the dead
He had fallen upon sleep.

“Come not to me, King Alfred, Save always for the ale:
Why should my harmless hinds be slain
Because the chiefs cry once again,
As in all fights, that we shall gain,
And in all fights we fail?

“Your scalds still thunder and prophesy
That crown that never comes;
Friend, I will watch the certain things,
Swine, and slow moons like silver rings,
And the ripening of the plums.”

And Alfred answered, drinking,
And gravely, without blame,
“Nor bear I boast of scald or king,
The thing I bear is a lesser thing,
But comes in a better name.

“Out of the mouth of the Mother of God,
More than the doors of doom,
I call the muster of Wessex men
From grassy hamlet or ditch or den,
To break and be broken, God knows when,
But I have seen for whom.

Out of the mouth of the Mother of God
Like a little word come I;
For I go gathering Christian men
From sunken paving and ford and fen,
To die in a battle, God knows when,

By God, but I know why.
“And this is the word of Mary,
The word of the world’s desire
`No more of comfort shall ye get,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.’ ”

~G.K. Chesterton: from Book II: "The Gathering of the Chiefs."

Mary with the Sun below her Feet,
by Matthias Grunewald. Black chalk, 1520.

"The human house is a paradox"

"WE cannot insist that the first years of infancy are of supreme importance, and that mothers are not of supreme importance; or that motherhood is a topic of sufficient interest for men, but not of sufficient interest for mothers. Every word that is said about the tremendous importance of trivial nursery habits goes to prove that being a nurse is not trivial. All tends to the return of the simple truth that the private work is the great one and the public work the small. The human house is a paradox, for it is larger inside than out."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Common Man.

Admiration Maternelle, by William Bouguereau (1825-1905).

Poem: To a Holy Roller

(THE SECT OF HOLY ROLLERS DEMONSTRATED AGAINST EVOLUTION AT DAYTON)

“Roll on,” said Gilbert to the earth:
“Roll on,” said Byron to the sea:
Accepting natural features thus,
Freely I say “Roll on” to thee.

Time like an ever rolling stream
Bears his most rolling sons away
Byranite saint, Darwinian sage,
And even Dayton has its day.

Earth changes; sings another bard,
“There rolls the deep where grew the tree”;
Convulsions viewed with equal calm
By Tennyson and Tennessee.

But ere you roll down history’s slope,
A moment may set us thinking
How Prohibition suits their mood,
Who get so drunk by never drinking.

What rows of bottles, blends of liquor,
WE need to reach in one wild leap
Those reels and rolls you get for nothing,
Great Bacchic Maenads on the cheap!

I blame you not that, writhing prone,
You flout the grave Darwinian’s view,
Of his extremely Missing Link,
For he is quite amusing too.

Marking the human ape evolve
(He puts his rolling into Latin),
Through epochs barely large enough
To swing an old Egyptian cat in.

Since you believe Man truly tilled
The Garden for the great Controller,
You back your Garden party up,
Like a consistent Garden Roller.

We, too, may deem Adam’s birth
Some more mysterious splendor shone,
Than prigs can pick off monkey’s bones,
Never you mind! Roll on! Roll on!

Grovel and gambol on all fours
Till you have proved beyond dispute
That human dignity is freed
From all connection with the brute.

~G.K. Chesterton

Catholic education

THOSE who refuse to understand that Catholic children must have an entirely Catholic school are back in the bad old days, as they would express it, when nobody wanted education but only instruction. They are relics of the dead time when it was thought enough to drill pupils in two or three dull and detached lessons that were supposed to be quite mechanical. They descend from the original Philistine who first talked about “The Three R.s”; and the joke about him is very symbolic of his type or time. For he was the sort of man who insists very literally on literacy, and, even in doing so, shows himself illiterate.

They were very uneducated rich men who loudly demanded education. And among the marks of their ignorance and stupidity was the particular mark that they regarded letters and figures as dead things, quite separate from each other and from a general view of life. They thought of a boy learning his letters as something quite cut off, for instance, from what is meant by a man of letters. They thought a calculating boy could be made like a calculating machine.

When somebody said to them, therefore, “These things must be taught in a spiritual atmosphere”, they thought it was nonsense; they had a vague idea that it meant that a child could only do a simple addition sum when surrounded with the smell of incense. But they thought simple addition much more simple than it is. When the Catholic controversialist said to them, “Even the alphabet can be learnt in a Catholic way”, they thought he was a raving bigot, they thought he meant that nobody must ever read anything but a Latin missal.

But he meant what he said, and what he said is thoroughly sound psychology. There is a Catholic view of learning the alphabet; for instance, it prevents you from thinking that the only thing that matters is learning the alphabet; or from despising better people than yourself, if they do not happen to have learnt the alphabet.

The old unpsychological school of instructors used to say: “What possible sense can there be in mixing up arithmetic with religion?” But arithmetic is mixed up with religion, or at the worst with philosophy. It does make a great deal of difference whether the instructor implies that truth is real, or relative, or changeable, or an illusion. The man who said, “Two and two may make five in the fixed stars”, was teaching arithmetic in an anti-rational way, and, therefore, in an anti-Catholic way. The Catholic is much more certain about the fixed truths than about the fixed stars.

But I am not now arguing which philosophy is the better; I am only pointing out that every education teaches a philosophy; if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. Every part of that education has a connection with every other part. If it does not all combine to convey some general view of life, it is not education at all.

~G.K. Chesterton: from The Common Man.

Vision of St. Thomas Aquinas, by Santi di Tito.
Oil on panel, 1593. San Marco, Florence.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), is the patron saint
of Catholic schools, Schools, Colleges, Students.

A Song of Defeat

THE line breaks and the guns go under,
The lords and the lackeys ride the plain;
I draw deep breaths of the dawn and thunder,
And the whole of my heart grows young again.
For our chiefs said ‘Done,’ and I did not deem it;

Our seers said ‘Peace,’ and it was not peace;
Earth will grow worse till men redeem it,
And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.
But the old flags reel and the old drums rattle,
As once in my life they throbbed and reeled;
I have found my youth in the lost battle,
I have found my heart on the battlefield.
For we that fight till the world is free,
We are not easy in victory:
We have known each other too long, my brother,
And fought each other, the world and we.

And I dream of the days when work was scrappy,
And rare in our pockets the mark of the mint,
When we were angry and poor and happy,
And proud of seeing our names in print.
For so they conquered and so we scattered,
When the Devil road and his dogs smelt gold,
And the peace of a harmless folk was shattered;
When I was twenty and odd years old.
When the mongrel men that the market classes
Had slimy hands upon England’s rod,
And sword in hand upon Afric’s passes
Her last Republic cried to God.
For the men no lords can buy or sell,
They sit not easy when all goes well,
They have said to each other what naught can smother,
They have seen each other, our souls and hell.

It is all as of old, the empty clangour,
The Nothing scrawled on a five-foot page,
The huckster who, mocking holy anger,
Painfully paints his face with rage.
And the faith of the poor is faint and partial,
And the pride of the rich is all for sale,
And the chosen heralds of England’s Marshal
Are the sandwich-men of the Daily Mail,
And the niggards that dare not give are glutted,
And the feeble that dare not fail are strong,
So while the City of Toil is gutted,
I sit in the saddle and sing my song.
For we that fight till the world is free,
We have no comfort in victory;
We have read each other as Cain his brother,
We know each other, these slaves and we.

~G.K. Chesterton