A Fairy Tale

IN NOVELS, romances, scientific reports and similar documents, we have all come across the story of the man who, on waking up, forgets his name and wanders out into the streets without an identity. He can exercise an ordinary intelligence; he can perform all ordinary functions, but he cannot remember who he is. I am in this position. But then, as it is a comfort for me to reflect, so are you. Every human being has forgotten who he is and where he came from. We are all blasted with one great obliteration of memory. We none of us saw ourselves born; and if we had, it would not have cleared up the mystery. Parents are a delight; but they are not an explanation. The one thing that no man, however learned, can ever know, is his own name. It is easier to comprehend the cosmos than to comprehend the ego; it is easier even to know where you are than to know who you are. We have forgotten our own meaning, and we are all wandering the streets without keepers. All that we call commonsense and practicality and worldly wisdom only means that we forget that we have forgotten. All that we mean by religion and poetry only means that for one wild moment we remember that we forget.

I was sitting the other day on a heap of stones in the Isle of Thanet, when I remembered that I had forgotten. Not a straw has stirred; not a bird had spoken; but my blood ran cold, and I knew at once that I was in fairyland. The commonplace country landscape of Thanet lent itself more to the fairy notion than any imaginable mountains or lakes or caves. It is always easier to see this elvish look in plain and familiar objects because of a fact that men in mostly our day fail to understand; because it is exactly the homeliest part of man that is nearest to heaven and hell. We can think of a stool or a pot being bewitched; we cannot easily think of a cartoon by Raphael being bewitched. Neither can we think easily of the Alps being bewitched; it would require a witch of some force and character. But a domestic and even prosaic landscape, like that of this flat corner of Kent, can be soaked in a supernaturalism all the more awful from being detached and alien from the landscape itself. Everything that stood up around me stood up shapeless and yet with some horrible hint of the human shape. Everything looked as if it had a face somewhere, but a face that was hidden or turned away. I seemed to be looking at the ugly back of everything. The stunted hedge looked like a line of hoary and hairy hobgoblins staring away from me towards the sun. The dwarfish trees were deformed and twisted by the silent and evil magic of the sea; they seemed to have hump-backs and hidden faces. Everything was at once secretive and vigilant; even the heap of stones beneath me seemed to be all eyes. But all external oddities were secondary to, or perhaps only symbolic of, the sudden sense of a sacred and splendid ignorance that had fallen upon my soul; the enigma of being alive. Saints have not discovered the answer. Philosophers have not even discovered the riddle. But in that moment at least I remembered that I could not remember.

But there is one merely human work in which the fundamental mood is truly and wisely recorded—I mean in fairly tales. I can never understand why it is that those who happen to disbelieve in Christianity do not go back to the great, healthy, permanent human tradition outside Christianity. Because you cannot rise to faith, you need not sink to natural philosophy. If I did not put my faith in the Gospel, I should not put it in Haeckel. I should put it in Jack the Giant Killer. I should put it in these enduring human stories, with their celebration of hope, surprise, courage, the fulfilment of contracts, and the natural relations of mankind. The point is apart from my present purpose, and I will not pursue it here; but I fancy that it is one of the strange testimonies to Christianity that its opponents do not get clear of it into the original human condition, but go mad with mere reaction and anarchy. Those who object to the faith often object to the human fables; those who dislike Christianity carry their absurdity to the point of disliking Paganism too.

The essence of fairyland is this; that it is a country of which we do not know the laws. This is also a peculiarity of the universe in which we live. We do not know anything about the laws of nature; we do not even know whether they are laws. All that we can do is to take first by faith (from our parents, aunts, and nurses), and afterwards by very meager experiment (during the miserably insufficient period of three score years and ten), the general proposition that there is some sort of strange connection, often repeated but still unexplained, between lighted gunpowder and a loud bang. And it is here that we may see the deep and sound philosophy of the fairy tale. The chemist says: “Mix these three substances and the bang will follow.” The good wizard in the fairy tale says: “Eat these three apples and the giant’s head will fall off.” But the chemist talks in a particular tone and style, which suggests that there is an abstract philosophy, some sort of inevitable connection between the three substances and the bang. Sometimes he calls it a necessity, which means a thing that cannot be broken. Sometimes he calls it a law, which means a thing that can be broken. But he always means that the mind sees a connection between the two things—as the mind sees a connection between four and eight—and the mind does nothing of the sort. The fairy-tale method is far more philosophical. The wizard says: “Do this one extraordinary thing and that other totally different extraordinary thing does continually follow. I don’t know why it does; I don’t even know that it will always do it. But it is a tip worth knowing when you want to kill a giant.” We do not know that these natural repetitions all around us are laws; we do not know that they are necessities. What we do know about them is that they are magic spells—that is, conditions which exist, but the nature of which is mystical altogether. Water is bewitched, so that it always goes downhill. Birds are bewitched, so that they fly. The sun is bewitched, so that it shines.

I rose from the heap of stones having become altogether a citizen of fairyland. I grasped my stick like a sword and went up the white road looking for giants. I was disappointed for some little time, the two or three people whom I met being so far as I could estimate actually smaller than myself. But there was something of a rapid rigidity in the road running in front of me like a lean white hound, that dragged me on in undiminished confidence in the wonders that awaited me. For it is a mark of the essential morality of fairyland (a thing too commonly overlooked) that happiness in fairyland, like happiness anywhere else, involves an object and even a challenge; we can only admire scenery if we want to get past it. No man can take his ease in Elfland as in the land of the lotus eater. Children are its citizens, and children do not want to take their ease. I hoped to find a castle and an ogre; if I had luck a three-headed ogre, for in Elfland all sport is the defiance of something stronger; our only hunting is the hunting of big game. I wanted him large and wicked, very wicked. A minute after the road and hedges turned at an abrupt angle, and I saw before me something that snapped my last faith in reasonable things.

There in front of me, solid and silent in the sun, was the unmistakable ogre’s castle—turreted and castellated, with an extravagant skyline, exactly as I had seen it brightly coloured in my nursery picture-books. With all my elvish feelings I had not really believed that I should find such a fantastic fortress on a road in Kent. Turning to a fat, elderly countryman who was standing by a haystack (himself no doubt a fairy), I said, “Who lives in this place?” “That place,” he said, “why that’s Mr. Harry Marks’ place.” And I leaned upon my stick and gazed and thought of the war in Elfland.

~G.K. Chesterton: Lunacy & Letters.

"He is bent on being a jolly journalist"

"YOU will not change Gilbert, you will only fidget him. He is bent on being a jolly journalist, to paint the town red, and he does not need style to do that. All he wants is buckets and buckets of red paint."

~Mrs. Frances Chesterton to Fr. O'Connor: quoted in Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the definitive biography by Maisie Ward.

● Amazon

See also, Frances Chesterton, article by Nancy Carpentier Brown.

"The gigantic secret of the Christian"

"JOY, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. . . . The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. . . . There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."

~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Ch. IX.

The error of impartiality

"IT is manifestly most unreasonable that intelligent men should be divided upon the absurd modern principle of regarding every clever man who cannot make up his mind as an impartial judge, and regarding every clever man who can make up his mind as a servile fanatic. As it is, we seem to regard it as a positive objection to a reasoner that he has taken one side or the other. We regard it (in other words) as a positive objection to a reasoner that he has contrived to reach the object of his reasoning. We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end."

~G.K. Chesterton: All Things Considered.

"From the good man to the saint"

"THE transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things. It is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him of his lady. A saint and a poet standing by the same flower might seem to say the same thing; but indeed though they would both be telling the truth, they would be telling different truths. For one the joy of life is a cause of faith, for the other rather a result of faith."

~G.K. Chesterton: St. Francis of Assisi, Chap. V, Le Jongleur De Dieu.

● Amazon

● Ignatius Press

The Unknown Warrior

THE recent ritual of Armistice Day was overshadowed, as everyone knows, by the shadowy figure of the Unknown Warrior. And this was well; for that figure, however like a shadow, alone possesses something of the character of a statue. It is one of the very few monumental things in modern civilisation. The world will never forget that altar which St Paul saw as he passed by, where the Greeks had built a shrine to the Unknown God. So it is in this case, almost alone among all modern cases; it is really possible that the world may never forget that we built a shrine to the Unknown Man.

For whatever the future is like, it will not be Futurist. The very notion of always talking in terms of tomorrow is a passing taste that will soon be a thing of yesterday. Those who are concerned for the coming thing are really rather concerned for the vanishing thing, concerned to catch a fashion before it vanishes. Most of the artistic experiments and social prophecies which appeal to the next age, are in fact stamped with all the special marks and limitations of this age. Our Utopian predictions may not be very easily fulfilled, but they will be very easily dated. Our Futurist pictures may be mistaken at the first glance for the primitive drawings of the Sandwich Islanders, but a more expert examination will certainly reveal the characteristic conventions of the twentieth century. This is as true of War Memorials as of everything else; and those who insisted on things of immediate usefulness were mostly denying and destroying the whole of their ultimate use. Whatever else might be said of such War Memorials, they do not happen to discharge the function of being memorials of the war. With a changing Society these practical things will become impracticable; these useful things will be disused. The building of cottages, let us say, is vital to the present shortage of housing; but it might become almost unintelligible in a society with a decently distributed power over the means of production, where a common man could afford to build his own cottage. A club or institute may be established with enthusiasm and applause; it may be regarded as a mere saving of wealth and life by 'keeping people out of the public house'. But it may be regarded as a meaningless waste by people who will, perhaps, have restored the public house to the proper public dignity, and made the old Christian inn a place for Christian men. These things are at best modern medicines for modern maladies. They will appear to another age like some special provisions against the Black Death, or some particular warning against the Norse pirates. But though the advanced ideas of our own age are the very last that are likely to endure into another age, neither is it enough to express common ideas in the sense of conventional ideas. That is, it is not enough to express common ideas in a conventional way.

If there are many mad pamphlets and queer pictures and fantastic flags of revolt in the dust-bin of the ages, it is equally true that there are whole rubbish-heaps of lost Latin epitaphs and dead English epics, and pompous monuments like the urns and nymphs in a deserted garden. The thing that survives is that which has a certain combination of normality with distinction. It has simplicity with a slight touch of strangeness; as has the style of Milton or Michelangelo. It is a tale just sufficiently unusual to be worth telling, and yet immediately intelligible when told. It is what the hero is to the human being; a thing magnified but made to scale. Of this really enduring quality I know no other modern example except the burial of the Unknown Warrior, with a King for his chief Mourner.

It is a tale that could be told in any future society, and remain simple and striking. It is a monument that could be looked at by any future generation, with any customs or costumes, and looked at with the same mixture of mystery and familiarity. If we wish to imagine the feelings of the future, the best approximation to it is not to trust the fancies of our own futurism, but to note the facts of our own attitude towards the past, especially the remote past. Now this story of the Unknown Warrior would have a point and a pathos if it were told about a prehistoric tribe burying a man in a barrow, or an ancient Egyptian procession bearing a faceless mummy to a pyramid. If we read that a nameless legionary was buried high upon the Capitol, and that the Roman Emperor offered some sacrifice or libation to his manes, we should understand what was meant. If we were told that some great medieval king spent wealth on masses to be sung in some great cathedral for the soul of some unknown archer, picked up at random on the field of Courtrai or Crecy, we should feel what we were meant to feel. We should feel what we felt on Armistice Day in London. It is something perhaps better expressed, in any age, by the silent symbol of gesture and action than by any definition of a thing so deep. It is strange that the same thinkers who disapprove of dogma often disapprove of ritualism. For ritualism is the only possible alternative to dogma. In this case the dogma is so deep and vital that its verbal definition invariably leads to disputes and absurd misunderstandings. It is a truth that worries people when put into words; so that they talk the wildest nonsense about it, and especially against it. Perhaps, therefore, it is just as well that their subconscious faith in this dogma should only be expressed in a grave and graceful ceremonial action. But the dogma itself, the truth symbolised itself, is something that was almost rediscovered in the realities of war: it is that in the darkness of battle, and in the very heart of the whirlwind of death, is discovered that mystery whose name is the quality of men.

Men are not equal in their realisation of equality. They are really equal in many other essentials of the true egalitarian idea, but they are not equal in that. Certain conditions favour the growth of plutocratic fashions obscuring our brotherhood; certain other conditions make intensely vivid the great things we have in common, as compared with the small things that divide us. And anyone who understands the real doctrine of equality (there are not very many in the modern world who do) will understand that some sense of it vaguely but invariably comes to the surface under the hideous conditions of war. An army, which in one sense would seem the very home of subordination, has nevertheless an ultimate tendency to encourage equality; because, whatever may be the rule or the orders, the facts are those of an intense independence. If any man really fails to understand the mystical dogma of the equality of man, he can immediately test it by thinking of two men, of totally different types and fortunes, falling on the same field at some terrible crisis in the war which saved our country. One might be, and often was, a gentleman of the finer tradition, fortunate in his friends, in his tastes, in his culture as well as his character.

Another might be some stunted serf of our servile industrial slums, a man whom all modern life conspired to crush and deform. In the hour when the flag of England was saved, there was no man who dared to say, or would have dreamed of saying, that one death was less glorious than the other.

~G.K. Chesterton: from The Apostle and the Wild Ducks and other essays.

The British tomb of The Unknown Warrior, an unidentified British soldier killed on a European battlefield during WWI. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, London on 11 November 1920.

"This vast illusion"

"UNDER all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its Reuter's Agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars suburban."

~G.K. Chesterton: Heretics, III. "On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small."

• The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 1:Heretics, Orthodoxy, the Blatchford Controversies