Christmas atmosphere and creed

We must make it clear, then, to those that feel the Nativity as an atmosphere and not a creed that this may at least be demanded of them — that they have the atmosphere. It is quite true that Dickens and the men of a manlier England would have said that they praised the spirit of Christmas and not the letter. But when they praised the spirit, they had it. It was the unmistakable old festivity of Dryden or Chaucer; it smelt and tasted of Christendom. Dickens would have made no doctrinal limitations in it; but there were intrinsic limitations in the nature of the thing. . . We must at least keep either the body or the soul of Christmas; either the central doctrine or else the exact physical observances. If we do not keep either one or the other, it is utterly idle to talk about a Higher Christmas or a New Christmas or an Improved Christmas; there is no sense in using the title at all when no vestige of the thing is left. We must simply say to ourselves, as cheerfully as we may, that there is one colour or smell or virtue the less in the universe.

– The Illustrated London News (7 January 1911).

“One very vile habit”

There is one very vile habit that the pedants have, and that is explaining to a man why he does a thing when the man himself can explain quite well — and quite differently.  If I go down on all-fours to find sixpence, it annoys me to be told by a passing biologist that I am really doing it because my remote ancestors were quadrupeds.  I concede that he knows all about biology, or even a great deal about my ancestors; but I know he is wrong, because he does not know about the sixpence.  If I climb a tree after a stray cat, I am unconvinced when a stray anthropologist tells me that I am doing it because I am essentially arboreal and barbaric.  I happen to know why I am doing it; and I know it is because I am amiable and somewhat over-civilised.  Scientists will talk to a man on general guess-work about things that they know no more about than about his pocket-money or his pet cat.  Religion is one of them, and all the festivals and formalities that are rooted in religion.  Thus a man will tell me that in keeping Christmas I am not keeping a Christmas feast, but a pagan feast.  This is exactly as if he told me that I was not feeling furiously angry, but only a little sad.  I know how I am feeling all right; and why I am feeling it.  I know this in the case of cats, sixpences, anger, and Christmas Day.  When a learned man tells me that on the 25th of December I am really astronomically worshipping the sun, I answer that I am not.  I am practicing a particular personal religion, the pleasures of which (right or wrong) are not in the least astronomical.  If he says that the cult of Christianity and the cult of Apollo are the same, I answer that they are utterly different; and I ought to know for I have held both of them.  I believed in Apollo when I was quite little; and I believe in Christmas now that I am very, very big.

– Illustrated London News, 1 January 1910.

“A very narrow ideal of breadth”

There is no person so narrow as the person who is sure that he is broad; indeed, being quite sure that one is broad is itself a form of narrowness. It shows that one has a very narrow ideal of breadth. But, moreover, there is an element involved in the Rationalist position which makes this unintentional bigotry peculiarly natural. A man who is in a house may think it is a very large house. He may think it a much larger house than it is. But he knows it is a house, because of its shape and appearance; because there are doors and windows — therefore there is a world outside. In the same way, a man inside a church may think it is the true church. He may think it a very broad and free church. But he knows it is a church, because it is shaped like one; therefore he knows that there are things beyond and outside the church. But suppose a man lived in a house of mirrors so craftily constructed that he really thought he was alone on an open plain. Suppose a man lived in a church painted so splendidly with sky and cloud that he thought he was in the open air under the dome of heaven. He would be in the same position as the typical Rationalist. Instead of being conscious that he stands in a large church, he is simply unconscious that he stands in a small universe.

– The Illustrated London News, 30 April 1910.

Chesterbelloc Edition!

It is strange but informing to discover that these wretchedly provincial attitudes of mind always think themselves universal, and nothing surprises world reformers of such a sort more than the discovery that other men differ from them.

– Hilaire Belloc,
On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters (1940).

“The way to respect a religion”

We talk much about “respecting” this or that person’s religion; but the way to respect a religion is to treat it as a religion: to ask what are its tenets and what are the consequences. But modern tolerance is deafer than intolerance. The old religious authorities, at least, defined a heresy before they condemned it, and read a book before they burned it. But we are always saying to a Mormon or a Moslem — “Never mind about your religion, come to my arms.” To which he naturally replies — “But I do mind about my religion, and I advise you to mind your eye.”

– The Illustrated London News, 13 May 1911.

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 hed 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.

– The Illustrated London News, 11 March 1911.

(A note to readers of The Hebdomadal Chesterton: A version of Mr. Jackson’s Platitudes in the Making with Chesterton’s own marginal comments has been published by Ignatius Press. It is quite interesting.)

“Deep and tenacious human habits”

The sexes tend, without any coercion, to come together. Consequently, in all moralising or legislating about sex, we must constantly allow for an element that does not exist in any other caste, section, or division. When we see that a chief wears a sword, while his serf does not wear a sword, we shall be roughly safe in supposing that this is because the lord prefers the serf swordless. When we see (in pretty recent Irish history) an Englishman allowed to carry firearms, but an Irishman not allowed to carry firearms, we may venture timidly to suppose that it is the Englishman who has arranged this, and not the Irishman. But it is not true that when we find the man smoking a pipe and the woman not smoking one that the veto must have come from the man. It may have come from the differentiation demanded on each side by the desire to attract the other.

No tyrants wish to please their slaves, and few sensible slaves do much to please their tyrants; and for this reason men and women never have been, and never can be, merely in the relationship of tyrants and slaves. There may have been a good deal of tyranny mixed up with it; there has been, and not male tyranny only. But this evil element can never be detected or destroyed but by a sane analysis, which will recognize the element of inevitable attraction. Marriage is not a hammer, but a magnet. The family does not rest on force, but on sex. And the upshot of it is that most of the ancient customs of the sexes are conveniences: not things imposed by one party, but things equally desired by both. I am not here speaking of laws and statutes (many of which, I think, are really unjust), but of certain deep and tenacious human habits, as the disproportionate emphasis on bodily dignity in the female or bodily hardihood in the male. These were never imposed; they are the oldest and freest things in the world.

– The Illustrated London News, 29 April 1911.

On nonsense

There is nothing that needs more fastidious care than our choice of nonsense. Sense is like daylight or daily air, and may come from any quarter or in any quantity. But nonsense is an art. Like an art, it is rarely successful, and yet entirely simple when it is successful. Like an art, it depends on the smallest word, and a misprint can spoil it. And like an art, when it is not in the service of heaven it is almost always in the service of hell. Numberless imitators of Lewis Carroll or of Edward Lear have tried to write nonsense and failed; falling back (one may hope) upon writing sense. But certainly, as the great Gilbert said, wherever there has been nonsense it has been precious nonsense…

I have suffered as much as any man from the public insult of the misprint. I have seen my love of books described as a love of boots. I have seen the word ‘cosmic’ invariably printed as ‘comic’; and have merely reflected that the two are much the same. As to Nationalists and Rationalists, I have come to the conclusion that no human handwriting or typewriting can clearly distinguish them; and I now placidly permit them to be interchanged, though the first represents everything I love and the second everything I loathe. But there is one kind of misprint I should still find it hard to forgive. I could not pardon a blunder in the printing of ‘Jabberwock’. I insist on absolute literalism in that really fine poem of Lear, ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose’. To spoil these new nonsense words would be like shooting a great musician improvising at the piano. The sounds could never be recovered again. ‘And as in uffish thought he stood’. If the printer had printed it ‘affish’ I doubt if the first edition would have sold. ‘Over the Great Gromboolian Plain’. Suppose I had seen it printed ‘Gromhoolian’. Perhaps I should never have known, as I know now, that Edward Lear was a yet greater man than Lewis Carroll.

The first principle, then, may be considered clear. Let mistakes be made in ordinary books — that is, in scientific works, established biographies, histories, and so on. Do not let us be hard on misprints when they occur merely in time-tables or atlases or works of science. In works like those of Professor Haeckel, for example, it is sometimes quite difficult to discover which are the misprints and which are the intentional assertions. But in anything artistic, anything which avowedly strays beyond reason, there we must demand the exactitude of art. If a thing is admittedly not possible, then the next best thing it can do is to be beautiful. If a thing is nonsensical, it ought to be perfectly nonsensical.

– The Illustrated London News, 11 March 1911.

On hot weather

The chief gift of hot weather to me is the somewhat unpopular benefit called a conviction of sin. All the rest of the year I am untidy, lazy, awkward, and futile. But in hot weather I feel untidy, lazy, awkward, and futile. Sitting in a garden-chair in a fresh breeze under a brisk grey and silver sky, I feel a frightfully strenuous fellow: sitting on the same garden-chair in strong sunshine, it begins slowly to dawn on me that I am doing nothing. In neither case, of course, do I get out of the chair. But I resent that noontide glare of photographic detail by the ruthless light of which I can quite clearly see myself sitting in the chair. I prefer a more grey and gracious haze, something more in the Celtic-twilight style, through which I can only faintly trace my own contours, vast but vague in the dusk and distance.

– The Illustrated London News, 11 June 1910.

Beggars

The other day, a British magistrate placidly proposed, apparently in so many words, that not only beggars should be punished, but also anyone who gives to beggars. Legally, this may be stated in the following two judgments: (1) that every poor man may be presumed to be deceiving; (2) that every rich man may be presumed to be wilfully deceived. The first opinion, if not quite logically clear, is quite legally established. The second is new, and seems even slightly improbable. Does he mean that it is a crime to give help where it is needed? Or does he mean that it is a crime to make a mistake about where it is needed? On either line of thought, I should enjoy watching him draft the Act of Parliament.

This is a moral matter, on which we must get our ideas clear; and I propose to clear my own ideas and yours, whether you like it or not. What is a beggar? A beggar is a man who asks help from another man solely in the name of something extraneous but common — as kinship or charity, the Fatherhood of God, or the brotherhood of man. He does not ask for the bread because he can at once give you the money, as in commerce. He does not ask for the bread because he will soon be able to pass you the mustard, as in Society. He asks you for the bread because you are supposed to be under an ancient law of pity, by which (as it is written) if a man asks you for bread you will not give him a stone. That is what a beggar is. He is a man who begs — that is, he is a man who asks without any clear power of return, except the opportunity he offers you to fulfill your own ideals.

– The Illustrated London News, 25 February 1911.

War and peace

The point I wished to put to the admirable peace propagandist is this — that since these conflicts arise from real desires, good or bad, there are only two ways in which they can be permanently overcome. One is to say that people shall not have these particular attachments to an island or a valley, to a costume or a creed. The other is to say that they shall have them, but shall also have some other very vivid and almost concrete attachment that can cover and control them all, as the worship of a particular god, or the crusade against a common enemy, or the admission of a common code of conscience. I say to the peace propagandist, “Either an Irishman must love Ireland, or you must invent something that he can love more than Ireland. I shall be interested to see you try.” But certainly it is utterly useless to talk about peace and the mere absence of hatred. It is useless to introduce German editors to English editors and ask them not to hate each other. They don’t hate each other. The life of an editor leaves little place for such powerful emotions. But in some foggy way the English editor does love England; and in his own blinking style the German editor does love Germany. Neither of them knows at what moment all that they like most may be menaced by something that they don’t in the least understand. The one remedy is to remove the affections; let the Englishman no longer like heavy breakfasts, rambling roads, irregular villages, personal liberty. Let the German no longer like long serious meals, long glasses of light beer, elaborate birthday formalities, and the habit of sitting quite still with a radiant face. The other method is that they should hold some other definite thing more sacred even than these. I can see no third method.

I have written this article by way of reply to numberless correspondents who seem to imagine that I revel in human carnage and drink hot blood. I wish to point out that, so far from being opposed to peace, I have taken the pains to think out the only two possible ways in which it could be achieved. One is by the Buddhist experiment of the elimination of all desires. The other, I think, is by the Christian expedient of a common religion.

– The Illustrated London News, 28 January 1911.