A CHESTERTON CALENDAR
_A Chesterton
Calendar_
Compiled from the Writings of
'G.K.C.' Both in Verse and in
Prose. With a section apart for
the Moveable Feasts.
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd.
Dryden House, Gerrard Street, London, W. 1911
PREFATORY NOTE
It will be found that almost all Mr. G. K. Chesterton's books have been
utilized in the making of this Calendar. A word of acknowledgment is
due to the various publishers for their courtesy in permitting this:
to Messrs. Grant Richards, Arthur L. Humphreys, J. W. Arrowsmith, John
Lane, J. M. Dent & Co., Macmillan & Co., Duckworth & Co., Harper & Co.,
Cassell & Co., and Methuen & Co. Recourse has been had also to the
files of the 'Daily News,' the 'Illustrated London News,' and other
journals to which Mr. Chesterton has been a contributor. The present
publishers feel they are peculiarly indebted to Mr. Chesterton himself
for his kindness in allowing them to include certain verses from poems
which have not yet been printed _in extenso_ elsewhere.
JANUARY
Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all
things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of
which I am generally accused.
'_Orthodoxy._'
NEW YEAR'S DAY
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It
is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new
backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year
resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh
about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man
starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it
is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be
born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
'_Daily News._'
JANUARY 2nd
There is no such thing as fighting on the winning side: one fights to
find out which is the winning side.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
JANUARY 3rd
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire
to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose
his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for
saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or
mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide- or a drill-book.
This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly
or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if
he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by
continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier, surrounded by
enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire
for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely
cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He
must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will
not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference
to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with
adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity
has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of
the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for
the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has
held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery
of chivalry: the Christian courage which is a disdain of death; not the
Chinese courage which is a disdain of life.
'_Orthodoxy._'
JANUARY 4th
The fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for
the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let
no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently the stones and weeds,
to have the mind a storehouse of sunsets, requires a discipline in
pleasure and an education in gratitude.
'_Twelve Types._'
JANUARY 5th
We have people who represent that all great historic motives were
economic, and then have to howl at the top of their voices in order to
induce the modern democracy to act on economic motives. The extreme
Marxian politicians in England exhibit themselves as a small, heroic
minority, trying vainly to induce the world to do what, according to
their theory, the world always does.
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
JANUARY 6th
_THE FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY_
THE WISE MEN
Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain,
That we may lose the way.
Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth.
We know all labyrinthine lore,
We are the three Wise Men of yore,
And we know all things but the truth.
Go humbly ... it has hailed and snowed ...
With voices low and lanterns lit,
So very simple is the road,
That we may stray from it.
The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day,
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.
The Child that was ere worlds begun
(... We need but walk a little way ...
We need but see a latch undone ...),
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.
The house from which the heavens are fed,
The old strange house that is our own,
Where tricks of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
And Honour is as hard as stone.
Go humbly; humble are the skies,
And low and large and fierce the Star,
So very near the Manger lies,
That we may travel far.
Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain,
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
For God Himself is born again;
And we are little children walking
Through the snow and rain.
'_Daily News._'
JANUARY 7th
The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of
families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still
domestic, of one man one house--this remains the real vision and magnet
of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general,
less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted
woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy
one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the
world's desire.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
JANUARY 8th
The dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they
both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as
a drink.
'_George Bernard Shaw._'
JANUARY 9th
The thing from which England suffers just now more than from any
other evil is not the assertion of falsehoods, but the endless and
irrepressible repetition of half-truths.
'_G. F Watts._'
JANUARY 10th
It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or
mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is
the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent
eternity, they represent it by a serpent with its tail in its mouth.
There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory
meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the
eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists
and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a
serpent eating its tail--a degraded animal who destroys even himself.
'_Orthodoxy._'
JANUARY 11th
Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It obviates the crude
requirements of polygamy. If you have one good wife you are sure to
have a spiritual harem.
'_Daily News._'
JANUARY 12th
We must not have King Midas represented as an example of success; he
was a failure of an unusually painful kind. Also, he had the ears
of an ass. Also (like most other prominent and wealthy persons), he
endeavoured to conceal the fact. It was his barber (if I remember
right) who had to be treated on a confidential footing with regard to
this peculiarity; and his barber, instead of behaving like a go-ahead
person of the succeed-at-all-costs school and trying to blackmail King
Midas, went away and whispered this splendid piece of society scandal
to the reeds, who enjoyed it enormously. It is said that they also
whispered it as the winds swayed them to and fro. I look reverently at
the portrait of Lord Rothschild; I read reverently about the exploits
of Mr. Vanderbilt. I know that I cannot turn everything I touch to
gold; but then I also know that I have never tried, having a preference
for other substances--such as grass and good wine. I know that these
people have certainly succeeded in something; that they have certainly
overcome somebody; I know that they are kings in a sense that no
men were ever kings before; that they create markets and bestride
continents. Yet it always seems to me that there is some small domestic
fact that they are hiding, and I have sometimes thought I heard upon
the wind the laughter and whisper of the reeds.
'_All Things Considered._'
JANUARY 13th
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been
found difficult; and left untried.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
JANUARY 14th
The old masters of a healthy madness--Aristophanes or Rabelais or
Shakespeare--doubtless had many brushes with the precisians or ascetics
of their day, but we cannot but feel that for honest severity and
consistent self-maceration they would always have had respect. But
what abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have
reserved for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and
did not even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain
to exuberance, which contented itself with the fool's cap without the
bells!
'_The Defendant._'
JANUARY 15th
The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future,
because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what
you like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freshly with my
favourite colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because
the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly
wiser than we, and of things done which we could not do. I know I
cannot write a poem as good as 'Lycidas.' But it is always easy to say
that the particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of
the future.
'_George Bernard Shaw._'
JANUARY 16th
'I have only that which the poor have equally with the rich; which the
lonely have equally with the man of many friends. To me this whole
strange world is homely, because in the heart of it there is a home; to
me this cruel world is kindly, because higher than the heavens there is
something more human than humanity. If a man must not fight for this,
may he fight for anything? I would fight for my friend, but if I lost
my friend, I should still be there. I would fight for my country, but
if I lost my country, I should still exist. But if what that devil
dreams were true, I should not be--I should burst like a bubble and be
gone; I could not live in that imbecile universe. Shall I not fight for
my own existence?'
'_The Ball and the Cross._'
JANUARY 17th
There are vast prospects and splendid songs in the point of view of
the typically unsuccessful man; if all the used-up actors and spoilt
journalists and broken clerks could give a chorus it would be a
wonderful chorus in praise of the world.
_Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_
JANUARY 18th
'Tommy was a good boy' is a purely philosophical statement, worthy of
Plato or Aquinas. 'Tommy lived the higher life' is a gross metaphor
from a ten-foot rule.
'_Orthodoxy._'
JANUARY 19th
Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. I do
not mean something connected with a piece of enamel, I mean something
with a violent happiness in it--an almost painful happiness. A man may
have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of
victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for
the moment's sake. He enjoys it for the woman's sake, or his own sake.
The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he
enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for
may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last for a
week. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks
of his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled with
eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary.
Once look at them as moments after Pater's manner, and they become as
cold as Pater and his style. Man cannot love mortal things. He can only
love immortal things for an instant.
'_Heretics._'
JANUARY 20th
It is remarkable that in so many great wars it is the defeated who
have won. The people who were left worst at the end of the war were
generally the people who were left best at the end of the whole
business. For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the
Christians. But they did not end in the decline of the Christians;
they ended in the decline of the Saracens. That huge prophetic wave
of Moslem power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns
of Christendom: that wave was broken, and never came on again. The
Crusades had saved Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem. The same
applies to that epic of Republican war in the eighteenth century to
which we Liberals owe our political creed. The French Revolution ended
in defeat; the kings came back across a carpet of dead at Waterloo.
The Revolution had lost its last battle, but it had gained its first
object. It had cut a chasm. The world has never been the same since.
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
JANUARY 21st
From such books ... we can discover what a clever man can do with the
idea of aristocracy. But from the 'Family Herald Supplement' literature
we can learn what the idea of aristocracy can do with a man who is not
clever. And when we know that we know English history.
'_Heretics._'
JANUARY 22nd
Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot
be used to back up a single sane one. The kinship and competition of
all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel
or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. On
the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly
humane; but you cannot be human. That you and a tiger are one may be a
reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as
cruel as the tiger. It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you;
it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in neither case does
evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably--that is, to admire
his stripes while avoiding his claws. If you want to treat a tiger
reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden.
'_Orthodoxy._'
JANUARY 23rd
Some priggish little clerk will say, 'I have reason to congratulate
myself that I am a civilized person, and not so bloodthirsty as the
Mad Mullah.' Somebody ought to say to him, 'A really good man would be
less bloodthirsty than the Mullah. But you are less bloodthirsty, not
because you are more of a good man, but because you are a great deal
less of a man. You are not bloodthirsty, not because you would spare
your enemy, but because you would run away from him.'
'_All Things Considered._'
JANUARY 24th
To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will
sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or
impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot
may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to
point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or
crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a
London street. Upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there
rests for the time being the spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts
the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he
realizes one of our visions.
'_The Defendant._'
JANUARY 25th
Silence is the unbearable repartee.
'_Charles Dickens._'
JANUARY 26th
'I am staring,' said MacIan at last, 'at that which shall judge us
both.'
'Oh yes,' said Turnbull in a tired way; 'I suppose you mean God.'
'No, I don't,' said MacIan, shaking his head, 'I mean him.' And he
pointed to the half-tipsy yokel who was ploughing, down the road.
'I mean him. He goes out in the early dawn; he digs or he ploughs a
field. Then he comes back and drinks ale, and then he sings a song. All
your philosophies and political systems are young compared to him. All
your hoary cathedrals--yes, even the Eternal Church on earth is new
compared to him. The most mouldering gods in the British Museum are
new facts beside him. It is he who in the end shall judge us all. I am
going to ask him which of us is right.'
'Ask that intoxicated turnip-eater----'
'Yes--which of us is right. Oh, you have long words and I have long
words; and I talk of every man being the image of God; and you talk of
every man being a citizen and enlightened enough to govern. But, if
every man typifies God, there is God. If every man is an enlightened
citizen, there is your enlightened citizen. The first man one meets is
always man. Let us catch him up.'
'_The Ball and the Cross._'
JANUARY 27th
I gravely doubt whether women ever were married by capture. I think
they pretended to be; as they do still.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
JANUARY 28th
On bright blue days I do not want anything to happen; the world is
complete and beautiful--a thing for contemplation. I no more ask for
adventures under that turquoise dome than I ask for adventures in
church. But when the background of man's life is a grey background,
then, in the name of man's sacred supremacy, I desire to paint on it in
fire and gore. When the heavens fail man refuses to fail; when the sky
seems to have written on it, in letters of lead and pale silver, the
decree that nothing shall happen, then the immortal soul, the prince of
all creatures, rises up and decrees that something shall happen, if it
be only the slaughter of a policeman.
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
JANUARY 29th
It is the very difference between the artistic mind and the
mathematical that the former sees things as they are in a picture,
some nearer and larger, some smaller and farther away: while to the
mathematical mind everything, every inch in a million, every fact in
a cosmos, must be of equal value. That is why mathematicians go mad,
and poets scarcely ever do. A man may have as wide a view of life as
he likes, the wider the better: a distant view, a bird's-eye view, but
still a view and not a map. The one thing he cannot attempt in his
version of the universe is to draw things to scale.
'_G. F. Watts._'
JANUARY 30th
EXECUTION OF CHARLES I
The face of the King's servants grew greater than the King.
He tricked them and they trapped him and drew round him in a ring;
The new grave lords closed round him that had eaten the abbey's fruits,
And the men of the new religion with their Bibles in their boots,
We saw their shoulders moving to menace and discuss.
And some were pure and some were vile, but none took heed of us;
We saw the King when they killed him, and his face was proud and pale,
And a few men talked of freedom while England talked of ale.
'_The Silent People._'
JANUARY 31st
The 'Iliad' is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey'
because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a
riddle.
'_The Defendant._'
FEBRUARY
FEBRUARY 1st
Many modern Englishmen talk of themselves as the sturdy descendants of
their sturdy Puritan fathers. As a fact, they would run away from a
cow. If you asked one of their Puritan fathers, if you asked Bunyan,
for instance, whether he was sturdy, he would have answered with tears,
that he was as weak as water. And because of this he would have borne
tortures.
'_Heretics._'
FEBRUARY 2nd
_CANDLEMAS. THE FEAST OF THE PURIFICATION_
But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on brown paper, it began to
dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a
most exquisite and essential one, behind. I searched all my pockets,
but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted
with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art
of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential.
I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the
wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is this: that
white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour, it is a shining
and affirmative thing: as fierce as red, as definite as black. When
(so to speak) your pencil grows red hot, it draws roses; when it grows
white hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities
of the best religious morality--of real Christianity, for example--is
exactly this same thing. The chief assertion of religious morality
is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the
avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like
pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or
sparing people revenge or punishment: it means a plain and positive
thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity
does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming
like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours, but He never
paints so gorgeously--I had almost said so gaudily--as when He paints
in white.
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
FEBRUARY 3rd
It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is
to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist, as it is easy
to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and
exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along
the historic path of Christendom--that would indeed have been simple.
It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which
one falls: only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of
the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been
obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling
adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering
through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild
truth reeling but erect.
'_Orthodoxy._'
FEBRUARY 4th
The curse against God is 'Exercise I' in the primer of minor poetry.
'_The Defendant._'
FEBRUARY 5th
Whatever else the worst doctrine of depravity may have been, it was
a product of spiritual conviction; it had nothing to do with remote
physical origins. Men thought mankind wicked because they felt wicked
themselves. If a man feels wicked, I cannot see why he should suddenly
feel good because somebody tells him that his ancestors once had tails.
Man's primary purity and innocence may have dropped off with his tail,
for all anybody knows. The only thing we all know about that primary
purity and innocence is that we have not got it.
'_All Things Considered._'
FEBRUARY 6th
If you have composed a bad opera you may persuade yourself that it is a
good one; if you have carved a bad statue you can think yourself better
than Michelangelo. But if you have lost a battle you cannot believe you
have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have
got him off.
'_George Bernard Shaw._'
FEBRUARY 7th _DICKENS BORN_
We are able to answer the question, 'Why have we no great men?' We
have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. We
are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we
are fastidious--that is, we are small. When Diogenes went about with
a lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had very little
time to be honest himself. And when anybody goes about on his hands
and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that
one man at any rate shall not be great. Now the error of Diogenes
is evident. The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted
to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man.
Diogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern,
but he never thought of looking inside the thief. And that is where
the Founder of Christianity found the honest man; He found him on a
gibbet and promised him Paradise. Just as Christianity looked for the
honest man inside the thief, democracy looked for the wise man inside
the fool. It encouraged the fool to be wise. We can call this thing
sometimes optimism, sometimes equality; the nearest name for it is
encouragement. It had its exaggerations--failure to understand original
sin, notions that education would make all men good, the childlike yet
pedantic philosophies of human perfectibility. But the whole was full
of faith in the infinity of human souls, which is in itself not only
Christian but orthodox; and this we have lost amid the limitations of
pessimistic science. Christianity said that any man could be a saint
if he chose; democracy, that every man could be a citizen if he chose.
The note of the last few decades in art and ethics has been that a man
is stamped with an irrevocable psychology and is cramped for perpetuity
in the prison of his skull. It was a world that expects everything and
everybody. It was a world that encouraged anybody to be anything. And
in England and literature its living expression was Dickens.
'_Charles Dickens._'
FEBRUARY 8th
That which is large enough for the rich to covet is large enough for
the poor to defend.
'_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'
FEBRUARY 9th
The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner,
that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined
themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos,
that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the
family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome
precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It
is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most
other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling
anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested
in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero
restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the
commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve
of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is
like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt
against the family are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting
against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa
is excitable, like mankind. Our younger brother is mischievous, like
mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.
'_Heretics._'
FEBRUARY 10th
He said: 'If these were silent the very stones would cry out.' With
these words He called up all the wealth of artistic creation that
has been founded on this creed. With those words He founded Gothic
architecture. For in a town like this, which seems to have grown Gothic
as a wood grows leaves--anywhere and anyhow--any odd brick or moulding
may be carved off into a shouting face. The front of vast buildings
is thronged with open mouths, angels praising God, or devils defying
Him. Rock itself is racked and twisted, until it seems to scream. The
miracle is accomplished; the very stones cry out.
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
FEBRUARY 11th
The chaos of habits that always goes with males when left entirely
to themselves has only one honourable cure; and that is the strict
discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy young
idealists in East End settlements losing their collars in the wash
and living on tinned salmon, will fully understand why it was decided
by the wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict that if men were to live
without women, they must not live without rules.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
FEBRUARY 12th
The British Empire may annex what it likes, it will never annex
England. It has not even discovered the island, let alone conquered it.
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
FEBRUARY 13th
Let it never be forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man;
he is a man who has devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous
intellectual art in which he may achieve masterpieces which he must
keep secret, fight thrilling battles and win hair-breadth victories
for which he cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished
impostor is the most wretched of geniuses: he is a Napoleon on a desert
island.
'_Browning._'
FEBRUARY 14th _ST. VALENTINE'S DAY_
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent
of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to
listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to
imagine that the ideal of constancy was a joke mysteriously imposed on
mankind by the devil, instead of being as it is a yoke consistently
imposed on all lovers by themselves. They have invented a phrase, a
phrase that is a black _v._ white contradiction in two words--'free
love'--as if a lover ever had been or ever could be free. It is
the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage
merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.
Modern sages offer to the lover with an ill-favoured grin the largest
liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect
him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon
the heavens as the record of his highest moment. They give him every
liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one
that he wants.
'_The Defendant._'
FEBRUARY 15th
London is the largest of the bloated modern cities; London is the
smokiest; London is the dirtiest; London is, if you will, the most
sombre; London is, if you will, the most miserable. But London is
certainly the most amusing and the most amused. You may prove that we
have the most tragedy; the fact remains that we have the most comedy,
that we have the most farce.
'_All Things Considered._'
FEBRUARY 16th
Our fathers had a plain sort of pity: if you will, a gross and coarse
pity. They had their own sort of sentimentalism. They were quite
willing to weep over Smike. But it certainly never occurred to them to
weep over Squeers. No doubt they were often narrow and often visionary.
No doubt they often looked at a political formula when they should
have looked at an elemental fact. No doubt they were pedantic in some
of their principles and clumsy in some of their solutions. No doubt,
in short, they were all very wrong, and no doubt we are the people and
wisdom shall die with us. But when they saw something that in their
eyes, such as they were, really violated their morality, such as it
was, then they did not cry 'Investigate!' They did not cry 'Educate!'
They did not cry 'Improve!' They did not cry 'Evolve!' Like Nicholas
Nickleby, they cried 'Stop!' And it did stop.
_Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_
FEBRUARY 17th
Some people do not like the word 'dogma.' Fortunately they are free,
and there is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two
things only, for the human mind--a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle
Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its
best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite
point; a prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a
man should not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible of
anything should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called
an ideal.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
FEBRUARY 18th
There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique
of another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the
communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There
are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often
they are made.
'_The Defendant._'
FEBRUARY 19th
There are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds
of democratic conception or sentiment of human equality. There are two
things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. They are
not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages
of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. But this is
a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this, again, is
an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No
special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having
to die. And no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of
having two legs. Every man is important if he loses his life; and every
man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it. And the
universal test everywhere of whether a thing is popular, of the people,
is whether it employs vigorously these extremes of the tragic and the
comic.
'_Charles Dickens._'
FEBRUARY 20th
Now the reason why our fathers did not make marriage, in the
middle-aged and static sense, the subject of their plays was a very
simple one; it was that a play is a very bad place for discussing
that topic. You cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or
failure of a marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of
the growth of an oak-tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very
reasonably observed, it is too long. A happy love-affair will make a
drama simply because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or
no. But a happy marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less
happy if it were. The essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks
herself an intense question; but the essence of a sensible wife is
that she is much too sensible to ask herself any questions at all. All
the things that make monogamy a success are in their nature undramatic
things, the silent growth of an instinctive confidence, the common
wounds and victories, the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing
of old jokes. Sane marriage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore
not surprising that most modern dramatists have devoted themselves to
insane marriage.
'_George Bernard Shaw._'
FEBRUARY 21st
If Americans can be divorced for 'incompatibility of temper,' I cannot
conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy
marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is
to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes
unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
FEBRUARY 22nd
Of a sane man there is only one safe definition: he is a man who can
have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
'_Tremendous Trifles._'
FEBRUARY 23rd
The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.
'_Heretics._'
FEBRUARY 24th
It is constantly assumed, especially in our Tolstoian tendencies, that
when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But
that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb.
That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating
the lamb. The real problem is--Can the lion lie down with the lamb
and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church
attempted; _that_ is the miracle she achieved.
'_Orthodoxy._'
FEBRUARY 25th
Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is
only redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and
crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or
the things on the retina of the eye, or the enormous irrelevancy of
encyclopædias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.
_Introduction to 'The Old Curiosity Shop.'_
FEBRUARY 26th
It is neither blood nor rain that has made England, but hope--the thing
all those dead men have desired. France was not France because she was
made to be by the skulls of the Celts or by the sun of Gaul. France was
France because she chose.
'_George Bernard Shaw._'
FEBRUARY 27th
A man must be partly a one-idead man because he is a one-weaponed
man--and he is flung naked into the fight. In short, he must (as the
books on Success say) give 'his best'; and what a small part of a man
'his best' is! His second and third best are often much better. If he
is the first violin he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that
he is a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a
fountain-pen, a hand at whist, a gun, and an image of God.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
FEBRUARY 28th
The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the
heavens, but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will
grow, till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or
stable. Not till we know the high things shall we know how lovely they
are.
'_William Blake._'
MARCH
March 1st _ST. DAVID'S DAY_
My eyes are void with vision; I sing but I cannot speak;
I hide in the vaporous caverns like a creature wild and weak;
But for ever my harps are tuned and for ever my songs are sung,
And I answer my tyrants ever in an unknown tongue.
When the blue men broke in the battle with the Roman or the Dane,
In the cracks of my ghastly uplands they gathered like ghosts again.
Some say I am still a Druid, some say my spirit shows
Catholic, Puritan, Pagan; but no man knows.
Mother of God's good witches, of all white mystery,
Whatever else I am seeking, I seek for thee.
For the old harp better fitted and swung on a stronger thong,
We, that shall sing for ever; O hear our song!
'_The Seven Swords._'
MARCH 2nd
It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a 'many-faced
and fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than to be a
many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many
modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards.
'_The Defendant._'
MARCH 3rd
A man may easily be forgiven for not doing this or that incidental act
of charity, especially when the question is as genuinely difficult
and dubious as is the case of mendicity. But there is something quite
pestilently Pecksniffian about shrinking from a hard task on the plea
that it is not hard enough. If a man will really try talking to the ten
beggars who come to his door he will soon find out whether it is really
so much easier than the labour of writing a cheque for a hospital.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
MARCH 4th
But the man we see every day--the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory,
the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office--he is too mentally worried
to believe in freedom. He is kept quiet with revolutionary literature.
He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of wild
philosophies. He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the next day,
a Superman (probably) the next day, and a slave every day. The only
thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory. The
only man who gains by all the philosophies is Gradgrind. It would be
worth his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied with sceptical
literature. And now I come to think of it, of course, Gradgrind is
famous for giving libraries. He shows his sense: all modern books are
on his side. As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the
vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long
enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man
will never change his environment, for he will always change his mind.
'_Orthodoxy._'
MARCH 5th
Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New
Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking
away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are
altering the ideal: it is easier.
'_Orthodoxy._'
MARCH 6th
In a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, it
is stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. Humility is the
luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or
a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the
cosmic things are what they really are--of immeasurable stature.
'_The Defendant._'
MARCH 7th
Thus because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in
oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed
themselves to find the sepulchre of Christ. But being in a civilization
which does believe in this dogma of fact for fact's sake, we do not see
the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole. I
am not speaking of a tenable ultimate utility, which is true both of
the Crusades and the polar explorations. I mean merely that we do see
the superficial and æsthetic singularity, the startling quality, about
the idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place
where a man died. But we do not see the æsthetic singularity and the
startling quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man
can live--a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the
meeting-place of some lines that do not exist.
'_Heretics._'
MARCH 8th
In one of his least convincing phrases, Nietzsche had said that just
as the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately
produce something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of
course, is sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the
man, so why should we worry about the superman? If the superman will
come by natural selection, may we not leave it to natural selection?
If the superman will come by human selection, what sort of superman
are we to select? If he is simply to be more just, more brave, or
more merciful, then Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher;
the only way we can work for it is to be more just, more brave, and
more merciful--sensible advice, but hardly startling. If he is to
be anything else than this, why should we desire him, or what else
are we to desire? These questions have been many times asked of the
Nietzscheites, and none of the Nietzscheites have even attempted to
answer them.
'_George Bernard Shaw._'
MARCH 9th
A man can be a Christian to the end of the world, for the simple reason
that a man could have been an Atheist from the beginning of it. The
materialism of things is on the face of things: it does not require
any science to find it out. A man who has lived and loved falls down
dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism, if you like. That is
Atheism, if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can
believe in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made any more
hopeless because we know the names of the worms who eat him, or the
names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful mind
somewhat difficult to discover.
'_All Things Considered._'
MARCH 10th
We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of
things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types,
with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we
treat the infantile limitations. A child has no difficulty in achieving
the miracle of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as
marvellous as his accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude
towards Premiers and Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially
encouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we
should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper.
'_The Defendant._'
MARCH 11th
When the working women in the poor districts come to the doors of the
public-houses and try to get their husbands home, simple-minded 'social
workers' always imagine that every husband is a tragic drunkard and
every wife a broken-hearted saint. It never occurs to them that the
poor woman is only doing under coarser conventions exactly what every
fashionable hostess does when she tries to get the men from arguing
over the cigars to come and gossip over the teacups.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
MARCH 12th
What have we done, and where have we wandered, we that have produced
sages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who could walk
with Dante, that we should talk as if we had never done anything more
intelligent than found colonies and kick niggers? We are the children
of light, and it is we that sit in darkness. If we are judged, it
will not be for the merely intellectual transgression of failing to
appreciate other nations, but for the supreme spiritual transgression
of failing to appreciate ourselves.
'_The Defendant._'
MARCH 13th
And for those who talk to us with interfering eloquence about Jaeger
and the pores of the skin, and about Plasmon and the coats of the
stomach, at them shall only be hurled the words that are hurled at fops
and gluttons, 'Take no thought what ye shall eat, or what ye shall
drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. For after all these things
do the Gentiles seek. But seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His
righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.'
'_Heretics._'
MARCH 14th
The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even
miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. Nay, the
really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the
Materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is
quite sure he is sane. The Materialist is sure that history has been
simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person
before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken.
Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
'_Orthodoxy._'
MARCH 15th
The modern world (intent on anarchy in everything, even in Government)
refuses to perceive the permanent element of tragic constancy which
inheres in all passion, and which is the origin of marriage. Marriage
rests upon the fact that you cannot have your cake and eat it; that you
cannot lose your heart and have it.
_Introduction to 'David Copperfield.'_
MARCH 16th
Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, 'I will not hit
you if you do not hit me'; there _is_ no trace of such a transaction.
There _is_ a trace of both men having said, 'We must not hit each
other in the holy place.' They gained their morality by guarding
their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the
shrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate
cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that
they were clean. The history of the Jews is the only early document
known to most Englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from
that. The Ten Commandments which have been found substantially common
to mankind were merely military commands; a code of regimental orders,
issued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert. Anarchy was
evil because it endangered the sanctity. And only when they made a holy
day for God did they find they had made a holiday for men.
'_Orthodoxy._'
MARCH 17th _ST. PATRICK'S DAY_
The average autochthonous Irishman is close to patriotism because he
is close to the earth; he is close to domesticity because he is close
to the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology and elaborate ritual
because he is close to the earth. In short, he is close to the heavens
because he is close to the earth.
'_George Bernard Shaw._'
MARCH 18th
We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe
to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty. If we catch sharks for
food, let them be killed most mercifully; let anyone who likes love the
sharks, and pet the sharks, and tie ribbons round their necks and give
them sugar and teach them to dance. But if once a man suggests that a
shark is to be valued against a sailor, or that the poor shark might
be permitted to bite off a nigger's leg occasionally, then I would
court-martial the man--he is a traitor to the ship.
'_All Things Considered._'
MARCH 19th
Every statute is a declaration of war, to be backed by arms. Every
tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a republic all punishment is
as sacred and solemn as lynching.
'_What's Wrong with the World._'
MARCH 20th
I have no sympathy with international aggression when it is taken
seriously, but I have a certain dark and wild sympathy with it when it
is quite absurd. Raids are all wrong as practical politics, but they
are human and imaginable as practical jokes. In fact, almost any act of
ragging or violence can be forgiven on this strict condition--that it
is of no use at all to anybody. If the aggression gets anything out of
it, then it is quite unpardonable. It is damned by the least hint of
utility or profit. A man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does
not steal. A gentleman knocks off his friend's hat, but he does not
annex his friend's hat.
'_All Things Considered._'
MARCH 21st