or that roses smell sweet, you did not talk of taking the best
out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call
it an entertaining coincidence; when the rose smelt sweet you did
not say, 'My father is a rude, barbaric symbol enshrining (perhaps
unconsciously) the deep delicate truth that flowers smell.' No, you
believed your father because you had found him to be a living fountain
of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would
tell you the truth to-morrow, as well as to-day.
_'Orthodoxy.'_
OCTOBER 9th
There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that
is a truism.
_'G. F. Watts.'_
OCTOBER 10th
Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it
is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where
the walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond
burns through. It glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire
which destroys us, in the roses of our romance and in the awful cup of
our religion. It stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in
first love.
_'Daily News.'_
OCTOBER 11th
Commonness means the quality common to the saint and the sinner, to
the philosopher and the fool; and it was this that Dickens grasped and
developed. In everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies,
that fears death, that likes sunlight: that thing enjoys Dickens. And
everybody does not mean uneducated crowds, everybody means everybody:
everybody means Mrs. Meynell.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
OCTOBER 12th
Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty
and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint
will save them.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
OCTOBER 13th
In a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. And how
perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified attitudes,
and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is
proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the
lyre, and says, 'Life is real, life is earnest,' and then goes into a
room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.
_'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_
OCTOBER 14th _BATTLE OF HASTINGS_
Gored on the Norman gonfalon
The Golden Dragon died,
We shall not wake with ballad strings
The good time of the smaller things,
We shall not see the holy kings
Ride down the Severn side.
_'Ballad of Alfred.'_
OCTOBER 15th
I am grown up, and I do not worry myself much about Zola's immorality.
The thing I cannot stand is his morality. If ever a man on this earth
lived to embody the tremendous text, 'But if the light in your body be
darkness, how great is the darkness!' it was certainly he. Great men
like Ariosto, Rabelais, and Shakespeare fall in foul places, flounder
in violent but venial sin, sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic
weakness, are dirty, are indefensible; and then they struggle up
again and can still speak with a convincing kindness and an unbroken
honour of the best things in the world: Rabelais, of the instruction
of ardent and austere youth; Ariosto, of holy chivalry; Shakespeare,
of the splendid stillness of mercy. But in Zola even the ideals are
undesirable; Zola's mercy is colder than justice--nay, Zola's mercy is
more bitter in the mouth than injustice. When Zola shows us an ideal
training he does not take us, like Rabelais, into the happy fields of
humanist learning. He takes us into the schools of inhumanist learning,
where there are neither books nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but
only deformities in glass bottles, and where the rule is taught from
the exceptions. Zola's truth answers the exact description of the
skeleton in the cupboard; that is, it is something of which a domestic
custom forbids the discovery, but which is quite dead, even when it is
discovered.
_'All Things Considered.'_
OCTOBER 16th
We talk in a cant phrase of the Man in the Street, but the Frenchman is
the Man in the Street. As the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines
in the street, so he fights in the street and dies in the street; so
that the street can never be commonplace to him.
_'Tremendous Trifles.'_
OCTOBER 17th
If we wish to preserve the family we must revolutionize the nation.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
OCTOBER 18th _ST. LUKE'S DAY_
In these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to
be scientific. Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor
in saying that he is our doctor, not our priest or our wife or ourself.
It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a
watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health
will follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that, obviously, it
is for us to judge. Physical science is like simple addition; it is
either infallible or it is false. To mix science up with philosophy
is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and
a science that has lost all its practical value. I want my private
physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for
my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.
_'All Things Considered.'_
OCTOBER 19th
It was absurd to say that Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields. But
it might have been fairly said that Waterloo was won on the village
green, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket. In a word, it
was the average of the nation that was strong, and athletic glories do
not indicate much about the average of a nation. Waterloo was not won
by good cricket-players. But Waterloo was won by bad cricket-players,
by a mass of men who had some minimum of athletic instincts and habits.
It is a good sign in a nation, when such things are done badly. It
shows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a
nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only
a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is
merely looking on.
_'All Things Considered.'_
OCTOBER 20th
I sometimes think it is a pity that people travel in foreign countries;
it narrows their minds so much.
_'Daily News.'_
OCTOBER 21st _TRAFALGAR DAY_
The heroic is a fact, even when it is a fact of coincidence or of
miracle; and a fact is a thing which can be admitted without being
explained. But I would merely hint that there is a very natural
explanation of this frightful felicity, either of phrase or action,
which so many men have exhibited on so many scaffolds or battlefields.
It is merely that when a man has found something which he prefers to
life, he then for the first time begins to live. A promptitude of
poetry opens in his soul of which our paltry experiences do not possess
the key. When once he has despised this world as a mere instrument, it
becomes a musical instrument, it falls into certain artistic harmonies
around him. If Nelson had not worn his stars he would not have been
hit. But if he had not worn his stars he would not have been Nelson;
and if he had not been Nelson he might have lost the battle.
_'Daily News.'_
OCTOBER 22nd
Watts proved no doubt that he was not wholly without humour by this
admirable picture ("The First Oyster"). Gladstone proved that he was
not wholly without humour by his reply to Mr. Chaplin, by his singing
of "Doo-dah," and by his support of a grant to the Duke of Coburg. But
both men were singularly little possessed by the mood or the idea of
humour. To them had been in peculiar fullness revealed the one great
truth which our modern thought does not know, and which it may possibly
perish through not knowing. They knew that to enjoy life means to take
it seriously. There is an eternal kinship between solemnity and high
spirits, and almost the very name of it is Gladstone. Its other name
is Watts. They knew that not only life, but every detail of life, is
most a pleasure when it is studied with the gloomiest intensity....
The startling cheerfulness of the old age of Gladstone, the startling
cheerfulness of the old age of Watts, are both redolent of this
exuberant seriousness, this uproarious gravity. They were as happy as
the birds because, like the birds, they were untainted by the disease
of laughter. They are as awful and philosophical as children at play:
indeed, they remind us of a truth true for all of us, though capable of
misunderstanding, that the great aim of a man's life is to get into his
second childhood.
_'Watts.'_
OCTOBER 23rd
The foil may curve in the lunge; but there is nothing beautiful about
beginning the battle with a crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strong
doctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts; but that
is no reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. Do
not be an opportunist; try to be theoretic at all the opportunities;
fate can be trusted to do all the opportunist part of it. Do not try to
bend; any more than the trees try to bend. Try to grow straight; and
life will bend you.
_'Daily News.'_
OCTOBER 24th
Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the
creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
_'The Club of Queer Trades.'_
OCTOBER 25th
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
OCTOBER 26th
It is currently said that hope goes with youth and lends to youth its
wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to
man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the
period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is
the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is
the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the
knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration
comes to the middle-aged. God has kept that good wine until now.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
OCTOBER 27th
We have made an empire out of our refuse; but we cannot make a nation
even out of our best material. Such is the vague and half-conscious
contradiction that undoubtedly possesses the minds of great masses of
the not unkindly rich. Touching the remote empire they feel a vague
but vast humanitarian hope; touching the chances of small holdings
or rural reconstruction in the heart of the empire they feel a doubt
and a disinclination that is not untouched with despair. Their creed
contains two great articles: first, that the common Englishman can get
on anywhere; and second, that the common Englishman cannot get on in
England.
_Introduction to 'Cottage Homes of England.'_
OCTOBER 28th
There is only one very timid sort of man that is not afraid of women.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
OCTOBER 29th
I do not see ghosts; I only see their inherent probability.
_'Tremendous Trifles.'_
OCTOBER 30th
Do you see this lantern? Do you see the cross carved on it and the
flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men
than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron,
and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on,
there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was,
by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You
can only destroy. You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world.
Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall now
destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit
to find it.
_'The Man who was Thursday.'_
OCTOBER 31st _HALLOW E'EN_
If we ever get the English back on to the English land they will become
again a religious people, if all goes well, a superstitious people.
The absence from modern life of both the higher and the lower forms of
faith is largely due to a divorce from nature and the trees and clouds.
If we have no more turnip ghosts it is chiefly from the lack of turnips.
_'Heretics.'_
NOVEMBER
NOVEMBER 1st _ALL SAINTS' DAY_
You cannot deny that it is perfectly possible that to-morrow morning in
Ireland or in Italy there might appear a man not only as good but good
in exactly the same way as St. Francis of Assisi. Very well; now take
the other types of human virtue: many of them splendid. The English
gentleman of Elizabeth was chivalrous and idealistic. But can you stand
still in this meadow and _be_ an English gentleman of Elizabeth? The
austere republican of the eighteenth century, with his stern patriotism
and his simple life, was a fine fellow. But have you ever seen him?
Have you ever seen an austere republican? Only a hundred years have
passed and that volcano of revolutionary truth and valour is as cold as
the mountains of the moon. And so it will be with the ethics which are
buzzing down Fleet Street at this instant as I speak. What phrase would
inspire a London clerk or workman just now? Perhaps that he is a son
of the British Empire on which the sun never sets; perhaps that he is
a prop of his Trades Union, or a class-conscious proletarian something
or other; perhaps merely that he is a gentleman, when he obviously is
not. Those names and notions are all honourable, but how long will they
last? Empires break; industrial conditions change; the suburbs will not
last for ever. What will remain? I will tell you: the Catholic saint
will remain.
_'The Ball and the Cross.'_
NOVEMBER 2nd _ALL SOULS' DAY_
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.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
NOVEMBER 3rd
You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.
_Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_
NOVEMBER 4th
The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the
right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But
I had heard that I was in the _wrong_ place, and my soul sang for
joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated
forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass
had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why
I could feel homesick at home.
_'Orthodoxy.'_
NOVEMBER 5th _GUY FAWKES' DAY_
Guy Fawkes' Day is not only in some rude sense a festival, and in
some rude sense a religious festival; it is also, what is supremely
symbolic and important, a winter religious festival. Here the 5th of
November, which celebrates a paltry Christian quarrel, has a touch of
the splendour of the 25th of December, which celebrates Christianity
itself. Dickens and all the jolly English giants who write of the red
firelight are grossly misunderstood in this matter. Prigs call them
coarse and materialistic because they write about the punch and plum
pudding of winter festivals. The prigs do not see that if these writers
were really coarse and materialistic they would not write about winter
feasts at all. Mere materialists would write about summer and the sun.
The whole point of winter pleasure is that it is a defiant pleasure, a
pleasure armed and at bay. The whole point is in the fierce contrast
between the fire and wine within and the roaring rains outside. And
some part of the sacredness of firelight we may allow to fireworks.
_Article in 'The Observer.'_
NOVEMBER 6th
What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought: it is the
old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. It is vain for
bishops and pious big wigs to discuss what things will happen if wild
scepticism runs its course. It has run its course. It is vain for
eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if
once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more
questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any
wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any
selves. You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men
doubt if there is a world.
_'Orthodoxy.'_
NOVEMBER 7th
A man ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy, and
emphatically not because he has a large frame to sustain. A man ought
to take exercise not because he is too fat, but because he loves foils
or horses or high mountains, and loves them for their own sake. And
a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love, and emphatically
not because the world requires to be populated. The food will really
renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking about his tissues.
The exercise will really get him into training so long as he is
thinking about something else. And the marriage will really stand
some chance of producing a generous-blooded generation if it had its
origin in its own natural and generous excitement. It is the first law
of health that our necessities should not be accepted as necessities;
they should be accepted as luxuries. Let us, then, be careful about
the small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness, or anything
that can be managed with care. But in the name of all sanity, let us be
careless about the important things, such as marriage, or the fountain
of our very life will fail.
_'Heretics.'_
NOVEMBER 8th
If there be any value in scaling the mountains, it is only that from
them one can behold the plains.
_'Daily News.'_
NOVEMBER 9th _LORD MAYOR'S DAY_
I pressed some little way farther through the throng of people, and
caught a glimpse of some things that are never seen in Fleet Street. I
mean real green which is like the grass in the glaring sun, and real
blue that is like the burning sky in another quarter of the world,
and real gold that is like fire that cannot be quenched, and real red
that is like savage roses and the wine that is the blood of God. Nor
was it a contemptible system of ideas that was supposed to be depicted
by these colours of flags and shields and shining horsemen. It was
at least supposed to be England, which made us all; it was at least
supposed to be London, which made me and better men. I at least am
not so made that I can make sport of such symbols. There in whatever
ungainly procession, there on whatever ugly shields, there was the
cross of St. George and the sword of St. Paul. Even if all men should
go utterly away from everything that is symbolized, the last symbol
will impress them. If no one should be left in the world except a
million open malefactors and one hypocrite, that hypocrite will still
remind them of holiness.
_'Daily News.'_
NOVEMBER 10th
Old happiness is grey as we
And we may still outstrip her;
If we be slippered pantaloons
O let us hunt the slipper!
The old world glows with colours clear,
And if, as saith the saint,
The world is but a painted show,
O let us lick the paint!
Far, far behind are morbid hours
And lonely hearts that bleed;
Far, far behind us are the days
When we were old indeed.
Behold the simple sum of things
Where, in one splendour spun,
The stars go round the Mulberry Bush,
The Burning Bush, the Sun.
_'Grey Beards at Play.'_
NOVEMBER 11th
A man (of a certain age) may look into the eyes of his lady-love to
see that they are beautiful. But no normal lady will allow that young
man to look into her eyes to see whether they are beautiful. The same
variety and idiosyncrasy has been generally observed in gods. Praise
them; or leave them alone; but do not look for them unless you know
they are there. Do not look for them unless you want them.
_'All Things Considered.'_
NOVEMBER 12th
Likelier across these flats afar,
These sulky levels smooth and free,
The drums shall crash a waltz of war
And Death shall dance with Liberty;
Likelier the barricades shall blare
Slaughter below and smoke above,
And death and hate and hell declare
That men have found a thing to love.
_'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_
NOVEMBER 13th
Everything is military in the sense that everything depends upon
obedience. There is no perfectly epicurean corner; there is no
perfectly irresponsible place. Everywhere men have made the way for us
with sweat and submission. We may fling ourselves into a hammock in
a fit of divine carelessness. But we are glad that the net-maker did
not make the net in a fit of divine carelessness. We may jump upon a
child's rocking-horse for a joke. But we are glad that the carpenter
did not leave the legs of it unglued for a joke.
_'Heretics.'_
NOVEMBER 14th
I will ride upon the Nightmare; but she shall not ride on me.
_'Daily News.'_
NOVEMBER 15th
A great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing
it. The things he describes are types because they are truths.
Shakespeare may or may not have ever put it to himself that Richard
the Second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must
necessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether an
artist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that
a critic should be allegorical.
_Introduction to 'Great Expectations.'_
NOVEMBER 16th
When society is in rather a futile fuss about the subjection of women,
will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege
of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education
becomes futile? For a boy is only sent to be taught at school when
it is too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done
already, and thank God it is nearly always done by women. Every man
is womanized, merely by being born. They talk of the masculine woman;
but every man is a feminized man. And if ever men walk to Westminster
to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join their
procession.
_'Orthodoxy.'_
NOVEMBER 17th
Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more
sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a
natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is
the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good _Times_
leading article than a good joke in _Punch_. For solemnity flows out of
men naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to
be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.
_'Orthodoxy.'_
NOVEMBER 18th
Yes, you are right. I am afraid of him. Therefore I swear by God that
I will seek out this man whom I fear until I find him and strike him
on the mouth. If heaven were his throne and the earth his footstool I
swear that I would pull him down.... Because I am afraid of him; and no
man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.
_'The Man who was Thursday.'_
NOVEMBER 19th
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.
_'Heretics.'_
NOVEMBER 20th
Every detail points to something, certainly, but generally to the
wrong thing. Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the
thousands of twigs on a tree. It is only the life of the tree that has
unity and goes up--only the green blood that springs, like a fountain,
at the stars.
_'The Club of Queer Trades.'_
NOVEMBER 21st
Shallow romanticists go away in trains and stop in places called
Hugmy-in-the-Hole, or Bumps-on-the-Puddle. And all the time they could,
if they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name of St.
John's Wood. I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not. I should
be afraid of the innumerable night of fir-trees, afraid to come upon a
blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the eagle. But all these
things can be imagined by remaining reverently in the Harrow train.
_'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_
NOVEMBER 22nd
Giants, as in the wise old fairy-tales, are vermin. Supermen, if not
good men, are vermin.
_'Heretics.'_
NOVEMBER 23rd