We always suspected, after reading _The Flying Inn_, that G. K.
Chesterton is fond of dogs. And now, reading his book, _The New
Jerusalem_ (which is full of very gorgeous matter), we learn that at
his home in Beaconsfield he is host to both a dog (called “Winkle”) and
a donkey (called “Trotsky”). Very genial is his picture of the start of
his pilgrimage to Palestine and his last farewell to these beasts:
The reader will learn with surprise that my first feeling
of fellowship went out to the dog; I am well aware that I
lay open my guard to a lunge of wit.... He jumped about me,
barking like a small battery, under the impression that I was
going for a walk; but I could not, alas, take him with me on a
stroll to Palestine.... The dog’s very lawlessness is but an
extravagance of loyalty; he will go mad with joy three times
on the same day at going out for a walk down the same road. We
hear strangely little of the real merits of animals; and one
of them surely is this innocence of all boredom; perhaps such
simplicity is the absence of sin. I have some sense myself
of the sacred duty of surprise; and the need of seeing the
old road as a new road. But I cannot claim that whenever I go
out for a walk with my family and friends, I rush in front of
them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness; or even leap
up round them attempting to lick their faces. It is in this
power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely
things that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western
civilization.
The only thing that bothers us in this: If it had occurred to G. K. C.
to prove that the scraper on his doorstep, or the radish growing in
the garden, was the “eternal type” of Western civilization, would he
not have made out an equally agreeable and convincing case for it? In
fact, only a few steps away from his home, he came to the crossroads
(and well we remember that crossroads, and the pub thereby--which is
it, Mr. Chesterton: the _Saracen’s Head_, or the _Royal White Hart_?)
and there decided that they were the symbol of civilization which had
lost its way. And then, a few minutes later (in the train, we suppose)
the glorious creature was noticing the heavy clouds that lay over the
landscape, and decided that _they_ were the emblem of our civilization.
It takes a good deal of agility to pursue our pilgrim through this
book, for every olive tree, signboard, sunset, gateway, proves to be a
magnificent symbol of some spiritual gorgeousness.
We were sorry that Mr. Chesterton, when leaving Beaconsfield, did
not find some symbolism in a thing which impressed us when we went
pilgriming in those parts. Edmund Burke lived there at one time, and
we remember reading in some guide-book that his home was “bounded in
front by a ha-ha.” We thought to ourself at that time, how excellently
symbolic it would have been if G. K. C. had bounded his own house in
the same way. In fact, we often went along his road to listen for it.
There was another bit of symbolism that used to impress us (it is
surprising how quickly one can pick up the habit of symbolizing) when
we dallied around Beaconsfield. That was that Edmund Waller is buried
under the big walnut tree in the churchyard:
_Edmundi Waller hic jacet
id quantum morti cessit_
And we thought it pleasant that Mr. Chesterton should have settled
in the village sacred to the poet who wrote the loveliest poem ever
written on girth--or, rather, on slenderness. You remember, of course,
his “On a Girdle.”
The average person dearly loves a label--also a libel: and Mr.
Chesterton’s gnomes--which are sometimes nuggets, sometimes merely
nugæ, but always golden--are ticketed as “paradoxes” by those who have
small inkling of what a paradox really is. The best definition was that
of Don Marquis, our happiest native contemporary practitioner in this
art, when he said that if the positive and negative poles of a truth
are bent until they meet (or approach) a spark flashes across.
The paradox is the oldest outcry of the philosopher on contemplating
the absurdity of the world. Originally a paradox was simply a
surprise--a statement contrary to generally accepted opinion, and
very likely untrue. As Hamlet said: “This was sometime a paradox, but
now the time gives it proof.” But latterly we do not grant the virtue
of paradox unless the epigram fulfils a double requirement: it must
_seem_ absurd; it must _be_ true, or at any rate true enough to give
the mind a sense of cheerful satisfaction. Its essence is that of
surprise--which is the essence of humour.
The intellectual growth of humanity is shown by its increasing
tolerance of the paradox. The greatest of all Paradoxers was crucified.
Every true paradox is a little parable of human fallibility. A parabola
is a conic section; a parable, one might say, is a comic section.
Mr. Chesterton once, in a delightful essay called “Christmas,” said
something that lingers in our mind as an exhibition of the paradox both
in its strength and weakness. He wrote:
It is not uncommon nowadays for the insane extremes in reality
to meet. Thus I have always felt that brutal Imperialism and
Tolstoian nonresistance were not only not opposite, but were
the same thing. They are the same contemptible thought that
conquest cannot be resisted, looked at from the two standpoints
of the conqueror and the conquered. Thus again teetotalism and
the really degraded gin-selling and dram-drinking have exactly
the same moral philosophy. They are both based on the idea that
fermented liquor is not a drink, but a drug.
Now a moment’s thought will show the reader that while these two
paradoxes are equal in wit, they are not equal in truth. The second
is gloriously true; the first, delightfully acute as it is, begs the
question. For the Tolstoian will retort that he does not maintain
that conquest cannot be resisted; but that, on the contrary, it _is_
resisted and defeated by passive oppugnance.
The paradox holds the mirror up to nature, but it is not a plane
mirror. It dignifies human nature by assuming that the mind is capable
of viewing itself in the refraction of absurdity. Thoughtless people
speak of the paradox as a reduction to absurdity. That is not so. There
are some subjects that have to be elevated to absurdity.
In conclusion: it is a dangerous tool. It must be gingerly handled lest
it become--like the pun--a mere verbicide. And towards the fair sex,
beware of paradoxes. They esteem but rarely its prankish tooth. Was
not Hamlet’s downfall--and his betrothed’s also--occasioned when he
practiced paradoxes on Ophelia?
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