"Where Ought I to Be?"

From  T.P.'s Weekly, April 24, 1914

There is an old adage which declares that great men are absent-minded, while an equally hoary saying describes genius as "an infinite capacity for taking pains." Perhaps in no man who can lay claims to genius are these two opposite qualities of greatness better exemplified than in that modern perpetrator of paradox, G. K. Chesterton. For, infinite as are his capacities for taking pains in the literary sense, his wife, to a very large extent, acts as his "business conscience," and it is said that she accompanies him on almost every journey, performing such small but necessary duties as the getting of tickets and the consulting of "Bradshaw."

Where Ought I to Be?

It is recorded, however, that on one occasion visitors arrived, and Mrs. Chesterton being called upon to play the part of hostess, was unable to accompany her husband. With the words, "Now, Gilbert, you know where you are to lecture and what your subject is?" Chesterton went to the railway station. Arriving there, he banged down a sovereign at the booking office, and said, "A ticket."

 "Where for ? " asked the astonished clerk. 

 "Free Trade Hall," replied Chesterton. 

 "Oh, Glasgow then ?" said the clerk, and Gilbert, assenting, received a ticket for that station.

 Stepping into the street at Glasgow, he was hailed by a friend : "Hullo, Chesterton, what are you doing here?"
"Oh, I'm lecturing at the Free Trade Hall."
" Oh no, you're not," said the friend.
"Oh, yes, I am," protested Chesterton. " I booked the engagement some months ago."
" But you cannot be," maintained the friend, "for the place is being renovated and the painters are in."
It slowly dawned upon Chesterton that he was at the wrong place, and he, further to justify his claim to greatness, sent a telegram to his wife : " Am here. Where ought I to be?"

A 'Bus Story. 

It is always said that no one enjoys a joke more than Chesterton , and, even when the joke tells against himself, he never fails to be heard laughing above the whole company. It is related that a certain man told of an act of politeness he had witnessed. He had seen a man give up his seat in a tram-car to a lady. "That's nothing," said one of the company. " What about old Chesterton here? I saw him get up and give his seat to three ladies." The company roared, but louder than the others was heard the jovial laughter of Chesterton . It is in more respects than one that Chesterton lays claims to "greatness."

"....that most uproarious of all things, humility..."

Now this is, I say deliberately, the only defect in the greatness of Mr. Shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man, that he is not easily pleased. He is an almost solitary exception to the general and essential maxim, that little things please great minds. And from this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility, comes incidentally the peculiar insistence on the Superman. After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby. Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man--the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its comer-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob a coward--in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.

-Heretics (1905)

"The greater the book the more the average man feels himself capable of editing it."

It is certainly a singular fact that the more mysterious a matter is the more popular it is with the mass of humanity: this fact is perhaps the root of religions and is at any rate a very gratifying thing. Pure matters of fact which any one could find out who took the trouble, such as the number of Lord Roberts's proclamations or the number of lamp-posts in the Borough road, are treated with a semi-mystical terror and respect, as the prerogatives of a priesthood of specialists. But the things which are inscrutable and immeasurable in themselves...in these everybody feels at home. The cheapest, the most numerous, the most personal and frivolous class of books are probably those dealing with the Bible, the most tremendous of works on the most tremendous of subjects. The greater the book the more the average man feels himself capable of editing it. The man who turns out a little tract on David or Saul every month would be worried if asked to interpret Spenser, completely embarrassed if asked to interpret Maeterlinck, and struck with mere grovelling terror if asked to interpret Mr. Stephen Phillips.

-March 2, 1901, The Speaker

Various quotes

 "The modern world may or may not recover a religion, but it is rapidly making a mythology"
 -The Century Magazine, May 1923

"[They] are in one sense very narrow indeed. They are progressive: that is, they deal in terms of time and not of eternity."
 -The Century Magazine, December 1922

"His greatest defect as a poet is a desire to scorn things, which means a desire to be ignorant of them. The true poet shuts nothing out; he looks upon nothing contemptuously, except perhaps upon contempt."
-The Pall Magazine, Volume XXV, September-December 1901

"He has...the fighting spirit, due not to the presence of courage, which is a spiritual virtue, but to the absence of fear, which is an animal defect"
--The Pall Magazine, Volume XXV, September-December 1901

"In the abstract the educated have, no doubt, an advantage over the uneducated; only it happens that we all have a gradual and growing conviction that those who have been educated have been educated wrong."
-The Reader, volume 9 (1907)

President Woodrow Wilson on GKC

Although a member of the Presybeterian Church by birthright, and regular in his attendance, [Woodrow Wilson] does not talk on such subjects along denominational lines; but he is quick to assert his Christianity and to claim for its dogmas a perfectly secure basis in logic and philosophy. One of the reasons why he enjoys Chesterton's essays is the cleverness with which that writer exposes the narrowness and obtuseness of scepticism.

-"Woodrow Wilson: Character Sketch"
Evening Post, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 112, 7 November 1912, Page 7

Minor Characters

"We must certainly be in a novel;
What I like about this novelist is that he takes such trouble about his minor characters."

-quoted in Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward (1943)

The Influence of G.K. Chesterton, Part Two

The Influence of G.K. Chesterton, Part Two

The Influence of G.K. Chesterton, Part One

The Influence of G.K. Chesterton, Part One

I decided to move this to my blog from where I had it before....This is the first of two parts

What do you think?

I just came across this quote tonight from a contribution Chesterton made to the Daily Telegraph in 1920 in answer to a question posed in that paper :

"There is something more peculiar and provocative in the Christian idea, and it was expressed in the words repentance and humility. Or, to put it in more topical terms, it means that when we face the facts of the age, the first facts we face should be the faults of ourselves; and that we should at least consider, concerning any fact, the possibility that it is our fault. Now, of course, the most important form of this is too individual for this public problem; indeed, it cannot in its nature be a criticism of anybody else."

-G.K. Chesterton

Is it a New World? A Series of Articles and Letters Contributed by Correspondents to the "Daily Telegraph" August-September, 1920 (published in 1921)

Various quotes

"It must be resolutely proclaimed that into the world of wonder there is no gate but the low gate of humility, through the arch of which the earth shines like elfland."
-March 23, 1901, The Speaker

"The very essence of friendship is in this intermixture, in those great midnight conversations in which the primary colours of separate personalities are mingled into incredible greens and purples, as rich and unrecoverable as a sunset."
-October 20, 1900, The Speaker 

"Undoubtedly looking down and speaking down and writing down to the human soul have been the sterilising curses of education. That everything should look up to everything else may be a little bewildering as geometry, but like many other impossibilities, it is simple and successful in morals."
-November 24, 1900, The Speaker

"He is one of the embodiments of that tendency, sound and useful originally, towards the poetry of the Savage, otherwise called the Bachelor..."
-November 10, 1900, The Speaker

"...the mystic is not...a man who reverences large things so much as a man who reverences small ones, who reduces himself to a point, without parts or magnitude, so that to him the grass is really a forest and the grasshopper a dragon."
-December 15, 1900, The Speaker

"With the humility of true mystics we shall praise each other in such a manner that it shall be clear that we are only praising God."

I understand from my daily paper that William Shakespeare was born some time ago, and that people are celebrating his creditable conduct in this respect. It is a very deep and noble trait or mark...that, when we wish to give people presents or to light bonfires in their honor, we select for admiration an incident which they could not possibly help. With the humility of true mystics we shall praise each other in such a manner that it shall be clear that we are only praising God. If ever we should fall into a habit of giving a man presents on the day of some meritorious action of his own, on the day that he wrote a poem or shot a millionaire, we may be perfectly certain that we have become pagans with all the heartless arrogance of paganism.

-Christian World, quoted in The Unitarian Register, volume 84 (1905)

Charles Dicken's son "specially recommended" GKC's book on his father

I had in an earlier post mentioned how Charles Dicken's daughter was an enthusiastic admirer of GKC's book on her father , with her saying it was the best book on Dickens since Forster's biography of him written 32 years before.

But this morning, while reading from a publication from 1912, I also found out that one of Dicken's sons also highly recommended it.

From Ohio Educational Monthly, volume 61 (1912) [emphasis mine]:

We sincerely hope that many teachers will study [Dicken's] life more or less in detail. to all who are interested we commend the following Books of Reference:

"My Father as I Recall Him," by Mamie Dickens: "Charles Dickens as I Knew Him," By George Dolby; "The Life of Charles Dickens," by John Forster; "Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens,'" by Robert Langton, and "Life of Charles Dickens," by Chesterton. The last named is specially recommended by Alfred Tennyson Dickens, who is not well pleased with the Forster Life.

Just wanted to share that, since I had been unaware of it before. :-)