"Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit."

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit. Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit. Consider the huge accumulations of detail piled up by men who have some crazy hobby of believing that Herodotus wrote Homer or that the Great Pyramid was a prophecy of the Great War. Consider the concrete circumstances and connected narratives that can often be given at vast lengths and in laborious detail by men who suffer from a  delusion of being persecuted, or being disinherited, or being the rightful King of England. These men are maddened by material facts; they are lunatics not by their fancies but by having learned too many facts. What they lack is proportion: a thing as invisible as beauty, as inscrutable as God.

-Come to Think of It (1930)

Chesterton inspriation for a rock album

Apparently Chesterton was the inspiration for rock album! :-) From an interview with
Jonathan Jackson of Enation:

So how was “Radio Cinematic” inspired by Chesterton? Jonathan explained, “I love G.K. Chesterton. I’m a huge C.S. Lewis fan and I discovered that he was influenced by Chesterton, so I started reading some of his work. But there was a particular theme in one of his books. I can’t remember if it was in ‘Orthodoxy’ or ‘The Everlasting Man.’ It had to do with your second childhood. And in his witty, brilliant way, he talked about – as you grow up, you get this invitation to enter your second childhood. I have felt that in my own life. Growing up, the world has its way of beating you down. I think one of the toughest things to live with is genuine joy. So in the band, we’ve always seen joy and having a sense of hope as a kind of rebellion. It’s not this passive, docile, soft thing that people oftentimes think. It actually comes from a place of having to fight.

[Source]

BTW, apparently Jonathan Jackson is also an Emmy Award winning actor as well. From his Wikipedia page:

Jonathan Stevens Jackson (born May 11, 1982) is an American actor, musician and author. His first well known character was Lucky Spencer on the ABC Daytime soap opera General Hospital, a role which has won him five Emmy Awards. In 2002, he played Jesse Tuck in the film Tuck Everlasting. In 2004 he started the band Enation (currently: Jonathan Jackson + Enation) with his brother, actor Richard Lee Jackson and friend Daniel Sweatt. He currently portrays Avery Barkley in the CMT drama Nashville.

[...] a man teaches a great deal by what he does not teach.

-May 12, 1905 Daily News

Fr. Ronald Knox and Orson Welles's broadcast of The War of the Worlds

Interesting anecdote concerning Fr. Ronald Knox (who, given his close friendship with GKC, it seems this blog is an appropriate place to post this):

In January 1926, for one of his regular BBC Radio programmes, our hero broadcast a simulated live report of revolution sweeping across London entitled Broadcasting from the Barricades. In addition to live reports of several people, including a government minister, being lynched, his broadcast mixed supposed band music from the Savoy Hotel with the hotel’s purported destruction by trench mortars. The Houses of Parliament and the clock tower were also said to have been flattened. Because the broadcast occurred on a snowy weekend, much of the United Kingdom was unable to get the newspapers until days later. The lack of newspapers caused a minor panic, as it was believed that this was caused by the events in London.

A 2005 BBC report on the broadcast suggests that the innovative style of our heroe’s programme may have influenced Orson Welles’s radio broadcast “The War of the Worlds” (1938), which foreshadowed it in its consequences. In an interview for the book This is Orson Welles, Welles himself said that the broadcast gave him the idea for “The War of the Worlds”! [emphasis mine] [source]

I had been aware of "Broadcasting the Barricades" before as well as the speculation that it influenced Orson Welles' broadcast, but I had been unaware until now that Welles himself stated it gave him the idea. (Of course, less than two months before his "War of the Worlds" broadcast, Orson Welles had done a broadcast of GKC's novel The Man Who Was Thursday.)

If there is any blunder which the past made carelessly, the present will reduplicate [it] carefully. Social reform, as now understood, seems to mean turning all our most antiquated sins into a system.

-October 12, 1912, Illustrated London News

The Press is no longer holding up a dim or dusty or cracked mirror to the world; it is simply painting a sort of mad picture of the world, which is a pastiche of a hundred pictures of anything or nothing, most of them badly painted and all of them badly chosen

-February 15, 1930, G.K's Weekly

[H/T American Chesterton Society]

Princess Diana and Maurice Baring

From the latest issue of Gilbert (July/Aug 2017), this interesting fact concerning one of Chesterton's best friends (featured with him and Belloc in the painting The Conversation Piece), Maruice Baring

[...] Baring's sister, the Honorable Margaret Baring, was married to Charles Spencer, the 6th Earl Spencer, and their great-granddaughter was none other than Diana, Princess of Wales which makes Maurice Baring her great-great uncle.

James Mattis quoting GKC

Secretary of Defense James Mattis quoted GKC in the opening of a speech he gave last week:

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. G.K. Chesterton once said: “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 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.”

Senator Peters, Deputy Secretary Shanahan, Secretary Speer – wonderful words. General Milley, great words. Sergeant Major Dailey, but most of all, to Charlie Tigers and Specialist Five Jim McCloughan... Cherie, you married well to a most wonderful person. They met at the Messiah, a reminder for all you young troops to go to church. [Source]

 [H/T American Chesterton Society]

It is much more likely that people's favourite actor really is their favourite actor than the politician they support is really the politician they admire.

-Introduction to The New World of the Theatre

[H/T American Chesterton Society)

[...] of all poetical publications the most poetical is a daily paper. The real objection to a daily paper is, of course, that it is too poetical. It is congested with poetry. It is a chaos of stars and sunshine, a confusion of the flowers and the sea. It is two hundred splendid books mixed up at once; so that the reader of that bewildering masterpiece loses the thread of all of them. It is impossible at once to keep in tune with the pantomime of a Government inquiry and the tragedy of a suicide at Wandsworth; but surely this is not from any lack of poetry in them [...]

-October 1, 1903, Daily News

But the influence of children goes further than its first trifling effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of the marvellousness of all things. We do (even when we are perfectly simple or ignorant)—we do actually treat talking in children as marvellous, walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children as marvellous. The cynical philosopher fancies he has a victory in this matter—that he can laugh when he shows that the words or antics of the child, so much admired by its worshippers, are common enough. The fact is that this is precisely where baby-worship is so profoundly right. Any words and any antics in a lump of clay are wonderful, the child's words and antics are wonderful, and it is only fair to say that the philosopher's words and antics are equally wonderful.

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect. We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly. We make puppets of children, lecture them, pull their hair, and reverence, love, and fear them. When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.

The Defendant (1901)

[Browning] had the one great requirement of a poet—he was not difficult to please. The life of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who object to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvellousness of all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming.

-Robert Browning (1903)