"...real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root."

...real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root. Even when we improve we never progress. For progress, the metaphor from the road, implies a man leaving his home behind him: but improvement means a man exalting the towers or extending the gardens of his home.

-The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)

"The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant."

The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing, an air of locality. London is a place, to be compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo. But Timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men--diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men-- hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky. Mr. Kipling, with all his merits, is the globe-trotter; he has not the patience to become part of anything. So great and genuine a man is not to be accused of a merely cynical cosmopolitanism; still, his cosmopolitanism is his weakness. That weakness is splendidly expressed in one of his finest poems, "The Sestina of the Tramp Royal," in which a man declares that he can endure anything in the way of hunger or horror, but not permanent presence in one place. In this there is certainly danger. The more dead and dry and dusty a thing is the more it travels about; dust is like this and the thistle-down and the High Commissioner in South Africa. Fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy fruit trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile. In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, "Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?" But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them. The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance; the motor-car stupidly destroys it. Moderns think of the earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round, the spirit of a schoolmistress...And 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 (1905)

"If the centre of our faith is a certain fact, would not people far from the centre have a muddled version of that fact?"

The first of all the difficulties that I have in controverting Mr. Blatchford is simply this, that I shall be very largely going over his own ground. My favourite text-book of theology is [Blatchford's book] God and My Neighbour, but I cannot repeat it in detail. If I gave each of my reasons for being a Christian, a vast number of them would be Mr. Blatchford’s reasons for not being one.

For instance, Mr. Blatchford and his school point out that there are many myths parallel to the Christian story; that there were Pagan Christs, and Red Indian Incarnations, and Patagonian Crucifixions, for all I know or care. But does not Mr. Blatchford see the other side of this fact? If the Christian God really made the human race, would not the human race tend to rumours and perversions of the Christian God? If the centre of our faith is a certain fact, would not people far from the centre have a muddled version of that fact? If we are so made that a Son of God must deliver us, is it odd that Patagonians should dream of a Son of God?

The Blatchfordian position really amounts to this- that because a certain thing has impressed millions of different people as likely or necessary, therefore it cannot be true. And then this bashful being, veiling his own talents, convicts the wretched G.K.C. of paradox! I like paradox, but I am not prepared to dance and dazzle to the extent of [Blatchford], who points to humanity crying out to a thing, and pointing to it from immemorial ages, as a proof that it cannot be there.

The story of a Christ is very common in legend and literature. So is the story of two lovers parted by Fate. So is the story of two friends killing each other for a woman. But will it seriously be maintained that, because these two stories are common as legends, therefore no two friends were ever separated by love or no two lovers by circumstances? It is tolerably plain, surely, that these two stories are common because the situation is an intensely probably and human one, because our nature is so built as to make them almost inevitable.

Why should it not be that our nature is so built as to make certain spiritual events inevitable? In any case, it is clearly ridiculous to attempt to disprove Christianity by the number and variety of Pagan Christs. You might as well take the number and variety of ideal schemes of society, from Plato’s Republic to Morris’ News from Nowhere, from More’s Utopia to Blatchford’s Merrie England, and then try and prove from them that mankind cannot ever reach a better social condition. If anything, of course, they prove the opposite; they suggest a human tendency towards a better condition.

Thus, in this first instance, when learned sceptics come to me and say, “Are you aware that  [others] have a story of Incarnation?” I should reply: “Speaking as an unlearned person, I don’t know. But speaking as a Christian, I should be very much astonished if they hadn’t.”

-"Christianity and Rationalism" (1904), The Blatchford Controversies

Collected Works, Volume 37

For anybody who is interested, next month Ignatius Press will be releasing volume 37 of the Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, which will consist of the last of his Illustrated London News articles (from 1935-1936).

"It is marked by a readiness to grant favours or conveniences to the citizen if he will give up some part of his old independence..."

We live in a very strange time, of which the main mark is that things are being altered and perverted so rapidly that what was the worst abuse yesterday is a comparatively mild anomaly today...the ignorant discontent of the rich against things like taxation begins to have a sort of shadowy excuse, not through any particular change of their own benighted intellects for the better, but by the extraordinary change in the science of taxation for the worse. A man who has always regarded himself as a Coriolanus hardening his heart against the sentimentalism of the Poor Rates finds himself in his old age a kind of Tribune of the People against the tyranny of the Insurance Act....Even illiterate plutocracy can sometimes be right by instinct as compared with more political monomaniacs and fidgetty prigs...

...our social reformers to-day have everywhere the same attitude, both rightly and wrongly. It is marked by a readiness to grant favours or conveniences to the citizen if he will give up some part of his old independence...

-April 12, 1913, Illustrated London News

"It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play."

It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke—that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls. When we are really holy we may regard the Universe as a lark...

-All Things Considered (1908)

"For the golden age only comes to men when they have, if only for a moment, forgotten gold."

For the golden age only comes to men when they have, if only for a moment, forgotten gold.

-Sidelights (1932)

"For it seems strangely forgotten that the unique authority of man is as much asserted in insisting on his mercy as in insisting on his mastery."

A short time ago the two first and most famous writers of our language to-day contradicted each other flatly, not for the first time, on a question of right and wrong. Mr. H.G. Wells wrote a defence of Vivisection, which was rather, perhaps, an attack on Anti-Vivisectionists. And Mr. Bernard Shaw wrote something which certainly could not possibly be mistaken for anything but an attack on Vivisectionists. I am not myself debating that matter in detail, because the chief mark of it, it seems to me, is a curious way which modern debaters have of debating against themselves. They do not seem to see the real inference from their own ideas....

...Neither Mr. Shaw nor Mr. Wells believes, as I do, in a mystical boundary between men and beasts. And yet that mystical boundary is really the only reason for either of the two men upholding either of the two moralities. The one thing in which they agree is the one thing which they do not admit. Mr. Wells claims the moral right to sacrifice all the other animals to man; and yet he would say that man is only a more or less accidental variety of the other animals. He assumes the very distinction that he denies. Mr. Shaw demands of man a moral magnanimity utterly unknown in all the rest of nature; and yet he would say that man is only a passing product of nature. He assumes the very distinction he denies. For it seems strangely forgotten that the unique authority of man is as much asserted in insisting on his mercy as in insisting on his mastery. If he is merely at one with nature, as all the other creatures are at one with nature, there is no more obligation for him than for them; and they certainly are not at one with each other. If he is only the brother of the wolf in the sense in which the wolf is the brother of the lamb, there seems nothing against the indefinite repetition of the brotherhood of Cain and Abel. If he is only to imitate the solidarity of a dog-fight or the natural affinities of a cannibal fish, there is no possible reason for asking him to disapprove of vivisection or of anything else. We do not expect the dog to be fond of the cat or the cat to be fond of the mouse. If we do expect the man to be fond of all of them, we are, in fact, treating him not only as a unique figure, but as a universal lord. We are, in fact, treating him exactly as he was treated in the old theological dogma which both Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw would reject, and not in the least as he is treated by the new scientific dogma which both Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw would accept. Even while each is arguing against the other, each is arguing against himself.

-October 15, 1927, Illustrated London News

Fallacies

....fallacies....do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

April 19, 1930, Illustrated London News

"Modern criticism, like all weak things, is overloaded with words."

Modern criticism, like all weak things, is overloaded with words.  In a healthy condition of language a man finds it very difficult to say the right thing, but at last says it. In this empire of journalese a man finds it so very easy to say the wrong thing that he never thinks of saying anything else. False or meaningless phrases lie so ready to his hand that it is easier to use them than not to use them.  These wrong terms picked up through idleness are retained through habit, and so the man has begun to think wrong almost before he has begun to think at all.

-George Bernard Shaw (1909)

H/T  this Chesterton FB page

"Young Joseph Ratzinger [Pope Benedict XVI] read and appreciated several of Chesterton's books; in fact, here and there, whether before or after the papal election, direct or indirect quotations emerge of the work of the inventor of Father Brown."
 
A G.K. Chestertonian Reading of this Pontificate (Zenit News)

"It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree."

But modern thought also hit my second human tradition. It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions. The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But he was an imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe. He spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent Unionist talks about the Irish and their ideals. He turned mankind into a small nationality. And his evil influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honourable of later scientific authors; notably in the early romances of Mr. H. G. Wells. Many moralists have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as wicked. But Mr. Wells and his school made the heavens wicked. We should lift up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin.

-Orthodoxy (1908)