Play

Of this childish monopoly of things purely human there are many examples. But certainly the most remarkable example is the institution called "play." There is nothing in the slightest degree childish, as the word is ordinarily understood, about the institution of play. It differs from all the other arts only in being more serious and direct; it differs from all the other games only in being more varied and poetical. When a grown-up person has an artistic idea he or she scrawls it down in a set of ugly hieroglyphics on a piece of paper and gives it to somebody else to take care of and turn into other and uglier hieroglyphics; or else he takes a stick of burnt wood or a mess of coloured pastes and plasters on to a piece of canvas a laborious and inadequate picture of what he means. A child simply thinks of the idea and performs it. If he thinks of a fight with swords, for example, he does not write and re-write and correct a piece of artificial prose about “ringing parries” and “dazzling thrusts in carte.” He does not mix three kinds of white and four kinds of blue in order to imitate the gleam of sunlight on steel. He simply fights with swords. My present contention is not merely that this conduct of the child is more picturesque, more amusing, more poetical, for of this almost all modern writers are fully aware. My contention at present is that it is much more human, much more sensible, much more sane. The conduct of a child who, the moment he thinks of a man in a hat and cloak, puts on a hat and cloak, appears to me preferable to the conduct of the adult artist simply because it is so much more reasonable. If, as one of us walks down the street, it suddenly strikes him how magnificent it would be to lunge and guard with his umbrella like a sword, why should he not lunge and guard with his umbrella? It is a much more serious and creditable proceeding than reading up irrelevant fact in the British Museum in order to write an ephemeral story about someone else lunging and guarding.

-November 16, 1901, The Speaker

We must remember that the whole discovery of reading is new to great classes of the community [..] It is not strictly true to say that any of their reading is bad; for it is entirely good that there is an ingenious code of signals by which are conveyed to them the inmost thoughts and secrets of men long in their graves. It is not true, strictly speaking, that any of the fiction they read is bad for it is altogether a good thing that they should. in any shape or form, live that mystical double life that separates man from the beasts, one life in the daily duty of selfishness, the other in that strange and fantastic unselfishness which makes the fate of some non-existent hero, the creature of an idle brain, almost as important as our own [...] These things are not, in the proper meaning of the word, bad, any more than a man is bad for not being Shakespeare, or a hill bad for not being Mount Everest.

-June 8, 1901, The Speaker

[W]hen we hear a man insisting endlessly upon the superior character of his sanctity to the sanctity of the multitude, we feel tolerably certain that, whatever else he may be, he is not a saint. A saint [..] is one who has forgotten his own points of superiority, being immersed in more interesting things [...T]he ideal mystic and saint is he who prostrates himself and grovels in the public road before the stupidest farm labourer he can find. No doubt the farm labourer will be astonished at this conduct. But the astonishment which the farm labourer feels at the mystic will be nothing to the astonishment which the mystic will feel at the farm labourer.

-May 31, 1902, The Speaker

The Jews, with their wonderful instinct for practical religion, swore that he who looked upon Jehovah died; but in a large number of transcendental schools and sages the sentence of death has been commuted to a doom of gibbering idiotcy.

-November 17, 1900, The Speaker

" 'Hide and Seek' is the greatest of games..."

High above [other games], and at the head of another class, towers the great and Royal game of "Hide and Seek," the noblest of all earthly games, and the game that includes all others. How the majority of men and women in this world can waste their time in childish amusement, such as golf and rabbit-shooting, while neglecting pastime of the gods, is indeed one of the riddles of existence. "Hide and Seek" is the greatest of games, because, like war, it has the whole earth for its chess-board. Every object of the landscape, tree or hole or hedge, has, like a huge chess-man, its own peculiar powers and functions in the game. A tree may be valuable because it is high, a wall because it is low, a bank because it is slippery, a rock because it is firm. The game includes planning, thinking, remembering, inventing, running, climbing, jumping, seeing, hearing, and waiting. The player has the emotions of all the outlaws since the world began. We may think long and hard before any of us can understand why this great terrestrial warfare, this ancient and earth-born strategy, should be considered childish, knocking little balls about with sticks considered manly. "Hide and Seek" is surely a greater thing than the absurd shooting of tiny little beasts and birds, which does not, to the really sportsmanlike spirit, differ very much from shooting bluebottles. For "Hide and Seek" is the noblest of all sports and chases, the hunting of man.

-November 30, 1901, The Speaker

"The Man in the Street"

[The Man in the Street] is a myth, perhaps a beautiful myth, but still a myth. This Man in the Street, this being by whose arbitrament politics, literature, and ethics are now tested and decided, is as fabulous as the Hydra; he is a thing that does not exist. My friend the Pessimist, to whom I have alluded in a previous article, and who is naturally disposed to take a somewhat gloomy view of things, declares that the Man in the Street does exist. But then my friend the Pessimist does not exist himself, so, he cannot be held to be a sound judge of all the niceties of the question, and may even be considered as having a certain bias. The essential proof that the Man in the Street does not exist is very simple. No one ever met anyone who believed himself to be the Man in the Street. No one ever met anyone who believed anyone else whom he knew intimately to be the Man in the Street. The sage who goes on the hopeless hunt after the average man will be endlessly disappointed as his researches exhibit endless variety and individuality. It will be more and more discovered that the Man in the Street only happens to be in the street, just as we happen to be in the street. Beyond that he resolves himself variously into the Man in the Cathedral, the Man in the Public-House, the Man in the National Gallery, the Man in the Penitentiary, the Man in the Fabian Society, the Man in the Divorce Court, the Man in Khaki- and the Man in Holy Orders. Among all the millions whom we summarise as men in the street there is not one who bears the least resemblance to any other man the moment we really understand his private memories, hopes, and conceptions. If we had to advise one man in the street how he should conduct himself in a definite crisis towards definite persons, our advice would be quite different to that which we should offer to another man in the street. No doubt there is a common human basis for all these men, but that common human basis includes the cultivated and exceptional quite as much as it includes these people. The dilemma, therefore, is simply this: either there is no such thing as the Man in the Street or else Maeterlinck is the Man in the Street and Mr. W. B. Yeats is the Man in the Street.

-April 12, 1902, The Speaker

Nations may safely import whole philosophies and constitutions, like so much tea or tobacco; but it goes ill with a people that has to import its superstition.

-February 23, 1901, The Speaker

Chesterton on Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman

Literature. Causerie of the Week: Dr. Barry's Live of Newman 
The Speaker, September 24, 1904

Another point very characteristic of the atmosphere to which [G.F.] Watts belonged is the quality of his moral indignation [...] He was really angry with the evils of the modern world. This still anger in Watts is closely connected with his simplicity, with his cheerfulness- nay, even with his optimism. Laughter has little or nothing to do with cheerfulness; some of the most cheerful people were the most unlaughing- Gladstone, for instance, and Watts. But it is, properly speaking, only the cheerful man, the optimist, who can be angry at all. It is the fashion nowadays for minor poets and minor philosophers to parade their enmity to the gods, to declare that their pessimism is a part of the immortal anger of Prometheus, the everlasting fury of protest against the baseness of the stars. But as a matter of fact they are not angry at all, as anyone knows who has heard their tired voices or seen them in a restaurant. The pessimist cannot be angry; for he has made up his mind to evil as the very stuff and colour of existence. It is only the optimist that can be really angry with the Serpent in Eden, for it is only he who is conscious of Eden. He alone can be furious, for he alone can be surprised.

-July 9, 1904, The Speaker

About patriotism itself I will say one thing only, on behalf of those like myself who are Nationalists at home and abroad. We also have had to breathe in a stifling vulgarity; to see a thousand faces fixed in one fatuous sneer. We also have had all the temptations possible to intellectual rebellion or to intellectual pride. If we have remained steadfast in a monotonous candor, we cannot claim that we were strengthened by ethical subtlety or new-fangled emancipation. We have remained steadfast because voices older than the hills called us to this spot; here in this island was to be our glory or failure. We have eaten its bread and been made wise with all its works. And if we are indeed near the end, and the madness of cosmopolitan materialism […] be indeed dragging our country to destruction, we can only say that at the end we must be with her, to claim our portion in the wrath of God.

–May 18, 1901, The Speaker

It may be that under a hundred badges and disguises there have never been but two parties in the world: those to whom life was a black figure on a white ground, and those to whom it was a white figure on a black ground; those to whom the background of the cosmos is so irradiated with some great hope and opportunity that the direst toils and macerations seem natural; and those to whom the background is black with so unfathomable a blackness that every pleasure must be hoarded like the flowers of Herrick.

-May 26, 1900, The Speaker

The basis of the artistic as of the ethical virtues is courage, and of courage there is only one certain and splendid signal- failure.

-May 12, 1900, The Speaker

The religious prophets, the Elijahs and the Baptists, the Savonarolas and the Bunyans, were the only real democrats, the only real disbelievers in the efficacy of fashion and station and wealth. They did conceive that the problem par excellence was not the problem of the poor, but the problem of the rich. They did go into kings' palaces and rebuke them as if they were the scum of the earth. They did speak to princes as the modern philanthropist speaks to costermongers. They did hope that there might be some real possibilities in peers and plutocrats, as we hope that there may be some real possibilities in vagabonds and thieves. They, I repeat, were perhaps the only real democrats that the world has ever seen. For it is no democracy, but only a foolish masquerade of aristocracy, when it is only possible for the aristocrat to be genuinely interested in the welfare of the plebeian. The real democracy is found when the plebeian may be genuinely interested in the welfare of the aristocrat.

-December 7, 1901, The Speaker

"The modern world is so broad that all its citizens are narrow."

The great curse of our civilisation is that it is so large that whole masses of its inhabitants never see any but one side of life, any but one phase of thought. The modern world is so broad that all its citizens are narrow. There were a great many advantages in living in a small State, one of them was that of living in a larger world. In Athens probably a man could not put his nose outside his door without hearing Mystics and Atheists talking at the top of their voices. Today there are whole tracts of country such as Brixton and Surbiton in which the householder might go out in perfect safety, in which great philosophers do not argue in the street, perhaps from one year's end to another. These vast herds of suburban citizens living perpetually among people like themselves, might, indeed, be rescued to some extent from ignorance of others and of current thought by the daily Press. But here again the party system frustrates us, and a man only reads in his daily paper his own prejudices embellished with other people’s arguments. Something must be done to shift and float these vast clogged and stagnant masses of human life. Unless this is done it will be no idle jest to say that our civilisation is melting away in an apocalypse which it has not even the sense to understand. We require, in short, first and foremost, a quicker circulation of the civic blood.

-November 2, 1901, The Speaker

"....the key-word of the Old Testament from beginning to end is the word "joy.' "

Again, one may ask, why should Hebraism be regarded as the expression of a dark self-effacement; why should the Hebrews be regarded as a gloomy people? They danced openly with delight in the goodness of God; the key-word of the Old Testament from beginning to end is the word "joy." Their sacred books blaze with gold and jewels just as they blaze with elemental gratitude and pleasure. They believe, more openly and professedly than any people has believed, in the primal fertilities, in the fact that the corn and the orchard are the signals of the ultimate beneficence, in the fact that children and the fruit of the womb are a heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord. They declared that God called all things good, the most stupendously daring thing that any people has ever said. Yet they said one thing more daring still; they said that all things called God good, that the blessing of the Seventh Day was hurled back again upon the Giver, that all created things praised the Lord. If this be the situation, it is at least striking. God declares that the leper is good, and the leper praises God in reply. It would cause no astonishment if such a people was accused of extravagant optimism, of grotesque exuberance, of hysterical hilarity. But that they should be accused of being sombre, and allowing no place for exhilaration, is perhaps one of the darkest and most ancient riddles of human stupidity. It is absolutely and genuinely, for all intellectual purposes, like accusing the French of a slow and heavy materialism, or the Vikings of an over-subtle aestheticism.

-December 28, 1901, The Speaker

"Optimism, or the utmost possible praise of all things, ought to be the keynote of criticism."

Optimism, or the utmost possible praise of all things, ought to be the keynote of criticism. It may appear to be an audacious assertion, but it may be tested by one very large and simple process. Compare the reality of a man's criticism when praising anything with its reality when excluding anything, and we shall all feel how much more often we agree with the former than with the latter. A man says, for example, "The Yorkshire moors are incomparably splendid," and we wholly agree. He goes on, "their superiority to the mere hills of Surrey--" and we instantly disagree with him. He says, "the Iliad, the highest expression of man's poetical genius," and all our hearts assent. He adds, "towering high above all our Hamlets and Macbeths," and we flatly deny it. A man may say, "Plato was the greatest man of antiquity," and we admit it; but if he says "he was far greater than Aischylus," we demur. Briefly, in praising great men we cheerfully agree to a superlative, but we emphatically decline a comparative. We come very near to the optimism of that universal superlative which in the morning of the world declared all things to be very good.

One of the results of this fact is that when a critic is really large-minded and really sympathetic and comprehensive, and really has hold of a guiding and enlightening idea, he should still watch with the greatest suspicion his own limitations and rejections. His praise will almost certainly be sound, his blame should always remain to his own mind a little dubious.

-May 3, 1902, The Speaker

"...a penny spent is a penny gained"

Proverbs are regarded as sacred things. The mere word suffices for the name of one of the books of the Bible, and yet it is remarkable what a large number of current proverbs when properly understood seem like texts from the horrible scriptures of a lower world. Proverbs are commonly at the best truisms; and a truism is a dead truth, a truth that we no longer feel as true. Spring, the stars, marriage, and death are truths, and it should be the aim of all literature and philosophy to prevent their becoming truisms. But it is extraordinary to notice the large number of proverbs, enshrining the wisdom of many generations, which are really mean and materialistic axioms fighting at every point against the realisation of a higher and more liberal life. We are told, for example, that "a penny saved is a penny gained," but proverbial philosophy is silent upon the far deeper and more practical piece of wisdom that a penny spent is a penny gained. If the author of the proverb wished to express himself with true philosophical lucidity he should have said that a penny saved is a penny placed in such a position that at some remote period it may effectively be gained. This form of words would make the proverb slightly more inconvenient for the purposes of constant repetition, but this I incline to think would be an advantage. Instances might be produced ad infinitum. It is said that "little things please little minds" but there is perhaps no better test of a great mind than that it reverences little things. It is said that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and a whole sermon might be preached against the vulgarity and inhumanity of the sentiment. A flower growing untouched in a meadow, a flower, therefore, that is really a flower, is immeasurably more ours when we enjoy it as such than when we amputate it, and put it in a pot. as if it were a diseased limb. A part of the cosmic life which preserves its own divine indifference to ourselves is worth any number of cosmic slaves that we have taught to fawn upon us. A bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. Everywhere we find this same quality in proverbs, that, although they are certainly not immoral, although they may be said to contain a certain brisk diurnal morality, yet they certainly fight so far as they go against the higher and braver life.

-September 14, 1901, The Speaker

"...he had his orders; he was the sentinel of God."

The great conception which lay at the back of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures was the conception that to man had been given a certain law, to champion which was his sole and simple business. ‘He hath shown thee, O man, that which is good’ is perhaps of all earthly sayings the one which has the deepest ring; it seems, as it were, too true and simple to be comprehended. The stars in their courses might fight against his honour, scientific discoveries might make the world seem more perilous and equivocal; at the turning of a stone or the splitting of a sea beast, the whole cosmic army might seem suddenly to desert to the devil. But man had in his heart a secret which would outlast these things; he had his orders; he was the sentinel of God.

-The Speaker, October 19th, 1901
The Man Who Was Orthodox (1963)

"True artistic symbolism exists in order to provide another alphabet .."

We need a much clearer conception of the real value and function of mysticism. It is not mysticism to explain a puzzle: to say that a green cross means evolution and a blue triangle means orthodoxy. This sort of allegorical art is a mere cryptogram which ceases to exist when it is explained. Whatever a mystic may be, he is surely not only a person who destroys mystery.

The real function of symbolism is much deeper and much more practical. We are surrounded in this world by huge and anonymous forces: as they rush by us we throw a name at them-love, death, destiny, remembrance-but the things themselves are infinitely vaster and more varied than the names. True artistic symbolism exists in order to provide another alphabet for the direct interpretation of these infinite anarchic things than the alphabet of language. It is not that a sea at sunset "represents" sorrow, but that a sea at sunset represents a great deal of the truth which is missed by the word "sorrow." So it is with Mr. Downing's Shakespeare allegory. It is not that Shakespeare is a mere philosopher: it is that philosophy is one way of describing certain unutterable things, and Shakespeare is another. Caliban, says Mr. Downing, "represents the mob." The truth is that Caliban represents an old, dark, and lawless element in things, an element which has no name except Caliban, and of which the mob is one of the hundred incarnations. So far from it being true that Caliban symbolises the mob in the street, it would be far truer to say that the mob in the street symbolises Caliban.

-May 11, 1901, The Speaker

"Religion does not consist in looking upon the world as an order, but in looking upon it as an act."

The earlier and more practical truth-the truth of religions-is that a tree is a miracle, an inexplicable explosion of divine life, and that no conceivable number of precisely similar trees go any way towards explaining it or turning the miracle into a law. If we saw a gentleman going to church every Sunday in a top hat and yellow dressinggown, our curiosity would not be allayed by his explaining that he had done the same thing regularly for the last twenty years. Nor can we excuse the eccentric conduct of the sun in rising in the east merely on the ground of habit and advanced years. What Mr. Dadson does not realise is that religion has nothing at all to do with the laws of nature, because it deals only with the primary wonder of the existence of anything which is entirely untouched by the monotonous manner in which anything when created chooses to behave. ... Religion does not consist in looking upon the world as an order, but in looking upon it as an act. For the purposes of Mr. Dadson's natural philosophy, it is quite right and proper to say that evolution made the world. But it is precisely as if a schoolmaster who had just been hit on the foot with a cricket ball were to ask who rolled the missile and were to receive the answer that revolution rolled it. The degree of gaiety which would be aroused in him by that reply would be about equal to the amount that I experience from the former explanation considered in the light, not of physical, but of mental science. Mr. Dadson is content with a mechanical explanation of the world, and he supposes that all myths and religions were meant to explain how rational the universe was. It does not occur to him that they may have been meant to express how irrational it was, to reach past all the minor phenomena that obey law to that supreme and splendid law which is a lawless thing.

-July 27, 1901, The Speaker