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

Education

While the modern public, with a kind of crude courage and good-will, build schools and more schools, and yet more schools, votes grants, and more grants, and yet more grants, serves our education to everyone everywhere as if education were something as plain and homogeneous as so much cheese, inquirers of the type of Miss [Charlotte] Mason are studying the first principles of education on which the good or ill of all this action rests with a care that may be called laboriousness and a calm that might almost be called scepticism. The contrast between the two spirits is odd and a little disquieting. The slow and deliberate theories are embodied in educational articles. The hasty and fleeting theories are embodied in enormous buildings of brick and stone. The more tested and less doubtful doctrines are printed in books which scarcely anybody reads. The less tested and doubtful theories are embodied in Acts of Parliament that everybody has to obey. Nothing can breed more strange doubts in the mind than the contemplation of so much responsibility in private and so much frivolity in public. We hear little but derision directed towards the old fathers and heresiarchs, who tore theories to shreds before they would proceed to the smallest practical reform, but if there be little doubt that they erred on one side I fancy there is even less doubt that we err on the other. No doubt it is a very legitimate and beautiful object to proceed rapidly from theory to execution; but to rush at the execution and then go on to the theory is not legitimate or beautiful; but it is the indwelling principle of modern politics and modern education. It is very fine to aim at having a thing established a week after it has been discovered to be good. But the aim of many advanced persons to-day is to have a thing established a week before it is discovered to be bad.

-May 13, 1905, Daily News

The whole of the modern attack upon marriage and the family is in its inmost nature plutocratic.

-A Handful of Authors (1953)

This is indeed the most bountiful of all the functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the beginning of the world have starved more than for bread.

-Robert Browning (1903)

Let a man have what ideal [..] he likes. That ideal must still consist of elements in a certain proportion; and if that proportion is disturbed the ideal is destroyed [...] Progress, in the good sense, does not consist in looking for a direction in which one can go on indefinitely. For there is no such direction, unless it be in quite transcendental things, like the love of God.

 -Fancies versus Fads (1923)

The policeman at the corner of the street is a paradox; he seems to be wholly unconscious of how wild, how fantastic, even how jocular a figure he is. For it is surely a paradox that each one of us should be restricted by his power, in order that each one of us should be free.

-December 25, 1901, Daily News

Lord Ivywood shared the mental weakness of most men who have fed on books; he ignored, not the value but the very existence of other forms of information.

-The Flying Inn (1914)

From Maisie Ward's book Return to Chesterton (p. 75):

To [Chesterton's] friends his ways seemed amusing, to strangers puzzling or even alarming. A policeman called one day in the country to say to Mr. Mills: "Is the gentleman all right who's staying with you? He's been seen going about with a drawn sword."

There was always a dim element of irony and doubt mixed with popular poetry and popular religion. But journalism demands blind and prostrate faith. And journalism seems to get it.

-January 22, 1910, Illustrated London News

Our great difficulty in the educated classes to-day is that we are willing to admit that the poor are wronged as long as we have also a fundamental feeling that they are wrong. I mean that we will admit that people are forced lower than the right human level- so long as it is admitted that we are the right human level.

-September 9, 1911, Daily News

If a sentiment is legitimate at all, it must be legitimate in its nature, and not merely in the accident of its being our own.

-January 6, 1903, Daily News

Guy Fawkes

I am not sure who it is who holds the cup or shield for this season as being the historical character who really wrote Shakespeare. I mean in that world of learned disputants who only agree on the first principle that Shakespeare could not write Shakespeare. [...] Personally, I believe the plays were written by Guy Fawkes. The proofs are innumerable. I have not even attempted to number them-or, as yet, to think of them. But I am sure there are a great many; there always are. Even at the moment, for instance, it occurs to me as significant that Shakespeare is criticised for one particular anachronism. He is criticised for having introduced gunpowder into an ancient Roman play. Guy Fawkes, no doubt, could not enjoy or even imagine any play without gunpowder. Moreover, Shakespeare's ancient Roman plays are full of the idea of revolution and civil war; and in such an excitement the great conspirator would have been carried away by his monomania and let off his fireworks almost without knowing it. Then there thronged to my support all the many arguments adduced to show that Shakespeare was of the old religion, or at least had some tenderness for it. It is no longer surprising that the dramatist should have a weakness for Friars. It is not unnatural that Guy Fawkes should make the Ghost testify quite clearly to Purgatory and the Sacrament of Penance. The preoccupation of the dramatist with palace revolutions and the murder of Princes is notorious. The true Bacanonian-or rather Post-Baconian-critic would not stop here. He would show an unexpected meaning in all the passages which have hitherto been dismissed as no better than mere masterpieces of literature. "Out, out, brief candle," would obviously refer to some experience in the vaults. And that vision of radiant dissolution, in which the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, leave not a wrack behind, expresses in anticipation the dizzy exultation at the destruction of Parliament. Nothing more is needed but a cryptogram-and anybody can find that.

[..] My suggestion about Guy Fawkes will hardly be given its due weight by serious scholars, I fear; and some may even suspect me of a lack of sympathy with this critical method.

-December 13, 1924, Illustrated London News