"What's Wrong With the World?" "I am"

According to a popular story that has circulated for a long time, a well known London newspaper in the early part of the twentieth century (usually stated to be The Times) asked the question "What is wrong with the world?" and received many replies. The shortest was from G.K. Chesterton, simply consisting of "I am."

Now, the story as told seems to be apocryphal, but it does seem to have a grain of truth in it. Since recently in a couple of places I came across people mentioning (correctly) that the story as told is apocryphal, I did state what the grain of truth seems to be, and so I decided just to post one of the replies I made below, for others who may be interested or doing research on it:

Well, even though the story as usually told is apocryphal, there is a grain of truth in it. In 1905, the Daily News in London published a letter called "What's Wrong With the World" by "A Heretic" that generated a huge correspondence from readers for months. Chesterton was one of the people who responded, and while his response was much longer than the apocryphal story indicates, it did include among other things this passage:

"In one sense, and that the eternal sense, the thing is plain. The answer to the question , 'What is Wrong?' is, or should be, I am wrong.' Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby."

(-Letter to the Daily News, August 16, 1905, "What is Wrong")

UPDATE: You can read the whole letter here.

"It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age."

From Joseph Pearce's book Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, p. 57:

...[Alec Guiness, i.e., "Obi-Wan Kenobi" of Star Wars fame] remained confident about the future, rooted in the belief that the essential traditions of Catholicism "remain firmly entrenched":

The Church has proved she is not moribund. "All shall be well," I feel, "and all manner of things shall be well", so long as the God who is worshiped is the God of all ages, past and to come, and not the Idol of Modernity, so venerated by some of our bishops, priests and mini-skirted nuns.

Guiness quoted one of Chesterton's "most penetrating statements" as a prelude to his discourse on the reform of the Church. "The Church", wrote Chesterton, "is the one thing that saves a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time."

[Note: The exact quote in its orginal form is "It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.", found in his essay "Why I am a Catholic", which appeared in the book Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creed, published in 1926. It is also repeated in the form "The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age" in The Catholic Church and Conversion (1927)]

Lamp-posts

A friend of mine has made game of me in a recent book for saying that lamp-posts are poetical; that common things, the boots I wear or the chair I sit on, if they once are understood, can satisfy the most gigantic imagination. I can only adhere with stubborn simplicity to my position. The boots I wear are, I will not say beautiful upon the mountains, but, at least, highly symbolic in the street, being the boots of one that bringeth good news. The chair I sit on is really romantic-nay, it is heroic, for it is eternally in danger. The lamp-posts are poetical; not merely from accidental, but from essential causes. It is not merely the softening sentimental associations that belong to lamp-posts, the beautiful facts that aristocrats were hanged from them, or that intoxicated old gentlemen embrace them: the lamp-post really has the whole poetry of man, for no other creature can lift a flame so high and guard it so well.

July 24, 1909, Illustrated London News

There is one moral matter in which we really can return good for evil without merely strengthening the evils; one weapon from the armoury of the saints is, even in a worldly sense, stronger than the world. That weapon is humility.

Illustrated London News, July 24, 1915

[H/T American Chesterton Society]

[The modern mind] finds it easier to prophesy Christmas like a Utopia than to enjoy it like a Saturnalia.

-December 20, 1922, Illustrated London News

"The Citizen has liberty; the Slave can have only leisure."

The Citizen has liberty; the Slave can have only leisure. The definition of the duties and rights of the citizens is really very necessary, lest they should come to be confused with the mere obedience and the mere holidays of a population really regarded as servile. The old Republicans were not wrong because they carried out a political theory, but because they did not carry it far enough; because too many of them claimed to be democrats while really remaining aristocrats. They were not, as their stupider critics say, too logical; they were rather only too tolerant of their own illogicality. Jefferson believed in citizens and owned slaves. He was in a false position; he knew it and he even said so. But he was in some ways in a better position than the despotic social reformer, who wishes to own all citizens as if they were slaves.

-November 29, 1930, Illustrated London News

"Theology is only thought applied to religion..."

[...] the critic generally begins by dismissing these conflicts with the statement that they are all about small points of theology. I do not admit that theological points are small points. Theology is only thought applied to religion; and those who prefer a thoughtless religion need not be so very disdainful of others with a more rationalistic taste. The old joke that the Greek sects only differed about a single letter is about the lamest and most illogical joke in the world. An atheist and a theist only differ by a single letter; yet theologians are so subtle as to distinguish definitely between the two.

-The New Jerusalem (1920)

"But you are unhappy because you disbelieve in evil, and think it philosophical to see everything in the same light of grey..."

"...Forgive me if I imagine things for you, so to speak; it is a way I have. You have studied superstitions all over the world, and you have seen things compared with which all that talk of salt and table-knives is like a child's game of consequences. You have been in the dark forests over which the vampire seems to pass more vast than a dragon; or in the mountains of the werewolf, where men say a man can see in the face of his friend or his wife the eyes of a wild beast. You have known people who had real superstitions; black, towering, terrific superstitions; you have lived with those people; and I want to ask you a question about them."

"You seem to know something about them yourself," answered Noel; "but I will answer any question you like."

"Were they not happier men than you?"

Gale paused a moment as he put the question, and then went on. "Did they not in fact sing more songs, and dance more dances, and drink wine with more real merriment? That was because they believed in evil. In evil spells, perhaps, in evil luck, in evil under all sorts of stupid and ignorant symbols; but still in something to be fought. They at least read things in black and white, and saw life as the battlefield it is. But you are unhappy because you disbelieve in evil, and think it philosophical to see everything in the same light of grey..."

The Poet and the Lunatics (1929)

"Were you ever an isosceles triangle?"

Gale still lay in the shadow of the thick trees staring up at the birds, as if he had never stirred. Garth called to him by name, but it was only after a silence that Gale spoke. What he said was:

"Were you ever an isosceles triangle?"

"Very seldom," replied Garth with restraint. "May I ask what the devil you are talking about?"

"Only something that I was thinking about," answered the poet, lifting himself up to one elbow. "I wondered whether it would be a cramping sort of thing to be surrounded by straight lines, and whether being in a circle would be any better. Did anybody ever live in a round prison?"'

-The Poet and the Lunatics (1929)

"... we must always realise not only the humanity of the oppressed, but even the humanity of the oppressor."

The one thing [Dickens] did not describe in any of the abuses he denounced was the soul-destroying potency of routine. He made out the bad school, the bad parochial system, the bad debtor's prison as very much jollier and more exciting than they may really have been. In a sense, then, he flattered them; but he destroyed them with the flattery. By making Mrs. Gamp delightful he made her impossible. He gave every one an interest in Mr. Bumble's existence; and by the same act gave every one an interest in his destruction. It would be difficult to find a stronger instance of the utility and energy of the method which we have, for the sake of argument, called the method of the optimistic reformer. As long as low Yorkshire schools were entirely colourless and dreary, they continued quietly tolerated by the public and quietly intolerable to the victims. So long as Squeers was dull as well as cruel he was permitted; the moment he became amusing as well as cruel he was destroyed. As long as Bumble was merely inhuman he was allowed. When he became human, humanity wiped him right out. For in order to do these great acts of justice we must always realise not only the humanity of the oppressed, but even the humanity of the oppressor. The satirist had, in a sense, to create the images in the mind before, as an iconoclast, he could destroy them. Dickens had to make Squeers live before be could make him die.

-Charles Dickens (1906)

"...the artist is not so much to copy the works of God as to copy the work of God..."

[...] the artist is not so much to copy the works of God as to copy the work of God, in the sense of the working of God; or the way in which God works. There will be in his art the same, or some approximation to the same, spirit and tendency of line and motion and balance; because there is only one creation and no inspiration from outside it. But the work will rather be that of the child of God making his own smaller world than the servant of God copying the details of the larger one. And as even the Divine Creator pours forth his cataracts in a manner proper to water and not to something else, as he carves even his trees in a style properly to be called wood-carving and not stone-carving, as he hollows the rock in one way and the wave in another, so the human creator also is right to recognise the materials in which his meaning is bodied forth; and to express it in his own materials and not in an imitation of the cosmic materials. As Mr. Gill once expressed it in a speech somewhere, "A sculptor has to make a man; but it has to be a stone man. It has to be the sort of man that God would have made, if He had chosen to make him in stone."

-A Handful of Authors (1953)

"GK Chesterton and Anglo-Catholicism –a forerunner of the Personal Ordinariates"