erne
G.KG
: CALENDAR:
Jbrevery
day-infhe
Year.
London: Cecil Palmer
jj
G. K. Chesterton
Calendar
Uniform with this Volume
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
OSCAR WILDE
H. G. WELLS
ROBERT BLATCHFORD
WALTER PATER
IBSEN
HILAIRE BELLOC
MARIE CORELLI
SIR J. M. BARRIE
BISMARCK
SIR ARTHUR PINERO
GEORGE MOORE
NIETZSCHE
THOREAU
ANATOLE FRANCE
FIELDING
GEORGE MEREDITH
WILLIAM BLAKE
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
HENRY ARTHUR JONES
THE SCOTS' CALENDAR
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CHARLES DICKENS
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G. K. CHESTERTON
The G. 1C Chesterton
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SECOND
EDITION
1921
PREFACE
I WISH to record my sincere acknowledgment to the following
publishers, from whose books have been taken many of the
quotations in the following pages: —
Messrs J. W. ARROWSMITH LTD.
„ CASSELL & Co. LTD.
„ J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
„ DUCKWORTH & Co.
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„ WILLIAMS & NORGATE.
My warmest thanks are also due to Mr. G. K. Chesterton
for the kind permission he gave me both to compile and
publish this volume.
C. P.
January
One
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a
new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a
new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new
eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolu-
tions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man
starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing
effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption
that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that
he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born
again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of
Heaven.
Two
God made the wicked Grocer
For a mystery and a sign,
That men might shun the awful shops
And go to inns to dine;
Where the bacon's on the rafter
And the wine is in the wood,
And God that made good laughter
Has seen that they are good.
The evil-hearted Grocer
Would call his mother " Ma'am,"
And bow at her and bob at her,
Her aged soul to damn,
And rub his horrid hands and ask
What article was next,
Though mortis in articulo
Should be her proper text.
Three
His props are not his children,
But pert lads underpaid,
Who call out " Cash !" and bang about
To work his wicked trade;
JANUAR Y
He keeps a lady in a cage
Most cruelly all day,
And makes her count and calls her " Miss
Until she fades away.
The righteous minds of innkeepers
Induce them now and then
To crack a bottle with a friend
Or treat unmoneyed men,
But who hath seen the Grocer
Treat housemaids to his teas
Or crack a bottle of fish-sauce
Or stand a man a cheese $*
Four
He sells us sands of Araby
As sugar for cash down;
He sweeps his shop and sells the dust
The purest salt in town,
He crams with cans of poisoned meat
Poor subjects of the King,
And when they die by thousands
Why, he laughs like anything.
The wicked Grocer groces
In spirits and in wine,
Not frankly and in fellowship
As men in inns do dine;
But packed with soap and sardines
And carried off by grooms,
For to be snatched by Duchesses
And drunk in dressing-rooms.
Five
The hell-instructed Grocer
Has a temple made of tin,
And the ruin of good innkeepers
Is loudly urged therein;
But now the sands are running out
From sugar of a sort,
The Grocer trembles; for his time,
Just like his weight, is short.
JANUARY
Six
There are only two ways of governing: by a rule and by
a ruler. And it is seriously true to say of a woman, in
education and domesticity, that the freedom of the
autocrat appears to be necessary to her. She is never
responsible until she is irresponsible. In case this sounds
like an idle contradiction, I confidently appeal to the cold
facts of history. Almost every despotic or oligarchic
state has admitted women to its privileges. Scarcely
one democratic state has ever admitted them to its rights.
Seven
An element of paradox runs through the whole of exist-
ence itself. It begins in the realm of ultimate physics
and metaphysics, in the two facts that we cannot imagine
a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a
space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complica-
tions of divinity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ
in the wilderness was truly pure, unless we also conceive
that he desired to sin. It runs, in the same manner,
through all the minor matters of morals, so that we can-
not imagine courage existing except in conjunction with
fear, or magnanimity existing except in conjunction
with some temptation to meanness.
Eight
Asceticism is a thing which in its very nature we tend
in these days to misunderstand. Asceticism, in the
religious sense, is the repudiation of the great mass of
human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the one
joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least
confined to religious asceticism: there is scientific asceti-
cism which asserts that truth is alone satisfying : there is
aesthetic asceticism which asserts that art is alone satis-
fying: there is amatory asceticism which asserts that love
is alone satisfying. There is even epicurean asceticism,
which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying.
Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the
statement that the speaker could live with that thing
alone, there lies the germ and essence of asceticism.
JANUARY
Nine
The Puritans fell, through the damning fact that they
had a complete theory of life, through the eternal paradox
that a satisfactory explanation can never satisfy. Like
Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical French
Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught
the lesson that men's wants have always been right and
their arguments always wrong. Reason is always a kind
of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than
the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men
of violence. We speak of " touching " a man's heart,
but we can do nothing to his head but hit it. The
tyranny of the Puritans over the bodies of men was
comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and conflagrations
are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the
tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and de-
moralised human spirit. Their brooding and raving
can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced,
for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial, madness
can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they
were fanatics, but because they were rationalists.
Ten
A great deal is said in these days about the value or value-
lessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a
productive tool so much as a weapon for defence. A
man building up an intellectual system has to build like
Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the trowel
in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality,
is the trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide
experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most
people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable
as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians.
Eleven
When people say that you can prove anything by logic,
they are not using words in a fair sense. What they
mean is that you can prove anything by bad logic. Deep
in the mystic ingratitude of the soul of man there is an
extraordinary tendency to use the name for an organ,
when what is meant is the abuse or decay of that organ.
Thus we speak of a man suffering from " nerves," which
4
JANUAR Y
is about as sensible as talking about a man suffering from
ten fingers. We speak of " liver " and " digestion "
when we mean the failure of liver and the absence of
digestion. And in the same manner we speak of the
dangers of logic, when what we really mean is the danger
of fallacy.
Twelve
The simplicity towards which the world is driving is the
necessary outcome of all our systems and speculations
and of our deep and continuous contemplation of things.
For the universe is like everything in it; we have to look
at it repeatedly and habitually before we see it. It is
only when we have seen it for the hundredth time that
we see it for the first time. The more consistently
things are contemplated, the more they tend to unify
themselves and therefore to simplify themselves. The
simplification of anything is always sensational. Thus
monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is as if
we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects,
and, suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together
into a huge and staring face.
Thirteen
Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of all earthly
tasks, that of making men turn back and wonder at the
simplicities they had learnt to ignore. It is strange that
the most unpopular of all doctrines is the doctrine which
declares the common life divine. Democracy, of which
Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of
gospels; there is nothing that so terrifies men as the
decree that they are all kings. Christianity, in Savonarola's
mind, identical with democracy, is the hardest of gospels;
there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as the
saying that they are all the sons of God.
Fourteen
It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if
so, the matter could be more appropriately described by
saying that modern readers are neglected by Providence.
The ground of this neglect, in so far as it exists, must
be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment that, like
5
/ ANUAR Y
the beard of Polonius, he is too long. Yet it is surely
a peculiar thing that in literature alone a house should
be despised because it is too large, or a host impugned
because he is too generous. If romance be really a
pleasure, it is difficult to understand the modern reader's
consuming desire to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure,
it is difficult to understand his desire to have it at all*
Fifteen
No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we
have grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the
outside of life but absolutely in the centre of it.
Sixteen
Romance, indeed, does not consist by any means so much
in experiencing adventures as in being ready for them.
How little the actual boy cares for incidents in comparison
to tools and weapons may be tested by the fact that the
most popular story of adventure is concerned with a man
who lived for years on a desert island with two guns and
a sword, which he never had to use on an enemy.
Seventeen
This is a truth little understood in our time, but a very
essential one. If optimism means a general approval, it
is certainly true that the more a man becomes an optimist
the more he becomes a melancholy man. If he manages
to praise everything, his praise will develop an alarming
resemblance to a polite boredom. He will say that the
marsh is as good as the garden; he will mean that the
garden is as dull as the marsh. He may force himself
to say that emptiness is good, but he will hardly prevent
himself from asking what is the good of such good.
This optimism does exist — this optimism which is more
hopeless than pessimism — this optimism which is the
very heart of hell. Against such an aching vacuum of
joyless approval there is only one antidote — a sudden and
pugnacious belief in positive evil. This world can be
made beautiful again by beholding it as a battlefield.
When we have defined and isolated the evil thing, the
colours come back into everything else. When evil
things have become evil, good things, in a blazing apoca-
lypse, become good.
6
JANUARY
Eighteen
There are some men who are dreary because they do not
believe in God; but there are many others who are dreary
because they do not believe in the devil. The grass
grows green again when we believe in the devil, the roses
grow red again when we believe in the devil.
Nineteen
The very word " superficial " is founded on a funda-
mental mistake about life, the idea that second thoughts
are best. The superficial impression of the world is by
far the deepest. What we really feel, naturally and
casually, about the look of skies and trees and the face of
friends, that and that alone will almost certainly remain
our vital philosophy to our dying day.
Twenty
An appreciation of Scott might be made almost a test of
decadence. If ever we lose touch with this one most
reckless and defective writer, it will be a proof to us that
we have erected round ourselves a false cosmos, a world
of lying and horrible perfection, leaving outside of it
Walter Scott and that strange old world which is as
confused and as indefensible and as inspiring and as
healthy as he.
Twenty-one
It is always impossible to define the instant and the turn
of mood which makes the whole difference between
danger being worse than endurance and endurance being
worse than danger. The actual outbreak generally
has a symbolic or artistic, or what some would call
whimsical, cause. Somebody fires off a pistol, or appears
in an unpopular uniform, or refers in a loud voice to a
scandal that is never mentioned in the newspapers; some-
body takes off his hat, or somebody doesn't take off his
hat; and a city is sacked before midnight.
Twenty-two
The greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this :
that men began to use the word " spiritual " as the same
as the word " good." They thought that to grow in
7
J ANUAR Y
refinement and uncorporeality was to grow in virtue.
When scientific evolution was announced, some feared
that it would encourage mere animality. It did worse :
it encouraged mere spirituality. It taught men to think
that so long as they were passing from the ape they were
going to the angel. But you can pass from the ape and
go to the devil,
Twenty-three
We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all
romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his
name. This man walks about the streets and can see
and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember
who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story.
Every man has forgotten who he is. One may under-
stand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more
distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are
all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten
our names. We have all forgotten what we really are.
All that we call common-sense and rationality and
practicality and positivism only means that for certain
dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten.
All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means
that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
Twenty-four
Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they
look. Really they require almost as careful a balance
of laws and conditions as do social and political liberty.
The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel
everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that
prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home
limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home
limits he has ceased to feel the Odyssey. He is free from
national prejudices and outside patriotism. But being
outside patriotism he is outside Henry V. Such a
literary man is simply outside all literature: he is more
of a prisoner than any bigot. For if there is a wall
between you and the world, it makes little difference
whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked
out.
8
JANUARY
Twenty- five
As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and
madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol
at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centri-
petal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For
the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is
fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller.
But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and
contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without
altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre
it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon
itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four
winds; it is a sign-post for free travellers.
Twenty-six
A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than the
country-side, for while nature is a chaos of unconscious
forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest
of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not
be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the
street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a de-
liberate symbol — a message from some man, as much as
if it were a telegram or a post card.
Twenty-seven
The two facts which attract almost every normal person
to children are, first, that they are very serious, and,
secondly, that they are in consequence very happy.
They are jolly with the completeness which is possible
only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable
schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which
dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old.
It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and
astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a
transcendent common-sense.
Twenty-eight
Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere
art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has
arisen out of pure reason.
There must always be a rich moral soil for any great
aesthetic growth. The principle of art for art's sake is a
9
/ ANUAR Y
very good principle if it means that there is a vital dis-
tinction between the earth and the tree that has its root
in the earth; but it is a very bad principle if it means that
the tree could grow just as well with its roots in the air.
Twenty-nine
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.
Thirty
I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain
itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explana-
tion; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explana-
tion. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to
satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explana-
tions I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false.
Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning;
and meaning must have someone to mean it. There
was something personal in the world, as in a work of art;
whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought
this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its
defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form
of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint:
we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not
drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience
to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there
had come into my mind a vague and vast impression
that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and
held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved
his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them
from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no
encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not
even thought of Christian theology.
10
JANUAR Y
Thirty-one
It is absurd indeed that Christians should be called the
enemies of life because they wish life to last for ever;
it is more absurd still to call the old comic writers dull
because they wished their unchanging characters to last
for ever. Both popular religion with its endless joys,
and the old comic story, with its endless jokes, have in
our time faded together. We are too weak to desire that
undying vigour. We believe that you can have too much
of a good thing — a blasphemous belief, which at one blow
wrecks all the heavens that men have hoped for. The
grand old defiers of God were not afraid of an eternity
of torment. We have come to be afraid of an eternity
of joy.
II
February
One
Master of arts and master of arms, master of all things yet,
For the musket as for the mandolin the master fingers
fret;
The news to the noise of the mandolin that all the world
comes home,
And the young are young and the years return and the
days of the kingdom come
When the wars wearied, and the tribes turned; and the
sun rose on Rome,
And all that Rome remembers when all her realms forget.
Two
The kings came over the olden Rhine to break an ancient
debt,
We took their rush at the river of death in the fields where
first we met,
But we marked their millions swaying; then we marked
a standard fall;
And far beyond them, like a bird, Manoury's bugle call:
And there were not kings or debts or doubts or anything
at all
But the People that remembers and the peoples that forget.
Three
We, the modern English, cannot easily understand the
French Revolution, because we cannot easily understand
the idea of bloody battle for pure common-sense; we
cannot understand common-sense in arms and conquering.
In modern England common-sense seems to mean putting
up with existing conditions. For us a practical politician
really means a man who can be thoroughly trusted to do
nothing at all; that is where he practically comes in. The
French feeling — the feeling at the back of the Revolution —
was that the more sensible a man was, the more you must
look out for slaughter.
13
FEBRUARY
Four
The pessimists who attack the universe are always under
this disadvantage. They have an exhilarating con-
sciousness that they could make the sun and moon better;
but they also have the depressing consciousness that they
could not make the sun and moon at all. A man looking
at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a
hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also
bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents
him personally from making such mistakes.
Five
This world is not to be justified as it is justified by the
mechanical optimists; it is not to be justified as the best
of all possible worlds. Its merit is not that it is orderly
and explicable; its merit is that it is wild and utterly
unexplained. Its merit is precisely that none of us could
have conceived such a thing, that we should have rejected
the bare idea of it as miracle and unreason. It is the
best of all impossible worlds.
Six
Blessings there are of cradle and of clan,
Blessings that fall of priests' and princes' hands;
But never blessing full of lives and lands,
Broad as the blessing of a^lonely man.
Seven
For the worst and most dangerous hypocrite is not he
who affects unpopular virtue, but he who affects popular
vice. The jolly fellow of the saloon bar and the race-
course is the real deceiver of mankind; he has misled
more than any false prophet, and his victims cry to him
out of hell.
Eight
It is a deadly error (an error at the back of much of the
false placidity of our politics) to suppose that lies are told
with excess and luxuriance, and truths told with modesty
and restraint. Some of the most frantic lies on the face
of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple
13
FEBR UAR Y
reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.
Many official declarations are just as dignified as Mr
Dombey, because they are just as fictitious.
Nine
If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor
became masters, I think the priests would escape, I fear
the gentlemen would; but I believe the gutters would
be simply running with the blood of philanthropists.
Ten
The man who said that an Englishman's house is his
castle said much more than he meant. The Englishman
thinks of his house as something fortified, and provisioned,
and his very surliness is at root romantic. And this
sense would naturally be strongest on wild winter nights,
when the lowered portcullis and the lifted drawbridge
do not merely bar people out but bar people in. The
Englishman's house is most sacred, not merely when the
King cannot enter it, but when the Englishman cannot
get out of it.
Eleven
Why should I care for the Ages
Because they are old and grey t
To me, like sudden laughter,
The stars are fresh and gay;
The world is a daring fancy,
And finished yesterday.
Twelve
Anyhow, there is this about such evil, that it opens door
after door in hell, and always into smaller and smaller
chambers. This is the real case against crime, that a
man does not become wilder and wilder, but only meaner
and meaner.
Thirteen
" Where does a wise man hide a leaf t In the forest.
But what does he do if there is no forest $"'
" Well, well," cried Flambeau irritably, " what does he
14
FEBR UAR Y
4t He grows a forest to hide it in/' said the priest in an
obscure voice. " A fearful sin."
Fourteen
After the first silence the small man said to the other:
44 Where does a wise man hide a pebble ?"'
And the tall man answered in a low voice: " On the
beach/'
The small man nodded, and after a short silence said:
" Where does a wise man hide a leaf?"'
And the other answered: " In the forest."
There was another stillness, and then the tall man re-
sumed : " Do you mean that when a wise man has to hide
a real diamond he has been known to hide it among sham
ones *"'
44 No, no," said the little man with a laugh, 44 we will let
bygones be bygones."
Fifteen
When will people understand that it is useless for a man
to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's
Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A
Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian
Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs.
Sixteen
A machine only is a machine because it cannot think.
Seventeen
I have always noticed that people who begin by taking
the intellect very seriously end up by having no intellects
at all. The idolater worships wood and stone; and if he
worships his own head it turns into wood and stone.
Eighteen
The evil of aristocracy is not that it necessarily leads to
the infliction of bad things or the suffering of sad ones;
the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the
hands of a class of people who can always inflict what
they can never suffer.
15
FEBRUARY
Nineteen
A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without
haying the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small
artist is content with art; a great artist is content with
nothing except everything.
Twenty
Bigotry may be roughly denned as the anger of men who
have no opinions.
Twenty-one
Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are dis-
puted. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a
religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really
destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them
their limits and their plain and defiant shape.
Twenty-two
** Do you know, Hump/' he said, " I think modern
people have somehow got their minds all wrong about
human life. They seem to expect what Nature has
never promised; and then try to ruin all that Nature
has really given."
Twenty- three
There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a
new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who
starts with a false theory and then sees everything as
making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of
human reason.
Twenty- four
There are crowds who do not care to revolt; but there are
no crowds who do not like someone else to do it for them;
a fact which the safest oligarchs may be wise to learn.
Twenty-five
It is one of the tragedies of the diplomat that they are
not allowed to admit either knowledge or ignorance.
16
FEBRUARY
Twenty-six
Lady, the light is dying in the skies,
Lady, and let us die when honour dies;
Your dear, dropped glove was like a gauntlet flung
When you and I were young,
For something more than splendour stood; and ease was
not the only good,
About the woods in Ivywood, when you and I were young.
Twenty-seven
The instant that man has any chance of existence, he
insists on a jolly existence. He only wishes to be '* alive "
in order to be lively,
Twenty-eight
The pale leaf falls in pallor, but the green leaf turns to
gold;
We that have found it good to be young shall find it
good to be old;
Life that bringeth the marriage-bell, the cradle and the
grave.
Life that is mean to the mean of heart, and only brave
to the brave.
Twenty-nine
The prime function of the imagination is to see our whole
orderly system of life as a pile of stratified revolutions.
In spite of all revolutionaries it must be said that the
function of imagination is not to make strange things settled
so much as to make settled things strange; not so much
to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders.
March
One
But I saw her cheek and forehead
Change, as at a spoken word,
And I saw her head uplifted
Like a lily to the Lord.
Naught is lost, but all transmuted,
Ears are sealed, yet eyes have seen;
Saw her smiles (O soul be worthy !),
Saw her tears (O heart be clean !).
Two
The aim of civil war, like the aim of all war, is peace.
Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil war in this
soldierly and decisive sense ; first, because they are women ;
and, secondly, because they are very few women. But
they can raise something else; which is altogether another
pair of shoes. They do not create revolution; what they
do create is anarchy; and the difference between these is
not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness
and finality. Revolution of its nature produces govern-
ment; anarchy only produces more anarchy.
Three
Humanity never produces optimists till it has ceased to
produce happy men.
Four
Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more
romantic than extravagance.
Heaven knows I for one speak disinterestedly in the
matter; for I cannot clearly remember saving a halfpenny
ever since I was born. But the thing is true; economy,
properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic
because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.
It is prosaic to throw money away, because it is prosaic
to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession
18
MARCH
of indifference — that is, it is a confession of failure. The
most prosaic thing about the house is the dustbin, and
the one great objection to the new fastidious and aesthetic
homestead is simply that in such a moral menage the
dustbin must be bigger than the house.
Five
It is quite unfair to say that a woman hates other women
individually; but I think it would be quite true to say
that she detests them in a confused heap. And this is
not because she despises her own sex, but because she
respects it; and respects especially that sanctity and
separation of each item which is represented in manners
by the idea of dignity and in morals by the idea of chastity.
Six
The world will have another washing day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H. G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;
Rationalists are growing rational —
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray.
So secret that the very sky seems small —
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
Seven
Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons; now
because they are talking about something too large for
anyone to understand, and now again because they are
talking about something too small for anyone to see.
Eight
Men trust an ordinary man because they trust themselves.
But men trust a great man because they do not trust
themselves, And hence the worship of great men always
appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear
of great men until the time when all other men are small.
Nine
This is the first essential element in government; coercion;
a necessary but not a noble element. I may remark in
passing that when people say that government rests on
force they give an admirable instance of the foggy and
19
MARCH
muddled cynicisms of modernity. Government does not
rest on force. Government is force; it rests on consent
or a conception of justice. A king or a community holding
a certain thing to be abnormal, evil, uses the general
strength to crush it out; the strength is his tool, but the
belief is his only sanction. You might as well say that
glass is the real reason for telescopes. But arising from
whatever reason the act of government is coercive and is
burdened with all the coarse and painful qualities of
coercion.
is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially demo-
cratic state that we are always wondering what we shall
do with the poor. If we were democrats, we should be
wondering what the poor will do with us.
Eleven
44 People like frequent laughter," answered Father Brown,
44 but I don't think they like a permanent smile. Cheer-
fulness without humour is a very trying thing."
Twelve
It is something to have wept as we have wept,
It is something to have done as we have done,
It is something to have watched when all men slept,
And seen the stars which never see the sun.
Thirteen
But in this grey morn of man's life
Cometh sometime to the mind
A little light that leaps and flies,
Like a star blown on the wind.
A star of nowhere, a nameless star,
A light that spins and swirls,
And cries that even in hedge and hill,
Even on earth, it may go ill
At last with the evil earls.
Fourteen
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The
honest rich can never forget it.
20
MARCH
Fifteen
A great classic means a man whom one can praise without
having read.
Sixteen
His harp was carved and cunning,
His sword prompt and sharp,
And he was gay when he held the sword,
Sad when he held the harp.
For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are many,
And all their songs are sad.
Seventeen
Pride juggles with her toppling towers,
They strike the sun and cease,
But the firm feet of humility
They grip the ground like trees.
Eighteen
Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong,
even if everybody is wrong about it.
Nineteen
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly con-
sidered.
Twenty
The two things that a healthy person hates most between
heaven and hell are a woman who is not dignified and a
man who is.
Twenty-one
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such
a long time.
Twenty-two
A joke is a fact. However indefensible it is it cannot be
attacked. However defensible it is it cannot be defended.
21
MARCH
Twenty-three
His soul will never starve for exploits and excitements
who is wise enough to be made a fool of. He will make
himself happy in the traps that have been laid for him;
he will roll in their nets and sleep. All doors will fly
open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere
courage. The whole is unerringly expressed in one
fortunate phrase — he will be always " taken in." To be
taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything.
It is the hospitality of circumstance. With torches and
trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by life.
And the sceptic is cast out by it.
Twenty-four
Few of us understand the street. Even when we step
into it as into a house or room of strangers. Few of us
see through the shining riddle of the street, the strange
folk who belong to the street only — the street walker or
the street arab, the nomads who, generation after genera-
tion, have kept their ancient secrets in the full blaze of the
sun. Of the street at night many of us know even less.
The street at night is a great house locked up.
Twenty-five
A socialist means a man who thinks a walking-stick like
an umbrella because they both go into the umbrella-
stand.
Twenty-six
When a man first tells the truth the first truth he tells is
that he himself is a liar.
Twenty-seven
It is always the humble man who talks too much; the
proud man watches himself too closely.
Twenty-eight
The promise, like the wheel, is unknown in Nature and
is the first mark of man. Referring only to human
civilisation, it may be said with seriousness that in the
beginning was tfce Word. The vow is to the man what
23
MARCH
the song is to the bird or the bark to the dog; his voice
whereby he is known. Just as a man who cannot keep
an appointment is not even fit to fight a duel, so the man
who cannot keep an appointment with himself is not
sane enough even for suicide. It is not easy to mention
anything on which the enormous apparatus of human
life can be said to depend. But if it depends on any-
thing, it is on this frail cord, flung from the forgotten
hills of yesterday to the invisible mountains of to-morrow.
Twenty-nine
Sorrow and pessimism are indeed, in a sense, opposite
things, since sorrow is founded on the value of something
and pessimism upon the value of nothing. And in
practice we find that those poets or political leaders who
come from the people, and whose experiences have really
been searching and cruel, are the most sanguine people
in the world. These men out of the old agony are always
optimists; they are sometimes offensive optimists.
Thirty
The great man will come when all of us are feeling great,
not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at
some splendid moment when we all feel that we could
do without him.
Thirty-one
Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget.
For we are the people of England, that never has spoken
yet.
There is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully,
There is many a free French peasant who is richer and
sadder than we.
There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.
There is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in our
eyes;
You laugh at us and love us, both mugs and eyes are wet:
Only you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet.
April
One
I have never been able to understand where people got
the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to
tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy
extended through time.
Two
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and
faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of
faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to
reality at all*
Three
The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a
tyrant. The hatred of a hero is more generous than the
love of a philanthropist.
Four
No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision
is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud.
Five
To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist
calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the
?'eatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war.
o preach egoism is to practise altruism.
Six
If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing.
Seven
He who wills to reject nothing, wills the destruction of
will; for will is not only the choice of something, but the
rejection of almost everything.
Eight
The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who
cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their
24
APRIL
insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but
by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have
both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside
with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out,
the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other
even into the health and happiness of the earth.
Nine
There is a sceptic far more terrible than he who believes
that everything began in matter. It is possible to meet
the sceptic who believes that everything began in himself.
Ten
To accept everything is an exercise, to understand every-
thing a strain. The poet only desires exaltations and
expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet
only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logi-
cian who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it
is his head that splits.
Eleven
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.
The madman is the man who has lost everything except
his reason.
Twelve
Oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not
strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a
much more exciting time; while odd people are always
complaining of the dullness of life.
Thirteen
When we say that a man shall not live in a pigsty because
he is not a pig, we do not mean that when he lives in a
cottage he must be nothing but a cottager. He may
regard his cottage as a cottager regards it, but also as a
poet regards it, or as a saint regards it. I should say
that a man fails in life if the inside of his house is not
larger than the outside.
Fourteen
I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a
mere ingenious defence of the indefensible.
25
APRIL
Fifteen
Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.
Sixteen
Cynicism denotes that condition of mind in which we
hold that life is in its nature mean and arid; that no soul
contains genuine goodness, and no state of things genuine
reliability.
Seventeen
It never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing
that he knows nothing about. It is the hating of a thing
when we do know something about it which corrodes the
character. We all have a dark feeling of resistance towards
people we have never met, and a profound and manly
dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not
harm a man to be certain before opening the books that
Whitman is an obscene ranter or that Stevenson is a mere
trifler with style. It is the man who can think these
things after he has read the books who must be in a fair
way to mental perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so
much the great intellectual sin as a thing which we may
call, to coin a word, " postjudice," not the bias before the
fair trial, but the bias that remains afterwards.
Eighteen
And well may God with the serving folk
Cast in His dreadful lot.
Is not He too a servant,
And is not He forgot t
Wherefore was God in Golgotha
Slain as a serf is slain;
And hate He had of prince and peer,
And love He had and made good cheer,
Of them that, like this woman here,
Go powerfully in pain.
Nineteen
We talk of art as something artificial in comparison with
life. But I sometimes fancy that the very highest art
is more real than life itself. At least this is true : that in
26
APRIL
proportion as passions become real they become poetical;
the lover is always trying to be the poet. All real energy
is an attempt at harmony and a high swing of rhythm;
and if we were only real enough we should all talk in
rhyme.
Twenty
What is the difference between Christ and Satan <
It is quite simple. Christ descended into hell; Satan
fell into it. One of them wanted to go up and went down;
the other wanted to go down and went up.
Twenty-one.
William Corbett's seemingly mad language is very literary,
so his seemingly mad meaning is very historical. Modern
people do not understand him because they do not
understand the difference between exaggerating a truth
and exaggerating a lie. He did exaggerate, but what he
knew, not what he did not know. He only appears
paradoxical because he upheld tradition against fashion.
A paradox is a fantastic thing that is said once: a fashion
is a more fantastic thing that is said a sufficient number
of times.
Twenty-two
There are two kinds of men who monopolise conversation.
The first kind are those who like the sound of their own
voice; the second are those who do not know what the
sound of their own voice is like.
Twenty-three
The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the
Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job
because all life is a riddle,
Twenty-four
Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult
in the " wonders " of creation, but it has forgotten that a
thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains
sensible. So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing,
naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we
27 c
APRIL
cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider
it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up
to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our
hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper.
Twenty-five
The fanatic is the father of one creed; but the tolerant
sceptic is the father of a thousand contradictory creeds.
Universalism gives birth to a myriad bigotries.
Twenty-six
The idea of the Citizen is that his individual human
nature shall be constantly and creatively active in altering
the State. The Germans are right in regarding the idea
as dangerously revolutionary. Every Citizen is a revolu-
tion. That is, he destroys, devours and adapts his
environment to the extent of his own thought and con-
science. This is what separates the human social effort
from the non-human; the bee creates the honey-comb,
but he does not criticise it. The German ruler really
does feed and train the German as carefully as a gardener
waters a flower. But if the flower suddenly began to
water the gardener, he would be much surprised. So in
Germany the people really are educated; but in France
the people educates. The French not only make up the
State, but make the State; not only make it, but re-
make it. In Germany the ruler is the artist, always
painting the happy German like a portrait; in France the
Frenchman is the artist, always painting and repainting
France like a house. No state of social good that does
not mean the Citizen choosing good, as well as getting
it, has the idea of the Citizen at all.
Twenty-seven
All that is the matter with the proud is that they will not
admit that they are vain.
Twenty-eight
Free speech is an idea which has at present all the un-
popularity of a truism; so that we tend to forget that it
was not so very long ago that it had the more practical
unpopularity which attaches to a new truth. Ingratitude
28
APRIL
is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He
takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes
the skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the
calm of a city street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a
forest clearing, whereas it is only kept in peace by a
sustained stretch and effort similar to that which keeps up
a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forget where we
stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in
relation to social phenomena. We forget that the earth is a
star, and we forget that free speech is a paradox.
Twenty-nine
Everything that is done in a hurry is certain to be anti-
quated; that is why modern industrial civilisation bears
so curious a resemblance to barbarism.
Thirty
Henry James always stood, if ever a man did, for civilisa-
tion; for that ordered life in which it is possible to tolerate
and to understand. His whole world is made out of
sympathy; out of a whole network of sympathies. It is
a world of wireless telegraphy for the soul; of a psycho-
logical brotherhood of men of which the communications
could not be cut. Sometimes this sympathy is almost
more terrible than antipathy; and his very delicacies
produce a sort of promiscuity of minds. Silence becomes
a rending revelation. Short spaces or short speeches
become overweighted with the awful worth of human life.
Minute unto minute uttereth speech, and instant unto
instant showeth knowledge. It is only when we have
realised how perfect is the poise of such great human art
that we can also realise its peril, and know that any outer
thing which cannot make it must of necessity destroy it.
May
One
It is good to sit where the good tales go,
To sit as our fathers sat;
But the hour shall come after his youth,
When a man shall know not tales but truth,
And his heart fail thereat.
When he shall read what is written
So plain in clouds and clods,
When he shall hunger without hope
Even for evil gods.
Two
The optimist is a better reformer than the pessimist;
and the man who believes life to be excellent is the man
who alters it most. It seems a paradox, yet the reason
of it is very plain. The pessimist can be enraged at evil*
But only the optimist can be surprised at it.
Three
Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other
things, arises merely from this : that we confuse the word
" indefinable " with the word " vague." If someone
speaks of a spiritual fact as " indefinable " we promptly
picture something misty, a cloud with indeterminate
edges. But this is an error even in commonplace logic.
The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the
primary fact. It is our arms, our legs, our pots and pans,
that are indefinable. The indefinable is the indisputable.
The man next door is indefinable, because he is too actual
to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual
things have the same fierce and practical proximity;
some to whom God is too actual to be defined.
In the city set upon slime and loam
They cry in their parliament " Who goes home
And there comes no answer in arch or dome,
For none in the city of graves goes home.
30
MA Y
Yet these shall perish and understand,
For God has pity on this great land.
Men that are men again; who goes gome 4
Tocsin and trumpeter : Who goes home <
For there's blood on the field and blood on the foam
And blood on the body when Man goes home.
And a voice valedictory. . . . Who is for Victory?1
Who is for Liberty < Who goes home 1
Five
I was never impressed, even when they were prevalent,
by problem plays and problem novels; I always suspected
that those who like problems do not like solutions. End-
less talk of " social problems " means endless endurance
of social wrongs. There was always this air of lingering
and evasion, even when people were pretending to be most
stringent and audacious. The Free Lovers shilly-shallied
much more about getting divorced than a healthy man
does about getting married.
Six
[ The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the
microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world
will be cloven with a way 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.
Seven
The opportunist politician is like a man who should
abandon billiards because he was beaten at billiards, and
abandon golf because he was beaten at golf. There is
nothing which is so weak for working purposes as this
enormous importance attached to immediate victory.
There is nothing that fails like success.
Eight
Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal;
I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without
being infallible — at any rate, without believing in some
infallibility. For progress by its very name indicates
MA Y
a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful
about the direction, we become in the same degree
doubtful about the progress.
Nine
When everything about a people is for the time growing
weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency.
So it is that when a man's body is a wreck he begins, for
the first time, to talk about health.
Ten
By a strange inversion the political idealist often does not
get what he asks for, but does get what he wants. The
silent pressure of his ideal lasts much longer and reshapes
the world much more than the actualities by which he
attempted to suggest it. What perishes is the letter,
which he thought so practical. What endures is the
spirit, which he felt to be unattainable and even unutter-
able. It is exactly his schemes that are not fulfilled; it is
exactly his vision that is fulfilled.
Eleven
To hear people talk one would think it was some sort of
magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hotch-potch
of hygienic meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air
and freehand drawing, we can produce something splendid
by accident; we can create what we cannot conceive.
Twelve
General ideals used to dominate literature. They have
been driven out by the cry of " art for art's sake." General
ideals used to dominate politics. They have been driven
out by the cry of " efficiency/' which may roughly be
translated as " politics for polities' sake." Persistently
for the last twenty years the ideals of order or liberty
have dwindled in our books; the ambitions of wit and
eloquence have dwindled in our parliaments. Literature
has purposely become less political; politics have pur-
posely become less literary.
Thirteen
For completeness and even comfort are almost the
definitions of insanity. The lunatic is the man who
33
MA Y
lives in a small world and thinks it is a large one: he is
the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it is
the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos
outside a certain tale of conspiracy or vision. Hence
the more clearly we see the world divided into Saxons
and non-Saxons, into our splendid selves and the rest,
the more certain we may be that we are slowly and quietly
going mad. The more plain and satisfying our state
appears, the more we may know that we are living in an
unreal world. For the real world is not satisfying.
The more clear become the colours and facts of Anglo-
Saxon superiority, the more surely we may know we are
in a dream. For the real world is not clear or plain.
The real world is full of bracing bewilderments and brutal
surprises.
Fourteen
Comfort is the blessing and the curse of the English,
and of Americans of the Pogram type also. With them
it is a loud comfort, a wild comfort, a screaming and
capering comfort; but comfort at bottom still. For there
is but an inch of difference between the cushioned
chamber and the padded cell.
Fifteen
But who will write us a riding song
Or a hunting song or a drinking song,
Fit for them that arose and rode
When day and the wine were red i
But bring me a quart of claret out,
And I will write you a clinking song,
A song of war and a song of wine
And a song to wake the dead.
Sixteen
It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from
education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot
be separated from education. It is education. A teacher
who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not
teaching.
Seventeen
Private lives are more important than public reputations.
33
MAY
Eighteen
We have in our great cities abolished the clean and sane
darkness of the country. We have outlawed Night and
sent her wandering in wild meadows; we have lit eternal
watch-fires against her return. We have made a new
cosmos, and as a consequence our own sun and stars*
And as a consequence also, and most justly, we have made
our own darkness. Just as every lamp is a warm human
moon, so every fog is a rich human nightfall. If it were
not for this mystic accident we should never see darkness :
and he who has never seen darkness has never seen the
sun.
Nineteen
Fog for us is the chief form of that outward pressure which
compresses mere luxury into real comfort. It makes
the world small, in the same spirit as in that common
and happy cry that the world is small, meaning that it is
full of friends. The first man that emerges out of the
mist with a light is for us Prometheus, a saviour bringing
fire to men, greater than the heroes, better than the saints,
Man Friday. Every rumble of a cart, every cry in the
distance, marks the heart of humanity beating undaunted
in the darkness. It is wholly human; man toiling in his
cloud. If real darkness is like the embrace of God, this
is the dark embrace of man.
Twenty
The worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the
worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on
a harp.
Twenty-one
There is nothing so fiercely realistic as sentiment and
emotion. Thought and the intellect are content to
accept abstractions, summaries, and generalisations;
they are content that ten acres of ground should be called
for the sake of argument X, and ten widows' incomes
called for the sake of argument Y; they are content that a
thousand awful and mysterious disappearances from the
visible universe should be summed up as the mortality
of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications of the soul
34
MAY
should bear the general name of the instinct of sex.
Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers.
But sentiment must have reality; emotion demands the
real fields, the real widows' homes, the real corpse, and
the real woman.
Twenty-two
The devil plotted since the world was young with al-
chemies of fire and witches' oils and magic. But he
never made a man.
Twenty-three
Hate is the weakness of a thwarted thing. Pride is the
weakness of a thing unpraised.
Twenty-four
Mr Wells recalls Burke in two essentials : that he is ready
to expend thoughts on the cause of the present discontents;
but that when it comes to the point, he refuses the
Revolution. And even the discontents are delicate
discontents of his own.
Twenty-five
Research is the search of people who don't know what they
want.
Twenty-six
Lady, the stars are falling pale and small,
Lady, we will not live if life be all,
Forgetting those good stars in heaven hung,
When all the world was young;
For more than gold was in a ring, and love was not a little
thing,
Between the trees in Ivywood, when all the world was
young.
Twenty-seven
Pessimism is the madness of Christian pity; and optimism
the self-indulgence of Christian faith.
Twenty-eight
Is there, then, any vital meaning in this idea of " great-
ness " or in our laments over its absence in our own time <t
35
MA Y
Some people say, indeed, that this sense of mass is but a
mirage of distance, and that men always think dead men
great and live men small. They seem to think that the
law of perspective in the mental world is the precise
opposite to the law of perspective in the physical world.
They think that figures grow larger as they walk away.
But this theory cannot be made to correspond with the
facts. We do not lack great men in our own day because
we decline to look for them in our own day; on the con-
trary, we are looking for them all day long.
Twenty-nine
We are not, as a matter of fact, mere examples of those
who stone the prophets and leave it to their posterity
to build their sepulchres. If the world would only pro-
duce our perfect prophet, solemn, searching, universal,
nothing would give us keener pleasure than to build his
sepulchre. In our eagerness we might even bury him
alive*
Thirty
It is a good rule of philosophy when regarding an end
to refer to the beginning.
Thirty-one
I plod and peer amid mean sounds and shapes,
I hunt for dusty gain and dreary praise,
And slowly pass the dismal grinning days,
Monkeying each other like a line of apes.
What care <• There was one hour amid all these
When I had stripped off like a tawdry glove
My starriest hopes and wants, for very love
Of time and desolate eternities.
Yea, for one great hour's triumph, not in me
Nor any hope of mine did I rejoice,
But in a meadow game of girls and boys
Some sunset in the centuries to be.
36
J
une
One
If there is one thing that I have believed from the first
and go on believing more and more, it is that everything
is interesting; that anything will turn symbolic if you
really stare at it.
Two
There is one very curious idea into which we have been
hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and that is that
nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the country
is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms
are commonly understood. The whole world of the
fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and non-
sensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles,
German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque
epics, the pictures of Mr Aubrey Beardsley and the puns
of Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very
large part, of the sanity and power of nature lies in the
fact that out of her comes all this instinct of caricature.
Nature may present itself to the poet too often as consist-
ing of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who live
in the country; they are men who go to the country for
inspiration and could no more live in the country than they
could go to bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live
in the heart of nature, farmers and peasants, know that
nature means cows and pigs, and creatures more humorous
than can be found in a whole sketch-book of Callot.
And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element
of the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy,
the energy which takes its own forms and goes its own way.
Three
In our oligarchy, a public man must either decline to
govern and be content to criticise; or he must govern
with the governing class. No governing class in history
has ever endured a dictator; hardly any such class has
ever permitted one to appear.
37
JUNE
Four
An artist who is at once individual and complete attracts
a type of praise which is a sort of disparagement; and even
those who overrate him underrate him. For the tendency
is always to insist on his art; and by art is often meant
merely arrangement. Because a very few colours can
be harmoniously arranged in a picture, it is implied that
he has not many colours on his palette.
Five
The modern mind is not a donkey that wants kicking
to make it go on. The modern mind is more like a
motor-car on a lonely road which two amateur motorists
have been just clever enough to take to pieces, but are
not quite clever enough to put together again.
Six
I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds
of men might be paralleled and represented in their
beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism,
and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are
real religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean
cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water — an excellent
thing if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic
movements might be well represented by soda-water —
which is a fuss about nothing. Mr Bernard Shaw's
philosophy is exactly like black coffee — it awakens, but
it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism
is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one's
contempt for it in stronger terms than that. Sometimes
one may come across something that may honestly be
compared to milk, an ancient and heathen mildness, an
earthly yet sustaining mercy — the milk of human kindness.
You can find it in a few pagan poets and a few old fables;
but it is everywhere dying out.
Seven
A bull is only a paradox which people are too stupid
to understand. It is the rapid summary of something
which is at once so true and so complex that the speaker
who has the swift intelligence to perceive it has not the
slow patience to explain it.
38
JUNE
Eight
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 charming.
Nine
The root of legal monogamy does not lie (as Shaw and
his friends are for ever drearily asserting) in the fact that
the man is a mere tyrant and the woman a mere slave.
It lies in the fact that if their love for each other is the
noblest and finest love conceivable, it can only find its
heroic expression in both becoming slaves.
Ten
The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce
in the heavens, but the nearer he comes to it the smaller
and smaller it will grow, till he finds it the humble
lantern over some little inn or stable. Not till we know
the high things shall we know how lovely they are*
Eleven
Very few people in this world would care to listen to the
real defence of their own characters. The real defence,
the defence which belongs to the Day of Judgment,
would make such damaging admissions, would clear
away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies
of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be
misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed
to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the most
practically difficult matters which arise from the code of
manners and the conventions of life, is that we cannot
properly justify a human being, because that justification
would involve the admission of things which may not
conventionally be admitted. We might explain and
make human and respectable, for example, the conduct
of some old fighting politician, who, for the good of his
party and his country, acceded to measures of which he
disapproved; but we cannot, because we are not allowed
to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he
disapproved.
39
JUNE
Twelve
It is untrue to say that what matters is quality and not
quantity. Most men have made one good joke in their
lives; but to make jokes as Dickens made them is to be a
great man. Many forgotten poets have let fall a lyric
with one really perfect image; but when we open any
play of Shakespeare, good or bad, at any page, important
or unimportant, with the practical certainty of finding
some imagery that at least arrests the eye and probably
enriches the memory, we are putting our trust in a great
man.
Thirteen
The world has kept sentimentalities simply because they
are the most practical things in the world. They alone
make men do things. The world does not encourage
a quite rational lover, simply because a perfectly rational
lover would never get married. The world does not
encourage a perfectly rational army, because a perfectly
rational army would run away.
Fourteen
Poetry deals entirely with those great eternal and mainly
forgotten wishes which are the ultimate despots of exist-
ence. Poetry presents things as they are to our emotions,
not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any
argument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a
glorious vision, poetry will say that it is a glorious vision,
and no philosophers will persuade poetry to say that it is
the exaggeration of the instinct of sex. If bereavement
is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry will say
that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry
to say that it is an evolutionary stage of great biological
value. And here comes in the whole value and object
of poetry, that it is perpetually challenging all systems
with the test of a terrible sincerity.
Fifteen
Music is mere beauty; it is beauty in the abstract, beauty
in solution. It is a shapeless and liquid element of
beauty, in which a man may really float, not indeed
affirming the truth, but not denying it.
40
JUNE
Sixteen
A man must be orthodox upon most things or he will
never even have time to preach his own heresy.
Seventeen
A true poet writes about the spring being beautiful
because (after a thousand springs) the spring really is
beautiful. In the same way the true humorist writes
about a man sitting down on his hat because the act of
sitting down on one's own hat (however often and ad-
mirably performed) really is extremely funny. We must
not dismiss a new poet because his poem is called To a
Skylark ; nor must we dismiss a humorist because his
new farce is called My Mother-in-Law. He may really
have splendid and inspiring things to say upon an eternal
problem. The whole question is whether he has.
Eighteen
" For the barbarian is the man who regards his passions
as their own excuse for being, who does not domesticate
them either by understanding their cause, or by con-
ceiving their goal." Whether this be or be not a good
definition of the barbarian, it is an excellent and perfect
definition of the poet. It might, perhaps, be suggested
that barbarians, as a matter of fact, are generally highly
traditional and respectable persons who would not put
a feather wrong in their headgear, and who generally
have very few feelings and think very little about those
they have. It is when we have grown to a greater and
more civilised stature that we begin to realise and put
to ourselves intellectually the great feelings that sleep
in the depths of us. Thus it is that the literature of our
day has steadily advanced towards a passionate simplicity,
and we become more primeval as the world grows older,
until Whitman writes huge and chaotic psalms to express
the sensations of a schoolboy out fishing, and Maeterlinck
embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a child in
the dark.
Nineteen
We may scale the heavens and find new stars innumerable,
but there is still the new star we have not found — that
on which we were born.
41
JUNE
Twenty
It may be a good thing to forget and forgive; but it is
altogether too easy a trick to forget and be forgiven.
Twenty-one
Do the people who call one of Browning's poems scientific
in its analysis realise the meaning of what they say t
One is tempted to think that they know a scientific analysis
when they see it as little as they know a good poem.
The one supreme difference between the scientific method
and the artistic method is, roughly speaking, simply this —
that a scientific statement means the same thing wherever
and whenever it is uttered, and that an artistic statement
means something entirely different, according to the rela-
tion in which it stands to its surroundings. The remark,
let us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that
sixteen ounces go to a pound, is equally true, and means
exactly the same thing, whether we state it at the beginning
of a conversation or at the end, whether we print it in a
dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if we take some
phrase commonly used in the art of literature — such a
sentence, for the sake of example, as " the dawn was
breaking " — the matter is quite different. If the sentence
came at the beginning of a short story, it might be a mere
descriptive prelude. If it were the last sentence in a short
story, it might be poignant with some peculiar irony or
triumph.
Twenty-two
Earth is not even earth without heaven, as a landscape
is not a landscape 'without the sky. And in a universe
without God there is not room enough for a man.
Twenty-three
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first;
Our wrath come after Russia's, and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are set to mark by our riot and our rest
God's scorn of all man's governance : it may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England, and we never have
spoken yet.
Mock at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget,
42
JUNE
Twenty-four
The right and proper thing, of course, is that every good
patriot should stop at home and curse his own country.
So long as that is being done everywhere, we may be sure
that things are fairly happy, and being kept up to a reason-
ably high standard. So long as we are discontented
separately we may be well content as a whole.
Twenty-five
We should think it ridiculous to speak of a man as suffer-
ing from his boots if we meant that he had really no boots.
But we do speak of a man suffering from digestion when
we mean that he suffers from a lack of digestion. In the
same way we speak of a man suffering from nerves when
we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than anyone
else's nerves. If anyone wishes to see how grossly
language can degenerate, he need only compare the old
optimistic use of the word nervous, which we employ in
speaking of a nervous grip, with the new pessimistic use
of the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervous
manner,
Twenty-six
Do not be an opportunist; try to be theoretic at all the
opportunities; Fate can be trusted to do all the opportunist
part of it. Do not try to bend; any more than the trees
try to bend. Try to grow straight; and life will bend you.
Twenty-seven
Men do not like another man because he is a genius,
least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves.
Twenty-eight
It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it
that an institution like the liberty of speech is right or
just. It is not natural or obvious to let a man utter follies
and abominations which you believe to be bad for man-
kind any more than it is natural or obvious to let a man
dig up a part of the public road, or infect half a town with
typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so
much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we
43 D
JUNE
know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear
everyone's account of it, is a theory which has been
justified upon the whole by experiment, but which
remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory.
It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time;
but, once admitted, it is a principle that does not merely
affect politics, but philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry.
Twenty-nine
The true patriot is always doubtful of victory; because
he knows that he is dealing with a living thing; a thing
with free will. To be certain of free will is to be uncertain
of success.
Thirty
Nothing is more certain than that though this world
is the only world that we have known, or of which we
could even dream, the fact remains that we have named
it " a strange world." In other words, we have certainly
felt that this world did not explain itself, that some-
thing in its complete and patent picture has been omitted.
And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where
incompleteness implies completeness, life implies im-
mortality.
44
July
One
The giant laughter of Christian men
That roars through a thousand tales,
Where greed is an ape and pride is an ass,
And Jack's away with his master's lass,
And the miser is banged with all his brass,
The farmer with all his flails;
Tales that tumble and tales that trick,
Yet end not all in scorning —
Of kings and clowns in a merry plight,
And the clock gone wrong and the world gone right,
That the mummers sing upon Christmas night
And Christmas Day in the morning.
Two
We talk of art as something artificial in comparison with
life. But I sometimes fancy that the very highest art
is more real than life itself. At least this is true; that in
proportion as passions become real they become poetical;
the lover is always trying to be the poet.
Three
Evolution is a metaphor from mere automatic unrolling.
Progress is a metaphor from merely walking along a
road — very likely the wrong road. But reform is a
metaphor for reasonable and determined men: it means
that we see a certain thing out of shape and we mean to
put it into shape.
Four
Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is
the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.
Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and
fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent
pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional
half- holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which 'all
things live.
45
JULY
Five
I have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt
in order to convey the main contention — that my own
case for Christianity is rational; but it is not simple. It
is an accumulation of varied facts, like the attitude of the
ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary agnostic has got
his facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a multitude
of reasons, but they are untrue reasons. He doubts
because the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren't;
because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it isn't; because
miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks were
lazy, but they were very industrious; because nuns are
unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because
Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in
peculiarly bright colours and gay with gold; because
modern science is moving away from the supernatural,
but it isn't, it is moving towards the supernatural with the
rapidity of a railway train.
Six
The perfect happiness of men on the earth (if it ever
comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satisfac-
tion of animals. It will be an exact and perilous balance;
like that of a desperate romance. Man must have just
enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just
enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.
Seven
O well for him that loves the sun,
That sees the heaven-race ridden or run,
The splashing seas of sunset won,
And shouts for victory.
God made the sun to crown his head,
And when death's dart at last is sped,
At least it will not find him dead,
And pass the carrion by.
O ill for him that loves the sun;
Shall the sun stoop for anyone t
Shall the sun weep for hearts undone
Or heavy souls that pray <
46
JULY
Not less for us and everyone
Was that white web of splendour spun;
O well for him who loves the sun
Although the sun should slay.
Eight
By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get
introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference —
Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of
God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adven-
ture, righteous indignation — Christendom. Insisting
that God is inside man, man is always inside himself.
By insisting that God transcends man, man has tran-
scended himself.
Nine
It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuous-
ness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our
epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is
that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.
Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with
taxi cabs and motor-cars; but this is not due to human
activity but to human repose. There would be less
bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply
walking about. Our world would be more silent if it
were more strenuous. And this which is true of the
apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle
of the intellect.
Ten
Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-
saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much
more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like
scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and
smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words
go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they
are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent
to walk and think for themselves.
Eleven
It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles
at which one falls, only one at which one stands.
47
JULY
Twelve
Beneath the gnarled old Knowledge-tree
Sat, like an owl, the evil sage:
" The world's a bubble/' solemnly
He read, and turned a second page.
" A bubble, then, old crow," I cried,
" God keep you in your weary wit !
A bubble — have you ever spied
The colours I have seen on it $"'
Thirteen
It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult
thing is to keep one's own.
Fourteen
There is a vital objection to the advice merely to grin
and bear it. The objection is that if you merely bear it,
you do not grin.
Fifteen
As long as the vision of heaven is always changing,
the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal
will remain long enough to be realised. The modern
young man will never change his environment; for he
will always change his mind.
Sixteen
If our life is ever really as beautiful as a fairy tale, we shall
have to remember that all the beauty of a fairy tale lies
in this: that the prince has a wonder which just stops
short of being fear. If he is afraid of the giant, there is
an end of him; but also if he is not astonished at the giant,
there is an end of the fairy tale. The whole point depends
upon his being at once humble enough to wonder and
haughty enough to defy.
Seventeen
For a few years our corner of Western Europe has had
a fancy for this thing we call fiction; that is for writing
down our own lives in order to look at them. But though
we call it fiction, it differs from older literatures chiefly
48
JULY
in being less fictitious. It imitates not only life, but the
limitations of life; it not only reproduces life, it repro-
duces death. But outside us, in every other country,
in every other age, there has been going on from the
beginning a more fictitious literature — I mean the kind
now called folklore, the literature of the people. Our
modern novels which deal with men as they are, are
chiefly produced by a small and educated section of society.
But this other literature deals with men greater than they
are — wfth demi-gods and heroes; and that is far too
important a matter to be trusted to the educated classes.
The fashioning of these portents is a popular trade, like
ploughing or brick-laying; the men who made hedges,
the men who made ditches, were the men who made
ditties. Men could not elect their kings, but they could
elect their gods.
Eighteen
One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can
hardly think too much of one's soul.
Nineteen
In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so
far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners.
Twenty
It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends
to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is
the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to
youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a
man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period
in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every
episode is the end of the world.
Twenty-one
But the power of hoping through everything, the know-
ledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great
inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that
good wine until now. It is from the backs of the elderly
gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst.
49
JULY
Twenty-two
There is nothing that so much mystifies the young as the
consistent frivolity of the old. They have discovered
their indestructibility. They are in their second and
clearer childhood, and there is a meaning in the merriment
of their eyes. They have seen the end of the End of the
World.
Twenty-three
Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate
and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in exist-
ence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The
man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills
himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes
out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered)
than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all
buildings: it insults all women.
Twenty-four
There are two main moral necessities for the work of a
great man: the first is that he should believe in the
truth of his message; the second is that he should believe
in the acceptability of his message. It was the whole
tragedy of Carlyle that he had the first and not the
second.
Twenty- five
Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Chris-
tianity declared it was in a conflict; the collision of two
passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not
really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to
hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the
clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of
courage. No quality* has ever so much addled the brains
and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a
strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
44 He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a
piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece
of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers.
50
JULY
Twenty-six
No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this
world: but we demand not strength enough to get on
with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it
enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it
worth changing < Can he look up at its colossal good
without once feeling acquiescence?" Can he look up
at its colossal evil without once feeling despair t Can
he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an
optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist t
Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough
of a Christian to die to it ?* In this combination, I main-
tain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational
optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole
universe for the sake of itself.
Twenty-seven
An optimist could not mean a man who thought every-
thing right and nothing wrong. For that is meaningless;
it is like calling everything right and nothing left. Upon
the whole, I came to the conclusion that the optimist
thought everything good except the pessimist, and that
the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.
Twenty-eight
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children,
when they find some game or joke that they specially
enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through ex-
cess, not absence of life. Because children have abound-
ing vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free,
therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.
They always say, " Do it again "; and the grown-up
person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-
up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
Twenty-nine
The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful,
though I hardly knew to whom. Children are grateful
when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or
sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he
JULY
put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs < We
thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers.
Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth 5"
Thirty
A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisa-
tion and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some
of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go
to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental
connection between the idea of prison and the idea of
picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can
say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties.
But we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken
any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a
fairy prince. As ideas, the egg and the chicken are further
off each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg
in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do
suggest bears.
Thirty-one
I would always trust the old wives' fables against the old
maids' facts. As long as wit is mother wit it can be as
wild as it pleases.
August
One
Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all
pictures of happiness. And the supreme and most
practical value of poetry is this, that in poetry, as in music,
a note is struck which expresses beyond the power of
rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions
arise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a
large and clumsy notation; it can only say that a man is
miserable, or that a man is happy; it is forced to ignore
that there are a million diverse kinds of misery and a
million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with
the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the de-
pression is the kind of depression that drives a man to
suicide, or the kind of depression that drives him to the
Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether the happiness is the
happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or the much
richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church.
Two
For wit is always connected with the idea that truth is
close and clear. Humour, on the other hand, is always
connected with the idea that truth is tricky and mystical
and easily mistaken.
Three
Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and
literature is only redeemed from an utter triviality,
surpassing that of naughts and crosses, by the fact that
it describes not the world around us, or the things on the
retina of the eye, or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclo-
paedias, but some condition to which the human spirit
can come.
Four
I doubt if anyone of any tenderness of imagination can
see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it.
It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving
so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature
53
AUGUST
could live in the wing of a butterfly, or the leaf of a tree.
When we look upon lives so human, so human and yet so
small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an
embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind
of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel
if he had created something that he could not understand.
Five
The modern mind is forced towards the future by a
certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with
which it regards the past.
Six
There is a certain kind of fascination, a strictly artistic
fascination, which arises from a matter being hinted at
in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting uncertainty
even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand
a poem in the same manner that we half understand the
world. One of the deepest and strangest of all human
moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps
in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the
feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered some-
thing stupendously direct and important, and that we have
by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it.
Seven
For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may
be quite certain that the effort is superfluous.
Eight
Mankind in the main has always regarded reason as a bit
of a joke.
Nine
But this new cloudy political cowardice has rendered
useless the old English compromise. People have begun
to be terrified of an improvement merely because it is
complete. They call it Utopian and revolutionary that
anyone should really have his own way, or anything be
really done, and done with. Compromise used to mean
that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among
modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf
is better than a whole loaf.
54
AUGUST
Ten
It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution
of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment
of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the
lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest liberties and
the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him
as the old church respected him; they do not write his
oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest
moment; they give him every liberty except the liberty
to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.
Eleven
The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is
born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may
never afterwards be found with the silver spoons in his
pocket.
Twelve
But very broadly speaking, it may still be said that women
stand for the dignity of love and men for the dignity of
comradeship. I mean that the institution would hardly
be respected if the males of the tribe did not mount guard
over it.
Thirteen
We often read nowadays of the valour or audacity with
which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated
superstition. There is not really any courage at all in
attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in
offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous
man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning
and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only
true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from
the future as from the past.
Fourteen
What makes it difficult for the average man to be a
universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist;
he has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well
as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless society. This
is generally true of males from the first hunter to the
last electrical engineer; each has not merely to act, but to
excel.
55
AUGUST
Nimrod has not only to be a mighty hunter before the
Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters.
The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer,
or he is outstripped by engineers yet more electrical.
Fifteen
It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing
no little cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a
work of art, let fall almost accidentally some apparently
trivial comment, which reveals to us with an instan-
taneous and complete mental illumination the fact that
he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in the
smallest degree understand what he is talking about.
He may have intended to correct merely some minute
detail of the work he is studying, but that single movement
is enough to blow him and all his diplomas into the air.
Sixteen
God is that which can make something out of nothing.
Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make some-
thing out of anything. In other words, while the joy of
God must be unlimited creation, the special joy of man
is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits,
Seventeen
Anyone could easily excuse the ill humour of the poor.
But great masses of the poor have not even any ill humour
to be excused. Their cheeriness is startling enough to
be the foundation of a miracle play; and certainly startling
enough to be the foundation of a romance.
Eighteen
Looking down on things may be a delightful experience,
only there is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage,
that is really seen when it is seen from a balloon. The
philosopher of the ego sees everything, no doubt, from a
high and rarefied heaven; only he sees everything fore-
shortened or deformed.
Nineteen
Perhaps the truth can be put most pointedly thus: that
democracy has one real enemy, and that is civilisation*
56
AUGUST
Twenty
Women speak to each other; men speak to the subject
they are speaking about. Many an honest man has sat
in a ring of his five best friends under heaven and forgotten
who was in the room while he explained some system.
This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are all
theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about
golf. Men are all impersonal; that is to say, republican.
No one remembers after a really good talk who has said
the good things.
Every man speaks to a visionary multitude; a mystical
cloud that is called the club.
Twenty-one
Discipline does not involve the Carlylean notion that
somebody is always right when everybody is wrong, and
that we must discover and crown that somebody. On the
contrary, discipline means that in certain frightfully
rapid circumstances one can trust anybody so long as he is
not everybody.
Twenty-two
One of the most curious things to notice about popular
aesthetic criticism is the number of phrases it will be found
to use which are intended to express an aesthetic failure,
and which express merely an aesthetic variety. Thus, for
instance, the traveller will often hear the advice from local
lovers of the picturesque, " The scenery round such and
such a place has no interest; it is quite flat." To dis-
parage scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging
a swan as quite white, or an Italian sky as quite blue.
Flatness is a sublime quality in certain landscapes, just
as rockiness is a sublime quality in others.
Twenty-three
The most important man on earth is the perfect man who
is not there.
Twenty-four
Idealism is only considering everything in its practical
essence. Idealism only means that we should consider
57
AUGUST
a poker in reference to poking before we discuss its suit-
ability for wife-beating; that we should ask if an egg is
good enough for practical poultry-rearing before we
decide that the egg is bad enough for practical politics.
Twenty-five
When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight,
then it breaks with a sound like song.
Twenty-six
Religion, the immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-
work as well as a servant of mankind. She provided men
at once with the theoretic laws of an unalterable cosmos;
and also with the practical rules of the rapid and thrilling
game of morality. She taught logic to the student and
told fairy tales to the children; it was her business to
confront the nameless gods whose fear is on all flesh, and
also to see the streets were spotted with silver and scarlet,
that there was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for
ringing bells.
Twenty-seven
The future is a blank wall on which every man can write
his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already
covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah,
Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make
the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be
as broad and turbulent as humanity.
Twenty-eight
You hold that your heretics and sceptics have helped the
world forward and handed on a lamp of progress. I deny
it. Nothing is plainer from real history than that each
of your heretics invented a complete cosmos of his own
which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces. Who
knows now exactly what Nestorius taught <? Who cares <
There are only two things that we know for certain about
it. The first is that Nestorius, as a heretic, taught some-
thing quite opposite to the teaching of Arius, the heretic
who came before him, and something quite useless to
James Turnbull, the heretic who comes after.
58
AUGUST
Twenty-nine
There is a strange process in history by which things that
decay turn into the very opposite of themselves. Thus in
England Puritanism began as the hardest of creeds, but
Jhas ended as the softest; soft-hearted and not unfrequently
soft-headed. Of old the Puritan in war was certainly
the Puritan at his best; it was the Puritan in peace whom
no Christian could be expected to stand.
Thirty
Surely the vilest point of human vanity is exactly that;
to ask to be admired for admiring what your admirers
do not admire.
Thirty-one
Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives nobody a
chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives
everybody his final chance.
59
September
One
Poetry deals with primal and conventional things — the
hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children,
the desire for immortal life. If men really had new
sentiments, poetry could not deal with them. If, let us
say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat bread; but
did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving
to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could
not express him. If a man, instead of falling in love with
a woman, fell in love with a fossil or a sea-anemone,
poetry could not express him. Poetry can only express
what is original in one sense — the sense in which we speak
of original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of
being new, but in the deeper sense of being old; it is
original in the sense that it deals with origins.
Two
It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought
to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history.
The legend is generally made by the majority of people
in the village, who are sane. The book is generally
written by the one man in the village who is mad.
Three
You cannot imprison a slave, because you cannot enslave
a slave.
Four
The Eugenic professor may or may not succeed in choosing
a baby's parents; it is quite certain that he cannot succeed
in choosing his own parents. All his thoughts, including
his Eugenic thoughts, are, by the very principle of those
thoughts, flowing from a doubtful or tainted source.
In short, we should need a perfectly Wise Man to do
the thing at all. And if he were a Wise Man he would
not do it.
60
SEPTEMBER
Five
The key fact in the new development of plutocracy is
that it will use its own blunder as an excuse for further
crimes. Everywhere the very completeness of the im-
poverishment will be made a reason for the enslavement;
though the men who impoverished were the same who
enslaved. It is as if a highwayman not only took away
a gentleman's horse and all his money, but then handed
him over to the police for tramping without visible means
of subsistence.
Six
What happens when everyone is asleep is called Evolution.
What happens when everyone is awake is called Revolu-
tion.
Seven
There is one sin : to call a green leaf grey,
Whereat the sun in heaven shuddereth.
There is one blasphemy: for death to pray,
For God alone knoweth the praise of death.
There is one creed: 'neath no world-terror's wing
Apples forget to grow on apple-trees.
There is one thing is needful — everything —
The rest is vanity of vanities.
Eight
The modern statesman is utterly ignorant of democracy
(or of aristocracy, for that matter) ; but he is not ignorant
of his own trade. His trade is the trade of a conjurer.
It is not so honourable as that of a conjurer, because the
conjurer only wishes his fraud to last for an instant. He
does not really try to deceive you into thinking he does not
deceive.
Nine
It is when you really perceive tHe unity of mankind that
you really perceive its variety. It is not a flippancy, it is a
very sacred truth, to say that when men really understand
that they are brothers they instantly begin to fight.
61
SEPTEMBER
Ten
Out through Paris and out and round beyond Paris, other
men in dim blue coats swung out in long lines upon the
plain, slowly folding upon Von Kluck like blue wings.
Von Kluck stood an instant; and then, flinging a few
secondary forces to delay the wing that was swinging
round on him, dashed across the Allies' line at a desperate
angle, to smash it in the centre as with a hammer. It was
less desperate than it seemed; for he counted, and might
well count, on the moral and physical bankruptcy of the
British line and the end of the French line immediately
in front of him, which for six days and nights he had
chased before him like autumn leaves before a whirlwind.
Not unlike autumn leaves, red-stained, dust-hued, and
tattered, they lay there as if swept into a corner. But
even as their conquerors wheeled eastwards, their bugles
blew the charge; and the English went forward through
the wood that is called Crecy, and stamped it with their
seal for the second time, in' the highest moment of all the
secular history of man.
Eleven
But it was not now the Crecy in which English and
French knights had met in a more coloured age, in a battle
that was rather a tournament. It was a league of all
knights for the remains of all knighthood, of all brother-
hood in arms or in arts, against that which is and has
been radically unknightly and radically unbrotherly
from the beginning. Much was to happen after — murder
and flaming folly and madness in earth and sea and sky;
but all men knew in their hearts that the third Prussian
thrust had failed, and Christendom was delivered once
more. The empire of blood and iron rolled slowly back
towards the darkness of the northern forests; and the
great nations of the West went forward; where side by
side, as after a long lovers' quarrel, went the ensigns
of St Denys and St George.
Twelve
It not only takes all sorts to make a world, but it certainly
takes all sorts to make a nation. If a nation could really
62
SEPTEMBER
be shown to consist of one type, then it ought not to have
self-government. It would be far better to attach it as an
ornament or appendage to some other people.
Thirteen
A man who thinks clearly does not mean a man who thinks
that anything can be done by thinking clearly. It means
a man who thinks clearly enough to see that some things
can and some things can't.
Fourteen
Individually, men may present a more or less rational
appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But human-
ity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful.
Men are men, but Man is a woman.
Fifteen
The most incredible thing about miracles is that they
happen. A few clouds in heaven do come together into
the staring shape of one human eye. A tree does stand
up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the exact
and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation. I have
seen both these things myself within the last few days.
Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a man
named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man
named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide.
In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence
which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually
miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of
Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.
Sixteen
In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning
enough to be more fastidious than their customers. They
positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and
weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in over-
coming them. If there were a fashionable hotel in London
which no man could enter who was under six foot, society
would meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in
it. If there were an expensive restaurant which by a
mere caprice of its proprietor was only open on Thursday
afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursday afternoon.
63
SEPTEMBER
Seventeen
44 A crime/' he said slowly, " is like any other work of
art." Don't look surprised; crimes are by no means the
only works of art that come from an infernal workshop.
But every work of art, divine or diabolic, has one indis-
pensable mark — I mean, that the centre of it is simple,
however much the fulfilment may be complicated. Thus,
in Hamlet, let us say, the grotesqueness of the grave-digger,
the flowers of the mad girl, the fantastic finery of Osric,
the pallor of the ghost, and the grin of the skull are all
oddities in a sort of tangled wreath round one plain tragic
figure of a man in black.
Eighteen
Every one of us as a boy or girl has had some midnight
dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in
which there was, under whatever imbecile forms, all the
deadly stress and panic of Wuthering Heights. Every one
of us has had a day-dream of our own potential destiny
not one atom more reasonable than Jane Eyre. And the
truth which the Brontes came to tell us is the truth that
many waters cannot quench love, and that suburban
respectability cannot touch or damp a secret enthusiasm.
Nineteen
It appears to us that of all the fairy tales none contains
so vital a moral truth as the old story, existing in many
forms, of Beauty and the Beast. There is written, with
all the authority of a human scripture, the eternal and
essential truth that until we love a thing in all its ugliness
we cannot make it beautiful. This was the weak point
in William Morris as a reformer: that he sought to reform
modern life, and that he hated modern life, instead of
loving it.
Twenty
It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours
that almost everything in it has been extolled enthusiasti-
cally and invariably extolled to the disadvantage of every-
thing else.
64
SEPTEMBER
Twenty-one
When the pessimist is popular it must always be not
because he shows all things to be bad, but because he
shows some things to be good. Men can only join
in a chorus of praise even if it is the praise of denun-
ciation. The man who is popular must be optimistic
about something even if he is only optimistic about
pessimism.
Twenty-two
Everyone on this earth should believe, amid whatever
madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament
have some object on the earth. Everyone on the earth
should believe that he has something to give to the world
which cannot otherwise be given. Everyone should, for
the good of men and the saving of his own soul, believe
that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the human
race, to be the friends of God. The evil wrought by this
mystical pride, great as it often is, is like a straw to the
evil wrought by a materialistic self-abandonment. The
crimes of the devil who thinks himself of immeasurable
value are as nothing to the crimes of the devil who thinks
himself of no value,
Twenty-three
Our modern attraction to short stories is not an accident
of form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and
fragility; it means that existence is only an impression,
and perhaps only an illusion. A short story of to-day
has the air of a dream; it has the irrevocable beauty of
falsehood; we get a glimpse of grey streets of London
or red plains of India, as in an opium vision; we see people
— arresting people with fiery and appealing faces. But
when the story is ended, the people are ended. We have
no instinct of anything ultimate and enduring behind
the episodes.
Twenty-four
The moderns, in a word, describe life in short stories
because they are possessed with the sentiment that life
itself is an uncommonly short story, and perhaps not a true
65
SEPTEMBER
one. But in this elder literature, even in the comic
literature (indeed, especially in the comic literature) the
reverse is true. The characters are felt to be fixed things
of which we have fleeting glimpses; that is, they are felt
to be divine. Uncle Toby is talking for ever, as the elves
are dancing for ever. We feel that whenever we hammer
on the house of Falstaff, Falstaff will be at home. We
feel it as a pagan would feel that, if a cry broke the silence
after ages of unbelief, Apollo would still be listening in his
temple.
Twenty-five
These writers may tell short stories, but we feel they are
only parts of a long story. And herein lies the peculiar
significance, the peculiar sacredness even, of penny
dreadfuls and the common printed matter made for our
errand-boys. Here in dim and desperate forms under
the ban of our base culture, stormed at by silly magistrates,
sneered at by silly schoolmasters — here is the old popular
literature still popular; here is the old unmistakable
voluptuousness, the thousand and one tales of Robin
Hood. Here is the splendid and static boy, the boy who
remains a boy through a thousand volumes and a thousand
years. Here in mere alleys and dim shops, shadowed
and shamed by the police, mankind is still driving its
dark trade of heroes. And elsewhere in all other ages
in braver fashion, under cleaner skies, the same eternal
tale-telling goes on; and the whole mortal world is a
factory of immortals.
Twenty-six
As our world advances through history towards its present
epoch, it becomes more specialist, less democratic, and
folklore turns gradually into fiction. But it is only slowly
that the old elfin fire fades into the light of common
realism.
Twenty-seven
For ages after our characters have dressed up in the
clothes of mortals they betray the blood of the gods.
Even our phraseology is full of relics of this. When a
modern novel is devoted to the bewilderments of a weak
66
SEPTEMBER
young clerk who cannot decide which woman he wants to
marry, or which new religion he believes, we still give
this knock-kneed cad the name of " the hero " — the name
which is the crown of Achilles.
Twenty-eight
The popular preference for a story with " a happy ending "
is not, or at least was not, a mere sweetstuff optimism ; it
is the remains of the old idea of the triumph of the dragon-
slayer, the ultimate apotheosis of the man beloved of
heaven.
Twenty-nine
44 Where would a wise man hide a leaf t In the forest $"'
The other did not answer.
" If there were no forest, he would make a forest. And
if he wished to hide a dead leaf, he would make a dead
forest."
There was still no reply, and the priest added still more
mildly and quietly:
" And if a man had to hide a dead body, he would make
a field of dead bodies to hide it in."
Thirty
The principle of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated
in two propositions. The first is this: that the things
common to all men are more important than the things
peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable
than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extra-
ordinary. Man is something more awful than men;
something more strange. The sense of the miracle
of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us
than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilisation.
The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as
something more heart-breaking than any music and more
startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even
than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic
even than having a Norman nose.
October
QM
Lo ! I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold;
Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
The year and I are old.
Now a great thing in the street
Seems any human nod,
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God.
In youth I sought the gold flower
Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.
Two
There are two things in which men are manifestly and
unmistakably equal. They are not equally clc
equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages of the modern
reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. But this is a
spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic.
And this, again, is an equally sublime spiritual certainty,
that all men are comic. No special and private sorrow
can be so dreadful as the fact of having to die. And no
freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of
having two legs. Every man is important if he loses
his life ; and every man is funny if he loses his hat and has
to run after it.
Three
The institution of the family is to be commended for
precisely the same reasons that the institution of the
nation, or the institution of the city, are in this matter to
be commended. It is a good thing for a man to live in a
family for the same reason that it is a good thing for a man
to be besieged in a city. It is a good thing for a man to
live in a family in the same sense that it is a beautiful
and delightful thing for a man to be snowed up in a street.
OCTOBER
They all force him to realise that life is not a thing from
outside, but a thing from inside. Above all, they all
insist upon the fact that life, if it be a truly stimulating
and fascinating life, is a thing which, of its nature, exists
in spite of ourselves.
Four
We learn of the cruelty of some school or child factory
from journalists; we learn it from inspectors, we learn it
from doctors, we learn it even from shame-stricken
schoolmasters and repentant sweaters; but we never learn
it from the children, we never learn it from the victims.
It would seem as if a living creature had to be taught,
like an art of culture, the art of crying out when it is hurt.
Five
We are always, in these days, asking our violent prophets
to write violent satires. In order to write satire like that
of Rabelais — satire that juggles with the stars and kicks
the world about like a football — it is necessary to be
oneself temperate, and even mild. A modern man like
Nietzsche, a modern man like Gorky, a modern man like
d'Annunsio, could not possibly write real and riotous
satire. They are themselves too much on the borderlands.
They could not be a success as caricaturists, for they are
already a great success as caricatures.
Six
The teetotaller has chosen a most unfortunate phrase
for the drunkard when he says that the drunkard is making
a beast of himself. The man who drinks ordinarily
makes nothing but an ordinary man of himself. The man
who drinks excessively makes a devil of himself. But
nothing connected with a human and artistic thing like
wine can bring one nearer to the brute life of nature.
The only man who is, in the exact and literal sense of the
words, making a beast of himself is the teetotaller.
Seven
No man dare say of himself, over his own name, how
badly he has behaved. No man dare say of himself, over
his own name, how well he has behaved.
69
OCTOBER
Eight
Moreover, of course, a touch of fiction is almost always
essential to the real conveying of fact, because fact, as
experienced, has a fragmentariness which is bewildering
at first hand and quite blinding at second hand. Facts
have at least to be sorted into compartments and the
proper head and tail given back to each. The perfection
and pointedness of art are a sort of substitute for the
pungency of actuality.
Without this selection and completion our life seems a
tangle of unfinished tales, a heap of novels, all volume one.
Nine
Melodrama is a form of art, legitimate like any other,
as noble as farce, almost as noble as pantomime. The
essence of melodrama is that it appeals to the moral sense
in a highly simplified state, just as farce appeals to the
sense of humour in a highly simplified state. Farce
creates people who are so intellectually simple as to
hide in packing-cases or pretend to be their own aunts.
Melodrama creates people so morally simple as to kill
their enemies in Oxford Street, and repent on seeing their
mother's photograph. The object of the simplification
in farce and melodrama is the same, and quite artistically
legitimate, the object of gaming a resounding rapidity
of action which subtleties would obstruct.
Ten
So we find ourselves faced with a fundamental contrast
between what is called fiction and what is called folklore.
The one exhibits an abnormal degree of dexterity operating
within our daily limitations; the other exhibits quite
normal desires extended beyond those limitations. Fiction
means the common things as seen by the uncommon
people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as
seen by the common people.
Eleven
The only question is whether all terms are useless, or
whether one can, with such a phrase, cover a distinct idea
about the origin of things. I think one can, and so evi-
70
OCTOBER
dently does the evolutionist, or he would not talk about
evolution. And the root phrase for all Christian theism
was this, that God was a creator, as an artist is a creator.
A poet is so separate from his poem, that he himself
speaks of it as a little thing he has " thrown off." Even
in giving it forth he has flung it away. This principle
that all creation and procreation is a breaking off is at
least as consistent through the cosmos as the evolutionary
principle that all growth is a branching out. A woman
loses a child even in having a child. All creation is
separation. Birth is as solemn a parting as death.
Twelve
In one sense things are only equal if they are entirely
different. Thus, for instance, people talk with a quite
astonishing gravity about the inequality or equality of
the sexes; as if there could possibly be any inequality
between a lock and a key. Wherever there is no element
of variety, wherever all the items literally have an identical
aim, there is at once and of necessity inequality.
Thirteen
A woman is only inferior to man in the matter of being
not so manly; she is inferior in nothing else. Man is
inferior to woman in so far as he is not a woman; there is
no other reason. And the same applies in some degree
to all genuine differences. ;
Fourteen
It is really difficult to decide when we come to the extreme
edge of veracity, when and when not it is permissible to
create an illusion. A standing example, for instance,
is the case of the fairy tales. We think a father entirely
pure and benevolent when he tells his children that a
beanstalk grew up into heaven, and a pumpkin turned into
a coach. We should consider that he lapsed from purity
and benevolence if he told his children that in walking
home that evening he had seen a beanstalk grow half-way
up the church, or a pumpkin grow as large as a wheel-
barrow.
OCTOBER
Fifteen
My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with
unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally
learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-
appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition*
The things I believed most then, the things I believe
most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem
to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are
not fantasies; compared with them other things are
fantastic. Compared with them religion is abnormally
right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is
nothing but the sunny country of common-sense. It is
not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges
earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised
elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth.
Sixteen
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all
classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant
oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
All democrats object to men being disqualified by the
accident of birth; tradition objects to their being dis-
qualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us
not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our
groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's
opinion, even if he is our father.
Seventeen
This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential
things in men are the things they hold in common, not
the things they hold separately. And the second principle
is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one
of those things which they hold in common.
Eighteen
The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed
only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints
of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a
matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonest and
most natural of the. feelings of a fresh nature, and almost
everyone has felt it alight capriciously upon him when
73
OCTOBER
looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The
love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal
a sentiment as the love of those whom we do know.
Nineteen
In our friends the richness of life is proved to us by what
we have gained; in the faces in the street the richness of
life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost.
And this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when
it is felt keenly by a young man, almost always expresses
itself in a desire after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a
desire to go through the world scattering goodness like
a capricious god. It is desired that mankind should hunt
in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a criminal;
that he should be an anonymous Saviour, an unrecorded
Christ.
Twenty
It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for
the people, when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties
and blunders of humanity, that they fall back upon a wild
desire to manage everything themselves. Their faith in
themselves is only a disillusionment with mankind. They
are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in personal
and public affairs — the position of the man who has lost
faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go
right if we could only get the strings into our own hands
is a fallacy almost without exception, but nobody can justly
say that it is not public-spirited. The sin and sorrow
of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it
loves them too much and trusts them too little.
Twenty-one
The tragedy of love is in love, not in marriage. There
is no unhappy marriage that might not be an equally
unhappy concubinage, or a far more unhappy seduction.
Whether the tie be legal or no, matters something to the
faithless party; it matters nothing to the faithful one.
Twenty-two
Now, one may believe in democracy or disbelieve in it.
It would be grossly unfair to conceal the fact that there
73
OCTOBER
are difficulties on both sides. The difficulty of believing
in democracy is that it is so hard to believe — like God and
most other good things. The difficulty of disbelieving
in democracy is that there is nothing else to believe in.
I mean there is nothing else on earth or in earthly politics.
Unless an aristocracy is selected by gods, it must be
selected by men. It may be negatively and passively
permitted, but either heaven or humanity must permit it;
otherwise it has no more moral authority than a lucky
pickpocket. It is baby talk to talk about " Superman " or
" Nature's Aristocracy " or " The Wise Few." " The
Wise Few " must be either those whom others think
wise — who are often fools; or those who think themselves
wise — who are always fools.
Twenty-three
It is common to meet nowadays men who talk of what
they call Free Love as if it were something like Free Silver
— a new and ingenious political scheme. They seem to
forget that it is as easy to judge what it would be like as
to judge of what legal marriage would be like. " Free
Love " has been going on in every town and village since
the beginning of the world; and the first fact that every
man of the world knows about it is plain enough. It
never does produce any of the wild purity and perfect
freedom its friends attribute to it. If any paper had the
pluck to head a column " Is Concubinage a Failure !"'
instead of " Is Marriage a Failure 4" the answer " Yes "
would be given by the personal memory of many men,
and by the historic memory of all,
Twenty-four
A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a
cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man
can no more possess a private religion than he can possess
a private sun and moon.
Twenty-five
The fact is that purification and austerity are even more
necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for
anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell
74
OCTOBER
patiently the stones and weeds, to have the mind a store-
house of sunsets, requires a discipline in pleasure and an
education in gratitude.
Twenty- six
Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It obviates
the crude requirements of polygamy. If you have one
good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.
Twenty-seven
The face of the King's servants grew greater than the
King.
He tricked them and they trapped him and drew round
him in a ring;
The new grave lords closed round him that had eaten
the abbey's fruits,
And the men of the new religion with their Bibles in their
boots,
We saw their shoulders moving to menace and discuss.
And some were pure and some were vile, but none took
heed of us;
We saw the King when they killed him, and his face was
proud and pale,
And a few men talked of freedom while England talked
of ale.
Twenty-eight
The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic
thing. It may seem strange to attribute optimism to
anything so destructive ; but, in truth, this particular kind
of optimism is inevitably, and by its nature, destructive.
The great dominant idea of the whole of that period, the
period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is
the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden
of dignity, liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit
systems are keeping him out of that Eden. No one can
do the least justice to the great Jacobins who does not
realise that to them breaking the civilisation of ages was
like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest.
Twenty-nine
For the great paradox of morality (the paradox to which
only the religious have given an adequate expression) is
75 F
OCTOBER
that the very vilest kind of fault is exactly the most easy
kind. We read in books and ballads about the wild fellow
who might kill a man or smoke opium, but who would
never stoop to lying or cowardice or to " anything mean."
But for actual human beings opium and slaughter have
only occasional charm; the permanent human tempta-
tion is the temptation to be mean. The one standing
probability is the probability of becoming a cowardly
hypocrite.
Thirty
The circle of the traitors is the lowest of the abyss, and it
is also the easiest to fall into. That is one of the ringing
realities of the Bible, that it does not make its great men
commit grand sins ; it makes its great men (such as David
and St Peter) commit small sins and behave like sneaks.
Thirty-one
Aristocracy uses the strong for the service of the weak;
slavery uses the weak for the service of the strong.
November
One
I have known people who protested against religious
education with arguments against any education, saying
that the child's mind must grow freely or that the old
must not teach the young. I have known people who
showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing
that there can be no human judgment, even for practical
purposes. They burned their own corn to set fire to
the church; they smashed their own tools to smash it;
any stick was good enough to beat it with, though it were
the last stick of their own dismembered furniture. We
do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks
this world for love of the other. But what are we to
say to the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred
of the other 1 He sacrifices the very existence of humanity
to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not
to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar
and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin
even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his
strange and eternal vengeance upon someone who never
lived at all.
Two
And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its
opponents only succeed in destroying all that they them-
selves justly hold dear. They do not destroy orthodoxy;
they only destroy political courage and common-sense.
They do not prove that Adam was not responsible to God ;
how could they prove it t They only prove (from their
premises) that the Czar is not responsible to Russia.
They do not prove that Adam should not have been
punished by God; they only prove that the nearest
sweater should not be punished by men. With their
Oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain
that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only
make certain that we shall not have a very jolly or com-
77
NOVEMBER
plete one here. With their paralysing hints of all con-
clusions coming out wrong they do not tear the book of
the Recording Angel; they only make it a little harder
to keep the books of Marshall & Snelgrove.
Three
Not only is the faith the mother of all worldly energies,
but its foes are the fathers of all worldly confusion. The
secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secu-
larists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort
to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid
waste the world.
Four
There is a great man who makes every man feel small.
But the real great man is the man who makes every man
feel great.
Five
It has often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing
that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an
equally important truth that religion is the thing that
makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.
Six
I know where Men can still be found,
Anger and clamorous accord,
And virtues growing from the ground,
And fellowship of beer and board,
And song, that is a sturdy cord,
And hope, that is a hardy shrub,
And goodness, that is God's last word —
Will someone take me to a pub. <
Seven
The English lower classes do not fear the English upper
classes in the least; nobody could. They simply and
freely and sentimentally worship them. The strength
of the aristocracy is not in the aristocracy at all; it is in
the slums.
Eight
The oligarchic character of the modern English common-
wealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty
78
NOVEMBER
of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the
kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial
and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.
Nine
We are, as a nation, in the truly extraordinary condi ion
of not knowing our own merits. We have played a great
and splendid part in the history of universal thought and
sentiment; we have been among the foremost in that
eternal and bloodless battle in which the blows do not
slay, but create.
Ten
In painting and music we are inferior to many other
nations; but in literature, science, philosophy, and political
eloquence, if history be taken as a whole, we can hold
our own with any. But all this vast heritage of intellectual
glory is kept from our schoolboys like a heresy; and they
are left to live and die, in the dull and infantile type of
patriotism which they learn from a box of tin soldiers.
Eleven
If a man is genuinely superior to his fellows the first thing
that he believes in is the equality of man.
Twelve
The first-rate great man is equal with other men, like
Shakespeare. The second-rate great man is on his
knees to other men, like Whitman. The third-rate great
man is superior to other men, like Whistler.
Thirteen
When all philosophies shall fail,
This word alone shall fit;
That a sage feels too small for life,
And a fool too large for it.
Fourteen
The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.
It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient
power of expression to utter and get rid of the element
of art in their being. It is healthful to every sane man
79
N OVEMBER
to utter the art within him; it is essential to every sane
man to get rid of the art within him at all costs. Artists
of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily,
as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists
of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces
a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
Fifteen
When modern sociologists talk of the necessity of accom-
modating oneself to the trend of the time, they forget
that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of
people who will not accommodate themselves to anything.
At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened
creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that
is not there*
Sixteen
And when we come to the end of the world
For me, I count it fit
To take the leap like a good river,
Shot shrieking over it.
Seventeen
To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the
sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble
man alone, the sea is really a sea. When he looks at all
the faces in the street, he does not only realise that men are
alive, he realises with a dramatic pleasure that they are
not dead.
Eighteen
Bake ye the big world all again
A cake with kinder leaven;
Yet these are sorry evermore —
Unless there be a little door,
A little door in heaven.
Nineteen
I should roughly define the first spirit in Puritanism thus:
It was a refusal to contemplate God or goodness with
anything lighter or milder than the most fierce concentra-
tion of the intellect.
80
NOVEMBER
Twenty
A Puritan meant originally a man whose mind had no
holidays. To use his own favourite phrase, he would let
no living thing come between him and his God; an
attitude which involved eternal torture for him and a
cruel contempt for all the living things. It was better
to worship in a barn than in a cathedral, for the specific
and specified reason that the cathedral was beautiful.
Twenty-one
Physically beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming
in between the intellect and the object of its intellectual
worship. The human brain ought to be at every instant
a consuming fire which burns through all conventional
images until they were as transparent as glass.
Twenty-two
The pagan set out, with admirable sense, to enjoy himself.
By the end of his civilisation he had discovered that a
man cannot enjoy himself and continue to enjoy anything
else.
Twenty-three
There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviare
on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on
principle.
Twenty-four
As the word " unreasonable " is open to misunderstanding,
the matter may be more accurately put by saying that
each one of these Christian or mystical virtues involves
a paradox in its own nature, and that this is not true of
any of the typically pagan or rationalist virtues. Justice
consists in finding out a certain thing due to a certain
man and giving it to him. Temperance consists in finding
out the proper limit of a particular indulgence and adhering
to that. But charity means pardoning what is un-
pardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping
when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And
faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue
at all.
81
NOVEMBER
Twenty-five
Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love
immortal things for an instant.
Twenty- six
You cannot easily make a good drama out of the success
or failure of marriage, just #s you could not make a good
drama out of the growth of an oak-tree or the decay of
an empire. As Polonius very reasonably observed, it is
too long.
Twenty-seven
A happy love affair will make a drama simply because
it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or no. But
a happy marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be
less happy if it were.
Twenty-eight
The essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks herself
an intense question; but the essence of a sensible wife is
that she is much too sensible to ask herself any questions
at all. All the things that make monogamy a success
are in their nature undramatic things, the silent growth
of an instinctive confidence, the common wounds and
victories, the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing
of old jokes.
Twenty-nine
Sane marriage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore
not surprising that most modern dramatists have devoted
themselves to insane marriage.
Thirty
Nor shall all iron dooms make dumb
Men wondering ceaselessly,
If it be not better to fast for joy
Than feast for misery.
December
One
The idea of private property universal but private, the
idea of families free but still families, of domesticity
democratic but still domestic, of one man one house —
this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind.
The world may accept something more official and
general, less human and intimate. But the world will
be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum
marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism
may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the world's
desire,
Two
Human tyranny, like every other human sin, has generally
some excuse or at least some temptation. It is further
difficulty that the excuse was often originally a respectable
one; some devotion to institution or ideals for which some
men at least had really been grateful.
Three
The peculiar evil that affects England is that, simply,
Englishmen have nothing whatever to do with it.
Four
Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages.
Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in
reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried
and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left
untried.
Five
4t Efficiency," of course, is futile for the same reason
that " strong men," " will power " and the superman
are futile. That is, it is futile because it only deals with
actions after they have been performed. It has no
philosophy for incidents before they happen; therefore
83
DECEMBER
it has no power of choice. An act can only be successful
or unsuccessful when it is over; if it is to begin it must be
in the abstract, right or wrong.
Six
There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of life
and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and
ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at
it the thousandth, you are in frightful danger of seeing
it for the first time,
Seven
The Middle Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine.
Our age is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of pre-
judice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a
direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a man should
not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible
of anything should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also
sometimes called an ideal.
Eight
There is no such thing as fighting on the winning side;
one fights to find out which is the winning side.
Nine
The human " race " has been playing at children's games
from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end,
which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
And one of the games to which it is most attached is
called " Keep to-morrow dark." . . . The players
listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever
men have to say about what is to happen in the next
generation. The players then wait until all the clever
men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go
and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple
tastes, however, it is great fun.
Ten
Man is an uprooted tree. That is the only reason why
unconscious nature has ever noticed him. That blind
man who, after having the holy touch on his eyes, '* saw
84
DECEMBER
men as trees walking/' knew what he was talking about.
It was a great renewal of youth and renovation of the
fairy tale of fact. Men are trees walking. But it is only
because they are uprooted trees that they can walk.
Eleven
A is an Agnostic dissecting a frog.
B was a Buddhist who had been a dog.
C was a Christian, a Christist I mean.
D was the Dog which the Buddhist had been.
E is for Ethics that grow upon trees.
F for St Francis who preached to the fleas.
G is for God which is easy to spell.
H is for Haeckel and also for Hell.
I is for the Ideas now commonly dead.
J is a Jesuit under the bed.
Twelve
K is the letter for Benjamin Kidd,
The Angels and Devils said don't, but he did.
L Louis the Ninth who, unlike the Eleventh,
Was a much better man than King Edward the Seventh.
M is for Man; by the way, What is Man ?"
N is for Nunquam who'll tell if he can,
O is the Om about which I won't trouble you.
P for the Pope and P. W. W.
Q is the Quaker quiescent in quod.
R is for Reason, a primitive God.
Thirteen
S is the Superman, harmless but fat.
T a Theosophist losing his hat.
U the Upanishads, clever but slight.
V is a Virtuous man killing Beit.
W is for Wesley who banged with his fist.
X for King Xerxes, a monotheist.
Y is for You who, depraved as you are,
Are Lord of Creation and Son of a Star.
Z Zarathustra who couldn't take stout;
He made war on the weak and they banged him about.
85
DECEMBER
Fourteen
Freedom of speech means practically, in our modern
civilisation, that we must only talk about unimportant
things. We must not talk about religion, for that is
illiteral; we must not talk about bread and cheese, for
that is talking shop; we must not talk about death, for
that is depressing; we must not talk about birth, for that
is indelicate.
Fifteen
For a plain, hard-working man the home is not the one
tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild
place in the world of rules and set tasks. The home is
the one place where he can put the carpet on the ceiling
or the slates on the floor if he wants to.
Sixteen
We have not only left undone those things that we ought
to have done; but we have even left undone those things
that we wanted to do.
Seventeen
History does not consist of completed and crumbling
ruins ; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by a
bankrupt builder. This world is more like an unfinished
suburb than a deserted cemetery.
Eighteen
Every form of literary art must be a symbol of some phase
of the human spirit; but whereas the phase is, in human
life, sufficiently convincing in itself, in art it must have a
certain pungency and neatness of form, to compensate
for its lack of reality.
Nineteen
That it is good for a man to realise that he is " the heir
of all the ages " is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less
popular but equally important point that it is good for
him sometimes to realise that he is not only an ancestor,
but an ancestor of primal antiquity; it is good for him to
wonder whether he is not a hero, and to experience
ennobling doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.
86
DECEMBER
Twenty
Dogmas are often spoken of as if they were signs of the
slowness or endurance of the human mind. As a matter
of fact, they are marks of mental promptitude and lucid
impatience. A man will put his meaning mystically
because he cannot waste time in putting it rationally.
Dogmas are not dark and mysterious; rather a dogma is
like a flash of lightning — an instantaneous lucidity that
opens across a whole landscape.
Twenty-one
A man should be always tied to his mother's apron strings;
he should always have a hold on his childhood, and be
ready at intervals to start anew from a childish standpoint.
Theologically the thing is best expressed by saying " You
must be born again." Secularly it is best expressed by
saying ** You must keep your birthday." Even if you
will not be born again, at least remind yourself occasion-
ally that you were born once.
Twenty-two
To the Buddhist or the Eastern fatalist existence is a
science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way.
But to a Christian existence is a story, which may end up
in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian
product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is
essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be
eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an
eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to
the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must
take care that he didn't. In Christian morals, in short,
it is wicked to call a man " damned "; but it is strictly
religious and philosophic to call him damnable.
Twenty-three
It is the custom in our little epoch to sneer at the middle
classes. Cockney artists profess to find the bourgeoisie
dull; as if artists had any business to find anything dull.
Decadents talk contemptuously of its conventions and its
set tasks; it never occurs to them that conventions and set
tasks are the very way to keep that greenness in the grass
and that redness in the roses — which they have lost for ever.
8?
DECEMBER
Twenty-four
Some stupid people started the idea that because women
obviously back up their own people through everything,
therefore women are blind and do not see anything.
They can hardly have known any women. The same
women who are ready to defend their men through thick
and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man)
almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses
or the thickness of his head. A man's friend likes him
but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always
trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who are
utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their
criticism. Thackeray expressed this well when he made
Pendennis' mother, who worshipped her son as a god,
yet assume that he would go wrong as a man. She
underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value.
The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can
safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last
thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound
the less it is blind.
Twenty-five
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable, timber, and shifting sand
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome*
This world is wild as an old wife's tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings,
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
Twenty-six
The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)
8$
DECEMBER
The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast,
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)
The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world's desire.)
The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee,
His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.
Twenty-seven
Marriage is a fact, an actual human relation like that of
motherhood which has certain human habits and loyalties,
except in a few monstrous cases, where it is turned to
torture by special insanity and sin. A marriage is neither
an ecstasy nor a slavery; it is a commonwealth; it is a
separate working and fighting thing like a nation.
Twenty-eight
Kings and diplomatists talk of " forming alliances "
when they make weddings; but indeed every wedding
is primarily an alliance. The family is a fact, and a man
is part of his wife even when he wishes he wasn't. The
twain are one flesh — yes, even when they are not one
spirit. Man is duplex. Man is a quadruped.
Twenty-nine
There is, of course, no paradox in saying that if we find
in a good book a wildly impossible character it is very
probable indeed that it was copied from a real person.
This is one of the commonplaces of good art criticism.
For although people talk of the restraints of fact and the
freedom of fiction, the case for most artistic purposes
is quite the other way. Nature is as free as air: art is
forced to look probable. There may be a million things
that do happen, and yet only one thing that convinces us as
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DECEMBER
likely to happen. -Out of a million possible things there
may be only one appropriate thing. I fancy, therefore,
that many stiff, unconvincing characters are copied from
the wild freak-show of real life.
Thirty
Pure and exalted atheists talk themselves into believing
that the working classes are turning with indignant scorn
from the churches. The working classes are not in-
dignant against the churches in the least. The things
the working classes really are indignant against are the
hospitals. The people has no definite disbelief in the
temples of theology. The people has a fiery and practical
disbelief in the temples of physical science. The things
the poor hate are the modern things, the rationalistic
things — doctors, inspectors, poor law guardians, pro-
fessional philanthropy. They never showed any re-
luctance to be helped by the old and corrupt monasteries.
They will often die rather than be helped by the modern
and efficient workhouse. .
Thirty-one
To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored
in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly
he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those
who have really seen fate and futurity as clear and in-
evitable.
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