Common Sense 101: Lessons from Chesterton

By Dale Ahlquist

Dale Ahlquist, the President of the American Chesterton Society, and author of G. K. Chesterton -The Apostle of Common Sense, presents a book of wonderful insights on how to "look at the whole world through the eyes of Chesterton". Since, as he says, "Chesterton wrote about everything", there is an ocean of his material to benefit from GKC's insights on a kaleidoscope of many important topics.

Chesterton wrote a hundred books on a variety of themes, thousands of essays for London newspapers, penned epic poetry, delighted in detective fiction, drew illustrations, and made everyone laugh by his keen humor. Everyone who knew Chesterton loved him, even those he debated with. His unique writing style that combines philosophy, spirituality, history, humor, and paradox have made him one of the most widely read authors of modern times.

As Ahlquist shows in his engaging volume, this most quoted writer of the 20th century has much to share with us on topics covering politics, art, education, wonder, marriage, fads, poetry, faith, charity and much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Sep 3, 2009
• ISBN: 9781681491059

Book preview

PREFACE

How did the world forget such an unforgettable character? Most people know almost nothing about G. K. Chesterton. And most of what they do know is wrong.

Even those of us who have gotten to know him do not see the complete picture. We see only glimpses. We know that he was a writer from the early twentieth century who wrote a hundred books and thousands of essays for the London newspapers, that he wrote and argued about everything, that he penned epic poetry but also delighted in detective fiction, that he made everyone laugh, that everyone who knew him loved him, that he was happily married but unhappily had no children, that he took on all the leading thinkers of his time and challenged them not only with his clear ideas but with the example of his own life, especially with the astounding decision he made to become a Catholic.

But looking at Chesterton is not as important as looking at the whole world through his eyes. This is not a book about Chesterton. It is a book about everything else from a Chestertonian perspective. It is an attempt to get inside of him and inhabit him like a large house so that we can see the world through the windows he provides. I have very little hope of succeeding, but I am trying to do it this way for two reasons. First, it is precisely the way Chesterton approached other writers, by getting inside of them. Second, I can’t think of a more wonderful way to see the world than through Chesterton’s eyes.

I have one great advantage: I don’t have to make anything up. Chesterton wrote about everything. An ocean of words poured out of his pen. I have simply immersed myself in that ocean. It is deep, it is dangerous, it is delightful, it is refreshing, it is full of surprises, it is full of life.

These chapters first saw life in the form of television programs for the Eternal Word Television Network. I wish to thank Steve Beaumont and all the good folks at EWTN for inviting me into their studios and for helping me introduce Chesterton to so many people around the world. My further appreciation goes to Chuck Chalberg for trying to make himself look as though he weighs three hundred pounds. My undying thanks to Peter Floriani, whose hard work made my easy work possible. And my inexpressible gratitude to my toughest critic, without whom not one page of this book could have or would have been written: my lovely wife, Laura.

1

Another Introduction to G. K. Chesterton

When he walks in through the door, the first thing we notice is that he fills up the room. Of course, he weighs three hundred pounds, but his height is even more extraordinary than his weight. He is six foot four, but he seems even taller. He is a giant. But he is no Goliath. He is actually an overgrown elf. He casts a spell, and the spell is called joy. It is something we have certainly felt on some occasion, but this is something that sweeps into our souls. His huge body shakes with laughter. Laughter blows through his moustache.

I suppose I enjoy myself more than most other people, because there’s such a lot of me having a good time.¹

He takes off his crumpled hat and his heavy cape. He leans his swordstick against the wall. He squints and adjusts the crooked lenses on the end of his nose, but they remain crooked still. There is geniality in his every gesture.

But what about that swordstick, is it real? Is there really a sword concealed inside the walking stick? There certainly is. Why does he carry a swordstick, of all things?

He says it is because he likes things that come to a point.² He has a romantic attachment to the sword, seen in his endless doodles and drawings. But this sword will never draw blood. It is the poetry without the prose. The only thing he ever stabs with it is the pillow on the couch in his study.

But the sword is not the only weapon he carries. He also carries . . . a gun! But why?

I bought it the day of my wedding, he explains . . . and then adds, to defend my bride.³ He says it has also proved to be quite useful on other occasions. For instance, whenever he hears a man say that life is not worth living, he takes out the gun and offers to shoot him. Always with the most satisfactory results, he laughs.⁴

But wait, there’s more in his arsenal. He also carries with him a big Texas knife. (Where does he keep all these things?) It is seven inches long when folded, fourteen inches long when open. The knife is only a short sword; and the pocket-knife is a secret sword. It has, he explains, that terrible tongue we call a blade.⁵

He sleeps with the knife under his pillow—and usually forgets it there. His wife has to retrieve it from all the hotels they stay at. He uses it mostly as a letter opener, and once during a debate, he absent-mindedly took it out and started sharpening his pencil with it, to the great amusement of the audience and the great distress of his opponent.

Yes, the many legends of his absent-mindedness are not exaggerations. He does miss a lot of trains. And the ones he does catch are not always the right ones. He will hail a cab to take him to the editorial offices of G. K.’s Weekly, his own newspaper, but he will not know the address. So he will have the cab take him first to a newsstand to buy a copy of the paper so he can get the address, and since many of the newsstands are sold out of the paper, it may take several stops. He walks away from bookstalls reading a book he has picked up, and the shopkeeper, recognizing him, simply sends a bill to his wife. His pockets overflow with books and newspapers, and he reads as he walks, oblivious of traffic, which screeches to a halt as he crosses the street.

There is more in his pockets. In addition to the reading material and the weapons, he says he can find whole worlds in his pockets, that on the Day of Judgment when the sea gives up its dead, so will his pockets give up the extraordinary things buried there.⁶ But what he cannot find in any of his pockets is his train ticket. Or money. The train ticket he has no doubt left on the counter where he bought it. The money he has given to beggars.

He seems so frivolous and so careless, but he gives money to beggars, not frivolously or carelessly, but because he believes in giving money to beggars, and giving it to them where they stand. He says he knows perfectly well all the arguments against giving money to beggars. But he finds those to be precisely the arguments for giving money to them. If beggars are lazy or deceptive or wanting a drink, he knows only too well his own lack of motivation, his own dishonesty, his own thirst. He doesn’t believe in scientific charity because that is too easy, as easy as writing a check. He believes in promiscuous charity because that is really difficult. It means the most dark and terrible of all human actions—talking to a man. In fact, I know of nothing more difficult than really talking to the poor men we meet.⁷ He says that if we really believed in democracy, we would not be debating about what we should do with the poor; the poor would be debating about what to do with us.⁸

And suddenly he does not seem so absent-minded and out of touch. His absent-mindedness, it turns out, is only about details that really don’t matter, though they are the kinds of things that fill up the lives of most of us while we neglect the things that do matter. He is always focused on the larger picture and on eternal truths. But he also has a passion for justice and a genuine love for everyone. He may be lost and helpless on the street, but he is always at home in the world.

He can expound, it seems, on any subject. The history of glass-making. Gargoyles. Milton. Huxley. Cheese. The Manichees. Shakespeare. Shaw. Shirts. Tennyson. Turnpikes. Taffy. He can quote whole passages of books from memory, books that he has read years and years before. Challenge him to offer evidence for one of his historical pronouncements, he will repeat verbatim the terms of the Magna Carta, in the original Old English!⁹ Ask him to autograph a book for you, and he will inscribe it with an original poem inside the front cover:

In this book the pretty pictures

May incur your righteous strictures,

Only do not read the verse

Because you’ll find it even worse.¹⁰

Or else he’ll toss off a perfect epigram or refer to the book as Bosh!

He doesn’t sign his name. He draws it. His penmanship is picturesque, as clear and clean as his prose, as full and fitting as his poetry.

And then he gives you the book as a gift Alas, my trade is words,¹¹ he says. He is embarrassed that words are the only thing he makes and the only gift that he can give. The humility is utterly sincere. It is the most striking thing about him, that such a big man should feel so small. But his very size may have something to do with his humility: It may be that the thin monks were holy, but I am sure it was the fat monks who were humble. To be fat is to be laughed at, and that is a more wholesome experience for the soul of man.¹²

And, indeed, he laughs harder than anyone at the jokes made at his own expense, and his caricatures of himself are more hilarious than any others. He can honestly enjoy his own foolishness and mock his own accomplishments. In debates, he disarms his opponents by agreeing with them when they attack him personally. It is when they attack his ideas that he reluctantly rises and utterly demolishes their arguments. But as his secretary would say, long afterward, It gave him no pleasure to excel over other people.¹³ He truly understands the great virtue of humility and the great sin of pride. He says he is no preacher, but if he had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against pride: All evil began with some attempt at superiority.¹⁴

He reminds us that he is only a scribbler. Then he suddenly reminds himself of a deadline. He has to produce an article for one of the many newspapers he writes for. He tries to find something, anything, to write on. The quicker goes the journalist the slower go his thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can be delivered earlier and earlier, and which every day is less worth delivering at all.¹⁵ But of course, if he writes it, it is worth reading, and still worth reading almost a century after he has written it. He can deliver a provocative essay on any subject, even when there doesn’t appear—at first—to be a subject. But before he plunges into thought, he takes out still another weapon. At least, some would call it a weapon. A cigar.

He makes the sign of the cross with the match before lighting the cigar. My muse, he says, taking a puff. Some men write with a pencil, others with a typewriter. I write with my cigar.¹⁶ As if sensing our disapproval, he laughs and he answers our objections before we can even list them. It is true that tobacco, though not an intoxicant, is in some sense a drug: but so is tea. It is true that tobacco, taken out of season and reason, spoils your appetite: but so do sweets. . . . It is true that it is a luxury, a mere keen and passing titillation or pungency: but so are pepper and salt and mustard and a hundred other blameless gifts. . . . It is true that it ends in smoke: but so do all worldly powers and pleasures. It is true that it falls into ashes: but so do we.¹⁷ He explains that there is nothing immoral about smoking a cigar. To regard smoking as immoral shows not merely a lack of clear thinking but a lack of clear standards. Lumping the wrong things together as evils blurs the lines between right and wrong and leads to chaos. It also leads to legal and practical confusion. The lack of clear standards among those who vaguely think of [smoking] as a vice may yet be the beginning of much peril and oppression.¹⁸

He defends smoking and drinking not as habits (All habits are bad habits.)¹⁹ but as simple, traditional pleasures that have been enjoyed by normal people for centuries. He points out that what society calls progress usually serves to punish all the things the common man enjoys. There is no normal thing that cannot now be taken from the normal man. Modern ‘emancipation’ has really been a new persecution of the Common Man and common sense.²⁰ If he is proud of anything, he is proud of defending the common man and common sense. I represent the jolly mass of mankind. I am the happy and reckless Christian.²¹ The puritanical assault on smoking is an example of the exaltation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones. If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made an essential and godliness is regarded as an offence.²² These matters of health and hygiene have been invoked to attack the simple pleasures that should be matters of personal liberty and convenience. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man’s minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. . . .²³

The question occurs to us: Does he always talk this way? Does he talk the same way he writes? Does he write the same way he talks? The answer is yes. His beloved wife, Frances, assures us that when he talks his tone and his outlook never vary—whoever may be with him. Early in the morning or late at night—in company with others or alone with his wife—he has the same way of approaching life—the same flow of a sudden idea.²⁴

He also talks to himself. If a man does not talk to himself, he says, it is because he is not worth talking to.²⁵

Better yet, he laughs at his own jokes. If a man may not laugh at his own jokes, at whose jokes may he laugh? May not an architect pray in his own cathedral?²⁶ Everything shakes with his laughter. He leans closer to us. Nothing has been worse than the modern notion that a clever man can make a joke without taking part in it. . . . It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one’s soul.²⁷

We could sit and bask in the glow of his words and laughter all night long, but his wife suddenly reminds him that he has to give a lecture this evening, and if he doesn’t hurry he will be late. Well, he will be late even if he hurries. A riot of activity follows, as Frances attempts to make her husband appear presentable, and he attempts to find out what he is supposed to be lecturing about. He scribbles a few notes on whatever scraps of paper are in reach and then is hurriedly loaded into a cab. Upon arriving at the lecture hall, the great man of great girth has trouble getting his huge frame out of the vehicle. Perhaps, someone suggests, if he tried to get out sideways. He groans: I have no sideways.²⁸

The lecture hall is completely full of people. His lectures are always sold out. He is given a long and laudatory introduction and a thundering ovation as he rises to speak and begins by saying quietly, almost to himself: After the whirlwind, the still small voice.

He reaches into a pocket for his notes but of course does not find them. He tries another pocket and eventually realizes that he does not have them. He begins his talk, even as he continues searching through his pockets. He gives an extemporaneous lecture, touching on and tying together a dazzling array of different subjects:²⁹

I have been invited tonight to give a lecture, but of course I cannot call myself a lecturer, because I fear there are some here who have actually heard one of my lectures. . . .

   I am a journalist and so am vastly ignorant of many things, but because I am a journalist I write and talk about them all. . . .

   I could certainly talk about the adventure of getting here this evening. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. . . .

   Part of the adventure of my arrival here was the journey across a modern urban landscape. It seems the modern world could easily be defined as a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic. . . .

   I think it may be cheerfully admitted that one of the strangest, largest, and most fundamental problems of modern life is . . . its ugliness. The world has grown richer and more complex, and more industrious and more orderly; upon the whole, it has grown more emancipated and more humane; but when all is said and done, upon the whole it has grown more ugly. . . . What can be the reason of this?

   . . . I believe that the great source of the hideousness of modern life is the lack of enthusiasm for modern life. If we really loved modern life we should make it beautiful. For all men seek to make beautiful the thing which they already think beautiful. The mother always seeks to deck out her child in what finery she possesses. The owner of a fine house adorns his house; the believer beautifies his church; the lover lavishes his lady; the patriot reforms his country. All these men improve a thing because they believe it is beautiful. . . . We do not make modern life beautiful precisely because we do not believe in modern life. . . . If we regarded the engineering of our age as the great Gothic architects regarded the engineering of their age we should make of the ordinary steam engine something as beautiful as the Christian cathedral. . . .

   There was a time when art was merely a tool which served religion, but we have tried to make art replace religion. We have tried to make art the only common bond. And we have tried to avoid the religious questions altogether. But the first and most important thing about any man is his vision, his conception, of existence. Upon this depends whether he will paint a gorgeous picture or a sad one. Upon this also depends whether he will paint a sad picture or merely jump over London Bridge. . . .

   The modern mind is a door with no house to it; a gigantic gate to nowhere. . . . The modern mind wishes to do away with such quaint ideas as right and wrong. The modern mind thinks that freedom somehow means breaking the rules. But here is where tradition is, as it generally is, on the side of truth. Tradition tells us that the rules are right. We cannot really prove them to be right, except perhaps when we see the consequences of trying to do away with them. The Ten Commandments, for instance. Throughout history, men have certainly failed to live up to them. But in modern times, men have more disastrously failed in trying to live without them. But it is only in establishing and obeying certain rules that freedom is possible. If we break the big laws we do not get freedom. We do not even get anarchy. We get the small laws. . . .

   There are some who would argue that we should have no absolutes, that evolution tends to rub out absolute lines. I say, we must have definite lines; but it is not because definite lines are the things which restrain humanity. It is because definite lines are the things which distinguish humanity. Our black lines are not the bars of the tiger’s cage. They are the stripes of the tiger’s skin: they are what makes him a tiger. If you think I want rules merely to restrain some inferior mob, you are quite wrong. It is true that bridles and blinders keep a great part of the human race out of the ditch, but this is not what I am urging. I am not urging anything so profoundly undemocratic. I do not mean that there are some people stupid enough to require general rules. I mean that there are no people wise enough to do without them. Our need for rules does not arise from the smallness of our intellects, but from the greatness of our task. Discipline is not necessary for things that are slow and safe; but discipline is necessary for things that are swift and dangerous. We do not need a map for a stroll; but we do need a map for a raid. And that is what Western Democracy is now engaged in: a raid. A raid on the New Jerusalem. It is a crusade of justice. We are trying to do right; one of the wildest perils. We are trying to bring political equity on the earth; to materialise an almost incredible justice. We cannot be vague about what we believe in, what we are willing to fight for, and to die for. There are twenty ways of criticizing a battle, but only one way of winning it. The ordinary man does not obey special rules because he is too stupid to see the alternative; he obeys them because he feels, though he cannot express the fact, that they are the only way of having a rapid and reasonable human activity. Dogmatic democracy as much as dogmatic ethics are our own special creation. There are some who will be annoyed by my calling it a creation of Christianity or a creation of Europe, but certainly it is one or the other. And as the wolf dies fighting, we shall die doctrinal, and Democracy as well as Christianity will die with us. For Democracy is always difficult, and we alone have the fixed principles which face difficulties. If our raid fails no other raid will succeed, and no men, perhaps, will ever come again so near to bringing justice on the earth!

There is outburst of cheering and applause at the conclusion of his speech, which he humbly acknowledges but grows uncomfortable as it lasts too long. Then, he urges the audience to calm down and invites people to ask questions. His spontaneous answers usually upstage anything he might have said during the lecture.

          Would you prefer to be thin?

          No. My weight gives us a subject with which to start these questions and answer sessions.³⁰

          What are your thoughts on Hell?

          I regard it as a thing to be avoided.³¹

          What do you think of the German language?

          I regard it with a profound agnosticism.³²

          If you were stranded on a desert island with only one book, what book would you want it to be?

          "Thomas’ Guide to Practical Shipbuilding."³³

          Could you speak louder please?

          Good sister, don’t worry. You aren’t missing a thing!³⁴

          What do you think will happen in the next great revolution: the revolt of Nature against Man?

          I hope Man will not hesitate to shoot.³⁵

          Isn’t Truth merely one’s own conception of things?

          That is the Big Blunder. All thought is an attempt to discover if one’s own conception is true or not.³⁶

          Do you believe in the comradeship between the sexes?

          Madam, if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade, you would turn me out of the house.³⁷

          You seem to know everything.

          I know nothing, Madam. I am a journalist.³⁸

           In the event of your having to change your original position, what tactic do you adopt?

          On such occasions, I invariably commit suicide.³⁹

He steps down from the stage. We step back and see that it is just a larger version of his favorite boyhood game, the Toy Theatre, where the figures are fantastic and heroic, the colors bright. He has battled the dragons once again. The applause fades, the lights dim, the picture begins to blur into rapidly passing images. There is the skeletal figure of Shaw, urging him to

Reviews for Common Sense 101

[morgangmac · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fantastic book for those looking to dip their toes into the depths of Chesterton. Ahlquist gives an easy, entertaining sketch of Chesterton's career, philosophy/theology, wit, personal life, and writings. I'm planning to dive in and pick up my first Chesterton tomorrow.

[bkw-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a good introduction to G.K. Chesterton.