In Defense Of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton

By G.K Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton was a master essayist. But reading his essays is not just an exercise in studying a literary form at its finest, it is an encounter with timeless truths that jump off the page as fresh and powerful as the day they were written.

The only problem with Chesterton's essays is that there are too many of them. Over five thousand! For most GKC readers it is not even possible to know where to start or how to begin to approach them.

So three of the world's leading authorities on Chesterton - Dale Ahlquist, Joseph Pearce, Aidan Mackey - have joined together to select the "best" Chesterton essays, a collection that will be appreciated by both the newcomer and the seasoned student of this great 20th century man of letters.

The variety of topics are astounding: barbarians, architects, mystics, ghosts, fireworks, rain, juries, gargoyles and much more. Plus a look at Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen, George MacDonald, T.S. Eliot, and the Bible. All in that inimitable, formidable but always quotable style of GKC. Even more astounding than the variety is the continuity of Chesterton's thought that ties everything together. A veritable feast for the mind and heart.

While some of the essays in this volume may be familiar, many of them are collected here for the first time, making their first appearance in over a century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Sep 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781681492568

G.K Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a prolific English journalist and author best known for his mystery series featuring the priest-detective Father Brown and for the metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday. Baptized into the Church of England, Chesterton underwent a crisis of faith as a young man and became fascinated with the occult. He eventually converted to Roman Catholicism and published some of Christianity’s most influential apologetics, including Heretics and Orthodoxy. 

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FOREWORD

Aidan Mackey

The essay is, for the moment, perhaps the most neglected literary form. I say for the moment because unless the moral and literary decadence of our day proves to be irreversible, the essay will eventually spring back into vigorous new life. The best essays have given us such a richness of erudition, elegance, wit, information, and sheer high bubbling fun that we must know beyond doubt that the essay will not perish.

It is with no disrespect at all to the classic masters of the form—Addison, Steele, Hazlitt, Arnold, Dr. Johnson, and Charles Lamb—that I declare my own high indebtedness to the essayists of the twentieth century, especially Robert Lynd, Belloc, E. V. Lucas (who, in addition to writing his own radiant essays, thought up the witty titles for some of G. K. Chesterton’s own collections of the form: Alarms and Discursions, Tremendous Trifles, Come to Think of It, A Shilling for My Thoughts, and others), and—the essayist most recent so far as my own knowledge goes—Bernard Levin, who died in 2004 and whose memory I salute.

It is, though, with Chesterton himself that this volume is concerned. After my boyhood introduction to him through The Man Who Was Thursday, I next discovered his essays and was, at the age of fourteen, ushered into a new and more spacious sphere of literary experience than that offered by the yarns of boys’ adventures, upon which I had previously fed.

Later, in my days as a schoolmaster, I had the pleasure and the fun of introducing many twelve- and thirteen-year-old pupils to my slightly abridged versions of a few of those illuminating pieces. A Piece of Chalk was always popular, as was The Twelve Men. I have long maintained that we frequently and culpably underestimate the ability of young people to understand adult concepts, provided that we explain and discuss them lucidly.

But the most rewarding essay to my charges seemed always to be What I Found in My Pocket, in which G. K. C. finds himself in a railway compartment without books or newspapers. The hearts of my pupils were won by the account of Chesterton being reduced to searching his pockets and unearthing tram tickets, upon which were short . . . scientific essays about some kind of pill, and a box of matches that prompted him to meditate on fire, which is stronger even than steel, the old, fierce female thing we all love, but dare not touch.

Then, especially enjoyed by the boys, came the passage: "The next thing that I took out was a pocket-knife. . . . I saw a vague and violent battle, in which the stone axes broke and stone knives were splintered against something shining and new in the hand of one desperate man. . . . I saw all the swords of Feudal and all the wheels of Industrial war. For the knife is only a short sword; and the pocket-knife is a secret sword."

The emphasis in that last sentence is mine. As for the whole passage, many times I have seen its effect upon the young imagination and have myself been warmed and rewarded by it.

If you, reader of this volume, are fortunate enough to have contact with young readers of our own day, do, I implore you, introduce them to the essay form—and there is no better place to start than with G. K. Chesterton.

PREFACE

Joseph Pearce

I am interested in getting to know the works of G. K. Chesterton. Could you recommend a good place to start? When I hear this question—one of the most frequently asked during my travels on the lecture circuit—I experience a sinking feeling deep inside. I am obviously not disappointed that my interlocutor desires to get to know Chesterton. (Perish the thought!) On the contrary, I am always delighted to learn of another would-be convert to the magic of G. K. C. The truth is that the sinking feeling overcomes me in spite of such delight, souring its sweetness. I have come to realise that this seemingly inexplicable sense of apprehension is caused by the knowledge that I have just been asked a question that is much easier to ask than it is to answer.

The first difficulty in answering such a question is that I need to know more about the person asking it before I am able to offer an adequate reply Does he prefer fiction or non-fiction? Does he like poetry? Is he the type of reader who likes to battle with the big questions of metaphysics, or does he prefer the truth served up in bite-size (or byte-size) chunks? I feel that I would have to sit down with my interlocutor and become his inquisitor, preferably over a pint or two of ale or a glass or two of wine. Since time seldom affords us the luxury of such pleasures, it becomes necessary to cut to the chase. Therefore, in the absence of all the necessary data, I offer the eminently sensible suggestion that he begin his study of Chesterton by buying my own biography of him! Such a solution has the added bonus of offering him the opportunity to instantly gratify his new-found enthusiasm for G. K. C. by purchasing a copy of the said volume even as he speaks, ample stocks of which are available at the author’s book-table at which he is presently standing.

In defence of such shameless salesmanship, and in defiance of those who wish to scoff, I explain that my biography is peppered throughout with liberal and lengthy quotations from many of Chesterton’s works. These serve as an appetizer or a sampler of G. K. C.’s considerable corpus, an hors d’oeuvre to his oeuvre. In fairness to Messieurs Ahlquist and Mackey, my co-conspirators in the compiling of the present volume, they have also published works that serve as good introductions to Chesterton. Needless to say, my interlocutor remains blissfully ignorant of these rival volumes as he is seduced into buying mine.

But let’s return to our original question and try to answer it in general terms in spite of our knowledge that every man is not Everyman and that, therefore, he will differ in his preferences from his fellow men. Should our interlocutor prefer fiction, he should be told that The Man Who Was Thursday is indubitably Chesterton’s finest novel but that it is less accessible and perhaps less fun than The Ball and the Cross. It is certainly more confusing on a first reading, whereas The Ball and the Cross offers the reader an unabashed battle between its Catholic and atheist protagonists in decidedly unambiguous terms. If he prefers poetry, he should be introduced to The Ballad of the White Horse or to Lepanto but should not be deprived of the delights of Chesterton’s less ambitious voyages into verse, such as The Donkey, The Fish, The Skeleton, and The Rolling English Road; nor should he be allowed to overlook relatively unknown and priceless gems, such as The Strange Music and The Crystal. If he wants to do battle with the great metaphysical truths underpinning reality, he should grapple with the acrobatic brilliance of The Everlasting Man or Orthodoxy. If he wants hagiography worthy of hallowing to the heights, he should read G. K. C.’s pen portrait of Saint Thomas Aquinas or Saint Francis of Assisi. And we have not even mentioned the works of literary biography, or the detective stories, or the works of history, politics, or economics. Or the essays.

As to the last, it is a sorry fact that Chesterton’s essays are sadly neglected in relation to the rest of his corpus, and this in spite of the fact that Chesterton is one of the finest essayists ever to grace the English language. In atonement for this sin of omission and this tradition of neglect, the present volume endeavours to bring together some of Chesterton’s finest essays. I am pleased to have partnered Messieurs Ahlquist and Mackey in this noble project in which we have wallowed self-indulgently in la crème de la crème of Chestertonian belles-lettres. We have rectified a crime by being partners in cream!

[Having soured the cream of Chesterton with the worst of puns, the author exits stage left, rather hurriedly, to a chorus of boos and hisses. . .]

INTRODUCTION

Dale Ahlquist

If I may myself imitate the timid and tentative tone of the true essayist, I will confine myself to saying that there is something in what I say.

— G. K. Chesterton, On Essays

And who do we think we are calling any collection of Chesterton essays the best? The prospect of putting such a collection together seemed not just presumptuous, but impossible. Nonetheless, I agreed to participate in putting this volume together, especially since it was obvious that my presence on the committee would be necessary to balance those two Englishmen. So I arranged their choices along with mine and did what good editors do, which is nothing. Thus we have a pure dose of Chesterton the Master Essayist. But no matter how large the book, any such collection will leave out shining literary gems, essays that are not merely outstanding, but perfect. Perfect, I say. How could a perfect essay not be included among the best? But I assure you we left several perfect essays out. And yet, here we are, trying to pass this collection off as The Best Essays of G. K. Chesterton.

We begin with the first essay of Chesterton’s first book, and we end with the last essay of his last book. (There will be pedants who point out that neither of these statements is true, but as Chesterton would say, they need not detain us.) Most of these essays are from previously compiled collections; however, a few of them are collected here for the first time. Two of the essays are not really essays but are transcripts of talks given by Chesterton. Why are they included? Because, as Chesterton’s wife and others attested, he talked just like he wrote.

In his essays, Chesterton can move from what seems to be the ridiculous to what is unmistakably the sublime in just a few paragraphs. He can start by lying in bed, contemplating painting the ceiling with a broom, and finish by reflecting on the inversion of values in modern society. He can start by losing a piece of chalk and finish with a profound meditation on the meaning of purity.

He takes on any topic—vulgarity; the police; sex; Jane Austen; mysticism; architecture; Shakespeare; voting; gargoyles; free verse; Mary, Queen of Scots; bureaucrats; demon possession; cheese; fantasy; religious tolerance—and he does not merely enlighten, he illuminates. He fills us with light and sheds light on everything else. There is, as he says, something in what he says. He combines his literary powers—a crispness of style, a lightness of touch, and a clarity of thought—to point to the truth. That is his goal. He gets there, and he gets there beautifully, often taking the scenic route.

As he neared the end of a long and prolific literary career, he promised to end with a bang. But all of his essays end with a bang. They begin with a bang too. He understands the value of both a good opening line and a good closing line. It is not just because he has a gift for aphorism. It is because he is a good mystery writer.

Yes, Chesterton the master essayist is still best remembered for his detective stories. But all of his essays are like detective stories. A good essay begins not just with an intriguing hook but a dilemma that needs to be solved—a fresh corpse, if you will. How did this victim get here? What are the clues? Who are the characters in this story, the suspects, the sleuth? We pursue the possible leads and gather information in each paragraph. Every sentence is suggestive. But then something thrilling happens. The solution when it is revealed comes as a surprise, even a shock. He has been leading us along in one direction, but then he abruptly changes course and stuns us with a conclusion that we had not been anticipating. At the same instant we realize that it is the only possible solution. Better still, it has been obvious all along. We just didn’t see it till he pointed it out to us.

Read Chesterton’s essay The Twelve Men. It builds perfectly to an ending that is utterly unexpected but completely satisfying. (No wonder all three of us had that one on our list. It shows that the other two guys were at least paying attention. There is hope even for England.)

The immortal writer, says Chesterton, is he who does something universal in a special manner.¹ This quality that he recognized in other great writers was something that he himself exhibited. He is a teacher who paints with words. Each of his essays is both a lesson and a work of art.

Introduction to The Defendant

The Defendant, 1901

In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a level, and make us all realise that we live on a planet with a sloping roof, you will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose. The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It is often difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come together except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it is always associated with one idea, recurrent and at last instinctive. The scene was the scene of the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, a prophet as much more gigantic than after-prophets as the boulders are more gigantic than the pebbles. He spoke some words—words that seemed shameful and tremendous—and the world, in terror, buried him under a wilderness of stones. The place is the monument of an ancient fear. If we followed the same mood of fancy, it would be more difficult to imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried under the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation—it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry. It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. If we weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth.

Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope—the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt. For the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of human history—that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.

The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God. Jesus Christ was crucified, it may be remembered, not because of anything he said about God, but on a charge of saying that a man could in three days pull down and rebuild the Temple. Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realising its goodness. The prophet who is stoned is not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a rejected lover. He suffers from an unrequited attachment to things in general.

It becomes increasingly apparent, therefore, that the world is in a permanent danger of being misjudged. That this is no fanciful or mystical idea may be tested by simple examples. The two absolutely basic words good and bad, descriptive of two primal and inexplicable sensations, are not, and never have been, used properly. Things that are bad are not called good by any people who experience them; but things that are good are called bad by the universal verdict of humanity.

Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a toothache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one’s back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilisation is a good civilisation not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.

Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea. I have found that every man is disposed to call the green leaf of the tree a little less green than it is, and the snow of Christmas a little less white than it is; therefore I have imagined that the main business of a man, however humble, is defence. I have conceived that a defendant is chiefly required when worldlings despise the world—that a counsel for the defence would not have been out of place in that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary and Man was rejected of men.

A Defence of Skeletons

The Defendant, 1901

Some little time ago I stood among immemorial English trees that seemed to take hold upon the stars like a brood of Ygdrasils. As I walked among these living pillars I became gradually aware that the rustics who lived and died in their shadow adopted a very curious conversational tone. They seemed to be constantly apologizing for the trees, as if they were a very poor show. After elaborate investigation, I discovered that their gloomy and penitent tone was traceable to the fact that it was winter and all the trees were bare. I assured them that I did not resent the fact that it was winter, that I knew the thing had happened before, and that no forethought on their part could have averted this blow of destiny. But I could not in any way reconcile them to the fact that it was winter. There was evidently a general feeling that I had caught the trees in a kind of disgraceful deshabille, and that they ought not to be seen until, like the first human sinners, they had covered themselves with leaves. So it is quite clear that, while very few people appear to know anything of how trees look in winter, the actual foresters know less than anyone. So far from the line of the tree when it is bare appearing harsh and severe, it is luxuriantly indefinable to an unusual degree; the fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette. The tops of two or three high trees when they are leafless are so soft that they seem like the gigantic brooms of that fabulous lady who was sweeping the cobwebs off the sky. The outline of a leafy forest is in comparison hard, gross, and blotchy; the clouds of night do not more certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds obscure the tree; the actual sight of the little wood, with its gray and silver sea of life, is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders’ webs.

But surely the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a vulgar one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a pianist. When winter, that healthy ascetic, carries his gigantic razor over hill and valley, and shaves all the trees like monks, we feel surely that they are all the more like trees if they are shorn, just as so many painters and musicians would be all the more like men if they were less like mops. But it does appear to be a deep and essential difficulty that men have an abiding terror of their own structure, or of the structure of things they love. This is felt dimly in the skeleton of the tree: it is felt profoundly in the skeleton of the man.

The importance of the human skeleton is very great, and the horror with which it is commonly regarded is somewhat mysterious. Without claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may assert that he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.

One ground exists for this terror: a strange idea has infected humanity that the skeleton is typical of death. A man might as well say that a factory chimney was typical of bankruptcy. The factory may be left naked after ruin, the skeleton may be left naked after bodily dissolution; but both of them have had a lively and workmanlike life of their own, all the pulleys creaking, all the wheels turning, in the House of Livelihood as in the House of Life. There is no reason why this creature (new, as I fancy, to art), the living skeleton, should not become the essential symbol of life.

The truth is that man’s horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all. It is man’s eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being undignified. And the fundamental matter which troubles him in the skeleton is the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is shamelessly grotesque. I do not know why he should object to this. He contentedly takes his place in a world that does not pretend to be genteel—a laughing, working, jeering world. He sees millions of animals carrying, with quite a dandified levity, the most monstrous shapes and appendages, the most preposterous horns, wings, and legs, when they are necessary to utility. He sees the good temper of the frog, the unaccountable happiness of the hippopotamus. He sees a whole universe which is ridiculous, from the animalcule, with a head too big for its body, up to the comet, with a tail too big for its head. But when it comes to the delightful oddity of his own inside, his sense of humour rather abruptly deserts him.

In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance (which was, in certain times and respects, a much gloomier period) this idea of the skeleton had a vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not, surely, the mere dread of death that did this, for these were ages in which men went to meet death singing; it was the idea of the degradation of man in the grinning ugliness of his structure that withered the juvenile insolence of beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in aristocratic stations and ages tended to an impeccable dignity, an endless summer of success which needed to be very sharply reminded of the scorn of the stars. It was well that such flamboyant prigs should be convinced that one practical joke, at least, would bowl them over, that they would fall into one grinning man-trap, and not rise again. That the whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realise; that birth was humorous, coming of age humorous, drinking and fighting humorous, they were far too young and solemn to know. But at least they were taught that death was humorous.

There is a peculiar idea abroad that the value and fascination of what we call Nature lie in her beauty. But the fact that Nature is beautiful in the sense that a dado or a Liberty curtain is beautiful, is only one of her charms, and almost an accidental one. The highest and most valuable quality in Nature is not her beauty, but her generous and defiant ugliness. A hundred instances might be taken. The croaking noise of the rooks is, in itself, as hideous as the whole hell of sounds in a London railway tunnel. Yet it uplifts us like a trumpet with its coarse kindliness and honesty, and the lover in Maud could actually persuade himself that this abominable noise resembled his lady-love’s name. Has the poet, for whom Nature means only roses and lilies, ever heard a pig grunting? It is a noise that does a man good—a strong, snorting, imprisoned noise, breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through every possible outlet and organ. It might be the voice of the earth itself, snoring in its mighty sleep. This is the deepest, the oldest, the most wholesome and religious sense of the value of Nature—the value which comes from her immense babyishness. She is as top-heavy, as grotesque, as solemn, and as happy as a child. The mood does come when we see all her shapes like shapes that a baby scrawls upon a slate—simple, rudimentary, a million years older, and stronger than the whole disease that is called Art. The objects of earth and heaven seem to combine into a nursery tale, and our relation to things seems for a moment so simple that a dancing lunatic would be needed to do justice to its lucidity and levity. The tree above my head is flapping like some gigantic bird standing on one leg; the moon is like the eye of a cyclops. And, however much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing for ever.

On Certain Modern Writers and the

Institution of the Family

Heretics, 1905

The family may fairly be considered, one would think, an ultimate human institution. Every one would admit that it has been the main cell and central unit of almost all societies hitherto, except, indeed, such societies as that of Lacedaemon, which went in for efficiency, and has, therefore, perished, and left not a trace behind. Christianity, even enormous as was its revolution, did not alter this ancient and savage sanctity; it merely reversed it. It did not deny the trinity of father, mother, and child. It merely read it backwards, making it run child, mother, father. This it called, not the family, but the Holy Family, for many things are made holy by being turned upside down. But some sages of our own decadence have made a serious attack on the family. They have impugned it, as I think wrongly; and its defenders have defended it, and defended it wrongly. The common defence of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defence of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one.

It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the willfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilised societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.

We can see this change, for instance, in the modern transformation of the thing called a club. When London was smaller, and the parts of London more self-contained and parochial, the club was what it still is in villages, the opposite of what it is now in great cities. Then the club was valued as a place where a man could be sociable. Now the club is valued as a place where a man can be unsociable. The more the enlargement and elaboration of our civilisation goes on the more the club ceases to be a place where a man can have a noisy argument, and becomes more and more a place where a man can have what is somewhat fantastically called a quiet chop. Its aim is to make a man comfortable, and to make a man comfortable is to make him the opposite of sociable. Sociability, like all good things, is full of discomforts, dangers, and renunciations. The club tends to produce the most degraded of all combinations—the luxurious anchorite, the man who combines the self-indulgence of Lucullus with the insane loneliness of St. Simeon Stylites.

If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuctoo. He goes to the fantastic borders of the earth. He pretends to shoot tigers. He almost rides on a camel. And in all this he is still essentially fleeing from the street in which he was born; and of this flight he is always ready with his own explanation. He says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; if he stares at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. He is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals—of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself. The street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering. He has to soothe and quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles. These creatures are indeed very different from himself. But they do not put their shape or colour or custom into a decisive intellectual competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy his principles and assert their own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do seek to do this. The camel does not contort his features into a fine sneer because Mr. Robinson has not got a hump; the cultured gentleman at No. 5 does exhibit a sneer because Robinson has not got a dado. The vulture will not roar with laughter because a man does not fly; but the major at No. 9 will roar with laughter because a man does not smoke. The complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbours is that they will not, as we express it, mind their own business. We do not really mean that they will not mind their own business. If our neighbours did not mind their own business they would be asked abruptly for their rent, and would rapidly cease to be our neighbours. What we really mean when we say that they cannot mind their own business is something much deeper. We do not dislike them because they have so little force and fire that they cannot be interested in themselves. We dislike them because they have so much force and fire that they can be interested in us as well. What we dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it. And all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character. They are not aversions to its feebleness (as is pretended), but to its energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise humanity for its weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.

Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere—a very powerful description in the purely literary sense—of the disgust and disdain which consume him

Reviews for In Defense Of Sanity

[19vatermit64 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Last Thursday I took a couple of our cars to a local garage to get their oil changed. I figured it was about time, as they were both 5,000 miles past the recommended service point. It was shortly before lunchtime, and I drove one car to the garage while one of my sons followed a few minutes behind. He had to go on to his college classes which start in the afternoon. I couldn't stand that kind of schedule. I like getting up early in the morning and getting my work done sooner rather than later. I am sure that influenced my selection of anesthesiology as a specialty. I also think that I am responding to my own father's habit of sleeping in. While he was teaching as a college professor, he avoided early morning classes. I suspect that my children inherited the 'sleep in late' gene from my side of the family. It must skip a generation. I brought along a book called In Defense of Sanity, which is a compilation of essays by G.K. Chesterton. The essays were selected by Dale Ahlquist, Joseph Pearce, and Aidan Mackey. I have met Ahlquist and Pearce at home schooling conferences. Ahlquist inspired me to look into reading more of Chesterton's works, and I joined the American Chesterton Society to immerse myself more into this writer's work. Both Pearce and Ahlquist signed copies of their books which I had bought. I am reminded that one should never say something flippant when an author asks what he should write when he autographs a book. One of the books in my library is signed with the message to 'keep in touch,' while another states that I am a poor example of manhood. Even serious writers have a sense of humor. I didn't think it would take long to change the oil in two cars, so I scanned the list of Chesterton's essays for one which would be short. I like short essays, because I often don't get back to a book for a while, and by then I need to start from the beginning again. This is especially true with Chesterton, because his writing seems to amble all over the place, and it requires a lot of concentration to follow his train of thought. Add to this that there was a television blaring away in the waiting room. The television show was 'Family Feud,' where two families are pitted against each other. They have to guess the results of survey questions posed to some nebulous cross sectional group of Americans. All of the questions are loaded with innuendo, and today's question was no different. How can one best humiliate a man? By talking about his ....? I wondered if there were children watching this show right now, and thought about how these competing families never seem to have minor children. I also realized I was alone in the waiting room, so I hunted for the power switch on the television and shut it off.Silence reigned. It reminded me of a time, back when I was in the Air Force, and I took our dog to the base veterinary clinic. I did not realize that we were not supposed to bring children - apparently a dog had mauled some child there in the past - so I showed up with several of my little creations in tow. The television in that waiting room was broadcasting the Jerry Springer Show where nearly every word spoken by the guests had to be blanked out. It was obvious that the persons were slinging around obscenities. Everyone in the waiting room was watching this demonstration of bad manners; everyone, including my children and I. I walked over and shut off the television, and then turned to the people staring at me in astonishment, announcing that I don't want my children watching that kind of garbage. Our dog was suddenly the next animal called back for a checkup.As I reached for my book, my gaze fell upon the magazines covering the coffee table in front of me. There were automotive and news magazines, a conservative journal which blamed every problem in the world on the Catholic Church, and a collection of gossip magazines. Right in the middle of the pile was a gossip magazine with a topless woman on the cover. Her arm was strategically placed across her chest. As I tossed it in the garbage, I thought about how one day this woman might have teenage daughters of her own, and how she will have to explain her behavior to them. More likely she will be trying to keep them from making the same mistakes she made when she was young and attractive. I thought about something mentioned in one of the few lectures on geriatric medicine which we had in medical school. This was back in the 1980’s, and we were reminded that some of the elderly women we would be treating probably participated in the ‘flapper’ generation of the 1920’s. We were advised that we might encounter diseases which seemed out of place in senior citizens. But for now there I sat, in a room with all manner of temptation spread before me like a smorgasbord: cars I can’t afford, women I don’t want, and news I don’t care about. I turned back to Chesterton.First, I became aware of men talking in the garage. I heard the workers calling out to one another as they went through their procedures on my cars. I heard the manager talking to someone on the phone about a worker who must be chronically late. I heard him mention that they will charge the employee ten dollars per day that he comes in late. Ouch. And lastly, I heard two workers discussing where they would buy lunch that day. There was nothing glamorous or dramatic about these conversations, but it was a welcome respite after the noise coming out of the television. It was refreshing to hear the ordinary speech of men going about the very honorable job of car care.Finally I opened the book. Three essays caught my interest at once. One was on the Book of Job, another on the contents of Chesterton’s pockets, and the last was simply titled ‘A Piece of Chalk.’ I had heard about his essay on his pockets, and I wanted to read about Job because I recently experienced a new type of suffering, but decided to read about chalk instead. I had read somewhere that Chesterton and a friend were once looking through the window of a store, and GKC had declared that of all the things on display, a piece of lowly chalk was the most powerful thing of all there present. I thought this was the essay; I was wrong. Chesterton begins his essay by procuring some chalk, after which he asked his landlady if she had any brown paper he could borrow. Now, I don’t know how big Chesterton was at the time he wrote this essay (1909), but he was a large man, and must have been very intimidating to those who did not know him well. I can only assume that the landlady fell into this category, as she eagerly supplied him with what he wanted. He then went out into the countryside to draw pictures on the paper. It struck me that Chesterton knew something about leisure which our present society has forgotten. I don’t know of any person who just walked out one day to go drawing pictures on brown paper. Certainly no adults would do this; we have too much other things to do. Only my children would possibly go and do something as fun as walk around outside and draw pictures. Even though our society is more advanced in so many ways, it appears as if we adults have forgotten how to take the time to play. St. Augustine once said that “without work is is impossible to have fun.” Perhaps too much of our work is just idling rather than pursuing a legitimate goal, and therefore we have burned up our free time - time we could spend coloring on brown paper. We need to recapture that childlike Anyway, Chesterton suddenly realizes that he forgot to bring along a piece of white chalk. This would not be a problem if he were coloring on white paper, but it is a disaster when one’s canvas is brown. He makes a good point about the color ‘white:’“And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours, but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”I agree with him, up to a point. Certainly virtue is not solely the absence of evil, but is the presence of good. I doubt anyone is going to get to Heaven simply because he avoided sin. But when an evil is avoided, or removed, other good things can appear. In my own case, shutting off the television - and tossing a magazine in the garbage - made it possible to listen to the sounds of men at work, and to read an essay uninterrupted, and to recall how white chalk is often all around us. We might even be sitting on it.