All Things Considered (Annotated) E-Book

G.K. Chesterton

• Herausgeber: ePembaBooks
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

• This edition includes the following editor's introduction: G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

First published in 1915, “All Things Considered” collects more than thirty essays that English author G. K. Chesterton wrote as columns for the London Daily News in the years before World War I.

The contents of “All Things Considered” are quintessential Chesterton, covering subjects from poetry to patriotism, anonymity to impartiality, from demagogues to mystagogues, from science to religion, from phonetic spelling to running after one's hat.
But regardless of the topic, each of the essays in "All Things Considered" is the usual Chesterton masterpiece, tempting the reader to track down even more of the 4,000 newspaper columns penned by Chesterton during his career. G. K. Chesterton is well known as a novelist, essayist, storyteller, poet, philosopher, theologian, historian, artist, and critic. He's less well-known as a journalist these days, yet all evidence indicates that he viewed his work for the various newspapers as his primary raison-de-etre. Therefore anyone interested in exploring the works of this colossal genius should include a sampling of his newspaper columns, as featured in "All Things Considered," along with all of his other brilliant books.

 

Leseprobe

Table of contents

G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

The Case For The Ephemeral

Cockneys And Their Jokes

The Fallacy Of Success

On Running After One's Hat

The Vote And The House

Conceit And Caricature

Patriotism And Sport

An Essay On Two Cities

French And English

The Zola Controversy

Oxford From Without

Woman

The Modern Martyr

On Political Secrecy

Edward VII. And Scotland

Thoughts Around Koepenick

The Boy

Limericks And Counsels Of Perfection

Anonymity And Further Counsels

On The Cryptic And The Elliptic

The Worship Of The Wealthy

Science And Religion

The Methuselahite

Spiritualism

The Error Of Impartiality

Phonetic Spelling

Humanitarianism And Strength

Wine When It Is Red

Demagogues And Mystagogues

The "Eatanswill Gazette"

Fairy Tales

Tom Jones And Morality

The Maid Of Orleans

A Dead Poet

Christmas

G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

There are writers who disappear into their subjects or, rather, who dissolve into them, like a substance that determines, but we barely perceive; others, on the other hand, it seems that their personality is the key to everything they touch. Among the latter is Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), author of almost a hundred works including essays, articles and short stories. He found it hard not to write a book on any subject that occupied his mind. He was a cultured man, and more intuitive than rigorous, although it must be admitted that his intuition was very well formed, except, perhaps, in his fierce defence of Catholicism, something which united him with his lifelong friend Hilaire Belloc, another who, if not bordering on fanaticism, at least touches on obsession bordering on nonsense at times, as when he postulated, something he shared with Chesterton, the need for there to be only one religion, the true one, that is, Catholicism. Chesterton is one of those writers, like Samuel Johnson, who possesses a strong personality, and he shares with the Scotsman the good fortune of having had talent; otherwise he would have been an imbecile or a buffoon. Not all those without talent are imbeciles or buffoons, for that you have to take some risk, and Chesterton took the risk, for the time being, of arguing with his contemporaries, and of confronting the great dead with an attitude not exempt from closeness and irreverence, without excluding admiration and respect, which manages to make them more alive to us. Moreover, like H. G. Wells, he was a writer concerned with his time, although the author of "The Invisible Man" was a socialist and Chesterton a conservative, but, like almost everything about him, he needs to define himself in order to fit in. I said earlier that he was not rigorous, and what I meant was not that he did not try to get to the end of his reflections, but that on many occasions he did not do enough research, for example, in science, when he talks about evolutionism, because, unlike H.G. Wells, he had no idea of biology. But Chesterton was a man of remarkable intelligence, as well as a wonderful prose writer, a master of paradoxes and parallels of all kinds, able to make sparks fly in any sentence. He was brilliant, and those sparkles illuminated much of what he spoke. He had other qualities: cordiality and humour, also with himself, although humour and cordiality did not exempt him from being combative and a fearsome debater. As is well known, he moved from agnosticism to Anglicanism before finally, in 1922, embracing Christianity with fervour and book. From that date is his text "Why I Am Catholic," which could be read in parallel with Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927). Chesterton looked a bit like filmmaker Orson Wells, very tall and getting fatter with age. They both had some temperamental stubbornness, I think. And they both shared what I said at the beginning: we recognise a Chesterton text as easily as we recognise a Wells film fragment as something that belongs entirely to them.

An overview of Chesterton's work In his early literary days Chesterton used to write poetry, his first two books, poetry collections, were published in 1900, making his debut with the volume of poems "Greybeards At Play." These were followed by collections of essays and in 1903, and his most substantial work to that point, a study of “Robert Browning.” In 1911, he would publish his finest work of poetry, "The Ballad of the White Horse." This was followed by phenomenal critical essays on various British literary figures, including Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens, and his first novel, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" (1904), a book of incisive political observation and social criticism approached with an intelligent sense of humour. He later published important titles such as "The Club of Queer Trades" (1905), the book of police intrigue and Christian allegory "The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare" (1908), "Manalive" (1912), "The Flying Inn" (1914) and "The Return of Don Quixote" (1927). His international transcendence, apart from his excellent books of essays, was based on the writing of novels and short stories that showed his skill in linguistic handling, in the use of insightful comedy, and in the imagination for the creation of detective plots, with many of them retaining a critical character and an allegorical sense. His stories featuring Father Brown brought him worldwide fame. This character was created on the basis of his friendship with Father John O'Connor, whom Chesterton met at the beginning of the 20th century. O'Connor's ideals of life made a strong impression on the intellectual mind of G. K., who by 1909 had left the hustle and bustle of London to live in the quieter Beaconsfield. The titles of the books with the adventures of the popular priest detective are "The Innocence of Father Brown" (1911), "The Wisdom of Father Brown" (1914), "The Incredulity of Father Brown" (1926), "The Secret of Father Brown" (1927) and "The Scandal of Father Brown" (1935). In fiction, he also published short stories, such as those collected in the volume "The Poet and the Lunatics" (1929), short stories centred on a single character, the poet Gabriel Gale. Chesterton was a lucid thinker on the political and social reality around him, defending the simplicity of primordial Christian values, and in 1911 he founded a publication with another British writer of French origin, Hilarie Belloc. After the First World War he took up distributism, which called for a better distribution of wealth and property. His ideas clashed with other important intellectuals of the time, such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. As explained above, in 1922 G. K. Chesterton eventually converted to Catholicism, writing biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas. Some of his most important essays are "Heretics" (1905), "Orthodoxy" (1908), "What's Wrong With the World" (1910), "The Everlasting Man" (1925) and the collection of essays previously appeared as columns in the Illustrated London News, “ All Things Considered” (1915).

He also wrote "A Short History of England" (1917) and biographies of writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and George Bernard Shaw.

The Editor, P.C. 2022

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

G. K. Chesterton

The Case For The Ephemeral

I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they stand. They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were handed in the moment before it was too late, and I do not think that our commonwealth would have been shaken to its foundations if they had been handed in the moment after. They must go out now, with all their imperfections on their head, or rather on mine; for their vices are too vital to be improved with a blue pencil, or with anything I can think of, except dynamite.

Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I had no time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous. Let any honest reader shut his eyes for a few moments, and approaching the secret tribunal of his soul, ask himself whether he would really rather be asked in the next two hours to write the front page of the Times, which is full of long leading articles, or the front page of Tit-Bits, which is full of short jokes. If the reader is the fine conscientious fellow I take him for, he will at once reply that he would rather on the spur of the moment write ten Times articles than one Tit-Bits joke. Responsibility, a heavy and cautious responsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody can do it. That is why so many tired, elderly, and wealthy men go in for politics. They are responsible, because they have not the strength of mind left to be irresponsible. It is more dignified to sit still than to dance the Barn Dance. It is also easier. So in these easy pages I keep myself on the whole on the level of the Times: it is only occasionally that I leap upwards almost to the level of Tit-Bits.

I resume the defence of this indefensible book. These articles have another disadvantage arising from the scurry in which they were written; they are too long-winded and elaborate. One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time. If I have to start for High-gate this day week, I may perhaps go the shortest way. If I have to start this minute, I shall almost certainly go the longest. In these essays (as I read them over) I feel frightfully annoyed with myself for not getting to the point more quickly; but I had not enough leisure to be quick. There are several maddening cases in which I took two or three pages in attempting to describe an attitude of which the essence could be expressed in an epigram; only there was no time for epigrams. I do not repent of one shade of opinion here expressed; but I feel that they might have been expressed so much more briefly and precisely. For instance, these pages contain a sort of recurring protest against the boast of certain writers that they are merely recent. They brag that their philosophy of the universe is the last philosophy or the new philosophy, or the advanced and progressive philosophy. I have said much against a mere modernism. When I use the word "modernism," I am not alluding specially to the current quarrel in the Roman Catholic Church, though I am certainly astonished at any intellectual group accepting so weak and unphilosophical a name. It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite. But apart altogether from that particular disturbance, I am conscious of a general irritation expressed against the people who boast of their advancement and modernity in the discussion of religion. But I never succeeded in saying the quite clear and obvious thing that is really the matter with modernism. The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly "in the know." To flaunt the fact that we have had all the last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last bonnets from Paris. To introduce into philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed's antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady's age. It is caddish because it is irrelevant. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion Similarly I find that I have tried in these pages to express the real objection to philanthropists and have not succeeded. I have not seen the quite simple objection to the causes advocated by certain wealthy idealists; causes of which the cause called teetotalism is the strongest case. I have used many abusive terms about the thing, calling it Puritanism, or superciliousness, or aristocracy; but I have not seen and stated the quite simple objection to philanthropy; which is that it is religious persecution. Religious persecution does not consist in thumbscrews or fires of Smithfield; the essence of religious persecution is this: that the man who happens to have material power in the State, either by wealth or by official position, should govern his fellow-citizens not according to their religion or philosophy, but according to his own. If, for instance, there is such a thing as a vegetarian nation; if there is a great united mass of men who wish to live by the vegetarian morality, then I say in the emphatic words of the arrogant French marquis before the French Revolution, "Let them eat grass." Perhaps that French oligarch was a humanitarian; most oligarchs are. Perhaps when he told the peasants to eat grass he was recommending to them the hygienic simplicity of a vegetarian restaurant. But that is an irrelevant, though most fascinating, speculation. The point here is that if a nation is really vegetarian let its government force upon it the whole horrible weight of vegetarianism. Let its government give the national guests a State vegetarian banquet. Let its government, in the most literal and awful sense of the words, give them beans. That sort of tyranny is all very well; for it is the people tyrannising over all the persons. But "temperance reformers" are like a small group of vegetarians who should silently and systematically act on an ethical assumption entirely unfamiliar to the mass of the people. They would always be giving peerages to greengrocers.

They would always be appointing Parliamentary Commissions to enquire into the private life of butchers. Whenever they found a man quite at their mercy, as a pauper or a convict or a lunatic, they would force him to add the final touch to his inhuman isolation by becoming a vegetarian. All the meals for school children will be vegetarian meals. All the State public houses will be vegetarian public houses. There is a very strong case for vegetarianism as compared with teetotalism. Drinking one glass of beer cannot by any philosophy be drunkenness; but killing one animal can, by this philosophy, be murder. The objection to both processes is not that the two creeds, teetotal and vegetarian, are not admissible; it is simply that they are not admitted.

The thing is religious persecution because it is not based on the existing religion of the democracy. These people ask the poor to accept in practice what they know perfectly well that the poor would not accept in theory. That is the very definition of religious persecution. I was against the Tory attempt to force upon ordinary Englishmen a Catholic theology in which they do not believe. I am even more against the attempt to force upon them a Mohamedan morality which they actively deny.

Again, in the case of anonymous journalism I seem to have said a great deal without getting out the point very clearly. Anonymous journalism is dangerous, and is poisonous in our existing life simply because it is so rapidly becoming an anonymous life. That is the horrible thing about our contemporary atmosphere. Society is becoming a secret society. The modern tyrant is evil because of his elusiveness. He is more nameless than his slave. He is not more of a bully than the tyrants of the past; but he is more of a coward. The rich publisher may treat the poor poet better or worse than the old master workman treated the old apprentice. But the apprentice ran away and the master ran after him.

Nowadays it is the poet who pursues and tries in vain to fix the fact of responsibility. It is the publisher who runs away. The clerk of Mr. Solomon gets the sack: the beautiful Greek slave of the Sultan Suliman also gets the sack; or the sack gets her. But though she is concealed under the black waves of the Bosphorus, at least her destroyer is not concealed. He goes behind golden trumpets riding on a white elephant. But in the case of the clerk it is almost as difficult to know where the dismissal comes from as to know where the clerk goes to. It may be Mr. Solomon or Mr. Solomon's manager, or Mr. Solomon's rich aunt in Cheltenham, or Mr. Soloman's rich creditor in Berlin.

The elaborate machinery which was once used to make men responsible is now used solely in order to shift the responsibility. People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we in this age are not suffering from the pride of tyrants. We are suffering from the shyness of tyrants; from the shrinking modesty of tyrants. Therefore we must not encourage leader-writers to be shy; we must not inflame their already exaggerated modesty. Rather we must attempt to lure them to be vain and ostentatious; so that through ostentation they may at last find their way to honesty.

The last indictment against this book is the worst of all. It is simply this: that if all goes well this book will be unintelligible gibberish.

For it is mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their nature accidental and incapable of enduring. Brief as is the career of such a book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of the philosophies that it attacks.

In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.

Cockneys And Their Jokes

A writer in the Yorkshire Evening Post is very angry indeed with my performances in this column. His precise terms of reproach are, "Mr. G. K. Chesterton is not a humourist: not even a Cockney humourist." I do not mind his saying that I am not a humourist—in which (to tell the truth) I think he is quite right. But I do resent his saying that I am not a Cockney. That envenomed arrow, I admit, went home. If a French writer said of me, "He is no metaphysician: not even an English metaphysician," I could swallow the insult to my metaphysics, but I should feel angry about the insult to my country. So I do not urge that I am a humourist; but I do insist that I am a Cockney. If I were a humourist, I should certainly be a Cockney humourist; if I were a saint, I should certainly be a Cockney saint. I need not recite the splendid catalogue of Cockney saints who have written their names on our noble old City churches. I need not trouble you with the long list of the Cockney humourists who have discharged their bills (or failed to discharge them) in our noble old City taverns. We can weep together over the pathos of the poor Yorkshireman, whose county has never produced some humour not intelligible to the rest of the world. And we can smile together when he says that somebody or other is "not even" a Cockney humourist like Samuel Johnson or Charles Lamb. It is surely sufficiently obvious that all the best humour that exists in our language is Cockney humour. Chaucer was a Cockney; he had his house close to the Abbey. Dickens was a Cockney; he said he could not think without the London streets. The London taverns heard always the quaintest conversation, whether it was Ben Johnson's at the Mermaid or Sam Johnson's at the Cock. Even in our own time it may be noted that the most vital and genuine humour is still written about London. Of this type is the mild and humane irony which marks Mr. Pett Ridge's studies of the small grey streets. Of this type is the simple but smashing laughter of the best tales of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, telling of the smoke and sparkle of the Thames. No; I concede that I am not a Cockney humourist. No; I am not worthy to be. Some time, after sad and strenuous after-lives; some time, after fierce and apocalyptic incarnations; in some strange world beyond the stars, I may become at last a Cockney humourist. In that potential paradise I may walk among the Cockney humourists, if not an equal, at least a companion. I may feel for a moment on my shoulder the hearty hand of Dryden and thread the labyrinths of the sweet insanity of Lamb. But that could only be if I were not only much cleverer, but much better than I am. Before I reach that sphere I shall have left behind, perhaps, the sphere that is inhabited by angels, and even passed that which is appropriated exclusively to the use of Yorkshiremen.

No; London is in this matter attacked upon its strongest ground. London is the largest of the bloated modern cities; London is the smokiest; London is the dirtiest; London is, if you will, the most sombre; London is, if you will, the most miserable. But London is certainly the most amusing and the most amused. You may prove that we have the most tragedy; the fact remains that we have the most comedy, that we have the most farce. We have at the very worst a splendid hypocrisy of humour. We conceal our sorrow behind a screaming derision. You speak of people who laugh through their tears; it is our boast that we only weep through our laughter. There remains always this great boast, perhaps the greatest boast that is possible to human nature. I mean the great boast that the most unhappy part of our population is also the most hilarious part. The poor can forget that social problem which we (the moderately rich) ought never to forget. Blessed are the poor; for they alone have not the poor always with them. The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially of vulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea. The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic. They saw something delicate which they could only express by something indelicate. I remember that Mr. Max Beerbohm (who has every merit except democracy) attempted to analyse the jokes at which the mob laughs. He divided them into three sections: jokes about bodily humiliation, jokes about things alien, such as foreigners, and jokes about bad cheese. Mr. Max Beerbohm thought he understood the first two forms; but I am not sure that he did. In order to understand vulgar humour it is not enough to be humorous. One must also be vulgar, as I am. And in the first case it is surely obvious that it is not merely at the fact of something being hurt that we laugh (as I trust we do) when a Prime Minister sits down on his hat. If that were so we should laugh whenever we saw a funeral. We do not laugh at the mere fact of something falling down; there is nothing humorous about leaves falling or the sun going down. When our house falls down we do not laugh. All the birds of the air might drop around us in a perpetual shower like a hailstorm without arousing a smile. If you really ask yourself why we laugh at a man sitting down suddenly in the street you will discover that the reason is not only recondite, but ultimately religious. All the jokes about men sitting down on their hats are really theological jokes; they are concerned with the Dual Nature of Man. They refer to the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

Quite equally subtle and spiritual is the idea at the back of laughing at foreigners. It concerns the almost torturing truth of a thing being like oneself and yet not like oneself. Nobody laughs at what is entirely foreign; nobody laughs at a palm tree. But it is funny to see the familiar image of God disguised behind the black beard of a Frenchman or the black face of a Negro. There is nothing funny in the sounds that are wholly inhuman, the howling of wild beasts or of the wind. But if a man begins to talk like oneself, but all the syllables come out different, then if one is a man one feels inclined to laugh, though if one is a gentleman one resists the inclination.

Mr. Max Beerbohm, I remember, professed to understand the first two forms of popular wit, but said that the third quite stumped him. He could not see why there should be anything funny about bad cheese. I can tell him at once. He has missed the idea because it is subtle and philosophical, and he was looking for something ignorant and foolish. Bad cheese is funny because it is (like the foreigner or the man fallen on the pavement) the type of the transition or transgression across a great mystical boundary. Bad cheese symbolises the change from the inorganic to the organic. Bad cheese symbolises the startling prodigy of matter taking on vitality. It symbolises the origin of life itself. And it is only about such solemn matters as the origin of life that the democracy condescends to joke. Thus, for instance, the democracy jokes about marriage, because marriage is a part of mankind. But the democracy would never deign to joke about Free Love, because Free Love is a piece of priggishness.

As a matter of fact, it will be generally found that the popular joke is not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The vulgar joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact. For instance, it is not in the least true that mothers-in-law are as a class oppressive and intolerable; most of them are both devoted and useful. All the mothers-in-law I have ever had were admirable. Yet the legend of the comic papers is profoundly true. It draws attention to the fact that it is much harder to be a nice mother-in-law than to be nice in any other conceivable relation of life. The caricatures have drawn the worst mother-in-law a monster, by way of expressing the fact that the best mother-in-law is a problem. The same is true of the perpetual jokes in comic papers about shrewish wives and henpecked husbands. It is all a frantic exaggeration, but it is an exaggeration of a truth; whereas all the modern mouthings about oppressed women are the exaggerations of a falsehood. If you read even the best of the intellectuals of to-day you will find them saying that in the mass of the democracy the woman is the chattel of her lord, like his bath or his bed. But if you read the comic literature of the democracy you will find that the lord hides under the bed to escape from the wrath of his chattel. This is not the fact, but it is much nearer the truth. Every man who is married knows quite well, not only that he does not regard his wife as a chattel, but that no man can conceivably ever have done so. The joke stands for an ultimate truth, and that is a subtle truth. It is one not very easy to state correctly. It can, perhaps, be most correctly stated by saying that, even if the man is the head of the house, he knows he is the figurehead.

But the vulgar comic papers are so subtle and true that they are even prophetic. If you really want to know what is going to happen to the future of our democracy, do not read the modern sociological prophecies, do not read even Mr. Wells's Utopias for this purpose, though you should certainly read them if you are fond of good honesty and good English. If you want to know what will happen, study the pages of Snaps or Patchy Bits as if they were the dark tablets graven with the oracles of the gods. For, mean and gross as they are, in all seriousness, they contain what is entirely absent from all Utopias and all the sociological conjectures of our time: they contain some hint of the actual habits and manifest desires of the English people. If we are really to find out what the democracy will ultimately do with itself, we shall surely find it, not in the literature which studies the people, but in the literature which the people studies.

I can give two chance cases in which the common or Cockney joke was a much better prophecy than the careful observations of the most cultured observer. When England was agitated, previous to the last General Election, about the existence of Chinese labour, there was a distinct difference between the tone of the politicians and the tone of the populace. The politicians who disapproved of Chinese labour were most careful to explain that they did not in any sense disapprove of Chinese. According to them, it was a pure question of legal propriety, of whether certain clauses in the contract of indenture were not inconsistent with our constitutional traditions: according to them, the case would have been the same if the people had been Kaffirs or Englishmen. It all sounded wonderfully enlightened and lucid; and in comparison the popular joke looked, of course, very poor. For the popular joke against the Chinese labourers was simply that they were Chinese; it was an objection to an alien type; the popular papers were full of gibes about pigtails and yellow faces. It seemed that the Liberal politicians were raising an intellectual objection to a doubtful document of State; while it seemed that the Radical populace were merely roaring with idiotic laughter at the sight of a Chinaman's clothes. But the popular instinct was justified, for the vices revealed were Chinese vices.