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Title: A Chesterton Calendar

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release date: May 29, 2014 [eBook #45811]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Irma Špehar and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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Produced by Irma Špehar and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)







A CHESTERTON CALENDAR

  _A Chesterton
  Calendar_

  Compiled from the Writings of
  'G.K.C.' Both in Verse and in
  Prose. With a section apart for
  the Moveable Feasts.

  Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd.

  Dryden House, Gerrard Street, London, W. 1911




PREFATORY NOTE


It will be found that almost all Mr. G. K. Chesterton's books have been
utilized in the making of this Calendar. A word of acknowledgment is
due to the various publishers for their courtesy in permitting this:
to Messrs. Grant Richards, Arthur L. Humphreys, J. W. Arrowsmith, John
Lane, J. M. Dent & Co., Macmillan & Co., Duckworth & Co., Harper & Co.,
Cassell & Co., and Methuen & Co. Recourse has been had also to the
files of the 'Daily News,' the 'Illustrated London News,' and other
journals to which Mr. Chesterton has been a contributor. The present
publishers feel they are peculiarly indebted to Mr. Chesterton himself
for his kindness in allowing them to include certain verses from poems
which have not yet been printed _in extenso_ elsewhere.




JANUARY


Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all
things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of
which I am generally accused.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


NEW YEAR'S DAY

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It
is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new
backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year
resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh
about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man
starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it
is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be
born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

  '_Daily News._'


JANUARY 2nd

There is no such thing as fighting on the winning side: one fights to
find out which is the winning side.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


JANUARY 3rd

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire
to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose
his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for
saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or
mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide- or a drill-book.
This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly
or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if
he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by
continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier, surrounded by
enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire
for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely
cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He
must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will
not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference
to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with
adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity
has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of
the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for
the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has
held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery
of chivalry: the Christian courage which is a disdain of death; not the
Chinese courage which is a disdain of life.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


JANUARY 4th

The fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for
the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let
no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently the stones and weeds,
to have the mind a storehouse of sunsets, requires a discipline in
pleasure and an education in gratitude.

  '_Twelve Types._'


JANUARY 5th

We have people who represent that all great historic motives were
economic, and then have to howl at the top of their voices in order to
induce the modern democracy to act on economic motives. The extreme
Marxian politicians in England exhibit themselves as a small, heroic
minority, trying vainly to induce the world to do what, according to
their theory, the world always does.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


JANUARY 6th

_THE FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY_

THE WISE MEN

    Step softly, under snow or rain,
      To find the place where men can pray;
    The way is all so very plain,
      That we may lose the way.

    Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
      On tortured puzzles from our youth.
    We know all labyrinthine lore,
    We are the three Wise Men of yore,
      And we know all things but the truth.

    Go humbly ... it has hailed and snowed ...
      With voices low and lanterns lit,
    So very simple is the road,
      That we may stray from it.

    The world grows terrible and white,
      And blinding white the breaking day,
    We walk bewildered in the light,
    For something is too large for sight,
      And something much too plain to say.

    The Child that was ere worlds begun
      (... We need but walk a little way ...
    We need but see a latch undone ...),
    The Child that played with moon and sun
      Is playing with a little hay.

    The house from which the heavens are fed,
      The old strange house that is our own,
    Where tricks of words are never said,
    And Mercy is as plain as bread,
      And Honour is as hard as stone.

    Go humbly; humble are the skies,
      And low and large and fierce the Star,
    So very near the Manger lies,
      That we may travel far.

    Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
      To roar to the resounding plain,
    And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
      For God Himself is born again;
    And we are little children walking
      Through the snow and rain.

    '_Daily News._'


JANUARY 7th

The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of
families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still
domestic, of one man one house--this remains the real vision and magnet
of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general,
less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted
woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy
one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the
world's desire.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


JANUARY 8th

The dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they
both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as
a drink.

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


JANUARY 9th

The thing from which England suffers just now more than from any
other evil is not the assertion of falsehoods, but the endless and
irrepressible repetition of half-truths.

  '_G. F Watts._'


JANUARY 10th

It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or
mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is
the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent
eternity, they represent it by a serpent with its tail in its mouth.
There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory
meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the
eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists
and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a
serpent eating its tail--a degraded animal who destroys even himself.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


JANUARY 11th

Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It obviates the crude
requirements of polygamy. If you have one good wife you are sure to
have a spiritual harem.

  '_Daily News._'


JANUARY 12th

We must not have King Midas represented as an example of success; he
was a failure of an unusually painful kind. Also, he had the ears
of an ass. Also (like most other prominent and wealthy persons), he
endeavoured to conceal the fact. It was his barber (if I remember
right) who had to be treated on a confidential footing with regard to
this peculiarity; and his barber, instead of behaving like a go-ahead
person of the succeed-at-all-costs school and trying to blackmail King
Midas, went away and whispered this splendid piece of society scandal
to the reeds, who enjoyed it enormously. It is said that they also
whispered it as the winds swayed them to and fro. I look reverently at
the portrait of Lord Rothschild; I read reverently about the exploits
of Mr. Vanderbilt. I know that I cannot turn everything I touch to
gold; but then I also know that I have never tried, having a preference
for other substances--such as grass and good wine. I know that these
people have certainly succeeded in something; that they have certainly
overcome somebody; I know that they are kings in a sense that no
men were ever kings before; that they create markets and bestride
continents. Yet it always seems to me that there is some small domestic
fact that they are hiding, and I have sometimes thought I heard upon
the wind the laughter and whisper of the reeds.

  '_All Things Considered._'


JANUARY 13th

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been
found difficult; and left untried.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


JANUARY 14th

The old masters of a healthy madness--Aristophanes or Rabelais or
Shakespeare--doubtless had many brushes with the precisians or ascetics
of their day, but we cannot but feel that for honest severity and
consistent self-maceration they would always have had respect. But
what abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have
reserved for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and
did not even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain
to exuberance, which contented itself with the fool's cap without the
bells!

  '_The Defendant._'


JANUARY 15th

The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future,
because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what
you like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freshly with my
favourite colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because
the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly
wiser than we, and of things done which we could not do. I know I
cannot write a poem as good as 'Lycidas.' But it is always easy to say
that the particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of
the future.

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


JANUARY 16th

'I have only that which the poor have equally with the rich; which the
lonely have equally with the man of many friends. To me this whole
strange world is homely, because in the heart of it there is a home; to
me this cruel world is kindly, because higher than the heavens there is
something more human than humanity. If a man must not fight for this,
may he fight for anything? I would fight for my friend, but if I lost
my friend, I should still be there. I would fight for my country, but
if I lost my country, I should still exist. But if what that devil
dreams were true, I should not be--I should burst like a bubble and be
gone; I could not live in that imbecile universe. Shall I not fight for
my own existence?'

  '_The Ball and the Cross._'


JANUARY 17th

There are vast prospects and splendid songs in the point of view of
the typically unsuccessful man; if all the used-up actors and spoilt
journalists and broken clerks could give a chorus it would be a
wonderful chorus in praise of the world.

  _Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_


JANUARY 18th

'Tommy was a good boy' is a purely philosophical statement, worthy of
Plato or Aquinas. 'Tommy lived the higher life' is a gross metaphor
from a ten-foot rule.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


JANUARY 19th

Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. I do
not mean something connected with a piece of enamel, I mean something
with a violent happiness in it--an almost painful happiness. A man may
have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of
victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for
the moment's sake. He enjoys it for the woman's sake, or his own sake.
The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he
enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for
may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last for a
week. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks
of his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled with
eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary.
Once look at them as moments after Pater's manner, and they become as
cold as Pater and his style. Man cannot love mortal things. He can only
love immortal things for an instant.

  '_Heretics._'


JANUARY 20th

It is remarkable that in so many great wars it is the defeated who
have won. The people who were left worst at the end of the war were
generally the people who were left best at the end of the whole
business. For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the
Christians. But they did not end in the decline of the Christians;
they ended in the decline of the Saracens. That huge prophetic wave
of Moslem power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns
of Christendom: that wave was broken, and never came on again. The
Crusades had saved Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem. The same
applies to that epic of Republican war in the eighteenth century to
which we Liberals owe our political creed. The French Revolution ended
in defeat; the kings came back across a carpet of dead at Waterloo.
The Revolution had lost its last battle, but it had gained its first
object. It had cut a chasm. The world has never been the same since.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


JANUARY 21st

From such books ... we can discover what a clever man can do with the
idea of aristocracy. But from the 'Family Herald Supplement' literature
we can learn what the idea of aristocracy can do with a man who is not
clever. And when we know that we know English history.

  '_Heretics._'


JANUARY 22nd

Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot
be used to back up a single sane one. The kinship and competition of
all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel
or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. On
the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly
humane; but you cannot be human. That you and a tiger are one may be a
reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as
cruel as the tiger. It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you;
it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in neither case does
evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably--that is, to admire
his stripes while avoiding his claws. If you want to treat a tiger
reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


JANUARY 23rd

Some priggish little clerk will say, 'I have reason to congratulate
myself that I am a civilized person, and not so bloodthirsty as the
Mad Mullah.' Somebody ought to say to him, 'A really good man would be
less bloodthirsty than the Mullah. But you are less bloodthirsty, not
because you are more of a good man, but because you are a great deal
less of a man. You are not bloodthirsty, not because you would spare
your enemy, but because you would run away from him.'

  '_All Things Considered._'


JANUARY 24th

To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will
sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or
impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot
may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to
point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or
crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a
London street. Upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there
rests for the time being the spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts
the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he
realizes one of our visions.

  '_The Defendant._'


JANUARY 25th

Silence is the unbearable repartee.

  '_Charles Dickens._'


JANUARY 26th

'I am staring,' said MacIan at last, 'at that which shall judge us
both.'

'Oh yes,' said Turnbull in a tired way; 'I suppose you mean God.'

'No, I don't,' said MacIan, shaking his head, 'I mean him.' And he
pointed to the half-tipsy yokel who was ploughing, down the road.

'I mean him. He goes out in the early dawn; he digs or he ploughs a
field. Then he comes back and drinks ale, and then he sings a song. All
your philosophies and political systems are young compared to him. All
your hoary cathedrals--yes, even the Eternal Church on earth is new
compared to him. The most mouldering gods in the British Museum are
new facts beside him. It is he who in the end shall judge us all. I am
going to ask him which of us is right.'

'Ask that intoxicated turnip-eater----'

'Yes--which of us is right. Oh, you have long words and I have long
words; and I talk of every man being the image of God; and you talk of
every man being a citizen and enlightened enough to govern. But, if
every man typifies God, there is God. If every man is an enlightened
citizen, there is your enlightened citizen. The first man one meets is
always man. Let us catch him up.'

  '_The Ball and the Cross._'


JANUARY 27th

I gravely doubt whether women ever were married by capture. I think
they pretended to be; as they do still.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


JANUARY 28th

On bright blue days I do not want anything to happen; the world is
complete and beautiful--a thing for contemplation. I no more ask for
adventures under that turquoise dome than I ask for adventures in
church. But when the background of man's life is a grey background,
then, in the name of man's sacred supremacy, I desire to paint on it in
fire and gore. When the heavens fail man refuses to fail; when the sky
seems to have written on it, in letters of lead and pale silver, the
decree that nothing shall happen, then the immortal soul, the prince of
all creatures, rises up and decrees that something shall happen, if it
be only the slaughter of a policeman.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


JANUARY 29th

It is the very difference between the artistic mind and the
mathematical that the former sees things as they are in a picture,
some nearer and larger, some smaller and farther away: while to the
mathematical mind everything, every inch in a million, every fact in
a cosmos, must be of equal value. That is why mathematicians go mad,
and poets scarcely ever do. A man may have as wide a view of life as
he likes, the wider the better: a distant view, a bird's-eye view, but
still a view and not a map. The one thing he cannot attempt in his
version of the universe is to draw things to scale.

  '_G. F. Watts._'


JANUARY 30th

EXECUTION OF CHARLES I

  The face of the King's servants grew greater than the King.
  He tricked them and they trapped him and drew round him in a ring;
  The new grave lords closed round him that had eaten the abbey's fruits,
  And the men of the new religion with their Bibles in their boots,
  We saw their shoulders moving to menace and discuss.
  And some were pure and some were vile, but none took heed of us;
  We saw the King when they killed him, and his face was proud and pale,
  And a few men talked of freedom while England talked of ale.

  '_The Silent People._'


JANUARY 31st

The 'Iliad' is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey'
because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a
riddle.

  '_The Defendant._'




FEBRUARY


FEBRUARY 1st

Many modern Englishmen talk of themselves as the sturdy descendants of
their sturdy Puritan fathers. As a fact, they would run away from a
cow. If you asked one of their Puritan fathers, if you asked Bunyan,
for instance, whether he was sturdy, he would have answered with tears,
that he was as weak as water. And because of this he would have borne
tortures.

  '_Heretics._'


FEBRUARY 2nd

_CANDLEMAS. THE FEAST OF THE PURIFICATION_

But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on brown paper, it began to
dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a
most exquisite and essential one, behind. I searched all my pockets,
but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted
with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art
of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential.
I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the
wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is this: that
white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour, it is a shining
and affirmative thing: as fierce as red, as definite as black. When
(so to speak) your pencil grows red hot, it draws roses; when it grows
white hot, it draws stars. 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.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


FEBRUARY 3rd

It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is
to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist, as it is easy
to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and
exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along
the historic path of Christendom--that would indeed have been simple.
It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which
one falls: only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of
the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been
obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling
adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering
through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild
truth reeling but erect.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


FEBRUARY 4th

The curse against God is 'Exercise I' in the primer of minor poetry.

  '_The Defendant._'


FEBRUARY 5th

Whatever else the worst doctrine of depravity may have been, it was
a product of spiritual conviction; it had nothing to do with remote
physical origins. Men thought mankind wicked because they felt wicked
themselves. If a man feels wicked, I cannot see why he should suddenly
feel good because somebody tells him that his ancestors once had tails.
Man's primary purity and innocence may have dropped off with his tail,
for all anybody knows. The only thing we all know about that primary
purity and innocence is that we have not got it.

  '_All Things Considered._'


FEBRUARY 6th

If you have composed a bad opera you may persuade yourself that it is a
good one; if you have carved a bad statue you can think yourself better
than Michelangelo. But if you have lost a battle you cannot believe you
have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have
got him off.

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


FEBRUARY 7th  _DICKENS BORN_

We are able to answer the question, 'Why have we no great men?' We
have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. We
are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we
are fastidious--that is, we are small. When Diogenes went about with
a lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had very little
time to be honest himself. And when anybody goes about on his hands
and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that
one man at any rate shall not be great. Now the error of Diogenes
is evident. The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted
to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man.
Diogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern,
but he never thought of looking inside the thief. And that is where
the Founder of Christianity found the honest man; He found him on a
gibbet and promised him Paradise. Just as Christianity looked for the
honest man inside the thief, democracy looked for the wise man inside
the fool. It encouraged the fool to be wise. We can call this thing
sometimes optimism, sometimes equality; the nearest name for it is
encouragement. It had its exaggerations--failure to understand original
sin, notions that education would make all men good, the childlike yet
pedantic philosophies of human perfectibility. But the whole was full
of faith in the infinity of human souls, which is in itself not only
Christian but orthodox; and this we have lost amid the limitations of
pessimistic science. Christianity said that any man could be a saint
if he chose; democracy, that every man could be a citizen if he chose.
The note of the last few decades in art and ethics has been that a man
is stamped with an irrevocable psychology and is cramped for perpetuity
in the prison of his skull. It was a world that expects everything and
everybody. It was a world that encouraged anybody to be anything. And
in England and literature its living expression was Dickens.

  '_Charles Dickens._'


FEBRUARY 8th

That which is large enough for the rich to covet is large enough for
the poor to defend.

  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'


FEBRUARY 9th

The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner,
that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined
themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos,
that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the
family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome
precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It
is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most
other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling
anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested
in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero
restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the
commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve
of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is
like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt
against the family are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting
against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa
is excitable, like mankind. Our younger brother is mischievous, like
mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.

  '_Heretics._'


FEBRUARY 10th

He said: 'If these were silent the very stones would cry out.' With
these words He called up all the wealth of artistic creation that
has been founded on this creed. With those words He founded Gothic
architecture. For in a town like this, which seems to have grown Gothic
as a wood grows leaves--anywhere and anyhow--any odd brick or moulding
may be carved off into a shouting face. The front of vast buildings
is thronged with open mouths, angels praising God, or devils defying
Him. Rock itself is racked and twisted, until it seems to scream. The
miracle is accomplished; the very stones cry out.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


FEBRUARY 11th

The chaos of habits that always goes with males when left entirely
to themselves has only one honourable cure; and that is the strict
discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy young
idealists in East End settlements losing their collars in the wash
and living on tinned salmon, will fully understand why it was decided
by the wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict that if men were to live
without women, they must not live without rules.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


FEBRUARY 12th

The British Empire may annex what it likes, it will never annex
England. It has not even discovered the island, let alone conquered it.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


FEBRUARY 13th

Let it never be forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man;
he is a man who has devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous
intellectual art in which he may achieve masterpieces which he must
keep secret, fight thrilling battles and win hair-breadth victories
for which he cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished
impostor is the most wretched of geniuses: he is a Napoleon on a desert
island.

  '_Browning._'


FEBRUARY 14th _ST. VALENTINE'S DAY_

The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent
of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to
listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to
imagine that the ideal of constancy was a joke mysteriously imposed on
mankind by the devil, instead of being as it is a yoke consistently
imposed on all lovers by themselves. They have invented a phrase, a
phrase that is a black _v._ white contradiction in two words--'free
love'--as if a lover ever had been or ever could be free. It is
the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage
merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.
Modern sages offer to the lover with an ill-favoured grin the largest
liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect
him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon
the heavens as the record of his highest moment. They give him every
liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one
that he wants.

  '_The Defendant._'


FEBRUARY 15th

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.

  '_All Things Considered._'


FEBRUARY 16th

Our fathers had a plain sort of pity: if you will, a gross and coarse
pity. They had their own sort of sentimentalism. They were quite
willing to weep over Smike. But it certainly never occurred to them to
weep over Squeers. No doubt they were often narrow and often visionary.
No doubt they often looked at a political formula when they should
have looked at an elemental fact. No doubt they were pedantic in some
of their principles and clumsy in some of their solutions. No doubt,
in short, they were all very wrong, and no doubt we are the people and
wisdom shall die with us. But when they saw something that in their
eyes, such as they were, really violated their morality, such as it
was, then they did not cry 'Investigate!' They did not cry 'Educate!'
They did not cry 'Improve!' They did not cry 'Evolve!' Like Nicholas
Nickleby, they cried 'Stop!' And it did stop.

  _Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_


FEBRUARY 17th

Some people do not like the word 'dogma.' Fortunately they are free,
and there is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two
things only, for the human mind--a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle
Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its
best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite
point; a prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a
man should not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible of
anything should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called
an ideal.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


FEBRUARY 18th

There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique
of another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the
communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There
are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often
they are made.

  '_The Defendant._'


FEBRUARY 19th

There are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds
of democratic conception or sentiment of human equality. There are two
things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. They are
not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages
of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. But this is
a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this, again, is
an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No
special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having
to die. And no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of
having two legs. Every man is important if he loses his life; and every
man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it. And the
universal test everywhere of whether a thing is popular, of the people,
is whether it employs vigorously these extremes of the tragic and the
comic.

  '_Charles Dickens._'


FEBRUARY 20th

Now the reason why our fathers did not make marriage, in the
middle-aged and static sense, the subject of their plays was a very
simple one; it was that a play is a very bad place for discussing
that topic. You cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or
failure of a marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of
the growth of an oak-tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very
reasonably observed, it is too long. A happy love-affair will make a
drama simply because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or
no. But a happy marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less
happy if it were. The essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks
herself an intense question; but the essence of a sensible wife is
that she is much too sensible to ask herself any questions at all. All
the things that make monogamy a success are in their nature undramatic
things, the silent growth of an instinctive confidence, the common
wounds and victories, the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing
of old jokes. Sane marriage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore
not surprising that most modern dramatists have devoted themselves to
insane marriage.

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


FEBRUARY 21st

If Americans can be divorced for 'incompatibility of temper,' I cannot
conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy
marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is
to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes
unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'

FEBRUARY 22nd

Of a sane man there is only one safe definition: he is a man who can
have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'

FEBRUARY 23rd

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.

  '_Heretics._'


FEBRUARY 24th

It is constantly assumed, especially in our Tolstoian tendencies, that
when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But
that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb.
That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating
the lamb. The real problem is--Can the lion lie down with the lamb
and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church
attempted; _that_ is the miracle she achieved.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


FEBRUARY 25th

Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is
only redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and
crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or
the things on the retina of the eye, or the enormous irrelevancy of
encyclopædias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.

  _Introduction to 'The Old Curiosity Shop.'_


FEBRUARY 26th

It is neither blood nor rain that has made England, but hope--the thing
all those dead men have desired. France was not France because she was
made to be by the skulls of the Celts or by the sun of Gaul. France was
France because she chose.

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


FEBRUARY 27th

A man must be partly a one-idead man because he is a one-weaponed
man--and he is flung naked into the fight. In short, he must (as the
books on Success say) give 'his best'; and what a small part of a man
'his best' is! His second and third best are often much better. If he
is the first violin he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that
he is a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a
fountain-pen, a hand at whist, a gun, and an image of God.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


FEBRUARY 28th

The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the
heavens, but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will
grow, till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or
stable. Not till we know the high things shall we know how lovely they
are.

  '_William Blake._'




MARCH


March 1st _ST. DAVID'S DAY_

  My eyes are void with vision; I sing but I cannot speak;
  I hide in the vaporous caverns like a creature wild and weak;
  But for ever my harps are tuned and for ever my songs are sung,
  And I answer my tyrants ever in an unknown tongue.

  When the blue men broke in the battle with the Roman or the Dane,
  In the cracks of my ghastly uplands they gathered like ghosts again.
  Some say I am still a Druid, some say my spirit shows
  Catholic, Puritan, Pagan; but no man knows.

  Mother of God's good witches, of all white mystery,
  Whatever else I am seeking, I seek for thee.
  For the old harp better fitted and swung on a stronger thong,
  We, that shall sing for ever; O hear our song!

  '_The Seven Swords._'


MARCH 2nd

It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a 'many-faced
and fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than to be a
many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many
modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards.

  '_The Defendant._'


MARCH 3rd

A man may easily be forgiven for not doing this or that incidental act
of charity, especially when the question is as genuinely difficult
and dubious as is the case of mendicity. But there is something quite
pestilently Pecksniffian about shrinking from a hard task on the plea
that it is not hard enough. If a man will really try talking to the ten
beggars who come to his door he will soon find out whether it is really
so much easier than the labour of writing a cheque for a hospital.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


MARCH 4th

But the man we see every day--the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory,
the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office--he is too mentally worried
to believe in freedom. He is kept quiet with revolutionary literature.
He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of wild
philosophies. He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the next day,
a Superman (probably) the next day, and a slave every day. The only
thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory. The
only man who gains by all the philosophies is Gradgrind. It would be
worth his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied with sceptical
literature. And now I come to think of it, of course, Gradgrind is
famous for giving libraries. He shows his sense: all modern books are
on his side. As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the
vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long
enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man
will never change his environment, for he will always change his mind.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


MARCH 5th

Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New
Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking
away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are
altering the ideal: it is easier.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


MARCH 6th

In a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, it
is stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. Humility is the
luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or
a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the
cosmic things are what they really are--of immeasurable stature.

  '_The Defendant._'


MARCH 7th

Thus because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in
oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed
themselves to find the sepulchre of Christ. But being in a civilization
which does believe in this dogma of fact for fact's sake, we do not see
the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole. I
am not speaking of a tenable ultimate utility, which is true both of
the Crusades and the polar explorations. I mean merely that we do see
the superficial and æsthetic singularity, the startling quality, about
the idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place
where a man died. But we do not see the æsthetic singularity and the
startling quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man
can live--a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the
meeting-place of some lines that do not exist.

  '_Heretics._'


MARCH 8th

In one of his least convincing phrases, Nietzsche had said that just
as the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately
produce something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of
course, is sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the
man, so why should we worry about the superman? If the superman will
come by natural selection, may we not leave it to natural selection?
If the superman will come by human selection, what sort of superman
are we to select? If he is simply to be more just, more brave, or
more merciful, then Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher;
the only way we can work for it is to be more just, more brave, and
more merciful--sensible advice, but hardly startling. If he is to
be anything else than this, why should we desire him, or what else
are we to desire? These questions have been many times asked of the
Nietzscheites, and none of the Nietzscheites have even attempted to
answer them.

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


MARCH 9th

A man can be a Christian to the end of the world, for the simple reason
that a man could have been an Atheist from the beginning of it. The
materialism of things is on the face of things: it does not require
any science to find it out. A man who has lived and loved falls down
dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism, if you like. That is
Atheism, if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can
believe in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made any more
hopeless because we know the names of the worms who eat him, or the
names of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful mind
somewhat difficult to discover.

  '_All Things Considered._'


MARCH 10th

We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of
things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types,
with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we
treat the infantile limitations. A child has no difficulty in achieving
the miracle of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as
marvellous as his accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude
towards Premiers and Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially
encouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we
should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper.

  '_The Defendant._'


MARCH 11th

When the working women in the poor districts come to the doors of the
public-houses and try to get their husbands home, simple-minded 'social
workers' always imagine that every husband is a tragic drunkard and
every wife a broken-hearted saint. It never occurs to them that the
poor woman is only doing under coarser conventions exactly what every
fashionable hostess does when she tries to get the men from arguing
over the cigars to come and gossip over the teacups.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


MARCH 12th

What have we done, and where have we wandered, we that have produced
sages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who could walk
with Dante, that we should talk as if we had never done anything more
intelligent than found colonies and kick niggers? We are the children
of light, and it is we that sit in darkness. If we are judged, it
will not be for the merely intellectual transgression of failing to
appreciate other nations, but for the supreme spiritual transgression
of failing to appreciate ourselves.

  '_The Defendant._'


MARCH 13th

And for those who talk to us with interfering eloquence about Jaeger
and the pores of the skin, and about Plasmon and the coats of the
stomach, at them shall only be hurled the words that are hurled at fops
and gluttons, 'Take no thought what ye shall eat, or what ye shall
drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. For after all these things
do the Gentiles seek. But seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His
righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.'

  '_Heretics._'


MARCH 14th

The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even
miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. Nay, the
really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the
Materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is
quite sure he is sane. The Materialist is sure that history has been
simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person
before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken.
Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


MARCH 15th

The modern world (intent on anarchy in everything, even in Government)
refuses to perceive the permanent element of tragic constancy which
inheres in all passion, and which is the origin of marriage. Marriage
rests upon the fact that you cannot have your cake and eat it; that you
cannot lose your heart and have it.

  _Introduction to 'David Copperfield.'_


MARCH 16th

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, 'I will not hit
you if you do not hit me'; there _is_ no trace of such a transaction.
There _is_ a trace of both men having said, 'We must not hit each
other in the holy place.' They gained their morality by guarding
their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the
shrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate
cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that
they were clean. The history of the Jews is the only early document
known to most Englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from
that. The Ten Commandments which have been found substantially common
to mankind were merely military commands; a code of regimental orders,
issued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert. Anarchy was
evil because it endangered the sanctity. And only when they made a holy
day for God did they find they had made a holiday for men.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


MARCH 17th _ST. PATRICK'S DAY_

The average autochthonous Irishman is close to patriotism because he
is close to the earth; he is close to domesticity because he is close
to the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology and elaborate ritual
because he is close to the earth. In short, he is close to the heavens
because he is close to the earth.

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


MARCH 18th

We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe
to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty. If we catch sharks for
food, let them be killed most mercifully; let anyone who likes love the
sharks, and pet the sharks, and tie ribbons round their necks and give
them sugar and teach them to dance. But if once a man suggests that a
shark is to be valued against a sailor, or that the poor shark might
be permitted to bite off a nigger's leg occasionally, then I would
court-martial the man--he is a traitor to the ship.

  '_All Things Considered._'


MARCH 19th

Every statute is a declaration of war, to be backed by arms. Every
tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a republic all punishment is
as sacred and solemn as lynching.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


MARCH 20th

I have no sympathy with international aggression when it is taken
seriously, but I have a certain dark and wild sympathy with it when it
is quite absurd. Raids are all wrong as practical politics, but they
are human and imaginable as practical jokes. In fact, almost any act of
ragging or violence can be forgiven on this strict condition--that it
is of no use at all to anybody. If the aggression gets anything out of
it, then it is quite unpardonable. It is damned by the least hint of
utility or profit. A man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does
not steal. A gentleman knocks off his friend's hat, but he does not
annex his friend's hat.

  '_All Things Considered._'


MARCH 21st

Modern and cultured persons, I believe, object to their children
seeing kitchen company or being taught by a woman like Peggotty. But
surely it is more important to be educated in a sense of human dignity
and equality than in anything else in the world. And a child who has
once had to respect a kind and capable woman of the lower classes
will respect the lower classes for ever. The true way to overcome the
evil in class distinctions is not to denounce them as revolutionists
denounce them, but to ignore them as children ignore them.

  '_Charles Dickens._'


MARCH 22nd

There is no clearer sign of the absence of originality among modern
poets than their disposition to find new topics. Really original poets
write poems about the spring. They are always fresh, just as the spring
is always fresh. Men wholly without originality write poems about
torture, or new religions, or some perversion of obscenity, hoping
that the mere sting of the subject may speak for them. But we do not
sufficiently realize that what is true of the classic ode is also
true of the classic joke. A true poet writes about the spring being
beautiful because (after a thousand springs) the spring really is
beautiful. In the same way the true humorist writes about a man sitting
down on his hat because the act of sitting down on one's own hat
(however often and admirably performed) really is extremely funny. We
must not dismiss a new poet because his poem is called 'To a Skylark';
nor must we dismiss a humorist because his new farce is called 'My
Mother-in-Law.' He may really have splendid and inspiring things to say
upon an eternal problem. The whole question is whether he has.

  _Introduction to 'Sketches by Boz.'_


MARCH 23rd

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of
God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine
being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely
off its head.

  '_All Things Considered._'


MARCH 24th

Social reformers have fired a hundred shots against the public-house,
but never one against its really shameful character. The sign of
decay is not in the public-house, but in the private bar; or rather
the row of five or six private bars, into each of which a respectable
dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by indulging his own half-witted
sin violates his own half-witted morality. Nearly all these places are
equipped with an atrocious apparatus of ground-glass windows which
can be so closed that they practically conceal the face of the buyer
from the seller. Words cannot express the abysses of human infamy
and hateful shame expressed by that elaborate piece of furniture.
Whenever I go into a public-house, which happens fairly often, I always
carefully open all these apertures and then leave the place in every
way refreshed.

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


MARCH 25th _LADY DAY_

    Fearfully plain the flowers grew,
        Like a child's book to read,
      Or like a friend's face seen in a glass.
    He looked, and there Our Lady was;
    She stood and stroked the tall live grass
      As a man strokes his steed.

    Her face was like a spoken word
      When brave men speak and choose,
    The very colours of her coat
      Were better than good news....

    'The gates of heaven are tightly locked,
      We do not guard our gain,
    The heaviest hind may easily
    Come silently and suddenly
      Upon me in a lane.

    'And any little maid that walks
      In good thoughts apart,
    May break the guard of the Three Kings,
    And see the dear and dreadful things
      I hid within my heart.'

    '_Ballad of Alfred._'


MARCH 26th

It is one of the mean and morbid modern lies that physical courage
is connected with cruelty. The Tolstoian and Kiplingite are nowhere
more at one than in maintaining this. They have, I believe, some
small sectarian quarrel with each other: the one saying that courage
must be abandoned because it is connected with cruelty, and the other
maintaining that cruelty is charming because it is a part of courage.
But it is all, thank God, a lie. An energy and boldness of body may
make a man stupid or reckless or dull or drunk or hungry, but it does
not make him spiteful.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


MARCH 27th

For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the
childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world
done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable.

  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'


MARCH 28th

Cruelty to animals is cruelty and a vile thing; but cruelty to a man is
not cruelty; it is treason. Tyranny over a man is not tyranny: it is
rebellion, for man is royal. Now, the practical weakness of the vast
mass of modern pity for the poor and the oppressed is precisely that it
is merely pity; the pity is pitiful, but not respectful. Men feel that
the cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never
feel that it is injustice to equals; nay, it is treachery to comrades.
This dark, scientific pity, this brutal pity, has an elemental
sincerity of its own, but it is entirely useless for all ends of social
reform. Democracy swept Europe with the sabre when it was founded upon
the Rights of Man. It has done literally nothing at all since it has
been founded only upon the wrongs of man. Or, more strictly speaking,
its recent failure has been due to its not admitting the existence
of any rights or wrongs, or indeed of any humanity. Evolution (the
sinister enemy of revolution) does not especially deny the existence
of God: what it does deny is the existence of man. And all the despair
about the poor, and the cold and repugnant pity for them, has been
largely due to the vague sense that they have literally relapsed into
the state of the lower animals.

  '_Charles Dickens._'


MARCH 29th

The modern humanitarian can love all opinions, but he cannot love all
men; he seems sometimes, in the ecstasy of his humanitarianism, even to
hate them all. He can love all opinions, including the opinion that men
are unlovable.

  _Introduction to 'Hard Times.'_


MARCH 30th

Every man is dangerous who only cares for one thing.

  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'


MARCH 31st

As Mr. Blatchford says, 'The world does not want piety, but soap--and
Socialism.' Piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas soap and
Socialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'




APRIL


APRIL 1st _ALL FOOLS' DAY_

We shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of
ourselves. For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be
quite certain that the effort is superfluous.

  '_The Defendant._'


APRIL 2nd

Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon
the organ of conviction--where it was never meant to be. A man was
meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth;
this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man
does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert--himself. The
part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine
Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But
the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus
we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility
typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical
of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous
humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility
was a spur that prevented a man from stopping: not a nail in his boot
that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man
doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the
new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him
stop working altogether.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


APRIL 3rd

It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of
all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human
experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask
the reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the
modern man--in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I
are two starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of
the past? Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one
after the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to
kill a mammoth with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the
Christian saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may
have been sabred by the Manchester Yeomany or shot in the '48? Are
we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to
spare them? Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have either
speared or spared? When we decline (in a marked manner) to fly the red
flag and fire across a barricade like our grandfathers, are we really
declining in deference to sociologists--or to soldiers? Have we indeed
outstripped the warrior and passed the ascetical saint? I fear we only
outstrip the warrior in the sense that we should probably run away from
him. And if we have passed the saint, I fear we have passed him without
bowing.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


APRIL 4th

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.

  '_The Defendant._'


APRIL 5th

Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages
that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs
continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover,
the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend.

  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'


APRIL 6th

Fairy-tales do not give a child his first idea of bogy. What
fairy-tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible
defeat of bogy. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since
he had an imagination. What the fairy-tale provides for him is a St.
George to kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy-tale does is this: it accustoms him by a series
of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors have a
limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these infinite
enemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is
something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger
than strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at the darkness
until the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller
than heaven. If there was one star in the sky it only made him a
Cyclops. But fairy-tales restored my mental health. For next day I read
an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite equal
dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similar
inexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, some
bad riddles, and a brave heart.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


APRIL 7th

The full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent
take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything we have missed
something--war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very
miserable truce.

  '_Charles Dickens._'


APRIL 8th

The old religionists tortured men physically for a moral truth. The new
realists torture men morally for a physical truth.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


APRIL 9th

'I sincerely maintain that Nature-worship is more morally dangerous
than the most vulgar Man-worship of the cities; since it can easily be
perverted into the worship of an impersonal mystery, carelessness, or
cruelty. Thoreau would have been a jollier fellow if he had devoted
himself to a green-grocer instead of to greens.'

  '_Alarms and Discursions._'


April 10th

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about
something--let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons
desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle
Ages, is approached on the matter, and begins to say, in the arid
manner of the Schoolmen, 'Let us first of all consider, my brethren,
the value of Light. If Light be in itself good----' At this point he
is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the
lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about
congratulating each other on their unmedieval practicality. But as
things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled
the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because
they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their
deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too
much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery;
some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the
night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably,
to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction
that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is
the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the
gas-lamp we must now discuss in the dark.

  '_Heretics._'


APRIL 11th

His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise
enough to be made a fool of. He will make himself happy in the traps
that have been laid for him; he will roll in their nets and sleep. All
doors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere
courage. The whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase--he
will be always 'taken in.' To be taken in everywhere is to see the
inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance. With
torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by Life.
And the sceptic is cast out by it.

  '_Charles Dickens._'


APRIL 12th

You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that
it is particular. A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson felt
an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes
will--will to anything. He only wants humanity to want something. But
humanity does want something. It wants ordinary morality. He rebels
against the law and tells us to will something or anything. But we
_have_ willed something. We have willed the law against which he rebels.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


APRIL 13th

I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might
be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand
for genuine Catholicism, and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these
at least are real religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean
cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water--an excellent thing if you
can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well
represented by soda-water--which is a fuss about nothing. Mr. Bernard
Shaw's philosophy is exactly like black coffee--it awakens, but it does
not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it
would be impossible to express one's contempt for it in stronger terms
than that. Sometimes one may come across something that may honestly
be compared to milk, an ancient and heathen mildness, an earthly yet
sustaining mercy--the milk of human kindness. You can find it in a few
pagan poets and a few old fables; but it is everywhere dying out.

  '_William Blake._'


APRIL 14th

As it is in politics with the specially potent man, so it is in history
with the specially learned. We do not need the learned man to teach
us the important things. We all know the important things, though we
all violate and neglect them. Gigantic industry, abysmal knowledge
are needed for the discovery of the tiny things--the things that seem
hardly worth the trouble. Generally speaking, the ordinary man should
be content with the terrible secret that men are men--which is another
way of saying that they are brothers.

  '_Illustrated London News._'


APRIL 15th

The women were of the kind vaguely called emancipated, and professed
some protest against male supremacy. Yet these new women would always
pay to a man the extraordinary compliment which no ordinary woman ever
pays to him--that of listening while he is talking.

  '_The Man who was Thursday._'


APRIL 16th

Whatever the merits or demerits of the Pantheistic sentiment of melting
into nature of 'Oneness' (I think they call it) with seas and skies,
it is not and it never has been a popular sentiment. It has been the
feeling of a few learned aesthetes or secluded naturalists. Popular
poetry is all against Pantheism and quite removed from Immanence. It is
all about the beautiful earth as an edge or fringe of something much
better and quite distinct. Ballads and carols do not go to the tune of
'One with the Essence of the Boundless World.' Ballads and carols go to
the tune of 'Over the hills and far away;' the sense that life leads by
a strange and special path to something sacred and separate.

  '_Daily News._'


APRIL 17th

How high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now
only know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds.
How low human happiness sank in the twentieth century, our children
will only know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people
to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity never
produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is
strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men
to a banquet with spears.

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


APRIL 18th

If a god does come upon the earth, he will descend at the sight of the
brave. Our prostrations and litanies are of no avail; our new moons and
sabbaths are an abomination. The great man will come when all of us are
feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at
some splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without him.

  '_Charles Dickens._'


APRIL 19th _PRIMROSE DAY_

If the great Jew who led the English Tories understood patriotism (as
I do not doubt that he did) it must have been a decidedly special and
peculiar kind of patriotism, and it necessarily laid him open to the
mistake about the relative positions of the terms Emperor and King. To
him no doubt Emperor seemed obviously a higher title; just as Brother
of the Sun and Moon would have seemed to him a higher title than
Second Cousin of the Evening Star. Among Orientals all such titles are
towering and hyperbolical. But of kingship as it has been felt among
Christian men he had no notion, and small blame to him. He did not
understand the domestic, popular, and priestly quality in the thing;
the idea expressed in the odd old phrase of being the breath of his
people's nostrils; the mystical life pumped through the lungs and
framework of a state.

  '_Illustrated London News._'


APRIL 20th

'I know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that only one or two may
rightly use, and only seldom. It is a fairy wand of great fear,
stronger than those who use it--often frightful, often wicked to use.
But whatever is touched with it is never again wholly common; whatever
is touched with it takes a magic from outside the world. It has made
mean landscapes magnificent and hovels outlast cathedrals. The touch of
it is the finger of a strange perfection.

'There it is!'--he pointed to the floor where his sword lay flat and
shining.

  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'


APRIL 21st

There are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make men
rich; the only 'instinct' I know of which does it is that instinct
which theological Christianity crudely describes as 'the sin of
avarice.'

  '_All Things Considered_.'


APRIL 22nd

It is a common saying that anything may happen behind our backs:
transcendentally considered, the thing has an eerie truth about it.
Eden may be behind our backs, or Fairyland. But this mystery of the
human back has, again, its other side in the strange impression
produced on those behind: to walk behind anyone along a lane is a thing
that, properly speaking, touches the oldest nerve of awe. Watts has
realized this as no one in art or letters has realized it in the whole
history of the world; it has made him great. There is one possible
exception to his monopoly of this magnificent craze. Two thousand years
before, in the dark scriptures of a nomad people, it had been said that
their prophet saw the immense Creator of all things, but only saw Him
from behind.

  '_G. F. Watts._'


APRIL 23rd _ST. GEORGE'S DAY_

    I see you how you smile in state
      Straight from the Peak to Plymouth Bar;
    You need not tell me you are great,
      I know how more than great you are.
    I know what spirit Chaucer was;
    I have seen Gainsborough and the grass.

    '_Tremendous Trifles._'


APRIL 24th

There is no fear that a modern king will attempt to override the
constitution: it is more likely that he will ignore the constitution
and work behind its back. He will take no advantage of his kingly
power: it is more likely that he will take advantage of his kingly
powerlessness--of the fact that he is free from criticism and
publicity. For the King is the most private person of our time. It
will not be necessary for anyone to fight against the proposal of a
censorship of the Press. We do not need a censorship of the Press. We
have a censorship by the Press.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


APRIL 25th _ST MARK'S DAY_

The only thing still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New
Theology.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


APRIL 26th

The modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor.
But then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man
before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern
man found the Church too simple exactly where life is too complex; he
found the Church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy.
The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entrées.
The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers.
And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it
was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there was any
insanity at all, it was in the extravagant entrées, not in the bread
and wine.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


APRIL 27th

THE two things that a healthy person hates most between heaven and hell
are a woman who is not dignified and a man who is.

  '_All Things Considered._'


APRIL 28th

For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic
caution to be added. Even for those who cannot do their work in bed
(as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious
that the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the
caution I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure
you do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak,
of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed,
let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy
man. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some
scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


APRIL 29th

The creed of our cruel cities is not so sane and just as the creed
of the old country-side; but the people are just as clever in giving
names to their sins in the city as in giving names to their joys in the
wilderness. One could not better sum up Christianity than by calling
a small white insignificant flower 'The Star of Bethlehem.' But then
again one could not better sum up the philosophy deduced from Darwinism
than in the one verbal picture of 'having your monkey up.'

  '_Daily News._'


APRIL 30th _ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA'S DAY_

Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange _coup de théâtre_
of morality--things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are
to vice. The spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible and
attractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged
like a dog the first and greatest of the Plantagenets, to the sublime
pity of St. Catherine, who, in the official shambles, kissed the
bloody head of the criminal. Our ethical teachers write reasonably
for prison reform; but we are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any
eminent philanthropist, go into Reading Jail to embrace the strangled
corpse before it is cast into the quicklime. Our ethical teachers write
wildly against the power of millionaires, but we are not likely to see
Mr. Rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly whipped in Westminster
Abbey.

  '_Orthodoxy._'




MAY


MAY 1st _LABOUR DAY_

  It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first;
  Our wrath come after Russia's, and our wrath be the worst.
  It may be we are set to mark by our riot and our rest
  God's scorn of all man's governance: it may be beer is best.
  But we are the people of England, and we never have spoken yet.
  Mock at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget.

  '_The Silent People._'


MAY 2nd

If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges
in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge
behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more
heavy because it is trifling, colourless, and of small import to the
soul, then, as I say, I give it up: I do not know what the word means.
To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area--deciding sales, banquets,
labours, and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area--providing
toys, boots, sheets, cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain
area--teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene: I can understand
how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could
narrow it.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


MAY 3rd

Since it is lawful to pray for the coming of the Kingdom, it is lawful
also to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restore the
Kingdom. It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in the trees.
It is lawful to pray, 'Thine anger come on earth as it is in Heaven.'

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


MAY 4th

    Happy is he and more than wise
      Who sees with wondering eyes and clean
    This world through all the grey disguise
      Of sleep and custom in between.
    Yes; we may pass the heavenly screen,
      But shall we know when we are there?
    Who know not what these dead stones mean,
      The lovely city of Lierre.

    '_Tremendous Trifles._'


MAY 5th

Anomalies do matter very much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract
illogicalities do matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm:
and this for a reason that anyone at all acquainted with human nature
can see for himself. All injustice begins in the mind: and anomalies
accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had
by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea
to nod his head three times before he got out of bed: the practical
politicians might say that this power was a harmless anomaly, that it
was not a grievance. It could do my subjects no harm; it could do me
no good. The people of Battersea, they would say, might safely submit
to it; but the people of Battersea could not safely submit to it, for
all that. If I had nodded their heads for them for fifty years, I could
cut off their heads for them at the end of it with immeasurably greater
ease; for there would have permanently sunk into every man's mind the
notion that it was a natural thing for me to have a fantastic and
irrational power. They would have grown accustomed to insanity.

  '_All Things Considered._'


MAY 6th

Ireland is a country in which the political conflicts are at least
genuine: they are about something. They are about patriotism, about
religion, or about money: the three great realities. In other words,
they are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives in, or with what
universe a man lives in, or how he is to manage to live in either. But
they are not concerned with which of two wealthy cousins in the same
governing class shall be allowed to bring in the same Parish Councils
Bill.

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


MAY 7th

Maeterlinck is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual
tremors as Messrs. Crosse & Blackwell are in filling a man with jam.
But it all depends on what you want to be filled with. Lord Rosebery,
being a modern sceptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I,
being an orthodox Christian, prefer the jam.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


MAY 8th

The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave
because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the
flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we
should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or
too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its
gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving
it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic
thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot.
Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic
patriot.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


MAY 9th

It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an
institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not
natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which
you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or
obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half
a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so
much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it
is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it,
is a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment,
but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It
is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but once
admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but
philosophy, ethics, and finally, poetry.

  '_Browning._'


MAY 10th

Whatever makes men feel old is mean--an empire or a skin-flint shop.
Whatever makes men feel young is great--a great war or a love-story.
And in the darkest of the books of God there is written a truth that
is also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions
and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that
startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is
no sceptic who does not feel that men have doubted before. There is
no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are
ancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his
neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do
the old things are fed by Nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who
is in love thinks that anyone has been in love before. No woman who
has a child thinks there have been such things as children. No people
that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken
empires.

  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'


MAY 11th

Most of us have suffered from a certain sort of lady who, by her
perverse unselfishness, gives more trouble than the selfish; who almost
clamours for the unpopular dish and scrambles for the worst seat. Most
of us have known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss of
self-effacement.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


MAY 12th

It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the
crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs
away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's
knowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious
literary researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently
accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be
expected from young people possessed of no little native humour. If I
had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to
the influence of Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the greatest
entertainment in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the
minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the
community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books.

  '_The Defendant._'


MAY 13th

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit: they
are never worshippers of Force. Soldiers more than any other men are
taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact
is obvious: the might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or
what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them. They
learn to obey symbols, arbitrary things, stripes on an arm, buttons
on a coat, a title, a flag. These may be artificial things; they may
be unreasonable things; they may, if you will, be wicked things; but
they are not weak things. They are not Force, and they do not look
like Force. They are parts of an idea, of the idea of discipline; if
you will, of the idea of tyranny; but still an idea. No soldier could
possibly say that his own bayonets were his authority. No soldier
could possibly say that he came in the name of his own bayonets. It
would be as absurd as if a postman said that he came inside his bag.
I do not, as I have said, underrate the evils that really do arise
from militarism and the military ethic. It tends to give people wooden
faces and sometimes wooden heads. It tends, moreover (both through its
specialization and through its constant obedience), to a certain loss
of real independence and strength of character. This has almost always
been found when people made the mistake of turning the soldier into a
statesman, under the mistaken impression that he was a strong man. The
Duke of Wellington, for instance, was a strong soldier and therefore
a weak statesman. But the soldier is always, by the nature of things,
loyal to something. And as long as one is loyal to something one can
never be a worshipper of mere force. For mere force, violence in the
abstract, is the enemy of anything we love. To love anything is to see
it at once under lowering skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in
misfortune; and when a soldier has accepted any nation's uniform he has
already accepted its defeat.

  '_All Things Considered._'


MAY 14th

Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals
is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike
faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about
the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the
General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere
mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision
is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much
as I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of
innocence when I believed in Liberals.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


MAY 15th

Distribute the dignified people and the capable people and the highly
business-like people among all the situations which their ambition or
their innate corruption may demand, but keep close to your heart, keep
deep in your inner councils the absurd people; let the clever people
pretend to govern you, let the unimpeachable people pretend to advise
you, but let the fools alone influence you; let the laughable people
whose faults you see and understand be the only people who are really
inside your life, who really come near you or accompany you on your
lonely march towards the last impossibility.

  _Introduction to 'David Copperfield.'_


MAY 16th

Philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and
Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. Nearly all the
more awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable,
from 'A child is born' to 'A soul is damned.' If the ordinary man may
not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


MAY 17th

Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


MAY 18th _GEORGE MEREDITH DIED_

The trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out into
deep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the evening
was so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a sunset all
to itself. I went along that road according to directions that had
been given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling, beyond which
the wood changed only faintly to a garden. It was as if the curious
courtesy and fineness of that character I was to meet went out from
him upon the valley; for I felt on all these things the finger of
that quality which the old English called 'faerie'; it is the quality
which those can never understand who think of the past as merely
brutal; it is an ancient elegance such as there is in trees. I went
through the garden and saw an old man sitting by a table, looking
smallish in his big chair. He was already an invalid, and his hair and
beard were both white; not like snow, for snow is cold and heavy, but
like something feathery, or even fierce; rather they were white like
white thistledown. I came up quite close to him; he looked at me as
he put out his frail hand, and I saw of a sudden that his eyes were
startlingly young. He was the one great man of the old world whom I
have met who was not a mere statue over his own grave.

He was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about the
books he had written; he was far too much alive for that. He talked
about the books he had not written. He unrolled a purple bundle of
romances which he had never had time to sell. He asked me to write
one of the stories for him, as he would have asked the milkman, if he
had been talking to the milkman. It was a splendid and frantic story,
a sort of astronomical farce. It was all about a man who was rushing
up to the Royal Society with the only possible way of avoiding an
earth-destroying comet; and it showed how, even on this huge errand,
the man was tripped up at every other minute by his own weaknesses
and vanities; how he lost a train by trifling or was put in gaol for
brawling. That is only one of them; there were ten or twenty more.
Another, I dimly remember, was a version of the fall of Parnell; the
idea that a quite honest man might be secret from a pure love of
secrecy, of solitary self-control. I went out of that garden with a
blurred sensation of the million possibilities of creative literature.
The feeling increased as my way fell back into the wood; for a wood is
a palace with a million corridors that cross each other everywhere. I
really had the feeling that I had seen the creative quality; which is
supernatural. I had seen what Virgil calls the Old Man of the Forest: I
had seen an elf. The trees thronged behind my path; I have never seen
him again; and now I shall not see him, because he died last Tuesday.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


MAY 19th _GLADSTONE DIED_

    Lift up your heads: in life, in death,
      God knoweth his head was high;
    Quit we the coward's broken breath
      Who watched a strong man die.

    Oh, young ones of a darker day,
      In Art's wan colours clad,
    Whose very love and hate are grey--
      Whose very sin is sad,

    Pass on; one agony long drawn
      Was merrier than your mirth,
    When hand-in-hand came death and dawn
      And spring was on the earth.

    '_To Them that Mourn._'


MAY 20th

If the authors and publishers of 'Dick Deadshot,' and such remarkable
works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to
take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught
at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels
and warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed.
Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their
idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of
the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively
criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the
high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room
tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstall in
Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or
suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are
our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost
unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter boys for their immorality
at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German
professors) whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant that
we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we
canvass the proposition that all property is theft.... At the very
instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life,
we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.

  '_The Defendant._'


MAY 21st

The English nation will still be going the way of all European nations
when the Anglo-Saxon race has gone the way of all fads.

  '_Heretics._'


MAY 22nd

The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain
kind of literature, and likes that kind even when it is bad better
than another kind of literature even when it is good. Nor is this
unreasonable; for the line between different types of literature is as
real as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people who
can only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is as
irrational as to offer a man who is shivering over weak, warm coffee a
really superior sort of ice.

  '_Charles Dickens._'


MAY 23rd

To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored in the shining
shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned to stone.
This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate and
futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect
creed of predestination, were turned to stone; the modern sociological
scientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The
only difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists
somewhat amusing, statues.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


MAY 24th _EMPIRE DAY_

I for one should be sincerely glad if we could have a national
celebration, remembering our real achievements and reminding ourselves
of our real work in the world. Only for any such national celebration
I should suggest two conditions: first, that our national celebration
should be invented by our nation and not by another nation. And
secondly, that it should be forced by the people on the newspaper
proprietors, and not by the newspaper proprietors on the people.

  '_Illustrated London News._'


MAY 25th

There is no hope for men who do not boast that their wives bully them.

  '_Alarms and Discursions._'


MAY 26th _ST. AUGUSTINE OF ENGLAND'S DAY_

If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have
followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged
(and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new
barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old
society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who
were forgetting how to make an arch, and she taught them to invent the
Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the
Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that
the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was
the only thing that ever brought us out of them.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


MAY 27th

One Sun is splendid: six Suns would be only vulgar. One Tower of Giotto
is sublime: a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white
posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry
of nature, in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love, in following
the single woman; the poetry of religion, in worshipping the single
star.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'


MAY 28th

Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales--because they
find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should
think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring
him.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


MAY 29th _THE RESTORATION_

It is a commonplace that the Restoration Movement can only be
understood when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it
is insufficiently realized that the tyranny which half frustrated
all the good work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was
not the fire of Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy
of restraint, which passed away: that still burns in the heart of
England, only to be quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is
seldom remembered that the Puritans were in their day emphatically
intellectual bullies, that they relied swaggeringly on the logical
necessity of Calvinism, that they bound omnipotence itself in the
chains of syllogism. The Puritans fell, through the damning fact that
they had a complete theory of life, through the eternal paradox that a
satisfactory explanation can never satisfy.

  '_Twelve Types._'


MAY 30th _BLESSED JOAN OF ARC_

Joan of Arc was not stuck at the Cross Roads either by rejecting all
the paths like Tolstoy or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She
chose a path and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I come
to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or
Nietzsche--all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of
all that is noble in Tolstoy: the pleasure in plain things, especially
in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the
poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that, and
with this great addition: that she endured poverty while she admired
it, whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out
its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and
pathetic in poor Nietzsche and his mutiny against the emptiness and
timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium
of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms.
Well, Joan of Arc had all that; and, again, with this difference, that
she did not praise fighting, but fought. We _know_ that she was not
afraid of an army, while Nietzsche for all we know was afraid of a
cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche
only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at
their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more
violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who
did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.

  '_Orthodoxy._'


MAY 31st

Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining
the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted
to trained men. If it wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks
men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that
I felt in the jury-box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the
solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its
specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious,
it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing
was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

  '_Tremendous Trifles._'




JUNE


JUNE 1st

The great lords will refuse the English peasant his three acres and a
cow on advanced grounds, if they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary
grounds. They will deny him the three acres on grounds of State
Ownership. They will forbid him the cow on grounds of humanitarianism.

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


JUNE 2nd

Life is a thing too glorious to be enjoyed.

  '_George Bernard Shaw._'


JUNE 3rd

I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me, in her grand green
drawing-room, whether I believed in comradeship between the sexes, and
why not. I was driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer:
'Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade, you
would turn me out of the house.'

  '_What's Wrong with the World._'


JUNE 4th

Every man of us to-day is three men. There is in every modern European
three powers so distinct as to be almost personal--the trinity of
our earthly destiny. The three may be rudely summarized thus: First
and nearest to us is the Christian, the man of the historic Church,
of the creed that must have coloured our minds incurably whether we
regard it as the crown and combination of the other two, or whether
we regard it as an accidental superstition which has remained for two
thousand years. First, then, comes the Christian; behind him comes
the Roman--the citizen of that great cosmopolitan realm of reason and
order, in the level and equality of which Christianity arose. He is the
Stoic who is so much sterner than the Ancorites. He is the Republican
who is so much prouder than kings. It is he that makes straight roads
and clear laws, and for whom good sense is good enough. And the third
man: he has no name, and all true tales of him are blotted out; yet he
walks behind us in every forest path and wakes within us when the wind
wakes at night. He is the origins--he is the man in the forest.

  '_William Blake._'


JUNE 5th

The right and proper thing, of course, is that every good patriot
should stop at home and curse his own country. So long as that is being
done everywhere, we may be sure that things are fairly happy, and being
kept up to a reasonably high standard. So long as we are discontented
separately we may be well content as a whole.

  '_Illustrated London News._'


JUNE 6th

I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that
democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that
tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to
a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or
arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the
tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing
to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert
against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a
legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a
book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people
in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one
man in the village, who is mad. Those who urge against tradition--that
men in the past were ignorant--may go and urge it at the Carlton Club,
along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will
not do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary
men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is
no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history
or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes--our
ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit
to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be
walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the
accident of birth: tradition objects to their being disqualified by
the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's
opinion, even if he is our groom: tradition asks us not to neglect a
good man's opinion, even if he is our father.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


JUNE 7th

You hold that your heretics and sceptics have helped the world forward
and handed on a lamp of progress. I deny it. Nothing is plainer from
real history than that each of your heretics invented a complete cosmos
of his own which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces. Who knows
now exactly what Nestorius taught? Who cares? There are only two things
that we know for certain about it. The first is that Nestorius, as a
heretic, taught something quite opposite to the teaching of Arius,
the heretic who came before him, and something quite useless to James
Turnbull, the heretic who comes after. I defy you to go back to the
Freethinkers of the past and find any habitation for yourself at all.
I defy you to read Godwin or Shelley, or the deists of the eighteenth
century, or the nature-worshipping humanists of the Renaissance,
without discovering that you differ from them twice as much as you
differ from the Pope. You are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are
always telling me that I ignore the cruelty of Nature. If you had been
an eighteenth-century sceptic you would have told me that I ignore the
kindness and benevolence of Nature. You are an Atheist, and you praise
the deists of the eighteenth century. Read them instead of praising
them, and you will find that their whole universe stands or falls with
the deity. You are a Materialist, and you think Bruno a scientific
hero. See what he said, and you will think him an insane mystic. No;
the great Freethinker, with his genuine ability and honesty, does
not in practice destroy Christianity. What he does destroy is the
Freethinker who went before.

  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_


JUNE 8th

When the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their
idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be
made. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that everyone
ought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that cosmic
truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what anyone says. The
former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees
inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating. Never
has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now,
when, for the first time, anyone can discuss it.

  _'Heretics.'_


JUNE 9th _DICKENS DIED_

The hour of absinthe is over. We shall not be much further troubled
with the little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows
and too clean for their delights. But we have a long way to travel
before we get back to what Dickens meant; and the passage is along an
English rambling road--a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick travelled.
But this at least is part of what he meant: that comradeship and
serious joy are not interludes in our travel, but that rather our
travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which, through God,
shall endure for ever. The inn does not point to the road: the road
points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn,
where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters. And when we drink
again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of
the world.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


JUNE 10th

I have always been inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people
rather than to believe that special and troublesome literary class
to which I belong. I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the
people who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of
the people who see life from the outside. I would always trust the
old wives' fables against the old maids' facts. As long as wit is
mother-wit it can be as wild as it pleases.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


JUNE 11th

However far aloft a man may go he is still looking up, not only at
God (which is obvious), but in a manner at men also: seeing more and
more all that is towering and mysterious in the dignity and destiny
of the lonely house of Adam.... So it may be hoped, until we die,
you and I will always look up rather than down at the labours and
habitations of our race; we will lift up our eyes to the valleys from
whence cometh our help. For from every special eminence beyond every
sublime landmark, it is good for our souls to see only vaster and
vaster visions of that dizzy and divine level, and to behold from our
crumbling turrets the tall plains of equality.

  _'Alarms and Discursions.'_


JUNE 12th

There is more of the song and music of mankind in a clerk putting on
his Sunday clothes than in a fanatic running naked down Cheapside.

  _'William Blake.'_


JUNE 13th

If we are to save the oppressed, we must have two apparently
antagonistic emotions in us at the same time. We must think the
oppressed man intensely miserable, and at the same time intensely
attractive and important. We must insist with violence upon his
degradation; we must insist with the same violence upon his dignity.
For if we relax by one inch the one assertion, men will say he does
not need saving. And if we relax by one inch the other assertion men
will say he is not worth saving. The optimists will say that reform
is needless. The pessimists will say that reform is hopeless. We must
apply both simultaneously to the same oppressed man; we must say that
he is a worm and a god; and we must thus lay ourselves open to the
accusation (or the compliment) of transcendentalism.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


JUNE 14th

You say your civilization will include all talents. Will it? Do you
really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to
vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus?

  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_


JUNE 15th

'Certainly, it is untrue that three is no company. Three is splendid
company. Three is the ideal number for pure comradeship: as in the
'Three Musketeers.' But if you reject the proverb altogether; if you
say that two and three are the same sort of company; if you cannot see
that there is a wider abyss between two and three than between three
and three million--then I regret to inform you that you shall have no
company either of two or three, but shall be alone in a howling desert
till you die.'

  _'Alarms and Discursions.'_


JUNE 16th

Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends on a
philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief, and is fading
with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to
think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him
at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.

  _'Heretics.'_


JUNE 17th

Just as the rivalry of armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism,
so the rivalry of parties is only a sort of sulky inheritance. Men
have votes, so women must soon have votes; poor children are taught by
force, so they must soon be fed by force; the police shut public-houses
by twelve o'clock, so soon they must shut them by eleven o'clock;
children stop at school till they are fourteen, so soon they will stop
till they are forty. No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first
principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt
this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


JUNE 18th _WATERLOO DAY_

The time of big theories was the time of big results. In the era
of sentiment and fine words, at the end of the eighteenth century,
men were really robust and effective. The sentimentalists conquered
Napoleon. The cynics could not catch De Wet. A hundred years ago our
affairs for good or evil were wielded triumphantly by rhetoricians. Now
our affairs are hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men.

  _'Heretics.'_


JUNE 19th

Herein lies the peculiar significance, the peculiar sacredness
even, of penny dreadfuls and the common printed matter made for our
errand-boys. Here in dim and desperate forms, under the ban of our
base culture, stormed at by silly magistrates, sneered at by silly
schoolmasters--here is the old popular literature still popular; here
is the unmistakable voluminousness, the thousand-and-one tales of Dick
Deadshot, like the thousand-and-one tales of Robin Hood. Here is the
splendid and static boy, the boy who remains a boy through a thousand
volumes and a thousand years. Here in mean alleys and dim shops,
shadowed and shamed by the police, mankind is still driving its dark
trade in heroes. And elsewhere, and in all ages, in braver fashion,
under cleaner skies, the same eternal tale-telling still goes on, and
the whole mortal world is a factory of immortals.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


JUNE 20th

There are two very curious things which the critic of life may observe.
The first is the fact that there is one real difference between men and
women: that women prefer to talk in two's, while men prefer to talk in
three's. The second is that when you find (as you often do) three young
cads and idiots going about together and getting drunk together every
day, you generally find that one of the three cads and idiots is (for
some extraordinary reason) not a cad and not an idiot. In those small
groups devoted to a drivelling dissipation there is almost always one
man who seems to have condescended to his company: one man who, while
he can talk a foul triviality with his fellows, can also talk politics
with a Socialist, or philosophy with a Catholic.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


JUNE 21st

Mankind has in nearly all places and periods seen that there is a soul
and a body as plainly as that there is a sun and moon. But because a
narrow Protestant sect called Materialists declared for a short time
that there was no soul, another narrow Protestant sect called Christian
Scientist is now maintaining that there is no body.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


JUNE 22nd

THOSE thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the
love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so,
perhaps, it would, if they had it.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


JUNE 23rd

Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a
complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the
beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man.
Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous
environment, the most dangerous of all is the commodious environment.
I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in
trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most
recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small
camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of
the needle to its largest: if, in short, we assume the words of Christ
to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at
the very least mean this--that rich men are not very likely to be
morally trustworthy.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


JUNE 24th _MIDSUMMER DAY_

    O well for him that loves the sun,
    That sees the heaven-race ridden or run,
    The splashing seas of sunset won,
      And shouts for victory.

    God made the sun to crown his head,
    And when death's dart at last is sped,
    At least it will not find him dead,
      And pass the carrion by.

    O ill for him that loves the sun;
    Shall the sun stoop for anyone?
    Shall the sun weep for hearts undone
      Or heavy souls that pray?

    Not less for us and everyone
    Was that white web of splendour spun;
    O well for him who loves the sun
      Although the sun should slay.

    _'Ballad of the Sun.'_


JUNE 25th

A man's good work is effected by doing what he does: a woman's by being
what she is.

  _'Robert Browning.'_


JUNE 26th

If the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they
previously took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the
modern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine
without even stating it.

  _'Heretics.'_


JUNE 27th

From the time of the first fairy tales men had always believed ideally
in equality; they had always thought that something ought to be done,
if anything could be done, to redress the balance between Cinderella
and the ugly sisters. The irritating thing about the French was
not that they said this ought to be done: everybody said that. The
irritating thing about the French was that they did it.

  _Introduction to 'Hard Times.'_


JUNE 28th

    My Lady clad herself in grey,
      That caught and clung about her throat;
    Then all the long grey winter-day
      On me a living splendour smote;
    And why grey palmers holy are,
      And why grey minsters great in story,
    And grey skies ring the morning star,
      And grey hairs are a crown of glory.

    My Lady clad herself in green,
      Like meadows where the wind-waves pass;
    Then round my spirit spread, I ween,
      A splendour of forgotten grass.
    Then all that dropped of stem or sod,
      Hoarded as emeralds might be,
    I bowed to every bush, and trod
      Amid the live grass fearfully.

    My Lady clad herself in blue,
      Then on me, like the seer long gone,
    The likeness of a sapphire grew,
      The throne of him that sat thereon.
    Then knew I why the Fashioner
      Splashed reckless blue on sky and sea;
    And ere 'twas good enough for her,
      He tried it on Eternity.

    Beneath the gnarled old Knowledge-tree
      Sat, like an owl, the evil sage:
    'The world's a bubble,' solemnly
      He read, and turned a second page.
    'A bubble, then, old crow,' I cried,
      'God keep you in your weary wit!
    A bubble--have you ever spied
      The colours I have seen on it?'

    _'A Chord of Colour.'_


JUNE 29th _ST. PETER'S DAY_

When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society,
He chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the
mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward--in a word, a man. And
upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not
prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed
because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded
by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing--the historic
Christian Church--was founded upon a weak man, and for that reason it
is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.

  _'Heretics.'_


JUNE 30th

There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur,
and the æsthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the
soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself
for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own
choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow
a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of
the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one
instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the
Alps among the silences of stars and snows. All around us is the city
of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats; but surely, sooner
or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that
the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.

  _'The Defendant.'_




JULY


JULY 1st

The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a
hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself,
as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and
heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music;
also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has
ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into
his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs, they should be in his
ears when he makes the mystical cross. But as it is, the difficulty
with English democracy at all elections is that it is something less
than itself. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the
electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


JULY 2nd

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning
all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite
equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of
sin--a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be
washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he
wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere
Materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable
water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians
dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology
which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J.
Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine
sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they
essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The
strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as
the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly
is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then
the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions: he must
either deny the existence of God, as all Atheists do, or he must deny
the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new
theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny
the cat.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


JULY 3rd

The love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment
as the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of
life is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street
the richness of life is proved to us by a hint of what we have lost.

  _'Robert Browning.'_


JULY 4th _INDEPENDENCE DAY_

The old Anglo-American quarrel was much more fundamentally friendly
than most Anglo-American alliances. Each nation understood the other
enough to quarrel. In our time, neither nation understands itself even
enough to quarrel.

  _Introduction to 'American Notes.'_


JULY 5th

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern
existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We
announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding.
We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a
scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as
indicating that the moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still
abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding
is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more
common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist
upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on
their posters 'Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,' or 'Mr. Jones of Worthing,
Not Dead Yet.' They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all.
They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the
marriages that are not dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give
of life is of necessity fallacious: they can only represent what is
unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with
the minority.

  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_


JULY 6th

    Happy, who like Ulysses or that lord
      That raped the fleece, returning full and sage,
    With usage and the world's wide reason stored,
      With his own kin can wait the end of age.
    When shall I see, when shall I see, God knows!
      My little village smoke; or pass the door,
    The old dear door of that unhappy house
      That is to me a kingdom and much more?
    Mightier to me the house my fathers made
      Than your audacious heads, O Halls of Rome!
    More than immortal marbles undecayed,
      The thin sad slates that cover up my home;
    More than your Tiber is my Loire to me,
      Than Palatine my little Lyré there;
    And more than all the winds of all the sea
      The quiet kindness of the Angevin air.

    _Translation from 'Du Bellay.'_


JULY 7th

It is a great mistake to suppose that love unites and unifies men.
Love diversifies them, because love is directed towards individuality.
The thing that really unites men and makes them like to each other is
hatred. Thus, for instance, the more we love Germany the more pleased
we shall be that Germany should be something different from ourselves,
should keep her own ritual and conviviality and we ours. But the
more we hate Germany the more we shall copy German guns and German
fortifications in order to be armed against Germany. The more modern
nations detest each other the more meekly they follow each other; for
all competition is in its nature only a furious plagiarism.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


JULY 8th

The temporary decline of theology had involved the neglect of
philosophy and all fine thinking, and Bernard Shaw had to find shaky
justifications in Schopenhauer for the sons of God shouting for joy. He
called it the Will to Live--a phrase invented by Prussian professors
who would like to exist but can't.

  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_


JULY 9th

There are only two kinds of social structure conceivable--personal
government and impersonal government. If my anarchic friends will not
have rules, they will have rulers. Preferring personal government, with
its tact and flexibility, is called Royalism. Preferring impersonal
government, with its dogmas and definitions, is called Republicanism.
Objecting broad-mindedly both to kings and creeds is called Bosh--at
least, I know no more philosophic word for it.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


JULY 10th

Now, I have no particular objection to people who take the gilt off
the gingerbread: if only for this excellent reason--that I am much
fonder of gingerbread than I am of gilt. But there are some objections
to this task when it becomes a crusade or an obsession. One of them is
this: that people who have really scraped the gilt off the gingerbread
generally waste the rest of their lives in attempting to scrape the
gilt off gigantic lumps of gold. Such has too often been the case with
Shaw. He can, if he likes, scrape the romance off the armaments of
Europe or the party system of Great Britain; but he cannot scrape the
romance off love or military valour, because it is all romance, and
three thousand miles thick.

  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_


JULY 11th

'The Church is not a thing like the Athenæum Club,' he cried. 'If the
Athenæum Club lost all its members, the Athenæum Club would dissolve
and cease to exist. But when we belong to the Church we belong to
something which is outside all of us: which is outside everything you
talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but
it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church
would still somehow exist in God.'

  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_


JULY 12th

Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these
people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most
horrible is the worship of the god within. Anyone who knows anybody
knows how it would work; anyone who knows anyone from the Higher
Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god
within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.
Let Jones worship the sun or moon--anything rather than the Inner
Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in
his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world,
firstly, in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to
look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and
enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being
a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but
definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the
moon, terrible as an army with banners.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


JULY 13th

The slum novelist gains his effects by describing the same grey mist
as draping the dingy factory and the dingy tavern. But to the man he
is supposed to be studying there must be exactly the same difference
between the factory and the tavern that there is to a middle-class man
between a late night at the office and a supper at Pagani's.

  _'Heretics.'_


JULY 14th _THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE_

The destruction of the Bastille was not a reform: it was something more
important than a reform. It was an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a
stone image. The people saw the building like a giant looking at them
with a score of eyes, and they struck at it as at a carved face. For
of all the shapes in which that immense illusion called Materialism
can terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive is that of the big
building. Man feels like a fly, an accident in the thing he has himself
made. It requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that man
made this confounding thing and man could unmake it. Therefore the
mere act of the ragged people in the street taking and destroying a
huge public building has a spiritual, and a ritual, meaning far beyond
its immediate political results. It is a religious service. If, for
instance, the Socialists were numerous or courageous enough to capture
and smash up the Bank of England you might argue for ever about the
inutility of the act, and how it really did not touch the root of the
economic problem in the correct manner. But mankind would never forget
it. It would change the world.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


JULY 15th _ST. SWITHIN'S DAY_

Only in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called
weather--beautiful and changeable as a woman. The great English
landscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is English)
have this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere
of their pictures: it is the subject of their pictures. They paint
portraits of the weather. The weather sat to Constable; the weather
posed for Turner--and the deuce of a pose it was. In the English
painters the climate is the hero; in the case of Turner a swaggering
and fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent. The tall and
terrible protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight, fills the
whole canvas and the whole foreground. Rich colours actually look
more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a dark
background, and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Against
a dim sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange
about them at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in
the grim garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the high
light in the picture, and its brightness kills all the bright blue
flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the
red daisies are really the lost-red eyes of day, and the sun-flower
is the vice-regent of the sun. Lastly, there is this value about the
colour that men call colourless: that it suggests in some way the mixed
and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife
and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on
the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue,
or blanching into white or breaking into green or gold. So we may be
perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself;
and when there is grey weather on our hills or grey hair on our heads
perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.

  _'Daily News.'_


JULY 16th

It is true that all sensible women think all studious men mad. It is
true, for the matter of that, all women of any kind think all men of
any kind mad. But they do not put it in telegrams any more than they
wire to you that grass is green or God all-merciful. These things are
truisms and often private ones at that.

  _'The Club of Queer Trades.'_


JULY 17th

You may come to think a blow bad because it humiliates. You may come to
think murder wrong because it is violent, and not because it is unjust.

  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_


JULY 18th _THACKERAY BORN_

In all things his great spirit had the grandeur and the weakness which
belonged to the England of his time--an England splendidly secure and
free, and yet (perhaps for that reason) provincial and innocent. He had
nothing of the doctrinal quality of the French and Germans. He was not
one who made up his mind, but one who let his mind make him up. He lay
naturally open to all noble influences flowing around him; but he never
bestirred himself to seek those that were not flowing or that flowed
in opposite directions. Thus, for instance, he really loved liberty,
as only a novelist can love it, a man mainly occupied with the variety
and vivacity of men. But he could not see the cause of liberty except
where the Victorian English saw it; he could not see it in the cause of
Irish liberty (which was exactly like the cause of Polish or Italian
liberty, except that it was led by much more religious and responsible
men), and he made the Irish characters the object of much innocent and
rather lumbering satire. But this was not his mistake, but the mistake
of the atmosphere, and he was a sublime emotional Englishman, who lived
by atmosphere. He was a great sensitive. The comparison between him
and Dickens is commonly as clumsy and unreasonable as a comparison
between Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade or Bulwer Lytton and Anthony
Trollope. But the comparison really has this element of actuality: that
Dickens was above all things creative; Thackeray was above all things
receptive. There is no sense in talking about truth in the matter:
both are modes of truth. If you like to put it so: the world imposed
on Thackeray, and Dickens imposed on the world. But it could be put
more truly by saying that Thackeray represents, in that gigantic parody
called genius, the spirit of the Englishman in repose. This spirit is
the idle embodiment of all of us; by his weaknesses we shall fail and
by his enormous sanities we shall endure.

  _Introduction to 'Thackeray.'_


JULY 19th

The Marchioness really has all the characteristics, the entirely
heroic characteristics, which make a woman respected by a man. She is
female--that is, she is at once incurably candid and incurably loyal,
she is full of terrible common sense, she expects little pleasure
for herself and yet she can enjoy bursts of it; above all, she is
physically timid and yet she can face anything.

  _Introduction to 'The Old Curiosity Shop.'_


JULY 20th

Democracy in its human sense is not arbitrament by the majority; it
is not even arbitrament by everybody. It can be more nearly defined
as arbitrament by anybody: I mean that it rests on that club-habit of
taking a total stranger for granted, of assuming certain things to be
inevitably common to yourself and him. Only the things that anybody may
be presumed to hold have the full authority of democracy. Look out of
the window and notice the first man who walks by. The Liberals may have
swept England with an overwhelming majority; but you would not stake a
button that the man is a Liberal. The Bible may be read in all schools
and respected in all law courts; but you would not bet a straw that he
believes in the Bible. But you would bet your week's wages, let us say,
that he believes in wearing clothes. You would bet that he believes
that physical courage is a fine thing, or that parents have authority
over children. Of course, he might be the millioneth man who does not
believe these things; if it comes to that, he might be the Bearded Lady
dressed up as a man. But these prodigies are quite a different thing
from any mere calculation of numbers. People who hold these views are
not a minority, but a monstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that
have full democratic authority the only test is this test of anybody:
what you would observe before any new-comer in a tavern--that is the
real English law. The first man you see from the window, he is the King
of England.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


JULY 21st

Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever
Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome.
Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of
civilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_


JULY 22nd

It is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic
state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If
we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with
us. With us the governing class is always saying to itself, 'What laws
shall we make?' In a purely democratic state it would be always saying,
'What laws can we obey?'

  _'Heretics.'_


JULY 23rd

No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic
cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition
exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is
that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian
saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint always has
a very sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed
with sleep. The medieval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones,
but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community
of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that.
Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure
creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite
extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with peculiar intentness
inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


JULY 24th

Novels and newspapers still talk of the English aristocracy that came
over with William the Conqueror. Little of our effective oligarchy is
as old as the Reformation; and none of it came over with William the
Conqueror. Some of the older English landlords came over with William
of Orange; the rest have come over by ordinary alien immigration.

  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_


JULY 25th

It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should
have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of
marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


JULY 26th

Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and
all fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art the Church
seems too Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the Church
seems too artistic. When you quarrel with us now you class us with
kingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it was
because we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The
Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond
the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last
summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.

  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_


JULY 27th

The best men of the Revolution were simply common men at their best.
This is why our age can never understand Napoleon. Because he was
something great and triumphant, we suppose that he must have been
something extraordinary, something inhuman. Some say he was the Devil;
some say he was the Superman. Was he a very, very bad man? Was he a
good man with some greater moral code? We strive in vain to invent the
mysteries behind that immortal mask of brass. The modern world with all
its subtleness will never guess his strange secret; for his strange
secret was that he was very like other people.

  '_Charles Dickens._'


JULY 28th

The greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this: that men
began to use the word 'spiritual' as the same as the word 'good.' They
thought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was to grow in
virtue. When scientific evolution was announced, some feared that
it would encourage mere animality. It did worse: it encouraged mere
spirituality. It taught men to think that so long as they were passing
from the ape they were going. But you can pass from the ape and go to
the devil.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


JULY 29th

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood
which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep
in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just
uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have
by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a
certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having
missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom,
but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

  _'Robert Browning.'_


JULY 30th

The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define,
the authority even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark
defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more
supernatural than all the authority of a man to think. We know now
that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear
scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the
same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


JULY 31st

The party system in England is an enormous and most efficient machine
for preventing political conflicts.

  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_




AUGUST


AUGUST 1st

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have
time to preach his own heresy.

  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_


AUGUST 2nd

Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next
generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one
set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching
the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It
is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason
is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that
our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely
a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, 'Why
should anything go right; even observation or deduction? Why should not
good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in
the brain of a bewildered ape?' The young sceptic says, 'I have a right
to think for myself.' But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says,
'I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.'

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


AUGUST 3rd

Even among liars there are two classes, one immeasurably better than
another. The honest liar is the man who tells the truth about his old
lies; who says on Wednesday, 'I told a magnificent lie on Monday.' He
keeps the truth in circulation; no one version of things stagnates in
him and becomes an evil secret. He does not have to live with old lies;
a horrible domesticity.

  _Introduction to 'The Old Curiosity Shop.'_


AUGUST 4th

The only way to remember a place for ever is to live in the place for
an hour; and the only way to live in the place for an hour is to forget
the place for an hour. The undying scenes we can all see, if we shut
our eyes, are not the scenes we have stared at under the direction
of guide-books; the scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not
look at all--the scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about
something else--about a sin, or a love affair, or some childish sorrow.
We can see the background now because we did not see it then.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


AUGUST 5th

THE keeper of a restaurant would much prefer that each customer should
give his order smartly, though it were for stewed ibis or boiled
elephant, rather than that each customer should sit holding his head
in his hands, plunged in arithmetical calculations about how much food
there can be on the premises.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


AUGUST 6th _TRANSFIGURATION_

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret
of the Christian. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels
towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the
thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural,
almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing
their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly
on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His
native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial
diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained
His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple and
asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. Yet He
restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that
shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was
something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray.
There was something that He covered by abrupt silence or impetuous
isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show
us when He walked upon our earth, and I have sometimes fancied that it
was His mirth.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


AUGUST 7th

Imperialism is foreign, Socialism is foreign, Militarism is foreign,
Education is foreign, strictly even Liberalism is foreign. But
Radicalism was our own; as English as the hedge-rows.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


AUGUST 8th

  A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
  Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
  Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
  The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay.
  Round us in antic order their crippled vices came--
  Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
  Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
  Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
  Life was a flower that faded, and death a drone that stung;
  The world was very old indeed when you and I were young!
  They twisted even decent sins to shapes not to be named:
  Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
  Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;
  When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us.
  Children we were--our forts of sand were even as weak as we,
  High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.
  Fools as we were in motley, all jangled and absurd,
  When all church bells were silent, our cap and bells were heard.

  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_


AUGUST 9th

In practice no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of
physical inheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely used
except for special modern purposes--such as the endowment of research
or the oppression of the poor.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


AUGUST 10th _THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY_

We, the modern English, cannot easily understand the French Revolution,
because we cannot easily understand the idea of a bloody battle
for pure common sense; we cannot understand common sense in arms
and conquering. The French feeling--the feeling at the back of the
Revolution--was that the more sensible a man was, the more you must
look out for slaughter.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


AUGUST 11th

Tom Jones is still alive, with all his good and all his evil; he is
walking about the streets; we meet him every day. We meet with him, we
drink with him, we smoke with him, we talk with him, we talk about him.
The only difference is that we have no longer the intellectual courage
to write about him. We split up the supreme and central human being,
Tom Jones, into a number of separate aspects. We let Mr. J. M. Barrie
write about him in his good moments, and make him out better than he
is. We let Zola write about him in his bad moments, and make him out
much worse than he is. We let Maeterlinck celebrate those moments of
spiritual panic which he knows to be cowardly; we let Mr. Rudyard
Kipling celebrate those moments of brutality which he knows to be far
more cowardly. We let obscene writers write about the obscenities of
this ordinary man. We let puritan writers write about the purities of
this ordinary man. We look through one peephole that makes men out as
devils, and we call it the New Art. We look through another peephole
that makes men out as angels, and we call it the New Theology. But if
we pull down some dusty old books from the bookshelf, if we turn over
some old mildewed leaves, and if in that obscurity and decay we find
some faint traces of a tale about a complete man--such a man as is
walking on the pavement outside--we suddenly pull a long face, and we
call it the coarse morals of a bygone age.

  _'All Things Considered.'_


AUGUST 12th

Self is the Gorgon. Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and
lives. Pride studies it for itself and is turned to stone.

  _'Heretics.'_


AUGUST 13th

You complain of Catholicism for setting up an ideal of virginity;
it did nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an ideal of
virginity; the Greeks in Athene, the Romans in the Vestal fire, set up
an ideal of virginity. What then is your real quarrel with Catholicism?
Your quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that Catholicism
has achieved an ideal of virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece
of floating poetry. But if you, and a few feverish men, in top hats,
running about in a street in London, choose to differ as to the ideal
itself, not only from the Church, but from the Parthenon whose name
means virginity, from the Roman Empire which went outwards from the
virgin flame, from the whole legend and tradition of Europe, from the
lion who will not touch virgins, from the unicorn who respects them,
and who make up together the bearers of your own national shield, from
the most living and lawless of your own poets, from Massinger, who
wrote the 'Virgin Martyr,' from Shakespeare, who wrote 'Measure for
Measure'--if you in Fleet Street differ from all this human experience,
does it never strike you that it may be Fleet Street that is wrong?

  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_


AUGUST 14th

It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt
(like that of a jolly hostess) to bring shy people out. For every
practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of
a tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea-party
it is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if
possible without bodily violence.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


AUGUST 15th _THE ASSUMPTION_

    One instant in a still light
      He saw Our Lady, then
    Her dress was soft as western sky,
    And she was a queen most womanly,
      But she was a queen of men.

    And over the iron forest
      He saw Our Lady stand,
    Her eyes were sad withouten art
    And seven swords were in her heart,
      But one was in her hand.

    _'Ballad of Alfred.'_


AUGUST 16th

I am not prepared to admit that there is, or can be, properly speaking,
in the world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual
beauty and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable and that
they should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root
of every conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and
not in a cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea
as the ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet
or any similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all
men partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine
nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so.

  _'Robert Browning.'_


AUGUST 17th

Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings
alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If scientific
civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will
laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.

  _'Heretics.'_


AUGUST 18th

All I have to urge is that I dislike the big Whiteley shop, and that I
dislike Socialism because it will (according to Socialists) be so like
that shop. It is its fulfilment, not its reversal. I do not object to
Socialism, because it will revolutionize our commerce, but because it
will leave it so horribly the same.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


AUGUST 19th

In a hollow of the grey-green hills of rainy Ireland lived an old, old
woman, whose uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat Race. But in her
grey-green hollows, she knew nothing of this; she didn't know that
there was a Boat Race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She
had heard of nobody at all, except of George the First, of whom she
had heard (I know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her
simple trust. And by and by, in God's good time, it was discovered that
this uncle of hers was really not her uncle, and they came and told her
so. She smiled through her tears, and said only, 'Virtue is its own
reward.'

  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_


AUGUST 20th

Surely the vilest point of human vanity is exactly that; to ask to be
admired for admiring what your admirers do not admire.

  _Introduction to 'Bleak House.'_


AUGUST 21st

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in
the man who eats grape-nuts on principle.

  _'Heretics.'_


AUGUST 22nd

There was until lately a law forbidding a man to marry his deceased
wife's sister; yet the thing happened constantly. There was no law
forbidding a man to marry his deceased wife's scullery-maid; yet it
did not happen nearly so often. It did not happen because the marriage
market is managed in the spirit and by the authority of women.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


AUGUST 23rd

This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful
than we ever know until some accident reminds us. If you wish to
perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment.
If you wish to realize how fearfully and wonderfully God's image is
made, stand upon one leg. If you want to realize the splendid vision of
all visible things--wink the other eye.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


AUGUST 24th _ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S DAY_

The Secularist says that Christianity produced tumult and cruelty. He
seems to suppose that this proves it to be bad. But it might prove it
to be very good. For men commit crimes not only for bad things, far
more often for good things. For no bad things can be desired quite
so passionately and persistently as good things can be desired, and
only very exceptional men desire very bad and unnatural things. Most
crime is committed because, owing to some peculiar complication, very
beautiful and necessary things are in some danger. For instance, if we
wanted to abolish thieving and swindling at one blow, the best thing
to do would be to abolish babies. Babies, the most beautiful things
on earth, have been the excuse and origin of almost all the business
brutality and financial infamy on earth. If we could abolish monogamic
or romantic love, the country would be dotted with Maiden Assizes.

  _'Religious Doubts of Democracy.'_


AUGUST 25th

There are only three things in the world that women do not understand;
and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


AUGUST 26th

Modern Nonconformist newspapers distinguish themselves by suppressing
precisely those nouns and adjectives which the founders of
Nonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at kings and queens.

  _'Heretics.'_


AUGUST 27th

Many of us live publicly with featureless public puppets, images of the
small public abstractions. It is when we pass our own private gate, and
open our own secret door, that we step into the land of the giants.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


AUGUST 28th

With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy
humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only
three things are possible: first, a perpetuation of Satanic pride;
secondly, tears; and third, laughter.

  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_


AUGUST 29th

Did Herbert Spencer ever convince you--did he ever convince
anybody--did he ever for one mad moment convince himself--that it
must be to the interest of the individual to feel a public spirit? Do
you believe that, if you rule your department badly, you stand any
more chance, or one half of the chance, of being guillotined that an
angler stands of being pulled into the river by a strong pike? Herbert
Spencer refrained from theft for the same reason he refrained from
wearing feathers in his hair, because he was an English gentleman with
different tastes.

  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_


AUGUST 30th

War is a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and
unanswerably--numbers and an unnatural valour. One does discover the
two urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are
ready to be dead.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


AUGUST 31st

Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and
more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is
sometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described
as the doctrine of the equality of men.

  _'Heretics.'_




SEPTEMBER


SEPTEMBER 1st

If a modern philanthropist came to Dotheboys Hall I fear he would not
employ the simple, sacred and truly Christian solution of beating Mr.
Squeers with a stick. I fancy he would petition the Government to
appoint a Royal Commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I think he
would every now and then write letters to the newspapers reminding
people that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, there was a
Royal Commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I agree that he might
even go the length of calling a crowded meeting in St. James's Hall
on the subject of the best policy with regard to Mr. Squeers. At this
meeting some very heated and daring speakers might even go the length
of alluding sternly to Mr. Squeers. Occasionally even hoarse voices
from the back of the hall might ask (in vain) what was going to be
done with Mr. Squeers. The Royal Commission would report about three
years afterwards and would say that many things had happened which were
certainly most regrettable, that Mr. Squeers was the victim of a bad
system; that Mrs. Squeers was also the victim of a bad system; but that
the man who sold Squeers' cane had really acted with great indiscretion
and ought to be spoken to kindly. Something like this would be what,
after four years, the Royal Commission would have said; but it would
not matter in the least what the Royal Commission had said, for by that
time the philanthropists would be off on a new tack and the world would
have forgotten all about Dotheboys Hall and everything connected with
it. By that time the philanthropists would be petitioning Parliament
for another Royal Commission; perhaps a Royal Commission to inquire
into whether Mr. Mantalini was extravagant with his wife's money;
perhaps a commission to inquire into whether Mr. Vincent Crummies kept
the Infant Phenomenon short by means of gin.

  _Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_


SEPTEMBER 2nd _BATTLE OF SEDAN_

The Germans have not conquered very much in history as a whole. About
fifty years ago they beat the French and fifty years before that the
French very soundly beat them. If we see history as a whole there is
no more doubt that the French people is the more military than there
is that the German people is the more musical. Germany is a great and
splendid nation; and there are millions of sensible German patriots
grappling with the sins and follies which are part of her problem.

  _'Illustrated London News.'_


SEPTEMBER 3rd

If votes for women do not mean mobs for women they do not mean what
they were meant to mean.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


SEPTEMBER 4th

There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially
mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are
commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there
is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and
sticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view.
Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely
business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was
because he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not
breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do
not go mad, but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers,
but creative artists very seldom.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


SEPTEMBER 5th

Our modern mystics make a mistake when they wear long hair or loose
ties to attract the spirits. The elves and the old gods when they
revisit the earth really go straight for a dull top-hat. For it means
simplicity, which the gods love.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


SEPTEMBER 6th

Women have been set free to be Bacchantes. They have been set free to
be virgin martyrs; they have been set free to be witches. Do not ask
them now to sink so low as the higher culture.

  _'All Things Considered.'_


SEPTEMBER 7th

The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but
that it loves them too much and trusts them too little.

  _'Robert Browning.'_


SEPTEMBER 8th

A philosopher cannot talk about any single thing, down to a pumpkin,
without showing whether he is wise or foolish; but he can easily talk
about everything without anyone having any views about him, beyond
gloomy suspicions.

  _'G. F. Watts.'_


SEPTEMBER 9th

    Chattering finch and water-fly
    Are not merrier than I;
    Here among the flowers I lie
    Laughing everlastingly.
    No: I may not tell the best;
    Surely, friends, I might have guessed
    Death was but the good King's jest,
    It was hid so carefully.

    _'The Skeleton.'_


SEPTEMBER 10th

England is still ruled by the great Barnacle family. Parliament is
still ruled by the great Barnacle trinity--the solemn old Barnacle, who
knew that the Circumlocution Office was a protection; the sprightly
young Barnacle, who knew that it was a fraud; and the bewildered
young Barnacle who knew nothing about it. From these three types our
Cabinets are still exclusively recruited. People talk of the tyrannies
and anomalies which Dickens denounced as things of the past like the
Star Chamber. They believe that the days of the old brutal optimism
and the old brutal indifference are gone for ever. In truth, this very
belief is only the continuance of the old stupid optimism and the old
brutal indifference. We believe in a free England and a pure England,
because we still believe in the Circumlocution Office account of this
matter. Undoubtedly our serenity is widespread. We believe that England
is really reformed, we believe that England is really democratic,
we believe that English politics are free from corruption. But this
general satisfaction of ours does not show that Dickens has beaten the
Barnacles. It only shows that the Barnacles have beaten Dickens.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


SEPTEMBER 11th

When a man begins to think that the grass will not grow at night unless
he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends either in an asylum or on
the throne of an emperor.

  _'Robert Browning.'_


SEPTEMBER 12th

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their
property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers
dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of
personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go
through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy.
But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human
life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in
themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives.
But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's.

  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_


SEPTEMBER 13th

The lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a
large one; he is a man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it
is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain
tale or conspiracy or vision. Hence the more clearly we see the world
divided into Saxons and non-Saxons, into our splendid selves and the
rest, the more certain we may be that we are slowly and quietly going
mad. The more plain and satisfying our state appears, the more we may
know that we are living in an unreal world. For the real world is not
satisfying. The more clear become the colours and facts of Anglo-Saxon
superiority, the more surely we may know we are in a dream. For the
real world is not clear or plain. The real world is full of bracing
bewilderments and brutal surprises. Comfort is the blessing and the
curse of the English, and of Americans of the Pogram type also. With
them it is a loud comfort, a wild comfort, a screaming and capering
comfort; but comfort at bottom still. For there is but an inch of
difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


SEPTEMBER 14th

I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of
is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific
when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly
nasty one. When people talked about the Fall of Man, they knew they
were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now they
talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand
it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately
false notion of what the words mean.

  _'The Club of Queer Trades.'_


SEPTEMBER 15th

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the
train before.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


SEPTEMBER 16th

Many people have wondered why it is that children's stories are so full
of moralizing. The reason is perfectly simple: it is that children like
moralizing more than anything else, and eat it up as if it were so much
jam. The reason why we, who are grown up, dislike moralizing is equally
clear: it is that we have discovered how much perversion and hypocrisy
can be mixed with it; we have grown to dislike morality not because
morality is moral, but because morality is so often immoral. But the
child has never seen the virtues twisted into vices; the child does not
know that men are not only bad from good motives, but also often good
from bad motives. The child does not know that whereas the Jesuit may
do evil that good may come, the man of the world often does good that
evil may come. Therefore, the child has a hearty, healthy, unspoiled,
and insatiable appetite for mere morality; for the mere difference
between a good little girl and a bad little girl. And it can be proved
by innumerable examples that when we are quite young we do like the
moralizing story. Grown-up people like the "Comic Sandford and Merton,"
but children like the real "Sandford and Merton."

  _'Daily News.'_


SEPTEMBER 17th

One of the few gifts that can really increase with old age is a
sense of humour. That is the whole fun of belonging to an ancient
civilization like our own great civilization of Europe. In my vision I
see Europe still sitting on her mighty bull, the enormous and mystic
mother from whom we come, who has given us everything from the 'Iliad'
to the French Revolution. And from her awful lips I seem to hear the
words:--

    'Think of me, old Mother Scrubbs,
    A-joining these 'ere totty clubs:
    Fancy me deserting the pubs
      At my time of life!'

    _'Illustrated London News.'_


SEPTEMBER 18th _DR. JOHNSON BORN_

If anyone wishes to see the real rowdy egalitarianism which is
necessary (to males at least) he can find it as well as anywhere in
the great old tavern disputes which come down to us in such books
as Boswell's 'Johnson.' It is worth while to mention that one name
especially, because the modern world in its morbidity has done it a
grave injustice. The demeanour of Johnson, it is said, was 'harsh
and despotic.' It was occasionally harsh, but it was never despotic.
Johnson was not in the least a despot. Johnson was a demagogue, he
shouted against a shouting crowd. The very fact that he wrangled with
other people is a proof that other people were allowed to wrangle with
him. His very brutality was based on the idea of an equal scrimmage
like that of football. It is strictly true that he bawled and banged
the table because he was a modest man. He was honestly afraid of being
overwhelmed or even overlooked. Addison had exquisite manners and was
the king of his company. He was polite to everybody, but superior to
everybody; therefore he has been handed down for ever in the immortal
insult of Pope:--

    Like Cato give his little Senate laws
    And sit attention to his own applause.

Johnson, so far from being king of his company, was a sort of Irish
Member in his own Parliament. Addison was a courteous superior and was
hated. Johnson was an insolent equal, and therefore was loved by all
who knew him and handed down in a marvellous book which is one of the
mere miracles of love.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


SEPTEMBER 19th

Brave men are all vertebrates: they have their softness on the surface
and their toughness in the middle.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


SEPTEMBER 20th

The teetotaller has chosen a most unfortunate phrase for the drunkard
when he says that the drunkard is making a beast of himself. The man
who drinks ordinarily makes nothing but an ordinary man of himself.
The man who drinks excessively makes a devil of himself. But nothing
connected with a human and artistic thing like wine can bring one
nearer to the brute life of Nature. The only man who is, in the exact
and literal sense of the words, making a beast of himself is the
teetotaller.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


SEPTEMBER 21st _ST. MATTHEW'S DAY_

The abyss between Christ and all His modern interpreters is that we
have no record that He ever wrote a word, except with His finger in
the sand. The whole is the history of one continuous and sublime
conversation. It was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for
any elaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and
idle words that the cross was set up on Calvary and the earth gaped,
and the sun was darkened at noonday.

  _'Twelve Types.'_


SEPTEMBER 22nd

  So with the wan waste grasses on my spear,
  I ride for ever seeking after God.
  My hair grows whiter than my thistle plume
  And all my limbs are loose; but in my eyes
  The star of an unconquerable praise:
  For in my soul one hope for ever sings,
  That at the next white corner of a road
  My eyes may look on Him.

  _'The Wild Knight.'_


SEPTEMBER 23rd

An error is more menacing than a crime, for an error begets crimes....
A free lover is worse than a profligate. For a profligate is serious
and reckless even in his shortest love; while a free lover is cautious
and irresponsible even in his longest devotion.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


SEPTEMBER 24th

If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters,
I think the priests would escape, I fear the gentlemen would; but
I believe the gutters would be simply running with the blood of
philanthropists.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


SEPTEMBER 25th

Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives nobody a chance;
religion says that life is so short that it gives everybody his final
chance.

  _Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_


SEPTEMBER 26th

In short, one Pankhurst is an exception, but a thousand Pankhursts are
a nightmare, a Bacchic orgy, a witch's sabbath. For in all legends men
have thought of women as sublime separately, but horrible in a crowd.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


SEPTEMBER 27th

Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance,
eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as a whole is changeful,
mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.

  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_


SEPTEMBER 28th

I should not be at all surprised if I turned one corner in Fleet Street
and saw a queer looking window, turned another corner and saw a yet
queerer looking lamp; I should not be surprised if I turned a third
corner and found myself in Elfland.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


SEPTEMBER 29th _ST. MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS_

Historic Christianity has always believed in the valour of St. Michael
riding in front of the Church Militant, and in an ultimate and absolute
pleasure, not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of the Spirit,
the wine of the blood of God.

  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_


SEPTEMBER 30th

When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he
himself is a liar.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_




OCTOBER


OCTOBER 1st

Of all the tests by which the good citizen and strong reformer can be
distinguished from the vague faddist or the inhuman sceptic, I know no
better test than this--that the unreal reformer sees in front of him
one certain future, the future of his fad; while the real reformer sees
before him ten or twenty futures among which his country must choose,
and may in some dreadful hour choose the wrong one. The true patriot is
always doubtful of victory; because he knows that he is dealing with a
living thing; a thing with free will. To be certain of free will is to
be uncertain of success.

  _Introduction to 'American Notes.'_


OCTOBER 2nd

Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in
Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana.
They are both helpless--one because he must not grasp anything, and the
other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoian's will is
frozen by a Buddhistic instinct that all special actions are evil. But
the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all
special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none
of them are special. They stand at the cross roads, and one hates all
the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is--well, some
things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross roads.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


OCTOBER 3rd

Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of
domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home,
and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head
of the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why
they ought not to do it.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


OCTOBER 4th _ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI_

For most people there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position
of St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any
earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears.
He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take
pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it
fell from his finger; he was perhaps the happiest of the sons of men.
Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of
what we think of the most imperious necessities; in his three vows
of poverty, chastity, and obedience he denied to himself, and those
he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most
large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial
atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all
men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a
monk and not a troubadour? We have a suspicion that if these questions
were answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this
sullen time of ours was answered also.

  _'Twelve Types.'_


OCTOBER 5th

It is awful to think that this world which so many poets have praised
has even for a time been depicted as a mantrap into which we may just
have the manhood to jump. Think of all those ages through which men
have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually
fallen to talking about having the courage to live.

  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_


OCTOBER 6th

We will eat and drink later. Let us remain together a little, we
who have loved each other so sadly, and have fought so long. I seem
to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were always
heroes--epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and you always brothers in arms.
Whether it was but recently (for Time is nothing) or at the beginning
of the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness where there
is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding
valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark and
you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and
sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the
daylight I denied it myself. But you were men. You did not forget your
secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to
tear it out of you.

  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_


OCTOBER 7th

The truest kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has
always done, accepting with a sportsman-like relish the estate to which
we are called, the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land
of our birth.

  _'Twelve Types.'_


OCTOBER 8th

When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung
or that roses smell sweet, you did not talk of taking the best
out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call
it an entertaining coincidence; when the rose smelt sweet you did
not say, 'My father is a rude, barbaric symbol enshrining (perhaps
unconsciously) the deep delicate truth that flowers smell.' No, you
believed your father because you had found him to be a living fountain
of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would
tell you the truth to-morrow, as well as to-day.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


OCTOBER 9th

There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that
is a truism.

  _'G. F. Watts.'_


OCTOBER 10th

Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it
is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where
the walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond
burns through. It glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire
which destroys us, in the roses of our romance and in the awful cup of
our religion. It stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in
first love.

  _'Daily News.'_


OCTOBER 11th

Commonness means the quality common to the saint and the sinner, to
the philosopher and the fool; and it was this that Dickens grasped and
developed. In everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies,
that fears death, that likes sunlight: that thing enjoys Dickens. And
everybody does not mean uneducated crowds, everybody means everybody:
everybody means Mrs. Meynell.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


OCTOBER 12th

Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty
and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint
will save them.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


OCTOBER 13th

In a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. And how
perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified attitudes,
and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is
proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the
lyre, and says, 'Life is real, life is earnest,' and then goes into a
room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.

  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_


OCTOBER 14th _BATTLE OF HASTINGS_

    Gored on the Norman gonfalon
    The Golden Dragon died,
      We shall not wake with ballad strings
    The good time of the smaller things,
    We shall not see the holy kings
      Ride down the Severn side.

    _'Ballad of Alfred.'_


OCTOBER 15th

I am grown up, and I do not worry myself much about Zola's immorality.
The thing I cannot stand is his morality. If ever a man on this earth
lived to embody the tremendous text, 'But if the light in your body be
darkness, how great is the darkness!' it was certainly he. Great men
like Ariosto, Rabelais, and Shakespeare fall in foul places, flounder
in violent but venial sin, sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic
weakness, are dirty, are indefensible; and then they struggle up
again and can still speak with a convincing kindness and an unbroken
honour of the best things in the world: Rabelais, of the instruction
of ardent and austere youth; Ariosto, of holy chivalry; Shakespeare,
of the splendid stillness of mercy. But in Zola even the ideals are
undesirable; Zola's mercy is colder than justice--nay, Zola's mercy is
more bitter in the mouth than injustice. When Zola shows us an ideal
training he does not take us, like Rabelais, into the happy fields of
humanist learning. He takes us into the schools of inhumanist learning,
where there are neither books nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but
only deformities in glass bottles, and where the rule is taught from
the exceptions. Zola's truth answers the exact description of the
skeleton in the cupboard; that is, it is something of which a domestic
custom forbids the discovery, but which is quite dead, even when it is
discovered.

  _'All Things Considered.'_


OCTOBER 16th

We talk in a cant phrase of the Man in the Street, but the Frenchman is
the Man in the Street. As the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines
in the street, so he fights in the street and dies in the street; so
that the street can never be commonplace to him.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


OCTOBER 17th

If we wish to preserve the family we must revolutionize the nation.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


OCTOBER 18th _ST. LUKE'S DAY_

In these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to
be scientific. Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor
in saying that he is our doctor, not our priest or our wife or ourself.
It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a
watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health
will follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that, obviously, it
is for us to judge. Physical science is like simple addition; it is
either infallible or it is false. To mix science up with philosophy
is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and
a science that has lost all its practical value. I want my private
physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for
my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.

  _'All Things Considered.'_


OCTOBER 19th

It was absurd to say that Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields. But
it might have been fairly said that Waterloo was won on the village
green, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket. In a word, it
was the average of the nation that was strong, and athletic glories do
not indicate much about the average of a nation. Waterloo was not won
by good cricket-players. But Waterloo was won by bad cricket-players,
by a mass of men who had some minimum of athletic instincts and habits.
It is a good sign in a nation, when such things are done badly. It
shows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a
nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only
a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is
merely looking on.

  _'All Things Considered.'_


OCTOBER 20th

I sometimes think it is a pity that people travel in foreign countries;
it narrows their minds so much.

  _'Daily News.'_


OCTOBER 21st _TRAFALGAR DAY_

The heroic is a fact, even when it is a fact of coincidence or of
miracle; and a fact is a thing which can be admitted without being
explained. But I would merely hint that there is a very natural
explanation of this frightful felicity, either of phrase or action,
which so many men have exhibited on so many scaffolds or battlefields.
It is merely that when a man has found something which he prefers to
life, he then for the first time begins to live. A promptitude of
poetry opens in his soul of which our paltry experiences do not possess
the key. When once he has despised this world as a mere instrument, it
becomes a musical instrument, it falls into certain artistic harmonies
around him. If Nelson had not worn his stars he would not have been
hit. But if he had not worn his stars he would not have been Nelson;
and if he had not been Nelson he might have lost the battle.

  _'Daily News.'_


OCTOBER 22nd

Watts proved no doubt that he was not wholly without humour by this
admirable picture ("The First Oyster"). Gladstone proved that he was
not wholly without humour by his reply to Mr. Chaplin, by his singing
of "Doo-dah," and by his support of a grant to the Duke of Coburg. But
both men were singularly little possessed by the mood or the idea of
humour. To them had been in peculiar fullness revealed the one great
truth which our modern thought does not know, and which it may possibly
perish through not knowing. They knew that to enjoy life means to take
it seriously. There is an eternal kinship between solemnity and high
spirits, and almost the very name of it is Gladstone. Its other name
is Watts. They knew that not only life, but every detail of life, is
most a pleasure when it is studied with the gloomiest intensity....
The startling cheerfulness of the old age of Gladstone, the startling
cheerfulness of the old age of Watts, are both redolent of this
exuberant seriousness, this uproarious gravity. They were as happy as
the birds because, like the birds, they were untainted by the disease
of laughter. They are as awful and philosophical as children at play:
indeed, they remind us of a truth true for all of us, though capable of
misunderstanding, that the great aim of a man's life is to get into his
second childhood.

  _'Watts.'_


OCTOBER 23rd

The foil may curve in the lunge; but there is nothing beautiful about
beginning the battle with a crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strong
doctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts; but that
is no reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. Do
not be an opportunist; try to be theoretic at all the opportunities;
fate can be trusted to do all the opportunist part of it. Do not try to
bend; any more than the trees try to bend. Try to grow straight; and
life will bend you.

  _'Daily News.'_


OCTOBER 24th

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the
creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

  _'The Club of Queer Trades.'_


OCTOBER 25th

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


OCTOBER 26th

It is currently said that hope goes with youth and lends to youth its
wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to
man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the
period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is
the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is
the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the
knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration
comes to the middle-aged. God has kept that good wine until now.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


OCTOBER 27th

We have made an empire out of our refuse; but we cannot make a nation
even out of our best material. Such is the vague and half-conscious
contradiction that undoubtedly possesses the minds of great masses of
the not unkindly rich. Touching the remote empire they feel a vague
but vast humanitarian hope; touching the chances of small holdings
or rural reconstruction in the heart of the empire they feel a doubt
and a disinclination that is not untouched with despair. Their creed
contains two great articles: first, that the common Englishman can get
on anywhere; and second, that the common Englishman cannot get on in
England.

  _Introduction to 'Cottage Homes of England.'_


OCTOBER 28th

There is only one very timid sort of man that is not afraid of women.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


OCTOBER 29th

I do not see ghosts; I only see their inherent probability.

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


OCTOBER 30th

Do you see this lantern? Do you see the cross carved on it and the
flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men
than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron,
and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on,
there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was,
by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You
can only destroy. You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world.
Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall now
destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit
to find it.

  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_


OCTOBER 31st _HALLOW E'EN_

If we ever get the English back on to the English land they will become
again a religious people, if all goes well, a superstitious people.
The absence from modern life of both the higher and the lower forms of
faith is largely due to a divorce from nature and the trees and clouds.
If we have no more turnip ghosts it is chiefly from the lack of turnips.

  _'Heretics.'_




NOVEMBER


NOVEMBER 1st _ALL SAINTS' DAY_

You cannot deny that it is perfectly possible that to-morrow morning in
Ireland or in Italy there might appear a man not only as good but good
in exactly the same way as St. Francis of Assisi. Very well; now take
the other types of human virtue: many of them splendid. The English
gentleman of Elizabeth was chivalrous and idealistic. But can you stand
still in this meadow and _be_ an English gentleman of Elizabeth? The
austere republican of the eighteenth century, with his stern patriotism
and his simple life, was a fine fellow. But have you ever seen him?
Have you ever seen an austere republican? Only a hundred years have
passed and that volcano of revolutionary truth and valour is as cold as
the mountains of the moon. And so it will be with the ethics which are
buzzing down Fleet Street at this instant as I speak. What phrase would
inspire a London clerk or workman just now? Perhaps that he is a son
of the British Empire on which the sun never sets; perhaps that he is
a prop of his Trades Union, or a class-conscious proletarian something
or other; perhaps merely that he is a gentleman, when he obviously is
not. Those names and notions are all honourable, but how long will they
last? Empires break; industrial conditions change; the suburbs will not
last for ever. What will remain? I will tell you: the Catholic saint
will remain.

  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_


NOVEMBER 2nd _ALL SOULS' DAY_

There are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably
equal. They are not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat,
as the sages of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive.
But this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this
again is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


NOVEMBER 3rd

You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.

  _Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_


NOVEMBER 4th

The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the
right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But
I had heard that I was in the _wrong_ place, and my soul sang for
joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated
forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass
had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why
I could feel homesick at home.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


NOVEMBER 5th _GUY FAWKES' DAY_

Guy Fawkes' Day is not only in some rude sense a festival, and in
some rude sense a religious festival; it is also, what is supremely
symbolic and important, a winter religious festival. Here the 5th of
November, which celebrates a paltry Christian quarrel, has a touch of
the splendour of the 25th of December, which celebrates Christianity
itself. Dickens and all the jolly English giants who write of the red
firelight are grossly misunderstood in this matter. Prigs call them
coarse and materialistic because they write about the punch and plum
pudding of winter festivals. The prigs do not see that if these writers
were really coarse and materialistic they would not write about winter
feasts at all. Mere materialists would write about summer and the sun.
The whole point of winter pleasure is that it is a defiant pleasure, a
pleasure armed and at bay. The whole point is in the fierce contrast
between the fire and wine within and the roaring rains outside. And
some part of the sacredness of firelight we may allow to fireworks.

  _Article in 'The Observer.'_


NOVEMBER 6th

What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought: it is the
old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. It is vain for
bishops and pious big wigs to discuss what things will happen if wild
scepticism runs its course. It has run its course. It is vain for
eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if
once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more
questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any
wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any
selves. You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men
doubt if there is a world.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


NOVEMBER 7th

A man ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy, and
emphatically not because he has a large frame to sustain. A man ought
to take exercise not because he is too fat, but because he loves foils
or horses or high mountains, and loves them for their own sake. And
a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love, and emphatically
not because the world requires to be populated. The food will really
renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking about his tissues.
The exercise will really get him into training so long as he is
thinking about something else. And the marriage will really stand
some chance of producing a generous-blooded generation if it had its
origin in its own natural and generous excitement. It is the first law
of health that our necessities should not be accepted as necessities;
they should be accepted as luxuries. Let us, then, be careful about
the small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness, or anything
that can be managed with care. But in the name of all sanity, let us be
careless about the important things, such as marriage, or the fountain
of our very life will fail.

  _'Heretics.'_


NOVEMBER 8th

If there be any value in scaling the mountains, it is only that from
them one can behold the plains.

  _'Daily News.'_


NOVEMBER 9th _LORD MAYOR'S DAY_

I pressed some little way farther through the throng of people, and
caught a glimpse of some things that are never seen in Fleet Street. I
mean real green which is like the grass in the glaring sun, and real
blue that is like the burning sky in another quarter of the world,
and real gold that is like fire that cannot be quenched, and real red
that is like savage roses and the wine that is the blood of God. Nor
was it a contemptible system of ideas that was supposed to be depicted
by these colours of flags and shields and shining horsemen. It was
at least supposed to be England, which made us all; it was at least
supposed to be London, which made me and better men. I at least am
not so made that I can make sport of such symbols. There in whatever
ungainly procession, there on whatever ugly shields, there was the
cross of St. George and the sword of St. Paul. Even if all men should
go utterly away from everything that is symbolized, the last symbol
will impress them. If no one should be left in the world except a
million open malefactors and one hypocrite, that hypocrite will still
remind them of holiness.

  _'Daily News.'_


NOVEMBER 10th

    Old happiness is grey as we
      And we may still outstrip her;
    If we be slippered pantaloons
      O let us hunt the slipper!

    The old world glows with colours clear,
      And if, as saith the saint,
    The world is but a painted show,
      O let us lick the paint!

    Far, far behind are morbid hours
      And lonely hearts that bleed;
    Far, far behind us are the days
      When we were old indeed.

    Behold the simple sum of things
      Where, in one splendour spun,
    The stars go round the Mulberry Bush,
      The Burning Bush, the Sun.

    _'Grey Beards at Play.'_


NOVEMBER 11th

A man (of a certain age) may look into the eyes of his lady-love to
see that they are beautiful. But no normal lady will allow that young
man to look into her eyes to see whether they are beautiful. The same
variety and idiosyncrasy has been generally observed in gods. Praise
them; or leave them alone; but do not look for them unless you know
they are there. Do not look for them unless you want them.

  _'All Things Considered.'_


NOVEMBER 12th

    Likelier across these flats afar,
      These sulky levels smooth and free,
    The drums shall crash a waltz of war
      And Death shall dance with Liberty;
    Likelier the barricades shall blare
      Slaughter below and smoke above,
    And death and hate and hell declare
      That men have found a thing to love.

    _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_


NOVEMBER 13th

Everything is military in the sense that everything depends upon
obedience. There is no perfectly epicurean corner; there is no
perfectly irresponsible place. Everywhere men have made the way for us
with sweat and submission. We may fling ourselves into a hammock in
a fit of divine carelessness. But we are glad that the net-maker did
not make the net in a fit of divine carelessness. We may jump upon a
child's rocking-horse for a joke. But we are glad that the carpenter
did not leave the legs of it unglued for a joke.

  _'Heretics.'_


NOVEMBER 14th

I will ride upon the Nightmare; but she shall not ride on me.

  _'Daily News.'_


NOVEMBER 15th

A great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing
it. The things he describes are types because they are truths.
Shakespeare may or may not have ever put it to himself that Richard
the Second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must
necessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether an
artist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that
a critic should be allegorical.

  _Introduction to 'Great Expectations.'_


NOVEMBER 16th

When society is in rather a futile fuss about the subjection of women,
will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege
of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education
becomes futile? For a boy is only sent to be taught at school when
it is too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done
already, and thank God it is nearly always done by women. Every man
is womanized, merely by being born. They talk of the masculine woman;
but every man is a feminized man. And if ever men walk to Westminster
to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join their
procession.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


NOVEMBER 17th

Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more
sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a
natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is
the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good _Times_
leading article than a good joke in _Punch_. For solemnity flows out of
men naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to
be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


NOVEMBER 18th

Yes, you are right. I am afraid of him. Therefore I swear by God that
I will seek out this man whom I fear until I find him and strike him
on the mouth. If heaven were his throne and the earth his footstool I
swear that I would pull him down.... Because I am afraid of him; and no
man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.

  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_


NOVEMBER 19th

Under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its
empires and its Reuter's Agency, the real life of man goes on concerned
with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song,
totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its
splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car
civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming
space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture
of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars
suburban.

  _'Heretics.'_


NOVEMBER 20th

Every detail points to something, certainly, but generally to the
wrong thing. Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the
thousands of twigs on a tree. It is only the life of the tree that has
unity and goes up--only the green blood that springs, like a fountain,
at the stars.

  _'The Club of Queer Trades.'_


NOVEMBER 21st

Shallow romanticists go away in trains and stop in places called
Hugmy-in-the-Hole, or Bumps-on-the-Puddle. And all the time they could,
if they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name of St.
John's Wood. I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not. I should
be afraid of the innumerable night of fir-trees, afraid to come upon a
blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the eagle. But all these
things can be imagined by remaining reverently in the Harrow train.

  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_


NOVEMBER 22nd

Giants, as in the wise old fairy-tales, are vermin. Supermen, if not
good men, are vermin.

  _'Heretics.'_


NOVEMBER 23rd

It is part of that large and placid lie that the rationalists tell
when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism.
Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling
cosmopolitan civilization. Long sea voyages were not so quick, but were
quite as incessant as to-day; and though in the nature of things Christ
had not many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that He had
some. And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen
with a yacht that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed
with the same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John;
which critics say could not have been written by one of the first few
Christians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its Platonic
tone. I am no judge of the philology, but every human being is a
divinely appointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems
to me to prove nothing at all.

  _'Daily News.'_


NOVEMBER 24th

Sometimes the best business of an age is to resist some alien
invasion; sometimes to preach practical self-control in a world too
self-indulgent and diffuse; sometimes to prevent the growth in the
state of great new private enterprises that would poison or oppress it.
Above all, it may happen that the highest task of a thinking citizen
may be to do the exact opposite of the work the Radicals had to do. It
may be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he
can find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and
sinking into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture.

  _Introduction to 'A Child's History of England.'_


NOVEMBER 25th

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is
to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

  _'Heretics.'_


NOVEMBER 26th

We talk of art as something artificial in comparison with life. But
I sometimes fancy that the very highest art is more real than life
itself. At least this is true: that in proportion as passions become
real they become poetical; the lover is always trying to be the poet.
All real energy is an attempt at harmony and a high swing of rhythm;
and if we were only real enough we should all talk in rhyme. However
this may be, it is unquestionable in the case of great public affairs.
Whenever you have real practical politics you have poetical politics.
Whenever men have succeeded in wars they have sung war-songs; whenever
you have the useful triumph you have also the useless trophy.

But the thing is more strongly apparent exactly where the great
Fabian falls foul of it--in the open scenes of history and the actual
operation of events. The things that actually did happen all over the
world are precisely the things which he thinks could not have happened
in Galilee, the artistic isolations, the dreadful dialogues in which
each speaker was dramatic, the prophecies flung down like gauntlets,
the high invocations of history, the marching and mounting excitement
of the story, the pulverizing and appropriate repartees. These things
do happen; they have happened; they are attested, in all the cases
where the soul of man had become poetic in its very peril. At every one
of its important moments the most certain and solid history reads like
an historical novel.

  _'Daily News.'_


NOVEMBER 27th

Anyone could easily excuse the ill-humour of the poor. But great
masses of the poor have not even any ill-humour to be excused. Their
cheeriness is startling enough to be the foundation of a miracle play;
and certainly is startling enough to be the foundation of a romance.

  _Introduction to 'Christmas Stories.'_


NOVEMBER 28th

    Lo! I am come to autumn,
      When all the leaves are gold;
    Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
      The year and I are old.

    In youth I sought the prince of men
      Captain in cosmic wars.
    Our Titan even the weeds would show
      Defiant, to the stars.

    But now a great thing in the street
      Seems any human nod,
    Where shift in strange democracy
      The million masks of God.

    In youth I sought the golden flower
      Hidden in wood or wold,
    But I am come to autumn,
      When all the leaves are gold.

    _'The Wild Knight.'_


NOVEMBER 29th

There is a noble instinct for giving the right touch of beauty to
common and necessary things, but the things that are so touched are
the ancient things, the things that always, to some extent, commended
themselves to the lover of beauty. The spirit of William Morris has not
seized hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful.
And this was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not
the supreme courage to face the ugliness of things; Beauty shrank from
the Beast and the fairy tale had a different ending.

  _'Twelve Types.'_


NOVEMBER 30th _ST. ANDREW'S DAY_

I am quite certain that Scotland is a nation; I am quite certain that
nationality is the key of Scotland; I am quite certain that all our
success with Scotland has been due to the fact that we have in spirit
treated it as a nation. I am quite certain that Ireland is a nation.
I am quite certain that nationality is the key of Ireland; I am quite
certain that all our failure in Ireland arose from the fact that we
would not in spirit treat it as a nation. It would be difficult to
find, even among the innumerable examples that exist, a stronger
example of the immensely superior importance of sentiment, to what is
called practicality, than this case of the two sister nations. It is
not that we have encouraged a Scotchman to be rich; it is not that
we have encouraged a Scotchman to be active; it is not that we have
encouraged a Scotchman to be free. It is that we have quite definitely
encouraged a Scotchman to be Scotch.

  _'All Things Considered.'_




DECEMBER


DECEMBER 1st

In this world of ours we do not so much go on and discover small
things: rather we go on and discover big things. It is the detail
that we see first; it is the design that we only see very slowly, and
some men die never having seen it at all. We see certain squadrons in
certain uniforms gallop past; we take an arbitrary fancy to this or
that colour, to this or that plume. But it often takes us a long time
to realize what the fight is about or even who is fighting whom.

So in the modern intellectual world we can see flags of many colours,
deeds of manifold interest; the one thing we cannot see is the map. We
cannot see the simplified statement which tells us what is the origin
of all the trouble.

  _'William Blake.'_


DECEMBER 2nd

Our wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the
world, but our folly belongs to those we love.

  _'Browning.'_


DECEMBER 3rd

Our fathers were large and healthy enough to make a thing humane, and
not worry about whether it was hygienic. They were big enough to get
into small rooms.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


DECEMBER 4th

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic
philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a
private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

  _Introduction to 'Book of Job.'_


DECEMBER 5th

That Christianity is identical with democracy, is the hardest of
gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as the saying
that they are all the sons of God.

  _'Twelve Types.'_


DECEMBER 6th _ST. NICHOLAS'S DAY_

All the old wholesome customs in connexion with Christmas were to the
effect that one should not touch or see or know or speak of something
before the actual coming of Christmas Day. Thus, for instance,
children were never given their presents until the actual coming of
the appointed hour. The presents were kept tied up in brown-paper
parcels, out of which an arm of a doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes
accidentally stuck. I wish this principle were adopted in respect
of modern Christmas ceremonies and publications. The editors of the
magazines bring out their Christmas numbers so long before the time
that the reader is more likely to be lamenting for the turkey of last
year than to have seriously settled down to a solid anticipation of the
turkey which is to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought to be
tied up in brown paper and kept for Christmas Day. On consideration,
I should favour the editors being tied up in brown paper. Whether the
leg or arm of an editor should ever be allowed to protrude I leave to
individual choice.

  _'All Things Considered.'_


DECEMBER 7th

We had talked for about half an hour about politics and God; for men
always talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is
because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God
is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of
a moustache.

  _'The Club of Queer Trades.'_


DECEMBER 8th

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism,
which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor
to the universe.

  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_


DECEMBER 9th

There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to
God; so that even now the colour of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of
a flower (or a firework) comes to our hearts with a kind of authority
and certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or
features of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the
whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the
child comes the woman--she understands.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


DECEMBER 10th

A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without
any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of
doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any
other man can love the rewards of it.

  _'Browning.'_


DECEMBER 11th

Among all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most
universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have
forgotten that they are living on a star.

  _'Defendant.'_


DECEMBER 12th _BROWNING DIED_

The poem, 'Old Pictures in Florence,' suggests admirably that a sense
of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon a sense of
completeness: that the part may easily and obviously be greater than
the whole. And from this Browning draws, as he is fully justified in
drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger scale of life.
For nothing is more certain than that though this world is the only
world that we have known, or of which we could ever dream, the fact
does remain that we have named it 'a strange world.' In other words,
we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, that
something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. And
Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness
implies completeness, life implies immortality. The second of the
great Browning doctrines requires some audacity to express. It can
only be properly stated as the hope that lies in the imperfection of
God--that is to say, that Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if
they were the burdens of man, were also his privileges. He held that
these stubborn sorrows and obscure valours might--to use a yet more
strange expression--have provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has
self-sacrifice and God has none, then man has in the universe a secret
and blasphemous superiority. And this tremendous story of a divine
jealousy Browning reads into the story of the Crucifixion. These are
emphatically the two main doctrines or opinions of Browning, which I
have ventured to characterize roughly as the hope in the imperfection
of man, and more boldly as the hope in the imperfection of God. They
are great thoughts, thoughts written by a great man, and they raise
noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of faith which the human spirit
will never answer or exhaust.

  _'Robert Browning.'_


DECEMBER 13th

    Elder father, though thine eyes
    Shine with hoary mysteries,
    Canst thou tell what in the heart
    Of a cowslip blossom lies?

    Smaller than all lives that be,
    Secret as the deepest sea,
    Stands a little house of seeds
    Like an elfin's granary.

    Speller of the stones and weeds,
    Skilled in Nature's crafts and creeds,
    Tell me what is in the heart
    Of the smallest of the seeds.

    God Almighty, and with Him
    Cherubim and Seraphim
    Filling all Eternity--
    Adonai Elohim.

    _'The Wild Knight.'_


DECEMBER 14th

The rare strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross obvious thing
is to miss it. Chaos is dull; because in chaos a train might go
anywhere--to Baker Street or Bagdad. But man is a magician and his
whole magic is in this that he does say 'Victoria,' and lo! it is
Victoria.

  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_


DECEMBER 15th

Men talk of philosophy and theology as if they were something
specialistic and arid and academic. But philosophy and theology are not
only the only democratic things, they are democratic to the point of
being vulgar, to the point, I was going to say, of being rowdy. They
alone admit all matters: they alone lie open to all attacks.... There
is no detail from buttons to kangaroos that does not enter into the gay
confusion of philosophy. There is no fact of life, from the death of a
donkey to the General Post Office, which has not its place to dance and
sing in, in the glorious carnival of theology.

  _'G. F. Watts.'_


DECEMBER 16th

The Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was a young and rising
politician--that is to say, he was a pleasant youth with flat fair hair
and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and enormous estates.
In public his appearances were always successful and his principle was
simple enough. When he thought of a joke he made it and was called
brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was
no time for trifling, and was called able. In private, in a club of
his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly like a
schoolboy.

  _'The Innocence of Father Brown.'_


DECEMBER 17th

The personal is not a mere figure for the impersonal: rather the
impersonal is a clumsy term for something more personal than common
personality. God is not a symbol of goodness. Goodness is a symbol of
God.

  _'William Blake.'_


DECEMBER 18th

The world is not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical
optimists; it is not to be justified as the best of all possible
worlds.... Its merit is precisely that none of us could have conceived
such a thing; that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as
miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


DECEMBER 19th

The educated classes have adopted a hideous and heathen custom of
considering death as too dreadful to talk about, and letting it remain
a secret for each person, like some private malformation. The poor, on
the contrary, make a great gossip and display about bereavement; and
they are right. They have hold of a truth of psychology which is at
the back of all the funeral customs of the children of men. The way
to lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it. The way to endure a painful
crisis is to insist very much that it is a crisis; to permit people who
must feel sad at least to feel important. In this the poor are simply
the priests of the universal civilization; and in their stuffy feasts
and solemn chattering there is the smell of the baked meats of Hamlet
and the dust and echo of the funeral games of Patroclus.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


DECEMBER 20th

A crime is like any other work of art. Don't look surprised; crimes are
by no means the only works of art that come from an infernal workshop.
But every work of art, divine or diabolic, has one indispensable
mark--I mean that the centre of it is simple, however the entourage may
be complicated.

  _'The Innocence of Father Brown.'_


DECEMBER 21st _ST. THOMAS'S DAY_

It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back
to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of
doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine
and the Freethinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine
horribly. The rationalists made me question whether reason was of any
use whatever; and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far
as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all.
As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures, the
dreadful thought broke into my mind, 'Almost thou persuadest me to be a
Christian.'

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


DECEMBER 22nd

Pure and exalted atheists talk themselves into believing that the
working classes are turning with indignant scorn from the churches.
The working classes are not indignant against the churches in the
least. The things the working classes really are indignant against are
the hospitals. The people has no definite disbelief in the temples of
theology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the
temples of physical science.

  _'Charles Dickens.'_


DECEMBER 23rd

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels.
In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, He has
partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a
turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour
or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather
increased than diminished.

  _'All Things Considered.'_


DECEMBER 24th _CHRISTMAS EVE_

THE TRUCE OF CHRISTMAS

    Passionate peace is in the sky--
    And in the snow in silver sealed
    The beasts are perfect in the field,
    And men seem men so suddenly--
      (But take ten swords and ten times ten
      And blow the bugle in praising men;
      For we are for all men under the sun,
      And they are against us every one;
      And misers haggle and madmen clutch
      And there is peril in praising much,
      And we have the terrible tongues uncurled
      That praise the world to the sons of the world).

    The idle humble hill and wood
    Are bowed about the sacred birth,
    And for one little hour the earth
    Is lazy with the love of good--
      (But ready are you, and ready am I,
      If the battle blow and the guns go by;
      For we are for all men under the sun,
      And they are against us every one;
      And the men that hate herd all together,
      To pride and gold, and the great white feather,
      And the thing is graven in star and stone
      That the men who love are all alone).

    Hunger is hard and time is tough,
    But bless the beggars and kiss the kings,
    For hope has broken the heart of things,
    And nothing was ever praised enough.
      (But hold the shield for a sudden swing
      And point the sword when you praise a thing,
      For we are for all men under the sun,
      And they are against us every one,
      And mime and merchant, thane and thrall
      Hate us because we love them all,
      Only till Christmastide go by
      Passionate peace is in the sky).

    _'The Commonwealth.'_


DECEMBER 25th _CHRISTMAS DAY_

    There fared a mother driven forth
    Out of an inn to roam;
    In the place where she was homeless
    All men are at home.
    The crazy stable close at hand,
    With shaking timber and shifting sand,
    Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
    Than the square stones of Rome.

    For men are homesick in their homes,
    And strangers under the sun,
    And they lay their heads in a foreign land
    Whenever the day is done.
    Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
    And chance and honour and high surprise,
    But our homes are under miraculous skies
    Where the Yule tale was begun.

    A Child in a foul stable,
    Where the beasts feed and foam,
    Only where He was homeless
    Are you and I at home:
    We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
    But our hearts we lost--how long ago!
    In a place no chart nor ship can show
    Under the sky's dome.

    This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
    And strange the plain things are,
    The earth is enough and the air is enough
    For our wonder and our war;
    But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
    And our peace is put in impossible things
    Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
    Round an incredible star.

    To an open house in the evening
    Home shall all men come,
    To an older place than Eden
    And a taller town than Rome.
    To the end of the way of the wandering star,
    To the things that cannot be and that are,
    To the place where God was homeless
    And all men are at home.

    _The House of Christmas: 'Daily News.'_


DECEMBER 26th _BOXING DAY_

There are innumerable persons with eyeglasses and green garments who
pray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian Games. But there is
about these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests
that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas. If so, where
is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions? Here is a
solid and ancient festive tradition still plying a roaring trade in
the streets, and they think it vulgar. If this is so, let them be very
certain of this: that they are the kind of people who in the time of
the maypole would have thought the maypole vulgar; who in the time of
the Canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage
vulgar; who in the time of the Olympian Games would have thought the
Olympian Games vulgar. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that
they were vulgar. Let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean
coarseness of speech, rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and
some heavy drinking: vulgarity there always was, wherever there was
joy, wherever there was faith in the gods.

  _'Heretics.'_


DECEMBER 27th _ST. JOHN'S DAY_

Christ did not love humanity, He never said He loved humanity; He loved
men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a
gigantic centipede. And the reason that the Tolstoians can even endure
to think of an equally distributed love is that their love of humanity
is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their own
theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.

  _'Twelve Types.'_


DECEMBER 28th _HOLY INNOCENTS' DAY_

That little urchin with the gold-red hair (whom I have just watched
toddling past my house), she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered;
her hair shall not be cut short like a convict's. No; all the kingdoms
of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. The winds
of the world shall be tempered to that lamb unshorn. All crowns that
cannot fit her head shall be broken; all raiment and building that does
not harmonize with her glory shall waste away. Her mother may bid her
bind her hair, for that is natural authority; but the Emperor of the
Planet shall not bid her cut it off. She is the human and sacred image;
all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the
pillars of society shall be shaken and the roofs of ages come rushing
down; and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


DECEMBER 29th _ST. THOMAS À BECKET_

When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of
Canterbury it was not only a sign of anger but a sort of black
admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for
his brains. Such a blow will remain for ever unintelligible unless we
realize what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before
they were distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the
great medieval conception that the Church is the judge of the world.
Becket objected to a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice.
And his reason was simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being
tried by the priest. The judiciary was itself _sub judice_. The kings
were themselves in the dock. The idea was to create an invisible
kingdom without armies or prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn
publicly all the kingdoms of the earth.

  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_


DECEMBER 30th

Progress is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically evident that
it is illegitimate for us. It is a sacred word, a word that could only
rightly be used by rigid believers and in the ages of faith.

  _'Heretics.'_


DECEMBER 31st

With all the multiplicity of knowledge there is one thing happily that
no man knows: whether the world is old or young.

  _'The Defendant.'_




THE MOVEABLE FEASTS


ADVENT SUNDAY

  People, if you have any prayers,
  Say prayers for me;
  And lay me under a Christian stone
  In this lost land I thought my own,
  To wait till the holy horn be blown
  And all poor men are free.

  _'Ballad of Alfred.'_


SHROVE TUESDAY

    Why should I care for the Ages
      Because they are old and grey?
    To me like sudden laughter
      The stars are fresh and gay;
    The world is a daring fancy
      And finished yesterday.

    Why should I bow to the Ages
      Because they are drear and dry?
    Slow trees and ripening meadows
      For me go roaring by,
    A living charge, a struggle
      To escalade the sky.

    The eternal suns and systems,
      Solid and silent all,
    To me are stars of an instant,
      Only the fires that fall
    From God's good rocket rising
      On this night of carnival.

    _'A Novelty' ('The Wild Knight')._


ASH WEDNESDAY

    Nor shall all iron doors make dumb
    Men wondering ceaselessly,
    If it be not better to fast for joy
    Than feast for misery?

    _'Ballad of Alfred.'_


PALM SUNDAY

    When fishes flew and forests walked
    And figs grew upon thorn,
    Some moment when the moon was blood
    Then surely I was born.

    With monstrous head and sickening cry
    And ears like errant wings,
    The devil's walking parody
    On all four-footed things.

    The tattered outlaw of the earth,
    Of ancient crooked will,
    Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
    I keep my secret still.

    Fools, for I also had my hour,
    One far fierce hour and sweet,
    There was a shout about my ears
    And palms before my feet.

    _'The Donkey' ('The Wild Knight')._


MAUNDAY THURSDAY

Jesus Christ made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes
it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not
joyful; he revels because he is not glad. 'Drink,' he says, 'for you
know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go
nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as
a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing
worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base
equality and an evil peace.' So he stands offering us the cup in his
hands. And in the high altar of Christianity stands another figure in
whose hand also is the cup of the vine. 'Drink,' he says, 'for
the whole world is as red as this wine with the crimson of the love and
wrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle, and this
is the stirrup cup. Drink, for this is my blood of the New Testament
that is shed for you. Drink, for I know whence you come and why. Drink,
for I know when you go and where.'

  _'Heretics.'_


GOOD FRIDAY

    And well may God with the serving folk
    Cast in His dreadful lot.
    Is not He too a servant,
    And is not He forgot?

    Wherefore was God in Golgotha
    Slain as a serf is slain;
    And hate He had of prince and peer,
    And love He had and made good cheer,
    Of them that, like this woman here,
    Go powerfully in pain.

    _'Ballad of Alfred.'_


HOLY SATURDAY

The Cross cannot be defeated for it is defeat.

  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_


EASTER DAY

I said to my companion the Dickensian, 'Do you see that angel over
there? I think it must be meant for the Angel at the Sepulchre.' He saw
that I was somewhat singularly moved, and he raised his eyebrows.

'I daresay,' he said. 'What is there odd about that?'

After a pause I answered, 'Do you remember what the Angel at the
Sepulchre said?'

'Not particularly,' ha replied; 'but where are you off to in such a
hurry?'

'I am going,' I said, 'to put pennies into automatic machines on the
beach. I am going to listen to the niggers. I am going to have my
photograph taken. I will buy some picture postcards. I do want a boat.
I am ready to listen to a concertina, and but for the defects of my
education should be ready to play it. I am willing to ride on a donkey;
that is, if the donkey is willing. For all this was commanded me by the
angel in the stained glass window.'

'I really think,' said the Dickensian, 'that I had better put you in
charge of your relations.'

'Sir,' I answered, 'there are certain writers to whom humanity owes
much, whose talent is yet of so shy and delicate or retrospective a
type that we do well to link it with certain quaint places or certain
perishing associations. It would not be unnatural to look for the
spirit of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, or even for the shade of
Thackeray in old Kensington. But let us have no antiquarianism about
Dickens for Dickens is not an antiquity. Dickens looks not backward but
forward; he might look at our modern mobs with satire, or with fury,
but he would love to look at them. He might lash our democracy, but
it would be because, like a democrat, he asked much from it. We will
not have all his books bound up under the title 'The Old Curiosity
Shop.' Rather we will have them all bound up under the title of 'Great
Expectations.' Wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make
something of it, swallow it with a holy cannibalism and assimilate it
with the digestion of a giant. We must take these trippers as he would
have taken them and tear out of them their tragedy and their farce. Do
you remember now what the Angel said at the Sepulchre? 'Why seek ye the
living among the dead? He is not here; He is risen.'

  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_


ASCENSION DAY

What is the difference between Christ and Satan?

It is quite simple. Christ descended into hell; Satan fell into it. One
of them wanted to go up and went down; the other wanted to go down and
went up.

  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_


WHITSUNDAY

I have a far more solid and central ground for submitting to
Christianity as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as
a scheme. And that is this; that the Christian Church in its practical
relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only
certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me
to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross;
some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One
fine morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may
see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is
dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will
not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live
with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an
original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might
shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact
with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting
to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always
expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.

  _'Orthodoxy.'_


TRINITY SUNDAY

    The meanest man in grey fields gone
    Behind the set of sun,
    Heareth between star and other star,
    Through the door of the darkness fallen ajar,
    The Council eldest of things that are,
    The talk of the Three in One.

    _'Ballad of Alfred.'_


CORPUS CHRISTI

All great spiritual Scriptures are full of the invitation not to test
but to taste; not to examine but to eat. Their phrases are full of
living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna and dreadful wine.
Worldliness and the polite society of the world has despised this
instinct of eating, but religion has never despised it.

  _'Daily News.'_



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LONDON AND ETON





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