Tag: G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton on International Differences in Humor

On By Christopher LansdownIn Interesting FindsLeave a comment

In order fully to understand this, it is necessary to realise, genuinely and thoroughly, that there is such a thing as an international difference in humour. If we take the crudest joke in the world—the joke, let us say, of a man sitting down on his hat—we shall yet find that all the nations would differ in their way of treating it humourously, and that if American humour treated it at all, it would be in a purely American manner. For example, there was a case of an orator in the House of Commons, who, after denouncing all the public abuses he could think of, did sit down on his hat. An Irishman immediately rose, full of the whole wealth of Irish humour, and said, “Should I be in order, Sir, in congratulating the honourable gentleman on the fact that when he sat down on his hat his head was not in it?” Here is a glorious example of Irish humour—the bull not unconscious, not entirely conscious, but rather an idea so absurd that even the utterer of it can hardly realise how abysmally absurd it is. But every other nation would have treated the idea in a manner slightly different. The Frenchman’s humour would have been logical: he would have said, “The orator denounces modern abuses and destroys to himself the top-hat: behold a good example!” What the Scotchman’s humour would have said I am not so certain, but it would probably have dealt with the serious advisability of making such speeches on top of someone else’s hat. But American humour on such a general theme would be the humour of exaggeration. The American humourist would say that the English politicians so often sat down on their hats that the noise of the House of Commons was one crackle of silk. He would say that when an important orator rose to speak in the House of Commons, long rows of hatters waited outside the House with note-books to take down orders from the participants in the debate. He would say that the whole hat trade of London was disorganised by the news that a clever remark had been made by a young M. P. on the subject of the imports of Jamaica. In short, American humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the Irish, nor transfiguringly lucid and appropriate like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination. It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.

This is from Chesterton’s essay on Bret Harte, in Varied Types.

Chesterton on the Consequences of Not Having a Philosophy of Life

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

The best reason for a revival of philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy certain horrible things will happen to him.  He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution; he will do the work that lies nearest; he will devote himself to deeds, not words.  Thus struck down by blow after blow of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords; such as those which I have catalogued above.  Those things are simply substitutes for thoughts.  In some cases they are the tags and tail-ends of somebody else’s thinking.  That means that a man who refuses to have his own philosophy will not even have the advantages of a brute beast, and be left to his own instincts.  He will only have the used-up scraps of somebody else’s philosophy; which the beasts do not have to inherit; hence their happiness.  Men have always one of two things: either a complete and conscious philosophy or the unconscious acceptance of the broken bits of some incomplete and shattered and often discredited philosophy.  Such broken bits are the phrases I have quoted: efficiency and evolution and the rest.  The idea of being “practical”, standing all by itself, is all that remains of a Pragmatism that cannot stand at all.  It is impossible to be practical without a Pragma.  And what would happen if you went up to the next practical man you met and said to the poor dear old duffer, “Where is your Pragma?” Doing the work that is nearest is obvious nonsense; yet it has been repeated in many albums.  In nine cases out of ten it would mean doing the work that we are least fitted to do, such as cleaning the windows or clouting the policeman over the head.  “Deeds, not words” is itself an excellent example of “Words, not thoughts”.  It is a deed to throw a pebble into a pond and a word that sends a prisoner to the gallows.  But there are certainly very futile words; and this sort of journalistic philosophy and popular science almost entirely consists of them.

Some people fear that philosophy will bore or bewilder them; because they think it is not only a string of long words, but a tangle of complicated notions.  These people miss the whole point of the modern situation.  These are exactly the evils that exist already; mostly for want of a philosophy.  The politicians and the papers are always using long words.  It is not a complete consolation that they use them wrong.  The political and social relations are already hopelessly complicated.  They are far more complicated than any page of medieval metaphysics; the only difference is that the medievalist could trace out the tangle and follow the complications; and the moderns cannot.  The chief practical things of today, like finance and political corruption, are frightfully complicated.  We are content to tolerate them because we are content to misunderstand them, not to understand them.  The business world needs metaphysics — to simplify it.
…
Philosophy is merely thought that has been thought out.  It is often a great bore.  But man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out.  The latter is what we commonly call culture and enlightenment today.  But man is always influenced by thought of some kind, his own or somebody else’s; that of somebody he trusts or that of somebody he never heard of, thought at first, second or third hand; thought from exploded legends or unverified rumours; but always something with the shadow of a system of values and a reason for preference.  A man does test everything by something.  The question here is whether he has ever tested the test.

­—G.K. Chesterton, The Common Man, The Revival of Philosophy—Why?

It is, indeed, a problem that so many people have never put so much as a few minutes thought into their idea of what the world that they live in is and what are the things that they find in it. One runs into this constantly.

It is not new, of course. It is merely more obvious at present. It’s more obvious because modern cultures do not have any dominant philosophy of life and so unthinking people do not have that accidental consistency which can give the misimpression that they believe consistent things. Each “used-up scrap of somebody else’s philosophy” comes, in modern times, from a different somebody else, which makes this lack of understanding of what he is saying far more obvious.

Which is not to say, of course, that there never was a time and place where it was more common for people to be taught to think and actually do a little bit of it. One of the effects of modern culture being a muddle of many different people’s philosophies is that it discourages a great many people from doing any thinking, just as a storm discourages a great many people from going outside.

It is worth noting, though, that human beings have tendend toward not thinking rigorously since the fall of man. Times and places vary with how much people actually bother to think, but they var far more with how obvious it is that they haven’t.

G.K. Chesterton on Marriage

On By Christopher LansdownIn Chesterton, Interesting Finds, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I was recently trying to find a quote from G.K. Chesterton on how the point of a wedding is the marriage vow, and the point of the marriage vow is that it’s daring. I wasn’t able to find the original, what I did find was a newspaper called The Holy Name Journal which seems to have been from Michigan. In the August 1921 edition, someone quotes Chesterton’s article almost in full. Since it was only available as a photograph (though, thanks to Google, a text-searchable photograph), I transcribed it for easier quoting:

A writer of the Westminster Gazett recently made the proposal to alter the marriage formula: “As to the vow at the altar, it seems conceivable that under other conditions the form of words ordained by the Prayer Book might be revised.” And the writer adds that may have omitted the words “to obey”, others might omit the words “til death do us part.” The following is Mr. G.K. Chesterton’s rejoined to The New Witness:

It never seems to occur to him that others might omit the wedding. What is the point of the ceremony except that it involves the vow? What is the point of the vow except that it involves vowing something dramatic and final? Why walk all the way to a church in order to say that you will retain a connection as long as you find it convenient? Why stand in front of an altar to announce that you will enjoy somebody’s society as long as you find it enjoyable? The writer talks of the reason for omitting some of the words, without realizing that it is an even better reason for omitting all the words. In fact, the proof that the vow is what I describe, and what Mr. Hocking apparently cannot even manage, a unique thing not to be confounded with a contract, can be found in the very form and terminology of the vow itself. It can be found in the very fact that the vow becomes verbally ridiculous when it is thus verbally amended. The daring dogmatic terms of the promise become ludicrous in face of the timidity and triviality, of the thing promised. To say “I swear to God, in the face of this congregation as I shall answer at the dreadful day of judgment, that Maria and I will be friends until we quarrel” is a thing of which the very diction implies the derision. It is like saying, “In the name of the angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven, I think I prefer Turkish to Egyptian cigarettes,” or “Crying aloud on the everlasting mercy, I confess I have grave doubts about whether sardines are good for me.” Obviously nobody would ever have invented such a ceremony, or invented any ceremony, to celebrate such a promise. Men would merely have done what they liked, as millions of healthy men have done, without any ceremony at all.

Divorce and re-marriage are simply a heavy and hypocritical masquerade for free love and no marriage; and I have far more respect for the revolutionists who from the first have described their free love as free. But of the marriage service obviously refers to a totally different order of ideas; the rather unfashionable [stuff?] that may be called heroic ideas. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect the fatigued fatalist of this school and period to understand these ideas; and I only ask here that they should understand their own ideas. Every one of their own arguments leads direct to promiscuity; and leaves no kind of use or meaning in marriage of any kind. But the idea of the vow is perhaps a little too bold and bracing for them at present, and is too strong for their heads, like sea air.

Chesterton on Essays

On By Christopher LansdownIn Chesterton, UncategorizedLeave a comment

In The Well and the Shallows, Chesterton has a chapter on writing styles and egotism. (It is called An Apology for Buffoons, for those interested in reading the whole thing.) In it, he talks about style and what is true egotism; the problem comes up that people are amusing may seem to be drawing attention to themselves, when actually they are drawing attention to the their subject. Conversely, there are people who may seem to be not talking of themselves and yet talk of little else. The second part contains the quote I’m writing this post to to quote, but the first part is worth mentioning.

As an example of someone who draws a great deal of attention to himself through his wit, the purpose of which is to draw attention away from himself and onto his subject, Chesterton uses Mr. George Bernard Shaw. The paragraph where he does is worth quoting in full, because it sets up the last sentence very well.

It is not an idle contradiction to say that Mr. Shaw is flippant because he is serious.  A man like Mr. Shaw has the deliberate intention of getting people to listen to what he has to say; and therefore he must be amusing.  A man who is only amusing himself need not be amusing.  Generally, when he is a perfect and polished stylist, he is not.  And there is a good deal of misunderstanding about the relative moral attitude of the two types; especially in connection with the old morality of modesty.  Most persons, listening to these loud flippancies would say that Mr. Bernard Shaw is egotistical.  Mr. Bernard Shaw himself would emphatically and violently assert that he is egotistical; and I should emphatically and violently assert that he is not.  It is not the first time we have somewhat tartly disagreed.  And perhaps I could not more effectively perform the just and necessary public duty of annoying Mr. Shaw than by saying (as I do say) that in this matter he really inherits an unconscious tradition of Christian humility.  The preaching friar puts his sermon into popular language, the missionary fills his sermon with anecdotes and even jokes, because he is thinking of his mission and not of himself It does not matter that Mr. Shaw’s sentences so often begin with the pronoun “I.” The Apostles Creed begins with the pronoun “I”; but it goes on to rather more important nouns and names.

Now that Chesterton mentions it, there is something very interesting in the fact that the Apostles Creed, as too does the Nicene Creed, starts with the word “I”. In fact, the Nicene creed has it more than once. And yet it is the very opposite of egotistical.

This is related, I think, to how the most momentous things a human being can do is to subsume himself into the mass of humanity. In a strange way, a man becomes most individual when he is in a group of people and reciting the same creed, word for word, all of the other men are reciting too, and which Christians have recited for many centuries.

Be that as it may, it’s really the second part—the disguised egotist—which is why I’m writing this post. Chesterton introduces this with:

Father Ronald Knox, in his satire on Modernism, has described the courteous vagueness of the Oxford manner which
….  tempering pious zeal
Corrected, “I believe” to “One does feel.”

It is quite true that “I believe” is a statement about other things, though admittedly with a bit of a caveat as to who the authority is. “One does feel” is just a description of an experience, if, still, in this more original form, a somewhat generalized feeling. In our own times it has become “I feel.” There is much that can be said about the move from thought (“I think”) to emotion (“I feel”). Suffice it to the moment, though, the timidity which drives it does change it into something that is about the person speaking far more than about the thing spoken about. And the epitome of this is what Chesterton calls, “the essay,” though that term now refers to other things. It is well known, even, now, though. It is a thing with great style and no substance, though often the pretense to substance. The style is unmistakable, and Chesterton imitates it rather well:

“The pond in my garden shows, under the change of morning, an apprehension of the moving air, hardly to be called a wave; and so little clouding its lucidity as to seem rather vacuity in motion.  Here at least is nothing to stain the bright negation of water; none of those suburban gold-fish that look like carrots and do but nose after their tails in a circle of frustration, to give some sulky gardener cause to cry ‘stinking fish’.  The mind is altogether carried away upon the faint curve of wind over water; the movement is something less solid than anything that we can call liquid; the smoke of my light Virginian cigarette does not mount more unsubstantially towards the sky.  Nor indeed inaptly:  it needs some such haven of patriarchal mildness to accent sharply the tang of mild tobacco; alone perhaps, of all the attributes of Raleigh’s red-haired mistress, rightly to be called virginal.”