{"collection":"scripture-revelation","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_45811/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_45811","id":"gutenberg_45811","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45811","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Category: Poetry","Category: Religion/Spirituality","Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936 -- Calendars"],"text":"A CHESTERTON CALENDAR\n\n  _A Chesterton\n  Calendar_\n\n  Compiled from the Writings of\n  'G.K.C.' Both in Verse and in\n  Prose. With a section apart for\n  the Moveable Feasts.\n\n  Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr\u00fcbner & Co. Ltd.\n\n  Dryden House, Gerrard Street, London, W. 1911\n\n\n\n\nPREFATORY NOTE\n\n\nIt will be found that almost all Mr. G. K. Chesterton's books have been\nutilized in the making of this Calendar. A word of acknowledgment is\ndue to the various publishers for their courtesy in permitting this:\nto Messrs. Grant Richards, Arthur L. Humphreys, J. W. Arrowsmith, John\nLane, J. M. Dent & Co., Macmillan & Co., Duckworth & Co., Harper & Co.,\nCassell & Co., and Methuen & Co. Recourse has been had also to the\nfiles of the 'Daily News,' the 'Illustrated London News,' and other\njournals to which Mr. Chesterton has been a contributor. The present\npublishers feel they are peculiarly indebted to Mr. Chesterton himself\nfor his kindness in allowing them to include certain verses from poems\nwhich have not yet been printed _in extenso_ elsewhere.\n\n\n\n\nJANUARY\n\n\nMere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all\nthings, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of\nwhich I am generally accused.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nNEW YEAR'S DAY\n\nThe object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It\nis that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new\nbackbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year\nresolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh\nabout things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man\nstarts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it\nis quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be\nborn again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.\n\n  '_Daily News._'\n\n\nJANUARY 2nd\n\nThere is no such thing as fighting on the winning side: one fights to\nfind out which is the winning side.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nJANUARY 3rd\n\nCourage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire\nto live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose\nhis life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for\nsaints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or\nmountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide- or a drill-book.\nThis paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly\nor quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if\nhe will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by\ncontinually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier, surrounded by\nenemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire\nfor living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely\ncling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He\nmust not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will\nnot escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference\nto it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.\nNo philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with\nadequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity\nhas done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of\nthe suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for\nthe sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has\nheld up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery\nof chivalry: the Christian courage which is a disdain of death; not the\nChinese courage which is a disdain of life.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nJANUARY 4th\n\nThe fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for\nthe appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let\nno bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently the stones and weeds,\nto have the mind a storehouse of sunsets, requires a discipline in\npleasure and an education in gratitude.\n\n  '_Twelve Types._'\n\n\nJANUARY 5th\n\nWe have people who represent that all great historic motives were\neconomic, and then have to howl at the top of their voices in order to\ninduce the modern democracy to act on economic motives. The extreme\nMarxian politicians in England exhibit themselves as a small, heroic\nminority, trying vainly to induce the world to do what, according to\ntheir theory, the world always does.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nJANUARY 6th\n\n_THE FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY_\n\nTHE WISE MEN\n\n    Step softly, under snow or rain,\n      To find the place where men can pray;\n    The way is all so very plain,\n      That we may lose the way.\n\n    Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore\n      On tortured puzzles from our youth.\n    We know all labyrinthine lore,\n    We are the three Wise Men of yore,\n      And we know all things but the truth.\n\n    Go humbly ... it has hailed and snowed ...\n      With voices low and lanterns lit,\n    So very simple is the road,\n      That we may stray from it.\n\n    The world grows terrible and white,\n      And blinding white the breaking day,\n    We walk bewildered in the light,\n    For something is too large for sight,\n      And something much too plain to say.\n\n    The Child that was ere worlds begun\n      (... We need but walk a little way ...\n    We need but see a latch undone ...),\n    The Child that played with moon and sun\n      Is playing with a little hay.\n\n    The house from which the heavens are fed,\n      The old strange house that is our own,\n    Where tricks of words are never said,\n    And Mercy is as plain as bread,\n      And Honour is as hard as stone.\n\n    Go humbly; humble are the skies,\n      And low and large and fierce the Star,\n    So very near the Manger lies,\n      That we may travel far.\n\n    Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes\n      To roar to the resounding plain,\n    And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,\n      For God Himself is born again;\n    And we are little children walking\n      Through the snow and rain.\n\n    '_Daily News._'\n\n\nJANUARY 7th\n\nThe idea of private property universal but private, the idea of\nfamilies free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still\ndomestic, of one man one house--this remains the real vision and magnet\nof mankind. The world may accept something more official and general,\nless human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted\nwoman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy\none; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the\nworld's desire.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nJANUARY 8th\n\nThe dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they\nboth make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as\na drink.\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nJANUARY 9th\n\nThe thing from which England suffers just now more than from any\nother evil is not the assertion of falsehoods, but the endless and\nirrepressible repetition of half-truths.\n\n  '_G. F Watts._'\n\n\nJANUARY 10th\n\nIt is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or\nmystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is\nthe very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent\neternity, they represent it by a serpent with its tail in its mouth.\nThere is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory\nmeal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the\neastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists\nand higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a\nserpent eating its tail--a degraded animal who destroys even himself.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nJANUARY 11th\n\nVariability is one of the virtues of a woman. It obviates the crude\nrequirements of polygamy. If you have one good wife you are sure to\nhave a spiritual harem.\n\n  '_Daily News._'\n\n\nJANUARY 12th\n\nWe must not have King Midas represented as an example of success; he\nwas a failure of an unusually painful kind. Also, he had the ears\nof an ass. Also (like most other prominent and wealthy persons), he\nendeavoured to conceal the fact. It was his barber (if I remember\nright) who had to be treated on a confidential footing with regard to\nthis peculiarity; and his barber, instead of behaving like a go-ahead\nperson of the succeed-at-all-costs school and trying to blackmail King\nMidas, went away and whispered this splendid piece of society scandal\nto the reeds, who enjoyed it enormously. It is said that they also\nwhispered it as the winds swayed them to and fro. I look reverently at\nthe portrait of Lord Rothschild; I read reverently about the exploits\nof Mr. Vanderbilt. I know that I cannot turn everything I touch to\ngold; but then I also know that I have never tried, having a preference\nfor other substances--such as grass and good wine. I know that these\npeople have certainly succeeded in something; that they have certainly\novercome somebody; I know that they are kings in a sense that no\nmen were ever kings before; that they create markets and bestride\ncontinents. Yet it always seems to me that there is some small domestic\nfact that they are hiding, and I have sometimes thought I heard upon\nthe wind the laughter and whisper of the reeds.\n\n  '_All Things Considered._'\n\n\nJANUARY 13th\n\nThe Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been\nfound difficult; and left untried.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nJANUARY 14th\n\nThe old masters of a healthy madness--Aristophanes or Rabelais or\nShakespeare--doubtless had many brushes with the precisians or ascetics\nof their day, but we cannot but feel that for honest severity and\nconsistent self-maceration they would always have had respect. But\nwhat abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have\nreserved for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and\ndid not even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain\nto exuberance, which contented itself with the fool's cap without the\nbells!\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nJANUARY 15th\n\nThe truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future,\nbecause it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what\nyou like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freshly with my\nfavourite colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because\nthe past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly\nwiser than we, and of things done which we could not do. I know I\ncannot write a poem as good as 'Lycidas.' But it is always easy to say\nthat the particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of\nthe future.\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nJANUARY 16th\n\n'I have only that which the poor have equally with the rich; which the\nlonely have equally with the man of many friends. To me this whole\nstrange world is homely, because in the heart of it there is a home; to\nme this cruel world is kindly, because higher than the heavens there is\nsomething more human than humanity. If a man must not fight for this,\nmay he fight for anything? I would fight for my friend, but if I lost\nmy friend, I should still be there. I would fight for my country, but\nif I lost my country, I should still exist. But if what that devil\ndreams were true, I should not be--I should burst like a bubble and be\ngone; I could not live in that imbecile universe. Shall I not fight for\nmy own existence?'\n\n  '_The Ball and the Cross._'\n\n\nJANUARY 17th\n\nThere are vast prospects and splendid songs in the point of view of\nthe typically unsuccessful man; if all the used-up actors and spoilt\njournalists and broken clerks could give a chorus it would be a\nwonderful chorus in praise of the world.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_\n\n\nJANUARY 18th\n\n'Tommy was a good boy' is a purely philosophical statement, worthy of\nPlato or Aquinas. 'Tommy lived the higher life' is a gross metaphor\nfrom a ten-foot rule.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nJANUARY 19th\n\nHappiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.\nSuppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure. I do\nnot mean something connected with a piece of enamel, I mean something\nwith a violent happiness in it--an almost painful happiness. A man may\nhave, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of\nvictory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for\nthe moment's sake. He enjoys it for the woman's sake, or his own sake.\nThe warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he\nenjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for\nmay be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last for a\nweek. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks\nof his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled with\neternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary.\nOnce look at them as moments after Pater's manner, and they become as\ncold as Pater and his style. Man cannot love mortal things. He can only\nlove immortal things for an instant.\n\n  '_Heretics._'\n\n\nJANUARY 20th\n\nIt is remarkable that in so many great wars it is the defeated who\nhave won. The people who were left worst at the end of the war were\ngenerally the people who were left best at the end of the whole\nbusiness. For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the\nChristians. But they did not end in the decline of the Christians;\nthey ended in the decline of the Saracens. That huge prophetic wave\nof Moslem power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns\nof Christendom: that wave was broken, and never came on again. The\nCrusades had saved Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem. The same\napplies to that epic of Republican war in the eighteenth century to\nwhich we Liberals owe our political creed. The French Revolution ended\nin defeat; the kings came back across a carpet of dead at Waterloo.\nThe Revolution had lost its last battle, but it had gained its first\nobject. It had cut a chasm. The world has never been the same since.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nJANUARY 21st\n\nFrom such books ... we can discover what a clever man can do with the\nidea of aristocracy. But from the 'Family Herald Supplement' literature\nwe can learn what the idea of aristocracy can do with a man who is not\nclever. And when we know that we know English history.\n\n  '_Heretics._'\n\n\nJANUARY 22nd\n\nDarwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot\nbe used to back up a single sane one. The kinship and competition of\nall living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel\nor insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. On\nthe evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly\nhumane; but you cannot be human. That you and a tiger are one may be a\nreason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as\ncruel as the tiger. It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you;\nit is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in neither case does\nevolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably--that is, to admire\nhis stripes while avoiding his claws. If you want to treat a tiger\nreasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nJANUARY 23rd\n\nSome priggish little clerk will say, 'I have reason to congratulate\nmyself that I am a civilized person, and not so bloodthirsty as the\nMad Mullah.' Somebody ought to say to him, 'A really good man would be\nless bloodthirsty than the Mullah. But you are less bloodthirsty, not\nbecause you are more of a good man, but because you are a great deal\nless of a man. You are not bloodthirsty, not because you would spare\nyour enemy, but because you would run away from him.'\n\n  '_All Things Considered._'\n\n\nJANUARY 24th\n\nTo the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will\nsometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or\nimpossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot\nmay not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to\npoint to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or\ncrimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a\nLondon street. Upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there\nrests for the time being the spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts\nthe policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he\nrealizes one of our visions.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nJANUARY 25th\n\nSilence is the unbearable repartee.\n\n  '_Charles Dickens._'\n\n\nJANUARY 26th\n\n'I am staring,' said MacIan at last, 'at that which shall judge us\nboth.'\n\n'Oh yes,' said Turnbull in a tired way; 'I suppose you mean God.'\n\n'No, I don't,' said MacIan, shaking his head, 'I mean him.' And he\npointed to the half-tipsy yokel who was ploughing, down the road.\n\n'I mean him. He goes out in the early dawn; he digs or he ploughs a\nfield. Then he comes back and drinks ale, and then he sings a song. All\nyour philosophies and political systems are young compared to him. All\nyour hoary cathedrals--yes, even the Eternal Church on earth is new\ncompared to him. The most mouldering gods in the British Museum are\nnew facts beside him. It is he who in the end shall judge us all. I am\ngoing to ask him which of us is right.'\n\n'Ask that intoxicated turnip-eater----'\n\n'Yes--which of us is right. Oh, you have long words and I have long\nwords; and I talk of every man being the image of God; and you talk of\nevery man being a citizen and enlightened enough to govern. But, if\nevery man typifies God, there is God. If every man is an enlightened\ncitizen, there is your enlightened citizen. The first man one meets is\nalways man. Let us catch him up.'\n\n  '_The Ball and the Cross._'\n\n\nJANUARY 27th\n\nI gravely doubt whether women ever were married by capture. I think\nthey pretended to be; as they do still.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nJANUARY 28th\n\nOn bright blue days I do not want anything to happen; the world is\ncomplete and beautiful--a thing for contemplation. I no more ask for\nadventures under that turquoise dome than I ask for adventures in\nchurch. But when the background of man's life is a grey background,\nthen, in the name of man's sacred supremacy, I desire to paint on it in\nfire and gore. When the heavens fail man refuses to fail; when the sky\nseems to have written on it, in letters of lead and pale silver, the\ndecree that nothing shall happen, then the immortal soul, the prince of\nall creatures, rises up and decrees that something shall happen, if it\nbe only the slaughter of a policeman.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nJANUARY 29th\n\nIt is the very difference between the artistic mind and the\nmathematical that the former sees things as they are in a picture,\nsome nearer and larger, some smaller and farther away: while to the\nmathematical mind everything, every inch in a million, every fact in\na cosmos, must be of equal value. That is why mathematicians go mad,\nand poets scarcely ever do. A man may have as wide a view of life as\nhe likes, the wider the better: a distant view, a bird's-eye view, but\nstill a view and not a map. The one thing he cannot attempt in his\nversion of the universe is to draw things to scale.\n\n  '_G. F. Watts._'\n\n\nJANUARY 30th\n\nEXECUTION OF CHARLES I\n\n  The face of the King's servants grew greater than the King.\n  He tricked them and they trapped him and drew round him in a ring;\n  The new grave lords closed round him that had eaten the abbey's fruits,\n  And the men of the new religion with their Bibles in their boots,\n  We saw their shoulders moving to menace and discuss.\n  And some were pure and some were vile, but none took heed of us;\n  We saw the King when they killed him, and his face was proud and pale,\n  And a few men talked of freedom while England talked of ale.\n\n  '_The Silent People._'\n\n\nJANUARY 31st\n\nThe 'Iliad' is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey'\nbecause all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a\nriddle.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\n\n\nFEBRUARY\n\n\nFEBRUARY 1st\n\nMany modern Englishmen talk of themselves as the sturdy descendants of\ntheir sturdy Puritan fathers. As a fact, they would run away from a\ncow. If you asked one of their Puritan fathers, if you asked Bunyan,\nfor instance, whether he was sturdy, he would have answered with tears,\nthat he was as weak as water. And because of this he would have borne\ntortures.\n\n  '_Heretics._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 2nd\n\n_CANDLEMAS. THE FEAST OF THE PURIFICATION_\n\nBut as I sat scrawling these silly figures on brown paper, it began to\ndawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a\nmost exquisite and essential one, behind. I searched all my pockets,\nbut I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted\nwith all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art\nof drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential.\nI cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the\nwise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is this: that\nwhite is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour, it is a shining\nand affirmative thing: as fierce as red, as definite as black. When\n(so to speak) your pencil grows red hot, it draws roses; when it grows\nwhite hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities\nof the best religious morality--of real Christianity, for example--is\nexactly this same thing. The chief assertion of religious morality\nis that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the\navoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like\npain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or\nsparing people revenge or punishment: it means a plain and positive\nthing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity\ndoes not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming\nlike Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours, but He never\npaints so gorgeously--I had almost said so gaudily--as when He paints\nin white.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 3rd\n\nIt is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is\nto keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist, as it is easy\nto be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and\nexaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along\nthe historic path of Christendom--that would indeed have been simple.\nIt is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which\none falls: only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of\nthe fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been\nobvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling\nadventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering\nthrough the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild\ntruth reeling but erect.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 4th\n\nThe curse against God is 'Exercise I' in the primer of minor poetry.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 5th\n\nWhatever else the worst doctrine of depravity may have been, it was\na product of spiritual conviction; it had nothing to do with remote\nphysical origins. Men thought mankind wicked because they felt wicked\nthemselves. If a man feels wicked, I cannot see why he should suddenly\nfeel good because somebody tells him that his ancestors once had tails.\nMan's primary purity and innocence may have dropped off with his tail,\nfor all anybody knows. The only thing we all know about that primary\npurity and innocence is that we have not got it.\n\n  '_All Things Considered._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 6th\n\nIf you have composed a bad opera you may persuade yourself that it is a\ngood one; if you have carved a bad statue you can think yourself better\nthan Michelangelo. But if you have lost a battle you cannot believe you\nhave won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have\ngot him off.\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 7th  _DICKENS BORN_\n\nWe are able to answer the question, 'Why have we no great men?' We\nhave no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. We\nare connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we\nare fastidious--that is, we are small. When Diogenes went about with\na lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had very little\ntime to be honest himself. And when anybody goes about on his hands\nand knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that\none man at any rate shall not be great. Now the error of Diogenes\nis evident. The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted\nto notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man.\nDiogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern,\nbut he never thought of looking inside the thief. And that is where\nthe Founder of Christianity found the honest man; He found him on a\ngibbet and promised him Paradise. Just as Christianity looked for the\nhonest man inside the thief, democracy looked for the wise man inside\nthe fool. It encouraged the fool to be wise. We can call this thing\nsometimes optimism, sometimes equality; the nearest name for it is\nencouragement. It had its exaggerations--failure to understand original\nsin, notions that education would make all men good, the childlike yet\npedantic philosophies of human perfectibility. But the whole was full\nof faith in the infinity of human souls, which is in itself not only\nChristian but orthodox; and this we have lost amid the limitations of\npessimistic science. Christianity said that any man could be a saint\nif he chose; democracy, that every man could be a citizen if he chose.\nThe note of the last few decades in art and ethics has been that a man\nis stamped with an irrevocable psychology and is cramped for perpetuity\nin the prison of his skull. It was a world that expects everything and\neverybody. It was a world that encouraged anybody to be anything. And\nin England and literature its living expression was Dickens.\n\n  '_Charles Dickens._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 8th\n\nThat which is large enough for the rich to covet is large enough for\nthe poor to defend.\n\n  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 9th\n\nThe modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner,\nthat the family is a bad institution, have generally confined\nthemselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos,\nthat perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the\nfamily is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome\nprecisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It\nis, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most\nother little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling\nanarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested\nin our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero\nrestaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the\ncommonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve\nof the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is\nlike humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt\nagainst the family are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting\nagainst mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa\nis excitable, like mankind. Our younger brother is mischievous, like\nmankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.\n\n  '_Heretics._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 10th\n\nHe said: 'If these were silent the very stones would cry out.' With\nthese words He called up all the wealth of artistic creation that\nhas been founded on this creed. With those words He founded Gothic\narchitecture. For in a town like this, which seems to have grown Gothic\nas a wood grows leaves--anywhere and anyhow--any odd brick or moulding\nmay be carved off into a shouting face. The front of vast buildings\nis thronged with open mouths, angels praising God, or devils defying\nHim. Rock itself is racked and twisted, until it seems to scream. The\nmiracle is accomplished; the very stones cry out.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 11th\n\nThe chaos of habits that always goes with males when left entirely\nto themselves has only one honourable cure; and that is the strict\ndiscipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy young\nidealists in East End settlements losing their collars in the wash\nand living on tinned salmon, will fully understand why it was decided\nby the wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict that if men were to live\nwithout women, they must not live without rules.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 12th\n\nThe British Empire may annex what it likes, it will never annex\nEngland. It has not even discovered the island, let alone conquered it.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 13th\n\nLet it never be forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man;\nhe is a man who has devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous\nintellectual art in which he may achieve masterpieces which he must\nkeep secret, fight thrilling battles and win hair-breadth victories\nfor which he cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished\nimpostor is the most wretched of geniuses: he is a Napoleon on a desert\nisland.\n\n  '_Browning._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 14th _ST. VALENTINE'S DAY_\n\nThe revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent\nof a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to\nlisten to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to\nimagine that the ideal of constancy was a joke mysteriously imposed on\nmankind by the devil, instead of being as it is a yoke consistently\nimposed on all lovers by themselves. They have invented a phrase, a\nphrase that is a black _v._ white contradiction in two words--'free\nlove'--as if a lover ever had been or ever could be free. It is\nthe nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage\nmerely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.\nModern sages offer to the lover with an ill-favoured grin the largest\nliberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect\nhim as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon\nthe heavens as the record of his highest moment. They give him every\nliberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one\nthat he wants.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 15th\n\nLondon is the largest of the bloated modern cities; London is the\nsmokiest; London is the dirtiest; London is, if you will, the most\nsombre; London is, if you will, the most miserable. But London is\ncertainly the most amusing and the most amused. You may prove that we\nhave the most tragedy; the fact remains that we have the most comedy,\nthat we have the most farce.\n\n  '_All Things Considered._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 16th\n\nOur fathers had a plain sort of pity: if you will, a gross and coarse\npity. They had their own sort of sentimentalism. They were quite\nwilling to weep over Smike. But it certainly never occurred to them to\nweep over Squeers. No doubt they were often narrow and often visionary.\nNo doubt they often looked at a political formula when they should\nhave looked at an elemental fact. No doubt they were pedantic in some\nof their principles and clumsy in some of their solutions. No doubt,\nin short, they were all very wrong, and no doubt we are the people and\nwisdom shall die with us. But when they saw something that in their\neyes, such as they were, really violated their morality, such as it\nwas, then they did not cry 'Investigate!' They did not cry 'Educate!'\nThey did not cry 'Improve!' They did not cry 'Evolve!' Like Nicholas\nNickleby, they cried 'Stop!' And it did stop.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_\n\n\nFEBRUARY 17th\n\nSome people do not like the word 'dogma.' Fortunately they are free,\nand there is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two\nthings only, for the human mind--a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle\nAges were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its\nbest, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite\npoint; a prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a\nman should not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible of\nanything should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called\nan ideal.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 18th\n\nThere are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique\nof another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the\ncommunion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There\nare some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often\nthey are made.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 19th\n\nThere are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds\nof democratic conception or sentiment of human equality. There are two\nthings in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. They are\nnot equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages\nof the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. But this is\na spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this, again, is\nan equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No\nspecial and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having\nto die. And no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of\nhaving two legs. Every man is important if he loses his life; and every\nman is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it. And the\nuniversal test everywhere of whether a thing is popular, of the people,\nis whether it employs vigorously these extremes of the tragic and the\ncomic.\n\n  '_Charles Dickens._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 20th\n\nNow the reason why our fathers did not make marriage, in the\nmiddle-aged and static sense, the subject of their plays was a very\nsimple one; it was that a play is a very bad place for discussing\nthat topic. You cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or\nfailure of a marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of\nthe growth of an oak-tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very\nreasonably observed, it is too long. A happy love-affair will make a\ndrama simply because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or\nno. But a happy marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less\nhappy if it were. The essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks\nherself an intense question; but the essence of a sensible wife is\nthat she is much too sensible to ask herself any questions at all. All\nthe things that make monogamy a success are in their nature undramatic\nthings, the silent growth of an instinctive confidence, the common\nwounds and victories, the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing\nof old jokes. Sane marriage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore\nnot surprising that most modern dramatists have devoted themselves to\ninsane marriage.\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 21st\n\nIf Americans can be divorced for 'incompatibility of temper,' I cannot\nconceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy\nmarriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is\nto fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes\nunquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\nFEBRUARY 22nd\n\nOf a sane man there is only one safe definition: he is a man who can\nhave tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\nFEBRUARY 23rd\n\nThe artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.\n\n  '_Heretics._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 24th\n\nIt is constantly assumed, especially in our Tolstoian tendencies, that\nwhen the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But\nthat is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb.\nThat is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating\nthe lamb. The real problem is--Can the lion lie down with the lamb\nand still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church\nattempted; _that_ is the miracle she achieved.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 25th\n\nNothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is\nonly redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and\ncrosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or\nthe things on the retina of the eye, or the enormous irrelevancy of\nencyclop\u00e6dias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.\n\n  _Introduction to 'The Old Curiosity Shop.'_\n\n\nFEBRUARY 26th\n\nIt is neither blood nor rain that has made England, but hope--the thing\nall those dead men have desired. France was not France because she was\nmade to be by the skulls of the Celts or by the sun of Gaul. France was\nFrance because she chose.\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 27th\n\nA man must be partly a one-idead man because he is a one-weaponed\nman--and he is flung naked into the fight. In short, he must (as the\nbooks on Success say) give 'his best'; and what a small part of a man\n'his best' is! His second and third best are often much better. If he\nis the first violin he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that\nhe is a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a\nfountain-pen, a hand at whist, a gun, and an image of God.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nFEBRUARY 28th\n\nThe wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the\nheavens, but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will\ngrow, till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or\nstable. Not till we know the high things shall we know how lovely they\nare.\n\n  '_William Blake._'\n\n\n\n\nMARCH\n\n\nMarch 1st _ST. DAVID'S DAY_\n\n  My eyes are void with vision; I sing but I cannot speak;\n  I hide in the vaporous caverns like a creature wild and weak;\n  But for ever my harps are tuned and for ever my songs are sung,\n  And I answer my tyrants ever in an unknown tongue.\n\n  When the blue men broke in the battle with the Roman or the Dane,\n  In the cracks of my ghastly uplands they gathered like ghosts again.\n  Some say I am still a Druid, some say my spirit shows\n  Catholic, Puritan, Pagan; but no man knows.\n\n  Mother of God's good witches, of all white mystery,\n  Whatever else I am seeking, I seek for thee.\n  For the old harp better fitted and swung on a stronger thong,\n  We, that shall sing for ever; O hear our song!\n\n  '_The Seven Swords._'\n\n\nMARCH 2nd\n\nIt may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a 'many-faced\nand fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than to be a\nmany-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many\nmodern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nMARCH 3rd\n\nA man may easily be forgiven for not doing this or that incidental act\nof charity, especially when the question is as genuinely difficult\nand dubious as is the case of mendicity. But there is something quite\npestilently Pecksniffian about shrinking from a hard task on the plea\nthat it is not hard enough. If a man will really try talking to the ten\nbeggars who come to his door he will soon find out whether it is really\nso much easier than the labour of writing a cheque for a hospital.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nMARCH 4th\n\nBut the man we see every day--the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory,\nthe little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office--he is too mentally worried\nto believe in freedom. He is kept quiet with revolutionary literature.\nHe is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of wild\nphilosophies. He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the next day,\na Superman (probably) the next day, and a slave every day. The only\nthing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory. The\nonly man who gains by all the philosophies is Gradgrind. It would be\nworth his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied with sceptical\nliterature. And now I come to think of it, of course, Gradgrind is\nfamous for giving libraries. He shows his sense: all modern books are\non his side. As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the\nvision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long\nenough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man\nwill never change his environment, for he will always change his mind.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nMARCH 5th\n\nProgress should mean that we are always walking towards the New\nJerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking\naway from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are\naltering the ideal: it is easier.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nMARCH 6th\n\nIn a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, it\nis stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. Humility is the\nluxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or\na large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the\ncosmic things are what they really are--of immeasurable stature.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nMARCH 7th\n\nThus because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in\noracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed\nthemselves to find the sepulchre of Christ. But being in a civilization\nwhich does believe in this dogma of fact for fact's sake, we do not see\nthe full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole. I\nam not speaking of a tenable ultimate utility, which is true both of\nthe Crusades and the polar explorations. I mean merely that we do see\nthe superficial and \u00e6sthetic singularity, the startling quality, about\nthe idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place\nwhere a man died. But we do not see the \u00e6sthetic singularity and the\nstartling quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man\ncan live--a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the\nmeeting-place of some lines that do not exist.\n\n  '_Heretics._'\n\n\nMARCH 8th\n\nIn one of his least convincing phrases, Nietzsche had said that just\nas the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately\nproduce something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of\ncourse, is sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the\nman, so why should we worry about the superman? If the superman will\ncome by natural selection, may we not leave it to natural selection?\nIf the superman will come by human selection, what sort of superman\nare we to select? If he is simply to be more just, more brave, or\nmore merciful, then Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher;\nthe only way we can work for it is to be more just, more brave, and\nmore merciful--sensible advice, but hardly startling. If he is to\nbe anything else than this, why should we desire him, or what else\nare we to desire? These questions have been many times asked of the\nNietzscheites, and none of the Nietzscheites have even attempted to\nanswer them.\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nMARCH 9th\n\nA man can be a Christian to the end of the world, for the simple reason\nthat a man could have been an Atheist from the beginning of it. The\nmaterialism of things is on the face of things: it does not require\nany science to find it out. A man who has lived and loved falls down\ndead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism, if you like. That is\nAtheism, if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can\nbelieve in spite of anything. But why our human lot is made any more\nhopeless because we know the names of the worms who eat him, or the\nnames of all the parts of him that they eat, is to a thoughtful mind\nsomewhat difficult to discover.\n\n  '_All Things Considered._'\n\n\nMARCH 10th\n\nWe should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of\nthings if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types,\nwith precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we\ntreat the infantile limitations. A child has no difficulty in achieving\nthe miracle of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as\nmarvellous as his accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude\ntowards Premiers and Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially\nencouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we\nshould be in a far more wise and tolerant temper.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nMARCH 11th\n\nWhen the working women in the poor districts come to the doors of the\npublic-houses and try to get their husbands home, simple-minded 'social\nworkers' always imagine that every husband is a tragic drunkard and\nevery wife a broken-hearted saint. It never occurs to them that the\npoor woman is only doing under coarser conventions exactly what every\nfashionable hostess does when she tries to get the men from arguing\nover the cigars to come and gossip over the teacups.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nMARCH 12th\n\nWhat have we done, and where have we wandered, we that have produced\nsages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who could walk\nwith Dante, that we should talk as if we had never done anything more\nintelligent than found colonies and kick niggers? We are the children\nof light, and it is we that sit in darkness. If we are judged, it\nwill not be for the merely intellectual transgression of failing to\nappreciate other nations, but for the supreme spiritual transgression\nof failing to appreciate ourselves.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nMARCH 13th\n\nAnd for those who talk to us with interfering eloquence about Jaeger\nand the pores of the skin, and about Plasmon and the coats of the\nstomach, at them shall only be hurled the words that are hurled at fops\nand gluttons, 'Take no thought what ye shall eat, or what ye shall\ndrink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. For after all these things\ndo the Gentiles seek. But seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His\nrighteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.'\n\n  '_Heretics._'\n\n\nMARCH 14th\n\nThe Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even\nmiscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. Nay, the\nreally sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the\nMaterialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is\nquite sure he is sane. The Materialist is sure that history has been\nsimply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person\nbefore mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken.\nMaterialists and madmen never have doubts.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nMARCH 15th\n\nThe modern world (intent on anarchy in everything, even in Government)\nrefuses to perceive the permanent element of tragic constancy which\ninheres in all passion, and which is the origin of marriage. Marriage\nrests upon the fact that you cannot have your cake and eat it; that you\ncannot lose your heart and have it.\n\n  _Introduction to 'David Copperfield.'_\n\n\nMARCH 16th\n\nMorality did not begin by one man saying to another, 'I will not hit\nyou if you do not hit me'; there _is_ no trace of such a transaction.\nThere _is_ a trace of both men having said, 'We must not hit each\nother in the holy place.' They gained their morality by guarding\ntheir religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the\nshrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate\ncleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that\nthey were clean. The history of the Jews is the only early document\nknown to most Englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from\nthat. The Ten Commandments which have been found substantially common\nto mankind were merely military commands; a code of regimental orders,\nissued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert. Anarchy was\nevil because it endangered the sanctity. And only when they made a holy\nday for God did they find they had made a holiday for men.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nMARCH 17th _ST. PATRICK'S DAY_\n\nThe average autochthonous Irishman is close to patriotism because he\nis close to the earth; he is close to domesticity because he is close\nto the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology and elaborate ritual\nbecause he is close to the earth. In short, he is close to the heavens\nbecause he is close to the earth.\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nMARCH 18th\n\nWe men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe\nto each other a terrible and tragic loyalty. If we catch sharks for\nfood, let them be killed most mercifully; let anyone who likes love the\nsharks, and pet the sharks, and tie ribbons round their necks and give\nthem sugar and teach them to dance. But if once a man suggests that a\nshark is to be valued against a sailor, or that the poor shark might\nbe permitted to bite off a nigger's leg occasionally, then I would\ncourt-martial the man--he is a traitor to the ship.\n\n  '_All Things Considered._'\n\n\nMARCH 19th\n\nEvery statute is a declaration of war, to be backed by arms. Every\ntribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a republic all punishment is\nas sacred and solemn as lynching.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nMARCH 20th\n\nI have no sympathy with international aggression when it is taken\nseriously, but I have a certain dark and wild sympathy with it when it\nis quite absurd. Raids are all wrong as practical politics, but they\nare human and imaginable as practical jokes. In fact, almost any act of\nragging or violence can be forgiven on this strict condition--that it\nis of no use at all to anybody. If the aggression gets anything out of\nit, then it is quite unpardonable. It is damned by the least hint of\nutility or profit. A man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does\nnot steal. A gentleman knocks off his friend's hat, but he does not\nannex his friend's hat.\n\n  '_All Things Considered._'\n\n\nMARCH 21st\n\nModern and cultured persons, I believe, object to their children\nseeing kitchen company or being taught by a woman like Peggotty. But\nsurely it is more important to be educated in a sense of human dignity\nand equality than in anything else in the world. And a child who has\nonce had to respect a kind and capable woman of the lower classes\nwill respect the lower classes for ever. The true way to overcome the\nevil in class distinctions is not to denounce them as revolutionists\ndenounce them, but to ignore them as children ignore them.\n\n  '_Charles Dickens._'\n\n\nMARCH 22nd\n\nThere is no clearer sign of the absence of originality among modern\npoets than their disposition to find new topics. Really original poets\nwrite poems about the spring. They are always fresh, just as the spring\nis always fresh. Men wholly without originality write poems about\ntorture, or new religions, or some perversion of obscenity, hoping\nthat the mere sting of the subject may speak for them. But we do not\nsufficiently realize that what is true of the classic ode is also\ntrue of the classic joke. A true poet writes about the spring being\nbeautiful because (after a thousand springs) the spring really is\nbeautiful. In the same way the true humorist writes about a man sitting\ndown on his hat because the act of sitting down on one's own hat\n(however often and admirably performed) really is extremely funny. We\nmust not dismiss a new poet because his poem is called 'To a Skylark';\nnor must we dismiss a humorist because his new farce is called 'My\nMother-in-Law.' He may really have splendid and inspiring things to say\nupon an eternal problem. The whole question is whether he has.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Sketches by Boz.'_\n\n\nMARCH 23rd\n\nMan is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of\nGod, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine\nbeing fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely\noff its head.\n\n  '_All Things Considered._'\n\n\nMARCH 24th\n\nSocial reformers have fired a hundred shots against the public-house,\nbut never one against its really shameful character. The sign of\ndecay is not in the public-house, but in the private bar; or rather\nthe row of five or six private bars, into each of which a respectable\ndipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by indulging his own half-witted\nsin violates his own half-witted morality. Nearly all these places are\nequipped with an atrocious apparatus of ground-glass windows which\ncan be so closed that they practically conceal the face of the buyer\nfrom the seller. Words cannot express the abysses of human infamy\nand hateful shame expressed by that elaborate piece of furniture.\nWhenever I go into a public-house, which happens fairly often, I always\ncarefully open all these apertures and then leave the place in every\nway refreshed.\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nMARCH 25th _LADY DAY_\n\n    Fearfully plain the flowers grew,\n        Like a child's book to read,\n      Or like a friend's face seen in a glass.\n    He looked, and there Our Lady was;\n    She stood and stroked the tall live grass\n      As a man strokes his steed.\n\n    Her face was like a spoken word\n      When brave men speak and choose,\n    The very colours of her coat\n      Were better than good news....\n\n    'The gates of heaven are tightly locked,\n      We do not guard our gain,\n    The heaviest hind may easily\n    Come silently and suddenly\n      Upon me in a lane.\n\n    'And any little maid that walks\n      In good thoughts apart,\n    May break the guard of the Three Kings,\n    And see the dear and dreadful things\n      I hid within my heart.'\n\n    '_Ballad of Alfred._'\n\n\nMARCH 26th\n\nIt is one of the mean and morbid modern lies that physical courage\nis connected with cruelty. The Tolstoian and Kiplingite are nowhere\nmore at one than in maintaining this. They have, I believe, some\nsmall sectarian quarrel with each other: the one saying that courage\nmust be abandoned because it is connected with cruelty, and the other\nmaintaining that cruelty is charming because it is a part of courage.\nBut it is all, thank God, a lie. An energy and boldness of body may\nmake a man stupid or reckless or dull or drunk or hungry, but it does\nnot make him spiteful.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nMARCH 27th\n\nFor human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the\nchildish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world\ndone what the wise men have seen to be inevitable.\n\n  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'\n\n\nMARCH 28th\n\nCruelty to animals is cruelty and a vile thing; but cruelty to a man is\nnot cruelty; it is treason. Tyranny over a man is not tyranny: it is\nrebellion, for man is royal. Now, the practical weakness of the vast\nmass of modern pity for the poor and the oppressed is precisely that it\nis merely pity; the pity is pitiful, but not respectful. Men feel that\nthe cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never\nfeel that it is injustice to equals; nay, it is treachery to comrades.\nThis dark, scientific pity, this brutal pity, has an elemental\nsincerity of its own, but it is entirely useless for all ends of social\nreform. Democracy swept Europe with the sabre when it was founded upon\nthe Rights of Man. It has done literally nothing at all since it has\nbeen founded only upon the wrongs of man. Or, more strictly speaking,\nits recent failure has been due to its not admitting the existence\nof any rights or wrongs, or indeed of any humanity. Evolution (the\nsinister enemy of revolution) does not especially deny the existence\nof God: what it does deny is the existence of man. And all the despair\nabout the poor, and the cold and repugnant pity for them, has been\nlargely due to the vague sense that they have literally relapsed into\nthe state of the lower animals.\n\n  '_Charles Dickens._'\n\n\nMARCH 29th\n\nThe modern humanitarian can love all opinions, but he cannot love all\nmen; he seems sometimes, in the ecstasy of his humanitarianism, even to\nhate them all. He can love all opinions, including the opinion that men\nare unlovable.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Hard Times.'_\n\n\nMARCH 30th\n\nEvery man is dangerous who only cares for one thing.\n\n  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'\n\n\nMARCH 31st\n\nAs Mr. Blatchford says, 'The world does not want piety, but soap--and\nSocialism.' Piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas soap and\nSocialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\n\n\nAPRIL\n\n\nAPRIL 1st _ALL FOOLS' DAY_\n\nWe shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of\nourselves. For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be\nquite certain that the effort is superfluous.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nAPRIL 2nd\n\nModesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon\nthe organ of conviction--where it was never meant to be. A man was\nmeant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth;\nthis has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man\ndoes assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert--himself. The\npart he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine\nReason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But\nthe new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus\nwe should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility\ntypical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical\nof our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous\nhumility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility\nwas a spur that prevented a man from stopping: not a nail in his boot\nthat prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man\ndoubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the\nnew humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him\nstop working altogether.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nAPRIL 3rd\n\nIt is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of\nall the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human\nexperiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask\nthe reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the\nmodern man--in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I\nare two starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of\nthe past? Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one\nafter the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to\nkill a mammoth with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the\nChristian saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may\nhave been sabred by the Manchester Yeomany or shot in the '48? Are\nwe still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to\nspare them? Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have either\nspeared or spared? When we decline (in a marked manner) to fly the red\nflag and fire across a barricade like our grandfathers, are we really\ndeclining in deference to sociologists--or to soldiers? Have we indeed\noutstripped the warrior and passed the ascetical saint? I fear we only\noutstrip the warrior in the sense that we should probably run away from\nhim. And if we have passed the saint, I fear we have passed him without\nbowing.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nAPRIL 4th\n\nThe prophet who is stoned is not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a\nrejected lover. He suffers from an unrequited attachment to things in\ngeneral.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nAPRIL 5th\n\nLaughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages\nthat loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs\ncontinually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover,\nthe wife at the husband, the friend at the friend.\n\n  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'\n\n\nAPRIL 6th\n\nFairy-tales do not give a child his first idea of bogy. What\nfairy-tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible\ndefeat of bogy. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since\nhe had an imagination. What the fairy-tale provides for him is a St.\nGeorge to kill the dragon.\n\nExactly what the fairy-tale does is this: it accustoms him by a series\nof clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors have a\nlimit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these infinite\nenemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is\nsomething in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger\nthan strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at the darkness\nuntil the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller\nthan heaven. If there was one star in the sky it only made him a\nCyclops. But fairy-tales restored my mental health. For next day I read\nan authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite equal\ndimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similar\ninexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, some\nbad riddles, and a brave heart.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nAPRIL 7th\n\nThe full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent\ntake it by storm. And if we have accepted everything we have missed\nsomething--war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very\nmiserable truce.\n\n  '_Charles Dickens._'\n\n\nAPRIL 8th\n\nThe old religionists tortured men physically for a moral truth. The new\nrealists torture men morally for a physical truth.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nAPRIL 9th\n\n'I sincerely maintain that Nature-worship is more morally dangerous\nthan the most vulgar Man-worship of the cities; since it can easily be\nperverted into the worship of an impersonal mystery, carelessness, or\ncruelty. Thoreau would have been a jollier fellow if he had devoted\nhimself to a green-grocer instead of to greens.'\n\n  '_Alarms and Discursions._'\n\n\nApril 10th\n\nSuppose that a great commotion arises in the street about\nsomething--let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons\ndesire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle\nAges, is approached on the matter, and begins to say, in the arid\nmanner of the Schoolmen, 'Let us first of all consider, my brethren,\nthe value of Light. If Light be in itself good----' At this point he\nis somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the\nlamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about\ncongratulating each other on their unmedieval practicality. But as\nthings go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled\nthe lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because\nthey wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their\ndeeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too\nmuch; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery;\nsome because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the\nnight, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably,\nto-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction\nthat the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is\nthe philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the\ngas-lamp we must now discuss in the dark.\n\n  '_Heretics._'\n\n\nAPRIL 11th\n\nHis soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise\nenough to be made a fool of. He will make himself happy in the traps\nthat have been laid for him; he will roll in their nets and sleep. All\ndoors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere\ncourage. The whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase--he\nwill be always 'taken in.' To be taken in everywhere is to see the\ninside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance. With\ntorches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by Life.\nAnd the sceptic is cast out by it.\n\n  '_Charles Dickens._'\n\n\nAPRIL 12th\n\nYou cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that\nit is particular. A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson felt\nan irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes\nwill--will to anything. He only wants humanity to want something. But\nhumanity does want something. It wants ordinary morality. He rebels\nagainst the law and tells us to will something or anything. But we\n_have_ willed something. We have willed the law against which he rebels.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nAPRIL 13th\n\nI have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might\nbe paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand\nfor genuine Catholicism, and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these\nat least are real religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean\ncold Agnosticism would be clean cold water--an excellent thing if you\ncan get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well\nrepresented by soda-water--which is a fuss about nothing. Mr. Bernard\nShaw's philosophy is exactly like black coffee--it awakens, but it does\nnot really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it\nwould be impossible to express one's contempt for it in stronger terms\nthan that. Sometimes one may come across something that may honestly\nbe compared to milk, an ancient and heathen mildness, an earthly yet\nsustaining mercy--the milk of human kindness. You can find it in a few\npagan poets and a few old fables; but it is everywhere dying out.\n\n  '_William Blake._'\n\n\nAPRIL 14th\n\nAs it is in politics with the specially potent man, so it is in history\nwith the specially learned. We do not need the learned man to teach\nus the important things. We all know the important things, though we\nall violate and neglect them. Gigantic industry, abysmal knowledge\nare needed for the discovery of the tiny things--the things that seem\nhardly worth the trouble. Generally speaking, the ordinary man should\nbe content with the terrible secret that men are men--which is another\nway of saying that they are brothers.\n\n  '_Illustrated London News._'\n\n\nAPRIL 15th\n\nThe women were of the kind vaguely called emancipated, and professed\nsome protest against male supremacy. Yet these new women would always\npay to a man the extraordinary compliment which no ordinary woman ever\npays to him--that of listening while he is talking.\n\n  '_The Man who was Thursday._'\n\n\nAPRIL 16th\n\nWhatever the merits or demerits of the Pantheistic sentiment of melting\ninto nature of 'Oneness' (I think they call it) with seas and skies,\nit is not and it never has been a popular sentiment. It has been the\nfeeling of a few learned aesthetes or secluded naturalists. Popular\npoetry is all against Pantheism and quite removed from Immanence. It is\nall about the beautiful earth as an edge or fringe of something much\nbetter and quite distinct. Ballads and carols do not go to the tune of\n'One with the Essence of the Boundless World.' Ballads and carols go to\nthe tune of 'Over the hills and far away;' the sense that life leads by\na strange and special path to something sacred and separate.\n\n  '_Daily News._'\n\n\nAPRIL 17th\n\nHow high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now\nonly know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds.\nHow low human happiness sank in the twentieth century, our children\nwill only know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people\nto be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity never\nproduces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is\nstrange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men\nto a banquet with spears.\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nAPRIL 18th\n\nIf a god does come upon the earth, he will descend at the sight of the\nbrave. Our prostrations and litanies are of no avail; our new moons and\nsabbaths are an abomination. The great man will come when all of us are\nfeeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at\nsome splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without him.\n\n  '_Charles Dickens._'\n\n\nAPRIL 19th _PRIMROSE DAY_\n\nIf the great Jew who led the English Tories understood patriotism (as\nI do not doubt that he did) it must have been a decidedly special and\npeculiar kind of patriotism, and it necessarily laid him open to the\nmistake about the relative positions of the terms Emperor and King. To\nhim no doubt Emperor seemed obviously a higher title; just as Brother\nof the Sun and Moon would have seemed to him a higher title than\nSecond Cousin of the Evening Star. Among Orientals all such titles are\ntowering and hyperbolical. But of kingship as it has been felt among\nChristian men he had no notion, and small blame to him. He did not\nunderstand the domestic, popular, and priestly quality in the thing;\nthe idea expressed in the odd old phrase of being the breath of his\npeople's nostrils; the mystical life pumped through the lungs and\nframework of a state.\n\n  '_Illustrated London News._'\n\n\nAPRIL 20th\n\n'I know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that only one or two may\nrightly use, and only seldom. It is a fairy wand of great fear,\nstronger than those who use it--often frightful, often wicked to use.\nBut whatever is touched with it is never again wholly common; whatever\nis touched with it takes a magic from outside the world. It has made\nmean landscapes magnificent and hovels outlast cathedrals. The touch of\nit is the finger of a strange perfection.\n\n'There it is!'--he pointed to the floor where his sword lay flat and\nshining.\n\n  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'\n\n\nAPRIL 21st\n\nThere are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make men\nrich; the only 'instinct' I know of which does it is that instinct\nwhich theological Christianity crudely describes as 'the sin of\navarice.'\n\n  '_All Things Considered_.'\n\n\nAPRIL 22nd\n\nIt is a common saying that anything may happen behind our backs:\ntranscendentally considered, the thing has an eerie truth about it.\nEden may be behind our backs, or Fairyland. But this mystery of the\nhuman back has, again, its other side in the strange impression\nproduced on those behind: to walk behind anyone along a lane is a thing\nthat, properly speaking, touches the oldest nerve of awe. Watts has\nrealized this as no one in art or letters has realized it in the whole\nhistory of the world; it has made him great. There is one possible\nexception to his monopoly of this magnificent craze. Two thousand years\nbefore, in the dark scriptures of a nomad people, it had been said that\ntheir prophet saw the immense Creator of all things, but only saw Him\nfrom behind.\n\n  '_G. F. Watts._'\n\n\nAPRIL 23rd _ST. GEORGE'S DAY_\n\n    I see you how you smile in state\n      Straight from the Peak to Plymouth Bar;\n    You need not tell me you are great,\n      I know how more than great you are.\n    I know what spirit Chaucer was;\n    I have seen Gainsborough and the grass.\n\n    '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nAPRIL 24th\n\nThere is no fear that a modern king will attempt to override the\nconstitution: it is more likely that he will ignore the constitution\nand work behind its back. He will take no advantage of his kingly\npower: it is more likely that he will take advantage of his kingly\npowerlessness--of the fact that he is free from criticism and\npublicity. For the King is the most private person of our time. It\nwill not be necessary for anyone to fight against the proposal of a\ncensorship of the Press. We do not need a censorship of the Press. We\nhave a censorship by the Press.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nAPRIL 25th _ST MARK'S DAY_\n\nThe only thing still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New\nTheology.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nAPRIL 26th\n\nThe modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor.\nBut then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man\nbefore ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern\nman found the Church too simple exactly where life is too complex; he\nfound the Church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy.\nThe man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entr\u00e9es.\nThe man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers.\nAnd surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it\nwas in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there was any\ninsanity at all, it was in the extravagant entr\u00e9es, not in the bread\nand wine.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nAPRIL 27th\n\nTHE two things that a healthy person hates most between heaven and hell\nare a woman who is not dignified and a man who is.\n\n  '_All Things Considered._'\n\n\nAPRIL 28th\n\nFor those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic\ncaution to be added. Even for those who cannot do their work in bed\n(as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious\nthat the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the\ncaution I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure\nyou do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak,\nof course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed,\nlet him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy\nman. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some\nscientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nAPRIL 29th\n\nThe creed of our cruel cities is not so sane and just as the creed\nof the old country-side; but the people are just as clever in giving\nnames to their sins in the city as in giving names to their joys in the\nwilderness. One could not better sum up Christianity than by calling\na small white insignificant flower 'The Star of Bethlehem.' But then\nagain one could not better sum up the philosophy deduced from Darwinism\nthan in the one verbal picture of 'having your monkey up.'\n\n  '_Daily News._'\n\n\nAPRIL 30th _ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA'S DAY_\n\nHistoric Christianity rose into a high and strange _coup de th\u00e9\u00e2tre_\nof morality--things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are\nto vice. The spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible and\nattractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged\nlike a dog the first and greatest of the Plantagenets, to the sublime\npity of St. Catherine, who, in the official shambles, kissed the\nbloody head of the criminal. Our ethical teachers write reasonably\nfor prison reform; but we are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any\neminent philanthropist, go into Reading Jail to embrace the strangled\ncorpse before it is cast into the quicklime. Our ethical teachers write\nwildly against the power of millionaires, but we are not likely to see\nMr. Rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly whipped in Westminster\nAbbey.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\n\n\nMAY\n\n\nMAY 1st _LABOUR DAY_\n\n  It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first;\n  Our wrath come after Russia's, and our wrath be the worst.\n  It may be we are set to mark by our riot and our rest\n  God's scorn of all man's governance: it may be beer is best.\n  But we are the people of England, and we never have spoken yet.\n  Mock at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget.\n\n  '_The Silent People._'\n\n\nMAY 2nd\n\nIf drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges\nin the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge\nbehind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more\nheavy because it is trifling, colourless, and of small import to the\nsoul, then, as I say, I give it up: I do not know what the word means.\nTo be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area--deciding sales, banquets,\nlabours, and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area--providing\ntoys, boots, sheets, cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain\narea--teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene: I can understand\nhow this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could\nnarrow it.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nMAY 3rd\n\nSince it is lawful to pray for the coming of the Kingdom, it is lawful\nalso to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restore the\nKingdom. It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in the trees.\nIt is lawful to pray, 'Thine anger come on earth as it is in Heaven.'\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nMAY 4th\n\n    Happy is he and more than wise\n      Who sees with wondering eyes and clean\n    This world through all the grey disguise\n      Of sleep and custom in between.\n    Yes; we may pass the heavenly screen,\n      But shall we know when we are there?\n    Who know not what these dead stones mean,\n      The lovely city of Lierre.\n\n    '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nMAY 5th\n\nAnomalies do matter very much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract\nillogicalities do matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm:\nand this for a reason that anyone at all acquainted with human nature\ncan see for himself. All injustice begins in the mind: and anomalies\naccustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had\nby some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea\nto nod his head three times before he got out of bed: the practical\npoliticians might say that this power was a harmless anomaly, that it\nwas not a grievance. It could do my subjects no harm; it could do me\nno good. The people of Battersea, they would say, might safely submit\nto it; but the people of Battersea could not safely submit to it, for\nall that. If I had nodded their heads for them for fifty years, I could\ncut off their heads for them at the end of it with immeasurably greater\nease; for there would have permanently sunk into every man's mind the\nnotion that it was a natural thing for me to have a fantastic and\nirrational power. They would have grown accustomed to insanity.\n\n  '_All Things Considered._'\n\n\nMAY 6th\n\nIreland is a country in which the political conflicts are at least\ngenuine: they are about something. They are about patriotism, about\nreligion, or about money: the three great realities. In other words,\nthey are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives in, or with what\nuniverse a man lives in, or how he is to manage to live in either. But\nthey are not concerned with which of two wealthy cousins in the same\ngoverning class shall be allowed to bring in the same Parish Councils\nBill.\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nMAY 7th\n\nMaeterlinck is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual\ntremors as Messrs. Crosse & Blackwell are in filling a man with jam.\nBut it all depends on what you want to be filled with. Lord Rosebery,\nbeing a modern sceptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I,\nbeing an orthodox Christian, prefer the jam.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nMAY 8th\n\nThe world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave\nbecause it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the\nflag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we\nshould leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or\ntoo glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its\ngladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving\nit more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic\nthoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot.\nSimilarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic\npatriot.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nMAY 9th\n\nIt is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an\ninstitution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not\nnatural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which\nyou believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or\nobvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half\na town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so\nmuch larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it\nis very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it,\nis a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment,\nbut which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It\nis really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but once\nadmitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but\nphilosophy, ethics, and finally, poetry.\n\n  '_Browning._'\n\n\nMAY 10th\n\nWhatever makes men feel old is mean--an empire or a skin-flint shop.\nWhatever makes men feel young is great--a great war or a love-story.\nAnd in the darkest of the books of God there is written a truth that\nis also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions\nand proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that\nstartle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is\nno sceptic who does not feel that men have doubted before. There is\nno rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are\nancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his\nneck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do\nthe old things are fed by Nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who\nis in love thinks that anyone has been in love before. No woman who\nhas a child thinks there have been such things as children. No people\nthat fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken\nempires.\n\n  '_The Napoleon of Notting Hill._'\n\n\nMAY 11th\n\nMost of us have suffered from a certain sort of lady who, by her\nperverse unselfishness, gives more trouble than the selfish; who almost\nclamours for the unpopular dish and scrambles for the worst seat. Most\nof us have known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss of\nself-effacement.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nMAY 12th\n\nIt is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the\ncrimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs\naway with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's\nknowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious\nliterary researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently\naccuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be\nexpected from young people possessed of no little native humour. If I\nhad forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to\nthe influence of Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the greatest\nentertainment in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the\nminds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the\ncommunity, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nMAY 13th\n\nSoldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit: they\nare never worshippers of Force. Soldiers more than any other men are\ntaught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact\nis obvious: the might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or\nwhat is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them. They\nlearn to obey symbols, arbitrary things, stripes on an arm, buttons\non a coat, a title, a flag. These may be artificial things; they may\nbe unreasonable things; they may, if you will, be wicked things; but\nthey are not weak things. They are not Force, and they do not look\nlike Force. They are parts of an idea, of the idea of discipline; if\nyou will, of the idea of tyranny; but still an idea. No soldier could\npossibly say that his own bayonets were his authority. No soldier\ncould possibly say that he came in the name of his own bayonets. It\nwould be as absurd as if a postman said that he came inside his bag.\nI do not, as I have said, underrate the evils that really do arise\nfrom militarism and the military ethic. It tends to give people wooden\nfaces and sometimes wooden heads. It tends, moreover (both through its\nspecialization and through its constant obedience), to a certain loss\nof real independence and strength of character. This has almost always\nbeen found when people made the mistake of turning the soldier into a\nstatesman, under the mistaken impression that he was a strong man. The\nDuke of Wellington, for instance, was a strong soldier and therefore\na weak statesman. But the soldier is always, by the nature of things,\nloyal to something. And as long as one is loyal to something one can\nnever be a worshipper of mere force. For mere force, violence in the\nabstract, is the enemy of anything we love. To love anything is to see\nit at once under lowering skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in\nmisfortune; and when a soldier has accepted any nation's uniform he has\nalready accepted its defeat.\n\n  '_All Things Considered._'\n\n\nMAY 14th\n\nNow, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals\nis exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike\nfaith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about\nthe Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the\nGeneral Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere\nmention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision\nis always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much\nas I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of\ninnocence when I believed in Liberals.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nMAY 15th\n\nDistribute the dignified people and the capable people and the highly\nbusiness-like people among all the situations which their ambition or\ntheir innate corruption may demand, but keep close to your heart, keep\ndeep in your inner councils the absurd people; let the clever people\npretend to govern you, let the unimpeachable people pretend to advise\nyou, but let the fools alone influence you; let the laughable people\nwhose faults you see and understand be the only people who are really\ninside your life, who really come near you or accompany you on your\nlonely march towards the last impossibility.\n\n  _Introduction to 'David Copperfield.'_\n\n\nMAY 16th\n\nPhilosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and\nGreats, but of those who pass through birth and death. Nearly all the\nmore awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable,\nfrom 'A child is born' to 'A soul is damned.' If the ordinary man may\nnot discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nMAY 17th\n\nKeeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nMAY 18th _GEORGE MEREDITH DIED_\n\nThe trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out into\ndeep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the evening\nwas so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a sunset all\nto itself. I went along that road according to directions that had\nbeen given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling, beyond which\nthe wood changed only faintly to a garden. It was as if the curious\ncourtesy and fineness of that character I was to meet went out from\nhim upon the valley; for I felt on all these things the finger of\nthat quality which the old English called 'faerie'; it is the quality\nwhich those can never understand who think of the past as merely\nbrutal; it is an ancient elegance such as there is in trees. I went\nthrough the garden and saw an old man sitting by a table, looking\nsmallish in his big chair. He was already an invalid, and his hair and\nbeard were both white; not like snow, for snow is cold and heavy, but\nlike something feathery, or even fierce; rather they were white like\nwhite thistledown. I came up quite close to him; he looked at me as\nhe put out his frail hand, and I saw of a sudden that his eyes were\nstartlingly young. He was the one great man of the old world whom I\nhave met who was not a mere statue over his own grave.\n\nHe was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about the\nbooks he had written; he was far too much alive for that. He talked\nabout the books he had not written. He unrolled a purple bundle of\nromances which he had never had time to sell. He asked me to write\none of the stories for him, as he would have asked the milkman, if he\nhad been talking to the milkman. It was a splendid and frantic story,\na sort of astronomical farce. It was all about a man who was rushing\nup to the Royal Society with the only possible way of avoiding an\nearth-destroying comet; and it showed how, even on this huge errand,\nthe man was tripped up at every other minute by his own weaknesses\nand vanities; how he lost a train by trifling or was put in gaol for\nbrawling. That is only one of them; there were ten or twenty more.\nAnother, I dimly remember, was a version of the fall of Parnell; the\nidea that a quite honest man might be secret from a pure love of\nsecrecy, of solitary self-control. I went out of that garden with a\nblurred sensation of the million possibilities of creative literature.\nThe feeling increased as my way fell back into the wood; for a wood is\na palace with a million corridors that cross each other everywhere. I\nreally had the feeling that I had seen the creative quality; which is\nsupernatural. I had seen what Virgil calls the Old Man of the Forest: I\nhad seen an elf. The trees thronged behind my path; I have never seen\nhim again; and now I shall not see him, because he died last Tuesday.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nMAY 19th _GLADSTONE DIED_\n\n    Lift up your heads: in life, in death,\n      God knoweth his head was high;\n    Quit we the coward's broken breath\n      Who watched a strong man die.\n\n    Oh, young ones of a darker day,\n      In Art's wan colours clad,\n    Whose very love and hate are grey--\n      Whose very sin is sad,\n\n    Pass on; one agony long drawn\n      Was merrier than your mirth,\n    When hand-in-hand came death and dawn\n      And spring was on the earth.\n\n    '_To Them that Mourn._'\n\n\nMAY 20th\n\nIf the authors and publishers of 'Dick Deadshot,' and such remarkable\nworks, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to\ntake down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught\nat a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels\nand warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed.\nYet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their\nidiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of\nthe educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively\ncriminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the\nhigh-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room\ntables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstall in\nWhitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or\nsuicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are\nour luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost\nunparalleled in history, we rate the gutter boys for their immorality\nat the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German\nprofessors) whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant that\nwe curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we\ncanvass the proposition that all property is theft.... At the very\ninstant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life,\nwe are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.\n\n  '_The Defendant._'\n\n\nMAY 21st\n\nThe English nation will still be going the way of all European nations\nwhen the Anglo-Saxon race has gone the way of all fads.\n\n  '_Heretics._'\n\n\nMAY 22nd\n\nThe public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain\nkind of literature, and likes that kind even when it is bad better\nthan another kind of literature even when it is good. Nor is this\nunreasonable; for the line between different types of literature is as\nreal as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people who\ncan only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is as\nirrational as to offer a man who is shivering over weak, warm coffee a\nreally superior sort of ice.\n\n  '_Charles Dickens._'\n\n\nMAY 23rd\n\nTo-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored in the shining\nshield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned to stone.\nThis has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate and\nfuturity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect\ncreed of predestination, were turned to stone; the modern sociological\nscientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The\nonly difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists\nsomewhat amusing, statues.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nMAY 24th _EMPIRE DAY_\n\nI for one should be sincerely glad if we could have a national\ncelebration, remembering our real achievements and reminding ourselves\nof our real work in the world. Only for any such national celebration\nI should suggest two conditions: first, that our national celebration\nshould be invented by our nation and not by another nation. And\nsecondly, that it should be forced by the people on the newspaper\nproprietors, and not by the newspaper proprietors on the people.\n\n  '_Illustrated London News._'\n\n\nMAY 25th\n\nThere is no hope for men who do not boast that their wives bully them.\n\n  '_Alarms and Discursions._'\n\n\nMAY 26th _ST. AUGUSTINE OF ENGLAND'S DAY_\n\nIf our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have\nfollowed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged\n(and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new\nbarbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old\nsociety and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who\nwere forgetting how to make an arch, and she taught them to invent the\nGothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the\nChurch is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that\nthe Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was\nthe only thing that ever brought us out of them.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nMAY 27th\n\nOne Sun is splendid: six Suns would be only vulgar. One Tower of Giotto\nis sublime: a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white\nposts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry\nof nature, in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love, in following\nthe single woman; the poetry of religion, in worshipping the single\nstar.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\nMAY 28th\n\nBoys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales--because they\nfind them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should\nthink, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring\nhim.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nMAY 29th _THE RESTORATION_\n\nIt is a commonplace that the Restoration Movement can only be\nunderstood when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it\nis insufficiently realized that the tyranny which half frustrated\nall the good work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was\nnot the fire of Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy\nof restraint, which passed away: that still burns in the heart of\nEngland, only to be quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is\nseldom remembered that the Puritans were in their day emphatically\nintellectual bullies, that they relied swaggeringly on the logical\nnecessity of Calvinism, that they bound omnipotence itself in the\nchains of syllogism. The Puritans fell, through the damning fact that\nthey had a complete theory of life, through the eternal paradox that a\nsatisfactory explanation can never satisfy.\n\n  '_Twelve Types._'\n\n\nMAY 30th _BLESSED JOAN OF ARC_\n\nJoan of Arc was not stuck at the Cross Roads either by rejecting all\nthe paths like Tolstoy or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She\nchose a path and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I come\nto think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or\nNietzsche--all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of\nall that is noble in Tolstoy: the pleasure in plain things, especially\nin plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the\npoor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that, and\nwith this great addition: that she endured poverty while she admired\nit, whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out\nits secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and\npathetic in poor Nietzsche and his mutiny against the emptiness and\ntimidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium\nof danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms.\nWell, Joan of Arc had all that; and, again, with this difference, that\nshe did not praise fighting, but fought. We _know_ that she was not\nafraid of an army, while Nietzsche for all we know was afraid of a\ncow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche\nonly praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at\ntheir own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more\nviolent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who\ndid something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.\n\n  '_Orthodoxy._'\n\n\nMAY 31st\n\nOur civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining\nthe guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted\nto trained men. If it wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks\nmen who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that\nI felt in the jury-box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the\nsolar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its\nspecialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious,\nit collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing\nwas done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.\n\n  '_Tremendous Trifles._'\n\n\n\n\nJUNE\n\n\nJUNE 1st\n\nThe great lords will refuse the English peasant his three acres and a\ncow on advanced grounds, if they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary\ngrounds. They will deny him the three acres on grounds of State\nOwnership. They will forbid him the cow on grounds of humanitarianism.\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nJUNE 2nd\n\nLife is a thing too glorious to be enjoyed.\n\n  '_George Bernard Shaw._'\n\n\nJUNE 3rd\n\nI remember an artistic and eager lady asking me, in her grand green\ndrawing-room, whether I believed in comradeship between the sexes, and\nwhy not. I was driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer:\n'Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade, you\nwould turn me out of the house.'\n\n  '_What's Wrong with the World._'\n\n\nJUNE 4th\n\nEvery man of us to-day is three men. There is in every modern European\nthree powers so distinct as to be almost personal--the trinity of\nour earthly destiny. The three may be rudely summarized thus: First\nand nearest to us is the Christian, the man of the historic Church,\nof the creed that must have coloured our minds incurably whether we\nregard it as the crown and combination of the other two, or whether\nwe regard it as an accidental superstition which has remained for two\nthousand years. First, then, comes the Christian; behind him comes\nthe Roman--the citizen of that great cosmopolitan realm of reason and\norder, in the level and equality of which Christianity arose. He is the\nStoic who is so much sterner than the Ancorites. He is the Republican\nwho is so much prouder than kings. It is he that makes straight roads\nand clear laws, and for whom good sense is good enough. And the third\nman: he has no name, and all true tales of him are blotted out; yet he\nwalks behind us in every forest path and wakes within us when the wind\nwakes at night. He is the origins--he is the man in the forest.\n\n  '_William Blake._'\n\n\nJUNE 5th\n\nThe right and proper thing, of course, is that every good patriot\nshould stop at home and curse his own country. So long as that is being\ndone everywhere, we may be sure that things are fairly happy, and being\nkept up to a reasonably high standard. So long as we are discontented\nseparately we may be well content as a whole.\n\n  '_Illustrated London News._'\n\n\nJUNE 6th\n\nI have never been able to understand where people got the idea that\ndemocracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that\ntradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to\na consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or\narbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the\ntradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing\nto aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert\nagainst the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a\nlegend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a\nbook of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people\nin the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one\nman in the village, who is mad. Those who urge against tradition--that\nmen in the past were ignorant--may go and urge it at the Carlton Club,\nalong with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will\nnot do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary\nmen in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is\nno reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history\nor fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.\nTradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes--our\nancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit\nto the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be\nwalking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the\naccident of birth: tradition objects to their being disqualified by\nthe accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's\nopinion, even if he is our groom: tradition asks us not to neglect a\ngood man's opinion, even if he is our father.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nJUNE 7th\n\nYou hold that your heretics and sceptics have helped the world forward\nand handed on a lamp of progress. I deny it. Nothing is plainer from\nreal history than that each of your heretics invented a complete cosmos\nof his own which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces. Who knows\nnow exactly what Nestorius taught? Who cares? There are only two things\nthat we know for certain about it. The first is that Nestorius, as a\nheretic, taught something quite opposite to the teaching of Arius,\nthe heretic who came before him, and something quite useless to James\nTurnbull, the heretic who comes after. I defy you to go back to the\nFreethinkers of the past and find any habitation for yourself at all.\nI defy you to read Godwin or Shelley, or the deists of the eighteenth\ncentury, or the nature-worshipping humanists of the Renaissance,\nwithout discovering that you differ from them twice as much as you\ndiffer from the Pope. You are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are\nalways telling me that I ignore the cruelty of Nature. If you had been\nan eighteenth-century sceptic you would have told me that I ignore the\nkindness and benevolence of Nature. You are an Atheist, and you praise\nthe deists of the eighteenth century. Read them instead of praising\nthem, and you will find that their whole universe stands or falls with\nthe deity. You are a Materialist, and you think Bruno a scientific\nhero. See what he said, and you will think him an insane mystic. No;\nthe great Freethinker, with his genuine ability and honesty, does\nnot in practice destroy Christianity. What he does destroy is the\nFreethinker who went before.\n\n  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_\n\n\nJUNE 8th\n\nWhen the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their\nidea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be\nmade. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that everyone\nought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that cosmic\ntruth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what anyone says. The\nformer freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees\ninquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating. Never\nhas there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now,\nwhen, for the first time, anyone can discuss it.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nJUNE 9th _DICKENS DIED_\n\nThe hour of absinthe is over. We shall not be much further troubled\nwith the little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows\nand too clean for their delights. But we have a long way to travel\nbefore we get back to what Dickens meant; and the passage is along an\nEnglish rambling road--a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick travelled.\nBut this at least is part of what he meant: that comradeship and\nserious joy are not interludes in our travel, but that rather our\ntravels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which, through God,\nshall endure for ever. The inn does not point to the road: the road\npoints to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn,\nwhere we shall meet Dickens and all his characters. And when we drink\nagain it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of\nthe world.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nJUNE 10th\n\nI have always been inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people\nrather than to believe that special and troublesome literary class\nto which I belong. I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the\npeople who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of\nthe people who see life from the outside. I would always trust the\nold wives' fables against the old maids' facts. As long as wit is\nmother-wit it can be as wild as it pleases.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nJUNE 11th\n\nHowever far aloft a man may go he is still looking up, not only at\nGod (which is obvious), but in a manner at men also: seeing more and\nmore all that is towering and mysterious in the dignity and destiny\nof the lonely house of Adam.... So it may be hoped, until we die,\nyou and I will always look up rather than down at the labours and\nhabitations of our race; we will lift up our eyes to the valleys from\nwhence cometh our help. For from every special eminence beyond every\nsublime landmark, it is good for our souls to see only vaster and\nvaster visions of that dizzy and divine level, and to behold from our\ncrumbling turrets the tall plains of equality.\n\n  _'Alarms and Discursions.'_\n\n\nJUNE 12th\n\nThere is more of the song and music of mankind in a clerk putting on\nhis Sunday clothes than in a fanatic running naked down Cheapside.\n\n  _'William Blake.'_\n\n\nJUNE 13th\n\nIf we are to save the oppressed, we must have two apparently\nantagonistic emotions in us at the same time. We must think the\noppressed man intensely miserable, and at the same time intensely\nattractive and important. We must insist with violence upon his\ndegradation; we must insist with the same violence upon his dignity.\nFor if we relax by one inch the one assertion, men will say he does\nnot need saving. And if we relax by one inch the other assertion men\nwill say he is not worth saving. The optimists will say that reform\nis needless. The pessimists will say that reform is hopeless. We must\napply both simultaneously to the same oppressed man; we must say that\nhe is a worm and a god; and we must thus lay ourselves open to the\naccusation (or the compliment) of transcendentalism.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nJUNE 14th\n\nYou say your civilization will include all talents. Will it? Do you\nreally mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to\nvote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus?\n\n  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_\n\n\nJUNE 15th\n\n'Certainly, it is untrue that three is no company. Three is splendid\ncompany. Three is the ideal number for pure comradeship: as in the\n'Three Musketeers.' But if you reject the proverb altogether; if you\nsay that two and three are the same sort of company; if you cannot see\nthat there is a wider abyss between two and three than between three\nand three million--then I regret to inform you that you shall have no\ncompany either of two or three, but shall be alone in a howling desert\ntill you die.'\n\n  _'Alarms and Discursions.'_\n\n\nJUNE 16th\n\nBlasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends on a\nphilosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief, and is fading\nwith it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to\nthink blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him\nat the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nJUNE 17th\n\nJust as the rivalry of armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism,\nso the rivalry of parties is only a sort of sulky inheritance. Men\nhave votes, so women must soon have votes; poor children are taught by\nforce, so they must soon be fed by force; the police shut public-houses\nby twelve o'clock, so soon they must shut them by eleven o'clock;\nchildren stop at school till they are fourteen, so soon they will stop\ntill they are forty. No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first\nprinciples, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt\nthis mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nJUNE 18th _WATERLOO DAY_\n\nThe time of big theories was the time of big results. In the era\nof sentiment and fine words, at the end of the eighteenth century,\nmen were really robust and effective. The sentimentalists conquered\nNapoleon. The cynics could not catch De Wet. A hundred years ago our\naffairs for good or evil were wielded triumphantly by rhetoricians. Now\nour affairs are hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nJUNE 19th\n\nHerein lies the peculiar significance, the peculiar sacredness\neven, of penny dreadfuls and the common printed matter made for our\nerrand-boys. Here in dim and desperate forms, under the ban of our\nbase culture, stormed at by silly magistrates, sneered at by silly\nschoolmasters--here is the old popular literature still popular; here\nis the unmistakable voluminousness, the thousand-and-one tales of Dick\nDeadshot, like the thousand-and-one tales of Robin Hood. Here is the\nsplendid and static boy, the boy who remains a boy through a thousand\nvolumes and a thousand years. Here in mean alleys and dim shops,\nshadowed and shamed by the police, mankind is still driving its dark\ntrade in heroes. And elsewhere, and in all ages, in braver fashion,\nunder cleaner skies, the same eternal tale-telling still goes on, and\nthe whole mortal world is a factory of immortals.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nJUNE 20th\n\nThere are two very curious things which the critic of life may observe.\nThe first is the fact that there is one real difference between men and\nwomen: that women prefer to talk in two's, while men prefer to talk in\nthree's. The second is that when you find (as you often do) three young\ncads and idiots going about together and getting drunk together every\nday, you generally find that one of the three cads and idiots is (for\nsome extraordinary reason) not a cad and not an idiot. In those small\ngroups devoted to a drivelling dissipation there is almost always one\nman who seems to have condescended to his company: one man who, while\nhe can talk a foul triviality with his fellows, can also talk politics\nwith a Socialist, or philosophy with a Catholic.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nJUNE 21st\n\nMankind has in nearly all places and periods seen that there is a soul\nand a body as plainly as that there is a sun and moon. But because a\nnarrow Protestant sect called Materialists declared for a short time\nthat there was no soul, another narrow Protestant sect called Christian\nScientist is now maintaining that there is no body.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nJUNE 22nd\n\nTHOSE thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the\nlove of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so,\nperhaps, it would, if they had it.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nJUNE 23rd\n\nOnly the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a\ncomplete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the\nbeginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man.\nFurther, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous\nenvironment, the most dangerous of all is the commodious environment.\nI know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in\ntrying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most\nrecent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small\ncamel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of\nthe needle to its largest: if, in short, we assume the words of Christ\nto have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at\nthe very least mean this--that rich men are not very likely to be\nmorally trustworthy.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nJUNE 24th _MIDSUMMER DAY_\n\n    O well for him that loves the sun,\n    That sees the heaven-race ridden or run,\n    The splashing seas of sunset won,\n      And shouts for victory.\n\n    God made the sun to crown his head,\n    And when death's dart at last is sped,\n    At least it will not find him dead,\n      And pass the carrion by.\n\n    O ill for him that loves the sun;\n    Shall the sun stoop for anyone?\n    Shall the sun weep for hearts undone\n      Or heavy souls that pray?\n\n    Not less for us and everyone\n    Was that white web of splendour spun;\n    O well for him who loves the sun\n      Although the sun should slay.\n\n    _'Ballad of the Sun.'_\n\n\nJUNE 25th\n\nA man's good work is effected by doing what he does: a woman's by being\nwhat she is.\n\n  _'Robert Browning.'_\n\n\nJUNE 26th\n\nIf the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they\npreviously took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the\nmodern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine\nwithout even stating it.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nJUNE 27th\n\nFrom the time of the first fairy tales men had always believed ideally\nin equality; they had always thought that something ought to be done,\nif anything could be done, to redress the balance between Cinderella\nand the ugly sisters. The irritating thing about the French was\nnot that they said this ought to be done: everybody said that. The\nirritating thing about the French was that they did it.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Hard Times.'_\n\n\nJUNE 28th\n\n    My Lady clad herself in grey,\n      That caught and clung about her throat;\n    Then all the long grey winter-day\n      On me a living splendour smote;\n    And why grey palmers holy are,\n      And why grey minsters great in story,\n    And grey skies ring the morning star,\n      And grey hairs are a crown of glory.\n\n    My Lady clad herself in green,\n      Like meadows where the wind-waves pass;\n    Then round my spirit spread, I ween,\n      A splendour of forgotten grass.\n    Then all that dropped of stem or sod,\n      Hoarded as emeralds might be,\n    I bowed to every bush, and trod\n      Amid the live grass fearfully.\n\n    My Lady clad herself in blue,\n      Then on me, like the seer long gone,\n    The likeness of a sapphire grew,\n      The throne of him that sat thereon.\n    Then knew I why the Fashioner\n      Splashed reckless blue on sky and sea;\n    And ere 'twas good enough for her,\n      He tried it on Eternity.\n\n    Beneath the gnarled old Knowledge-tree\n      Sat, like an owl, the evil sage:\n    'The world's a bubble,' solemnly\n      He read, and turned a second page.\n    'A bubble, then, old crow,' I cried,\n      'God keep you in your weary wit!\n    A bubble--have you ever spied\n      The colours I have seen on it?'\n\n    _'A Chord of Colour.'_\n\n\nJUNE 29th _ST. PETER'S DAY_\n\nWhen Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society,\nHe chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the\nmystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward--in a word, a man. And\nupon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not\nprevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed\nbecause of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded\nby strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing--the historic\nChristian Church--was founded upon a weak man, and for that reason it\nis indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nJUNE 30th\n\nThere are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur,\nand the \u00e6sthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the\nsoldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself\nfor his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own\nchoice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow\na truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of\nthe soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one\ninstant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the\nAlps among the silences of stars and snows. All around us is the city\nof small sins, abounding in backways and retreats; but surely, sooner\nor later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that\nthe reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.\n\n  _'The Defendant.'_\n\n\n\n\nJULY\n\n\nJULY 1st\n\nThe average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a\nhundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself,\nas he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and\nheart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music;\nalso (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has\never seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into\nhis vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs, they should be in his\nears when he makes the mystical cross. But as it is, the difficulty\nwith English democracy at all elections is that it is something less\nthan itself. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the\nelectorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nJULY 2nd\n\nModern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning\nall inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite\nequally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of\nsin--a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be\nwashed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he\nwanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere\nMaterialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable\nwater, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians\ndispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology\nwhich can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J.\nCampbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine\nsinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they\nessentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The\nstrongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as\nthe starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly\nis) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then\nthe religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions: he must\neither deny the existence of God, as all Atheists do, or he must deny\nthe present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new\ntheologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny\nthe cat.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nJULY 3rd\n\nThe love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment\nas the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of\nlife is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street\nthe richness of life is proved to us by a hint of what we have lost.\n\n  _'Robert Browning.'_\n\n\nJULY 4th _INDEPENDENCE DAY_\n\nThe old Anglo-American quarrel was much more fundamentally friendly\nthan most Anglo-American alliances. Each nation understood the other\nenough to quarrel. In our time, neither nation understands itself even\nenough to quarrel.\n\n  _Introduction to 'American Notes.'_\n\n\nJULY 5th\n\nIt is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern\nexistence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We\nannounce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding.\nWe do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a\nscaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as\nindicating that the moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still\nabroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding\nis really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more\ncommon. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist\nupon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on\ntheir posters 'Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,' or 'Mr. Jones of Worthing,\nNot Dead Yet.' They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all.\nThey cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the\nmarriages that are not dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give\nof life is of necessity fallacious: they can only represent what is\nunusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with\nthe minority.\n\n  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_\n\n\nJULY 6th\n\n    Happy, who like Ulysses or that lord\n      That raped the fleece, returning full and sage,\n    With usage and the world's wide reason stored,\n      With his own kin can wait the end of age.\n    When shall I see, when shall I see, God knows!\n      My little village smoke; or pass the door,\n    The old dear door of that unhappy house\n      That is to me a kingdom and much more?\n    Mightier to me the house my fathers made\n      Than your audacious heads, O Halls of Rome!\n    More than immortal marbles undecayed,\n      The thin sad slates that cover up my home;\n    More than your Tiber is my Loire to me,\n      Than Palatine my little Lyr\u00e9 there;\n    And more than all the winds of all the sea\n      The quiet kindness of the Angevin air.\n\n    _Translation from 'Du Bellay.'_\n\n\nJULY 7th\n\nIt is a great mistake to suppose that love unites and unifies men.\nLove diversifies them, because love is directed towards individuality.\nThe thing that really unites men and makes them like to each other is\nhatred. Thus, for instance, the more we love Germany the more pleased\nwe shall be that Germany should be something different from ourselves,\nshould keep her own ritual and conviviality and we ours. But the\nmore we hate Germany the more we shall copy German guns and German\nfortifications in order to be armed against Germany. The more modern\nnations detest each other the more meekly they follow each other; for\nall competition is in its nature only a furious plagiarism.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nJULY 8th\n\nThe temporary decline of theology had involved the neglect of\nphilosophy and all fine thinking, and Bernard Shaw had to find shaky\njustifications in Schopenhauer for the sons of God shouting for joy. He\ncalled it the Will to Live--a phrase invented by Prussian professors\nwho would like to exist but can't.\n\n  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_\n\n\nJULY 9th\n\nThere are only two kinds of social structure conceivable--personal\ngovernment and impersonal government. If my anarchic friends will not\nhave rules, they will have rulers. Preferring personal government, with\nits tact and flexibility, is called Royalism. Preferring impersonal\ngovernment, with its dogmas and definitions, is called Republicanism.\nObjecting broad-mindedly both to kings and creeds is called Bosh--at\nleast, I know no more philosophic word for it.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nJULY 10th\n\nNow, I have no particular objection to people who take the gilt off\nthe gingerbread: if only for this excellent reason--that I am much\nfonder of gingerbread than I am of gilt. But there are some objections\nto this task when it becomes a crusade or an obsession. One of them is\nthis: that people who have really scraped the gilt off the gingerbread\ngenerally waste the rest of their lives in attempting to scrape the\ngilt off gigantic lumps of gold. Such has too often been the case with\nShaw. He can, if he likes, scrape the romance off the armaments of\nEurope or the party system of Great Britain; but he cannot scrape the\nromance off love or military valour, because it is all romance, and\nthree thousand miles thick.\n\n  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_\n\n\nJULY 11th\n\n'The Church is not a thing like the Athen\u00e6um Club,' he cried. 'If the\nAthen\u00e6um Club lost all its members, the Athen\u00e6um Club would dissolve\nand cease to exist. But when we belong to the Church we belong to\nsomething which is outside all of us: which is outside everything you\ntalk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but\nit does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church\nwould still somehow exist in God.'\n\n  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_\n\n\nJULY 12th\n\nOf all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these\npeople call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most\nhorrible is the worship of the god within. Anyone who knows anybody\nknows how it would work; anyone who knows anyone from the Higher\nThought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god\nwithin him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.\nLet Jones worship the sun or moon--anything rather than the Inner\nLight; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in\nhis street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world,\nfirstly, in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to\nlook inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and\nenthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being\na Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but\ndefinitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the\nmoon, terrible as an army with banners.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nJULY 13th\n\nThe slum novelist gains his effects by describing the same grey mist\nas draping the dingy factory and the dingy tavern. But to the man he\nis supposed to be studying there must be exactly the same difference\nbetween the factory and the tavern that there is to a middle-class man\nbetween a late night at the office and a supper at Pagani's.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nJULY 14th _THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE_\n\nThe destruction of the Bastille was not a reform: it was something more\nimportant than a reform. It was an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a\nstone image. The people saw the building like a giant looking at them\nwith a score of eyes, and they struck at it as at a carved face. For\nof all the shapes in which that immense illusion called Materialism\ncan terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive is that of the big\nbuilding. Man feels like a fly, an accident in the thing he has himself\nmade. It requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that man\nmade this confounding thing and man could unmake it. Therefore the\nmere act of the ragged people in the street taking and destroying a\nhuge public building has a spiritual, and a ritual, meaning far beyond\nits immediate political results. It is a religious service. If, for\ninstance, the Socialists were numerous or courageous enough to capture\nand smash up the Bank of England you might argue for ever about the\ninutility of the act, and how it really did not touch the root of the\neconomic problem in the correct manner. But mankind would never forget\nit. It would change the world.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nJULY 15th _ST. SWITHIN'S DAY_\n\nOnly in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called\nweather--beautiful and changeable as a woman. The great English\nlandscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is English)\nhave this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere\nof their pictures: it is the subject of their pictures. They paint\nportraits of the weather. The weather sat to Constable; the weather\nposed for Turner--and the deuce of a pose it was. In the English\npainters the climate is the hero; in the case of Turner a swaggering\nand fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent. The tall and\nterrible protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight, fills the\nwhole canvas and the whole foreground. Rich colours actually look\nmore luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a dark\nbackground, and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Against\na dim sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange\nabout them at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in\nthe grim garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the high\nlight in the picture, and its brightness kills all the bright blue\nflowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the\nred daisies are really the lost-red eyes of day, and the sun-flower\nis the vice-regent of the sun. Lastly, there is this value about the\ncolour that men call colourless: that it suggests in some way the mixed\nand troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife\nand expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on\nthe eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue,\nor blanching into white or breaking into green or gold. So we may be\nperpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself;\nand when there is grey weather on our hills or grey hair on our heads\nperhaps they may still remind us of the morning.\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\nJULY 16th\n\nIt is true that all sensible women think all studious men mad. It is\ntrue, for the matter of that, all women of any kind think all men of\nany kind mad. But they do not put it in telegrams any more than they\nwire to you that grass is green or God all-merciful. These things are\ntruisms and often private ones at that.\n\n  _'The Club of Queer Trades.'_\n\n\nJULY 17th\n\nYou may come to think a blow bad because it humiliates. You may come to\nthink murder wrong because it is violent, and not because it is unjust.\n\n  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_\n\n\nJULY 18th _THACKERAY BORN_\n\nIn all things his great spirit had the grandeur and the weakness which\nbelonged to the England of his time--an England splendidly secure and\nfree, and yet (perhaps for that reason) provincial and innocent. He had\nnothing of the doctrinal quality of the French and Germans. He was not\none who made up his mind, but one who let his mind make him up. He lay\nnaturally open to all noble influences flowing around him; but he never\nbestirred himself to seek those that were not flowing or that flowed\nin opposite directions. Thus, for instance, he really loved liberty,\nas only a novelist can love it, a man mainly occupied with the variety\nand vivacity of men. But he could not see the cause of liberty except\nwhere the Victorian English saw it; he could not see it in the cause of\nIrish liberty (which was exactly like the cause of Polish or Italian\nliberty, except that it was led by much more religious and responsible\nmen), and he made the Irish characters the object of much innocent and\nrather lumbering satire. But this was not his mistake, but the mistake\nof the atmosphere, and he was a sublime emotional Englishman, who lived\nby atmosphere. He was a great sensitive. The comparison between him\nand Dickens is commonly as clumsy and unreasonable as a comparison\nbetween Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade or Bulwer Lytton and Anthony\nTrollope. But the comparison really has this element of actuality: that\nDickens was above all things creative; Thackeray was above all things\nreceptive. There is no sense in talking about truth in the matter:\nboth are modes of truth. If you like to put it so: the world imposed\non Thackeray, and Dickens imposed on the world. But it could be put\nmore truly by saying that Thackeray represents, in that gigantic parody\ncalled genius, the spirit of the Englishman in repose. This spirit is\nthe idle embodiment of all of us; by his weaknesses we shall fail and\nby his enormous sanities we shall endure.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Thackeray.'_\n\n\nJULY 19th\n\nThe Marchioness really has all the characteristics, the entirely\nheroic characteristics, which make a woman respected by a man. She is\nfemale--that is, she is at once incurably candid and incurably loyal,\nshe is full of terrible common sense, she expects little pleasure\nfor herself and yet she can enjoy bursts of it; above all, she is\nphysically timid and yet she can face anything.\n\n  _Introduction to 'The Old Curiosity Shop.'_\n\n\nJULY 20th\n\nDemocracy in its human sense is not arbitrament by the majority; it\nis not even arbitrament by everybody. It can be more nearly defined\nas arbitrament by anybody: I mean that it rests on that club-habit of\ntaking a total stranger for granted, of assuming certain things to be\ninevitably common to yourself and him. Only the things that anybody may\nbe presumed to hold have the full authority of democracy. Look out of\nthe window and notice the first man who walks by. The Liberals may have\nswept England with an overwhelming majority; but you would not stake a\nbutton that the man is a Liberal. The Bible may be read in all schools\nand respected in all law courts; but you would not bet a straw that he\nbelieves in the Bible. But you would bet your week's wages, let us say,\nthat he believes in wearing clothes. You would bet that he believes\nthat physical courage is a fine thing, or that parents have authority\nover children. Of course, he might be the millioneth man who does not\nbelieve these things; if it comes to that, he might be the Bearded Lady\ndressed up as a man. But these prodigies are quite a different thing\nfrom any mere calculation of numbers. People who hold these views are\nnot a minority, but a monstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that\nhave full democratic authority the only test is this test of anybody:\nwhat you would observe before any new-comer in a tavern--that is the\nreal English law. The first man you see from the window, he is the King\nof England.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nJULY 21st\n\nMany clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever\nBabylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome.\nCan you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of\ncivilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours?\n\n  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_\n\n\nJULY 22nd\n\nIt is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic\nstate that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If\nwe were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with\nus. With us the governing class is always saying to itself, 'What laws\nshall we make?' In a purely democratic state it would be always saying,\n'What laws can we obey?'\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nJULY 23rd\n\nNo two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic\ncathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition\nexists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is\nthat the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian\nsaint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint always has\na very sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed\nwith sleep. The medieval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones,\nbut his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community\nof spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that.\nGranted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure\ncreed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite\nextravagances. The Buddhist is looking with peculiar intentness\ninwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nJULY 24th\n\nNovels and newspapers still talk of the English aristocracy that came\nover with William the Conqueror. Little of our effective oligarchy is\nas old as the Reformation; and none of it came over with William the\nConqueror. Some of the older English landlords came over with William\nof Orange; the rest have come over by ordinary alien immigration.\n\n  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_\n\n\nJULY 25th\n\nIt is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should\nhave all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of\nmarriage if he had all our wives in one harem.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nJULY 26th\n\nChristianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and\nall fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art the Church\nseems too Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the Church\nseems too artistic. When you quarrel with us now you class us with\nkingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it was\nbecause we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The\nChurch always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond\nthe times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last\nsummer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.\n\n  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_\n\n\nJULY 27th\n\nThe best men of the Revolution were simply common men at their best.\nThis is why our age can never understand Napoleon. Because he was\nsomething great and triumphant, we suppose that he must have been\nsomething extraordinary, something inhuman. Some say he was the Devil;\nsome say he was the Superman. Was he a very, very bad man? Was he a\ngood man with some greater moral code? We strive in vain to invent the\nmysteries behind that immortal mask of brass. The modern world with all\nits subtleness will never guess his strange secret; for his strange\nsecret was that he was very like other people.\n\n  '_Charles Dickens._'\n\n\nJULY 28th\n\nThe greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this: that men\nbegan to use the word 'spiritual' as the same as the word 'good.' They\nthought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was to grow in\nvirtue. When scientific evolution was announced, some feared that\nit would encourage mere animality. It did worse: it encouraged mere\nspirituality. It taught men to think that so long as they were passing\nfrom the ape they were going. But you can pass from the ape and go to\nthe devil.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nJULY 29th\n\nOne of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood\nwhich will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep\nin sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just\nuttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have\nby a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a\ncertain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having\nmissed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom,\nbut in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.\n\n  _'Robert Browning.'_\n\n\nJULY 30th\n\nThe authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define,\nthe authority even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark\ndefences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more\nsupernatural than all the authority of a man to think. We know now\nthat this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear\nscepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the\nsame moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nJULY 31st\n\nThe party system in England is an enormous and most efficient machine\nfor preventing political conflicts.\n\n  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_\n\n\n\n\nAUGUST\n\n\nAUGUST 1st\n\nA man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have\ntime to preach his own heresy.\n\n  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 2nd\n\nJust as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next\ngeneration, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one\nset of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching\nthe next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It\nis idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason\nis itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that\nour thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely\na sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, 'Why\nshould anything go right; even observation or deduction? Why should not\ngood logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in\nthe brain of a bewildered ape?' The young sceptic says, 'I have a right\nto think for myself.' But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says,\n'I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.'\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 3rd\n\nEven among liars there are two classes, one immeasurably better than\nanother. The honest liar is the man who tells the truth about his old\nlies; who says on Wednesday, 'I told a magnificent lie on Monday.' He\nkeeps the truth in circulation; no one version of things stagnates in\nhim and becomes an evil secret. He does not have to live with old lies;\na horrible domesticity.\n\n  _Introduction to 'The Old Curiosity Shop.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 4th\n\nThe only way to remember a place for ever is to live in the place for\nan hour; and the only way to live in the place for an hour is to forget\nthe place for an hour. The undying scenes we can all see, if we shut\nour eyes, are not the scenes we have stared at under the direction\nof guide-books; the scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not\nlook at all--the scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about\nsomething else--about a sin, or a love affair, or some childish sorrow.\nWe can see the background now because we did not see it then.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 5th\n\nTHE keeper of a restaurant would much prefer that each customer should\ngive his order smartly, though it were for stewed ibis or boiled\nelephant, rather than that each customer should sit holding his head\nin his hands, plunged in arithmetical calculations about how much food\nthere can be on the premises.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 6th _TRANSFIGURATION_\n\nJoy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret\nof the Christian. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels\ntowers in this respect, as in every other, above all the\nthinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural,\nalmost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing\ntheir tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly\non His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His\nnative city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial\ndiplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained\nHis anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple and\nasked men how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. Yet He\nrestrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that\nshattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was\nsomething that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray.\nThere was something that He covered by abrupt silence or impetuous\nisolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show\nus when He walked upon our earth, and I have sometimes fancied that it\nwas His mirth.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 7th\n\nImperialism is foreign, Socialism is foreign, Militarism is foreign,\nEducation is foreign, strictly even Liberalism is foreign. But\nRadicalism was our own; as English as the hedge-rows.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 8th\n\n  A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,\n  Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.\n  Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;\n  The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay.\n  Round us in antic order their crippled vices came--\n  Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.\n  Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,\n  Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.\n  Life was a flower that faded, and death a drone that stung;\n  The world was very old indeed when you and I were young!\n  They twisted even decent sins to shapes not to be named:\n  Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.\n  Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;\n  When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us.\n  Children we were--our forts of sand were even as weak as we,\n  High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.\n  Fools as we were in motley, all jangled and absurd,\n  When all church bells were silent, our cap and bells were heard.\n\n  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 9th\n\nIn practice no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of\nphysical inheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely used\nexcept for special modern purposes--such as the endowment of research\nor the oppression of the poor.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 10th _THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY_\n\nWe, the modern English, cannot easily understand the French Revolution,\nbecause we cannot easily understand the idea of a bloody battle\nfor pure common sense; we cannot understand common sense in arms\nand conquering. The French feeling--the feeling at the back of the\nRevolution--was that the more sensible a man was, the more you must\nlook out for slaughter.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 11th\n\nTom Jones is still alive, with all his good and all his evil; he is\nwalking about the streets; we meet him every day. We meet with him, we\ndrink with him, we smoke with him, we talk with him, we talk about him.\nThe only difference is that we have no longer the intellectual courage\nto write about him. We split up the supreme and central human being,\nTom Jones, into a number of separate aspects. We let Mr. J. M. Barrie\nwrite about him in his good moments, and make him out better than he\nis. We let Zola write about him in his bad moments, and make him out\nmuch worse than he is. We let Maeterlinck celebrate those moments of\nspiritual panic which he knows to be cowardly; we let Mr. Rudyard\nKipling celebrate those moments of brutality which he knows to be far\nmore cowardly. We let obscene writers write about the obscenities of\nthis ordinary man. We let puritan writers write about the purities of\nthis ordinary man. We look through one peephole that makes men out as\ndevils, and we call it the New Art. We look through another peephole\nthat makes men out as angels, and we call it the New Theology. But if\nwe pull down some dusty old books from the bookshelf, if we turn over\nsome old mildewed leaves, and if in that obscurity and decay we find\nsome faint traces of a tale about a complete man--such a man as is\nwalking on the pavement outside--we suddenly pull a long face, and we\ncall it the coarse morals of a bygone age.\n\n  _'All Things Considered.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 12th\n\nSelf is the Gorgon. Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and\nlives. Pride studies it for itself and is turned to stone.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 13th\n\nYou complain of Catholicism for setting up an ideal of virginity;\nit did nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an ideal of\nvirginity; the Greeks in Athene, the Romans in the Vestal fire, set up\nan ideal of virginity. What then is your real quarrel with Catholicism?\nYour quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that Catholicism\nhas achieved an ideal of virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece\nof floating poetry. But if you, and a few feverish men, in top hats,\nrunning about in a street in London, choose to differ as to the ideal\nitself, not only from the Church, but from the Parthenon whose name\nmeans virginity, from the Roman Empire which went outwards from the\nvirgin flame, from the whole legend and tradition of Europe, from the\nlion who will not touch virgins, from the unicorn who respects them,\nand who make up together the bearers of your own national shield, from\nthe most living and lawless of your own poets, from Massinger, who\nwrote the 'Virgin Martyr,' from Shakespeare, who wrote 'Measure for\nMeasure'--if you in Fleet Street differ from all this human experience,\ndoes it never strike you that it may be Fleet Street that is wrong?\n\n  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 14th\n\nIt cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt\n(like that of a jolly hostess) to bring shy people out. For every\npractical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of\na tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea-party\nit is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if\npossible without bodily violence.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 15th _THE ASSUMPTION_\n\n    One instant in a still light\n      He saw Our Lady, then\n    Her dress was soft as western sky,\n    And she was a queen most womanly,\n      But she was a queen of men.\n\n    And over the iron forest\n      He saw Our Lady stand,\n    Her eyes were sad withouten art\n    And seven swords were in her heart,\n      But one was in her hand.\n\n    _'Ballad of Alfred.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 16th\n\nI am not prepared to admit that there is, or can be, properly speaking,\nin the world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual\nbeauty and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable and that\nthey should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root\nof every conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and\nnot in a cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea\nas the ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet\nor any similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all\nmen partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine\nnothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so.\n\n  _'Robert Browning.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 17th\n\nOnce men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings\nalone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If scientific\ncivilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will\nlaugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 18th\n\nAll I have to urge is that I dislike the big Whiteley shop, and that I\ndislike Socialism because it will (according to Socialists) be so like\nthat shop. It is its fulfilment, not its reversal. I do not object to\nSocialism, because it will revolutionize our commerce, but because it\nwill leave it so horribly the same.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 19th\n\nIn a hollow of the grey-green hills of rainy Ireland lived an old, old\nwoman, whose uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat Race. But in her\ngrey-green hollows, she knew nothing of this; she didn't know that\nthere was a Boat Race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She\nhad heard of nobody at all, except of George the First, of whom she\nhad heard (I know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her\nsimple trust. And by and by, in God's good time, it was discovered that\nthis uncle of hers was really not her uncle, and they came and told her\nso. She smiled through her tears, and said only, 'Virtue is its own\nreward.'\n\n  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 20th\n\nSurely the vilest point of human vanity is exactly that; to ask to be\nadmired for admiring what your admirers do not admire.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Bleak House.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 21st\n\nThere is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in\nthe man who eats grape-nuts on principle.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 22nd\n\nThere was until lately a law forbidding a man to marry his deceased\nwife's sister; yet the thing happened constantly. There was no law\nforbidding a man to marry his deceased wife's scullery-maid; yet it\ndid not happen nearly so often. It did not happen because the marriage\nmarket is managed in the spirit and by the authority of women.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 23rd\n\nThis world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful\nthan we ever know until some accident reminds us. If you wish to\nperceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment.\nIf you wish to realize how fearfully and wonderfully God's image is\nmade, stand upon one leg. If you want to realize the splendid vision of\nall visible things--wink the other eye.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 24th _ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S DAY_\n\nThe Secularist says that Christianity produced tumult and cruelty. He\nseems to suppose that this proves it to be bad. But it might prove it\nto be very good. For men commit crimes not only for bad things, far\nmore often for good things. For no bad things can be desired quite\nso passionately and persistently as good things can be desired, and\nonly very exceptional men desire very bad and unnatural things. Most\ncrime is committed because, owing to some peculiar complication, very\nbeautiful and necessary things are in some danger. For instance, if we\nwanted to abolish thieving and swindling at one blow, the best thing\nto do would be to abolish babies. Babies, the most beautiful things\non earth, have been the excuse and origin of almost all the business\nbrutality and financial infamy on earth. If we could abolish monogamic\nor romantic love, the country would be dotted with Maiden Assizes.\n\n  _'Religious Doubts of Democracy.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 25th\n\nThere are only three things in the world that women do not understand;\nand they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 26th\n\nModern Nonconformist newspapers distinguish themselves by suppressing\nprecisely those nouns and adjectives which the founders of\nNonconformity distinguished themselves by flinging at kings and queens.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 27th\n\nMany of us live publicly with featureless public puppets, images of the\nsmall public abstractions. It is when we pass our own private gate, and\nopen our own secret door, that we step into the land of the giants.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 28th\n\nWith any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy\nhumiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only\nthree things are possible: first, a perpetuation of Satanic pride;\nsecondly, tears; and third, laughter.\n\n  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 29th\n\nDid Herbert Spencer ever convince you--did he ever convince\nanybody--did he ever for one mad moment convince himself--that it\nmust be to the interest of the individual to feel a public spirit? Do\nyou believe that, if you rule your department badly, you stand any\nmore chance, or one half of the chance, of being guillotined that an\nangler stands of being pulled into the river by a strong pike? Herbert\nSpencer refrained from theft for the same reason he refrained from\nwearing feathers in his hair, because he was an English gentleman with\ndifferent tastes.\n\n  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 30th\n\nWar is a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and\nunanswerably--numbers and an unnatural valour. One does discover the\ntwo urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are\nready to be dead.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nAUGUST 31st\n\nCarlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and\nmore reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is\nsometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described\nas the doctrine of the equality of men.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\n\n\nSEPTEMBER\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 1st\n\nIf a modern philanthropist came to Dotheboys Hall I fear he would not\nemploy the simple, sacred and truly Christian solution of beating Mr.\nSqueers with a stick. I fancy he would petition the Government to\nappoint a Royal Commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I think he\nwould every now and then write letters to the newspapers reminding\npeople that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, there was a\nRoyal Commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I agree that he might\neven go the length of calling a crowded meeting in St. James's Hall\non the subject of the best policy with regard to Mr. Squeers. At this\nmeeting some very heated and daring speakers might even go the length\nof alluding sternly to Mr. Squeers. Occasionally even hoarse voices\nfrom the back of the hall might ask (in vain) what was going to be\ndone with Mr. Squeers. The Royal Commission would report about three\nyears afterwards and would say that many things had happened which were\ncertainly most regrettable, that Mr. Squeers was the victim of a bad\nsystem; that Mrs. Squeers was also the victim of a bad system; but that\nthe man who sold Squeers' cane had really acted with great indiscretion\nand ought to be spoken to kindly. Something like this would be what,\nafter four years, the Royal Commission would have said; but it would\nnot matter in the least what the Royal Commission had said, for by that\ntime the philanthropists would be off on a new tack and the world would\nhave forgotten all about Dotheboys Hall and everything connected with\nit. By that time the philanthropists would be petitioning Parliament\nfor another Royal Commission; perhaps a Royal Commission to inquire\ninto whether Mr. Mantalini was extravagant with his wife's money;\nperhaps a commission to inquire into whether Mr. Vincent Crummies kept\nthe Infant Phenomenon short by means of gin.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 2nd _BATTLE OF SEDAN_\n\nThe Germans have not conquered very much in history as a whole. About\nfifty years ago they beat the French and fifty years before that the\nFrench very soundly beat them. If we see history as a whole there is\nno more doubt that the French people is the more military than there\nis that the German people is the more musical. Germany is a great and\nsplendid nation; and there are millions of sensible German patriots\ngrappling with the sins and follies which are part of her problem.\n\n  _'Illustrated London News.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 3rd\n\nIf votes for women do not mean mobs for women they do not mean what\nthey were meant to mean.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 4th\n\nThere is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially\nmystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are\ncommonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there\nis a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and\nsticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view.\nMost of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely\nbusiness-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was\nbecause he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not\nbreed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do\nnot go mad, but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers,\nbut creative artists very seldom.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 5th\n\nOur modern mystics make a mistake when they wear long hair or loose\nties to attract the spirits. The elves and the old gods when they\nrevisit the earth really go straight for a dull top-hat. For it means\nsimplicity, which the gods love.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 6th\n\nWomen have been set free to be Bacchantes. They have been set free to\nbe virgin martyrs; they have been set free to be witches. Do not ask\nthem now to sink so low as the higher culture.\n\n  _'All Things Considered.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 7th\n\nThe sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but\nthat it loves them too much and trusts them too little.\n\n  _'Robert Browning.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 8th\n\nA philosopher cannot talk about any single thing, down to a pumpkin,\nwithout showing whether he is wise or foolish; but he can easily talk\nabout everything without anyone having any views about him, beyond\ngloomy suspicions.\n\n  _'G. F. Watts.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 9th\n\n    Chattering finch and water-fly\n    Are not merrier than I;\n    Here among the flowers I lie\n    Laughing everlastingly.\n    No: I may not tell the best;\n    Surely, friends, I might have guessed\n    Death was but the good King's jest,\n    It was hid so carefully.\n\n    _'The Skeleton.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 10th\n\nEngland is still ruled by the great Barnacle family. Parliament is\nstill ruled by the great Barnacle trinity--the solemn old Barnacle, who\nknew that the Circumlocution Office was a protection; the sprightly\nyoung Barnacle, who knew that it was a fraud; and the bewildered\nyoung Barnacle who knew nothing about it. From these three types our\nCabinets are still exclusively recruited. People talk of the tyrannies\nand anomalies which Dickens denounced as things of the past like the\nStar Chamber. They believe that the days of the old brutal optimism\nand the old brutal indifference are gone for ever. In truth, this very\nbelief is only the continuance of the old stupid optimism and the old\nbrutal indifference. We believe in a free England and a pure England,\nbecause we still believe in the Circumlocution Office account of this\nmatter. Undoubtedly our serenity is widespread. We believe that England\nis really reformed, we believe that England is really democratic,\nwe believe that English politics are free from corruption. But this\ngeneral satisfaction of ours does not show that Dickens has beaten the\nBarnacles. It only shows that the Barnacles have beaten Dickens.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 11th\n\nWhen a man begins to think that the grass will not grow at night unless\nhe lies awake to watch it, he generally ends either in an asylum or on\nthe throne of an emperor.\n\n  _'Robert Browning.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 12th\n\nThieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their\nproperty that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers\ndislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of\npersonal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go\nthrough the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy.\nBut philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human\nlife; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in\nthemselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives.\nBut philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's.\n\n  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 13th\n\nThe lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a\nlarge one; he is a man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it\nis the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain\ntale or conspiracy or vision. Hence the more clearly we see the world\ndivided into Saxons and non-Saxons, into our splendid selves and the\nrest, the more certain we may be that we are slowly and quietly going\nmad. The more plain and satisfying our state appears, the more we may\nknow that we are living in an unreal world. For the real world is not\nsatisfying. The more clear become the colours and facts of Anglo-Saxon\nsuperiority, the more surely we may know we are in a dream. For the\nreal world is not clear or plain. The real world is full of bracing\nbewilderments and brutal surprises. Comfort is the blessing and the\ncurse of the English, and of Americans of the Pogram type also. With\nthem it is a loud comfort, a wild comfort, a screaming and capering\ncomfort; but comfort at bottom still. For there is but an inch of\ndifference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 14th\n\nI never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of\nis a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific\nwhen it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly\nnasty one. When people talked about the Fall of Man, they knew they\nwere talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now they\ntalk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand\nit, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately\nfalse notion of what the words mean.\n\n  _'The Club of Queer Trades.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 15th\n\nThe only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the\ntrain before.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 16th\n\nMany people have wondered why it is that children's stories are so full\nof moralizing. The reason is perfectly simple: it is that children like\nmoralizing more than anything else, and eat it up as if it were so much\njam. The reason why we, who are grown up, dislike moralizing is equally\nclear: it is that we have discovered how much perversion and hypocrisy\ncan be mixed with it; we have grown to dislike morality not because\nmorality is moral, but because morality is so often immoral. But the\nchild has never seen the virtues twisted into vices; the child does not\nknow that men are not only bad from good motives, but also often good\nfrom bad motives. The child does not know that whereas the Jesuit may\ndo evil that good may come, the man of the world often does good that\nevil may come. Therefore, the child has a hearty, healthy, unspoiled,\nand insatiable appetite for mere morality; for the mere difference\nbetween a good little girl and a bad little girl. And it can be proved\nby innumerable examples that when we are quite young we do like the\nmoralizing story. Grown-up people like the \"Comic Sandford and Merton,\"\nbut children like the real \"Sandford and Merton.\"\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 17th\n\nOne of the few gifts that can really increase with old age is a\nsense of humour. That is the whole fun of belonging to an ancient\ncivilization like our own great civilization of Europe. In my vision I\nsee Europe still sitting on her mighty bull, the enormous and mystic\nmother from whom we come, who has given us everything from the 'Iliad'\nto the French Revolution. And from her awful lips I seem to hear the\nwords:--\n\n    'Think of me, old Mother Scrubbs,\n    A-joining these 'ere totty clubs:\n    Fancy me deserting the pubs\n      At my time of life!'\n\n    _'Illustrated London News.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 18th _DR. JOHNSON BORN_\n\nIf anyone wishes to see the real rowdy egalitarianism which is\nnecessary (to males at least) he can find it as well as anywhere in\nthe great old tavern disputes which come down to us in such books\nas Boswell's 'Johnson.' It is worth while to mention that one name\nespecially, because the modern world in its morbidity has done it a\ngrave injustice. The demeanour of Johnson, it is said, was 'harsh\nand despotic.' It was occasionally harsh, but it was never despotic.\nJohnson was not in the least a despot. Johnson was a demagogue, he\nshouted against a shouting crowd. The very fact that he wrangled with\nother people is a proof that other people were allowed to wrangle with\nhim. His very brutality was based on the idea of an equal scrimmage\nlike that of football. It is strictly true that he bawled and banged\nthe table because he was a modest man. He was honestly afraid of being\noverwhelmed or even overlooked. Addison had exquisite manners and was\nthe king of his company. He was polite to everybody, but superior to\neverybody; therefore he has been handed down for ever in the immortal\ninsult of Pope:--\n\n    Like Cato give his little Senate laws\n    And sit attention to his own applause.\n\nJohnson, so far from being king of his company, was a sort of Irish\nMember in his own Parliament. Addison was a courteous superior and was\nhated. Johnson was an insolent equal, and therefore was loved by all\nwho knew him and handed down in a marvellous book which is one of the\nmere miracles of love.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 19th\n\nBrave men are all vertebrates: they have their softness on the surface\nand their toughness in the middle.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 20th\n\nThe teetotaller has chosen a most unfortunate phrase for the drunkard\nwhen he says that the drunkard is making a beast of himself. The man\nwho drinks ordinarily makes nothing but an ordinary man of himself.\nThe man who drinks excessively makes a devil of himself. But nothing\nconnected with a human and artistic thing like wine can bring one\nnearer to the brute life of Nature. The only man who is, in the exact\nand literal sense of the words, making a beast of himself is the\nteetotaller.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 21st _ST. MATTHEW'S DAY_\n\nThe abyss between Christ and all His modern interpreters is that we\nhave no record that He ever wrote a word, except with His finger in\nthe sand. The whole is the history of one continuous and sublime\nconversation. It was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for\nany elaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and\nidle words that the cross was set up on Calvary and the earth gaped,\nand the sun was darkened at noonday.\n\n  _'Twelve Types.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 22nd\n\n  So with the wan waste grasses on my spear,\n  I ride for ever seeking after God.\n  My hair grows whiter than my thistle plume\n  And all my limbs are loose; but in my eyes\n  The star of an unconquerable praise:\n  For in my soul one hope for ever sings,\n  That at the next white corner of a road\n  My eyes may look on Him.\n\n  _'The Wild Knight.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 23rd\n\nAn error is more menacing than a crime, for an error begets crimes....\nA free lover is worse than a profligate. For a profligate is serious\nand reckless even in his shortest love; while a free lover is cautious\nand irresponsible even in his longest devotion.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 24th\n\nIf the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters,\nI think the priests would escape, I fear the gentlemen would; but\nI believe the gutters would be simply running with the blood of\nphilanthropists.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 25th\n\nPessimism says that life is so short that it gives nobody a chance;\nreligion says that life is so short that it gives everybody his final\nchance.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 26th\n\nIn short, one Pankhurst is an exception, but a thousand Pankhursts are\na nightmare, a Bacchic orgy, a witch's sabbath. For in all legends men\nhave thought of women as sublime separately, but horrible in a crowd.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 27th\n\nIndividually, men may present a more or less rational appearance,\neating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as a whole is changeful,\nmystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.\n\n  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 28th\n\nI should not be at all surprised if I turned one corner in Fleet Street\nand saw a queer looking window, turned another corner and saw a yet\nqueerer looking lamp; I should not be surprised if I turned a third\ncorner and found myself in Elfland.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 29th _ST. MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS_\n\nHistoric Christianity has always believed in the valour of St. Michael\nriding in front of the Church Militant, and in an ultimate and absolute\npleasure, not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of the Spirit,\nthe wine of the blood of God.\n\n  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_\n\n\nSEPTEMBER 30th\n\nWhen a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he\nhimself is a liar.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\n\n\nOCTOBER\n\n\nOCTOBER 1st\n\nOf all the tests by which the good citizen and strong reformer can be\ndistinguished from the vague faddist or the inhuman sceptic, I know no\nbetter test than this--that the unreal reformer sees in front of him\none certain future, the future of his fad; while the real reformer sees\nbefore him ten or twenty futures among which his country must choose,\nand may in some dreadful hour choose the wrong one. The true patriot is\nalways doubtful of victory; because he knows that he is dealing with a\nliving thing; a thing with free will. To be certain of free will is to\nbe uncertain of success.\n\n  _Introduction to 'American Notes.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 2nd\n\nNietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in\nTibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana.\nThey are both helpless--one because he must not grasp anything, and the\nother because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoian's will is\nfrozen by a Buddhistic instinct that all special actions are evil. But\nthe Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all\nspecial actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none\nof them are special. They stand at the cross roads, and one hates all\nthe roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is--well, some\nthings are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross roads.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 3rd\n\nModern women defend their office with all the fierceness of\ndomesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home,\nand develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head\nof the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why\nthey ought not to do it.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 4th _ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI_\n\nFor most people there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position\nof St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any\nearthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears.\nHe called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take\npleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it\nfell from his finger; he was perhaps the happiest of the sons of men.\nYet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of\nwhat we think of the most imperious necessities; in his three vows\nof poverty, chastity, and obedience he denied to himself, and those\nhe loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most\nlarge-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial\natmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all\nmen were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a\nmonk and not a troubadour? We have a suspicion that if these questions\nwere answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this\nsullen time of ours was answered also.\n\n  _'Twelve Types.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 5th\n\nIt is awful to think that this world which so many poets have praised\nhas even for a time been depicted as a mantrap into which we may just\nhave the manhood to jump. Think of all those ages through which men\nhave had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually\nfallen to talking about having the courage to live.\n\n  _'George Bernard Shaw.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 6th\n\nWe will eat and drink later. Let us remain together a little, we\nwho have loved each other so sadly, and have fought so long. I seem\nto remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were always\nheroes--epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and you always brothers in arms.\nWhether it was but recently (for Time is nothing) or at the beginning\nof the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness where there\nis not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding\nvalour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark and\nyou never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and\nsky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the\ndaylight I denied it myself. But you were men. You did not forget your\nsecret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to\ntear it out of you.\n\n  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 7th\n\nThe truest kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has\nalways done, accepting with a sportsman-like relish the estate to which\nwe are called, the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land\nof our birth.\n\n  _'Twelve Types.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 8th\n\nWhen your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung\nor that roses smell sweet, you did not talk of taking the best\nout of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call\nit an entertaining coincidence; when the rose smelt sweet you did\nnot say, 'My father is a rude, barbaric symbol enshrining (perhaps\nunconsciously) the deep delicate truth that flowers smell.' No, you\nbelieved your father because you had found him to be a living fountain\nof facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would\ntell you the truth to-morrow, as well as to-day.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 9th\n\nThere is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that\nis a truism.\n\n  _'G. F. Watts.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 10th\n\nRed is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it\nis the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where\nthe walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond\nburns through. It glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire\nwhich destroys us, in the roses of our romance and in the awful cup of\nour religion. It stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in\nfirst love.\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 11th\n\nCommonness means the quality common to the saint and the sinner, to\nthe philosopher and the fool; and it was this that Dickens grasped and\ndeveloped. In everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies,\nthat fears death, that likes sunlight: that thing enjoys Dickens. And\neverybody does not mean uneducated crowds, everybody means everybody:\neverybody means Mrs. Meynell.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 12th\n\nSome of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty\nand restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint\nwill save them.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 13th\n\nIn a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. And how\nperfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified attitudes,\nand pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is\nproved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the\nlyre, and says, 'Life is real, life is earnest,' and then goes into a\nroom and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.\n\n  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 14th _BATTLE OF HASTINGS_\n\n    Gored on the Norman gonfalon\n    The Golden Dragon died,\n      We shall not wake with ballad strings\n    The good time of the smaller things,\n    We shall not see the holy kings\n      Ride down the Severn side.\n\n    _'Ballad of Alfred.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 15th\n\nI am grown up, and I do not worry myself much about Zola's immorality.\nThe thing I cannot stand is his morality. If ever a man on this earth\nlived to embody the tremendous text, 'But if the light in your body be\ndarkness, how great is the darkness!' it was certainly he. Great men\nlike Ariosto, Rabelais, and Shakespeare fall in foul places, flounder\nin violent but venial sin, sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic\nweakness, are dirty, are indefensible; and then they struggle up\nagain and can still speak with a convincing kindness and an unbroken\nhonour of the best things in the world: Rabelais, of the instruction\nof ardent and austere youth; Ariosto, of holy chivalry; Shakespeare,\nof the splendid stillness of mercy. But in Zola even the ideals are\nundesirable; Zola's mercy is colder than justice--nay, Zola's mercy is\nmore bitter in the mouth than injustice. When Zola shows us an ideal\ntraining he does not take us, like Rabelais, into the happy fields of\nhumanist learning. He takes us into the schools of inhumanist learning,\nwhere there are neither books nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but\nonly deformities in glass bottles, and where the rule is taught from\nthe exceptions. Zola's truth answers the exact description of the\nskeleton in the cupboard; that is, it is something of which a domestic\ncustom forbids the discovery, but which is quite dead, even when it is\ndiscovered.\n\n  _'All Things Considered.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 16th\n\nWe talk in a cant phrase of the Man in the Street, but the Frenchman is\nthe Man in the Street. As the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines\nin the street, so he fights in the street and dies in the street; so\nthat the street can never be commonplace to him.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 17th\n\nIf we wish to preserve the family we must revolutionize the nation.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 18th _ST. LUKE'S DAY_\n\nIn these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to\nbe scientific. Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor\nin saying that he is our doctor, not our priest or our wife or ourself.\nIt is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a\nwatering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health\nwill follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that, obviously, it\nis for us to judge. Physical science is like simple addition; it is\neither infallible or it is false. To mix science up with philosophy\nis only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and\na science that has lost all its practical value. I want my private\nphysician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for\nmy private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.\n\n  _'All Things Considered.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 19th\n\nIt was absurd to say that Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields. But\nit might have been fairly said that Waterloo was won on the village\ngreen, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket. In a word, it\nwas the average of the nation that was strong, and athletic glories do\nnot indicate much about the average of a nation. Waterloo was not won\nby good cricket-players. But Waterloo was won by bad cricket-players,\nby a mass of men who had some minimum of athletic instincts and habits.\nIt is a good sign in a nation, when such things are done badly. It\nshows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a\nnation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only\na few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is\nmerely looking on.\n\n  _'All Things Considered.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 20th\n\nI sometimes think it is a pity that people travel in foreign countries;\nit narrows their minds so much.\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 21st _TRAFALGAR DAY_\n\nThe heroic is a fact, even when it is a fact of coincidence or of\nmiracle; and a fact is a thing which can be admitted without being\nexplained. But I would merely hint that there is a very natural\nexplanation of this frightful felicity, either of phrase or action,\nwhich so many men have exhibited on so many scaffolds or battlefields.\nIt is merely that when a man has found something which he prefers to\nlife, he then for the first time begins to live. A promptitude of\npoetry opens in his soul of which our paltry experiences do not possess\nthe key. When once he has despised this world as a mere instrument, it\nbecomes a musical instrument, it falls into certain artistic harmonies\naround him. If Nelson had not worn his stars he would not have been\nhit. But if he had not worn his stars he would not have been Nelson;\nand if he had not been Nelson he might have lost the battle.\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 22nd\n\nWatts proved no doubt that he was not wholly without humour by this\nadmirable picture (\"The First Oyster\"). Gladstone proved that he was\nnot wholly without humour by his reply to Mr. Chaplin, by his singing\nof \"Doo-dah,\" and by his support of a grant to the Duke of Coburg. But\nboth men were singularly little possessed by the mood or the idea of\nhumour. To them had been in peculiar fullness revealed the one great\ntruth which our modern thought does not know, and which it may possibly\nperish through not knowing. They knew that to enjoy life means to take\nit seriously. There is an eternal kinship between solemnity and high\nspirits, and almost the very name of it is Gladstone. Its other name\nis Watts. They knew that not only life, but every detail of life, is\nmost a pleasure when it is studied with the gloomiest intensity....\nThe startling cheerfulness of the old age of Gladstone, the startling\ncheerfulness of the old age of Watts, are both redolent of this\nexuberant seriousness, this uproarious gravity. They were as happy as\nthe birds because, like the birds, they were untainted by the disease\nof laughter. They are as awful and philosophical as children at play:\nindeed, they remind us of a truth true for all of us, though capable of\nmisunderstanding, that the great aim of a man's life is to get into his\nsecond childhood.\n\n  _'Watts.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 23rd\n\nThe foil may curve in the lunge; but there is nothing beautiful about\nbeginning the battle with a crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strong\ndoctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts; but that\nis no reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. Do\nnot be an opportunist; try to be theoretic at all the opportunities;\nfate can be trusted to do all the opportunist part of it. Do not try to\nbend; any more than the trees try to bend. Try to grow straight; and\nlife will bend you.\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 24th\n\nTruth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the\ncreation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.\n\n  _'The Club of Queer Trades.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 25th\n\nIf a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 26th\n\nIt is currently said that hope goes with youth and lends to youth its\nwings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to\nman, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the\nperiod in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is\nthe period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is\nthe end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the\nknowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration\ncomes to the middle-aged. God has kept that good wine until now.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 27th\n\nWe have made an empire out of our refuse; but we cannot make a nation\neven out of our best material. Such is the vague and half-conscious\ncontradiction that undoubtedly possesses the minds of great masses of\nthe not unkindly rich. Touching the remote empire they feel a vague\nbut vast humanitarian hope; touching the chances of small holdings\nor rural reconstruction in the heart of the empire they feel a doubt\nand a disinclination that is not untouched with despair. Their creed\ncontains two great articles: first, that the common Englishman can get\non anywhere; and second, that the common Englishman cannot get on in\nEngland.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Cottage Homes of England.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 28th\n\nThere is only one very timid sort of man that is not afraid of women.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 29th\n\nI do not see ghosts; I only see their inherent probability.\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 30th\n\nDo you see this lantern? Do you see the cross carved on it and the\nflame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men\nthan you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron,\nand preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on,\nthere is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was,\nby denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You\ncan only destroy. You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world.\nLet that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall now\ndestroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit\nto find it.\n\n  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_\n\n\nOCTOBER 31st _HALLOW E'EN_\n\nIf we ever get the English back on to the English land they will become\nagain a religious people, if all goes well, a superstitious people.\nThe absence from modern life of both the higher and the lower forms of\nfaith is largely due to a divorce from nature and the trees and clouds.\nIf we have no more turnip ghosts it is chiefly from the lack of turnips.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\n\n\nNOVEMBER\n\n\nNOVEMBER 1st _ALL SAINTS' DAY_\n\nYou cannot deny that it is perfectly possible that to-morrow morning in\nIreland or in Italy there might appear a man not only as good but good\nin exactly the same way as St. Francis of Assisi. Very well; now take\nthe other types of human virtue: many of them splendid. The English\ngentleman of Elizabeth was chivalrous and idealistic. But can you stand\nstill in this meadow and _be_ an English gentleman of Elizabeth? The\naustere republican of the eighteenth century, with his stern patriotism\nand his simple life, was a fine fellow. But have you ever seen him?\nHave you ever seen an austere republican? Only a hundred years have\npassed and that volcano of revolutionary truth and valour is as cold as\nthe mountains of the moon. And so it will be with the ethics which are\nbuzzing down Fleet Street at this instant as I speak. What phrase would\ninspire a London clerk or workman just now? Perhaps that he is a son\nof the British Empire on which the sun never sets; perhaps that he is\na prop of his Trades Union, or a class-conscious proletarian something\nor other; perhaps merely that he is a gentleman, when he obviously is\nnot. Those names and notions are all honourable, but how long will they\nlast? Empires break; industrial conditions change; the suburbs will not\nlast for ever. What will remain? I will tell you: the Catholic saint\nwill remain.\n\n  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 2nd _ALL SOULS' DAY_\n\nThere are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably\nequal. They are not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat,\nas the sages of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive.\nBut this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this\nagain is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 3rd\n\nYou cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 4th\n\nThe modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the\nright place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But\nI had heard that I was in the _wrong_ place, and my soul sang for\njoy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated\nforgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass\nhad always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why\nI could feel homesick at home.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 5th _GUY FAWKES' DAY_\n\nGuy Fawkes' Day is not only in some rude sense a festival, and in\nsome rude sense a religious festival; it is also, what is supremely\nsymbolic and important, a winter religious festival. Here the 5th of\nNovember, which celebrates a paltry Christian quarrel, has a touch of\nthe splendour of the 25th of December, which celebrates Christianity\nitself. Dickens and all the jolly English giants who write of the red\nfirelight are grossly misunderstood in this matter. Prigs call them\ncoarse and materialistic because they write about the punch and plum\npudding of winter festivals. The prigs do not see that if these writers\nwere really coarse and materialistic they would not write about winter\nfeasts at all. Mere materialists would write about summer and the sun.\nThe whole point of winter pleasure is that it is a defiant pleasure, a\npleasure armed and at bay. The whole point is in the fierce contrast\nbetween the fire and wine within and the roaring rains outside. And\nsome part of the sacredness of firelight we may allow to fireworks.\n\n  _Article in 'The Observer.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 6th\n\nWhat we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought: it is the\nold age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. It is vain for\nbishops and pious big wigs to discuss what things will happen if wild\nscepticism runs its course. It has run its course. It is vain for\neloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if\nonce we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more\nquestions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any\nwilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any\nselves. You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men\ndoubt if there is a world.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 7th\n\nA man ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy, and\nemphatically not because he has a large frame to sustain. A man ought\nto take exercise not because he is too fat, but because he loves foils\nor horses or high mountains, and loves them for their own sake. And\na man ought to marry because he has fallen in love, and emphatically\nnot because the world requires to be populated. The food will really\nrenovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking about his tissues.\nThe exercise will really get him into training so long as he is\nthinking about something else. And the marriage will really stand\nsome chance of producing a generous-blooded generation if it had its\norigin in its own natural and generous excitement. It is the first law\nof health that our necessities should not be accepted as necessities;\nthey should be accepted as luxuries. Let us, then, be careful about\nthe small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness, or anything\nthat can be managed with care. But in the name of all sanity, let us be\ncareless about the important things, such as marriage, or the fountain\nof our very life will fail.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 8th\n\nIf there be any value in scaling the mountains, it is only that from\nthem one can behold the plains.\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 9th _LORD MAYOR'S DAY_\n\nI pressed some little way farther through the throng of people, and\ncaught a glimpse of some things that are never seen in Fleet Street. I\nmean real green which is like the grass in the glaring sun, and real\nblue that is like the burning sky in another quarter of the world,\nand real gold that is like fire that cannot be quenched, and real red\nthat is like savage roses and the wine that is the blood of God. Nor\nwas it a contemptible system of ideas that was supposed to be depicted\nby these colours of flags and shields and shining horsemen. It was\nat least supposed to be England, which made us all; it was at least\nsupposed to be London, which made me and better men. I at least am\nnot so made that I can make sport of such symbols. There in whatever\nungainly procession, there on whatever ugly shields, there was the\ncross of St. George and the sword of St. Paul. Even if all men should\ngo utterly away from everything that is symbolized, the last symbol\nwill impress them. If no one should be left in the world except a\nmillion open malefactors and one hypocrite, that hypocrite will still\nremind them of holiness.\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 10th\n\n    Old happiness is grey as we\n      And we may still outstrip her;\n    If we be slippered pantaloons\n      O let us hunt the slipper!\n\n    The old world glows with colours clear,\n      And if, as saith the saint,\n    The world is but a painted show,\n      O let us lick the paint!\n\n    Far, far behind are morbid hours\n      And lonely hearts that bleed;\n    Far, far behind us are the days\n      When we were old indeed.\n\n    Behold the simple sum of things\n      Where, in one splendour spun,\n    The stars go round the Mulberry Bush,\n      The Burning Bush, the Sun.\n\n    _'Grey Beards at Play.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 11th\n\nA man (of a certain age) may look into the eyes of his lady-love to\nsee that they are beautiful. But no normal lady will allow that young\nman to look into her eyes to see whether they are beautiful. The same\nvariety and idiosyncrasy has been generally observed in gods. Praise\nthem; or leave them alone; but do not look for them unless you know\nthey are there. Do not look for them unless you want them.\n\n  _'All Things Considered.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 12th\n\n    Likelier across these flats afar,\n      These sulky levels smooth and free,\n    The drums shall crash a waltz of war\n      And Death shall dance with Liberty;\n    Likelier the barricades shall blare\n      Slaughter below and smoke above,\n    And death and hate and hell declare\n      That men have found a thing to love.\n\n    _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 13th\n\nEverything is military in the sense that everything depends upon\nobedience. There is no perfectly epicurean corner; there is no\nperfectly irresponsible place. Everywhere men have made the way for us\nwith sweat and submission. We may fling ourselves into a hammock in\na fit of divine carelessness. But we are glad that the net-maker did\nnot make the net in a fit of divine carelessness. We may jump upon a\nchild's rocking-horse for a joke. But we are glad that the carpenter\ndid not leave the legs of it unglued for a joke.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 14th\n\nI will ride upon the Nightmare; but she shall not ride on me.\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 15th\n\nA great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing\nit. The things he describes are types because they are truths.\nShakespeare may or may not have ever put it to himself that Richard\nthe Second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must\nnecessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether an\nartist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that\na critic should be allegorical.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Great Expectations.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 16th\n\nWhen society is in rather a futile fuss about the subjection of women,\nwill no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege\nof women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education\nbecomes futile? For a boy is only sent to be taught at school when\nit is too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done\nalready, and thank God it is nearly always done by women. Every man\nis womanized, merely by being born. They talk of the masculine woman;\nbut every man is a feminized man. And if ever men walk to Westminster\nto protest against this female privilege, I shall not join their\nprocession.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 17th\n\nSeriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more\nsensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a\nnatural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is\nthe easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good _Times_\nleading article than a good joke in _Punch_. For solemnity flows out of\nmen naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to\nbe light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 18th\n\nYes, you are right. I am afraid of him. Therefore I swear by God that\nI will seek out this man whom I fear until I find him and strike him\non the mouth. If heaven were his throne and the earth his footstool I\nswear that I would pull him down.... Because I am afraid of him; and no\nman should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.\n\n  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 19th\n\nUnder all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its\nempires and its Reuter's Agency, the real life of man goes on concerned\nwith this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song,\ntotally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its\nsplendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car\ncivilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming\nspace, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture\nof the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars\nsuburban.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 20th\n\nEvery detail points to something, certainly, but generally to the\nwrong thing. Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the\nthousands of twigs on a tree. It is only the life of the tree that has\nunity and goes up--only the green blood that springs, like a fountain,\nat the stars.\n\n  _'The Club of Queer Trades.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 21st\n\nShallow romanticists go away in trains and stop in places called\nHugmy-in-the-Hole, or Bumps-on-the-Puddle. And all the time they could,\nif they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name of St.\nJohn's Wood. I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not. I should\nbe afraid of the innumerable night of fir-trees, afraid to come upon a\nblood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the eagle. But all these\nthings can be imagined by remaining reverently in the Harrow train.\n\n  _'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 22nd\n\nGiants, as in the wise old fairy-tales, are vermin. Supermen, if not\ngood men, are vermin.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 23rd\n\nIt is part of that large and placid lie that the rationalists tell\nwhen they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism.\nChristianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling\ncosmopolitan civilization. Long sea voyages were not so quick, but were\nquite as incessant as to-day; and though in the nature of things Christ\nhad not many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that He had\nsome. And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen\nwith a yacht that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed\nwith the same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John;\nwhich critics say could not have been written by one of the first few\nChristians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its Platonic\ntone. I am no judge of the philology, but every human being is a\ndivinely appointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems\nto me to prove nothing at all.\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 24th\n\nSometimes the best business of an age is to resist some alien\ninvasion; sometimes to preach practical self-control in a world too\nself-indulgent and diffuse; sometimes to prevent the growth in the\nstate of great new private enterprises that would poison or oppress it.\nAbove all, it may happen that the highest task of a thinking citizen\nmay be to do the exact opposite of the work the Radicals had to do. It\nmay be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he\ncan find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and\nsinking into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture.\n\n  _Introduction to 'A Child's History of England.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 25th\n\nScience in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is\nto provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 26th\n\nWe talk of art as something artificial in comparison with life. But\nI sometimes fancy that the very highest art is more real than life\nitself. At least this is true: that in proportion as passions become\nreal they become poetical; the lover is always trying to be the poet.\nAll real energy is an attempt at harmony and a high swing of rhythm;\nand if we were only real enough we should all talk in rhyme. However\nthis may be, it is unquestionable in the case of great public affairs.\nWhenever you have real practical politics you have poetical politics.\nWhenever men have succeeded in wars they have sung war-songs; whenever\nyou have the useful triumph you have also the useless trophy.\n\nBut the thing is more strongly apparent exactly where the great\nFabian falls foul of it--in the open scenes of history and the actual\noperation of events. The things that actually did happen all over the\nworld are precisely the things which he thinks could not have happened\nin Galilee, the artistic isolations, the dreadful dialogues in which\neach speaker was dramatic, the prophecies flung down like gauntlets,\nthe high invocations of history, the marching and mounting excitement\nof the story, the pulverizing and appropriate repartees. These things\ndo happen; they have happened; they are attested, in all the cases\nwhere the soul of man had become poetic in its very peril. At every one\nof its important moments the most certain and solid history reads like\nan historical novel.\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 27th\n\nAnyone could easily excuse the ill-humour of the poor. But great\nmasses of the poor have not even any ill-humour to be excused. Their\ncheeriness is startling enough to be the foundation of a miracle play;\nand certainly is startling enough to be the foundation of a romance.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Christmas Stories.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 28th\n\n    Lo! I am come to autumn,\n      When all the leaves are gold;\n    Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out\n      The year and I are old.\n\n    In youth I sought the prince of men\n      Captain in cosmic wars.\n    Our Titan even the weeds would show\n      Defiant, to the stars.\n\n    But now a great thing in the street\n      Seems any human nod,\n    Where shift in strange democracy\n      The million masks of God.\n\n    In youth I sought the golden flower\n      Hidden in wood or wold,\n    But I am come to autumn,\n      When all the leaves are gold.\n\n    _'The Wild Knight.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 29th\n\nThere is a noble instinct for giving the right touch of beauty to\ncommon and necessary things, but the things that are so touched are\nthe ancient things, the things that always, to some extent, commended\nthemselves to the lover of beauty. The spirit of William Morris has not\nseized hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful.\nAnd this was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not\nthe supreme courage to face the ugliness of things; Beauty shrank from\nthe Beast and the fairy tale had a different ending.\n\n  _'Twelve Types.'_\n\n\nNOVEMBER 30th _ST. ANDREW'S DAY_\n\nI am quite certain that Scotland is a nation; I am quite certain that\nnationality is the key of Scotland; I am quite certain that all our\nsuccess with Scotland has been due to the fact that we have in spirit\ntreated it as a nation. I am quite certain that Ireland is a nation.\nI am quite certain that nationality is the key of Ireland; I am quite\ncertain that all our failure in Ireland arose from the fact that we\nwould not in spirit treat it as a nation. It would be difficult to\nfind, even among the innumerable examples that exist, a stronger\nexample of the immensely superior importance of sentiment, to what is\ncalled practicality, than this case of the two sister nations. It is\nnot that we have encouraged a Scotchman to be rich; it is not that\nwe have encouraged a Scotchman to be active; it is not that we have\nencouraged a Scotchman to be free. It is that we have quite definitely\nencouraged a Scotchman to be Scotch.\n\n  _'All Things Considered.'_\n\n\n\n\nDECEMBER\n\n\nDECEMBER 1st\n\nIn this world of ours we do not so much go on and discover small\nthings: rather we go on and discover big things. It is the detail\nthat we see first; it is the design that we only see very slowly, and\nsome men die never having seen it at all. We see certain squadrons in\ncertain uniforms gallop past; we take an arbitrary fancy to this or\nthat colour, to this or that plume. But it often takes us a long time\nto realize what the fight is about or even who is fighting whom.\n\nSo in the modern intellectual world we can see flags of many colours,\ndeeds of manifold interest; the one thing we cannot see is the map. We\ncannot see the simplified statement which tells us what is the origin\nof all the trouble.\n\n  _'William Blake.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 2nd\n\nOur wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the\nworld, but our folly belongs to those we love.\n\n  _'Browning.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 3rd\n\nOur fathers were large and healthy enough to make a thing humane, and\nnot worry about whether it was hygienic. They were big enough to get\ninto small rooms.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 4th\n\nA cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic\nphilosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a\nprivate religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.\n\n  _Introduction to 'Book of Job.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 5th\n\nThat Christianity is identical with democracy, is the hardest of\ngospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as the saying\nthat they are all the sons of God.\n\n  _'Twelve Types.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 6th _ST. NICHOLAS'S DAY_\n\nAll the old wholesome customs in connexion with Christmas were to the\neffect that one should not touch or see or know or speak of something\nbefore the actual coming of Christmas Day. Thus, for instance,\nchildren were never given their presents until the actual coming of\nthe appointed hour. The presents were kept tied up in brown-paper\nparcels, out of which an arm of a doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes\naccidentally stuck. I wish this principle were adopted in respect\nof modern Christmas ceremonies and publications. The editors of the\nmagazines bring out their Christmas numbers so long before the time\nthat the reader is more likely to be lamenting for the turkey of last\nyear than to have seriously settled down to a solid anticipation of the\nturkey which is to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought to be\ntied up in brown paper and kept for Christmas Day. On consideration,\nI should favour the editors being tied up in brown paper. Whether the\nleg or arm of an editor should ever be allowed to protrude I leave to\nindividual choice.\n\n  _'All Things Considered.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 7th\n\nWe had talked for about half an hour about politics and God; for men\nalways talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is\nbecause in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God\nis not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of\na moustache.\n\n  _'The Club of Queer Trades.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 8th\n\nHe had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism,\nwhich is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor\nto the universe.\n\n  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 9th\n\nThere was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to\nGod; so that even now the colour of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of\na flower (or a firework) comes to our hearts with a kind of authority\nand certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or\nfeatures of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the\nwhole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the\nchild comes the woman--she understands.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 10th\n\nA man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without\nany hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of\ndoing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any\nother man can love the rewards of it.\n\n  _'Browning.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 11th\n\nAmong all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most\nuniversal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have\nforgotten that they are living on a star.\n\n  _'Defendant.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 12th _BROWNING DIED_\n\nThe poem, 'Old Pictures in Florence,' suggests admirably that a sense\nof incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon a sense of\ncompleteness: that the part may easily and obviously be greater than\nthe whole. And from this Browning draws, as he is fully justified in\ndrawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger scale of life.\nFor nothing is more certain than that though this world is the only\nworld that we have known, or of which we could ever dream, the fact\ndoes remain that we have named it 'a strange world.' In other words,\nwe have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, that\nsomething in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. And\nBrowning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness\nimplies completeness, life implies immortality. The second of the\ngreat Browning doctrines requires some audacity to express. It can\nonly be properly stated as the hope that lies in the imperfection of\nGod--that is to say, that Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if\nthey were the burdens of man, were also his privileges. He held that\nthese stubborn sorrows and obscure valours might--to use a yet more\nstrange expression--have provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has\nself-sacrifice and God has none, then man has in the universe a secret\nand blasphemous superiority. And this tremendous story of a divine\njealousy Browning reads into the story of the Crucifixion. These are\nemphatically the two main doctrines or opinions of Browning, which I\nhave ventured to characterize roughly as the hope in the imperfection\nof man, and more boldly as the hope in the imperfection of God. They\nare great thoughts, thoughts written by a great man, and they raise\nnoble and beautiful doubts on behalf of faith which the human spirit\nwill never answer or exhaust.\n\n  _'Robert Browning.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 13th\n\n    Elder father, though thine eyes\n    Shine with hoary mysteries,\n    Canst thou tell what in the heart\n    Of a cowslip blossom lies?\n\n    Smaller than all lives that be,\n    Secret as the deepest sea,\n    Stands a little house of seeds\n    Like an elfin's granary.\n\n    Speller of the stones and weeds,\n    Skilled in Nature's crafts and creeds,\n    Tell me what is in the heart\n    Of the smallest of the seeds.\n\n    God Almighty, and with Him\n    Cherubim and Seraphim\n    Filling all Eternity--\n    Adonai Elohim.\n\n    _'The Wild Knight.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 14th\n\nThe rare strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross obvious thing\nis to miss it. Chaos is dull; because in chaos a train might go\nanywhere--to Baker Street or Bagdad. But man is a magician and his\nwhole magic is in this that he does say 'Victoria,' and lo! it is\nVictoria.\n\n  _'The Man who was Thursday.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 15th\n\nMen talk of philosophy and theology as if they were something\nspecialistic and arid and academic. But philosophy and theology are not\nonly the only democratic things, they are democratic to the point of\nbeing vulgar, to the point, I was going to say, of being rowdy. They\nalone admit all matters: they alone lie open to all attacks.... There\nis no detail from buttons to kangaroos that does not enter into the gay\nconfusion of philosophy. There is no fact of life, from the death of a\ndonkey to the General Post Office, which has not its place to dance and\nsing in, in the glorious carnival of theology.\n\n  _'G. F. Watts.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 16th\n\nThe Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was a young and rising\npolitician--that is to say, he was a pleasant youth with flat fair hair\nand a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and enormous estates.\nIn public his appearances were always successful and his principle was\nsimple enough. When he thought of a joke he made it and was called\nbrilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was\nno time for trifling, and was called able. In private, in a club of\nhis own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly like a\nschoolboy.\n\n  _'The Innocence of Father Brown.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 17th\n\nThe personal is not a mere figure for the impersonal: rather the\nimpersonal is a clumsy term for something more personal than common\npersonality. God is not a symbol of goodness. Goodness is a symbol of\nGod.\n\n  _'William Blake.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 18th\n\nThe world is not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical\noptimists; it is not to be justified as the best of all possible\nworlds.... Its merit is precisely that none of us could have conceived\nsuch a thing; that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as\nmiracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 19th\n\nThe educated classes have adopted a hideous and heathen custom of\nconsidering death as too dreadful to talk about, and letting it remain\na secret for each person, like some private malformation. The poor, on\nthe contrary, make a great gossip and display about bereavement; and\nthey are right. They have hold of a truth of psychology which is at\nthe back of all the funeral customs of the children of men. The way\nto lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it. The way to endure a painful\ncrisis is to insist very much that it is a crisis; to permit people who\nmust feel sad at least to feel important. In this the poor are simply\nthe priests of the universal civilization; and in their stuffy feasts\nand solemn chattering there is the smell of the baked meats of Hamlet\nand the dust and echo of the funeral games of Patroclus.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 20th\n\nA crime is like any other work of art. Don't look surprised; crimes are\nby no means the only works of art that come from an infernal workshop.\nBut every work of art, divine or diabolic, has one indispensable\nmark--I mean that the centre of it is simple, however the entourage may\nbe complicated.\n\n  _'The Innocence of Father Brown.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 21st _ST. THOMAS'S DAY_\n\nIt was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back\nto orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of\ndoubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine\nand the Freethinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine\nhorribly. The rationalists made me question whether reason was of any\nuse whatever; and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far\nas doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all.\nAs I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures, the\ndreadful thought broke into my mind, 'Almost thou persuadest me to be a\nChristian.'\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 22nd\n\nPure and exalted atheists talk themselves into believing that the\nworking classes are turning with indignant scorn from the churches.\nThe working classes are not indignant against the churches in the\nleast. The things the working classes really are indignant against are\nthe hospitals. The people has no definite disbelief in the temples of\ntheology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the\ntemples of physical science.\n\n  _'Charles Dickens.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 23rd\n\nA turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels.\nIn so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, He has\npartly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a\nturkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour\nor two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather\nincreased than diminished.\n\n  _'All Things Considered.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 24th _CHRISTMAS EVE_\n\nTHE TRUCE OF CHRISTMAS\n\n    Passionate peace is in the sky--\n    And in the snow in silver sealed\n    The beasts are perfect in the field,\n    And men seem men so suddenly--\n      (But take ten swords and ten times ten\n      And blow the bugle in praising men;\n      For we are for all men under the sun,\n      And they are against us every one;\n      And misers haggle and madmen clutch\n      And there is peril in praising much,\n      And we have the terrible tongues uncurled\n      That praise the world to the sons of the world).\n\n    The idle humble hill and wood\n    Are bowed about the sacred birth,\n    And for one little hour the earth\n    Is lazy with the love of good--\n      (But ready are you, and ready am I,\n      If the battle blow and the guns go by;\n      For we are for all men under the sun,\n      And they are against us every one;\n      And the men that hate herd all together,\n      To pride and gold, and the great white feather,\n      And the thing is graven in star and stone\n      That the men who love are all alone).\n\n    Hunger is hard and time is tough,\n    But bless the beggars and kiss the kings,\n    For hope has broken the heart of things,\n    And nothing was ever praised enough.\n      (But hold the shield for a sudden swing\n      And point the sword when you praise a thing,\n      For we are for all men under the sun,\n      And they are against us every one,\n      And mime and merchant, thane and thrall\n      Hate us because we love them all,\n      Only till Christmastide go by\n      Passionate peace is in the sky).\n\n    _'The Commonwealth.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 25th _CHRISTMAS DAY_\n\n    There fared a mother driven forth\n    Out of an inn to roam;\n    In the place where she was homeless\n    All men are at home.\n    The crazy stable close at hand,\n    With shaking timber and shifting sand,\n    Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand\n    Than the square stones of Rome.\n\n    For men are homesick in their homes,\n    And strangers under the sun,\n    And they lay their heads in a foreign land\n    Whenever the day is done.\n    Here we have battle and blazing eyes,\n    And chance and honour and high surprise,\n    But our homes are under miraculous skies\n    Where the Yule tale was begun.\n\n    A Child in a foul stable,\n    Where the beasts feed and foam,\n    Only where He was homeless\n    Are you and I at home:\n    We have hands that fashion and heads that know,\n    But our hearts we lost--how long ago!\n    In a place no chart nor ship can show\n    Under the sky's dome.\n\n    This world is wild as an old wives' tale,\n    And strange the plain things are,\n    The earth is enough and the air is enough\n    For our wonder and our war;\n    But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings\n    And our peace is put in impossible things\n    Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings\n    Round an incredible star.\n\n    To an open house in the evening\n    Home shall all men come,\n    To an older place than Eden\n    And a taller town than Rome.\n    To the end of the way of the wandering star,\n    To the things that cannot be and that are,\n    To the place where God was homeless\n    And all men are at home.\n\n    _The House of Christmas: 'Daily News.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 26th _BOXING DAY_\n\nThere are innumerable persons with eyeglasses and green garments who\npray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian Games. But there is\nabout these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests\nthat it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas. If so, where\nis the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions? Here is a\nsolid and ancient festive tradition still plying a roaring trade in\nthe streets, and they think it vulgar. If this is so, let them be very\ncertain of this: that they are the kind of people who in the time of\nthe maypole would have thought the maypole vulgar; who in the time of\nthe Canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage\nvulgar; who in the time of the Olympian Games would have thought the\nOlympian Games vulgar. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that\nthey were vulgar. Let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean\ncoarseness of speech, rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and\nsome heavy drinking: vulgarity there always was, wherever there was\njoy, wherever there was faith in the gods.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 27th _ST. JOHN'S DAY_\n\nChrist did not love humanity, He never said He loved humanity; He loved\nmen. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a\ngigantic centipede. And the reason that the Tolstoians can even endure\nto think of an equally distributed love is that their love of humanity\nis a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their own\ntheories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.\n\n  _'Twelve Types.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 28th _HOLY INNOCENTS' DAY_\n\nThat little urchin with the gold-red hair (whom I have just watched\ntoddling past my house), she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered;\nher hair shall not be cut short like a convict's. No; all the kingdoms\nof the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. The winds\nof the world shall be tempered to that lamb unshorn. All crowns that\ncannot fit her head shall be broken; all raiment and building that does\nnot harmonize with her glory shall waste away. Her mother may bid her\nbind her hair, for that is natural authority; but the Emperor of the\nPlanet shall not bid her cut it off. She is the human and sacred image;\nall around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the\npillars of society shall be shaken and the roofs of ages come rushing\ndown; and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 29th _ST. THOMAS \u00c0 BECKET_\n\nWhen four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of\nCanterbury it was not only a sign of anger but a sort of black\nadmiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for\nhis brains. Such a blow will remain for ever unintelligible unless we\nrealize what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before\nthey were distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the\ngreat medieval conception that the Church is the judge of the world.\nBecket objected to a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice.\nAnd his reason was simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being\ntried by the priest. The judiciary was itself _sub judice_. The kings\nwere themselves in the dock. The idea was to create an invisible\nkingdom without armies or prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn\npublicly all the kingdoms of the earth.\n\n  _'What's Wrong with the World.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 30th\n\nProgress is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically evident that\nit is illegitimate for us. It is a sacred word, a word that could only\nrightly be used by rigid believers and in the ages of faith.\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nDECEMBER 31st\n\nWith all the multiplicity of knowledge there is one thing happily that\nno man knows: whether the world is old or young.\n\n  _'The Defendant.'_\n\n\n\n\nTHE MOVEABLE FEASTS\n\n\nADVENT SUNDAY\n\n  People, if you have any prayers,\n  Say prayers for me;\n  And lay me under a Christian stone\n  In this lost land I thought my own,\n  To wait till the holy horn be blown\n  And all poor men are free.\n\n  _'Ballad of Alfred.'_\n\n\nSHROVE TUESDAY\n\n    Why should I care for the Ages\n      Because they are old and grey?\n    To me like sudden laughter\n      The stars are fresh and gay;\n    The world is a daring fancy\n      And finished yesterday.\n\n    Why should I bow to the Ages\n      Because they are drear and dry?\n    Slow trees and ripening meadows\n      For me go roaring by,\n    A living charge, a struggle\n      To escalade the sky.\n\n    The eternal suns and systems,\n      Solid and silent all,\n    To me are stars of an instant,\n      Only the fires that fall\n    From God's good rocket rising\n      On this night of carnival.\n\n    _'A Novelty' ('The Wild Knight')._\n\n\nASH WEDNESDAY\n\n    Nor shall all iron doors make dumb\n    Men wondering ceaselessly,\n    If it be not better to fast for joy\n    Than feast for misery?\n\n    _'Ballad of Alfred.'_\n\n\nPALM SUNDAY\n\n    When fishes flew and forests walked\n    And figs grew upon thorn,\n    Some moment when the moon was blood\n    Then surely I was born.\n\n    With monstrous head and sickening cry\n    And ears like errant wings,\n    The devil's walking parody\n    On all four-footed things.\n\n    The tattered outlaw of the earth,\n    Of ancient crooked will,\n    Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,\n    I keep my secret still.\n\n    Fools, for I also had my hour,\n    One far fierce hour and sweet,\n    There was a shout about my ears\n    And palms before my feet.\n\n    _'The Donkey' ('The Wild Knight')._\n\n\nMAUNDAY THURSDAY\n\nJesus Christ made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes\nit, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not\njoyful; he revels because he is not glad. 'Drink,' he says, 'for you\nknow not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go\nnor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as\na humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing\nworth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base\nequality and an evil peace.' So he stands offering us the cup in his\nhands. And in the high altar of Christianity stands another figure in\nwhose hand also is the cup of the vine. 'Drink,' he says, 'for\nthe whole world is as red as this wine with the crimson of the love and\nwrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle, and this\nis the stirrup cup. Drink, for this is my blood of the New Testament\nthat is shed for you. Drink, for I know whence you come and why. Drink,\nfor I know when you go and where.'\n\n  _'Heretics.'_\n\n\nGOOD FRIDAY\n\n    And well may God with the serving folk\n    Cast in His dreadful lot.\n    Is not He too a servant,\n    And is not He forgot?\n\n    Wherefore was God in Golgotha\n    Slain as a serf is slain;\n    And hate He had of prince and peer,\n    And love He had and made good cheer,\n    Of them that, like this woman here,\n    Go powerfully in pain.\n\n    _'Ballad of Alfred.'_\n\n\nHOLY SATURDAY\n\nThe Cross cannot be defeated for it is defeat.\n\n  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_\n\n\nEASTER DAY\n\nI said to my companion the Dickensian, 'Do you see that angel over\nthere? I think it must be meant for the Angel at the Sepulchre.' He saw\nthat I was somewhat singularly moved, and he raised his eyebrows.\n\n'I daresay,' he said. 'What is there odd about that?'\n\nAfter a pause I answered, 'Do you remember what the Angel at the\nSepulchre said?'\n\n'Not particularly,' ha replied; 'but where are you off to in such a\nhurry?'\n\n'I am going,' I said, 'to put pennies into automatic machines on the\nbeach. I am going to listen to the niggers. I am going to have my\nphotograph taken. I will buy some picture postcards. I do want a boat.\nI am ready to listen to a concertina, and but for the defects of my\neducation should be ready to play it. I am willing to ride on a donkey;\nthat is, if the donkey is willing. For all this was commanded me by the\nangel in the stained glass window.'\n\n'I really think,' said the Dickensian, 'that I had better put you in\ncharge of your relations.'\n\n'Sir,' I answered, 'there are certain writers to whom humanity owes\nmuch, whose talent is yet of so shy and delicate or retrospective a\ntype that we do well to link it with certain quaint places or certain\nperishing associations. It would not be unnatural to look for the\nspirit of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, or even for the shade of\nThackeray in old Kensington. But let us have no antiquarianism about\nDickens for Dickens is not an antiquity. Dickens looks not backward but\nforward; he might look at our modern mobs with satire, or with fury,\nbut he would love to look at them. He might lash our democracy, but\nit would be because, like a democrat, he asked much from it. We will\nnot have all his books bound up under the title 'The Old Curiosity\nShop.' Rather we will have them all bound up under the title of 'Great\nExpectations.' Wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make\nsomething of it, swallow it with a holy cannibalism and assimilate it\nwith the digestion of a giant. We must take these trippers as he would\nhave taken them and tear out of them their tragedy and their farce. Do\nyou remember now what the Angel said at the Sepulchre? 'Why seek ye the\nliving among the dead? He is not here; He is risen.'\n\n  _'Tremendous Trifles.'_\n\n\nASCENSION DAY\n\nWhat is the difference between Christ and Satan?\n\nIt is quite simple. Christ descended into hell; Satan fell into it. One\nof them wanted to go up and went down; the other wanted to go down and\nwent up.\n\n  _'The Ball and the Cross.'_\n\n\nWHITSUNDAY\n\nI have a far more solid and central ground for submitting to\nChristianity as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as\na scheme. And that is this; that the Christian Church in its practical\nrelation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only\ncertainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me\nto-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross;\nsome day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One\nfine morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may\nsee why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is\ndead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will\nnot startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live\nwith such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an\noriginal lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might\nshatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact\nwith what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting\nto meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always\nexpecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.\n\n  _'Orthodoxy.'_\n\n\nTRINITY SUNDAY\n\n    The meanest man in grey fields gone\n    Behind the set of sun,\n    Heareth between star and other star,\n    Through the door of the darkness fallen ajar,\n    The Council eldest of things that are,\n    The talk of the Three in One.\n\n    _'Ballad of Alfred.'_\n\n\nCORPUS CHRISTI\n\nAll great spiritual Scriptures are full of the invitation not to test\nbut to taste; not to examine but to eat. Their phrases are full of\nliving water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna and dreadful wine.\nWorldliness and the polite society of the world has despised this\ninstinct of eating, but religion has never despised it.\n\n  _'Daily News.'_\n\n\n\nPRINTED BY\n\nSPOTTISWOODE AND CO. LTD., COLCHESTER\n\nLONDON AND ETON","title":"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.","tradition":"scripture-revelation","translated_text":null,"word_count":40410}