Fancies Versus Fads. G. K. Chesterton

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      Published by Good Press, 2019

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      EAN 4057664130631

Table of Contents

       INTRODUCTION

       FANCIES VERSUS FADS

       The Romance of Rhyme

       Hamlet and the Psycho-Analyst

       The Meaning of Mock Turkey

       Shakespeare and the Legal Lady

       On Being an Old Bean

       The Fear of the Film

       Wings and the Housemaid

       The Slavery of Free Verse

       Prohibition and the Press

       The Mercy of Mr. Arnold Bennett

       A Defence of Dramatic Unities

       The Boredom of Butterflies

       The Terror of a Toy

       False Theory and the Theatre

       The Secret Society of Mankind

       The Sentimentalism of Divorce

       Street Cries and Stretching the Law

       The Revolt of the Spoilt Child

       The Innocence of the Criminal

       The Prudery of the Feminists

       How Mad Laws are Made

       The Pagoda of Progress

       The Myth of the “Mayflower”

       Much Too Modern History

       The Evolution of Slaves

       Is Darwin Dead?

       Turning Inside Out

       Strikes and the Spirit of Wonder

       A Note on Old Nonsense

       Milton and Merry England

INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      I HAVE strung these things together on a slight enough thread; but as the things themselves are slight, it is possible that the thread (and the metaphor) may manage to hang together. These notes range over very variegated topics and in many cases were made at very different times. They concern all sorts of things from lady barristers to cave-men, and from psycho-analysis to free verse. Yet they have this amount of unity in their wandering, that they all imply that it is only a more traditional spirit that is truly able to wander. The wild theorists of our time are quite unable to wander. When they talk of making new roads, they are only making new ruts. Each of them is necessarily imprisoned in his own curious cosmos; in other words, he is limited by the very largeness of his own generalization. The explanations of the Marxian must not go outside economics; and the student of Freud is forbidden to forget sex. To see only the fanciful side of these serious sects may seem a very frivolous pleasure; and I will not dispute that these are very frivolous criticisms. I only submit that this frivolity is the last lingering form of freedom.

      In short, the note of these notes, so to speak, is that it is only from a normal standpoint that all the nonsense of the world takes on something of the wild interest of wonderland. I mean it is only in the mirror of a very moderate sense and sanity, which is all I have ever claimed to possess, that even insanities can appear as images clear enough to appeal to the imagination. After all, the ordinary orthodox person is he to whom the heresies can appear as fantasies. After all, it is we ordinary human and humdrum people who can enjoy eccentricity as a sort of elfland; while the eccentrics are too serious even to know that they are elves. When a man tells us that he disapproves of children being told fairy-tales, it is we who can perceive that he is himself a fairy. He himself has not the least idea of it. When he says he would discourage children from playing with tin soldiers, because it is militarism, it is we and not he who can enjoy in fancy the fantastic possibilities of his idea. It is we who suddenly think of children playing with little tin figures of philanthropists, rather СКАЧАТЬ