A Chesterton Calendar. G. K. Chesterton

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

      'All Things Considered.'

      JANUARY 24th

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

      'The Defendant.'

      JANUARY 25th

      Silence is the unbearable repartee.

      'Charles Dickens.'

      JANUARY 26th

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

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

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

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

      'Ask that intoxicated turnip-eater——'

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

      'The Ball and the Cross.'

      JANUARY 27th

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

      'What's Wrong with the World.'

      JANUARY 28th

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

      'Tremendous Trifles.'

      JANUARY 29th

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

      'G. F. Watts.'

      JANUARY 30th

      EXECUTION OF CHARLES I

      The face of the King's servants grew greater than the King.

       He tricked them and they trapped him and drew round him in a ring;

       The new grave lords closed round him that had eaten the abbey's fruits,

       And the men of the new religion with their Bibles in their boots,

       We saw their shoulders moving to menace and discuss.

       And some were pure and some were vile, but none took heed of us;

       We saw the King when they killed him, and his face was proud and pale,

       And a few men talked of freedom while England talked of ale.

       'The Silent People.'

      JANUARY 31st

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

      The Defendant.'

      [Pg 42]

       [Pg 43]

February

       Table of Contents

      FEBRUARY 1st

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

      'Heretics.'

      FEBRUARY 2nd

      CANDLEMAS. THE FEAST OF THE PURIFICATION

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