Colloquium

If you're going to be in Upland, IN from June 1st through 4th this year, you might consider attending the Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Friends. The event, held at Taylor University, will feature addresses, panels, dramatic presentations, and presumably a great deal of sitting. The line-up looks excellent, though the George MacDonald reenactment and the panel on the mystery literature of G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers seem to be particularly promising.

There is also a student essay competition, wherein papers on topics relating to the Colloquium's focus will be judged by Joseph Pearce. The winner, it is said, will receive $100, as well as free registration to the Colloquium, and free room and board. I'd enter myself if I weren't already planning to go to the Chesterton Conference later that month, but there's nothing to say that some other lucky punk could do it. Try!

So, if you have an interest in C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, etc., this could be a nice way to kick off the summer. You can read all about the event here.

Splitcat Chintzibobs

Dr. Thursday recently wrote about the "difficult question" of character names in fiction. Several snippets from Chesterton are included. It is gut splitting funny; as Dr. T. advises at the top of his post: "Put the drink down now! You have been warned."

link to Dr. Thursday's On names - a difficult question

Another Chesterton Fan in Blogdom

I'm constantly amazed at how many Chesterton references I see in blogdom. At least two or three a day. The latest:

A blogger responds to a blog meme, and lists the four books he could read over and over:

Four books I could read over and over (series count as one, and excluding the Bible):
A Pattern Language – Christopher Alexander
Against Christianity – Peter Leithart
Tell We Have Faces – C.S. Lewis
Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton

John Derbyshire on Chesterton

Yesterday on National Review Online John Derbyshire took a weak stab against GKC:

"It was merry in England before this new learning came up," said the Third Duke of Norfolk. (He was referring to the rise of general literacy, a new thing in his time.) "I would have all things as they were in times past." That could not be. With the invention of printing, the wood had been made into a boat. The same can be said of G. K. Chesterton's fantasy of Britain returning to a feudal condition, jolly squires gazing on benignly as their plump tenants swilled mugs of ale, tonsured monks in the back ground to answer life's hard questions when required. Attitudes like this go beyond conservative. Standing athwart History crying "Stop!" is conservative; hopeless longing for what is irreversibly gone (if it ever actually existed in the imagined form) is reactionary.

A new Chesterton poem

The title of this post is not accurate.

The poem was first published in 1922, in The Ballad of St. Barbara, and Other Verses. This book is out of print, and only selections from it have been reprinted in The Complete Works series. It was with considerable glee that I discovered not only an edition of St. Barbara while out rummaging yesterday, but a first edition at that. There are a number of pieces therein that I shall be transcribing for the benefit of the world. These, once added to the running file I have been keeping of "fresh" Chestertonia, will eventually be forwarded to Martin Ward for addition to his marvelous site.

It is not a new poem, but it is new to the Internet.

Anyhow, here is "Nightmare," a poem that has no relation to the Chesterton essay of the same name.

Nightmare

The silver and violet leopard of the night
Spotted with stars and smooth with silence sprang;
And though three doors stood open, the end of light
Closed like a trap; and stillness was a clang.

Under the leopard sky of lurid stars
I strove with evil sleep the hot night long,
Dreams dumb and swollen of triumphs without wars,
Of tongueless trumpet and unanswering gong.

I saw a pale imperial pomp go by,
Helmet and hornèd mitre and heavy wreath;
Their high strange ensigns hung upon the sky
And their great shields were like the doors of death.

Their mitres were as moving pyramids
And all their crowns as marching towers were tall;
Their eyes were cold under their carven lids
And the same carven smile was on them all.

Over a paven plain that seemed unending
They passed unfaltering till it found an end
In one long shallow step; and these descending
Fared forth anew as long away to wend.

I thought they travelled for a thousand years;
And at the end was nothing for them all,
For all that splendour of sceptres and of spears,
But a new step, another easy fall.

The smile of stone seemed but a little less,
The load of silver but a little more:
And ever was that terraced wilderness
And falling plain paved like a palace floor.

Rust red as gore crawled on their arms of might
And on their faces wrinkles and not scars:
Till the dream suddenly ended; noise and light
Loosened the tyranny of the tropic stars.

But over them like a subterranean sun
I saw the sign of all the fiends that fell;
And a wild voice cried "Hasten and be done,
Is there no steepness in the stairs of hell?"

He that returns, He that remains the same,
Turned the round real world, His iron vice;
Down the grey garden paths a bird called twice,
And through three doors mysterious daylight came.

==

There will be a few more of these in the future, most likely.

The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult

The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult was retold in French by Joseph Bédier (1900); and our Hilaire Belloc provided an English translation of Bédier's work (1945). (link to Belloc's translation of Bédier's The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult at gutenberg.org). You can learn about the Tristan and Iseult legends at the web site TRISTAN and ISOLDE . net; the web site is not associated with the new movie and treats the subject generally. As for the new movie, here is an excerpt from one review:

It’s almost pointless to debate the film’s inaccuracies when it comes to plot and character relationships because there are so many different versions of the original story. But “Tristan and Isolde” does leave out some vital elements of the love affair, including its connection to the Arthurian legend, a potion binding the lovers in enduring love through life and death, Tristan’s marriage to another woman, the public accusation of lechery, the subsequent trial and Isolde’s sentence to life as a prostitute in a leper colony.

There’s so much more to the story than is depicted — years of suffering and betrayal, longing and desperation. The film wraps it all into a nice, two-hour-long MTV rendering where all of the honorable characters have the svelte bodies and glowing skin of runway models, and the bad guys look more like Grima Wormtongue. It’s entertaining, sure — but the reshaping of the story makes it tragically insubstantial.

The tale’s real power is in the epic quality of the love story. The film has been stripped of its historical significance, mystery and all the qualities that have made the legend so enduring in our culture. By catering to adolescent girls’ infatuation with stories of forbidden love, “Tristan and Isolde” loses its potential to become anything more than a sexier version of “A Knight’s Tale,” and settles for an easy spot in the middle of the bell curve.

(link to review of Tristan and Isolde in The Michigan Daily)

The New York Times noted the PG-13 rating was due "to some fairly bloodless fighting and some very chaste lovemaking."

Japan with a Beard

"Momus" at Wired News begins his article about population decline in Japan by quoting Chesterton:

G.K. Chesterton opens his breezy 1910 jeremiad What's Wrong With the World with a humorous warning regarding "the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about 'young nations' and 'dying nations,' as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life.

"Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth," he wrote. "Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation may be decrepit, or the 10,000th may be vigorous."

Despite Chesterton's sensible warning, people continue to map nations metaphorically to the lifespan of individuals; Mark Steyn, in a somewhat hysterical essay about Muslim population growth in Europe published in January's New Criterion, says, "As fertility shrivels, societies get older -- and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age."

Then the author goes on to say that Japan is in a mid-life crisis ... or "growing a lovely long white beard."

And jeremiad, in my opinion, is too somber a word to describe anything written by Chesterton.

Rich and Dumb

This reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s observation that in order to be smart enough to earn a lot of money, you must be dumb enough to want a lot of money (rough quote, at best):

A developing list of stupid ways rich people spend their money, including $38 bottles of water and a $47,000 princess bed for a little girl.

Kirk was a GKC Friend

The anonymous blogger at Burke to Kirk quotes Chesterton to make a larger point about capital punishment. I don't necessarily agree with it, but it's thought-provoking:

"G.K. Chesterton once said that when you vote, you are putting on the uniform of every official, soldier, or executioner who will perform grim actions on behalf of the public. Thus, in a democracy, when you pull the lever, you are taking responsibility for every life that might be taken by and for the state."

Remembering the Big Guy

Alexander Woollcott first met Chesterton in May of 1914, when they lunched together in Soho. Woolcott recalled what GKC had said on the difference between power and authority: "If a rhinoceros were to enter this restaurant now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I should be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever." The luncheon broke off at four o'clock at which point Chesterton was loaded into a cab, "probably," according to Woollcott's blurred recollection, "with the use of a derrick and shoehorn." [Foreward, Charles Dickens, by G.K. Chesterton, New York: Reader's, 1942, pp. xii-xii.]

Chesterton on Shaw & Spelling

This excerpt from Chesterton's George Bernard Shaw may be interesting to you after reading the essay Nick found, Hilaire Belloc's On Spelling.

... Mr. Shaw has found himself, led by the same mad imp of modernity, on the side of the people who want to have phonetic spelling. The people who want phonetic spelling generally depress the world with tireless and tasteless explanations of how much easier it would be for children or foreign bagmen if "height" were spelt "hite." Now children would curse spelling whatever it was, and we are not going to permit foreign bagmen to improve Shakespeare. Bernard Shaw charged along quite a different line; he urged that Shakespeare himself believed in phonetic spelling, since he spelt his own name in six different ways. According to Shaw, phonetic spelling is merely a return to the freedom and flexibility of Elizabethan literature. That, again, is exactly the kind of blow the old speller does not expect. As a matter of fact there is an answer to both the ingenuities I have quoted. When women have fought in revolutions they have generally shown that it was not natural to them, by their hysterical cruelty and insolence; it was the men who fought in the Revolution; it was the women who tortured the prisoners and mutilated the dead. And because Shakespeare could sing better than he could spell, it does not follow that his spelling and ours ought to be abruptly altered by a race that has lost all instinct for singing. But I do not wish to discuss these points; I only quote them as examples of the startling ability which really brought Shaw to the front; the ability to brighten even our modern movements with original and suggestive thoughts.

Belloc in Expression

Though he is overshadowed (sometimes, perhaps unfairly) by his enormous friend G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc was nonetheless capable of speaking with force, candour and good humour when the situation called for it. We have seen a good example of this in the essay to which I linked yesterday. I offer today two more examples, though smaller in scope.

Belloc, as most of you will hopefully be aware, was one of few politically-minded authors of his time to actually hold office. Contemporaries like H.G. Wells and Jack London ran - and lost.

Belloc ran for the House of Commons in 1906, and, though he eventually won, he had to overcome his share of intolerance, both with regard to his actual politics and to his religion.

On the occasion of his forst campaign speech, Belloc took to the stage with a rosary in his hands and an angry stare, the piercing gimlet eyes we have so often seen in his pictures sweeping across the audience like machine gun fire. Saith he, "gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible I go to mass every day... As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative."

Though this pronouncement is demonstrative of the righteous thunder that Belloc could bring down upon the unwary, he was also archly aware of the foibles of his particular lifestyle. He once famously advised that a young writer should "concentrate on one subject. Let him, when he is twenty, write about the earthworm. Let him continue for forty years to write of nothing but the earthworm. When he is sixty, pilgrims will make a hollow path with their feet to the door of the world's great authority on the earthworm. They will knock at his door and humbly beg to be allowed to see the Master of the Earthworm."

Finally, we can turn to his ingenuity with light verse. Chesterton has remarked in his Autobiography upon Belloc's production of the only real battle song for social movements. It was "real," Chesterton opined, because it actually had some elements of battle and strategy to it. While Belloc's counterparts relied on bland appeals to the sun rising, or the approach of dawn, or other various inevitabilities, Belloc... well, let's let Chesterton tell it:

And then Belloc wrote a poem called "The Rebel," and nobody noticed the interesting point about it. It is a very violent and bitter poem; it would be much too revolutionary for most of the revolutionists; even those with red ties would blush, and those with pale green ties would turn pale and green with sickness, at such threats against the rich as break out here--"and hack their horses at the knees and hew to death their timber trees," and the very fine ending, "and all these things I mean to do; for fear perhaps my little son should break his hands as I have done."

That is not a Song Before Sunrise. That is an attack before sunrise. But the peculiar point I wish to note here, appears in the previous verse about the actual nature of the attack. It is the only revolutionary poem I ever read, that suggested that there was any plan for making any attack. The first two lines of the verse run: "When we shall find them where they stand, a mile of men on either hand?" The Comrades of the Dawn always seemed to be marching in column, and singing. They never seemed to have heard of deploying; into the long line that faces the foe for battle. The next two lines are: "I mean to charge from right away, and force the flanks of their array." Whoever heard of the Comrades of the Dawn having so complicated an idea as that of turning the enemy's flank? Then comes the encirclement:

And press them inward from the plains
And drive them clamouring down the lanes,
And gallop and harry and have them down,
And carry the gates and hold the town.

The Pursuit; and then the Holding of the Bridgehead.

Now that is the only Song of the Class War I ever read that has the haziest notion of what a war would be like. In this wild lyric, full of vindictive violence and destruction, there is also in quite swift lyrical form a perfectly clear tactical plan and military map; a definite description of how men may storm a fortress, if it has to be stormed. The violence of this democratic, though doubtless dramatic, utterance goes far beyond anything that any Communist will reach in a hundred years. But it involves also the real character of battle; and a battle, like every human work, is at once designed in its beginning and doubtful in its end. Now the Comrades of the Dawn already annoyed me; because their revolution was wildly undesigned in its beginning, but had no doubt about its end. Just like Imperialism; and the South African War.

So turn a thought to Hilaire Belloc in your idle moments, if you've the mind. He is worth a look.

Belloc in the New Statesman

The upcoming issue of the New Statesman (Jan. 16, 2006) will feature a reprint of Hilaire Belloc's 1930 essay, "On Spelling," as a part of their "Backward Glance" series. An excerpt follows:

Spelling is a great breeder of hatred among the nations and of divisions, misapprehensions, wars - or as our fathers more splendidly put it (to a roll of drums) "Warres"; as also of Dissencyons and Broils. Here myself I confess to the weakness; to see "labour" spelt "labor" makes me see red; and the more openly we admit it the better for international and domestic prose.

Now that this word "labor" should be so abhorrent to the intimate taste of the English mind is a very good reply to the pedants who will defend spelling as a reminder of the origin of words. "Labor" is right. "Labour" is a twisted thing, coming round by way of a dead French usage. You may say, of course, if you like, that even so, it teaches you a little history and that at least such spelling reminds you that the gentry were French before they were English. But if you say this you lie; for it teaches people nothing of the sort, and such few people as hear this truth about the English gentry only fall into a passion and disbelieve it.

Again, who when he comes across a little word "ink" considers that imperial liquid which only the Basileus on his Constantinopolitan throne could use for his most awful signature? If there is one word the spelling of which ought to teach every child the whole story of Europe and of the great Byzantine centre thereof it is the little word "ink" - and it teaches nothing at all. Neither, for that matter, does Constantinopolitan, hard as it is to spell.

No, all that talk of spelling teaching one the past of words and things is nonsense. If there was any sense in it we should spell the Canon of a Cathedral after the same way in which we spell a gun. They are the same word; and yet I suppose there is not one man in 20,000 who would not ridicule the spelling of the Piece with one "n" and of the Ecclesiastic with two. For my part, if I had to give the extra "n" to either I should give it to the cleric, as one of God’s creatures and a hierarch and therefore infinitely nobler than a piece of brute metal.

You can read the rest of the essay here, although only once per day owing to the New Statesman's non-subscriber access policy. My advice to you would be to save the article to Notepad, or some such thing, that you might enjoy it in future times. It does not appear anywhere else on the Internet, as far as I can find.

Chesterton in Rolling Stone

G.K. Chesterton is quoted (sort of) in a new article about Neil Young in Rolling Stone magazine:

"[Neil Young] receives songs as much as he writes them. The exchange is a mystical one, and mysticism, as G.K. Chesterton somewhere remarks, keeps people and cultures sane. Logic, too emphatically embraced, is what undoes the mind."

link to article

Pearce: Chesterton Was Wrong

Carl Olson recently interviewed Joseph Pearce about his new book Flowers of Heaven: One Thousand Years of Christian Verse (IgnatiusInsight.com, Jan 13, 2006):

IgnatiusInsight.com: One of your favorite authors, G.K. Chesterton, was frank about his dislike for modern poetry, including the work of T.S. Eliot. What do you think of Chesterton's assessment of Eliot's poetry?

Joseph Pearce: He was wrong! Frankly, I don’t believe Chesterton understood Eliot’s poetry, though he admired Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral. Like many others of his generation, Chesterton disliked the novelty of Eliot’s avant garde approach to meter and rhyme. I like to think that Chesterton would have grown to admire Eliot if he had lived longer. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a deeply mystical and religious work and arguably his masterpiece, was not published until several years after Chesterton’s death.

Click here for the entire IgnatiusInsight.com interview with Joseph Pearce.

Nate Blake on Trickle-Down Philosophy

I would like to inform, as a member of the Nate Blake Fan Club, that Nathanael Blake has another fine article up at the Oregon State Daily Barometer; Muggeridge made the cut this time:

How many intellectuals have loudly proclaimed that there is no real right and wrong, only to be appalled when people behave as if there is no right and wrong?

Once loosed, ideas originally proposed as personal rationalization or as the intellectual baubles of the arrogant cognoscenti will not be easily leashed again. Malcolm Muggeridge acerbically commented, "Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursions of barbarian hordes; ours has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elites."

Ideas that become part of the cultural background will relentlessly seek their logical conclusion, regardless of whether their proponents have bothered to think them out. Most people, of course, largely accept the presumptions of their environment uncritically; we might call the percolation of ideas from the intellectuals to the masses "trickle-down philosophy."

CR: Fantasy Special Issue

The latest Chesterton Review is a special edition on fantasy literature. If the faerie writings of Tolkien, Lewis, MacDonald, or even Rowling interest you, then get your eyes on the 300 pages of this issue.

The end this edition's Letters section mentions a new Chesterton web resource, G.K. Chesterton ir Lietuva - Krikščioniškosios vertybės ir kultūra šiandien. For the reader who prefers English to Lithuanian you are in luck; the web site has an English resources section. Presently this includes an article by Stratford Caldecott - Evangelising the Imagination through Story: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

GKC's Long Reach

A blogger from India invokes the big man's name to attack secularism, though it appears to be a re-print from an article in The Hindu ("India's National Newspaper"), who may have been re-printing it from The Guardian. It's hard to say, but I'm always interested to see GKC get mentioned on the other side of the Euphrates.

"By all means, let's have a serious debate about religious belief, one of the most complex and fascinating phenomena on the planet, but the suspicion is that it's not what this chorus wants. Behind unsubstantiated assertions, sweeping generalisations and random anecdotal evidence, there's the unmistakable whiff of panic; they fear religion is on the march again. There's an aggrieved frustration that they've been short-changed by history; we were supposed to be all atheist rationalists by now. Secularisation was supposed to be an inextricable part of progress. Even more grating, what secularisation there has been is accompanied by the growth of weird irrationalities from crystals to ley lines. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, the problem when people don't believe in God is not that they believe nothing, it is that they believe anything."

Link.

The Old Way to RSS Feed

In October of 1927 when the Shaws had moved into a new apartment in Westminster, George Bernard immediately befriended the young assistant in the foyer bookshop and assigned her to keep him informed of any new articles by G.K. Chesterton. [Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, v. III, p. 139]

Reunification?

There have been various rumblings lately (in the form of a cordial declaration on the part of the Eastern Church about being "open to talks" and of some more concrete pronouncements from leaders of the Traditional Anglican Community) that the beginnings of a reunification could be at hand.

This is a wonderful time to hear about it, of course; we're just coming off of Christmas (or going into it, for our Julian readers), and Benedict XVI's upcoming encyclical, Deus est Caritas, could prove just the catalyst to reinvigorate the love of man and spirit of reconciliation that are meant to be manifestations of the love of God, but so often and so tragically fall by the wayside.

Now, there is clearly a sort of general optimism about all of this that is, I would hope, infectious. Things are at a very early and uncertain stage, but all things, as we know, are possible with His stewardship. The concept of a reconciliation - particularly with the Eastern Church - is a serious matter, of course; a matter over which I exert no control and in which I have no great stake. I am thrilled nonetheless.

It is in this buzz of possibility that I recalled one of Chesterton's better - and snarkier - editorial replies. It is a delightful and browpeating piece of verse, penned at the height of the debate over the Welsh Disestablishment Bill. It could almost be belted out in a tavern were it not so esoteric. It is as follows:

Antichrist -or- The Reunion of Christendom

'A Bill which has shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe.' -- Mr. F.E. Smith, on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill.

Are they clinging to their crosses,

F.E. Smith,

Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,

Are they, Smith?

Do they, fasting, trembling, bleeding,

Wait the news from this our city?

Groaning 'That's the Second Reading!'

Hissing 'There is still Committee!'

If the voice of Cecil falters,

If McKenna's point has pith,

Do they tremble for their altars?

Do they, Smith?

Russian peasants round their pope

Huddled, Smith,

Hear about it all, I hope,

Don't they, Smith?

In the mountain hamlets clothing

Peaks beyond Caucasian pales,

Where Establishment means nothing

And they never heard of Wales,

Do they read it all in Hansard

With a crib to read it with --

'Welsh Tithes: Dr Clifford Answered.'

Really, Smith?

In the lands where Christians were,

F.E. Smith,

In the little lands laid bare,

Smith, O Smith!

Where the Turkish bands are busy

And the Tory name is blessed

Since they hailed the Cross of Dizzy

On the banners from the West!

Men don't think it half so hard if

Islam burns their kin and kith,

Since a curate lives in Cardiff

Saved by Smith.

It would greatly, I must own,

Soothe me, Smith!

If you left this theme alone,

Holy Smith!

For your legal cause or civil

You fight well and get your fee;

For your God or dream or devil

You will answer, not to me.

Talk about the pews and steeples

And the Cash that goes therewith!

But the souls of Christian peoples . . .

Chuck it, Smith!

It all sounds rather silly to us now, of course. We must remember that it took guts to stand up to someone as powerful as F.E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, at the height of a furor that was one of the sole interests of the nation. We must make similar allowances for the gallons of ink spilled in the name of the Superman over the years, but that is a story for another time.

Until such time as I can produce a light verse sketch of Pope Urban II and the Emperor Romanus shaking hands warmly in St. Peter's square without it seeming sordid, it would be worthwhile to keep the efforts of the various ecclesiastic diplomats in our thoughts. As with all things, we should watch and pray.

Continuing on the theme of Epiphany

I'd like to thank Joe and Eric for so graciously inviting me to contribute to this project. I've been a great fan of theirs for some time, and it's good to know that my efforts at self-promotion are finally bearing fruit.

My post for today was inspired in part by yesterday's feast, the poem Joe posted, and something else. I came upon this, my favourite picture of Chesterton, while searching for something earlier today, and it struck me as being a fitting illustration, perhaps, of the spirit of the Epiphany.

In the events commemorated at Epiphany, we can see much that is symbolic as well as literal. On a basic level, there is the arrival of the three magi and their subsequent adoration of the infant Christ, the baptism of the adult Christ in the river Jordan, and the wedding miracle at Cana.

In the first, we see the initial turning of the Pagan world towards the Lord, though they know it not. They come bearing gifts, and guided by mystery. It is what one might call the culmination - or almost a purgative vindication - of the moral, philosophic and aesthetic efforts of the Pagans. They are guided by the great Star of David into the House of Israel at last; towards what St. Leo the Great called Israelitica dignitas. The old world looks down upon the rising son and offers up riches in supplication.

In the second, we witness the breathtaking - we could say scandalous - entry of Jesus Christ into the contemporary public eye. He stands before John the Baptist and insists upon the baptism of repentence. There is a hesitancy to John's eventual agreement to do this thing, but he is compelled to. Then the Dove of the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus, and He is proclaimed as the Son. He receives the gift of baptism, though He does not need it; just as He received the sweet spices and gold of the magi, though they were without value to one such as He. A gift from John of the Levites - the Israelites turn towards the Lord.

In the third, He attends a wedding in Cana. It is important to see this as a reflection of the social, familial nature of Christendom; indeed, Jesus attends the wedding with His Mother. In what is His first miracle, Christ turns water into wine, the party's supplies of wine having long since been exhausted by the jubilant guests. It is thought by some that the groom intentionally saved the best wine for last, so delicious did it prove. What has this wrought, then? We can see the importance of the Mother Mary to the Lord; an importance we would do well to remember. Christ brings forth wine, the drink that fires the emotions and enflames the spirit, and at a wedding no less. He has reached into the heart of fellowship, both romantic and filial, and kicked it up a notch. And, though it may seem as though the point is being belaboured, the wine that flows is better than any that had e'er come before. The New Love burned like the sun in a room of candles.

The important consideration that joins these narratives - and the reason for the use of the image above - is that the boons of these stories run both ways. The magi brought gifts; John the Levite gave a baptism; the wedding gave Christ the opportunity to step fully into the world in His most glorious aspect. All of this, indeed, without any of the benefactors being fully aware of the significance of their actions. But, for all of this, Christ grants an even greater gift to each in return. He is the respite at the end of the journey; He is the vindication of a life's work; He is, if we may be so glib, the life of the party.

==

"If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God." - G.K. Chesterton

The Wise Men

JANUARY 6th
THE FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY

THE WISE MEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily News

(GKC reprinted in Chesterton Day by Day)

Motivational Poster

Every office needs a good motivational poster:



Thanks to Robert Pearson at New Victorian for pointing out the Motivator.

New Yorker Cites GKC

I don't subscribe to The New Yorker. Its bigoted secularism is too much, but it has some fine writing, so I read it when a friend of mine gives me his past issues. I just got the November 21, 2005 issue, in which Adam Gopnik gives C.S. Lewis a rather ungenerous and slashing treatment. If you want to read it, go here: Link. I'm more interested, however, in the following statement from the beginning:

Praise a good writer too single-mindedly for too obviously ideological reasons for too long, and pretty soon you have him all to yourself. The same thing has happened to G. K. Chesterton: the enthusiasts are so busy chortling and snickering as their man throws another right hook at the rationalist that they don’t notice that the rationalist isn’t actually down on the canvas; he and his friends have long since left the building.

I'm not sure I fully understand the passage. Gopnik appears to be saying that people don't listen to GKC's defenders anymore because they unequivocally cheer for the man. It's an odd assessment. GKC defenders cheer for him (i) because he deserves it, and (ii) practically no one cheered for him for nearly fifty years after his death. The great man nearly fell off the literary map. I'm glad to see that Gopnik thinks the Chestertonians have made a big enough impact to push GKC from the forgotten, through the spotlight, to irrelevancy, but Gopnik is the first person I've ever heard make that complaint.

Beerbohm: Sundaram v. Epstein

Sundaram appears to think and write just like Joseph Epstein. Surely this will be the biggest plagiarism scandal since Stephen Ambrose.

Beerbohm was primarily and always an ironist, a comedian, an amused observer standing on the sidelines with a smile and a glass of wine in his hand. G.K. Chesterton said of him that "he does not indulge in the base idolatry of believing in himself."

Joseph Epstein. "The Beerbohm Cult" in The Weekly Standard, 11/11/2002, LINK

Beerbohm was primarily and always an ironist, a comedian, an amused observer standing on the sidelines with a smile and a glass of wine in his hand. G K Chesterton rightly observed that 'he does not indulge in the base idolatry of believing in himself'.

V. Sundaram. "The incomparable Max Beerbohm" in India's News Today, 1/4/2006, LINK

More on Beerbohm

V. Sundaram wrote an introduction to Max Beerbohm yesterday in India's News Today. A couple clippings:

As indeed in every other sphere of life, even in the world of journalism and mass media, we only have paid mercenaries to do allotted tasks in a routine manner. Most of the journalists today are more bureaucratic, soulless and gutless than most of the bureaucrats. In this enervating and asphyxiating atmosphere, I cannot help recalling a great English journalist like Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) who was also a talented novelist, caricaturist, short story writer, versifier, satirist, parodist, essayist and theatre-critic. Many of his journalistic pieces written between 1895 and 1925 can be read with interest and enthusiasm even today. There is nothing stale about them. They are very humane and contemporary.

...

Beerbohm was primarily and always an ironist, a comedian, an amused observer standing on the sidelines with a smile and a glass of wine in his hand. G K Chesterton rightly observed that 'he does not indulge in the base idolatry of believing in himself'.

GK New Year Quote

I found this on a blog. I can't vouch that it's accurate (and GKC is probably the most misquoted writer in history), but it rings a bell, and it's a great quote either way:

" The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul."-G. K. Chesterton

Link.

Welcome to Nick Milne

Nick Milne (a.k.a. Furor) of A Gentle Fuss and Evening Isles Fantastical will soon be posting his contributions here at Chesterton and Friends.

Welcome!

Mr. Max Beerbohm

Oliver Kamm writes about Max Beerbohm in his European culture and humor article (published today at The Times Online):

[Beerbohm's] caricatures were affectionate but not obsequious representations of the great and the good. He was, said The Times, the greatest of English comic artists. His genius can be seen in, among many others, his cartoon of H. G. Wells, with whom he was friendly but whose utopianism he was repelled by. The cartoon shows a wide-eyed Wells conjuring up “the darling future”, a severe-looking bespectacled lady clutching a scientific instrument in one arm and an even more severe-looking baby in the other.

Beerbohm had little interest in politics but he had a social conscience. While strongly supporting the war effort in two world wars, he was opposed to the Boer War and drew a series of cartoons about it. He lent his name shortly before his death to a petition opposing atomic weapons.

Above all, Beerbohm’s sparkling Zuleika Dobson shows the devastating effects of single-mindedness. Beauty, in the form of the eponymous heroine, descends on Oxford and wreaks havoc among the aesthetes of the undergraduate population, who collectively commit suicide. The satire here is most particularly on a Romanticism represented by a brooding young aristocrat. It might have foreshadowed the selfabsorbed European culture that two decades later could not perceive till too late the deadliness of movements that seemed to promise a real historical dynamic.

You can find some of Beerbohm's drawings online here and here.

G.K. Chesterton wrote in All Things Considered that Max Beerbohm "has every merit except democracy".

Unless

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

-- G.K. Chesterton, Daily News

(source: Chesterton Day by Day: New Year's Day)

(Mis)quoting GKC

ACS' Dale Ahlquist corrects/helps Fr. Neuhaus at First Things.

On Cornhusker Cuisine

Hilaire Belloc recalled, while walking through France, the cooking he ate in Omaha, Nebraska. He thought it likely the worst he had taken (The Path to Rome, p. 161 & 163).

Almost a Friend of Bill?

A portrait of Cheslea Clinton, done in colored pencil and portraying the teenager as a heavenly angel, can be seen hanging in Hillary Clinton's study. The artist, Sue Shanahan of Mokena Illinois, inscribed the drawing with "Angels fly because they take themselves lightly," a familiar Chesterton quotation. Chicago Tribune, September 11, 1994, Tempo p. 1.

A Waugh Christmas

Evelyn Waugh liked to send out satirical Christmas cards, and the apex (or nadir] of this practice was reached during the Christmas season of 1929. Waugh's card that year consisted of extracts reprinted from unfavorable reviews of his first novel, Decline and Fall. The harshest passage of all was taken from a review by Chesterton. [Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh, Boston, 1975, p. 98]

In Advance of the Times

I WAS reflecting in the course of the recent feast of Christmas (which, like other feasts, is preceded by a fast) that the combination is still a puzzle to many. The Modernist, or man who boasts of being modern, is generally rather like a man who overeats himself so much on Christmas Eve that he has no appetite on Christmas Day. It is called being In Advance of the Times; and is incumbent upon all who are progressive, prophetic, futuristic and generally looking towards what Mr. Belloc calls the Great Rosy Dawn: a dawn which generally looks a good deal rosier the night before than it does the morning after.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Thing, "The Feasts and the Ascetic"

A Christmas Carol

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap, 
     His hair was like a light. 
(O weary, weary were the world, 
     But here is all aright.) 
The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast, 
     His hair was like a star. 
(O stern and cunning are the kings, 
     But here the true hearts are.) 
The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart, 
     His hair was like a fire. 
(O weary, weary is the world, 
     But here the world's desire.) 
The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee, 
     His hair was like a crown. 
And all the flowers looked up at Him, 
     And all the stars looked down.

-- G.K. Chesterton, from The Wild Knight, 1900

Santa Claus

I do not think that I myself was ever very much worried about Santa Claus, or that alleged dreadful whisper of the little boy that Father Christmas "is only your father." Perhaps the word "only" would strike all children as the mot juste.

-- G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

GKC on Christmas

"What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business."

"If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by Poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings."

"Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate."

"The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings."

"The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why."

Courtesy of the American Chesterton Society.

Hilaire is Here

The long awaited first issue of King's Land: A Home for Bellocian Thought arrived in my mailbox yesterday. King's Land is the journal of the fledgling American Belloc Society. The columns are presently: As I Please, The Path to Rome, On..., Bringing Belloc to Bear, Liturgy and Sanity, and (of course) Schall on Belloc.

It was enjoyable to read this 17 page pamphlet of short essays. Most were quite good, especially Christopher Ruckdeschel's On... "Economic Personism," which gave an introduction to the heart of Distributism. James Vogel's essay for The Path to Rome: "The Genius of Belloc" was a good introduction to the man. One essay, Liturgy and Sanity: "Whither Church Music?," did not fit well with the others, as it made no effort to directly tie itself to Belloc (other than putting one's dissatisfaction into words). But overall it was good to read and I look forward to the next issue.

To subscribe to King's Land contact the American Belloc Society at info@hbelloc.org.

You can read the reprinted essay by Fr Schall, "Permanence," online at his Georgetown webpage.

Veteran Author with Perspective and Experience

Dappled Things, "a new literary magazine dedicated to providing a space for young writers to engage the literary world from a Catholic perspective," is now online. The first issue has an article with introductory editorial words making exception for a "more veteran" author because "we have much to gain" from his perspective and experience. That ol' vet is Dale Ahlquist, and he channels perspective and experience to us through his article "G.K. Chesterton and the Use of Imagination."

Thank you, Dale.

... far too long to recognize the truth ...

Ian Vásquez, director at the Cato Institute, recently published an article about economic freedom in democracy. He cites our beloved Belloc:

Economic freedom allows for independent sources of wealth to counterbalance political power and to nourish a pluralistic society. When the state owns or exerts undue control over banking, credit, telecommunications, or newsprint, for example, it controls not only economic activity, but expression as well. It has taken the world far too long to recognize the truth in the statement of early 20th-century writer Hilaire Belloc that "the control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself."

(eJournal USA: Issues of Democracy. Dec 2005. link)

Bottum: "it's just too much"

Joseph Bottum at First Things, December 17:

Something in the Christmas season rightly tempts us to such sentimental gilding, just as something in the Christmas season tempts us—awk!—to the chaotic chiasmus of this kind of fake-Chestertonian prose, every sentence an aphorism eased along by alliteration’s artful aid, until the words clot up in a giant Christmas pudding that subsides with a half-baked sigh as it cools upon the table. “I’m sick of Chesterton,” F. Scott Fitzgerald has Amory Blaine complain in This Side of Paradise. From January to November, the style of G.K. Chesterton may go down easy. But around Christmas, while the streets jingle with Salvation Army bells and the elevators jangle with Muzaked carols, it’s just too much. Just too much.

It Is Official!

I'm a bit late noticing it but a little over a week ago, on December 8th, a blog was immaculately conceived: a blog of pure Chesterton, The Blog of the American Chesterton Society. Thanks to Nancy C. Brown, Our Lady of Flying Stars, for starting this venture. And, of course, thanks to Dale Ahlquist, our Servant and President, for blessing the blog.

Mind in Motion

Christian History & Biography has an article that chronicles the conversion of C.S. Lewis. Several "friends of Chesterton" are players in this process. I'll quote some bits and highlight it People-style with big boldface names:

... recurring moments of joy and the sustained impact of George MacDonald's Phantastes, which Lewis said "baptized" his imagination, convinced him that there was in reality something to be sought and found.

... Lewis's Oxford friend Owen Barfield convinced him that if physical reality is all there is, thought itself (being a mere byproduct of matter) would lack validity and significance. To maintain his [W.T.] Kirkpatrick-inspired quest for a rational account of reality, Lewis saw that he must believe, as he later expressed in Miracles, that "reason is something more than cerebral bio-chemistry."

... in the mid-1920s, through the impact of friends and of G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man (1926), he found himself thinking that "Christianity was very sensible apart from its Christianity."

... Certainty about the Incarnation came two ... after a late-night talk with J.R.R. Tolkien gave him the idea that the pagan dying-and-rising-god myths were "good dreams" given by God to prepare the ground for myth to become fact in Jesus of Nazareth.

LINK

Gilbert is Here

The new issue of Gilbert Magazine is out. I just got my copies today. I suspect they should be hitting mailboxes within the next day or two.

It looks like a good one: Dale Ahlquist writes about the Catholic convert Alec Guinness, John Peterson spins two excellent stories, Mike Foster pulls Evelyn Waugh off the shelf, and more.

Consider subscribing to the magazine. It's in its ninth year, which by itself is quite an accomplishment for such a niche publication.

A Christmas Garland

A Christmas Garland by Max Beerbohm, first printed in 1912, is available at Gutenberg.org (link). Readers of this blog might enjoy some of his parody, such as:

* SOME DAMNABLE ERRORS ABOUT CHRISTMAS, G.K. CH*ST*RT*N

* OF CHRISTMAS, H*L**RE B*LL*C

* PERKINS AND MANKIND, H.G. W*LLS

* A STRAIGHT TALK, G**RG* B*RN*RD SH*W

thanks to Diogenes at CWN for finding this

G.K. Chesterton: QOTD web page

I've made a little web page to give a "quote of the day" from G.K. Chesterton. It grabs text from the University of Notre Dame's web pages for Chesterton Day by Day (link), parses out the current day's quotation, and then presents it to you.

Chesterton Day by Day: Today's Quote

Enjoy!

Greybeards at Play, online

GKC's Greybeards at Play has been online for a long time, but I only just noticed it this weekend. You can find it at the University of Notre Dame as well as in Martin Ward's collection.

Come snow! where fly, by some strange law,
hard snowballs -- without noise --
through streets untenanted, except
by good unconscious boys.

Belloc the Out-of-Touch Crank?

Blogimus Maximus wrote a post earlier this week about "intelligent design" and "evolution." In it he refers to Hilaire Belloc's A Companion to Mr. Wells's 'Outline of History'.

The first thing [Belloc] attacks in Wells's [Outline of History] is the beginning, which treats of the origin of life. Belloc describes Natural Selection, the theory to which Wells held, as "dead."

The "well-educated" modern reader will smile at this out-of-touch crank...but I wonder what this reader would think if he ever got to the appendix, where Belloc quotes several eminent scientific contemporaries, saying quite clearly that Natural Selection was an inadequate explanation for evolution. Belloc may have been wrong, but it was not a matter of "him and William Jennings Bryan" vs. "Science". There seemed to be a great deal of "science" on his end of things; just what on earth was happening back then, anyway? We can be sure that if there ever was some academic reaction against Darwinism during which it became unfashionable, the Darwinian propagandists have smoothed over this little bump in Progress. Or did it never happen? Was every one of those professors Belloc quoted simply a crank? I have my doubts.

LINK to the full post at Blogimus Maximus.

Thursday on Thursday, no.20

"He's rationalistic, and, what's worse, he's rich. When duty and religion are really destroyed, it will be by the rich."

- Gabriel Syme, in GKC's The Man Who Was Thursday

Attention Folks in Northern Illinois

"The Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College, Illinois, houses a major research collection of the books and papers of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. These writers are well known for their impact on contemporary literature and Christian thought. Together they produced over four hundred books including novels, drama, poetry, fantasy, children's books, and Christian treatises. Overall, the Wade Center has more than 11,000 volumes including first editions and critical works. Other holdings on the seven authors include letters, manuscripts, audio and video tapes, artwork, dissertations, periodicals, photographs, and related materials. Any of these resources may be studied in the quiet surroundings of the Kilby Reading Room."

Link.

Eco, GKC, Telegraph, Wash. Times

"Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.

"They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms -- yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. ...

"The ideologies such as communism that promised to supplant religion have failed in spectacular and very public fashion. ...

"G.K. Chesterton is often credited with observing: 'When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything.' Whoever said it -- he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

"The 'death of God,' or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of 'The Da Vinci Code.'?"

Umberto Eco, writing on "God isn't big enough for some people," Nov. 27 in the London Telegraph.

From the Washington Times.

The Blog of Important Things

The December 7th entry in Chesterton Day by Day (1912) is from "The Club of Queer Trades":

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

This sounds a bit like blogging, does it not?

Sands of Jars on GKC

Aaron Sands, bassist for Jars of Clay, wrote this morning: "When I read [G.K. Chesterton's] essays, stories, letters, and poetry, I feel like I'm looking at the world through the eyes of a child. And I begin to trust without knowing, love without understanding, and believe without seeing just a little bit more."

Fire & Knowledge

Readers of the Chesterton & Friends blog may also enjoy taking a look at Fire & Knowledge. Blogfather Joshua Sowin lists his favorite authors as "John Piper, Iain Murray, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Dickens, David McCullough, Neil Postman, and many others." Recently he has posted tidbits from G.K. Chesterton and comments about C.S. Lewis. The contents are primarily quotation but there is good food for thought in Sowin's selections.

John, son of Malcom, requiescant in pace

John Muggeridge, son of Malcom Muggeridge, died last Friday (Nov 25) in Toronto. David Warren published a heartfelt eulogy in the Ottawa Citizen. Warren writes of Malcom's conversion to the Catholic church:

Malcolm Muggeridge's Christian conversion and late-life reception into the Catholic Church -- his "media discovery" of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and related events -- were iconic for a generation of believing Christians, of all denominations, throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. Yet how many know who led that notorious stray sheep into the Catholic fold? It was his son, John, and John's wife, Anne -- whose own husband had been her most remarkable convert.

And he writes of the importance of personal holiness:

I could assemble a chorus-line of people to affirm that John was the kindest, sweetest, most decent human being ever. I heard several argue that he was a saint -- long before we were ever grieving. But the John I knew, and well, was no saint by natural disposition. He so much loved the world, and everything that was beautifully small; but he was equipped with no more than the standard human conscience. What made him "unnatural," as it were, was the recklessness with which he acknowledged Christ.

Recently, in these columns, I've been touching on the old political puzzle of "church and state." But while meditating on the life of John Muggeridge, as I have been doing inevitably since watching him die, a key to this relation has come home to me. It is that, in church and state alike, there must be an overarching appreciation of the importance of personal holiness. Without this, we have a dog's life, and there is nothing for church nor state to cherish.

Paul Johnson a Friend?

In his much discussed memoirs, Paul Johnson mentioned among notable messengers of the modern age, the reckless like Rimbaud and the thoughtful like Emerson, the sinners like Byron and the saints like Chesterton. The reader must judge whether Johnson is siding with Catholic proponents of Chesterton's canonization or merely restating the obvious finding that Chesterton was a good man. The Quest for God, 1996, p. 80

Pearced by a Swordstick

This is from a recent article about author Joseph Pearce. He will be speaking at a CSL conference in Lakeland, Florida this weekend. His talks for the conference are titled "Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racism to Faith," "Narnia & Middle Earth: When Two Worlds Collude," and "The Tolkien Code: Unlocking The Lord of the Rings."

[Joseph] Pearce was twice imprisoned in his native England for editing extreme right-wing magazines, according to a biography on the Web site of his publisher, Ignatius Press.

"I was involved in the Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. As a young man, I was very bigoted toward nonwhites," Pearce said.

He began reading the works of G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), an English journalist and Catholic apologist. Initially attracted by Chesterton's political and economic views, he was later persuaded by Chesterton's defense of the Catholic faith. He converted while in prison.

(Lakeland Ledger, 11/26/05)

GKC and the Puritans

G.K. Chesterton infuriated some Americans back in 1930 when he said, while visiting New York on Thanksgiving Day, that the English should institute their own special Thanksgiving Day—to celebrate that the Pilgrim Fathers had left. No wonder he felt that way. Consider The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church’s description of Puritanism: “They demanded express scriptural warrant for all the details of public worship. They attacked church ornaments, vestments, surplices, organs, the sign of the cross.” Eric Voegelin considered the Puritans one of the earliest strains of modern gnosticism and described (borrowing from Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity) in great detail their use of social boycotts and political defamation in their campaign of intolerance toward other Christian denominations and the study of classic philosophy and scholastic theology. Voegelin said their attack against the Western tradition was so effective that Western society has never completely recovered from the their blow.
But I'm still happy they came.

LibriVox

I recently found the LibriVox website. LibriVox is a volunteer project that subtitles itself as "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain." Basically the idea is that individuals read old books out loud while a PC or mp3 player (e.g., iPod) records them. The mp3 files are then made available online for the world to download: either listen to them on your PC, burn them to an audio or mp3 CD, or copy them to an mp3 player.

P. Smith in the City [P.G. Wodehouse, 1910] is available at LibriVox.

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (October 15, 1881 – February 14, 1975) was an English comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success for more than seventy years. Described by Sean O'Casey as "English literature's performing flea", Wodehouse was an acknowledged master of English prose admired both by contemporaries like Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by modern writers like Salman Rushdie, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. [P.G. Wodehouse at Wikipedia]

Lewis on Fairy Tales & True Myth

Fairy Tales

I saw how (fairy) stories could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood.

Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ?

I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze things. And reverence itself did harm.

The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical.

But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency?

- C.S. Lewis, in an essay called "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said"


True Myth

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the others are men's myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the mind of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing himself through what we call "real things."

- The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves

Thanks to the Denver Post for rounding up these quotations.

Chesterton's Alphabet

Many thanks to Nick Milne; he has transcribed Chesterton's "An Alphabet" from Collected Nonsense and Light Verse.

A is an Agnostic dissecting a frog,
B was a Buddhist who had been a dog,
C was a Christian, a Christist I mean,
D was the Dog that the Buddhist had been,

You can read all of GKC's "An Alphabet" at Nick's blog, A Gentle Fuss.

Belloc on Men & Monkeys

The Marmozet

The species Man and Marmozet
    Are intimately linked;
The Marmozet survives as yet,
    But Men are all extinct.

[Hilaire Belloc. The Bad Child's Book of Beasts. 1896]

A Pity

The water tower on the top of Campden Hill, the structure that figured so decisively in the battles of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, was razed in 1970. The London Encyclopedia, Bethesda: Adler, 1986, 762.

Complement the Papal Writings in 2007

We [Wineskin Media] are pleased to announce our 2007 Social Justice Engagement Calendar, soon to be available from IHS Press [link to IHS press].

...

With this weekly calendar, you’ll sample major papal writings:

• Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII
• Singulari Quadam, Pius X
• Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI
• Mater et Magistra, John XXIII
• Pacem in Terris, John XXIII
• Populorum Progressio, Paul VI
• Octogesima Adveniens, Paul VI
• Laborem Exercens, John Paul II
• On the Ecological Crisis, John Paul II
• Centesimus Annus, John Paul II

...

You’ll also hear from Vatican II, with Gaudium et Spes, as well as the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

...

As a bonus, this year’s calendar also includes selections from the works of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. These engaging Catholic laymen, while certainly not doctrinal authorites, consciously modeled their economic theories on Catholic social principles. They complement the papal writings as they clarify and explore the underlying economic issues. And they’re funny.

And as some of us most heartily and vigorously refuse to be led to Socialism, we have long adopted the harder alternative called trying to think things out.
-- G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity

GKC: Not a Self-Help Guru

It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. If you want to succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked cards. You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about whist; you may want a book about cheating at whist. But you cannot want a book about Success. Especially you cannot want a book about Success such as those which you can now find scattered by the hundred about the book-market. You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: "The jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to do his best. He must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive, and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL." That is the kind of thing the book would say, and very useful it would be, no doubt, if read out in a low and tense voice to a young man just about to take the high jump. Or suppose that in the course of his intellectual rambles the philosopher of Success dropped upon our other case, that of playing cards, his bracing advice would run—"In playing cards it is very necessary to avoid the mistake (commonly made by maudlin humanitarians and Free Traders) of permitting your opponent to win the game. You must have grit and snap and go in to win. The days of idealism and superstition are over. We live in a time of science and hard common sense, and it has now been definitely proved that in any game where two are playing IF ONE DOES NOT WIN THE OTHER WILL." It is all very stirring, of course; but I confess that if I were playing cards I would rather have some decent little book which told me the rules of the game. Beyond the rules of the game it is all a question either of talent or dishonesty; and I will undertake to provide either one or the other—which, it is not for me to say.

-- G.K. Chesterton, "The Fallacy of Success" in All Things Considered, 1915

Lewis and Narnia

Pretty good feature piece at NYT about LWW and Lewis, though I have two quibbles:

[T]here are some Hollywood observers who seem to believe that there is a good reason Lewis is among the last of the classic children’s authors to be adapted for the movies, and that in taking on Narnia, Disney has backed itself into a corner. If the studio plays down the Christian aspect of the story, it risks criticism from the religious right, the argument goes; if it is too upfront about the religious references, on the other hand, that could be toxic at the box office.

I assume that the writer is referring to “playing down the Christian aspect” in the marketing. Such a worry is misplaced. There’s no need to mention the Christian aspect of the story in the mass marketing. Every Christian worth his salt has heard that it’s a Christian-based film. If there is a need to get the word out among Christians, it’s being accomplished just fine through the “sub-strata” marketing of the film: disbursing ten-minute excerpts to local churches.

If the writer is referring to the content of the film itself, the concern is ludicrous. Just adapt the book the best you can for the screen. The religious message is there and the allegory isn’t particularly deep or complex, but the Christianity is not overt. I read the books during my middle school years, and I had no idea there was a Christian message in them (perhaps I’m daft, but even when Aslan was killed and resurrected, it didn’t dawn on me). Make the film for the sake of the story and let any religious messages work themselves out.

Did they actually sleep together, this earnest, scholarly young man, conventional in almost every other way, and a woman 26 years his senior? Walter Hooper, the editor of Lewis’s “Collected Letters,” thinks it “not improbable.” A.N. Wilson, the best and most persuasive of Lewis’s biographers, argues that there’s no reason at all to think they didn’t, leaving us with the baffling and disquieting psychological picture of C.S. Lewis, the great scholar and writer and Christian apologist-to-be, pedaling off on his bicycle, his academic gown flapping in the wind, to have a nooner with Mum.

The writer here is talking about Lewis’ odd relationship with the mother of his friend, Edward Moore. They agreed to take care of each other’s mother if the other died, and Moore did. Lewis lived up to his promise with incredible loyalty, and his friends and biographers have puzzled about it for the past fifty years.
I don’t know if Lewis had an affair with the woman, but I’m assuming the NYT writer came up with the most damning evidence possible, and the best he has is this quote: “there’s no reason at all to think they didn’t.” And that from a biographer who isn’t particularly fond of Christianity. With that piece of evidence the writer wants to imagine Lewis riding off for a nooner? That writer has an over-active imagination, as have many others.

Garry Wills recommends...

Garry Wills was recently interviewed by Sam Hodges of the Dallas Morning News:

DMN: You draw on St. Augustine, G.K. Chesterton and John Henry Newman. For the layperson who might want to get started with those writers, do you have a reading plan?

Wills: For Augustine, probably the best thing is to read a good biography, and Peter Brown's [Augustine of Hippo] is the best. ... For Chesterton, Orthodoxy is a wonderful starting point. For Newman, any collection of his sermons.

Progress...

-- by Zach Brissett of In Toon With the World, Small Pax, and Southern Appeal

Atheist vs. Syme

"The Raving Atheist" takes on The Man Who Was Thursday.

Thursday on Thursday, no.19

"You are a very fine fellow. You can believe in a sanity which is not merely your sanity."

- Gabriel Syme, in GKC's The Man Who Was Thursday

Illustrious St. Paul's

Many Chestertonians will recall that Milton had once been a pupil at Chesterton's school, St. Paul's, but perhaps fewer are aware that Samuel Pepys and Edmund Halley also were educated there. The London Encyclopedia, Bethesda: Adler, 1986, p. 762.

New GKC Blog

Brand new GKC blog from Gilbert! contributor, Kyro Lantsberger.

Nick Milne, Chestertonian Blogger

Nick Milne, Welcome to blogland! Nick is the college recipient of this year's Gilbert & Frances Scholarship. His essay "On Intellectual Honesty" was published in the most recent issue of Gilbert Magazine, and it also appears on his new blog A Gentle Fuss.

Google Print: Belloc on Beer

I concur with Eric that Google Print is "pretty neat." Here are the results of a search for 'beer' in Hilaire Belloc's The Path to Rome (link):

Pages 1 - 10 of 10 in book for beer. (0.04 seconds) Page 34 Those great men — Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him — drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. ... Page 75 Or she would put her head in and say — “I can recommend our excellent beer. It is really preferable to this local wine.” And my neighbour, a tourist, ... Page 98 said I. “Beer,” said she. “Anything else?” said I. “No,” said she. “Why, then, give me some of that excellent beer.” I drank this with delight, ... Page 121 For my part, I sat silent, crippled with fatigue, trying to forget my wounded feet, drinking stoup after stoup of beer and watching the ... Page 122 ... which are so many yards and so many yards, . . .“ &c., and so forth . . exactly like a mill. I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking beer ... Page 130 ... we separated; I had no time to preach my full doctrine, but gave him instead a deep and misty glass of cool beer, and pledged him brotherhood, freedom, ... Page 154 Let him (said I) drink red wine and white, good beer and mead — if he could get it — liqueurs made by monks, and, in a word, all those feeding, ... Page 187 THE GOOD SAVAGES 187 there ordering beer for myself and for a number of peasants (who but for this would have me their butt, and even as it was found ... Page 276 [Sorry, this page's content is restricted] Page 317 ... will return to the simpler life, and there will be dogs, and beer, and catches upon ...

For Friday: Guinness & Friendship

Chesterton wrote the column "Our Notebook" for The Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936. Here is an advertisement from a 1930 edition:


N.B. - the source for these images is the Illustrated London News Home Page.

Chesterton the Prophet

G.K. Chesterton presented a lecture to the Lyceum Club in 1923. The Chesterton Review recently republished some notes taken during the lecture, and I posted an excerpt from them last month (The Need of a Philosophy). These were Chesterton's concluding remarks:

"It is necessary therefore for each of us to arrange an order in our thinking and if you decide to accept these beliefs you must be able to explain why you believe them and how, and within what limitations. Without some such consecutive philosophy, society will become a monster without a brain."

I Would've Bought It

In 1922, during his lecture-tour stay in Chicago, Chesterton met with Sinclair Lewis and John Drinkwater to converse over illegal whiskey. They decided to collaborate on a murder mystery, a three-act play to be entitled, Mary Queen of Scotch, with each of them contributing one act. Not surprisingly, the three authors forgot about the project as quickly and easily as they had dreamed it up.

Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961, p. 304.

Thursday on Thursday, no.18

"Millionaires I can understand, they are nearly all mad."

- Gabriel Syme, in GKC's The Man Who Was Thursday

Gigantic Secret

Sam Schneider wrote in his blog (A Fish Hook Through the Nose):

I got home today and needed a good laugh, so I sat down in my bed with two red pillows propped behind me and finished G.K. Chesterton's great work [Orthodoxy]. I never thought that a book on philosophy could make me laugh out loud, but from now on that will be my central deciding factor in all such books. At this point, I would like to write a long quote from the last two pages of the book, a passage that sent chills along my body, carried by a deep, inexpressible joy. However, as I myself usually skim such quotes in other blogs, let me leave it a great and fathomed secret, one that you will only know if you yourself open up this same book and read it. My only recommendation is the penciled words I encountered at the end of my copy, "Wow. I will be forever changed."

I am sure the last paragraph of Orthodoxy has changed the lives of many people.

Deep Thoughts by G.K. ?

A blogger discovered Chesterton and described him as a cross between C.S. Lewis and SNL's Jack Handey. This is the danger of quote collections, I suppose. But I'm sure G.K. is laughing heartily!

Here are a few Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey:

"One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh no," I said, "Disneyland burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late."

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."

"It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man."

more Deep Thoughts can be found here

GKC in Gheon

I bought an old copy of Henri Gheon's Secrets of the Saints, a four-in-one volume that contains The Secret of the Cure D'Ars, The Secret of the Little Flower, The Secret of Saint Margaret Mary, and The Secret of Saint John Bosco. For $11.00, including P&H, I was pretty pleased at the prospect of it arriving.

And when it did, I discovered that there was an added bonus: An essay by Chesterton, "The Challenge of the Cure d'Ars," which was written as an epilogue to the first English edition of The Secret of the Cure d'Ars. The publishers of my newly-acquired 1954 edition said it's "too good to be omitted in this collection." I read it, and I agree. The first line alone may have been worth the entire $11.00:

"The Catholic Church is much too universal to be called international; for she is older than all the nations."

For Friday: Guinness & Golf

Chesterton wrote the column "Our Notebook" for The Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936. Here is an advertisement from a 1930 edition:

Playing Marbles

Chip Scanlon wrote yesterday at Poynter Online:

The story [Mark Maremont. "The CEO's Private Golf Shuttle". WSJ. 1 Oct 2005] showed in exacting detail how members of the business elite take advantage of corporate planes meant to save time and ensure the security of CEOs. This way, they get free transportation to golf courses where they can indulge their passion for a pastime G.K. Chesterton defined as "an expensive way of playing marbles."

Dear Reader: Do you know the source of this GKC quotation?

Thursday on Thursday, no.17

"I regret to inform you that your remarks convey no impression to my mind. Perhaps if you were to remove the remains of your original forehead and some portion of what was once your chin, your meaning would become clearer. Mental lucidity fulfils itself in many ways."

- Gabriel Syme, in GKC's The Man Who Was Thursday

Belloc as Historian

I missed this article by Michael Hennessy about "Belloc as a Catholic Historian" at Seattle Catholic in early September. But yesterday's reprint in Spero News alerted me to it.

If Belloc most wanted to be remembered for his serious verse — although he thought its quality too slight to merit the devoted attention of posterity (a judgement from which I, for one, demur) — he is perhaps best known today as the author of the humorous "Cautionary Verses for Children", and for his historical works. Although he was a historian by training, having read what even then was dubiously referred to as Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford (in between bouts of orating, throwing port, belittling unbelievers, singing, presiding over the Union and walking here and there at tremendous pace with a bottle of wine in one pocket and chunks of bread and cheese in the other), he often felt more duty than pleasure in writing his numerous histories.

read more...

For Friday: Guinness for Strength

Chesterton wrote the column "Our Notebook" for The Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936. Here is an advertisement from a 1930 edition:

(speaking of heroic virtue ...)



SOURCE

No Opportunity for Heroic Virtue?

Paul Burnell, writing in a BBC News article about the putative miracle and possible canonization of Cardinal Newman, asks why there are few English Catholic saints:

Catholic writer Dr William Oddie said it is difficult to pinpoint the reason.

"In a lot of ways England is a bit of a backwater in the Catholic Church - we're really pretty small beer.

"It could be there has been less opportunity to live a heroic life in the modern era."

The former Editor of The Catholic Herald added: "Maybe the English haven't been holy enough."

However Dr Oddie is quick to nominate another English candidate for sainthood - the writer GK Chesterton.

"He was a man of immense holiness - he would also be the first journalist to be canonised."

Less opportunity to live a heroic life in the modern era? Perhaps Dr. Oddie is a hermit and has no contact with the modern world. How else to explain his ignorance of the opportunity provided by the world today? We still have family, work, and culture (and I think England does as well) -- all of which are attacked by the modern world. Yes, that is where virtue comes in to play.

Thursday on Thursday, no.16

"I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do -- I can die."

- Gabriel Syme, in GKC's The Man Who Was Thursday

Family Friendly Violence

Steve Tilley of the Edmonton Sun writes:

Traveller's Tales' latest title will try to walk the fine line between intense action and teen-friendly fun, with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe mixing puzzle-solving and exploration with copious amounts of monster slaying. The game hits stores Nov. 15, just ahead of the Disney flick's Dec. 9 release.

As a bit* of a lark, the developers temporarily added computer code that instructed the game to show blood splatters with every impact of sword or arrow on monster flesh, and the screen was soon awash in red as the game's quartet of kid heroes had it out with waves of critters.

But that's not what Narnia is about, said Burton [director of game development studio Traveller's Tales]. "I don't think it glorifies violence," he said. "It's not like you're getting into a car with a prostitute, sleeping with her and killing her to get the money back." [a reference to Grand Theft Auto]

LINK

Perhaps if Hollywood makes a new Thursday movie we'll get a spin-off video game of bomb-throwing anarchists.

* Yes, a bit, it may be just a single bit in the computer program. What's the difference? Mr. Burton correctly sees the difference is enormous. One little bit is not as good as another; it is the fine line between the right and wrong solution.