Chesterton as an Essayist

   Principally, I have decided to work about this author because he is a very constant person in relation to his work, and even sometimes he affords to give some advices to his lectors.

   In the article “A Defence of Rash Vows” –an abridged version of a chapter in his book “The Defendant”, 1903- Chesterton tries to find a reason to explain a insanity or senseless oath made by men very often, as it happens with lovers and the marriage. This is a point which leads the writer to introduce a matter related to religion and, therefore, deepening in his Christian beliefs as a result of his previous conversion (which took place in 1922): “The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words –‘free-love’- as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-favoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants”.

   On the other hand, Chesterton compares today’s men with “the decadents” –not men who did things which were decadent, but “belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is generally accepted as a robust age (...) ‘For he that lives more lives than one, More deaths that one must die’: At the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadents”. Here we can get aware of the author’s opposition to modern errors like the industrial and capitalist civilisation, which he solves claiming for the social ideal from the Middle Ages. As an example of this, let’s have a look at the following statement: “The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one’s self, of the weakness and mutability of one’s self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind”.

   In short, he justifies the fact of making “rash vows” as an impulse to release oneself: “To be everlasting passing through dangers which we cannot scare us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us –this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom”. Besides, he adds: “The man who made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the greatness of a great moment (...) And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said, that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement of a vow”. That’s the way he shows what forces a person to promise something; and we indeed can proof it with his sentence: “Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt to obtain pleasure without paying for it”. Although it’s obvious his conclusion is more flat: “All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships”. Resuming, we could say this writing deals with rash promises and tells us why they should be made and kept. Apart from that, it would also be at our disposal the consideration of making imprudent decisions up because of one’s worrying for being successful in the living society.

   If we continue to investigate the labour of this writer as an essayist, we could glance at his article “A Piece of Chalk”, extracted from an essay in “Tremendous Trifles”. The original essay appeared in the Daily News (the newspaper for which he worked) on November the 4^th, 1905. This one is useful for Chesterton to reflect once more the importance of the purity “of the best religious morality, of real Christianity” from the mere range of colours, for, as he says, “the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour (...) God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age has realised this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that white was a blank and colourless thing, negative and non-committal, then white would be used instead of black and grey for the funereal dress of this pessimistic period. Which is not the case”. As it can be proved, morality is always present, but what is extraordinary and more impressive is how the composer joins the moral stuff to some simple things such as colours themselves –but, of course, he bears in mind the white colour and its plainness and authenticity at all times: “(...) as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the 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 chalk, 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”. By the way, let’s emphasise Chesterton’s words when saying “...philosophy (nay, religion)...”; this demonstrates his preference for the religion before the ‘science’ related to some famous characters likes Charles Dickens, a philosopher who was severely criticised by him (even he wrote a critical book against this person, in 1906). Anyway, our English writer seems to fall into the arms of philosophy at the end of this essay, when he concludes revealing: “And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk”, creating, thus, a masterly metaphor which gives the name to the composition. That’s why it lets us say that nothing, somehow, manages to be everything.

   And, to go on with this literary taste our last affirmation has left, we’d better look upon another essay called “Concerning a Strange City”, which is included into “The Common Man”, originally in The New Witness (11-25-21). In fact, the author talks about “the power of words”, as the article starts so: “Everyone has his own private and almost secret selection among the example of the mysterious power of words, the power which a certain verbal combination has over the emotions and even the soul”. More in advance, the reader is able to find out a certain contrast between poetry and prose: “The great lines of the poets are like landscapes or visions, but the same strange light can be found not only in the high places of poetry but also in quite obscure corners of prose”. Once we have read it, it would not be very difficult to deduce he’s defending his own genre, I mean, his own way of writing and, so, his way of expression: “I can only express what I mean by saying that it is the finite part of the image that really suggests infinity”. Moreover, some philosophical sketches may be noticed too: “In the mind of man, if not in the nature of things, there seems to be some connection between concentration and reality (...) there has always been this spearlike selection and concentration in man’s conception of higher things. Compared with that, there is something not only vague but vulgar in most of the talk about infinity. (...) this infinity is the enemy of all that is fine”.

   Apart from that, as the same Chesterton quotes, there are “philological points” drawn in the mentioned text: “(...) most things that are fine are finite. (...) All fine things are in this sense finished, even when they are eternal”. Finally, we are immersed in a world which has to do with the relationship between Poetry and Religion; that is explained in these words: “Poetry is committed to this concentration fully as much as religion (...) And if religion were removed tomorrow, the poets would only begin to act as the pagans acted”. To sum up all what has been exposed above, we could say in this essay Religion, Poetry and Philosophy are joined but, at the same time, distinguished as far as we are concerned after reading it. Gilbert Keith touches briefly the different points here and is trying to make his readers acquire the same kind of knowledge and morality, if we take into account the philosophy he describes.

   Precisely in another of his writings titled “Negative and Positive Morality” -published in Illustrated London News (ILN) on January the 3^rd, 1920- he also makes reference to the morality, although it is a special one in this case: the religious morality. We understand it when we go over the argument, which begins telling so: “The silliest sort of progressive complains of negative morality, and compares it unfavourably with positive morality. (...) To desire the construction of something is to desire the destruction of whatever prevents its construction”. Then, after having done such an introduction, our author clears up that “This is particularly plain in the fuss about the ‘negative’ morality of the Ten Commandments. The truth is that the curtness of the Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion but of its liberality and humanity. (...) In comparison with this positive morality, the Ten Commandments rather shine in that brevity which is the soul of wit ” –let’s remark this last term, for we are told how important the Commandments are for every Christian and, therefore, for this converted person, and equally the primal shortness of the optimistic moral. Once we have made a mention of Christendom’s Ten Commandments, we could link it to the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins, what indeed reflects a profound morality.

   So far so good; but, however, the type of negative morality is found against this positive one and here the trouble comes up: “Negative morality is positive morality, stated in the plainest and therefore the most positive way”. Then we have reached the polemic: is this true? To answer that, Chesterton takes as an instance a particular case: somebody called Mr Robinson’s slaughter (what supposes to constitute a violent narration with an end that eventually remains as sympathetic): “If I am told not to murder Mr Robinson, if I am stopped in the very act of murdering Mr Robinson, it is obvious that Mr Robinson is not only spared, but in a sense renewed, and even created. And those who like Mr Robinson, among them my reactionary romanticism might suggest the inclusion of Mrs Robinson, will be well aware that they have recovered a living and complex unity”. To be more concrete, we are being informed of the writer’s idealism, a sort of revolutionary Romanticism that gives turn immediately to the Christianity and its consequent religious outlines again: “(...) those who like European civilisation, and the common code of what used to be called Christendom, will realise that salvation is not negative, but highly positive, and even highly complex. (...) Nothing is negative except nothing. It is not our rescue that was negative, but only nothingness and annihilation from which we were rescued”. It must not be necessary to name the intention of the novelist here, as the expression “rescued” shows sincerely the meaning of the context, as well as the following paragraph: “When our hopes for the coming time seem disturbed or doubtful, and peace chaotic, let us remember that it is really our disappointment that is an illusion. It is our rescue that is a reality. Our grounds for gratitude are really far greater than our powers of being grateful” -one more time, the religious beliefs are patent here, as the expression “being grateful” indicates; an undoubted strong belief supported by the pun in the latest assertion: “We adorn things most when we love them most. And we love them most when we have nearly lost them”-.

   Not strictly morality but rather scepticism is the main point in a different creation from this author named “The Extraordinary Cabman”, which first appeared in London’s Daily News and was later collected in the volume of essays “Tremendous Trifles”; if we talk a bit more about it, we should say Chesterton’s aim here is the philosophical question of reality represented by his hating towards sceptic people, especially some contemporary men like George Bernard Shaw (presumably one of his friends at the meeting in the course of the article). This sort of scepticism provokes the entrance for metaphysic matters in this issue, as follows: “(...) the question is whether a man can be certain of anything at all. I think he can be certain, for if (...) it is impossible intellectually to entertain certainty, what is this certainty which it is impossible to entertain? If I have never experienced such a thing as certainty I cannot even say that a thing is not certain”. And, indeed, such is the importance of this focusing that he says himself: “(...) metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing”.

   According to what we are able to read, Chesterton wanders through his imagination as he fancies a cabman –who is driving him and has had a misunderstanding with him- isn’t certainly human: without any doubt, he is a very special character because he has a frightful expression on his face but he’s completely honest, G.K. thinks.

   In another way, we might submerge in a queer atmosphere of confusion when he explains that “The exciting question for real scepticism is whether we possess past life”, but it is merely a parenthetical comment made in order to guide the own reader before the sceptics’ supposition that we possess a future life. Along the essay, nevertheless, Chesterton shows his political beliefs when revealing “I believe in Democracy” or “I believe in free will”,or even “I believe in fixed character of virtue”.

   Let’s go on having a look at “The Shop of Ghosts”, which is also included in “Tremendous Trifles”, after having been published in London’s Daily News. This is a parable about Christmas and, as it is logic, the enormous religiosity invading this writer is obvious with the starring of Father Christmas, who turns out to be immortal –Mr Charles Dickens, who takes part in the action too, addresses him saying: “I understand it now (...) you will never die”, and then the essay is finished. But, further away, we take note of the present opposition to the modern world: G.K. expresses “I am a democrat; I know I am out of fashion in the modern world”. In addition, Father Christmas in person says: “They seem to object to me on such curious and inconsistent sort of grounds, these scientific men, and these innovators” / “These modern people are living and I am dead” -to what the same author, principal role in the story, replies: “You may be dead (...) But as for what they are doing, do not call it living”. Lastly, let’s highlight the notable mysticism in this paragraph: “in some strange way, the mental cure did not seem to be final. There was still in my mind an unmanageable something that told me that I had strayed into some odd atmosphere, or that I had already done some odd thing. I felt as if I had worked a miracle or committed a sin. It was as if I had, at any rate, stepped across some border in my soul” –this may permit us to join the chastity described at the beginning of this summarise. And this kind of mysticism gathers the one developed in “Babies” (from the essay “In Defence of Baby Worship”, which just exposes his meaning only by pronouncing its title; it was taken from “The Defendant”, 1903), where we find a strong contrast between common sense and a presumed mysticism: “The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common sense”. Altogether, we have the same impression of Christianity when it is told that “As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation”; same sensation that is felt in this other example: “When we look upon lives so human and yet so small... we feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that >God< might feel... (...) >They< give us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven”.

   The mysticism we had named before is now introduced more clearly: “The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural”. Finally, it would also be interesting to look at the relationship, composed by him, between those small creatures and grown up people –it becomes, nay, a clever comparison: “But the influence of children goes further than its first trifling effort of remarking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of the marvellousness of all things. We do actually treat talking in children as marvellous, walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children as marvellous...>and< that attitude towards children is right. It is our attitude towards grown up people that is wrong”.

   Related to “The Shop of Ghosts” and, maybe, to “Babies” too in what respects to religion, is “Christmas and the First Games”, which takes part in the book “The Coloured Lands”. Here G.K. exposes the meaning of the essay at the beginning, when he reveals: “I have sometimes been haunted with a vague story about a wild and fantastic uncle, the enemy of parents and the cause of revolution in nurseries, who went about preaching a certain theory; I mean the theory that all the objects which children use at Christmas for what we call riotous or illegitimate purposes, were originally created for those purposes; and not for the humdrum household purposes which they now serve”. If analysing what he says this time, we could touch the subject which provokes such a polemic confrontation in our current society: the consumerism that invades those compulsive and other not so compulsive buyers when Christmas holiday come. “I cannot set forth here in any great detail any actual proofs of these prehistoric origins; but I never heard of anybody bothering about proofs in connection with prehistoric origins (...) Nobody expects any historic evidence for things of this sort, because they are prehistoric; and nobody dreams of attempting to found them on any scientific facts; they are simply Science. I do not see why my favourite uncle and I should not be Science too. I do not see why we should not simply make things up out of our own heads; things which cannot possibly be contradicted, just as they cannot possibly be proved”. For this case, we should take into consideration Chesterton’s speaking about scientific aspects: it is not his speciality but that’s why he does not get entangled in the matter and just explains the fact that someone can’t cast doubt on something if he/she can’t prove it. This may drive us up to morality questions again. However, the essayist does not let himself go influenced by such a subject anew and he leaders a criticism now towards modern prose writers of his time, such as Dr Freud: “The only difference is that my uncle and I, especially when we set out with a general intention of talking about Christmas, cannot manage to work up that curious loathing of the human race, which is now considered essential to any history written for humanitarians. Dr Freud (as is perhaps natural after a heavy day of psychopathic interviews) seems to have taken quite a dislike to human beings. So when he makes up the story of how their first forgotten institutions arose in utterly unrecorded times, he makes the family story as nasty as he can; like any other modern novelist. But my uncle and I (especially at Christmas) happen to feel in a more cheerful and charitable frame of mind; -let’s emphasise the word ‘charitable’, which tends to be connected to Christmas dates but is actually senseless by the beginning of the 20^th century as well as now, already a hundred years afterwards- (...) and, as there are no iron creeds or dogmas to restrain anybody from anything, we have as much right to imagine cheerful things as he has to imagine gloomy ones. And we beg to announce, with the same authority, that everything began with a celestial pillow fight of cherubs, or that the whole world was made entirely for the games of children”. As a consequence of his saying, he can deduce he ranks equally with the mentioned doctor, for taking an example.

   Following that we come across a short paragraph where he sets out the points which show the authenticity of his uncle’s beliefs: “The two or three truths, of which my uncle’s hypothesis is at least symbolic or suggestive, may be conveniently arranged thus. First, it must always be remembered that there really is a mystery, and something resembling a religious mystery, in the origin of many things which have since become (very rightly) practical and (very wrongly) prosaic (...) Second, it must be remembered that these rituals, including Christmas, have been on the whole preserved by the populace; for a true populace is far more traditional than an aristocracy. They have been preserved by poor people, though generally by poor people who possessed some small property, in short, most markedly by a peasantry”. Precisely in harmony with the countrymen we have at our disposal another essay of him under the name of “The Gardener and the Guinea”; Chesterton deals here with the English Peasantry, whom he devotes a kind worship, and talks about their characteristic at the very first moment (equality, community, co-operation and common laws) and names the country gardener as the example which best takes after the English peasant: “Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an English Peasant. Indeed, the type can only exist in community, so much it depend on co-operation and common laws (...) you cannot have a Peasant till you have a peasantry. The essence of the Peasant ideal is equality; and you cannot be equal all by yourself. Nevertheless, because human nature always craves and half creates the things necessary to its happiness, there are approximations and suggestions of the possibility of such a race even here. The nearest approach I know to the temper of a Peasant in England is that of the country gardener”. Immediately after, G.K. tells us a story which consists of a parable that occurred to him. In it, a gardener who was working on his ground found a golden coin, a pure Spade Guinea of the Georges. Chesterton said to him to keep it –as the same gardener had found it-; at first, the worker thought of making a brooch for his wife but later he brought it back to our writer because he wasn’t feeling happy with it: as the author writes, “I could not get a ray of light on the reason of his refusal; but he looked lowering and unhappy. Had he some mystical instinct that it is just such accidental and irrational wealth that is the doom of all peasantries? Perhaps he dimly felt that the boy’s pirate tales are true; and that buried treasure is a thing for robbers and not for producers. Perhaps he thought there was a curse on such capital: on the coal of the coal-owners, on the gold of the gold-seekers. Perhaps there is”. In the last analysis, we are bound to face the next expression: “(...) at least I know that it needs a man to make a garden; a man whose name is Adam”, what forces us to make allusion of the Christianity obvious in this case again.

   At any rate, it’s possible for the lectors to prove that Gilbert Keith can’t only talk about morality, religiousness and mysticism; besides, he demonstrated his agile capacity for undertaking some distinct affairs such as the one in which “Asparagus” is based on: the English class system and its fads. To begin with this composition, which was written by Chesterton on June the 18^th, 1914, for “New Witness”, there’s an evident similarity between asparagus and the noble families. At first, asparagus seem to be an incomprehensible complement to relate to the aim in this article, but we are likely to realise why the author did so after glancing at the initial words: “We might say of sticks of asparagus that they have often lost their heads, and we might say the same of aristocrats. Both heads have been bitten off by the guillotine before now. But to complete the parallel we must maintain that the head of the aristocrat was the best part of him; and this is often hard to maintain”. More concretely and profoundly, G.K. confesses: “But, indeed, I do not base the view upon any such fancies from phraseology. Far deeper in earth are the roots of asparagus. The one essential of an aristocracy is to be in advance of its age. (...) There must be a password”.

   In a more practical and materialistic manner, Chesterton tries to remark the importance of the asparagus and their simplicity to be eaten: “The working instance best known to us of the middle classes is the old arbitrary distinction about how to eat asparagus .Now, excluding cannibalism and the habit of eating sand (about which I can offer no opinion) there is really nothing one can eat which is less fitted to be eaten with the fingers than asparagus (...) it doesn’t want any holding up. We will not exaggerate. (...) while strictly avoiding anything like exaggeration or frivolity, I still note that the point of asparagus is that it is not the food, among other foods, specially fitted to the fingers. (...) It could not have been custom: that is why it was etiquette”.

   Changing with what it has been exposed above, and continuing with the nobles, we reach the result of the aristocratic Futurism or, as it’s well-known, Progress: “Tennyson, who was too much touched with this aristocratic –or snobbish- Futurism, wrote, ‘Lest one good custom should corrupt the world’, which really means lest everybody should learn the right way of eating asparagus. And so, out of luxury and waste and weariness, the fever they call Progress came into the world”. As a form of conclusion, we find: “They have changed the password”, he means, a change into the English class system.

Dealing with a different business, we face the essay known as “How I found the Superman”, which occurs to be a satire on the Nietzchian Superman and in which our author configures a critic against some modern writers such as Shaw and Mr Wells, starting so: “Readers of Mr Bernard Shaw and other modern writers may be interested to know that the Superman has been found. I found him; he lives in South Croydon. My success will be a great blow to Mr Shaw, who has been following quite a false scent, and is now looking for the creature in Blackpool; and as for Mr Wells’ notion of generating him out of gases in a private laboratory I always thought it doomed to failure”. Then, all what has been mentioned is followed by a political matter: “(...) daring experiments in Neo-Individualist Eugenics (...) are now the one absorbing interest of the English democracy (...)”. Moreover, we are told about Superman’s parents; as far as his father, Dr Hagg, concerns, we have:“(...) he became one of our greatest geologists; and achieved that bold and bright outlook upon the future of Socialism which only geology can give. At first there seems something like a rift, a faint, but perceptible, fissure, between his views and those of his aristocratic wife” –let’s take notice of Lady Hypatia Hagg’s social class, the aristocracy, which has also been commented previously. This way, we can observe a contrast between the marriage of Superman’s parents: a geologist (him) and an aristocrat (her), which brings the birth of the Superman as an outcome: “(...) the married pair perceived an essential union in the unmistakably modern character of both their views; and in this enlightening and comprehensive expression their souls found peace. The result is that this union of the two highest types of our civilisation, the fashionable lady and all but vulgar medical man, has been blessed by the birth of the Superman, that being whom all the labourers in Battersea are so eagerly expecting night and day (...) the creature who was more marvellous than the children of men”.

   After Superman’s death, Chesterton describes something unnatural in the funeral: “As I walked away from Croydon that night I saw men in black carrying out a coffin that was not of any human shape”; what is more, he qualifies the funeral as “cosmic”. And, once described the whole situation, he finishes telling the reader that “I thought that there was a hoot of laughter in the high wail of the wind”, which let –at least for me- deduce a little mark of irony and, therefore, satire in general. Perhaps it would be interesting to say this article appeared in Daily News (1909).

   The next essay I’m bound to analyse is “On American Morals”. It is about American Puritanism and it’s outstanding enough the description we find of the moral mind of this Continent, which is supposed to be a mix between feebleness and insignificance: “America is sometimes offered to us, even by Americans (who ought to know better) as a moral example. There are indeed very real American virtues; but this virtuous attitude is hardly one of them”. That is exactly what precedes a critic to cultural critics such as Miss Avis D. Carlson: “And if anyone wants to know whether a welter of weakness and inconsequence the moral of America can sometimes be, he may be advised to look, not so much to the Crime Wage or the Charleston, as to the serious idealistic essays by highbrows and cultural critics”.

   Another chief point in this article may be the wrong of the standard of abstract right and wrong for the Americans; this is explained to us with the following terms: “The standard of abstract right and wrong apparently is this. That a girl by smoking a cigarette makes herself one of the company of the fiends of hell. That such an action is much the same as that of a sexual vampire. That a young man who continues to drink fermented liquor must necessarily be ‘evil’ and must deny the very existence of any difference between right and wrong. That is the ‘standard of abstract right and wrong’ that is apparently taught in the American home. And it is perfectly obvious, on the face of it, that it is not a standard of abstract right or wrong at all”. In continuation, Gilbert Keith gives his particular definition of these American standards: “It is a chaos of social and sentimental accidents and associations, some of them snobbish, all of them provincial, but, above all, nearly all of them concrete and connected with a materialistic prejudice against particular materials”. There’s also a new reference to Miss Carlson that helps him to criticise the “American Culture, in the decay of Puritanism” –remarks on standards and ideals-: “And yet the writer in question calmly proposes that we should abolish all ideas of right and wrong, and abandon the whole human conception of a standard of abstract justice, because a boy in Boston cannot be induced to think that a nice girl is a devil when she smokes a cigarette”; let’s stop up to here for emphasising the weight a polemic issue like smoking has and, why not, mentioning this theme has continued to be cause troubles till nowadays. Therefore, we could extract this author was also worried about the surrounding environment and he doesn’t doubt a moment to declare his feelings. “If the rising generation were faced with no worse doubts and difficulties than this, it would not be very difficult to reconcile them to the traditions of truth and justice. But I think the episode is worth mentioning, merely because it throws a ray of light on the moral condition of American Culture, in the decay of Puritanism. And when next we are told that the idealism of America is to set a ‘standard’ by which England must transform herself, it will be well to remember what is apparently meant by a standard and an ideal”.

   Still without leaving the main point of considering what is right or either wrong, Chesterton is talking now of the offspring, despite he doesn’t mind the matter in the slightest: “Prohibition is sometimes praised for its simplicity. But I myself do not say anything so absurd as that Americans are savages; nor do I think it would matter much if they were descended from savages. It is culture that counts and not ethnology; and the culture that is concerned here derives indirectly rather from New England that from Old America. Whatever it derives from, however, this is the thing to be noted about it: that it really does not seem to understand what is meant by a standard of right and wrong”. To judge by what has been read, this can be considered as one of the most important thesis defended in this very essay.

   G.K. also addresses Miss Carlson, telling her Puritan people in America don’t have much of morality. He speaks to her as a manner of hint, as follows: “I would therefore venture to say to Miss Avis Carlson that the quarrel in question does not arise from the Yankee Puritans having too much morality, but from their having too little. It does not arise from their drawing too hard and fast a line of distinction between right and wrong, but from their being much to loose and indistinct (...) I hope at least that some of the Fundamentalists will succeed in being a little more fundamental than this”. Before sentencing the writing in question, our man of letters institutes a comparison between “the old secret society” and “the new secret” one. Thus, he redacts: “The old secret society may have been justified or not; but it had a definite object: it was directed against somebody. The new secret society seems to have been directed against somebody; often against anybody who drank; in time, for all I know, against anybody who smoked”. Finally, he concludes: “It is this sort of formless fanaticism that is the great danger of the American Temperament; and it is well to insist that if men must persecute, they will be more clear-headed if they persecute for a creed”. As a consequence of all this, one must have clear that men ought to follow something they believe in, and they mustn’t be influenced themselves by their fanaticism.

   As far as philosophy itself concerns in the essay above, we should match this with the following one, with the title of “On Mending and Ending Things”, that came out on December the 23^rd, 1905, in Illustrated London News, and whose chief claiming is the importance of understanding a things nature or, what is the same, catching the truth of a concept who happens to be a timeless truth. So, it’s exposed to us through the explanation of the difference between MENDING and ENDING, which seem to be alike terms but they are contrary to each other: “’It must be mended or ended’. Few people who use this useful phrase about reform notice the important thing about it. The important thing about it is that the two methods described here are not similar but opposite; between mending and ending that is not a difference of degree but of vital antagonism of kind. ‘Mending’ is based upon the idea that the original nature of a thing is good; ‘ending’ is based upon the idea that the original nature of a thing is bad or, at least, has lost all power of being good (...) a thing is either bad or good in its original aims and functions. If it is good, we are in favour of mending it; and because we are in favour of mending it, we are necessarily opposed to ending it. If it is bad, we are in favour of ending it; and because we are in favour of ending it, we ought to fly into a passion at the mere thought of mending it”.

   As a way of explaining this opposition, Chesterton recurs to the ideal philosophy: “(...) there is nothing so really practical and urgent as ideal philosophy”. And, after that, we are shown a thesis about this sort of philosophy: “It is a practical course to destroy a thing; but the only other practical course is to idealise it”.

   Forthwith, it would not be bed to have a track the short article called “Philosophy for the Schoolroom” (Daily News, June 22, 1907) for going on with this writer’s particular philosophy. Here we come across a brief listing of the necessary beliefs for free thought; the same Gilbert advertises the philosophy or, as he brands it, “The Alphabet of Thinking”, as an abstract thing which can be developed in a school, in a common schoolroom with a blackboard, etc. (for example, arguments, dogmas,...). Then, we can allude to some of his lines appearing in this case: “Every argument begins with an infallible dogma, and that infallible dogma can only be disputed by falling back on some other infallible dogmas; you can never prove your first statement or it would not be your first. All this is the alphabet of thinking. And it has this special and positive point about it, that it can be taught in a school, like the other alphabet. Not to start an argument without stating your postulates could be taught in philosophy as it is taught in Euclid, in a common schoolroom with a blackboard”. And, once again, Chesterton’s faith comes up: “Much of our chaos about religion and doubt arises from this –that our modern sceptics always begin by telling us what they do not believe. But even in a sceptic we want to know what he does believe. Before arguing, we want to know what we need not argue about. And this confusion is infinitely increased by the fact that all the sceptics of our time are sceptics at different degrees of the dissolution of scepticism. Now you and I have, I hope, this advantage over all those clever new philosophers, that we happen not to be mad”. In addition, I would dare to remark the relationship with the scepticism and the “new philosophers”: our writer has already complaint about sceptic people –let’s remember his essay “The Extraordinary Cabman”- and now he makes a speech about them with the usual irony which characterises his attitude towards all of them.

   Another of the conclusions we might take from this composition is the point that mankind believes in plenty of things that can’t be justified or proved –G.K. makes a listing of the necessary beliefs for free thought: “But let us clearly realise this fact, that we do believe in a number of things which are part of our existence, but which cannot be demonstrated. Leave religion for the moment wholly put of question. All which are unproved and unprovable. Let us state them roughly. (1) Every sane man believes that the world around him and the people in it are real, and not his own delusion or dream (...) That anything exists except myself is unproved and unprovable. (2) All sane men believe that this world not only exists, but matters. Every man believes there is a sort of obligation on us to interest ourselves in this vision or panorama of life (...) (3) All sane men believe that there is such a thing as a self, or ego, which is continuous (...) That there is such a paramount “I” is unproved and unprovable. But it is more than unproved and unprovable; it is definitely disputed by many metaphysicians. (4) Lastly, most sane men believe, and all sane men in practice assume, that they have a power of choice and responsibility for action (...) And if the youth of the future must not (at present) be taught any religion, it might at least be taught, clearly and firmly, the three or four sanities and certainties of human free thought”.

   To pursue with the investigation about this English author, let’s change into a distinct subject, this time involved in the essay whose name is “The Nightmare”; the dealing of the text is how nightmares are fun, when they are not real, and therefore we have: “(...) there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare –when you know it is a nightmare. That is the essential. That is the stern condition laid upon all artists touching this luxury of fear. The terror must be fundamentally frivolous. Sanity may play with insanity; but insanity must not be allowed to play with sanity (here there’s an obvious literary pun which is used by Chesterton to dwell on the main point and, apart from that, making the writing be faster). Let such poets as the one I was reading in the garden, by all means, be free to imagine what outrageous deities and violent landscapes they like. By all means, let them wander freely amid their opium pinnacles and perspectives. But these huge gods, these high cities, are toys (what we find now is a kind of metaphor, another literary resort); they must never for an instant be allowed to be anything else. Man, a gigantic child, must play with Babylon and Nineveh, with Isis and with Ashtaroth. By all means, let him take up the Burden of Tyre, so long as he can take it lightly. But the old gods must be his dolls, not his idols. His central sanctities, his true possessions, should be Christian and simple”. To complete what has been said, our author resorts to philosophical tones again, although with a farther meaning: “Now in sober truth there is a magnificent idea in these monsters of the Apocalypse. It is, I suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or more universal than we are might appear to us frightful and even confused”.

   Reassuming the previous statements, Gilbert expresses that “I like monsters beneath the throne very much. It is when one of them goes wandering in deserts and finds a throne for himself that evil faiths begin, and there is (literally) the devil to pay in dancing girls or human sacrifice. As long as those misshapen elemental powers are around the throne, remember that the thing that they worship is the likeness of the appearance of a man. That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the subject of Tales of Terror and such things, which unless a man of letters do well and truly believe, without doubt he will end by blowing his brains out or by writing badly”. Inserting a new comment on philosophy about men, he adds: “Man, the central pillar of the world must be upright and straight; around him all the trees and beasts and elements and devils may crook and curl like smoke if they choose”. And, at the end, it’s highlighting this observation: “All really imaginative literature is only the contrast between the weird curves of Nature and the straightness of the soul”, in which oneself can denote the rule the literary genre plays on this essay. To cut away with it, Chesterton clarifies: “(...) I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare tonight (...) We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up nor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall not ride on me”.

   One of the aspects, out of the last commented essay, in which G.K. was equally radical is the Medievalism, and this caused him to write and remember the forgotten virtues of the Middle Ages in “On Turnpikes and Medievalism”, which happened to become a newspaper column, later collected in his book “All I survey” (1933). It begins with a parallelism between the Middle Ages and modern times, a point often analysed by him too (we’d better rename “A Defence of Rash Vows”), in order to compare with past times: “Opening my newspaper the other day, I saw a short but emphatic leaderette entitled ‘A Relic of Medievalism’. It expressed a profound indignation upon the fact that somewhere or other, in some fairly remote corner of this country, there is a turnpike-gate, with a toll. It insisted that this antiquated tyranny is insupportable, because it is supremely important that our road traffic should go very fast; presumably a little faster than it does. So it described the momentary delay in this place as a relic of medievalism. I fear the future will look at that sentence, somewhat sadly and a little contemptuously, as a very typical relic of modernism. I mean it will be a melancholy relic of the only period in all human history when people were proud of being modern. For though today is always today and the moment is always modern, we are the only men in all history who fell back upon bragging about the mere fact that today is not yesterday. I fear that some in the future will explain it by saying that we had precious little else to brag about. For, whatever the medieval faults, they went with one merit. Medieval people never worried about being medieval; and modern people do worry horribly about being modern”. In the same way, Chesterton demonstrates the Medieval times’ influence on modern times: “The modern world contains a good many relics of medievalism” (he puts, as some examples, the Webminster Abbey, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales).Thus, theauthor reaches a point of even hating the cult of progress.

   A mention apart is deserved by the following work. I’m referring to “The Case for the Ephemeral”, excerpted from “All Things Considered”, an e-text in progress from an edition by John Lane Company, New York, 1909. The essential point here is the defence of transitory things; to start with it, G.K. Chesterton criticises his entire book (“All Things Considered”) for being too long –due to he was in a hurry, according to him, while he was writing it-. Personally, I think the first words are principally sincere and revealing: “I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or rather flying subjects”; because of what he says, fashionable issues worry him and literature seems to be more or less useless, but in fact it turns out to be his passion. Going on with this, he retakes the critic this way: “Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I had no time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous”. Now he complaints the book has much of soberness, what may look like a bit incomprehensible, but anyway, his intention continues to clarify the context through the union to the responsibility: “Responsibility, a heavy and cautious responsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody can do it”. Perhaps if we stop to make a reflection about that, then we’ll be able to realise its truth: he immerses himself into the politic world (“That is why so many tired, elderly, and wealthy men go in for politics. They are responsible, because they have not the strength of mind left to be irresponsible”), a difficult and troubling matter if we take into account the rough situation at his time –the beginning of the 20^th century-, when everything was developing towards further improvements and his will was utterly not in favour of it, provided that his preference presumed to be Medieval stuff.

   “I resume the defence of this indefensible book. These articles have another disadvantage arising from the scurry in which they were written; they are too long-winded and elaborate. One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time”, he declares. Note that he uses rather a clash more proximate to a rhetoric paradox than to anything else. “I feel frightfully annoyed with myself for not getting to the point more quickly; but I had not enough leisure to be quick”.

   In the same argument, he stresses the disliking of modernism and gathers his personal fight, nay outcry, versus modernism: “(...) these pages contain a sort of protest against the boast of certain writers that they are merely recent. They brag that their philosophy of the universe or the new philosophy, or the advanced and progressive philosophy –let’s emphasise his intention to manifest the clear transience of inventions and progresses, which he tries to beat by means of the tradition-. I have said much against a mere modernism (...) I am conscious of a general irritation expressed against the people who boast of their advancement and modernity in the discussion of religion. But I never succeeded in saying the quite clear and obvious thing that is really the matter with modernism. The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness”. Newly, he penetrates into the sphere of the religion, and that’s why I dare to say this author is really obsessed with these both aspects: modernity and faith, making his texts become a mite monotone. The term pronounced by him as a “religious persecution” gains the leading role at this moment: “The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion. Similarly I find that I have tried in these pages to express the real objection to philanthropists and have not succeeded (the own Chesterton feels he has failed; from a global outlook, we could conclude he has got a patent pessimistic mind, as he proves the surrounding society does not fit him or, better said, he has not settled down in the contemporary environment). I have not seen the quite simple objection to the causes advocated by certain wealthy idealists; causes of which the cause called teetotalism is the strongest case. I have used many abusive terms about the thing, calling it Puritanism, or superciliousness, or aristocracy; but I have not seen and stated the quite simple objection to philanthropy; which is that it is religious persecution (...) the essence of religious persecution is this: that the man who happens to have material power in the State, either by wealth or by official position, should govern his fellow-citizens not according to their religion or philosophy, but according to his own”.

   Next, it should be strongly recommended to look at the plainness with what Gilbert Keith shows a case as an instance for his defended reasons: he refers to vegetarianism (we might find a commonplace with his essay “Asparagus”, already commented) and teetotalism, and he also carries out a comparison between the two of them: “There is a very strong case for vegetarianism as compared with teetotalism. Drinking one glass of beer cannot by any philosophy be drunkenness; but killing one animal can, by this philosophy, be murder. The objection to both processes is not that they two creeds, teetotal and vegetarian, are not admissible; it is simply that they are not admitted. The thing is religious persecution because it is not based on the existing religion of the democracy”. So far, the writer demonstrates his widespread capacity as far as religious knowledge concerns –he establishes a complex relation from one, religious persecution, to the other, religion of the democracy. What immediately follows that is another example, this time attached to his rejection towards “the Tory attempt”: “I was against the Tory attempt to force upon ordinary Englishmen a Catholic theology in which they do not believe. I am even more against the attempt to force upon them a Mohamedan morality which they actively deny”.

   Partly, Chesterton talks of his close society again, chaining it to his own profession, journalism, and his way or method of writing (more personal, what induces us to regard it as a honest monologue: “Again, in the case of anonymous journalism I seem to have said a great deal without getting out the point very clearly. Anonymous journalism is dangerous, and is poisonous in our existing life simply because it is so rapidly becoming an anonymous life. That is the horrible thing about our contemporary atmosphere. Society is becoming a secret society”. As a consequence of his costume to go back to the same thing once and another, he returns to the point of responsibility, the writers and their conduct –however, he focuses his glance now at other ones-, informing about how their behaviour should be: “The rich publisher may treat the poor poet better or worse than the old master workman treated the old apprentice. But the apprentice ran away and the master ran after him. Nowadays it is the poet who pursues and tries in vain to fix the fact of responsibility. It is the publisher who runs away”. Before leaving this article, let’s pay attention to the resort of showing parallelisms and comparisons constantly: rich publisher-poor poet, old master workman-apprentice, like religious persecution-religion of the democracy.

   In the last analysis, why not alluding the conclusion? It contains a new quotation about responsibility and a note referring to our attitude to the same writers: “The elaborate machinery which was once used to make men responsible is now used solely in order to shift the responsibility. People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we in this age are not suffering from the pride of tyrants. We are suffering from the shyness of tyrants (...) Therefore we must not encourage leader-writers to be shy (...) Rather we must attempt to lure them to be vain and ostentatious; so that through ostentation they may al last find their way to honesty”. Eventually, this manner of concluding also consists of a last damnation to “All Things Considered”: “The last indictment against this book is the worst of all. It is simply this: that if all goes well, this book will be unintelligible gibberish (...) Brief as is the career of such a book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of the philosophies that it attacks. In the end, it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. I will matter to us greatly on which side we fought”.

   If, whoever the reader is, he/she thinks Gilbert Keith Chesterton is an antiquated author, permit me tell him/her he/she is wrong. Otherwise, you only have to look upon a posterior essay, “The Great Shipwreck as Analogy” by name, written on May the 11^th, 1912, after the Titanic sunk. It was first found in The Illustrated London News.

   As the title says, there’s an analogy “between the great modern ship and our great modern society”. Gilbert attacks our civilisation, comparing it to the Titanic and its feebleness or, what is more, its lack of safety. Thus, he aims: “The tragedy of the great shipwreck is too terrific for any analogies of mere fancy. It is a fact; a fact perhaps too large and plain for the eyes easily to take in. Our whole civilisation is indeed very like the TITANIC; alike in its power and its impotence, its insecurity”. Along this essay, we can imagine we are psychologists and investigate human minds, for we are shown the fact such a fantastic and luxury vessel makes one be more careless and this is really dangerous: “By the time you have made your ship as big as a commonwealth, it does become very like a ship –rather like a sinking ship. For there is a real connection between such catastrophes and a certain frame of mind which refuses to expect them (...) But if you make your boat so large that it does not even look like a boat, but like a sort of watering-place, it must, by the deepest habit of human nature, induce a less vigilant attitude of the mind”. In the same line of reflection, there are some philosophical (if we want to modify it, we’d better say ‘psychological’) remarks: “The mental process is quite illogical, but it is quite inevitable. Of course, both sailors and passengers are intellectually aware that motors at sea are often less useful than life-boats, and that ices are no antidote to icebergs. But man is not only governed by what he thinks but by what he chooses to think about; and the sights that sink into us day by day colour our minds with every tint between insolence and terror. This is one of the worst evils in that extreme separation of social classes which marks the modern ship –and State (we may understand the meaning of this by glancing backwards at the title again: there’s an obvious analogy between the social discrimination in the huge Titanic as well as in the own State). Moreover, we distinguish a continuation with what has been told, at the beginning, about modernity, and a determinate relationship with reality and unreality: “But whether or no our unhappy fellow-creatures on the Titanic suffered more than they need from this unreality of original outlook, they cannot have had less instinct of actuality than we have who are left alive on land: and now that they are much more real than we” (he is pessimistic about the panorama but maybe optimistic and more profound regarding to those who lost their lives in that far-for-us disaster). There’s a certain kind of mystery round the dead in the catastrophe. As an example, the case of Sylvia Pankhurst: “It is this curious, cold, flimsy incapacity to conceive what a THING is like that appears in so many places, even in the comments on this astounding sorrow. It appears in the displeasing incident of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, who, immediately after the disaster, seems to have hastened to assure the public that men must get no credit for giving the boats up to women, because it was the ‘rule’ al sea”. The deduction of him about it are these: “It is vain to rule if your subjects can and do disobey you. It is vain to vote if your delegates can and do disobey you (...) And if the word ‘rule’ be used in the wider sense of an attempt to maintain a certain standard of private conduct out of respect for public opinion, we can only say that not only is this a real moral triumph –remarking at present the term ‘moral’ and all it involves if we go back some of his previous articles, such as “Negative and Positive Morality”-, but it is, in our present condition, rather a surprising and reasurring one. It is exactly this corporate conscience that the modern State has dangerously neglected”.

   At last, we are talked of the acquaintances of people on board: “There was probably more instinctive fraternity and sense of identical interests, I will say, not on an old skipper’s vessel, but on an old pirate’s, than there was between the emigrants, the aristocrats, the journalists, or the millionaires who set out to die together on the great ship. That they found in so cruel a way their brotherhood and the need of man for the respect of his neighbour, this is a dreadful fact, but certainly the reverse of a degrading one”.

   As he did with Sylvia Pankhurst, Chesterton names here the case of a man called Mr Stead, and he configures another example of the great shipwreck –even this bloke could be considered as somehow praised by the essayist-: “The case of Mr Stead, which I feel with rather special emotions, both of sympathy and difference, is very typical of the whole tragedy. Mr Stead was far too great and brave a man to require any concealment of his exaggerations or his more unbalanced moods; his strength was in a flaming certainty, which one only weakens by calling sincerity, and a hunger and thirst for human sympathy. His excess, we may say, with real respect, was in the direction of megalomania; a childlike belief in big empires, big newspapers, big alliances –big ships (this last comment has more of a critic than worship). He toiled like a Titan for that Anglo-American combination of which the ship that has gone down may well be called the emblem. And at the last all these big things broke about him, and somewhat bigger things remained: a courage that was entirely individual; a kindness that was entirely universal. His death may become a legend –as, indeed, occurred with the sunk of the Titanic”.

   Passing now to other matters, we could analyse Gilbert’s essay “The Suffragist”, in which we find out his political point of view, related to women. To take an obvious example, he makes an introduction explaining that political womanhood called ‘Suffragettes’ is a term often confused: “Like most other popular sentiments, it is generally wrongly stated even when it is rightly felt (...) For the things which are the simplest so long as they are undisputed invariably become the subtlest when once they are disputed”. This reports lead, next, to a description of the opposition between sexes stating as follows: “And this matter of the functions of the sexes is primarily a matter of the instincts; sex and breathing are about the only two things that generally work best when they are least worried about. That, I suppose, is why the same sophisticated age that has poisoned the world with Feminism is also polluting it with Breathing Exercises. We plunge at once into a forest of false analogies and bad blundering history; while almost any man or woman left to themselves would know at least that sex is quite different from anything else in the world –here it can be commented the magnitude the essayist deals with in this subject, which has been, moreover, a very controversial affair since the ancient times-. There is no kind of comparison possible between a quarrel of a man and woman (however right the woman may be) and the other quarrels of slave and master, of rich and poor, or of patriot and invader, with which the Suffragists deluge us every day”. Lately, he compares the dichotomy man-woman with other cases of transcendent controversy like those quoted. But what excels is the way he talks about responsible females, simply saying that “Real responsible woman has never been silly”, what can induce us to understand a certain point of irony, though true at once, in the statement.

   Proceeding with this narration, it’s extremely important the assertion that exposes that “(...) the very first fact about sexes is that they like each other”. Maybe this chances to clear this scheme up: “The sexes cannot wish to abolish each other; and, if we allow them any sort of permanent opposition, it will sink into something as base as a party system (let’s also notice his aversion against political disposition in general). As marriage, therefore, is rooted in an aboriginal unity of instincts, you cannot compare it, even in its quarrels, with any of the mere collisions of separate institutions”. It’s overseen, then, how sexes and instincts are joined together; and this will be the chief view globally: to prove that the attraction of the sexes is the most fundamental issue, he declares: “(...) any philosophy about the sexes that begins with anything but the mutual attraction of the sexes, begins with a fallacy; and all its historical comparisons are as irrelevant and impertinent as puns”. And said that, it’s attached to the instincts anew: “But to expose such cold negation of the instincts is easy: to express or even half express the instincts is very hard (...) They are much concerned with how a thing is done, as well as whether one may do it: and the deepest elements in their attraction or aversion can often only be conveyed by stray examples or sudden images”.

   Chesterton plays with words, not taking notice of what he has said about impertinent puns before: “The point is not that women are unworthy of votes; it is not even that votes are unworthy of men, so long as they are merely votes; and have nothing in them of this ancient militarism of democracy”. Reading that “No honest man dislikes the public woman. He can only dislike the political woman; an entirely different thing”, one can acquire the knowledge of his attack to female politicians, something he is making obvious once and another. For finishing with it, he draws the conclusion now transcribed: “I only write here of the facts of natural history; and the fact is that it is this, and not the publicity or importance, that hurts. It is for the modern world to judge whether such instincts are indeed danger signals; and whether the hurting of moral as of material nerves is a tocsin and a warning of nature”. His obsession about modern society and morality is patent at the end, aside his desire of avoiding the polemic and let the moderns opine about his defences.

   But before leaving the subject of differentiation of sexes, why not having a look at “The Equality of Sexlessness”? There the discrimination is perfectly identified and we might find an analogy with the previous commented article if we pay attention to the first words: “In almost all the modern opinions of women it is curious to observe how many lies have to be assumed before a case can be made”. At the same time, it makes one denote a new critic to modernity and women in general, referring to their opinions, which are impregnated with fallacies. As usual in the author, we are brought to glance at the past, seeing that “(...) women were (...) enslaved by the convention of natural inferiority to man”, and Chesterton adds somebody’s observation: “Those days, we are told, ‘in which women were held incapable of positive social achievements are gone forever”. Consequently, “The same critic goes on to state, with all the solemn emphasis of profound thought, that ‘the important thing is not that women are the same as men –that is fallacy- but that they are just as valuable to society as men. Equality of citizenship means that there were twice as many heads to solve present-day problems as there were to solve the problems of the past. And two heads are better than one”. Gilbert Keith reassumes his characteristic criticism regarding to the modern times and he straightens himself and considers the matter in the earnest manner: “And the dreadful proof of the modern collapse of all that was meant by man and wife and the family council, is that this sort of imbecility can be taken seriously”.

   In order to explain the principal aim in the essay, i.e., the equality of sexlessness, he alludes to a point which first appeared in “The London Times”: “The London Times, in a studied leading article, points out that the first emancipators of women (whoever they were) had no idea what lay in store for future generations: ‘Could they have foreseen it they might have disarmed much opposition by pointing to the possibilities, not only of freedom, but of equality and fraternity also’. And we ask, what does it all mean? What in the name of all that is graceful and dignified does fraternity with women mean? What nonsense, or worse, is indicated by the freedom and equality of the sexes? We mean something quite definite when we speak of a man being a little free with the ladies. What definite freedom is meant when the freedom of women is proposed? (important to notice the ramblings the writer composes for reaching the answer: that provides, beyond all doubt, a fast pace to the text and helps to emphasise it. However, it also involves calling the reader’s attendance) (...) If it means, as we fear it does, freedom from responsibility of managing a home and a family, an equal right with men in business and social careers, at the expense of home and family, then such progress we can only call progressive deterioration”. He defends, thus, his own thoughts against the evolutions the improvements carry out.

   Finally, we are taught equality and fraternity are expected with the establishment of sexlessness: “And for men too, there is, according to a famous authoress, a hope of freedom. Men are beginning to revolt, we are told, against the old tribal custom of desiring fatherhood. The male is casting off the shackles of being a creator and a man. When all are sexless there will be but fraternity, free and equal. The only consoling thought is that it will endure but for one generation”. This essay is an extract from GK’s Weekly, July 26, 1930.

   The article “Government and the Rights of Man” –written on July the 30^th, 1921 for Illustrated London News- is in the same tendency of politics, but it is treated with a further grasp: the writer sets out the theme of freedom and begins to make a speech of how words hurt people: “I could never see why a man who is not free to open his mouth to drink should be free to open it to talk. Talking does far more direct harm to other people (...) it is certain that a vast amount of evil would be prevented if we all wore gags”. Moreover, he deepens in the subject of liberty and explains the possible solutions to the problem: “The answer is that, unless a man is allowed to talk, he might as well be a chimpanzee who is only able to chatter. In other words, if a man loses the responsibility for these rudimentary functions and forms of freedom, he loses not only his citizenship, but his manhood. But there are other personal liberties still permitted to us, more elaborate and civilised than that simple human speech which is still closely akin to the chatter of the chimpanzees”.

   Then, separately but in addition to what he pronounces for clearing it up, we are introduced a parable of a Post Office in order to talk about the rights of mankind that are to be left by the same government: “By some oversight, which I am quite unable to explain, we are still allowed to write private letters if we put them in public pillar-boxes (...) And all this anarchy and deterioration could be stopped by the simple process of standardisation of all correspondence”. Thus, he alludes to Mr H.G. Wells, a sceptic criticised by him very often (like G.B. Shaw; let’s recall his essay “The Extraordinary Cabman”) and makes nomenclature once more of the social reform, which gathers some other remarks of him about Socialism: “I know if I use the word ‘standardisation’, Mr H.G. Wells will welcome it and begin to think of it seriously [indeed there opens before me a vista of vast social reform]”. And then what happens is that he shows his contempt for correspondence -something clear if we take refuge in his proclaim at the parable-: ”I very seldom write to anybody; and I never write to the people I like best. About them I do not trouble, for they understand. But there are unanswered letters from total strangers about which I feel a remorse”.

   Partly referring to the previous comments about answering all the people he would have killed and even leaving them some money when he died, he makes a contrast telling as follows: “(...) I am not really converted to my own project, even by my own failure. I am not really convinced of the necessity of standardised correspondence, either by the existence of criminal letters or my own criminal neglect of letters”. And, subsequently, there’s a critic to modern talk: “If or when, in some strange mood at some distant date, I should actually answer a letter, I should still prefer to answer it myself. Even if I had nothing to write except an apology for not writing, I should prefer my self-abasement to have the character of self-determination. It is a most extraordinary fact that all modern talk about self-determination is applied to everything except the self”. This precedes the conclusion at the end, in which we are explained the clear purpose of the quoted composition: “(...) the question I have here discussed under the parable of the Post Office is not the question of whether there are abuses in drink or diet, as there are calumny and blackmail in any pillar-box or postman’s bag. It is the question of whether in these days the claims of government are to leave anything whatever of the rights of man”.

   As a proof of how fundamental liberty is for Gilbert Keith, why not looking now at “The Free Man”? There we find the mentioned topic chained to religions already in the initial paragraph: “The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why men find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define. It refers finally to the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to save their lives by law, man has to save his soul by choice”. If we are able to denote a certain trace of morality, maybe we should base on the following statement: “Generally, the moral substance of liberty is this: that man is not meant merely to receive good laws, good food: or good conditions, like a tree in a garden, but is meant to take a certain princely pleasure in selecting and shaping like the gardener (a new reference to this profession)”. If we move forward, we read that “Perhaps that is the meaning of the trade of Adam”: the instance of Adam, like in “The Gardener and the Guinea”, shows a little bit of his sensibility round religion and it’s repeated, but with relationship to God and the Creation, presenting the man as a creator: “And the best popular words for rendering the real idea of liberty are those which speak of man as a creator. We use the word ‘make’ about most of the things in which freedom is essential, as a country walk or a friendship or a love affair. When a man ‘makes his way’ through a wood he has really created, he has built a road, like the Romans. When a man ‘makes a friend’, he makes a man. And in the third case we talk of a man ‘making love’, as if he were (as, indeed, he is) creating new masses and colours of that flaming material and awful form of manufacture”.

   But Chesterton does not conform with pointing out to freedom simply in the way above, and then he analyses it from a deeper outlook, which is not another but the liberty in two senses: spiritual and political: “In its primary spiritual sense, liberty is the god in man, or, if you like the word, the artist. In its secondary political sense, liberty is the living influence of the citizen on the State in the direction of moulding or deflecting it”. In fact, human beings are the unique who disposes of liberty: “Men are the only creatures that evidently possess it. On the other hand, the eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness. On the other hand, ants, bees, and beavers exhibit the highest miracle of the State influencing the citizen; but no perceptible trace of the citizen influencing the State”.

   Religiosity tuns out to go on constituting the first interest for the author, so he tries to draw the relationship between humanity and it: “(...) The isolation of this idea in humanity is humanity akin to its religious character; but it is not even in humanity by any means equally distributed. The idea that the State should not only be supported by its children (...) but should be constantly criticised and reconstructed by them, is an idea stronger in Christendom than any other part of the planet; stronger in Western than Eastern Europe”. And finally, resorting to politics, he manages to declare that “(...) touching the pure idea of the individual being free to speak and act within limits, the assertion of this idea, we may fairly say, has been the peculiar honour own country (...) And there was a real old English sincerity in the vulgar chorus that ‘Britons never shall be slaves’. We had no equality and hardly any justice; but freedom we were really fond of. And I think just now it is worth while to draw attention to the old optimistic prophecy that ‘Britons never shall be slaves’. The mere love of liberty has never been at a lower ebb in England than it has been for the last twenty years (...) Two hundred years ago we turned out the Stuarts rather than endanger the Habeas Corpus Act. Two years ago we abolished the Habeas Corpus Act rather than turn out the Home Secretary. We passed a law (which is now in force) that an Englishman’s punishment shall not depend upon judge and jury, but upon the governors and jailers who have got hold of him (...) // Political liberty (...) consists in the power of criticising those flexible parts of the State which constantly require reconsideration, not the basis, but the machinery. In plainer words, it means the power of saying the sort of things that a decent but discontented citizen wants to say (...) // the forbidding of (...) things (whether just or not) is only tyranny in a secondary and special sense. It restrains the abnormal, not the normal man. But the normal man, the decent discontented citizen, does want to protest against unfair law courts (...) If he is run in for doing this (as he will be) he does want to proclaim the character or known prejudices of the magistrate who tries him. If he is sent to prison (as he will be) he does want to have clear and civilised sentence, telling him when he will come out. And these are literally and exactly the things that he now cannot get. That is the almost cloying humour of the present situation”. As we can see, Chesterton is extremely concerned about the current matters and spares no effort to make it public. And the current worrying for him is the fact that one is not able to proclaim openly his/her feelings merely because it may cause disturbances in the environmental society.

   As a way of closing this article, he admits “I can say abnormal things in modern magazines. It is the normal things that I am not allowed to say (...) The thing I must not write is rational criticism of the men and institutions of my country. The present condition of England is briefly this: That no Englishman can say in public a twentieth part of what he says in private”. The proof of how true what he says is: “One cannot say, for instance, that –But I am afraid I must leave out that instance, because one cannot say it. I cannot prove my case- because it is so true”.

   If we take a look at the composition “The Sectarian of Society”, we’ll see another linking to freedom; so then, Chesterton defends liberty in the surroundings and, therefore, there must exist credo, as he says: “A fixed creed is absolutely indispensable to freedom”. As a matter of fact, this involves communication through the wit and the essayist justifies that by confessing: “For while men are and should be various, there must be some communication between them if they are to get any pleasure out of their variety. And an intellectual formula is the only thing that can create a communication that does not depend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy”. In order to show an instance of these statements, Gilbert chooses Socialism: “(...) instead of a small and varied group, you have enormous monotonous groups. Instead of the liberty of dogma, you have a tyranny of taste. Allegory apart, instances of what I mean will occur to every one; perhaps the most obvious is Socialism. Socialism means the ownership by the organ of government (whatever it is) of all things necessary to production (...) When once it has been discovered that Socialism does not mean a narrow economic formula, it is also discovered that Socialism does mean wearing one particular kind of clothes, reading one particular kind of books, hanging up one particular kind of pictures, and in the majority of cases even eating one particular kind of food. For men must recognise each other somehow. These men will not know each other somehow. These men will not know each other by a principle, like fellow-citizens. They cannot know each other by a smell, like dogs. So they have to fall back on general colouring”. Repeatedly, the author resorts to political schemes to entrust his affirmations to the readers and, what is more, he intends to prevent people from considering, in this case, the Socialism in a superfluous way such as that of thinking it to be “a narrow economic formula”, and urges them to resign themselves to accept this type of government in a more sensitive manner: the fact of forming a society. And maybe this community constituted by determinate people causes him to wander through so many different issues in order to set out the several dilemmas on his time -though, nevertheless, we generally continue to be surrounded by these difficulties nowadays: indeed, Chesterton actually seem to predict the future situation-.

   In a parallel way, and for taking another example, our appreciated man of letters turns back to decant towards the side of religion: “(...) it is supremely so in the case of religion. As long as you have a creed, which every one in a certain group believes or is supposed to believe, then that group will consist of the old recurring figures of religious history, who can be appealed to by the creed and judged by it; the saint, the hypocrite, the brawler, the weak brother. These people do each other good; or they all join together to do the hypocrite good, with heavy and repeated blows. But once break the bond of doctrine which alone holds these people together, each will gravitate to his own kind outside the group. The hypocrites will all get together and call each other saints; the saints will get lost in a desert and call themselves weak brethren; the weak brethren will get weaker and weaker in a general atmosphere of imbecility; and the brawler will go off looking for somebody else with whom to brawl. This has very largely happened to modern English religion”. Like in previous occasions, modernity and religiosity are matched and, as a result of their union, criticised by the writer, who is strongly hostile to the current progress and the situation produced as a consequence of it. “But wherever the falsity appears, it comes from neglect of the same truth: that men should agree on a principle, that they may differ on everything else; that God gave men a law that they might turn it into liberties”. In the same way, we are taught the line which chains all this entanglement and, generally talking, the explanation of the essay: the principle all the human beings should follow is the same Christianity, the faith in the Almighty (which perhaps is led to other gates by men’s choice).

   The main point for being successful, according to Chesterton, is the opposition of elements: “As a matter of fact, the more sexes are in violent contrast, the less likely they are to be in violent collision. The more incompatible their tempers are, the better”. Let’s stop here to mention the analogy of this text with the one included in “The Equality of Sexlessness”, where men and women are antagonistic poles but, contrarily, it implies the welfare state for society. “There are very few marriages of identical taste and temperament; they are generally unhappy. But to have the same fundamental theory, to think the same thing a virtue, whether you practise or neglect it, to think the same thing a sin, whether you punish or pardon or laugh at it, in the last extremity to call the same thing duty and the same thing a disgrace –this really is necessary to a tolerably happy marriage”. Again, this English man leads us to the extent of the Christian matrimonial sacrament and profits by this point to become absorbed in the limits of man and woman. “(...) and it is much better represented by a common religion than it is by affinities and auras. And what applies to the family applies to the nation. A nation with a root religion will be tolerant. A nation with no religion will be bigoted”. This gives a good account of his personal interest in nationalism, as all his essays in which England appears demonstrate. “(...) Lastly, the worst effect of all is this: that when men come together to profess a creed, they come courageously (...) But when they come together in a clique, they come sneakishly, eschewing all change or disagreement (...)”. Up to this extent, and still getting in touch with politics, I’d dare to say when a man ‘profess a creed’ and he fails through the fault of a bad-posed political point or equally a social problem –which is being defended- badly understood. That is considered by the author as a Medical Mistake, which does with a remedy or cure.

   At length, we learn from the conclusion that men of the same kind go together in mass in order to follow a creed: “For birds of a feather flock together, but birds of the white feather most of all”. We may be seduced here to taste the raw intention in the expression ‘birds of the white feather’... Will it mean that humanity is really coward? It wouldn’t be very strange if we take into consideration Chesterton’s ill will towards stupidity of men; an obstinacy that might have something to do with the temper of stingy people, properly summarised in “The Miser and his friends”, where we come to the extent of economical theory and the trouble attached to it, e.g., the distributism; firstly, we have an acute critic to the modern miser, opposed to the old one: “Whenever the unhealthy man has been on top, he has left a horrible savour that humanity finds still in its nostrils. Now, in our time, the unhealthy man is on top; but he is not the man mad on sex, like Nero; or mad on statecraft, like Louis XI; he is simply the man mad on money. Our tyrant is not the satyr or the torturer; but the miser. The modern miser has changed much from the miser of legend and anecdote; but only because he has grown yet more insane. The old miser had some touch of the human artist about him in so far that he collected gold (...) The modern idolater of riches is content with far less genuine things. The glitter of guineas is like the glitter of buttercups, the chink of pelf is like the chime of bells, compared with the dreary papers and dead calculations which make the hobby of the modern miser. The modern millionaire loves nothing so lovable as a coin (...) And as for comfort, the old miser could be comfortable, as many tramps and savages are, when he was once used to being unclean (...) The round coins in the miser’s stocking were safe in some sense. The round noughts in the millionaire’s ledger are safe in no sense; the same fluctuation which excites him with their increase depresses him with their diminution”. This is, to a certain extent, believable because rich men are extremely worried about the figures in their bank account, what contradicts the mean’s liking, for he just gets conformed with the simple and material coins. “The miser at least collects coins; his hobby is numismatics. The man who collects noughts collects nothings”. However, we are shown the clearest way of this confrontation: in the easiest of all the cases, collecting coins is more useful than just increasing the number of figures in one’s wealth. Certainly, here we face the differences in the élite, id est, between rich and filthy rich people: “It may be admitted that the man amassing millions is a bit of an idiot; but it may be asked in what sense does he rule the modern world. The answer to this is very important and rather curious. The evil enigma for us here is not the rich, but the Very Rich. The distinction is important; because this special problem is separate from the old general quarrel about rich and poor that runs through the Bible and all strong books, old and new. The special problem to-day is that certain powers and privileges have grown so world-wide and unwieldy that they are out of the power of the moderately rich as well as of the moderately poor. They are out of the power of everybody except a few millionaires –that is, misers”. Having reached this point, Chesterton insists on the fact millionaires are, indeed, stingier than all the rest of the society (divided now into moderately rich, now into moderately poor). The same writer recognises he’s not connected with this discrimination of classes: “In the old normal friction of normal wealth and poverty I am myself on the Radical side”. The hated modernity, if put in relation to the rich, has this effect on him: “The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market. The things that change modern history (...) are getting too big for everybody except the misers”. He talks about rich and very rich men and we are set out moderately rich also include good people: “There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser aristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people, even good people (...) But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it”.

   And already now, speaking apart about old and modern miser, it goes on: “Lastly, the most serious point about them is this: that the new miser is flattered for his meanness and the old one never was. It was never called self-denial in the old miser that he lived on bones. It is called self-denial in the new millionaire if he lives on beans”. For getting rid of this attempt then, Chesterton extracts these lines: “Of the two I have more respect for the old miser, gnawing bones in an attic: if he was not nearer to God, he was at least a little nearer to men. His simple life was a little more like the life of the real poor”. Even though we cut off this article, we must clarify first the writer lets his opinion go further than he did in other publications and expresses openly his contempt towards modern mass and reveals which side he is in. Besides, one can notice anew the tremendous religiousness of this man (as God is present everywhere).

   Yet, once we have already analysed other matters such as morality, philosophy, religion or politics, we reach now the affair of reality. Indeed, we can appreciate Chesterton’s worry about the shortness of reality of his contemporary society in the brief article named known us “The Real Journalist”, which begins this way: “Our age, which has boasted of realism will fail chiefly through lack of reality”. In addition, the essayist puts the emphasis on the difference between the essence and the appearance of the thing that is carried out, and reasons that “Never, I fancy, has there been so grave and startling a divorce between the real way a thing is done and the look of it when it is done”. And, in this case, the writer picks as an example the newspaper itself, for journalism is his own profession and he knows it perfectly well: “I take the nearest and most topical instance to hand a newspaper (...) Seen from the outside, it seems to come round as automatically as the clock and as silently as the dawn. Seen from the inside, it gives all its organisers a gasp of relief every morning to see that it has come out at all”.

   And related to his job we could consider it’s the matter he shelters in “Cheese”; Gilbert praises the cheese and expresses it’s disregarded generally in European Literature, as his work “The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature” shows: “Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese (...) Yet it has every quality which we require in an exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to breeze and seas (an essential point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted even by the civilisation of the modern cities (...) The substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient –sometimes in the individual case, always in the type and custom (...) nor can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it”. If we look back a little bit, we come across the fact he also covered the issue of food in “Asparagus”... why has he chosen another kind of nourishment this time, and what for? As it has been proved, it has to do with rhymes and sounds, but let’s not have enough with it; if we continue to read this essay, we reach the theme about the clash between bad and good habits, that is, mechanical and poetic communities, in following quotation: “Now, it is just here that true poetic civilisation differs from that paltry and mechanical civilisation that holds us all in bondage. Bad customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism –critic towards modernity again-. Good customs are universal and varied, like native chivalry and self-defence. Both the good and the bad civilisation cover us as with a canopy, and protect us from all that is outside. But a good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella –artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform. So it is with the contrast between the substances that vary and the substances that are the same wherever they penetrate. By a wise doom of heaven (he highlights the importance of God’s Kingdom and how the Creator influences on human beings, though they’re not parishioners), men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the same cheese”. If we have a look at the last sentence, it’s standing the adjective ‘same’, which is used by Chesterton because it has been narrated a journey he made according to his usual lectures and which let him taste some different and good kinds of cheese in several inns next to the road. After having gone out of England, he arrives in Babylon and is served some biscuits there, instead of cheese he had asked for. Referring to the waiter who served him, he tells so: “He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against Modern Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong”. Once more, we are taught the contempt to modernity from his literary outlook; the Modern World is stood out with qualifications that are this time scornful (‘huge and unparalleled’). “Cheese” was published in “Alarms and Discursions” in 1910.

   In “The Poet and the Cheese”, as the title reveals, cheese turns up, laced anew to poetry. Gilbert Keith describes a landscape which reminds him of a poet called Wordsworth and his typical rural poems. This place he drops round is called Stilton, like a famous brand of cheese and, when the author (and main character of the story all at once) realises there’s no cheese of this class there, he becomes perplexed and utters the words: “(...) it seemed to me a strange allegory of England as she is now; this little town that had lost its glory; and forgotten, so to speak, the meaning of its own name. And I thought it yet more symbolic because from that old and full and virile life, the great cheese was gone; and only the beer remained. And even that will be stolen by the Liberals or adulterated by the Conservatives”. At the time, we can notice a certain stress of politics and comparison to England, as a sort of critic for his own country and, consequently, for the party system.

   Another story in the same line, but much further if we glance at the direct meaning, is “The Enchanted Man”, where this English erudite focuses on a mishap that happened to him once he went to see a performance of Buckingham Players titled “Pot Luck”, by Miss Gertrude Robins, at Naphill Theatre. Like in many other occasions, he takes profit by the opportunity for alluding his compatriots and sending a message to the reader: “The English are modest people; that is why they are entirely ruled and run by the few of them that happen to be immodest”. As he says, he remembers something queer while being at the theatre, and this is the result of a wired anecdote that had occurred to him in his previous journey up to there: “I have troubled recollection of having seen a very good play and made a very bad speech; I have a cloudy recollection of talking to all sorts of nice people afterwards, but talking to them jerkily and with half a head, as a man talks when he has one eye on a clock”.

   The Christian worrying is obvious early: “And the truth is that I had one eye on an ancient and timeless clock, hung uselessly in heaven; whose very name has passed into a figure for such bemused folly”. His imagination becomes rather madness when telling that “I began to fancy that I was spirally climbing the Tower of Babel in a dream”, what reflects, at the same time, his enormous sense of religiousness –he takes an extract from the Bible-.

   Talking about his own country in ascertainable political terms, for he turns to some words thrown out by the patriot Mr Joseph Chamberlain: “From the edge of that abrupt steep I saw something indescribable, which I am now going to describe. When Mr Joseph Chamberlain delivered his great patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch parts of South Africa, he made use of the expression ‘the illimitable veldt’. The word ‘veldt’ is Dutch, and the word ‘illimitable’ is Double Dutch (let’s look here at the linguistic pattern). But the meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave him a sense of largeness and dreariness which he had never found in England. Well, if he never found it in England, it was because he never looked for it in England. In England –the author repeats this place-name for heighten the British strength and charisma he’s proud of- there is an illimitable number of illimitable veldts. I saw six or seven separate eternities in cresting as many different hills. One cannot find anything more infinite than a finite horizon, free and lonely and innocent. The Dutch veldt may be a little more desolate than Birmingham. But I am sure it is not so desolate as that English hill was, almost within a cannon-shot of High Wycombe”. On the other hand, the mysticism is patent when saying: “There was something heathen about its union of beauty and death; sorrow seemed to glitter, as it does in some of the great pagan poems. I understood one of the thousand poetical phrases of the populace, ‘a God-forsaken place’. Yet something was present there; and I could not yet find the key to my fixed impression. Then suddenly I remembered the right word. It was an enchanted place”. Let’s make a recollection –like he quotes- and relate it newly to the previous essay “The Extraordinary Cabman”, and we’ll understand his way of narrating such fantastic reports.

   “There was never a better place than POT LUCK; for it

a tale with a point and a tale that might happen any day among English peasants. There were never better actors than the local Buckingham Players: for they were acting their own life with just that rise into exaggeration which is the transition from life to art”. Gilbert refers to the play itself, the one he has gone to see at the beginning of this narration, and later on he finishes off with the phrase “(...) we live in an enchanted land”. In short, he generalises his own case for comprising the whole society of his time.

   The essay I’m going to deal with at present, apart, is “The Man Who thinks Backwards”; as Chesterton explains, “The man who thinks backwards is a powerful person to-day: indeed, if he is not omnipotent, he is at least omnipresent. It is he who writes nearly all the learned books and articles, especially of the scientific or skeptical sort”. Thus, we notice some other ramblings from the author about sceptic people and scientists altogether, two kinds of beings he has already grumbled of in different compositions.

   We have been exposed the definition of a man who thinks this way, but: what ‘thinking backwards’ consists of? He sets it out too: “But especially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage (certainly, these are two of the subject most commented by him when talking of humanity). For the man who thinks backwards is very frequently a woman –he does accost clearly womanhood and makes a speech which will be useful for him to criticise the mankind itself later-.Thinking backwards is not quite easy to define abstractedly; and, perhaps, the simplest method is to take some object, as plain as possible, and from it illustrate the two modes of thought: the right mode in which all real results have been rooted; the wrong mode, which is confusing all our current discussions, especially our discussions about the relations of the sexes”. Before proceeding with the heart of this article, I’d better link this assortment of definition to his work “The Equality of Sexlessness” (already studied) and this proves the real interest of Chesterton in dividing the two flanks of human race, making relevant the current polemic round discrimination. It’s essential to point out here that his main ambition in politics is declaring himself as a Pacifist and defending this movement. Only this way it can be understood his hatred towards war, which is frequently related to politics by him, fact that turns both of these terms into two of the most important matters between the host of beliefs he confesses.From a forward outlook, the man is watched and, inherently, criticised so: “Among the live creatures that crawl about this star the queerest is the thing called Man”. To be more clear is nearly impossible, in my opinion: Chesterton demonstrates with those words the profound imbecility of men, whom he qualifies as “This plucked and plumeless bird, comic and forlorn” and “is the butt of all the philosophies. He is the only naked animal; and this quality, once, it is said, his glory, is now his shame. He has to go outside himself for everything that he wants. He might almost be considered as an absent-minded who had gone bathing and left his clothes everywhere, so that he has hung his hat upon the beaver and his coat upon the sheep (in order to be more realistic, the essayist chooses some common animals for comparing them to men). The rabbit has white warmth for a waistcoat, and the glow-worm has a lantern for a head. But man has no heat in his hide, and the light in his body is darkness; and he must look for light and warmth in the wild, cold universe in which he is cast”. And soon he starts to reflect on a mystical way, opposing to the scepticism and science of those attacked before: “This is equally true of his soul and of his body; he is the only creature that has lost his heart as much as he has lost his hide. In a spiritual sense, he has taken leave of his senses; and even in a literal sense, he has been unable to keep his hair on. And just as this external need of his hat lit in his dark brain the dreadful star called religion (another metaphor for presenting an equal fundamental factor, the one which probably leads the essay), so it has lit in his hand the only adequate symbol of it: I mean the red flower called Fire”.

   After giving an example of what it’s gonna be disputed, we find the definition of ‘thinking forwards’: “He who has thus gone back to the beginning, and seen everything as quaint and new, will always see things in their right order, the one depending on the other in degree of purpose and importance: the poker for the fire and the fire for the man and the man for the glory of God. This is thinking forwards”.

   To think backwards, by its own, is available for the essayist’s cleverness to return to modern attempts: “Before we begin discussing our various new plans for the people’s welfare, let us make a kind of agreement that we will argue in a straightforward way, and not in a tail-foremost way. The typical modern movements may be right; but let them be defended because they are right, not because they are typical modern movements”. At least now we can say there’s an advantage, though a bit rigorous, of this issue which he makes great play with. As in “The Real Journalist”, he goes on with reality and addresses the readers in a global manner in which he himself includes: “Let us ask ourselves first what we really do want, not what recent legal decisions have told us to want, or recent logical philosophies’ proved that we must want, or recent social prophecies predicted that we shall some day want”. In conclusion, he supports thinking backwards: “In all such bewilderment he is wise who resists this temptation of trivial triumph or surrender, and happy (in an echo of the Roman poet) who remembers the roots of things”.

   Is perhaps the lack of this power-will by some writers what induces Chesterton to compose “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls”? I’ve made this question because it seems so when one reads this essay –scanned by George Allaires- and finds out youth short novels are not miserable, but the centre of plenty of fantasies: “One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar, intrinsically it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations. In former centuries, the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it”.

   This sort of literature must exist, as long as it’s a kind of need: “There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception than the current boys’ literature of the lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed, and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture. But good people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important”. As well it’s important to separate literature from the cheating world of fiction, which are commonly joined but they’re really chalk and cheese, and then Chesterton justifies what he said previously: “Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity”. But we might wonder why these penny dreadfuls are so brief? Gilbert Keith replies: “A story can never be too long, for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, like the last halfpenny or the last pipelight”. This sort of literature is often regarded as attached to crimes: “It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes (...) The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from young people possessed of no little native humour”. And, consequently, Chesterton denies the assertion this type of writing is a crime: “(...) it is firmly fixed in the minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books. Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime”. Therefore, he criticises the magisterial theory which accuses the Penny Dreadfuls: “The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys’ novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, and this is the rubbish. So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: the whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventures, rambling, disconnected, and endless. It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort”. And it’s just that we don’t consider properly the lower classes, according to the author’s sayings: “In the case of our own class, we recognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it (...) we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human”. So, defending penny dreadfuls and criticising what lectors have done respect of them, our dearest Chesterton declares: “(...) this is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms, it is not built at all”.

   He attacks, on the other hand, modern literature -regarded as a sort of art in the society, what reflects the crucial consideration the own Chesterton devotes to the action of writing itself-; particularly, he draws a satire from the literature respecting to highbrow people: “It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables”. He claims, in addition, that these penny dreadfuls are not criminal, but we are the real criminals: “These things are our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German professors) whether morality (a usual matter on him: let’s bring to mind “Negative and Positive Morality”, among other instances) is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant that we accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving. But it is we who are morbid exceptions; it is we who are the criminal class. This should be our great comfort (remarking here the evident irony)”. And, to finish with that, he reassumes the critic to educated people: “There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of cultivated persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets”. This type of writing is obviously different from some other sorts of literature, such as the aforementioned short novels (novelettes) or the Detective Stories, which he also named in any occasion; precisely due to its singularity, Chesterton fixes his eyes on Penny Dreadfuls, although it has already been proved why he truly defend them.

   Finally, once again talking of morality, he says popular romance is moral: “So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture, it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life. The poor the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life have often been mad, scatter-brained, and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a ‘blood and thunder’ literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men”; as it finishes, he leaves a determinate savour of religion (‘heaven’) and humanity (‘blood of men’) is left...

   The remark made by Chesterton when he said “(...) young people possessed of no little native humour”, could be taken as a hint to mention his e-text “Cockneys and their Jokes”, in progress, from an edition by John Lane Company -New York, 1909-, excerpted from “All The Things Considered”. As a whole, we can sum up in advance it’s a text on the nature of humour. At first hand, it contains an introduction to start with the subject and the first assertions, which are fundamental and reveal us how the author is. There, “A writer in the Yorkshire Evening Post is very angry indeed with my performances in this column. His precise terms of reproach are: ‘Mr G.K. Chesterton is not a humorist, not even a Cockney humorist’. I do not mind his saying I am not a humorist –in which (to tell the truth) I think he is quite right. But I do resent his saying that I am not a Cockney”. That proves the writer’s patriotism and pride of being an inhabitant from London. “So I do not urge that I am a humorist; but I do insist that I am a Cockney”.

   “It is surely sufficiently obvious that all the best humour that exists in our language is Cockney humour (...) Even in our time, it may be noted that the most vital and genuine humour is still written about London (...) I concede that I am not a Cockney humorist”.

   Gilbert speaks of his City, London, and people from there: “London is the largest of the bloated modern cities (this is clearly contrary to his personal beliefs, as he hates modern world, but the fact of having been born there makes him worship the place itself); London is the smokiest; London is the dirtiest; London is, if you will, the most sombre; London is, if you will, the most miserable. So far, we realise the description about the town is not optimistic or hopeful at all, but this will change immediately, as soon ever as he determines: “But London is certainly the most amusing and the most amused. You may prove that we have the most tragedy; the fact remains that we have the most comedy, that we have the most farce. We have, at the very worst, a splendid hypocrisy of humour. We conceal our sorrow behind a screaming derision. You speak of people who laugh through their tears; it is our boast that we only weep through our laughter. There remains always this great boast, perhaps the greatest boast that is possible to human nature. I mean the greatest that the most unhappy part of our population is also the most hilarious part”. Like that contrast we pointed between the tedious towards modernity and the boast of an English patriot before, is reflected here with the help of matching opposites such as laughter and tears, unhappiness and joy or tragedy and comedy, among others...

   Partly inside these comparisons, we come across the relationship with the poor and the rich and the division of both categories: “The poor can forget that social problem which we (the moderately rich) ought never to forget” » especial stress this affirmation has: Chesterton includes himself inside the ‘moderately Rich’ people; if it’s remarkable, it’s due to the following statement, which happens to contradict the one mentioned: “Blessed are the poor –he takes Christ’s own words-; for they alone have not the poor always with them. The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it”; G.K. is plunging into philosophical or, “if you will”, moral matters. Let’s turn back to “The Miser and His Friends” in case it’s necessary to clear up the context, anyway. Forwardly, the essayist takes up the task of talking about funny stories and adds precision to the explaining why they are made and what for: “I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially of vulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle idea. The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic. They saw something delicate which they could only express by something indelicate” » a new contrasting, this time ‘delicate-indelicate’: that shows the satire of criticising ordinary stuff. According to Mr Max Beerbohm, there are 3 kinds of jokes: “I remember that Mr Max Beerbohm (who has every merit except democracy) attempted to analyse the jokes at which the mob laughs. He divided them into three sections: jokes about bodily humiliation, jokes about things alien, such as foreigners, and jokes about bad cheese”.

   What really impacted me was the presumable safety he shows when keeping: “In order to understand vulgar humour it is not enough to be humorous. One must also be vulgar, as I am”.Afterwards, he passes on to summarise the distinction of three sections, according to Mr Beerbohm’s classification of jokes: “And in the first case (...) If you really ask yourself why we laugh at a man sitting down suddenly in the street, you will discover that the reason is not only recondite, but ultimately religious” » we find the catholic sentiment even related to humour. “(...) Quite equally subtle and spiritual is the idea at the back of laughing at foreigners”; maybe we denote in that conclusion the irritation he suffers every time he hears somebody making fun of one who does not belong to the same country, and therefore we must highlight the subject of patriotism again, at the time being the most essential point in this article. “(...) Mr Max Beerbohm, I remember, professed to understand the first two forms of popular wit, but said that the third quite stumped him. He could not see why there should be anything funny about bad cheese” » once more, he resorts to name the cheese as an element for proving what he supports. “(...) Bad cheese symbolises the startling prodigy of matter taking on vitality. It symbolises the origin of life itself. And it is only about such solemn matters as the origin of life that the democracy condescends to joke”. He gathers both, life and politics, and puts them aside the ‘bad cheese’, forming this way a group in which every member is outstanding in the atmosphere of his thinking. Otherwise, he could not be able to prove it, as it does now: “The vulgar joke is, generally in the oddest way, the truth and yet not the fact (...) The joke stands for an ultimate truth, and that is a subtle truth. It is not very easy to state correctly”.

   “But the vulgar comic papers are so subtle and true that they are even prophetic”. Why all this?, e.g., how can our writer demonstrate what he has said previously? “If you really want to know what is going to happen to the future of our democracy, do not read the modern sociological prophecies, do not read even Mr Wells’s Utopias for this purpose, though you should certainly read them if you are found of good honesty and good English » he makes a fool of Mr Wells and alludes to politics once more because he’s drawing a speech of the democracy. “If you want to know what will happen, study the pages of Snaps or Patchy Bits as if they were the dark tablets graven with the oracles of gods. For, mean and gross as they are, in all seriousness, they contain what is entirely absent from all Utopias and all the sociological conjectures of our time: they contain some hint of the actual habits and manifest desires of the English people”.

   And lastly, referring to literature itself: “If we are really to find out what the democracy will ultimately do with itself, we shall surely find it, not in the literature which studies the people, but in the literature which the people studies”.

   The conclusion he extracts from this composition is the next: an example of when the common or Cockney people were a much better prophecy that the careful observations of the most highbrow observer; “The popular papers always persisted in representing the New Woman or the Suffragette –he makes reference to this political party anew, such as he did in “The Suffragist”- as an ugly woman, fat, in spectacles, with bulging clothes, and generally falling off a bicycle”. And he backs this specific sort of female insistently: “As a matter of plain external fact, there was not a word of truth in this. The leaders of the movement of female emancipation are not at all ugly; most of them are extraordinarily good-looking. Nor are they different to art or decorative costume; many of them are alarmingly attached to these things. Yet the popular instinct was right. For the popular instinct was that in this movement, rightly or wrongly, there was an element of indifference to female dignity, of a quite new willingness of women to be grotesque. These women did truly despise the pontifical quality of woman. And in our streets and around our Parliament we have seen the stately woman of art and culture turn into the comic woman of Comic Bits. And whether we think the exhibition justifiable or not, the prophecy of the comic papers is justified: the healthy and vulgar masses were conscious of a hidden enemy to their traditions who has now come out into the daylight, that scriptures might be fulfilled. For the two things that a healthy person hates most between heaven and hell are a woman who is not dignified and a man who is”.

   And, precisely talking of femaleness, Gilbert Keith Chesterton also remembered his deceased wife and incidentally wanted to commemorate his past and, in passing too, introduce the subject of death. It was written in the last years of the nineteenth century and consists of a monologue of him towards his sweetheart. The first contact to her prays this way: “You want to talk to me about death: my views about death are bright, brisk and entertaining”. As follows, he wanders throughout his mind and may takes out the most pessimistic perspective. “When Azrael takes a soul, it may be to other and brighter worlds: like those whither you and I go together. The transformation called Death (this is obviously an allegory of this station in life) may be something as beautiful and dazzling as the transformation called Love”. In fact, he tyrannises the act of loving someone, as long as he compares it to Death, but recognises the beauty of the action of being in love. “It may make the dead man ‘happy’, just as your mother knows that you are happy. But none the less it is a transformation, and sad sometimes for those left behind”. Next, we reach the point of a relative’s affection –concretely her wife’s mother-, and then we come across the issue of Family:“A mother whose child is dying can hardly believe that in the inscrutable Unknown there is anyone who can look to it as well as she. And if a mother cannot trust her child easily to God Almighty, shall I be so mean as to be angry because she cannot trust it easily to me?” » he takes as an instance the maternal affection to compare to his love... “I tell you I have stood before your mother and felt like a thief”. Chesterton addresses his wife confessing he does not believe in spiritual or carnal death: “I know you are not going to part: neither physically, mentally, morally nor spiritually. But she (her mother) sees a new element in your life, wholly from outside –is it not natural, given her temperament, that you should find her perturbed? Oh, dearest, dearest Frances, let us always be very gentle to older people (he claims for imposing respect towards the elderly lot and now he stands for their defence). Indeed, darling, it is not they who are the tyrants, but we. They may interrupt our building in the scaffolding stages: we turn their house upside down when it is their final home and rest. Your mother would certainly have worried if you had been engaged to the Archangel Michael (who, indeed, is bearing his disappointment very well): how much more when you are engaged to an aimless, tactless, reckless, unbrushed, strange-hatted, opinionated scarecrow who has suddenly walked into the vacant place”. » as it can be appreciated, he names Archangel Michael, what supposes to remind us of religion.

Chesterton agrees that his wife’s mother is right: a mother always is concerned about her descendants’ marriages, so this one would not be an exception...“I could have prophesied her unrest: wait and will calm down all right, dear. God comfort her: I dare not...”. » and this is the way the letter ends.

   And, at end, let’s evoke his writing called “The Twelve Men” (from an essay in “Tremendous Trifles”, in 1909). Here we cross along a passage in which the author meddles with jurisdiction attached to the courts. And, if I go over it, that is to throw into relief the capacity this essayist has to sum up all his general ideas or beliefs in a sole composition.

   In fact, he remarks that, when being in a court or, more concretely, in a jury box, “we settle down with a rollicking ease into our seats (for we are a bold, devil-may-care race (...)), and an oath is administered to us in a totally inaudible manner by an individual resembling an army surgeon in his second childhood” » he may want to stick out here the seriousness of a trial. Gilbert studies a determined case in a court –which presumably chanced to bewilder him-: “(...) we pass on to a woman who neglected her children, and who looks as if somebody or something had neglected her. And I am one of those who fancy that something had. All the time that the eye took in these light appearances and the brain passed these light criticisms, there was in this heart a barbaric pity and fear which men have never been able to utter from the beginning, but which is the power behind half the poems of the world” » obviously, he backs women again and separate them from maleness, who is not supposed to contain this tenderness. “The mood cannot even inadequately be suggested –this proves the troubles existing for explaining the sensation he felt before this event- except faintly by this statement that tragedy is the highest expression of the infinite value of human life”. Full of skill, Chesterton expresses, so, the sensibility of mankind and ‘the infinite value’ it possesses. What it’s a pity is that this feeling comes up just because of a tragic happening...

   The same writer confesses sincerely: “Never had I stood so close to pain; and never so far away from pessimism (an interesting and extraordinary thing if we take into account tragedy also brings uneasiness and often decay with it).

   He regrets to have talked about those sensations but, immediately, he justifies he did so in order to expose the nucleus of this composition, that is, the existence of paradoxes, which drives us towards the foundation of all religion and, particularly, the Christianity. “Ordinarily, I should not have spoken of these dark emotions at all, for speech about them is too difficult, but I mention them now for a specific and particular reason to the statement of which I will proceed at once. I speak of these feelings because, out of the furnace of them, there came a curious realisation of a political or social truth. I saw with a queer and indescribable kind of clearness what a jury really is, and why we must never let it go. The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards socialism and professionalism”. According to the last sentence –in bold letter-, we are put into the matter of the past and politics too. “The principle has been applied to law and politics by innumerable modern writers. Many Fabians –where we can include Mr George Bernard Shaw, whom Chesterton devotes a notable hostility- have insisted that a greater part of our political work should be performed by experts. Many legalists have declared that the untrained jury should be altogether supplanted by the trained Judge. Now, if this world of ours were really what is called reasonable, I do not know that there would be any fault to find with this. But the true result of all experience and the true foundation of all religion is this. That the four or five things that it is most practically essential that a man should know, are all of them what people call paradoxes. That is to say, that though we all find them in life to be mere plain truths, yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty of seeming verbal contradictions. One of them, for instance, is the unimpeachable platitude that the man who finds most pleasure for himself is often the man who least bunts for it. Another is a paradox of courage; the fact that the way to avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it”. Perhaps the last assertion reaffirms what he said previously, in the letter to Frances; he has never shown a feeling of terror in respect to demise.

   At the moment, Gilbert Keith gets ready to set out the fundamental sense of all the paradoxes and, therefore, the most crucial of them: “Now, one of these four or five paradoxes which should be taught to every infant prattling at his mother’s knee is the following: That the more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it, and the more a man learns a thing, the
less he knows it. The Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted, would be absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied a thing and practised it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its significance. In the same way, alas!, we all go on every day, unless we are continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility, seeing less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones”. Once again, we are taught how stupid men are, as it has been commented in “The Sectarian of Society” and “The Miser and His Friends”.

   And, before closing this narration, this English essayist goes into hiding to the religion: “(...) the instinct of Christian civilisation has most wisely declared that into their judgements there shall upon every occasion be infused fresh blood and fresh thoughts from the streets”.

   Then, speaking a bit of him time and society, he says: “Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided (he agrees them and boasts of being opposed to experts and Fabianism), that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box” » as it should be, and this is what he has been claiming all along the article, human personal feelings are the first and they prevail over the law itself.

   And finally, to surmount the present affair, there’s a last reference to Christendom: “(...) when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity”.

Note: All these texts have been selected from:"G.K. Chesterton Library".

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