All Things Considered quotes

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.

Let any honest reader shut his eyes for a few moments, and approaching the secret tribunal of his soul, ask himself whether he would really rather be asked in the next two hours to write the front page of the Times, which is full of …

anybody can do it. 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.

It is more dignified to sit still than to dance the Barn Dance. It is also easier.

So in these easy pages I keep myself on the whole on the level of the Times: it is only occasionally that I leap upwards almost to the level of Tit-Bits.

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.

If I have to start for High-gate this day week, I may perhaps go the shortest way. If I have to start this minute, I shall almost certainly go the longest.

To flaunt the fact that we have had all the last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last bonnets from Paris.

To introduce into philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed’s antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady’s age.

It is caddish because it is irrelevant. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.

like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last bonnets from Paris. To introduce into philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed’s antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady’s age. It is caddish because it is irrelevant.

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. I have not seen the quite simple objection to the causes advocated by certain wealthy idealists;

For it is mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their nature accidental and incapable of enduring. 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. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.

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 great boast that the most unhappy part of our population is also the most hilarious part.

I mean the great boast that the most unhappy part of our population is also the most hilarious part. The poor can forget that social problem which we (the moderately rich) ought never to forget.

Blessed are the poor; for they alone have not the poor always with them.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

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.

All the jokes about men sitting down on their hats are really theological jokes; they are concerned with the Dual Nature of Man.

They refer to the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

Bad cheese is funny because it is (like the foreigner or the man fallen on the pavement) the type of the transition or transgression across a great mystical boundary. Bad cheese symbolises the change from the inorganic to the organic.

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. Thus, for instance, the democracy jokes about marriage, because marriage is a part of mankind.

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 the 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.

I know that these people have certainly succeeded in something; that they have certainly overcome somebody; I know that they are kings in a sense that no men were ever kings before; that they create markets and bestride continents.

Yet it always seems to me that there is some small domestic fact that they are hiding, and I have sometimes thought I heard upon the wind the laughter and whisper of the reeds.

At least, let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish;

It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic—eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing—such as making love.

A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no animal could be wilder.

Nothing beyond inconvenience seems really to have been caused by them; and inconvenience, as I have said, is only one aspect, and that the most unimaginative and accidental aspect of a really romantic situation.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

The water that girdled the houses and shops of London must, if anything, have only increased their previous witchery and wonder. For as the Roman Catholic priest in the story said:

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. The water that girdled the houses and shops of London must, if anything, have only increased their previous witchery and wonder. For as the Roman Catholic priest in the story said:

“Wine is good with everything except water,” and on a similar principle, water is good with everything except wine.

Anomalies do matter very much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract illogicalities do matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm. And this for a reason that any one at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself.

All injustice begins in the mind.

And anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times before he got out of bed.

For there would have permanently sunk into every man’s mind the notion that it was a natural thing for me to have a fantastic and irrational power.

They would have grown accustomed to insanity.

For, in order that men should resist injustice, something more is necessary than that they should think injustice unpleasant. They must think injustice absurd; above all, they must think it startling. They must retain the violence of a virgin astonishment.

The Court of Chancery is indefensible—like mankind. The Inquisition is abominable—like the universe. But the optimist sees injustice as something discordant and unexpected, and it stings him into action.

The pessimist can be enraged at wrong; but only the optimist can be surprised at it.

And it is the same with the relations of an anomaly to the logical mind. The pessimist resents evil (like Lord Macaulay) solely because it is a grievance. The optimist resents it also, because it is an anomaly;

he cannot see them and he cannot spoil them. If a man’s mind is erroneously possessed with the idea that he is a great violinist, that need not prevent his being a gentleman and an honest man.

But if once his mind is possessed in any strong degree with the knowledge that he is a gentleman, he will soon cease to be one.

But there is a third kind of satisfaction of which I have noticed one or two examples lately—another kind of satisfaction which is neither a pleasure in the virtues that we do possess nor a pleasure in the virtues we do not possess.

And the reason they agree so much in both cases is really that they belong to one social class; and therefore the dining life is the real life.

Tory and Liberal statesmen like each other, but it is not because they are both expansive; it is because they are both exclusive.

Waterloo was not won by good cricket-players. But Waterloo was won by bad cricket-players, by a mass of men who had some minimum of athletic instincts and habits.

It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them.

And it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on.

As long as the game was a game, everybody wanted to join in it. When it becomes an art, every one wants to look at it.

When it was frivolous it may have won Waterloo: when it was serious and efficient it lost Magersfontein.

In the Waterloo period there was a general rough-and-tumble athleticism among average Englishmen. It cannot be re-created by cricket, or by conscription, or by any artificial means. It was a thing of the soul.

Unfortunately, I have noticed in many aspects of our popular education that this is not done at all. One teaches our London children to see London with abrupt and simple eyes. And London is far more difficult to see properly than any other place.

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

The education of the Parisian child is something corresponding to the clear avenues and the exact squares of Paris.

It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being international and being cosmopolitan.

All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan.

If we are to be international we must be national.

he will be conscious that there is something in it too deep and too unmanageable to imitate.

The Englishman who has a fancy for France will try to be French; the Englishman who admires France will remain obstinately English.

This is to be particularly noticed in the case of our relations with the French, because it is one of the outstanding peculiarities of the French that their vices are all on the surface, and their extraordinary virtues concealed.

it is at its crisis, it is in the balance; and may be found wanting. The French, therefore, are quite right in considering it a living question. It is still living as a question, because it is not yet solved. But

Shakspere is not a living question: he is a living answer.

For my part, therefore, I think the French Zola controversy much more practical and exciting than the English Shakspere one. The admission of Zola to the Panthéon may be regarded as defining Zola’s position.

but the very place where it stands shows that it was put up by a foreigner for foreigners. There is surely something modest and manly about not attempting to express our greatest poet in the plastic arts in which we do not excel.

We honour Shakspere as the Jews honour God—by not daring to make of him a graven image.

Our sculpture, our statues, are good enough for bankers and philanthropists, who are our curse: not good enough for him, who is our benediction. Why should we celebrate the very art in which we triumph by the very art in which we fail?

We can only say that he came from nowhere and that he went everywhere. For him a monument in any place is out of place. A cold statue in a certain square is unsuitable to him as it would be unsuitable to Dickens.

If we put up a statue of Dickens in Portland Place to-morrow we should feel the stiffness as unnatural. We should fear that the statue might stroll about the street at night.

But in France the question of whether Zola shall go to the Panthéon when he is dead is quite as practicable as the question whether he should go to prison when he was alive.

And I think there is an obvious fallacy in the bitter contrasts drawn by some moderns between the aversion to Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and the popularity of some such joke as “Dear Old Charlie.” Surely there is nothing mysterious or unphilosophic in the popular preference.

The joke of “Dear Old Charlie” is passed—because it is a joke. “Ghosts” are exorcised—because they are ghosts.

This is, of course, the whole question of Zola. I am grown up, and I do not worry myself much about Zola’s immorality. The thing I cannot stand is his morality.

Of such substance also was this Puritan who had lost his God. A Puritan of this type is worse than the Puritan who hates pleasure because there is evil in it. This man actually hates evil because there is pleasure in it.

Zola was worse than a pornographer, he was a pessimist.

He did worse than encourage sin: he encouraged discouragement. He made lust loathsome because to him lust meant life.

It would be easy enough, like the writer in the Outlook, to enjoy the pleasures and deny the perils.

Oh what a happy place England would be to live in if only one did not love it!

So it would. It would also be cheaper if a number of us slept at different times, so as to use the same pair of trousers. But the question is not how cheap are we buying a thing, but what are we buying?

It is cheap to own a slave. And it is cheaper still to be a slave.

My correspondent also says that the habit of dining out in restaurants, etc., is growing. So, I believe, is the habit of committing suicide. I do not desire to connect the two facts together.

I would carry bread and cheese in my pocket or eat chocolate out of automatic machines. For the personal element in some things is sacred. I heard Mr. Will Crooks put it perfectly the other day:

“The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.”

My correspondent says, “Would not our women be spared the drudgery of cooking and all its attendant worries, leaving them free for higher culture?”

It means taking literature seriously, a very amateurish thing to do. It means pardoning indecency only when it is gloomy indecency. Its disciples will call a spade a spade; but only when it is a grave-digger’s spade.

The higher culture is sad, cheap, impudent, unkind, without honesty and without ease. In short, it is “high.”

That abominable word (also applied to game) admirably describes it.

So far from getting always the same meals from the same place, let her invent, if she likes, a new dish every day of her life.

Let woman be more of a maker, not less. We are right to talk about “Woman;” only blackguards talk about women.

Yet all men talk about men, and that is the whole difference. Men represent the deliberative and democratic element in life. Woman represents the despotic.

The incident of the Suffragettes who chained themselves with iron chains to the railings of Downing Street is a good ironical allegory of most modern martyrdom.

It generally consists of a man chaining himself up and then complaining that he is not free.

Some say that such larks retard the cause of female suffrage, others say that such larks alone can advance it; as a matter of fact, I do not believe that they have the smallest effect one way or the other.

but his human seriousness survived the inhuman joke, because, in whatever posture, he had died for his faith. The modern martyr of the Pankhurst type courts the absurdity without making the suffering strong enough to eclipse the absurdity.

She is like a St. Peter who should deliberately stand on his head for ten seconds and then expect to be canonised for it.

Or, again, the matter might be put in this way. Modern martyrdoms fail even as demonstrations, because they do not prove even that the martyrs are completely serious. I think, as a fact, that the modern martyrs generally are serious, perhaps a trifle too serious.

He is enjoyed not because he creates mystery, but because he destroys mystery. Nobody would have the courage to publish a detective-story which left the problem exactly where it found it. That would rouse even the London public to revolution.

No one dare publish a detective-story that did not detect.

There are three broad classes of the special things in which human wisdom does permit privacy. The first is the case I have mentioned—that of hide-and-seek, or the police novel, in which it permits privacy only in order to explode and smash privacy.

We have in this country all that has ever been alleged against the evil side of religion; the peculiar class with privileges, the sacred words that are unpronounceable; the important things known only to the few.

In fact we lack nothing except the religion.

It would be difficult to find, even among the innumerable examples that exist, a stronger example of the immensely superior importance of sentiment to what is called practicality than this case of the two sister nations.

It is not that we have encouraged a Scotchman to be rich; it is not that we have encouraged a Scotchman to be active; it is not that we have encouraged a Scotchman to be free. It is that we have quite definitely encouraged a Scotchman to be Scotch.

A vague, but vivid impression was received from all our writers of history, philosophy, and rhetoric that the Scottish element was something really valuable in itself, was something which even Englishmen were forced to recognise and respect.

of the idea of discipline; if you will, of the idea of tyranny; but still an idea. No soldier could possibly say that his own bayonets were his authority. No soldier could possibly say that he came in the name of his own bayonets.

It would be as absurd as if a postman said that he came inside his bag.

I do not, as I have said, underrate the evils that really do arise from militarism and the military ethic. It tends to give people wooden faces and sometimes wooden heads.

It would be the end of German soldiers to be affected by German philosophy.

Energetic people use energy as a means, but only very tired people ever use energy as a reason.

Athletes go in for games, because athletes desire glory. Invalids go in for calisthenics; for invalids (alone of all human beings) desire strength.

Modern England is too prone to present the spectacle of a person who is enormously delighted because he has not got the contrary disadvantages to his own.

The Englishman is always saying “My house is not damp” at the moment when his house is on fire.

The Englishman is always saying, “I have thrown off all traces of anæmia” in the middle of a fit of apoplexy. Let us always remember that if an Englishman wants to swindle English people, he does not dress up in the uniform of a soldier.

We have an Army of which the officers are proud of their families and ashamed of their uniforms. If I were a king of any country whatever, and one of my officers were ashamed of my uniform, I should be ashamed of my officer.

Beware, then, of the really well-bred and apologetic gentleman whose clothes are at once quiet and fashionable, whose manner is at once diffident and frank. Beware how you admit him into your domestic secrets, for he may be a bogus Earl. Or, worse still, a real one.

We rely on a certain good humour and education in the upper class to interpret to us our contradictory Constitution. No educated man born of woman will be quite so absurd as the system that he has to administer.

In short, we do not get good laws to restrain bad people. We get good people to restrain bad laws.

And last of all we in England have an aristocracy instead of an Army. We have an Army of which the officers are proud of their families and ashamed of their uniforms.

If the aggressor gets anything out of it, then it is quite unpardonable. It is damned by the least hint of utility or profit. A man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does not steal.

A gentleman knocks off his friend’s hat; but he does not annex his friend’s hat.

For this reason (as Mr. Belloc has pointed out somewhere), the very militant French people have always returned after their immense raids—the raids of Godfrey the Crusader, the raids of Napoleon; “they are sucked back, having accomplished nothing but an epic.”

When some trick of this sort is played, the newspapers opposed to it always describe it as “a senseless joke.” What is the good of saying that?

Every joke is a senseless joke. A joke is by its nature a protest against sense.

It is no good attacking nonsense for being successfully nonsensical. Of course it is nonsensical to paint a celebrated Italian General a bright red; it is as nonsensical as “Alice in Wonderland.” It is also, in my opinion, very nearly as funny.

whereas very often the reason is simple healthy human bribery. And thus especially we say that the Yellow Press is exaggerative, over-emotional, illiterate, and anarchical, and a hundred other long words; whereas the only objection to it is that it tells lies.

We waste our fine intellects in finding exquisite phraseology to fit a man, when in a well-ordered society we ought to be finding handcuffs to fit him.

This criticism of the modern type of righteous indignation must have come into many people’s minds, I think, in reading Dr. Horton’s eloquent expressions of disgust at the “corrupt Press,” especially in connection with the Limerick craze. Upon the Limerick craze itself, I fear Dr.

It is not in the least desirable that everybody should be earnest.

It is highly desirable that everybody should be honest, but that is a thing that can go quite easily with a coarse and cheerful character.

But the ineffectualness of most protests against the abuse of the Press has been very largely due to the instinct of democracy (and the instinct of democracy is like the instinct of one woman, wild but quite right) that the people who were trying to …

It is quite true that there is a young and beautiful fanaticism in which men do not care to reveal their names.

But there is a more elderly and a much more common excitement in which men do not dare to reveal them.

Then there is another rule for making journalism honest on which I should like to insist absolutely. I should like it to be a fixed thing that the name of the proprietor as well as the editor should be printed upon every paper.

He suppresses this other and more dangerous article because he thinks it right. The old idea that he is simply a mode of the expression of the public, an “organ” of opinion, seems to have entirely vanished from his mind.

To-day the editor is not only the organ, but the man who plays on the organ.

For in all our modern movements we move away from Democracy.

Oppression in the past, has commonly been an individual matter. The oppressors were as simple as the oppressed, and as lonely.

The aristocrat sometimes hated his inferiors; he always hated his equals.

The plutocrat was an individualist. But in our time even the plutocrat has become a Socialist. They have science and combination, and may easily inaugurate a much greater tyranny than the world has ever seen.

The reports of the debates in the Houses of Parliament are constantly growing smaller and smaller in our newspapers. Perhaps this is partly because the speeches are growing duller and duller. I think in some degree the two things act and re-act on each other.

For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.

The speeches in our time are more careful and elaborate, because they are meant to be read, and not to be heard. And exactly because they are more careful and elaborate, they are not so likely to be worthy of a careful and elaborate report.

It was mostly the fruit of our first and most natural sin—the habit of regarding ourselves as conjurers rather than priests, for the definition is that a conjurer is apart from his audience, while a priest is a part of his.

The conjurer despises his congregation; if the priest despises any one, it must be himself.

The curse of all journalism, but especially of that yellow journalism which is the shame of our profession, is that we think ourselves cleverer than the people for whom we write, whereas, in fact, we are generally even stupider. But this insolence has its Nemesis;

For the journalist, having grown accustomed to talking down to the public, commonly talks too low at last, and becomes merely barbaric and unintelligible.

By his very efforts to be obvious he becomes obscure.

This just punishment may specially be noticed in the case of those staggering and staring headlines which American journalism introduced and which some English journalism imitates. I once saw a headline in a London paper which ran simply thus: “Dobbin’s Little Mary.”

and then with the assistance of this realism make the man out to be a prophet and a saviour of his kind, whereas he is merely a private and stupid man who happens to like cats or to dislike doctors.

The old flatterer took for granted that the King was an ordinary man, and set to work to make him out extraordinary.

The newer and cleverer flatterer takes for granted that he is extraordinary, and that therefore even ordinary things about him will be of interest.

No! if we have to pay for splendour let us praise it as splendour, not as simplicity.

When next I meet a rich man I intend to walk up to him in the street and address him with Oriental hyperbole. He will probably run away.

Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false. To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value.

I want my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.

I apologise for stating all these truisms. But the truth is, that I have just been reading a thick pamphlet written by a mass of highly intelligent men who seem never to have heard of any of these truisms in their lives.

To me it is all wild and whirling; as if a man said—

“The plumber can find nothing wrong with our piano; so I suppose that my wife does love me.”

I am not going to enter here into the real doctrine of original sin, or into that probably false version of it which the New Theology writer calls the doctrine of depravity.

Nothing can be, in the strictest sense of the word, more comic than to set so shadowy a thing as the conjectures made by the vaguer anthropologists about primitive man against so solid a thing as the human sense of sin.

By its nature the evidence of Eden is something that one cannot find. By its nature the evidence of sin is something that one cannot help finding.

Some statements I disagree with; others I do not understand. If a man says, “I think the human race would be better if it abstained totally from fermented liquor,” I quite understand what he means, and how his view could be defended.

What sort of view of sin can they have had before science disturbed it? Did they think that it was something to eat? When people say that science has shaken their faith in immortality, what do they mean?

Did they think that immortality was a gas?

Of course the real truth is that science has introduced no new principle into the matter at all.

Some statements I disagree with; others I do not understand. If a man says, “I think the human race would be better if it abstained totally from fermented liquor,” I quite understand what he means, and how his view could be defended.

If a man says, “I wish to abolish beer because I am a temperance man,” his remark conveys no meaning to my mind. It is like saying, “I wish to abolish roads because I am a moderate walker.”

If a man says, “I am not a Trinitarian,” I understand. But if he says (as a lady once said to me), “I believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual sense,” I go away dazed.

My chief objection to these semi-scientific revolutionists is that they are not at all revolutionary.

They are the party of platitude. They do not shake religion: rather religion seems to shake them.

They can only answer the great paradox by repeating the truism.

Every day the daily paper reviews some new philosopher who has some new religion; and there is not in the whole two thousand words of the whole two columns one word as witty as or wise as that word “Methuselahite.”

The whole meaning of literature is simply to cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of philosophy are never literature.

That soldier had in him the very soul of literature; he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought, like Victor Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the paganism of to-day.

I could hardly therefore define my religion....” “I can,” I should say, somewhat sternly. “Your religion is to live a long time; and if you stop here a moment longer you won’t fulfil it.”

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defends idleness, and calls it art.

As a matter of fact, no men would be killed quicker than the Methuselahites.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

And in the very case I have quoted we may see an example of how little the theory of Methuselahism really inspires our best life. For there is one riddle in that case which cannot easily be cleared up.

And in the very case I have quoted we may see an example of how little the theory of Methuselahism really inspires our best life. For there is one riddle in that case which cannot easily be cleared up.

If it was the man’s religion to live as long as he could, why on earth was he enlisting as a soldier?

It is the test of one’s seriousness. It is the test of a responsible religion or theory whether it can take examples from pots and pans and boots and butter-tubs. It is the test of a good philosophy whether you can defend it grotesquely.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

When I was a very young journalist I used to be irritated at a peculiar habit of printers, a habit which most persons of a tendency similar to mine have probably noticed also.

the same applies to microbes. If you isolate a thing, you may get the pure essence of gravity. But if you take a large thing (such as the Solar System) it must be comic, at least in parts.

The germs are serious, because they kill you. But the stars are funny, because they give birth to life, and life gives birth to fun.

If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only prove it by talking about Plato and George Washington, your theory may be a quite frivolous thing.

I mean the printer’s tendency to turn the word “cosmic” into the word “comic.” It annoyed me at the time. But since then I have come to the conclusion that the printers were right. The democracy is always right.

Whatever is cosmic is comic.

Moreover, there is another reason that makes it almost inevitable that we should defend grotesquely what we believe seriously. It is that all grotesqueness is itself intimately related to seriousness. Unless a thing is dignified, it cannot be undignified.

Moreover, there is another reason that makes it almost inevitable that we should defend grotesquely what we believe seriously. It is that all grotesqueness is itself intimately related to seriousness.

Unless a thing is dignified, it cannot be undignified.

Why is it funny that a man should sit down suddenly in the street? There is only one possible or intelligent reason: that man is the image of God. It is not funny that anything else should fall down;

The fall of roofs and high buildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down that we laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man.

Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

The above, which occupies the great part of my article, is a parenthises. It is time that I returned to my choleric correspondent who rebuked me for being too frivolous about the problem of Spiritualism.

All wise schools have agreed that this latter capture depends to some extent on the faith of the capturer. So it comes to this: If you have no faith in the spirits your appeal is in vain; and if you have—is it needed?

If you do not believe, you cannot. If you do—you will not.

That is the real distinction between investigation in this department and investigation in any other. The priest calls to the goddess, for the same reason that a man calls to his wife, because he knows she is there.

But no normal lady will allow that young man to look into her eyes to see whether they are beautiful. The same vanity and idiosyncrasy has been generally observed in gods.

Praise them; or leave them alone; but do not look for them unless you know they are there. Do not look for them unless you want them. It annoys them very much.

The man who took the trouble to deduce from the police reports would probably be the man who would take the trouble to deduce further and different things from the evidence.

The man who had the sense to form an opinion would be the man who would have the sense to alter it.

It is worth while to dwell for a moment on this minor aspect of the matter because the error about impartiality and justice is by no means confined to a criminal question. In much more serious matters it is assumed that the agnostic is impartial;

I said, “With pleasure. Descartes, Dr. Johnson, Newton, Faraday, Newman, Gladstone, Pasteur, Browning, Brunetiere—as many more as you please.” To which that quite admirable and idealistic young man made this astonishing reply—“Oh, but of course they had to say that; they were Christians.”

First he challenged me to find a black swan, and then he ruled out all my swans because they were black.

The fact that all these great intellects had come to the Christian view was somehow or other a proof either that they were not great intellects or that they had not really come to that view. The argument thus stood in a charmingly convenient form:

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

We say that the juryman is not a juryman because he has brought in a verdict. We say that the judge is not a judge because he gives judgment.

We say that the sincere believer has no right to vote, simply because he has voted.

“Generally” is an exalted metaphysical term; “jenrally” is not. If you “encourage” a man, you pour into him the chivalry of a hundred princes; this does not happen if you merely “inkurrij” him. “Republics,” if spelt phonetically, might actually forget to be public.

“Holidays,” if spelt phonetically, might actually forget to be holy.

Here is a case that has just occurred. A certain magistrate told somebody whom he was examining in court that he or she “should always be polite to the police.”

Politeness is not really a frippery. Politeness is not really even a thing merely suave and deprecating.

Politeness is an armed guard, stern and splendid and vigilant, watching over all the ways of men; in other words, politeness is a policeman.

A policeman is not merely a heavy man with a truncheon: a policeman is a machine for the smoothing and sweetening of the accidents of everyday existence. In other words, a policeman is politeness; a veiled image of politeness—sometimes impenetrably veiled.

They call him a “pleeceman.” Thus the whole romance of the ancient city disappears from the word, and the policeman’s reverent courtesy of demeanour deserts him quite suddenly. This does seem to me the case against any extreme revolution in spelling.

If you spell a word wrong you have some temptation to think it wrong.

For the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

It is imagination that makes a man outwit his enemy, and it is imagination that makes him spare his enemy.

It is precisely because this picturing of the other man’s point of view is in the main a thing in which Christians and Europeans specialise that Christians and Europeans, with all their faults, have carried to such perfection both the arts of peace and war.

And it is precisely because savages are pitiless that they are still—merely savages. If they could imagine their enemy’s sufferings they could also imagine his tactics. If Zulus did not cut off the Englishman’s head they might really borrow it.

For if you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

When I was about seven years old I used to think that the chief modern danger was a danger of over-civilisation.

… are truly stunted or depraved—dedicate nearly all their tales and sayings to the subject of physical kinship, of a curse on this or that tribe, of a taint in this or that family, of the invincible law of blood, of the unavoidable evil of places.

The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man and is always talking about what he may do.

Hence all the Zola heredity and Ibsen heredity that has been written in our time affects me as not merely evil, but as essentially ignorant and retrogressive. This sort of science is almost the only thing that can with strict propriety be called reactionary.

We shall never have a common peace in Europe till we have a common principle in Europe. People talk of “The United States of Europe;” but they forget that it needed the very doctrinal “Declaration of Independence” to make the United States of America.

You cannot agree about nothing any more than you can quarrel about nothing.

It may be worth while uttering the warning to wealthy philanthropists and idealists that this argument from the animal should not be thoughtlessly used, even against the atrocious evils of excess; it is an argument that proves too little or too much.

Doubtless, it is unnatural to be drunk. But then in a real sense it is unnatural to be human.

Doubtless, the intemperate workman wastes his tissues in drinking; but no one knows how much the sober workman wastes his tissues by working. No one knows how much the wealthy philanthropist wastes his tissues by talking; or, in much rarer conditions, by thinking.

and certainly there is nothing intoxicating or even particularly lively about beasts. Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene.

And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness—or so good as drink.

The pronouncement of these particular doctors is very clear and uncompromising; in the modern atmosphere, indeed, it even deserves some credit for moral courage.

No one knows how much the wealthy philanthropist wastes his tissues by talking; or, in much rarer conditions, by thinking. All the human things are more dangerous than anything that affects the beasts—sex, poetry, property, religion.

The real case against drunkenness is not that it calls up the beast, but that it calls up the Devil.

It does not call up the beast, and if it did it would not matter much, as a rule; the beast is a harmless and rather amiable creature, as anybody can see by watching cattle. There is nothing bestial about intoxication;

At least, the postmistress would not dangle a strip of tempting sixpenny stamps before the enthusiast’s eyes as he was being dragged away with his tongue out. If we made drinking open and official we might be taking one step towards making it careless.

In such things to be careless is to be sane: for neither drunkards nor Moslems can be careless about drink.

They have introduced an almost insane individualism into that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariously communal.

They have made even levities into secrets. They have made laughter lonelier than tears.

There is a third thing to which the mystagogues have recently been applying the methods of a secret society: I mean manners. Men who sought to rebuke rudeness used to represent manners as reasonable and ordinary;

If you assume the ordinary dignity of a decent citizen and say that you don’t see the harm of having a mother or a pillow-case, she would say that of course you wouldn’t. This is what I call being a mystagogue.

It is more vulgar than being a demagogue; because it is much easier.

The primary point I meant to emphasise is that this sort of aristocracy is essentially a new sort. All the old despots were demagogues; at least, they were demagogues whenever they were really trying to please or impress the demos.

Fairies and journalists seem to be lovely and lawless; they seem to be both of them too exquisite to descend to the ugliness of everyday duty. But it is an illusion created by the sudden sweetness of their presence.

Journalists live under law; and so in fact does fairyland.

If you really read the fairy-tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition.

This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.

The whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread, upon one thread.

Cinderella may have a dress woven on supernatural looms and blazing with unearthly brilliance; but she must be back when the clock strikes twelve. The king may invite fairies to the christening, but he must invite all the fairies or frightful results will follow.

We may not see the direct logical connection between three beautiful silver spoons and a large ugly policeman; but then who in fairy tales ever could see the direct logical connection between three bears and a giant, or between a rose and a roaring beast?

Not only can these fairy-tales be enjoyed because they are moral, but morality can be enjoyed because it puts us in fairyland, in a world at once of wonder and of war.

It would be too much to expect that any such merely chronological incident should induce the people who write about Fielding to read him; this kind of neglect is only another name for glory.

A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read.

This is not in itself wholly unjust; it merely implies a certain respect for the realisation and fixed conclusions of the mass of mankind. I have never read Pindar (I mean I have never read the Greek Pindar;

It is commonly unmeaning enough to call Shakspere a great moralist; but in this particular way Shakspere is a very typical moralist. Whenever he alludes to right and wrong it is always with this old implication.

Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.

And if goodness only exists in certain human minds, a man wishing to praise goodness will naturally exaggerate the amount of it that there is in human minds or the number of human minds in which it is supreme.

Every confession that man is vicious is a confession that virtue is visionary.

Every book which admits that evil is real is felt in some vague way to be admitting that good is unreal. The modern instinct is that if the heart of man is evil, there is nothing that remains good.

that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least patronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the loudest blasphemer in Hyde Park.

Nothing ought to be too big for a brave man to attack; but there are some things too big for a man to patronise.

And I must say that the historical method seems to me excessively unreasonable. I have no knowledge of history, but I have as much knowledge of reason as Anatole France.

Joan of Arc is a wild and wonderful thing enough, but she is much saner than most of her critics and biographers.

We shall not recover the common sense of Joan until we have recovered her mysticism.

Our wars fail, because they begin with something sensible and obvious—such as getting to Pretoria by Christmas. But her war succeeded—because it began with something wild and perfect—the saints delivering France.

we moderns get both displaced. She put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. In modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed.

Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy.

It is not for us to explain this flaming figure in terms of our tired and querulous culture. Rather we must try to explain ourselves by the blaze of such fixed stars.

With Francis Thompson we lose the greatest poetic energy since Browning. His energy was of somewhat the same kind.

Browning was intellectually intricate because he was morally simple.

He was too simple to explain himself; he was too humble to suppose that other people needed any explanation.

except perhaps himself. Complicated ideas do not produce any more ideas. Mongrels do not breed. Religious ritual attracts because there is some sense in it. Religious imagery, so far from being subtle, is the only simple thing left for poets.

So far from being merely superhuman, it is the only human thing left for human beings.

A poet like Francis Thompson could deduce perpetually rich and branching meanings out of two plain facts like bread and wine; with bread and wine he can expand everything to everywhere. But with a French menu he cannot expand anything; except perhaps himself.

Complicated ideas do not produce any more ideas. Mongrels do not breed.

Religious ritual attracts because there is some sense in it. Religious imagery, so far from being subtle, is the only simple thing left for poets. So far from being merely superhuman, it is the only human thing left for human beings.

but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business. Nothing shall induce me to darken human homes, to destroy human festivities, to insult human gifts and human benefactions for the sake of some hypothetical knowledge which Nature curtained from our eyes.

We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.

If we catch sharks for food, let them be killed most mercifully; let any one who likes love the sharks, and pet the sharks, and tie ribbons round their necks and give them sugar and teach them to dance.

… separate destiny, whether I have made him in the sight of God a slave or a martyr, or one whom the gods love and who die young—that is far more removed from my possibilities of knowledge than the most abstruse intricacies of mysticism or theology.

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels.

In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means.

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means.

But God has never told us what a turkey means.

And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.