A bunch of Chesterton
September 26th 2011 01:04
from The Romance of the Rascal - essay in The Common Man
The novel of Smollet's time was better than the novel of the Victorian time, in so far as it recognised more clearly that good and evil exist and are entangled even in the same man. The novel of Smollet's time was better than the novel of our own time, in so far as it recognised that, even when they are entangled in the same man, they can still be distinguished and are very different, and at war till death.
from The Hound of Heaven - essay in The Common Man
In some aspects of art, poetry and pomp, the Catholic is more akin to the pagan; in some aspects of philosophy and logic (though this is little understood), he has more sympathy with the sceptic or the agnostic. But in the central solid fact of the subject or subject matter he is still something utterly separate from sceptics and even pagans; and all Christians have their part in him.
from Two Stubborn Pieces of Iron - essay in The Common Man
Co-educate as much as you like, there will always be a wall between the sexes until love or lust breaks it down. Your co-educative playground for pupils in their teens will not be a place of sexless camaraderie. It will be a place where the boys go about in fives sulkily growling at the girls, and where the girls go about in twos turning up their noses at the boys.
from Essay on Henry James
Henry James must be considered as a great man of letters; and the greatness itself is something which existed in geniuses utterly unlike him. It might seem startling and even comic to compare him to Dickens or even to Shakespeare; but what makes him great is what makes them great. It is ideas; the power of generating and making vivid an incessant output of ideas.
from Essay on Henry James
He has been attacked for making a great deal of small things; the point is that the things were things; that we should have lost them if he had not given them, that he never wrote about nothing. Each small notion had the serious thing called value - like a jewel, or, like what is both smaller and more valuable, a seed.
from Essay on The Boyhood of Dickens
Higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do not even admire the universe; they fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to criticize or even see it.
from Essay on Dickens the Myth Maker
Once the great characters are face to face [in Dickens' stories], the ladder by which they climbed is forgotten and falls down, the structure of the story drops to pieces, the plot is abandoned, the other characters deserted at every kind of crisis; the whole crowded thoroughfare is blocked by two or three talkers, who take their immortal ease as if they were already in Paradise. For they do not exist for the story; the story exists for them, and they know it.
from Essay on Dickens the Myth Maker
Dickens' work is never reckoned by novels. They are simply lengths cut from the flowing and mixed substance of which any length will be certain to contain a proportion of brilliant and of bad stuff.
from Essay on Dickens and Scott
In the democratic aspect of the interest and variety of all men, there is, of course, no democrat so great as Dickens. But in the other matter, in the idea of the dignity of all men, there is no democrat so great as Scott. Scott was fond of describing kings in disguise. But all his characters are kings in disguise.
from Essay on Dickens the Myth Maker
There are always two types of reformer. The first pessimistic, the second optimistic. One dwells upon the fact that souls are being lost; the other dwells upon the fact that they are worth saving. Both are quite right, but they naturally tend to a difference of method and a difference of perception. The first describes how bad men are under bad conditions. The second describes how good men are under bad conditions. Of the first class or writers is Gorky. Of the second is Dickens.
from Essay on Dickens the Myth Maker
Nobody was ever less optimistic than Dickens in his treatment of evil or the evil man. [There is] no attempt to whitewash evil. He crowds his stories with a kind of villain rare in modern fiction - the villain without any 'redeeming point.'
The villain is not in the story to be a character; he is there to be a danger - a careless, ruthless, and uncompromising menace. It is necessary to make the evil thing a man. He must be a man only in the sense that he must have a wit and a will to be matched with the wit and the will of the man chiefly fighting. The evil may be inhuman, but it must not be impersonal, which is almost exactly the position occupied by Satan in the theological scheme.
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