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Notes The characteristic word for Mr. Chesterton and his attitude to life is vitality. He has been seeking
for human nature, and he has found it at last in Christian idealism. But having found it, he will
allow no compromise in its acceptance. It is life he wants, in such wholeness as to embrace every
element of human nature. And he finds that Christianity has quickened and intensified life all
along the line. It is the great source of vitality, come that men might have life and that they might
have it more abundantly. He finds an essential joy and riot in creation, a “tense and secret festivity.”
And Christianity corresponds to that riot. “The more I considered Christianity, the more I found
that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for
good things to run wild.” It has let loose the wandering, masterless, dangerous virtues, and has
insisted that not one or another of them shall run wild, but all of them together. The ideal of
wholeness which Matthew Arnold so eloquently advocated, is not a dead mass of theories, but a
world of living things. Christ will put a check on none of the really genuine elements in human
nature. In Him there is no compromise. His love and His wrath are both burning. All the separate
elements of human nature are in full flame, and it is the only ultimate way of peace and safety. The
various colours of life must not be mixed but kept distinct. The red and white of passion and
purity must not be blended into the insipid pink of a compromising and consistent respectability.
They must be kept strong and separate, as in the blazing Cross of St. George on its shield of white.
Chaucer’s “Daisy” is one of the greatest conceptions in all poetry. It has stood for centuries as the
emblem of pure and priceless womanhood, with its petals of snowy white and its heart of gold.
Mr. Chesterton once made a discovery that sent him wild with joy—“Then waxed I like the wind
because of this, And ran like gospel and apocalypse
From door to door, with wild, anarchic lips, Crying the very blasphemy of bliss.
”The discovery was that “the Daisy has a ring of red.” Purity is not the enemy of passion; nor must
passion and purity be so toned down and blent with one another, as to give a neutral result. Both
must remain, and both in full brilliance, the virgin white and the passionate blood-red ring.
In the present age of reason, the cry is all for tolerance, and for redefinition which will remove
sharp contrasts and prove that everything means the same as everything else. In such an age a
doctrine like this seems to have a certain barbaric splendour about it, as of a crusader risen from
the dead. But Mr. Chesterton is not afraid of the consequences of his opinions. If rationalism
opposes his presentation of Christianity, he will ride full tilt against reason. In recent years, from
the time of Newman until now, there has been a recurring habit of discounting reason in favour
of some other way of approach to truth and life. Certainly Mr. Chesterton’s attack on reason is as
interesting as any that have gone before it, and it is even more direct. Even on such a question as
the problem of poverty he frankly prefers imagination to study. In art he demands instinctiveness,
and has a profound suspicion of anybody who is conscious of possessing the artistic temperament.
As a guide to truth he always would follow poetry in preference to logic. He is never tired of
attacking rationality, and for him anything which is rationalised is destroyed in the process. In
one of his most provokingly unanswerable sallies, he insists that the true home of reason is the
madhouse. “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who
has lost everything except his reason.” When we say that a man is mad, we do not mean that he
is unable to conduct a logical argument. On the contrary, any one who knows madmen knows that
they are usually most acute and ingeniously consistent in argument. They isolate some one fixed
idea, and round that they build up a world that is fiercely and tremendously complete. Every
detail fits in, and the world in which they live is not, as is commonly supposed, a world of
disconnected and fantastic imaginations, but one of iron-bound and remorseless logic. No task is
more humiliating, nor more likely to shake one’s sense of security in fundamental convictions,
than that of arguing out a thesis with a lunatic.
Further, beneath this rationality there is in the madman a profound belief in himself. Most of us
regard with respect those who trust their own judgment more than we find ourselves able to trust

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