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Unit 32: G.K. Chesterton-On Lying In Bed ...

faculty of wonder, without which no man can live. To regain that faculty is to be born again, out Notes
of a false world into a true. The constant repetition of the laws of Nature blunts our spirits to the
amazing character of every detail which she reproduces. To catch again the wonder of common
things“the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower” is to pass from darkness into
light, from falsehood to truth. “All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind
rests ultimately upon one assumption: a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on
repeating itself it is probably dead: a piece of clockwork.” But that is mere blindness to the
mystery and surprise of everything that goes to make up actual human experience. “The repetition
in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying
the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once;
the crowded stars seemed bent on being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose
a thousand times.”
That is one fact, which fairy tales emphasise—the constant demand for wonder in the world, and
the appropriateness and rightness of the wondering attitude of mind, as man passes through his
lifelong gallery of celestial visions. The second fact is that all such vision is conditional, and
“hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing
withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing which is
forbidden.” This is the very note of fairyland. “You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if
you do not say the word ‘cow’; or you may live happily with the King’s daughter, if you do not
show her an onion.” The conditions may seem arbitrary, but that is not the point. The point is that
there always are conditions. The parallel with human life is obvious. Many people in the modern
world are eagerly bent on having the reward without fulfilling the condition, but life is not made
that way. The whole problem of marriage is a case in point. Its conditions are rigorous, and people
on all sides are trying to relax them or to do away with them. Similarly, all along the line, modern
society is seeking to live in a freedom which is in the nature of things incompatible with the
enjoyment or the prosperity of the human spirit. There is an if in everything. Life is like that, and
we cannot alter it. Quarrel with the seemingly arbitrary or unreasonable condition, and the whole
fairy palace vanishes. “Life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as brittle as the window-pane.”
From all this it is but a step to the consideration of dogma and the orthodox Christian creed. Mr.
Chesterton is at war to the knife with vague modernism in all its forms. The eternal verities which
produce great convictions are incomparably the most important things for human nature. No
“inner light” will serve man’s turn, but some outer light, and that only and always. “Christianity
came into the world, firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look
inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company
and a divine captain.” This again is human nature. No man can live his life out fully without being
mastered by convictions that he cannot challenge, and for whose origin he is not responsible. The
most essentially human thing is the sense that these, the supreme conditions of life, are not of
man’s own arranging, but have been and are imposed upon him.
At almost every point this system may be disputed. Mr. Chesterton, who never shrinks from
pressing his theories to their utmost length, scoffs at the modern habit of “saying that such-and-
such a creed can be held in one age, but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was
credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a
certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might
as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-
past four.” That is precisely what many of us do say. Our powers of dogmatising vary to some
extent with our moods, and to a still greater extent with the reception of new light. There are many
days on which the dogmas of early morning are impossible and even absurd when considered in
the light of evening.
But it is not our task to criticise Mr. Chesterton’s faith nor his way of dealing with it. Were we to

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