Good and evil both increase at compound interest.

Though Christian charity sounds a very cold thing to people whose heads are full of sentimentality, and though it is quite distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection. The difference between a Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or ‘likings’ and the Christian has only ‘charity’. The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even have imagined him- self liking at the beginning.

This same spiritual law works terribly in the opposite direction. The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them: afterwards they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them. The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become — and so on in a vicious circle for ever.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.
From Mere Christianity

I had an interesting and humiliating experience to-day

Beautiful little account by C S Lewis about not judging people by appearances . It is from a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves written in 1930.

I had an interesting and humiliating experience to-day (Saturday).

I had to go out to tea on Boars’ Hill and a man I had beenlunching with, Lawson, offered to drive me. I used to know him at [University College] and I lunch with him and Keir once a week for old sake’s sake, though Lawson is a most terrible bore.

As soon as he got me in the car he decided that we had a good deal of spare time and said he would drive me first to see his old father, recently widowed, whom he has just set up in a little house at the neighbouring village of Holton. On the way I bitterly regretted having been let in for this. Lawson is a tiny little man with puffed out cheeks, a pursed in mouth, and a bristly moustache: very bright staring eyes: and rolls the eyes, jerking his head this way and that, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, while he talks, talks, talks, all about himself: or else talks big of university politics, retailing opinions which I know not to be his own and which in any case I despise. I thought ‘Now he is going to show me over this house and tell me how he arranged this and why he did that—reams of it.’

When we arrived we found a lovely wild garden with a little red cottage in it. We met an old man speaking with a broad Yorkshire accent and plainly in the technical sense ‘not a gentleman’.

Point No. I in favour of Lawson—he is not ashamed of his origins: he rose enormously in my eyes. Then Lawson shut up completely and let the old man talk, which he did, describing all he was doing in the garden. He was just like Lawson, only in an old man it was different: and the courage of him setting to work to build up a new life here in his old age was impressive. When we had been round the whole place and into the house, and when I saw so many things out of Lawson’s rooms in Merton [College]brought out here, and saw the affection between them, and realised how Lawson had busied himself about the whole—and then remembered how abominably I had treated my father—and worst of all how I had dared to despise Lawson, I was, as I said, humiliated.

Yet I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. It does one good to see the fine side of people we’ve always seen the worst of. It reminded me very much of the clerk in Bleak House (or is it Great Expectations) who takes the hero out to see his father and has a cannon on the roof. Do you remember?

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That troublesome God we learned about when we were children

Note -In order to keep this section short enough when it was given on the air,

I mentioned only the Materialist view and the Religious view. But to be complete I ought to mention the In between view called Life-Force philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution. The wittiest expositions of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw, but the most profound ones in those of Bergson. People who hold this view say that the small variations by which life on this planet "evolved" from the lowest forms to Man were not due to chance but to the "striving" or "purposiveness" of a Life-Force. When people say this we must ask them whether by Life-Force they mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then "a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to perfection" is really a God, and their view is thus identical with the Religious. If they do not, then what is the sense in saying that something without a mind "strives" or has "purposes"? This seems to me fatal to their view. One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?
C S Lewis in Mere Christianity

Let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race

"The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place."

It is exactly this backdoor, this sense of having a retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterlizing spirit in modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus, in politics the modern Jingoes practically say, `Let us have the pleasure of conquerors without the pains of soldiers: let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race.' Thus, in religion and morals, the decadent mystics say: `Let us have the fragrance of sacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint...

And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and snows. 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.

-- A Defence of Rash Vows by G.K. Chesterton 1901

http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/rash_vows.html

BEHIND YOU!!!

"No human being of any imagination ever took the smallest interest in the victories of the strong. It is only the victories of the weak that can be interesting."

PUNCH AND JUDY

There is something which is popular and still poor. There is something that is successful and yet bankrupt. There is a drama before the public which the public always applauds. It has run for a million nights and still it does not pay. That is a case for municipal enterprise. I propose that Punch and Judy should be put on the rates.

I have heard the oddest things said about Punch by literary men. I have heard him called Pagan. I have heard him degraded to the level of the Superman. Surely, however, it is obvious that Punch is the most Christian of all possible figures. Punch is Christian because Punch is grotesque.

The one thing that we have all forgotten about Mr Punch is the one thing that our fathers made most prominent — his hump. The victories of Punch are, indeed, the victories of a violent person, but they are the victories of a hunchback. That is, they are the victories of a grotesque cripple. No human being of any imagination ever took the smallest interest in the victories of the strong. It is only the victories of the weak that can be interesting. And all the victories, almost literally without exception, which humanity has celebrated at all, have been the victories of the weak — the weak in size, as in Jack the Giant-killer; or in numbers as at Marathon or Thermopylae; or in station and obvious chances, as in Cinderella or modern socialism; or in bodily defect, as in the blind Samson or the hump-backed Punch.

There are, indeed, human stories like that of Samson, of a man stronger than any other individual man. But there are no stories of this strong man conquering another weaker man and exulting in his strength … Strong as he is, his enemy must be stronger than he. And this is obviously the real meaning of Mr Punch. The whole point of the drama is that one highly ridiculous person with a hump is a match for all the organized forces of society, including the Beadle and the Hangman. The emphasis is not on the fact that he claims victory or has a right to expect it; the point is that he does not expect the victory, but does get it. The whole point of the story is that of a forlorn hope. The whole point is not that Punch puts his foot down, but that he has his back to the wall …

But the moral claim of Punch and Judy, though obvious, is not its only claim. Artistically it represents something sadder than a lost art; it represents a frustrated art. The technical conception of the whole thing, that of managing a dolt with the thumb and two fingers, is exactly one of those direct arts that ought not to be allowed to die. It is probably as subtle as fencing, which is also chiefly managed by the thumb and forefinger. There must be men who can do it, undeservedly starving amongst men who cannot do it. The ragged English Punch and Judy is infinitely superior (on the first principles of art) to the elaborate and civilized Italian system of marionettes. Marionettes are mechanism, like mere trains and telephones. Punch and Judy is manual labour; it is in a strict sense handicraft. The man works this thing — works it by personal and vital gestures — as if he were himself the actor. It is his own right hand that has become to him a separate person. It is his right hand that has lost or has not lost its cunning. It is his right hand that has taught him terrible things. And when he lifts the three fingers that make a doll into a man, he is lifting the same three fingers that all High Pontiffs have lifted in benediction.

If Punch and Judy is permitted to die, there will die with it three things. First, a genuine historic survival of the old Christian farce, in which the clown or fool always had the best of everybody. Secondly, there will die a definite mode of dexterity; one which could be applied to a hundred other hearty pantomimes besides this of Punch and Judy. Thirdly, it will mean the disappearance of a great pleasure of the poor.

Daily News, October 26th, 1907

PUNCH AND JUDY, II

The art of the Punch and Judy show, like the art of the old guilds, is a handicraft. It is that low thing called manual labour, like the work of the sculptor, the violinist and the painter of the Transfiguration. The interest of it lies in the fact that the only instrument really employed is the hand, and the costume of the comic figure is merely a kind of glove. Everything is done with these three fingers, or rather two fingers and a thumb, with which, in fact, all the mightiest or most ingenious works of man have been done. Everything turns on the co-operation of that trinity of digits: the pen, the pencil, the bow of the violin, and even the foil or the sword. In this respect Punch and Judy has a purity and classical simplicity as a form of art, superior even to what is more commonly called the puppet show — the more mechanical system of marionettes that work on wires. And there is this final touch of disgrace in the neglect of it: that while marionettes are mostly a foreign amusement, Punch has become a purely English survival. It is very English, it is really popular, it is within the reach of comparatively poor men. Who can wonder that it is dying out?

Illustrated London News, October 8th, 1921

They wanted to be the Cosmos

All real spirituality is a testimony to this world as much as the other: the material universe does exist.

Now the mystics around me had not this lively faith that things are fantasies because they are facts. They wanted, as all magicians did, "to control the elements"; to be the Cosmos. They wished the stars to be their omnipresent eyes and winds their long wild tongues unrolled; and therefore they favoured twilight, and all the dim and borderland mediums in which one thing melts into another...in which a man can be as large as Nature and (what is worse) as impersonal as Nature. But I never was properly impressed with the mystery of twilight, but rather with the riddle of daylight, as huge and staring as the sphinx. 

And everything had that strange and high indifference that belongs only to things that are...

Read the rest here:

http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/post.html

Gargoyles

Alarms and Discursions 1910

G.K. Chesterton

Introductory: On Gargoyles

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ALONE at some distance from the wasting walls of a disused abbey I found half sunken in the grass the grey and goggle-eyed visage of one of those graven monsters that made the ornamental water-spouts in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. It lay there, scoured by ancient rains or striped by recent fungus, but still looking like the head of some huge dragon slain by a primeval hero. And as I looked at it, I thought of the meaning of the grotesque, and passed into some symbolic reverie of the three great stages of art.

* * * *

I

Once upon a time there lived upon an island a merry and innocent people, mostly shepherds and tillers of the earth. They were republicans, like all primitive and simple souls; they talked over their affairs under a tree, and the nearest approach they had to a personal ruler was a sort of priest or white witch who said their prayers for them. They worshipped the sun, not idolatrously, but as the golden crown of the god whom all such infants see almost as plainly as the sun.

Now this priest was told by his people to build a great tower, pointing to the sky in salutation of the Sun-god; and he pondered long and heavily before he picked his materials. For he was resolved to use nothing that was not almost as clear and exquisite as sunshine itself; he would use nothing that was not washed as white as the rain can wash the heavens, nothing that did not sparkle as spotlessly as that crown of God. He would have nothing grotesque or obscure; he would not even have anything emphatic or even anything mysterious. He would have all the arches as light as laughter and as candid as logic. He built the temple in three concentric courts, which were cooler and more exquisite in substance each than the other. For the outer wall was a hedge of white lillies, ranked so thick that a green stalk was hardly to be seen; and the wall within that was of crystal, which smashed the sun into a million stars. And the wall within that, which was the tower itself, was a tower of pure water, forced up in an everlasting fountain; and upon the very tip and crest of that foaming spire was one big and blazing diamond, which the water tossed up eternally and caught again as a child catches a ball.

"Now," said the priest, "I have made a tower which is a little worthy of the sun."

II

But about this time the island was caught in a swarm of pirates; and the shepherds had to turn themselves into rude warriors and seamen; and at first they were utterly broken down in blood and shame; and the pirates might have taken the jewel flung up for ever from their sacred fount. And then, after years of horror and humiliation, they gained a little and began to conquer because they did not mind defeat. And the pride of the pirates went sick within them after a few unexpected foils; and at last the invasion rolled back into the empty seas and the island was delivered. And for some reason after this men began to talk quite differently about the temple and the sun. Some, indeed, said, "You must not touch the temple; it is classical; it is perfect, since it admits no imperfections." But the others answered, "In that it differs from the sun, that shines on the evil and the good and on mud and monsters everywhere. The temple is of the noon; it is made of white marble clouds and sapphire sky. But the sun is not always of the noon. The sun dies daily; every night he is crucified in blood and fire."

Now the priest had taught and fought through all the war, and his hair had grown white, but his eyes had grown young. And he said, "I was wrong and they are right. The sun, the symbol of our father, gives life to all those earthly things that are full of ugliness and energy. All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. Let us point to heaven with tusks and horns and fins and trunks and tails so long as they all point to heaven. The ugly animals praise God as much as the beautiful. The frog's eyes stand out of his head because he is staring at heaven. The giraffe's neck is long because he is stretching towards heaven. The donkey has ears to hear-let him hear."

And under the new inspiration they planned a gorgeous cathedral in the Gothic manner, with all the animals of the earth crawling all over it, and all the possible ugly things making up one common beauty, because they all appealed to the god. The columns of the temple were carved like necks of giraffes; the dome was like an ugly tortoise; and the highest pinnacle was a monkey standing on his head with his tail pointing at the sun. And yet the whole was beautiful, because it was lifted up in one living and religious gesture as a man lifts his hands in prayer.

III

But this great plan was never properly completed. The people had brought up on great wagons the heavy tortoise roof and the huge necks of stone, and all the thousand and one oddities that made up that unity, the owls and the efts and the crocodiles and the kangaroos, which hideous by themselves might have been magnificent if reared in one definite proportion and dedicated to the sun. For this was Gothic, this was romantic, this was Christian art; this was the whole advance of Shakespeare upon Sophocles. And that symbol which was to crown it all, the ape upside down, was really Christian; for man is the ape upside down.

But the rich, who had grown riotous in the long peace, obstructed the thing, and in some squabble a stone struck the priest on the head and he lost his memory. He saw piled in front of him frogs and elephants, monkeys and giraffes, toadstools and sharks, all the ugly things of the universe which he had collected to do honour to God. But he forgot why he had collected them. He could not remember the design or the object. He piled them all wildly into one heap fifty feet high; and when he had done it all the rich and influential went into a passion of applause and cried, "This is real art! This is Realism! This is things as they really are!"

* * * *

That, I fancy is the only true origin of Realism. Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason. This is so not merely in the sense of insanity but of suicide. It has lost its reason; that is its reason for existing. The Old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their god. The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs, dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summon all these million creatures to worship their god; and then have no god for them to worship. Paganism was in art a pure beauty; that was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty created by controlling a million monsters of ugliness; and that in my belief was the zenith and the noon. Modern art and science practically mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them; and I will venture to call that the disruption and the decay. The finest lengths of the Elgin marbles consist of splendid horses going to the temple of a virgin. Christianity, with its gargoyles and grotesques, really amounted to saying this: that a donkey could go before all the horses of the world when it was really going to the temple. Romance means a holy donkey going to the temple. Realism means a lost donkey going nowhere.

The fragments of futile journalism or fleeting impression which are here collected are very like the wrecks and riven blocks that were piled in a heap round my imaginary priest of the sun. They are very like that grey and gaping head of stone. Yet I will venture to make even of these trivial fragments the high boast that I am a medievalist and not a modern. That is, I really have a notion of why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have not the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the connecting links between all these chaotic papers. But it could be stated. This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else; I leave to others the angels and the arches and the spires. But I am very sure of the style of the architecture and of the consecration of the church.

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 Up to G.K.Chesterton's Works on the Web.

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Last modified: 17th June, 1999

Martin Ward, Software Technology Research Lab, De Montfort University, Leicester.
Email: martin@gkc.org.uk

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