Chestnuts from Chesterton
LOOK I'M SORRY HE LIKED PUNS TOO, OKAY?
As an addendum to last week’s essay, “What is missing, what is gone”: It might be instructive to imagine a museum visitor squinting critically at a transportive work like the Winged Victory of Samothrace or Leonora Carrington’s The Pleasures of Dagoberto and muttering to himself: “But does it validate my feelings about myself? Am I sufficiently represented, or should I complain to the curators and ask them to remove the painting? Is the creator a perfect human being, or problematic? How does this artwork make me feel about me? How does this artwork benefit me?” Or put the same person in a recital of Cécile Chaminade’s passionately sinuous music and have him mutter the same questions. Why we consider this approach appropriate and helpful in literature is beyond me.
But here is G.K. Chesterton in response, in Orthodoxy (1908), a book far too funny for that title:
Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom….
If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice. If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
….“But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”
For a change of pace, see Chesterton’s three variations on the nursery rhyme “Old King Cole” written to parody Lord Tennyson, W.B. Yeats, and Walt Whitman. (One might have to read Yeats and The Idylls of the King and “Song of Myself” to cackle at these—but they are so very delightful when one has.)
News:
On Fragile Waves is the 2022 winner of the Washington State Book Award for fiction.
I’ll be signing at the grand opening of the Crossroads Barnes and Noble, which is relocating from downtown, next Wednesday, September 28, 5-7pm.