WE ALWAYS suspected, after reading The Flying Inn, that G. K. Chesterton is fond of dogs. And now, reading his book, The New Jerusalem (which is full of very gorgeous matter), we learn that at his home in Beaconsfield he is host to both a dog (called “Winkle”) and a donkey (called “Trotsky”). Very genial is his picture of the start of his pilgrimage to Palestine and his last farewell to these beasts:
The reader will learn with surprise that my first feeling of fellowship went out to the dog; I am well aware that I lay open my guard to a lunge of wit.... He jumped about me, barking like a small battery, under the impression that I was going for a walk; but I could not, alas, take him with me on a stroll to Palestine.... The dog’s very lawlessness is but an extravagance of loyalty; he will go mad with joy three times on the same day at going out for a walk down the same road. We hear strangely little of the real merits of animals; and one of them surely is this innocence of all boredom; perhaps such simplicity is the absence of sin. I have some sense myself of the sacred duty of surprise; and the need of seeing the old road as a new road. But I cannot claim that whenever I go out for a walk with my family and friends, I rush in front of them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness; or even leap up round them attempting to lick their faces. It is in this power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western civilization.
The only thing that bothers us in this: If it had occurred to G. K. C. to prove that the scraper on his doorstep, or the radish growing in the garden, was the “eternal type” of Western civilization, would he not have made out an equally agreeable and convincing case for it? In fact, only a few steps away from his home, he came to the crossroads (and well we remember that crossroads, and the pub thereby—which is it, Mr. Chesterton: the Saracen’s Head, or the Royal White Hart?) and there decided that they were the symbol of civilization which had lost its way. And then, a few minutes later (in the train, we suppose) the glorious creature was noticing the heavy clouds that lay over the landscape, and decided that they were the emblem of our civilization. It takes a good deal of agility to pursue our pilgrim through this book, for every olive tree, signboard, sunset, gateway, proves to be a magnificent symbol of some spiritual gorgeousness.
We were sorry that Mr. Chesterton, when leaving Beaconsfield, did not find some symbolism in a thing which impressed us when we went pilgriming in those parts. Edmund Burke lived there at one time, and we remember reading in some guide-book that his home was “bounded in front by a ha-ha.” We thought to ourself at that time, how excellently symbolic it would have been if G. K. C. had bounded his own house in the same way. In fact, we often went along his road to listen for it.
There was another bit of symbolism that used to impress us (it is surprising how quickly one can pick up the habit of symbolizing) when we dallied around Beaconsfield. That was that Edmund Waller is buried under the big walnut tree in the churchyard:
Edmundi Waller hic jacet
id quantum morti cessit
And we thought it pleasant that Mr. Chesterton should have settled in the village sacred to the poet who wrote the loveliest poem ever written on girth—or, rather, on slenderness. You remember, of course, his “On a Girdle.”
The average person dearly loves a label—also a libel: and Mr. Chesterton’s gnomes—which are sometimes nuggets, sometimes merely nugæ, but always golden—are ticketed as “paradoxes” by those who have small inkling of what a paradox really is. The best definition was that of Don Marquis, our happiest native contemporary practitioner in this art, when he said that if the positive and negative poles of a truth are bent until they meet (or approach) a spark flashes across.
The paradox is the oldest outcry of the philosopher on contemplating the absurdity of the world. Originally a paradox was simply a surprise—a statement contrary to generally accepted opinion, and very likely untrue. As Hamlet said: “This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.” But latterly we do not grant the virtue of paradox unless the epigram fulfils a double requirement: it must seem absurd; it must be true, or at any rate true enough to give the mind a sense of cheerful satisfaction. Its essence is that of surprise—which is the essence of humour.
The intellectual growth of humanity is shown by its increasing tolerance of the paradox. The greatest of all Paradoxers was crucified. Every true paradox is a little parable of human fallibility. A parabola is a conic section; a parable, one might say, is a comic section.
Mr. Chesterton once, in a delightful essay called “Christmas,” said something that lingers in our mind as an exhibition of the paradox both in its strength and weakness. He wrote:
It is not uncommon nowadays for the insane extremes in reality to meet. Thus I have always felt that brutal Imperialism and Tolstoian nonresistance were not only not opposite, but were the same thing. They are the same contemptible thought that conquest cannot be resisted, looked at from the two standpoints of the conqueror and the conquered. Thus again teetotalism and the really degraded gin-selling and dram-drinking have exactly the same moral philosophy. They are both based on the idea that fermented liquor is not a drink, but a drug.
Now a moment’s thought will show the reader that while these two paradoxes are equal in wit, they are not equal in truth. The second is gloriously true; the first, delightfully acute as it is, begs the question. For the Tolstoian will retort that he does not maintain that conquest cannot be resisted; but that, on the contrary, it is resisted and defeated by passive oppugnance.
The paradox holds the mirror up to nature, but it is not a plane mirror. It dignifies human nature by assuming that the mind is capable of viewing itself in the refraction of absurdity. Thoughtless people speak of the paradox as a reduction to absurdity. That is not so. There are some subjects that have to be elevated to absurdity.
In conclusion: it is a dangerous tool. It must be gingerly handled lest it become—like the pun—a mere verbicide. And towards the fair sex, beware of paradoxes. They esteem but rarely its prankish tooth. Was not Hamlet’s downfall—and his betrothed’s also—occasioned when he practiced paradoxes on Ophelia?
