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    Alarms And Discursions (A Selection Of Essays)
    Alarms And Discursions (A Selection Of Essays)
    Alarms And Discursions (A Selection Of Essays)
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    Alarms And Discursions (A Selection Of Essays)

    By G. K. Chesterton

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    The essay is a formidable piece of work. A good one conveys the argument and the author’s point of view and persuades the reader that action and their involvement is required. Over the centuries many of our novelists and poets have turned to this form to help society collect its thoughts and decide on a course of action. Today we look at the essays of GK Chesterton. Prolific as a writer of novels and short stories as well as poetry he wrote some 4,000 essays, a few of which we have gathered here. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Campden hill, Kensington on May 29th 1874. Originally after attending St Pauls School he went to Slade to learn the illustrators art and literature. In 1896 he joined a small London publisher and began his journalistic career as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. Thereafter he obtained weekly columns in the Daily News and The Illustrated London News. For many he is known as a very fine novelist and the creator of the Father Brown Detective stories which were much influenced by his own beliefs. A large man – 6’ 42 and 21st in weight he was apt to be forgetful in that delightful way that the British sometimes are – a telegram home to his wife saying he was in one place but where should he actually be. But he was prolific in many other areas; he wrote plays, essays, loved to debate and wrote hundreds of poems. But in this volume we concentrate on his essays collected together as “Alarms And Discursions”. Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on 14th June 1936 and is buried in Beaconsfield just outside of London. Many of these essays are also available as an audiobook from our sister company Word Of Mouth as well of books of poems and short stories. Many samples are at http://www.youtube.com/user/PortablePoetry?feature=mhee our youtube channel

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Word To The Wise
    Release dateAug 20, 2013
    ISBN9781780009582
    Alarms And Discursions (A Selection Of Essays)
    Author

    G. K. Chesterton

    G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English writer, philosopher and critic known for his creative wordplay. Born in London, Chesterton attended St. Paul’s School before enrolling in the Slade School of Fine Art at University College. His professional writing career began as a freelance critic where he focused on art and literature. He then ventured into fiction with his novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday as well as a series of stories featuring Father Brown.

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      Book preview

      Alarms And Discursions (A Selection Of Essays) - G. K. Chesterton

      GK Chesterton – Selected Essays - Alarms And Discursions

      The essay is a formidable piece of work.  A good one conveys the argument and the author’s point of view and persuades the reader that action and their involvement is required.  

      Over the centuries many of our novelists and poets have turned to this form to help society collect its thoughts and decide on a course of action.  Today we look at the essays of GK Chesterton.  Prolific as a writer of novels and short stories as well as poetry he wrote some 4,000 essays, a few of which we have gathered here.

      Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Campden hill, Kensington on May 29th 1874.  Originally after attending St Pauls School he went to Slade to learn the illustrators art and literature.   In 1896 he joined a small London publisher and began his journalistic career as a freelance art and literary critic.  In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. Thereafter he obtained weekly columns in the Daily News and The Illustrated London News.  For many he is known as a very fine novelist and the creator of the Father Brown Detective stories which were much influenced by his own beliefs.  A large man – 6’ 42 and 21st in weight he was apt to be forgetful in that delightful way that the British sometimes are – a telegram home to his wife saying he was in one place but where should he actually be.    But he was prolific in many other areas; he wrote plays, essays, loved to debate and wrote hundreds of poems.  But in this volume we concentrate on his essays collected together as Alarms And Discursions. 

      Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on 14th June 1936 and is buried in Beaconsfield just outside of London.

      Many of these essays are also available as an audiobook from our sister company Word Of Mouth as well of books of poems and short stories. Many samples are at http://www.youtube.com/user/PortablePoetry?feature=mhee our youtube channel  

      Index Of Titles

      Anarchist, The

      Appetite Of Earth, The

      Cheese

      Chorus, The

      Criminal Head, A

      Drama Of Dolls, A

      Dukes

      Ethandune

      Field Of Blood, The

      Five Hundred And Fifty-Five

      Flat Freak, The

      Furrows, The

      Futurists, The

      Garden Of The Sea, The

      Glory Of Grey, The

      Gold Of Glastonbury, The

      High Plains, The

      How I Found Superman

      Introductory: On Gargoyles

      Long Bow, The

      Man And His Newspaper, The

      Modern Scrooge, The

      New House, The

      Nightmare, The

      Philosophy Of Sight Seeing, The

      Red Town, The

      Romance Of The Marshes, A

      Sentimentalist, The

      Simmons And The Social Tie

      Steward Of The Chiltern Hundreds, The

      Strangeness Of Luxury, The

      Surrender Of A Cockney, The

      Telegraph Poles, The

      Three Kinds Of Men, The

      Triumph Of The Donkey, The

      Wheel, The

      White Horses, The

      Wings Of Stone, The

      Wrath Of The Roses, The

      GK Chesterton – A Biography

      The Anarchist

      I have now lived for about two months in the country, and have gathered the last rich autumnal fruit of a rural life, which is a strong desire to see London. Artists living in my neighbourhood talk rapturously of the rolling liberty of the landscape, the living peace of woods. But I say to them (with a slight Buckinghamshire accent), Ah, that is how Cockneys feel. For us real old country people the country is reality; it is the town that is romance. Nature is as plain as one of her pigs, as commonplace, as comic, and as healthy. But civilization is full of poetry, even if it be sometimes an evil poetry. The streets of London are paved with gold; that is, with the very poetry of avarice. With these typically bucolic words I touch my hat and go ambling away on a stick, with a stiffness of gait proper to the Oldest Inhabitant; while in my more animated moments I am taken for the Village Idiot. Exchanging heavy but courteous salutations with other gaffers, I reach the station, where I ask for a ticket for London where the king lives. Such a journey, mingled of provincial fascination and fear, did I successfully perform only a few days ago; and alone and helpless in the capital, found myself in the tangle of roads around the Marble Arch.

      A faint prejudice may possess the mind that I have slightly exaggerated my rusticity and remoteness. And yet it is true as I came to that corner of the Park that, for some unreasonable reason of mood, I saw all London as a strange city and the civilization itself as one enormous whim. The Marble Arch itself, in its new insular position, with traffic turning dizzily all about it, struck me as a placid monstrosity. What could be wilder than to have a huge arched gateway, with people going everywhere except under it? If I took down my front door and stood it up all by itself in the middle of my back garden, my village neighbours (in their simplicity) would probably stare. Yet the Marble Arch is now precisely that; an elaborate entrance and the only place by which no one can enter. By the new arrangement its last weak pretence to be a gate has been taken away. The cabman still cannot drive through it, but he can have the delights of riding round it, and even (on foggy nights) the rapture of running into it. It has been raised from the rank of a fiction to the dignity of an obstacle.

      As I began to walk across a corner of the Park, this sense of what is strange in cities began to mingle with some sense of what is stern as well as strange. It was one of those queer-coloured winter days when a watery sky changes to pink and grey and green, like an enormous opal. The trees stood up grey and angular, as if in attitudes of agony; and here and there on benches under the trees sat men as grey and angular as they. It was cold even for me, who had eaten a large breakfast and purposed to eat a perfectly Gargantuan lunch; it was colder for the men under the trees. And to eastward through the opalescent haze, the warmer whites and yellows of the houses in Park-lane shone as unsubstantially as if the clouds themselves had taken on the shape of mansions to mock the men who sat there in the cold. But the mansions were real, like the mockery.

      No one worth calling a man allows his moods to change his convictions; but it is by moods that we understand other men's convictions. The bigot is not he who knows he is right; every sane man knows he is right. The bigot is he whose emotions and imagination are too cold and weak to feel how it is that other men go wrong. At that moment I felt vividly how men might go wrong, even unto dynamite. If one of those huddled men under the trees had stood up and asked for rivers of blood, it would have been erroneous but not irrelevant. It would have been appropriate and in the picture; that lurid grey picture of insolence on one side and impotence on the other. It may be true (on the whole it is) that this social machine we have made is better than anarchy. Still, it is a machine; and we have made it. It does hold those poor men helpless: and it does lift those rich men high ... and such men, good Lord! By the time I flung myself on a bench beside another man I was half inclined to try anarchy for a change.

      The other was of more prosperous appearance than most of the men on such seats; still, he was not what one calls a gentleman, and had probably worked at some time like a human being. He was a small, sharp-faced man, with grave, staring eyes, and a beard somewhat foreign. His clothes were black; respectable and yet casual; those of a man who dressed conventionally because it was a bore to dress unconventionally as it is. Attracted by this and other things, and wanting an outburst for my bitter social feelings, I tempted him into speech, first about the cold, and then about the General Election. To this the respectable man replied:

      Well, I don't belong to any party myself. I'm an Anarchist.

      I looked up and almost expected fire from heaven. This coincidence was like the end of the world. I had sat down feeling that somehow or other Park-lane must be pulled down; and I had sat down beside the man who wanted to pull it down. I bowed in silence for an instant under the approaching apocalypse; and in that instant the man turned sharply and started talking like a torrent.

      Understand me, he said. Ordinary people think an Anarchist means a man with a bomb in his pocket. Herbert Spencer was an Anarchist. But for that fatal admission of his on page 793, he would be a complete Anarchist. Otherwise, he agrees wholly with Pidge.

      This was uttered with such blinding rapidity of syllabification as to be a better test of teetotalism than the Scotch one of saying Biblical criticism six times. I attempted to speak, but he began again with the same rippling rapidity.

      You will say that Pidge also admits government in that tenth chapter so easily misunderstood. Bolger has attacked Pidge on those lines. But Bolger has no scientific training. Bolger is a psychometrist, but no sociologist. To any one who has combined a study of Pidge with the earlier and better discoveries of Kruxy, the fallacy is quite clear. Bolger confounds social coercion with coercional social action.

      His rapid rattling mouth shut quite tight suddenly, and he looked steadily and triumphantly at me, with his head on one side. I opened my mouth, and the mere motion seemed to sting him to fresh verbal leaps.

      Yes, he said, that's all very well. The Finland Group has accepted Bolger. But, he said, suddenly lifting a long finger as if to stop me, but Pidge has replied. His pamphlet is published. He has proved that Potential Social Rebuke is not a weapon of the true Anarchist. He has shown that just as religious authority and political authority have gone, so must emotional authority and psychological authority. He has shown

      I stood up in a sort of daze. I think you remarked, I said feebly, that the mere common populace do not quite understand Anarchism - Quite so, he said with burning swiftness; as I said, they think any Anarchist is a man with a bomb, whereas -

      But great heavens, man! I said; it's the man with the bomb that I understand! I wish you had half his sense. What do I care how many German dons tie themselves in knots about how this society began? My only interest is about how soon it will end. Do you see those fat white houses over in Park-lane, where your masters live?

      He assented and muttered something about concentrations of capital.

      Well, I said, if the time ever comes when we all storm those houses, will you tell me one thing? Tell me how we shall do it without authority? Tell me how you will have an army of revolt without discipline?

      For the first instant he was doubtful; and I had bidden him farewell, and crossed the street again, when I saw him open his mouth and begin to run after me. He had remembered something out of Pidge.

      I escaped, however, and as I leapt on an omnibus I saw again the enormous emblem of the Marble Arch. I saw that massive symbol of the modern mind: a door with no house to it; the gigantic gate of Nowhere.

      The Appetite Of Earth

      I was walking the other day in a kitchen garden, which I find has somehow got attached to my premises, and I was wondering why I liked it. After a prolonged spiritual self-analysis I came to the conclusion that I like a kitchen garden because it contains things to eat. I do not mean that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden is often very beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on some monstrous cabbage is much subtler and grander than the mere freakish and theatrical splashing of yellow and violet on a pansy. Few of the flowers merely meant for ornament are so ethereal as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautiful as an orchard; but why is it that the word orchard sounds as beautiful as the word flower-garden, and yet also sounds more satisfactory? I suggest again my extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery: that it contains things to eat.

      The cabbage is a solid; it can be approached from all sides at once; it can be realized by all senses at once. Compared with that the sunflower, which can only be seen, is a mere pattern, a thing painted on a flat wall. Now, it is this sense of the solidity of things that can only be uttered by the metaphor of eating. To express the cubic content of a turnip, you must be all round it at once. The only way to get all round a turnip at once is to eat the turnip. I think any poetic mind that has loved solidity, the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, the firmness of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were things to eat. If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only white firwood were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread: but there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles, certain split stones of blue and green, that make me wish my teeth were stronger.

      Somebody staring into the sky with the same ethereal appetite declared that the moon was made of green cheese. I never could conscientiously accept the full doctrine. I am Modernist in this matter. That the moon is made of cheese I have believed from childhood; and in the course of every month a giant (of my acquaintance) bites a big round piece out of it. This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not contrary to it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some degree actually contradicted by the senses and the reason; first because if the moon were made of green cheese it would be inhabited; and second because if it were made of green cheese it would be green. A blue moon is said to be an unusual sight; but I cannot think that a green one is much more common. In fact, I think I have seen the moon looking like every other sort of cheese except a green cheese. I have seen it look exactly like a cream cheese: a circle of warm white upon a warm faint violet sky above a cornfield in Kent. I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese, rising a dull red copper disk amid masts and dark waters at Honfleur. I have seen it look like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an ordinary sensible Prussian blue sky; and I have once seen it so naked and ruinous-looking, so strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyere cheese, that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it, as if it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and unearthly cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green; and I incline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough. The moon, like everything else, will ripen by the

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