In 1905, the English writer, journalist, and philosopher G. K.
Chesterton published a book of essays critiquing the ideas of his literary
contemporaries (even though many of them, like George Bernard Shaw, also happened
to be his personal friends), entitled Heretics.
His book was aimed at a host of positions that he deeply opposed,
including skepticism, relativism, and nihilism.
In fact, the trends of thought that he viewed as precarious sophisms
covered a whole range of topics; some particular to his time, and some (like
racism) that are still with us today.
Orthodoxy, which appeared in 1908, was intended to be a companion
volume, in which Chesterton set out to present, in an unsystematic and very
personal way, his own beliefs. It, too,
contained ideas specific to its time, but also set out a lasting philosophy
based on Chesterton’s optimistic, common-sense Christianity, and his deep and
abiding sense of wonder at the world. In
this work, so filled with the illuminating paradoxes for which he is justly
famous,[1] Chesterton devoted a chapter to what he described as “The Ethics of
Elfland.”[2]
He set out to discuss “what
ethic and philosophy come from being fed on fairy tales.”[3] Noting the fact that that many fairy tales
are designed to teach a moral or lesson, he made it clear that his essay was
“not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but with the whole
spirit of its law.”[4] It was not the
individual message of the individual fairy tale that he was concerned with, but,
“I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.”[5] For Chesterton, fairy tales were, “in the true
sense of the word, reasonable…in the true sense of the word,
necessary.”[6] This necessity arose out
of the synthesis of reason and imagination that the fairy tale alone
possessed. For Chesterton, the fairy
tale view was a complete and true version of the universe. Science could only present facts; fairy tales
allowed us to understand them. “When we
are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly
as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to
horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it
is magic.”[7] Chesterton saw the fairy
tale as a means of understanding the world around us, of giving us a sense of the
underlying meaning and wonder of things.
“The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the
terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact
and its mystery. A tree grows fruit
because it is a magic tree. Water runs
downhill because it is bewitched. The
sun shines because it is bewitched.”[8]
In this paradox, Chesterton
sought to awaken in us the sense that fairy tales teach us to believe in magic
because life itself is magical. Fairy
tales do not reject logic; they simply extend it to the imaginary. “If the three brothers all ride horses, there
are six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true rationalism, and Fairy
Land is full of it.”[9] We have all seen
birds fly, but that is not proof that dragons can’t also fly. For Chesterton, the whole world was magical,
and fairy tales served to remind us of this.
In what is probably his
best-known work, the novel The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton’s protagonist,
Gabriel Syme, receives the moniker Thursday when he is given a seat on the
Central Anarchist Council of Europe, whose members are called by the days of
the week. He lives through a series of
bewildering adventures, culminating on the night of a great masquerade
ball. Syme sees all the forms of nature
dancing before him as he beholds the costumed dancers. He sees a man dressed as a windmill, another
as an elephant. There is a dancing
lamppost, a dancing apple tree, and a dancing ship. One reveler is even dressed as a
hornbill. He sees a fairy dancing with a
pillar-box and a peasant girl dancing with the moon. “One would have thought that the untamable
tune of some mad musician had set all the common objects of field and street
dancing an eternal jig. And long
afterwards, when Syme was middle-aged and at rest, he could never see one of
those particular objects—a lamppost, or an apple tree, or a windmill—without
thinking that it was a strayed reveler from that revel of masquerade.”[10] This is the world of the fairy tale, where a
fairy dances with a pillar-box and a peasant girl dances with the moon, but it
is also the “everyday” world—transformed by wonder.
Before arriving at the
masquerade ball, Gabriel Syme and his companions on the Council of Days are
forced by circumstances to share their individual ideas about the nature of
Nature itself, and Syme cries out: “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole
world? It is that we have only known the
back of the world. We see everything
from behind, and it looks brutal. That
is not a tree, but the back of a tree.
That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping
and hiding a face? If we could only get
round in front—”[11] It is only after
experiencing the costume ball, “as absurd as Alice in Wonderland, yet as grave
and kind as a love story,”[12] that Syme is able to see the “faces” of the
world around him—as revelers strayed from the ball. This is the mystery of the world revealed by
the fairy tale, where an object as common as a lamppost can seem like a reveler
at a dance.
Chesterton felt those ideas,
he said, from childhood, before he had heard of philosophy or theology. All children who read fairy tales secretly
hope they are actually true. Chesterton,
as he grew to be a man, realized that they were even truer than the truths of
science. For him, a sunset was magic,
magic accessible to all, and the Divine was a magician. Scientists might still debate among
themselves why this or that exact combination of meteorology and optics,
oceanography or quantum physics, results in a sunset—but what is undeniable is
that a sunset causes awe and wonder in the human heart. For Chesterton, the sunset was a magician’s
painting, a wonder greater than the conjurer summoning a glass castle from the
sea.
Hermann Hesse, in his novel
Die Morgenlandfahrt, usually translated into English as The Journey to the
East, told the story of a vast and timeless journey made up of all the
spiritual seekers and artists, imaginary or real, of every time and place. They form a league of searchers traveling
toward the light. Don Quixote and
Parzival are members, as are Zoroaster and Plato. Albertus Magnus and the modern artist Paul
Klee are fellow travelers. Hesse (the
mysterious H. H.) and his wife Ninon take part in the journey. The original title of the book, Die
Morgenlandfahrt, has rich and complex connotations that are not easily captured
in the English version. The German title
can be translated as the “The Journey to the Orient,” but it can also mean “The
Tomorrowland Journey.”[13] The story can
be interpreted as the voyage toward enlightenment—as the East represents the
coming of the light—but it is also important to remember that Morgenland, in addition to meaning "the East" or "the Orient," is used by several German Romantic writers as a name for Fairy Land or Jinnistan. In this sense, the title Die Morgenlandfahrt can also be interpreted as the journey toward imagination and
wonder. Hesse described the goal of the
journey as “the home and youth of the soul.”[14] He likened the blissful experience of the
journey itself to “the same secret as the happiness in dreams…the freedom to
experience everything imaginable simultaneously, to exchange the outward and
inward easily, to move Time and Space about like scenes in a theatre.”[15] The journey brings meaning and hope with it,
“as we conquered the war-shattered world by our faith and transformed it into a
Paradise.”[16] The journey is one of
internal transformation, a journey of the imagination, but its effects on all
those that it touches are real. The journey
has as its goal the “home” of which Novalis spoke,[17] the Golden Age of fairy
tales and universal poesy.
Chesterton saw the world of
fairy tales, the Morgenland, as a place of wonder but not unreason, of
happiness but not lawlessness. On the
contrary, he saw the laws of elfland as being fairer and more reasonable than
any other laws humans had claimed to discover. At the center of the ethics of elfland is the
law of reciprocity, the law of gratitude.
In order to achieve a boon, one must follow the rules, because obedience
to the rules is payment for the boon.
Cinderella must return by midnight.
She must return by midnight not because it is the “law,” but because her
obedience is payment for the favor she receives. It is less a law of right or wrong than of
worthiness or unworthiness. In fairy
tales, people must do all sorts of strange things, from singing a certain song
to retrieving a certain sword. They do
these things in order to show their worthiness; their true-heartedness. It is by fidelity, fortitude, and devotion to
duty that magic favors or gifts are gained.
But in a greater sense, it is by using these virtues as an expression of
gratitude that the gift of magic is reciprocated.
Over and over again in fairy
tales, the true heart is separated from the false by its ability to express
gratitude. The boy who stops to thank
the old woman is the one who discovers that she is a Wise Woman. “For the universe is a single jewel, and
while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of
this jewel it is literally true. The
cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another
one.”[18] The universe itself is a fairy
tale told by a divine storyteller and “the proper form of thanks to it is some
form of humility and restraint…”[19] For
Chesterton, the great lesson that he learned in the nursery was humble
gratitude; gratitude for sunsets, for dragons, and for all things good and
extraordinary.
[1] Quentin Lauer, S.J., G.K. Chesterton, Philosopher Without
Portfolio, (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. 30.
[2] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1908), pp. 81-118.
[3] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 88.
[4] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 89.
[5] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 89.
[6] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 89.
[7] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 93.
[8] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 94.
[9] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 90.
[10] G.K.Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (New York: Capricorn
Books, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960), p. 184.
[11] G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, pp. 176-177.
[12] G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, p. 186.
[13] Mark Boulby, Hermann Hesse: His Mind and Art (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1967), p. 248.
[14] Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East, trans. Hilda Rosner (New
York: Picador Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) p. 27.
[15] Hermann Hesse, p. 28.
[16] Hermann Hesse, p. 28.
[17] Hermann Hesse, p. 13.
[18] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 116-117.
[19] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 117.
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