Next Chesterton Meeting on Saturday

Just a reminder that the next meeting of the G.K. Chesterton Society of Ireland will be this Saturday, the 21st November at 1pm in the usual venue of the Central Catholic Library, 74 Merrion Square, Dublin. The text for discussion will be the next three chapters of Heretics, which are: Omar and the Sacred Vine, The Mildness of the Yellow Press, and The Moods of George Moore. As I always say, they are VERY short chapters, you would read all three in one sitting. The text is available online at the link given below.

We also resolved to look out for Chesterton in the news, so if you come across any such mention, perhaps you could take a clipping, a print-out, or just a mental note.

It's free and everybody is welcome. Discussion is always free-ranging, so don't worry if you don't know much about Chesterton.

Here is a link to the text online.

Saturday's Meeting Postponed to July 25th

Dear friends

Unfortunately, we've had to postpone Saturday's meeting. The Central Catholic Library has just learned of a festival happening in their vicinity on Saturday and have decided it's best to stay closed on that day.

We have rescheduled for Saturday 25th of this month, again at twelve p.m, again in the Central Catholic Library. The text for discussion is still the first three chapters of Heretics.

Sorry for the postponement and I hope you can make it on the 25th.

Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton updated

I've just updated my Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton site-- an article-by-article journey through Chesterton's thought and works. The articles originally appear in the Open Door magazine. I've tried to make it more navigable, too.

http://chestertonwisdom.weebly.com/

Next Meeting of the Chesterton Society!

The next meeting of the G.K. Chesterton Society will be on Saturday the eleventh of July, at twelve, in the Central Catholic Library as before. (The address is 74 Merrion Square.) I hope you can make it and please feel welcome to invite anyone you know who might be interested.

We are going to start looking at what is perhaps Chesterton's first major work, Heretics. So if possible please read the first three chapters of that book-- they are very short. If you can't get your hands on a physical copy, it's easily available in many places online, including here. They are very short chapters.

If you don't get around to reading it, though, don't hesitate to come along anyway.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

I wrote 'next Sunday' as the day for our brief meeting an hour before the Belloc meeting!

It is actually NEXT SATURDAY!

Everything else is true, though. So, the date is Saturday 6th June. The time is 12:00. And the venue is the Central Catholic Library.

See you there, hopefully.

Meeting

Dear friends

Apologies for the late notice, but we have decided to have a brief meeting ahead of the Irish Hilaire Belloc Society's next meeting, which takes place in the Central Catholic Library on the 6th June-- next Sunday. The Belloc Society are meeting at 1:00 so we will meet at twelve.

The purpose of this meeting is to decide the direction of our little Society. It has languished for some time, hopefully we can put some life back into it.

Please do come along, and please email me at Maolsheachlann@gmail.com if you can make it. Then you can stay for the Belloc meeting, if you want!

Many thanks

Maolsheachlann

Here are the details of the Belloc meetin

he next meeting of the Belloc Society will take place on Saturday , 6th June, 2015 in the Central Catholic Library between 13.00 and 14.45.

Below are a number of links you might look at :
The first is a link to the chosen text the coming meeting from 'The Servile State'
http://alternative-right.blogspot.ie/2014/07/hilaire-belloc-servile-state-and.html?m=1

The second is to a youtube video of Hilaire Belloc singing three songs at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmCTfnNvafo

and the third is to BBC Radio 4 extra for Sunday 24th last at 7.15
where you can find the third of four readings of Belloc's "The Old Road" [15 minutes each in length]
http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fprogrammes%2Fb0075qxn%23auto&h=uAQEUGcVZ&enc=AZMnkVX3vpNv3RpSC-7MaE-tVcehQjqfwqmlrhq12bORf-lrDIggOtIRRDPtOhZtDXYHEAnDuYCkPSCqJNyvGgkg8Hw3ZNRsD50-HYJqIA46JAoZXDAcJ-MkbW6YjpMDs_YkEK2F-6fXSzTdi2YCbOAumTacKvldliWAJJzLH_y6og&s=1

A Tour Through Chesterton's Ideas

Has anyone ever come up to you and said, "Hieronymous" (let's say your name is Hieronymous), "I'd really love to learn more about this C.P. Chesterfield, or whatever his name is, that you yak on about so incessantly. Is there a website you can direct me to that will give me an overview of his life and works in a series of short, fun articles?"

Well, next time that happens, you can say, "Yes, Jemima" (let's assume your friend's name is Jemima), "there is! It's called The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton, and even though it's written by that twit Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh, it's quite good! Just click here!". (I'm assuming you have hyperlinked conversations with your friends.)

This site is a collection of the articles on Chesterton that I've been writing for The Open Door magazine. I intend to keep adding to it as long as my articles keep appearing in the magazine. After all, there is a near-infinity of things to write about Chesterton, since Chesterton wrote about everything....

Hope you enjoy it! Please consider sharing if you do.

The History of the Beaconsfield War Memorial

This blog has been a long time neglected, while the Facebook page of the group has been quite active. I'm hoping to resucitate the blog! All contributions welcome.

This is an entertaining and quite profound episode from Chesterton's Autobiography, in which he describes the discussions that went on in his home town of Beaconsfield over whether a WWI memorial should be erected, and what form it takes. But, as you'll see, the episode has many more depths to it than that...

I have lived in Beaconsfield from the time when it was almost a village to the time when, as the enemy profanely says, it is almost a suburb. It would be truer to say that the two things in some sense still exist side by side; and the popular instinct has recognised the division by actually talking about the Old Town and the New Town. I once planned a massive and exhaustive sociological work, in several volumes, which was to be called "The Two Barbers of Beaconsfield" and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent citizens to whom I went to get shaved. For those two shops do indeed belong to two different civilisations. The hairdresser of the New Town belongs to the new world and has the spotlessness of the specialist; the other has what may be called the ambidexterity of the peasant, shaving (so to speak) with one hand while he stuffs squirrels or sells tobacco with the other. The latter tells me from his own recollection what happened in Old Beaconsfield; the former, or his assistants, tell me from the Daily Mail what has not happened in a wider world. But I suggest this comparison, merely as an introduction to a parallel matter of local interest; which happens to embody, better perhaps than any other emblem, all those large matters that are more than local. If I wanted to write a book about the whole of this great passage in the history of England, including the Great War and many other changes almost as great, I should write it in the form of a History of the Beaconsfield War Memorial.

The plain primary proposal was that a cross should be set up at the cross-roads. Before the discussion was half over there had entered into it the following subjects of debate: (1) The Position of Woman in the Modern World, (2) Prohibition and the Drink Question, (3) The Excellence or Exaggeration of the Cult of Athletics, (4) The Problem of Unemployment, Especially in Relation to Ex-Service Men, (5) The Question of Support for Hospitals and the General Claims of Surgery and Medicine, (6) The Justice of the War, (7) Above all, or rather under all, for it was in many ways masked or symbolically suggested, the great war of religion which has never ceased to divide mankind, especially since that sign was set up among them. Those who debated the matter were a little group of the inhabitants of a little country town; the rector and the doctor and the bank manager and the respectable trades-men of the place, with a few hangers-on like myself, of the more disreputable professions of journalism or the arts. But the powers that were present there in the spirit came out of all the ages and all the battlefields of history; Mahomet was there and the Iconoclasts, who came riding out of the East to ruin the statues of Italy, and Calvin and Rousseau and the Russian anarchs and all the older England that is buried under Puritanism; and Henry the Third ordering the little images for Westminster and Henry the Fifth, after Agincourt, on his knees before the shrines of Paris. If one could really write that little story of that little place, it would be the greatest of historical monographs.

The first thing to note, as typical of the modern tone, is a certain effect of toleration which actually results in timidity. Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it. There is a further qualification of some interest; that in this, as in many things, there is an immense intellectual superiority in the poor, and even in the ignorant. The cottagers of the Old Town either liked the Cross because it was Christian and said so, or else disliked the Cross because it was Popish and said so. But the leaders of the No-Popery Party were ashamed to talk No-Popery. They did not say in so many words that they thought a Crucifix a wicked thing; but they said, in any number of words, that they thought a parish pump or a public fountain or a municipal motor-bus a good thing. But the greater number of them tended to the proposal of a Club Building, especially for ex-service men; where the latter could have refreshment (that is where the Drink Question came in) or play games (that is where the Athletic Question came in) or possibly even share the Club on equal terms with their wives and women-folk (that is where the Wrongs of Women came in) and generally, in fact, enjoy all that we should desire ex-soldiers to enjoy, if there were really any chance of letting them do so. The scheme was in that sense admirable; but, as it proceeded, it became almost too admirable, in the original Latin sense of astonishing. Those who had propounded it called themselves, I need hardly say, the Practical Party. They justly condemned us of the other group as dreamers and mystical visionaries. They set to work to draw up their plans for the Club; and they were certainly plans of the most magnificent completeness. There were to be cricket-fields and football-fields and swimming-baths and golf-courses, for all I know. The incident has a primary moral, with reference to that strange modern notion about what is practical and constructive, which seems merely to mean what is large and largely advertised. By the end of the controversy the plan of the Practical Party had swelled to the ends of the earth and taken on the dimensions of Aladdin's Palace. There was not the remotest chance of collecting subscriptions for such a scheme; at the rate it was developing it might run to millions. Meanwhile, the vision of the mere visionaries could be realised easily for a few hundred pounds.

And the second moral to the story is this; that the modern mind finds it very difficult to understand the idea of an aim or object. When I was speaking on behalf of the simple stone monument at the cross-roads, I quoted the excellent saying of Mr. Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, when his sister asks him, just before the ball, whether it would not be much more rational if conversation at a ball took the place of dancing; and he answers, "Much more rational, but not half so like a ball." I pointed out that a parish-pump might seem to some more rational than a Cross, but it was not half so like a War Memorial. A club, or a hospital ward, or anything having its own practical purpose, policy and future, would not really be a War Memorial at all; it would not be in practice a memory of the War. If people thought it wrong to have a memory of the War, let them say so. If they did not approve of wasting money on a War Memorial, let us scrap the War Memorial and save the money. But to do something totally different which we wanted to do, on pretence of doing something else that we did not do, was unworthy of Homo sapiens and the dignity of that poor old anthropoid. I got some converts to my view; but I think that many still thought I was not practical; though in fact I was very specially practical, for those who understand what is really meant by a Pragma. The most practical test of the problem of unmemorial memorials was offered by the Rector of Beaconsfield, who simply got up and said, "We already have a ward in the Wycombe Hospital which was supposed to commemorate something. Can anybody here tell me what it commemorates?"

Anyhow, the Cross was the crux; and it is no pun but a plain truth to put it so. But the curious point is that few of those who found the Cross crucial would admit in so many words that it was crucial because it was the Cross. They advanced all sorts of alternative objections or made all sorts of alternative proposals. One lady wished to have a statue of a soldier, and I shuddered inwardly, knowing what such statues can be; fortunately another lady, with a nephew in the Navy, called out indignantly, "What about the sailors?" Whereupon the first lady said with hasty but hearty apology, "Oh, yes; and a sailor as well." Whereupon a third lady, with a brother in the Air Force, proposed that this also should be included in the group; and the first lady with large and generous gestures accepted all and every addition of the kind; so that this magnificent sculptural monument was soon towering into tanks and toppling with aeroplanes. It seemed a little dangerous; but it was safer than a market-cross. Other objections to the latter symbol were adduced, probably to cover the real objection; such as the monument as an obstacle to traffic. The local doctor, an admirable physician but a sceptic of rather a schoolboy sort, observed warmly, "If you do stick up a thing like this, I hope you'll stick a light on it, or all our cars will smash into it in the dark." Whereupon my wife, who was then an ardent Anglo-Catholic, observed with an appearance of dreamy rapture, "Oh, yes! How beautiful! A lamp continually burning before the Cross!" Which was not exactly what the man of science had proposed; but it could not have been more warmly seconded.

Lastly, the most significant part of this social episode was the end of it. If anyone fails to realise how lasting, or lingering, in spite of everything, are the old social forms of England and its structure as an ancient aristocratic state, he could not do better than consider the last quiet and ironic ending of the great battle of the Beaconsfield War Memorial. There was a huge paper plebiscite in which hardly anybody knew what he was voting for, but which turned up somehow with a narrow numerical majority for the building of the Club. The Club, for which the practical majority had voted was never built. The Cross, for which the more mystical minority had largely forgotten to vote, was built. When the whole fuss of papers and public meetings was over, and everybody was thinking about other things, the rector of the parish raised a quiet subscription of his own among his own co-religionists and sympathisers; got enough money to put up a Cross and put it up. Meanwhile Lord Burnham, the chief landlord of the neighbourhood, equally casually informed the Ex-Service Men and their sympathisers that they could use a hall, which was his property, for their Club, if they liked, they appeared to be perfectly contented; and so far from demanding any other Club, seemed to have become fairly indifferent about the use of this one. So did the Great War pass over Beaconsfield, making the world safe for Democracy and the holding of any number of public meetings full of the revolutionary hopes of the Modern World; and so in the end the whole matter was decided at the private discretion of the Squire and Parson, as it was in the days of old.