(no subject)
No Chesterton on Gender, yet, but here is some Chesterton on people rebelling against Christianity by turning to psuedopaganism, for Scott. Rock on into that night, dude.
THERE is a section, perhaps a small section, of Modern Youth which
certainly strikes its elders as hard and sceptical and selfish.
And of these it is customary to say that they are Pagans.
It suddenly flashed across me yesterday (as one of those
obvious truths that evade us even when they are obvious)
that of course what is really the matter with them is that they
have lost their Paganism.
I do not say, as so many journalists say, that they have lost
their Christianity. For it is the quite simple and sober
truth that most of them never had any. It is not their fault,
though every day that passes convinces me more and more that it
is their misfortune. But the notion, so common in novels
and newspapers, that this new generation has rebelled against
old-fashioned orthodoxy is sheer stark historical ignorance.
It is the worst of all kinds of historical ignorance;
ignorance of the historical events we have seen ourselves.
It is absurd to say that a young man of nineteen who mixes
cocktails and Communism in a studio rag in Chelsea is
rebelling against Victorian Virtue or the Family Bible.
You might as well say that a young buck of the Regency who
wrenched off door-knockers and fought with watchmen was rebelling
against the Puritans of 1649 or the tyranny of Oliver Cromwell.
You might as well say that the Cavaliers who revelled at
The Cock in the reign of Charles II were rising in just revolt
against the usurpation of Richard III. No very laborious
historical learning will be needed to perceive that there is
something wrong in the calculation somewhere, if only because it
skips about four or five generations that come in between.
Paganism may be compared to that diffused light that glows
in a landscape when the sun is behind a cloud. So when the true
centre of worship is for some reason invisible or vague, there has
always remained for healthy humanity a sort of glow of gratitude
or wonder or mystical fear, if it were only reflected from ordinary
objects or natural forces or fundamental human traditions.
It was the glory of the great Pagans, in the great days of Paganism,
that natural things had a sort of projected halo of the supernatural.
And he who poured wine upon the altar, or scattered dust upon the grave,
never doubted that he dealt in some way with something divine;
however vague or fanciful or even sceptical he might be about the names
and natures of the divinities. Wine was more than wine; it was a god.
Corn was more than corn; it was a goddess. There is much doubt
and dispute about how literally they understood these statements;
but they certainly understood the first half of the sentence as meaning
exactly what it said. They were not satisfied with realism, because they
never quite lost the sense of something more real than realism.
They were not content to call a spade a spade, because it was almost
always a sacred spade; not only when it dug the graves of the dead,
but even when it dug the garden to grow fruit for the living.
They were not content with the dead certainty that eggs are eggs,
because they were full of divine uncertainty about the birds,
which were their signals and auguries. And this natural magic
in things, mixed and modified with things greater and things less,
has descended through the civilized centuries to men of every sort;
not only to the mass of men who are traditionalists, but generally
also to the few men who are revolutionists. Men like Shelley or Heine
might get rid of religion, but they would not get rid of this great
glamour of natural things, which seemed to make them preternatural.
That legend still lingers from Shelley to Swinburne, from Heine
to Wilde, and after that something begins to go wrong with it.
They are not the first generation of rebels to be Pagans.
They are the first generation of rebels not to be Pagans.
The young fool, the flower of all our cultural evolution,
the heir of all the ages, and the precious trust we have
to pass on to posterity--the young fool can no longer be
trusted to be a Pantheist, let alone a good hearty Pagan.
He does not realize in the least that Bacchus has mixed
his cocktail, and Pomona dropped the cherry into it.
He is under the strange delusion that eggs are eggs and that
spades are only spades. He entertains a perfectly extraordinary
idea that wine is wine and that women are just women.
He is cut off from all the secret secondary meanings and messages
of things; the truths that come to the sensitive in silence;
the atmosphere around every object, that is almost visible
like a halo. He has lost the traditions of humanity, and rather
especially the traditions of heathenry. I suppose it would
not do to send out missionaries to convert him to Paganism.
But he is a much more stupid and stunted and limited person
since he left off being a Pagan.
It is what has gone wrong with a whole section of the rising generation.