14 July, A Chesterton Calendar (With a Comment From the Old Curmudgeon)

I seldom comment on my Chesterton Calendar posts, but I cannot allow this one to pass! Tremendous Trifles was published in 1909 when Chesterton was still a protestant and an active Liberal. Whilst he never officially eschewed his liberalism, after his conversion to the Faith of Christ in 1922, he took a much dimmer view of it.

He says, in this excerpt,

Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual, and a ritual, meaning far beyond its immediate political results. It is a religious service. 

I wonder how he would have reacted if the 'huge public building' had been la cathédrale de Notre-Dame de Paris? It definitely was, and is a 'huge public building'! Would it still have had a 'spiritual and ritual meaning'?

I fear that here he is still suffering from the 19th century Whig, Liberal tendency to romanticise the Revolution.

JULY 14th

THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE

The destruction of the Bastille was not a reform: it was something more important than a reform. It was an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image. The people saw the building like a giant looking at them with a score of eyes, and they struck at it as at a carved face. For of all the shapes in which that immense illusion called Materialism can terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive is that of the big building. Man feels like a fly, an accident in the thing he has himself made. It requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man could unmake it. Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual, and a ritual, meaning far beyond its immediate political results. It is a religious service. If, for instance, the Socialists were numerous or courageous enough to capture and smash up the Bank of England you might argue for ever about the inutility of the act, and how it really did not touch the root of the economic problem in the correct manner. But mankind would never forget it. It would change the world.

‘Tremendous Trifles.’

Chesterton, G. K.. The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books] (Kindle Locations 44569-44578). Catholic Way Publishing. Kindle Edition.