This week is supposed to belong to C. S. Lewis, but here I am quoting Chesterton. Again. Don’t be sad. You’ll read plenty of Lewis quotes this week, I assure you, and rightly so. He is to be honored, but thanks to a second gunman on a grassy knoll, Lewis has already had to share this week for the past 50 years, so my blog entry will come as no surprise to him.
Enough chit-chat. Back to my Chestercrush.
In his epic battle against the so-called “progressives,” Chesterton notes that their goals are always changing. The “ideal” to be attained is always the newest one. Everyone votes for “Change,” even as recently as 2008, but the reality is that when the masses are sold on “Change,” the only ones to actually reap anything profitable are the ones who are selling it. If “progress” is the only goal, then any change at all makes the constituency happy. But it doesn’t make them happy freemen. It makes them happy slaves, and it prevents any real progress.
Here’s an excerpt from Orthodoxy, Chapter 7, “The Eternal Revolution”:
“This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards which progress is directed; it must be fixed. Whistler used to make many rapid studies of a sitter; it did not matter if he tore up twenty portraits. But it would matter if he looked up twenty times, and each time saw a new person sitting placidly for his portrait. So it does not matter (comparatively speaking) how often humanity fails to imitate its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitful. But it does frightfully matter how often humanity changes its ideal; for then all its old failures are fruitless. The question therefore becomes this: How can we keep the artist discontented with his pictures while preventing him from being vitally discontented with his art? How can we make a man always dissatisfied with his work, yet always satisfied with working? How can we make sure that the portrait painter will throw the portrait out of window instead of taking the natural and more human course of throwing the sitter out of window?”
This is only a small portion of a fantastic essay from a monumental book. You can read it online, or download several different formats, here.
You can download it for your Kindle App here.
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