FANCIES VERSUS FADS
| BY THE SAME AUTHOR |
| Charles Dickens All Things Considered Tremendous Trifles Alarms and Discursions A Miscellany of Men The Ballad of the White Horse Wine, Water, and Song The Flying Inn A Shilling for My Thoughts The Uses of Diversity |
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
{iv}
First Published in 1923
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
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I HAVE strung these things together on a slight enough thread; but asthe things themselves are slight, it is possible that the thread (andthe metaphor) may manage to hang together. These notes range over veryvariegated topics and in many cases were made at very different times.They concern all sorts of things from lady barristers to cave-men, andfrom psycho-analysis to free verse. Yet they have this amount of unityin their wandering, that they all imply that it is only a moretraditional spirit that is truly able to wander. The wild theorists ofour time are quite unable to wander. When they talk of making new roads,they are only making new ruts. Each of them is necessarily imprisoned inhis own curious cosmos; in other words, he is limited by the verylargeness of his own generalization. The explanations of the Marxianmust not go outside economics; and the student of Freud is forbidden toforget sex. To see only the fanciful side of these serious sects mayseem a very frivolous pleasure; and I will not dispute that these arevery frivolous criticisms. I only submit that this frivolity is the lastlingering form of freedom.
In short, the note of these notes, so to speak, is that it is only froma normal standpoint that all the nonsense of the world takes onsomething of{vi} the wild interest of wonderland. I mean it is only in themirror of a very moderate sense and sanity, which is all I have everclaimed to possess, that even insanities can appear as images clearenough to appeal to the imagination. After all, the ordinary orthodoxperson is he to whom the heresies can appear as fantasies. After all, itis we ordinary human and humdrum people who can enjoy eccentricity as asort of elfland; while the eccentrics are too serious even to know thatthey are elves. When a man tells us that he disapproves of childrenbeing told fairy-tales, it is we who can perceive that he is himself afairy. He himself has not the least idea of it. When he says he woulddiscourage children from playing with tin soldiers, because it ismilitarism, it is we and not he who can enjoy in fancy the fantasticpossibilities of his idea. It is we who suddenly think of childrenplaying with little tin figures of philanthropists, rather round andwith tin top-hats; the little tin gods of our commercial religion. It iswe who develop his imaginative idea for him, by suggesting little leadendolls of Conscientious Objectors in fixed attitudes of refinedre