A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

G.K. Day: Manalive

When he was still alive, G.K. Chesterton would usually refer to himself as a journalist rather than a Christian apologist, poet, or social critic as the rest of the world usually refers to him today (if they refer to him at all).  In addition to writing multiple articles a week for a number of periodicals for over 30 years, Chesterton also wrote dozens of other books.  They were collections of poetry, treatises, short stories, and even a number of novels.  The following is an excerpt from one of his most interesting novels: Manalive.

In it, an enigmatic individual named Innocent Smith arrives one day at a quaint inn in London.  He and his spontaneity, courage, love, and philosophy of life exemplify Chesterton’s beliefs and vision for the way a man should live his life.

"This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed.  He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.  It is as if a man were found gambling wildly in a gambling hell, and you found that he only played for trouser buttons.  It is as if you found a man making a clandestine appointment with a lady at a Covent Garden ball, and then you found it was his grandmother.  Everything is ugly and discreditable, except the facts; everything is wrong about him, except that he has done no wrong.

"It will then be asked, `Why does Innocent Smith continued far into his middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many false charges?'  To this I merely answer that he does it because he really is happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and alive.  He is so young that climbing garden trees and playing silly practical jokes are still to him what they once were to us all.  And if you ask me yet again why he alone among men should be fed with such inexhaustible follies, I have a very simple answer to that, though it is one that will not be approved.

"There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don't like it.  If Innocent is happy, it is because he IS innocent.  If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments.  It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy.  It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods.  It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.

If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman, he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love-letter was like a song-- at least, not a comic song."

"Do not imagine, please, that any such attitude is easy to me or appeals in any particular way to my sympathies.  I am an Irishman, and a certain sorrow is in my bones, bred either of the persecutions of my creed, or of my creed itself.  Speaking singly, I feel as if a man was tied to tragedy, and there was no way out of the trap of old age and doubt.  But if there is a way out, then, by Christ and St. Patrick, this is the way out.  If one could keep as happy as a child or a dog, it would be by being as innocent as a child, or as sinless as a dog.  Barely and brutally to be good--that may be the road, and he may have found it.”