I was reminded again today of why Chesterton is one of my favourite writers. The quoted text below is from Heretics, his 1905 collection of essays which analyzed and deconstructed social views of prominent writers in his day such as H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, etc. It is the forerunner to the much more famous Orthodoxy and is well worth reading. This passage, written in criticism of modern writers' distaste for the institution of the family, rings so true for me as a member of a large family who has married into another large family. I have 8 very unique siblings and 9 unique sibling-in-laws; as a married man now, the possibility of becoming a father to more unique individuals is exciting, and as Chesterton puts it, romantic.
"The institution of the family is to be commended for
precisely the same reasons that the institution of the nation, or the
institution of the city, are in this matter to be commended. It is a good thing
for a man to live in a family for the same reason that it is a good thing for a
man to be besieged in a city. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family
in the same sense that it is a beautiful and delightful thing for a man to be
snowed up in a street. They all force him to realize that life is not a thing
from outside, but a thing from inside. Above all, they all insist upon the fact
that life, if it be a truly stimulating and fascinating life, is a thing which,
of its nature, exists in spite of ourselves. The modern writers who have
suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution,
have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness,
bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of
course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is
wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It
is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other
little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. It is
exactly because our brother George is not interested in our religious
difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family
has some of the bracing qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because
our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister
Sarah that the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons
and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply
revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa
is excitable, like mankind Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind.
Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world. Those who wish,
rightly or wrongly, to step out of all this, do definitely wish to step into a
narrower world. They are dismayed and terrified by the largeness and variety of
the family. Sarah wishes to find a world wholly consisting of private
theatricals; George wishes to think the Trocadero a cosmos. I do not say, for a
moment, that the flight to this narrower life may not be the right thing for
the individual, any more than I say the same thing about flight into a
monastery. But I do say that anything is bad and artificial which tends to make
these people succumb to the strange delusion that they are stepping into a
world which is actually larger and more varied than their own. The best way
that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind
would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well
as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us
did on the day that he was born. This is, indeed, the sublime and special
romance of the family. It is romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic
because it is everything that its enemies call it. It is romantic because it is
arbitrary. It is romantic because it is there. So long as you have groups of
men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian atmosphere. It is
when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men. The element
of adventure begins to exist; for an adventure is, by its nature, a thing that
comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. Falling
in love has been often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic
accident. In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something
of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and
transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an unbearable beauty,
like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far as we have certainly
something to do with the matter; in so far as we are in some sense prepared to
fall in love and in some sense jump into it; in so far as we do to some extent
choose and to some extent even judge—in all this falling in love is not truly
romantic, is not truly adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure
is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk
suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which
we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and
leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt
is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into
the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is
incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which
could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when
we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale."
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith) (2011-03-30). Heretics (pp.
81-82). Kindle Edition.
