Indeed, in his 1907 book Heretics Chesterton had already argued the case for the connection between convictions and creativity in his comments on his friend George Bernard Shaw:

. . . it is quite an error to suppose that absence of definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility. A man who believes something is ready and witty, because he has all his weapons about him. He can apply his test in an instant. The man engaged in a conflict with a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw may fancy he has ten faces; similarly a man engaged against a brilliant duellist may fancy that the sword of his foe has turned to ten swords in his hand. But this is not really because the man is playing with ten swords, it is because he is aiming very straight with one.

And he adds another point that applies to himself as well as to Shaw: any man with such gifts could be constantly making up merely verbal paradoxes or witticisms at will. The real interest of this kind of wit is that it comes out of a direct perception of truth based on principle.

In this text, we see this process from about as close as it is possible to get unless we are literally standing over an author as he writes. These recently discovered aphorisms are Chesterton’s spontaneous reactions to a book, Platitudes in the Making: Precepts and Advices for Gentlefolk, by Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948). So far as we can tell, Chesterton received this book from Jackson, the first biographer of George Bernard Shaw, when it was privately printed in 1911. By then, Jackson had already gained a reputation as a socialist thinker. He shared the editorship of the prominent weekly The New Age with another well-known figure, A. R. Orage. And he belonged to that movement of British thought around Shaw that saw itself as progressive, modern, and iconoclastic.

As was typical of Chesterton, though his views could not have been more different from Jackson’s, the two writers were literary friends. Chesterton produced publishers’ blurbs for Jackson’s other books. Jackson never intended his friendly gift to be the occasion for a battle of wit between himself and GKC, but that is what it be came. It appears that, as he read through each of Jackson’s maxims, Chesterton instantly responded with a comment of his own. Since his words were never intended to be seen by anyone, Chesterton is here musing — and amusing himself — privately, trying to get at the truth about each point. Sometimes he wholly approves of what Jackson has written and merely adds “good” or “excellent.” More often, he is moved to wrestle Jackson’s formulation toward more traditional religious and social views, which, properly understood, Chesterton thought even more daring and fresh than so-called advanced positions. So what we have here is a written record of Chesterton’s spontaneous reactions to a worthy opponent, though Ches ter ton’s genius as an aphorist is such that his non-premeditated replies to Jackson’s carefully prepared and categorized sayings gives the impression of a literary lion batting around a young cub.

The story of how this book came to be discovered is itself an intriguing tale worthy of the creator of the priest/detective Father Brown. The trail of evidence begins in San Francisco where, in 1955, an American neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Kessler, bought a copy of Jackson’s Platitudes from a second-hand bookseller. Dr. Kessler found that the book was inscribed, “To G.K. Chesterton with esteem from Holbrook Jackson.” But a still more exciting discovery awaited him when he turned to the text and discovered Chesterton’s hand-written annotations. Chesterton had also drawn on the first page a faun who is dancing and playing a horn. Not knowing what to do with this discovery, Dr. Kessler kept it in his library for years.

In the 1980s, after he had begun subscribing to the Chesterton Review, Dr. Kessler, who was by then living in Paris as a painter, contacted Christiane d’Haussy, the secretary of the French Chesterton Society. They quickly wrote to the Reverend Ian Boyd, C. S. B., the Review’s editor. Father Boyd flew from the magazine’s headquarters at Saint Thomas More College in Sas katoon, Saskatchewan to Paris, confirmed that the aphorisms were indeed Chesterton’s, and took the Jackson book with Chesterton’s annotations to Eng land, where he announced the discovery. From Lon don, an understandably excited Father Boyd called the present writer, who invited Chesterton scholars and the press to a luncheon in Washington in August of 1988. Stories of the find subsequently appeared in the New York Times and other national news outlets.

This edition brings into print for the first time the complete set of these previously unknown aphorisms. In both style and substance, the private, spontaneous Chesterton is the same man we encounter in public. By 1911, Chesterton had already published some of his greatest and most original books such as Heretics, Orthodoxy, and What’s Wrong with the World in addition to studies of Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and Shaw, as well as the early novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday. His regular columns in several British newspapers had gained him a large popular following; and 1911 was also the year of his epic “The Ballad of the White Horse,” and the first collection of Father Brown stories, The Innocence of Father Brown. These words, then, come from a Chesterton at the height of his powers.

Though Chesterton’s basic views were settled by this time and are relatively well known, it is worth looking at some specific lines of his quarrel with Jackson’s position. There is a kind of Shawian/ Nietzschean aspiration toward the Superman in Jackson’s writing that leaves out of the picture many things Chesterton thought essential to the sanely human. For example, Jackson has accepted the notion — which is really the death of what makes us what we are — that intellectual decisions are mere lifeless formulas that restrict freedom. Hence, he begins the whole collection with the precept: “As soon as an idea is accepted it is time to reject it.” For Chesterton, this meant the complete abandonment of everything familiar (in every sense of the word) for an inhuman transcendence: “No: it is time to build another idea on it. You are always rejecting: & you build nothing.” In both theology and ordinary hu man pursuits, real innovation and human freedom come out of something already given, not the mere escape from alleged limitations.

A few pages later, Jackson makes the then common argument that definitions limit ideas and institutions limit life. A great deal of that kind of thought has seeped into the basic assumptions of our own time. But Chesterton, with an eye always fixed on real existing things rather than abstract liberation notes: “Definitions are ideas. A snake’s head and tail don’t ‘limit’ the snake. They make him.” Without being fully aware of what he and others were advocating at the time, Jackson pursued progress in ways that would simply have abolished humanity.

That problem becomes clearer when Jackson turns to the relative roles of intelligence and instinct. In the section appropriately named “Slipping the Cables,” he takes several swipes at the human mind. A few decades later, the Nazis, with their exaltation of will and animality over civilization, would demonstrate the diabolical nature of such appeals to irrationality. Chesterton knew where such thought was headed. For instance, to Jackson’s “Reason is the dotage of instinct,” he replies presciently, “. . . said the sheep haughtily, as they followed each other to the slaughter house.” Jackson seemed to believe that genius, as opposed to mere mental cleverness, was an irrational — but illuminating — force of nature. Chesterton, who valued plain goodness and the great commonalities that united all men, dismisses Jackson’s talk of genius or intelligence with the observation that they “are both trifles” compared with the most important things.

This sort of brilliant debunking of pseudo-profundities lies at the heart of Chesterton. As a former art school student, he always admired and valued painting, drawing, and sculpture. But when Jackson, mixing social commentary with aesthetics, claims that “In a beautiful city an art gallery would be superfluous. In an ugly one it is a narcotic,” Chesterton erupts, “In a real one it is an art gallery.”

Christianity and classical philosophy had seen sin, error, and weakness in human beings, and they sought to correct them by teaching us how to become more ourselves. The followers of the Superman, however, looked down on ordinary humanity and only succeeded in diminishing themselves: “Look at [man]; but don’t look down on him. Verily I say unto you that many prophets & professors have desired to be human beings, & have not attained to it.”

Beyond these general observations on human nature, however, Jackson had a political and theological program. He and Chesterton agreed that freedom had been lost in England owing to the conspiracy be tween power and money, but they disagreed about how to resolve the situation. Chesterton thought the remedy for the concentration of wealth and power in too few hands was to distribute them more widely as a prelude to restoring authentic democracy. There was a religious dimension to democracy for Chester ton as well. For Jackson, the purpose of socialism was “to make the world a fit place for supreme beings.” As a result, socialism had to re strain ordinary human beings because it “recognizes that there are limits to human trustworthiness and, as a consequence, seeks to abolish private property. This is an admission that no men are fit to own things.”

This abuse of the otherwise salubrious doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin drew one of Chesterton’s longest replies:

Exactly. Socialism is Manichaen & castrates men to keep them pure. The Catholic Church permitted love & ownership, although they were certain to produce dangers & sins. Socialism reverses this courageous course & goes back to the desert with the pessimists.

The disagreement here, of course, reflects each author’s beliefs about the ultimate basis of things. Jackson thinks there is nothing higher than the higher type of human being represented by himself, and so seeks to restrain others. Socialism, he says, does not expect too much from man. Chesterton believes that God Himself took a risk in making humans free and rebukes socialism because “it expects too little. It will have a surprise!”

These kinds of observations are familiar to anyone who knows Chesterton’s work. The fact that he thought them of so ordinary a nature that he never used them extensively elsewhere shows how fecund he was and how serenely confident about what his published books had already established. But he does use some of these reflections in one of the Illustrated London News columns he wrote on March 11, 1911, presumably just after he read Jackson.¹

In that brief essay entitled “The Two Kinds of Paradox,” Chesterton makes a plea for the kind of sublime nonsense and paradox he finds in writers like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. That nonsense is artistically exact, and therefore perfect. It opens up the mind to new realms of the imagination. But Chesterton sees another kind of paradox that is not so much either true or false, good or bad, but that points us toward the opposed worlds of the fruitful and the barren: “Nonsense ought to be suggestive; but nowadays it is abortive. The new epigrams are not even fantastic finger-posts on a wild road: they are tablets, each set in a brick wall at the end of a blind alley. So far as they concern thought at all, they cry to men, “‘Think no more,’ as the voice said ‘Sleep no more’ to Macbeth.” Chesterton concludes, “Even when they are really witty (as in the case of Mr. Shaw), they commonly commit the one crime that cannot be forgiven among free men. They say the last word.”

Then, in a typical turn for Chesterton the newspaper columnist, as characteristic of his columns as is the article in the works of Thomas Aquinas, he reveals the subject that has really inspired his earlier reflections:

I will give such instances as happen to lie before me. I see on my table a book of aphorisms by a young Socialist writer, Mr. Holbrook Jackson; it is called “Platitudes in the Making,” and curiously illustrates this difference between the paradox that starts thought and the paradox that prevents thought. Of course, the writer has read too much Nietzsche and Shaw, and too little of less groping and more gripping thinkers. But he says many really good things of his own, and they illustrate perfectly what I mean here about the suggestive and the destructive nonsense.

Chesterton is quite willing to allow, for example, Jackson’s recommendation, “Suffer fools gladly: they may be right.” That practice may lead us to glimpse the great humanity that lies in every one of our fellow creatures. Dull Uncle George, the numbing repetitiveness of a Miss Bootle, the inarticulate grunts of the old Major next door deserve our attention: “It can never narrow our minds, it can never arrest our life, to suppose that a particular fool is not such a fool as he looks. It must all be to the increase of charity, and charity is the imagination of the heart.”

By contrast, the worship of our lives and of some inhuman life force in Jackson, and many other before and since, undermines the real dignity of those we see around us. At one point, Jackson urged: “Don’t think — do.” Chesterton comments in his annotation: “Do think. Do!”, and in his column: “This is exactly like saying “Don’t eat — digest.” All doing that is not mechanical or accidental involves thinking; only the modern world seems to have forgotten that there can be such a thing as decisive and dramatic thinking . . . Here we have the black nonsense, like black magic, that shuts down the brain.”

Very little, if anything, ever shut down Chesterton’s brain. If he took the trouble to record his own reactions to a thinker like Jackson, it was out of true curiosity and charity toward everything human, even human folly. We are fortunate that this text has resurfaced and can now give us a closer appreciation for that clear-sighted charity in action. The names and causes have changed a bit since Chesterton confronted them, but these aphorisms are a living guide to much that is still very much with us.

Robert Royal is with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.