Mindscapes: The Geographies of Imagined Worlds Book

Whenever I feel that the shadows are gathering around me, and all my efforts are coming to naught, I pick up a volume of G.K. Chesterton and find that I've just been looking at things through the wrong end of the telescope.

Twelve Types: A Collection of Mini-Biographies is ostensibly a collection of essays on literary subjects. I don't know why the subtitle refers to "Mini-Biographies," because GKC is not interested in biographies. Instead he concentrates on how we see the world around us, as suggested by the lives and work of figures such as Sir Walter Scott, Tolstoy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Carlyle, Charles II, and Lord Byron, to name just a few. Some he excoriates, like Carlyle and Tolstoy, for urging us into dead ends; others, like Scott, he praises for seeing things in a different light, even when it has seemed to become unfashionable:Closely connected with this is one of the charges most commonly brought against Scott, particularly in his own day'the charge of a fanciful and monotonous insistence upon the details of armour and costume. The critic in the 'Edinburgh Review' said indignantly that he could tolerate a somewhat detailed description of the apparel of Marmion, but when it came to an equally detailed account of the apparel of his pages and yeomen the mind could bear it no longer. The only thing to be said about that critic is that he had never been a little boy. He foolishly imagined that Scott valued the plume and dagger of Marmion for Marmion's sake. Not being himself romantic, he could not understand that Scott valued the plume because it was a plume, and the dagger because it was a dagger. Like a child, he loved weapons with a manual materialistic love, as one loves the softness of fur or the coolness of marble. One of the profound philosophical truths which are almost confined to infants is this love of things, not for their use or origin, but for their own inherent characteristics, the child's love of the toughness of wood, the wetness of water, the magnificent soapiness of soap. So it was with Scott, who had so much of the child in him. Human beings were perhaps the principal characters in his stories, but they were certainly not the only characters. A battle-axe was a person of importance, a castle had a character and ways of its own. A church bell had a word to say in the matter. Like a true child, he almost ignored the distinction between the animate and inanimate. A two-handed sword might be carried only by a menial in a procession, but it was something important and immeasurably fascinating'it was a two-handed sword.There is something about being able to rotate the axis of one's life by a few degrees so that the sun shines more brightly and the megrims are dispelled. Sometimes I think he was the greatest psychologist who ever lived.