Seven days of human life, the meaning of the phrase, "the spice of life," both brought the same recurring motif that "a great many people are at this moment paying rather too much attention to the spice of life, and rather too little attention to life." Not in any "distraction from life is the secret we are all seeking, the secret of enjoying life. I am perfectly certain that all our world will end in despair unless there is some way of making the mind itself, the ordinary thoughts we have at ordinary times, more healthy and more happy than they seem to be just now, to judge by most modern novels and poems. . . ." A week had never been for Chesterton just seven days hard, although he had worked hard enough. He had enjoyed the spice of life, he had liked Beer and Skittles and the distractions of life and its high points of achievement.
But it is much more important to remember that I have been intensely and imaginatively happy in the queerest because the quietest places. I have been filled with life from within in a cold waiting-room, in a deserted railway junction. I have been completely alive sitting on an iron seat under an ugly lamp-post at a third rate watering place. In short, I have experienced the mere excitement of existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as ditchwater. And, by the way, is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.
The younger generation were despairing of life in the face of life's manifold gifts. Chesterton as a youth had revolted against the pessimism of his elders, now he revolted as an old man against a young generation corroded by a yet more poisonous pessimism. "The Hollow Men" T. S. Eliot had called a poem and in it came the lines
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Forgive me if I say in my old world fashion, that I'm damned if I ever felt like that . . . I knew that the world was perishable and would end, but I did not think it would end with a whimper, but, if anything, with a trump of doom . . . I will even be so indecently frivolous as to burst into song, and say to the young pessimists:
Some sneer; some snigger; some simper;
In the youth where we laughed, and sang.
And they may end with a whimper
But we will end with a bang.
His last message for this generation was the sound of a trumpet calling us to resurrection. A dead world must find life again, must go back to the meaning of the book of Genesis at which it had learnt to sneer: must realise a week once more with—"the grandeur of that conception, by which a week has become a wonderful and mystical thing in which Man imitates God in his labour and in his rest."
Through his call sounds a note of most solemn warning.
Unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which moderns call a dull life, our whole civilisation will be in ruins in about fifteen years. Whenever anybody proposes anything really practical, to solve the economic evil today, the answer always is that the solution would not work, because the modern town populations would think life dull. That is because they are entirely unacquainted with life. They know nothing but distractions from life; dreams which may be found in the cinema; that is, brief oblivions of life. . . . Unless we can make daybreak and Daily bread and the creative secrets of labour interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our civilisation a fatigue which is the one disease from which civilisations do not recover. So died the great Pagan civilisation; of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods.*
[* The Listener, January 31, 1934.]