Innocent Smith shoots at people with a pistol. But not in order to kill them. Rather, he does so “with the eccentric but innocent purpose of giving a wholesome scare” to individuals whom he thinks don’t value life enough. The brush with death bestows a new zest for life on the hapless target. In the same spirit, Smith tries to keep his own experience of life fresh by repeatedly eloping with his wife and breaking into his own house—so as to see these familiar entities as though for the first time.
Take the idea of the value of home, for example, an idea that Chesterton touches on in “Manalive” and a number of other works. Smith travels around the world not to see foreign things, but to see familiar things. That is, the purpose of his travel is to come home and see home as something wild and wondrous, only with the added shock that this “foreign place” belongs to himself.
Like Wagner’s use of the leitmotiv in his “Ring Cycle,” Chesterton takes a basic pattern—this idea of rediscovering the familiar in order to see it as it really is—and plays with it, introduces many variations on the theme, throughout his body of work.
“It is quite unnecessary … and it is spiritually untrue. I cannot see any Battersea here; I cannot see any London or any England. I cannot see that door. I cannot see that chair: because a cloud of sleep and custom has come across my eyes. The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays. … The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
In another short story, “The Colored Lands,” Chesterton writes of a boy who becomes bored with his home. A young man comes along and shows him a selection of magical eyeglasses—one red, one green, one yellow and so on—that turn the world entirely one color or another, and even seem to transport the wearer to a foreign place, dominated by all red, or all green, and so on. The young man tells of his own boredom, which led him to travel in these strange colored lands. He tells how each one at first thrilled and delighted him, but how each one grew monotonous in time. There were elements of each color that he wished he could combine. When a wizard allows him to begin to mix the colors and the worlds to create his own ideal, he finds that he has created the real world and his own home.
Stories like this remind us that what we take for granted might easily have turned out differently (and worse). We could live in a perfectly serviceable world that was all one color. Or that lacked all grass. Or that was completely flat. Yet we find the real world staggeringly varied, and, as it were, overfilled with superfluous beauty. This is what Chesterton wants us to recognize about the most familiar things, like home.
I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. … What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales.
According to Chesterton, this imaginary exploit of an Englishman “discovering” England is the perfect image for the task of the philosopher. “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?” That’s what good philosophers seek to discover.
I suspect that the answer to that question would be something very close to, or at least a component of, the secret of life—of being truly and fully “alive,” just like Innocent Smith is a “Manalive.” Deep inside, we paradoxically long for both activity and rest, the new and the familiar, the search and the possession. As psychologist Jordan Peterson teaches, a healthy mental state is to find a balance between order and chaos, the order of the known and the chaos of the unknown. That would be something very like having, for the same few minutes, “the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with the humane security of coming home again.”
Particularly in our day, with so many enemies arrayed against it, what grander adventure is there than to set out to raise a family in a world that often tries to tear that ancient institution apart? What more perilous and more rewarding journey might one take than to guide the little bark of a family through the uncertain waters of our time? And that journey takes place at home.
