Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Name: The Apostle and the Wild Ducks — Part IV. On Literature, Eulogy of Robin Hood
Author: Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The Apostle and the Wild Ducks… (1975)

Summary

“The Apostle and the Wild Ducks — Part IV. On Literature, Eulogy of Robin Hood”, published in 1975, is a work by Gilbert Keith Chesterton. It explores elements such as Robin Hood, ballads and melodrama.

Quotes from The Apostle and the Wild Ducks… (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Apostle and the Wild Ducks… (1975)

“ But when they are talking seriously they do talk pompously. A man has only to walk down the Battersea Highroad on a Saturday night to hear round him one universal chatter of such things as `How can I sell my own child?' And as for the burglar who thinks of the little ones at home, every evidence in life and the newspapers seems to support the hypothesis that criminals are sentimental, and I can readily believe in that burglar.
Now, these Robin Hood ballads, as I say, show among other things an amusing proof of this popularity, this antiquity, this intense realism of sentimental melodrama. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Apostle and the Wild Ducks… (1975)

“ But when we look at these rude and bloody legends of a rude and bloody age, the ballads of Robin Hood, we find an altruism wilder than that of the Pirate of Penzance. The capering satire of the nineteenth century is positively less fantastic than the reality of the thirteenth. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Apostle and the Wild Ducks… (1975)

“ The Kipling story, with its savage pleasantry and its colossal cynicism, is immeasurably superior in almost everything there is to the strained romantic melodrama; but it has one inferiority. It is not so like life. The Adelphi play gives a much more accurate version of the solemn, magnanimous, vainglorious pose which the average man really adopts in matters he thinks important. The poor do, indeed, employ a gross fantasy of speech (such as `Gawd send', etc.) when they wish to be satiric or frivolous; but that is simply their literature ”

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Source: Wikisource

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Apostle and the Wild Ducks… (1975)

“ The modern world thinks short stories artistic, mistaking a weak digestion for a fine palate. So has arisen the preposterous paradox that the old spirit exhibited in the long books and the long ballads was not literary, because it liked to have so much literature. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Apostle and the Wild Ducks… (1975)

“ The great English generosity is really in these ballads. There is nothing that Robin Hood seems to like so much as being knocked down by somebody, and getting up and telling him how fine a fellow he must be. It is useless for Mr Henley and such prophets of revenge to go back to our old English literature; they will not find what they want. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Apostle and the Wild Ducks… (1975)

“ No, it is realism that is artificial and melodrama that is human. The slangy short stories are written by pale men in libraries; the melodramas are written by men of the people. The case of the people is very like the similar case of schoolboys. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Apostle and the Wild Ducks… (1975)

“ The notion that the historic past, and particularly the Middle Ages, was a mass of negligible darkness is pretty well gone by this time; and there are quite a large number of people engaged in collecting the original costumes, and the genuine ballads, and the authentic frying pans of the twelfth century. The only thing that I never can understand about these people is why instead of admiring the doings of these ages, they do not merely do them. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Apostle and the Wild Ducks… (1975)

“ It is somewhat parallel to the equally strange assertion that religion was at enmity with life because it refused to believe in the finality and victory of death. Sceptics say that the saints were the foes of life because they desired life to last for ever. ”

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Summary

Quotes from The Apostle and the Wild Ducks… (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)

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