Words Worth Noting - August 20, 2025

“The truth is that the Imperial movement going on around us has few of the marks of patriotism. Above all, it lacks one essential quality, and closely connected with the sense of sudden antiquity of which I have spoken, a quality which it is very difficult, perhaps, accurately to define. Perhaps the best phrase for it would be an exultant melancholy. These old war ballads do not dwell upon victory to anything like the extent to which they dwell upon defeat, disaster, the darkness which alone leaves visible the single star of fidelity. The hero of all these songs is not the triumphant hero in the car; their hero is the last man by the flag. The only strong nation and the only strong empire is the nation or the empire that has before it continually this vision of its own final disaster and its own final defiance. There is no success for anything which we do not love more than success. There lies in patriotism, as in every form of love, a great peril, a peril of self-committal, which, while it scares the prudent, fascinates the brave. But this spirit of noble peril and melancholy, which runs from end to end of the patriotic poetry of the world, is just the note which is lacking in current Imperial patriotism…”

G.K. Chesterton in “Patriotic Poetry” in Daily News Nov. 29, 1901, reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)