Words Worth Noting - July 10, 2026

“I admit that the very best of the tea-table novels are great art – for instance, Emma, or Northanger Abbey. Sheer elemental genius can make a work of art out of anything. Michael Angelo might make a statue out of mud, and Jane Austen could make a novel out of tea – that much more contemptible substance. But on the whole I still think that a tale about one man killing another man is more likely to have something in it than a tale in which all the characters are talking trivialities without any of that instant and silent presence of death which is one of the strong spiritual bonds of all mankind. I still prefer the novel in which one person does another person to death to the novel in which all the persons are feebly (and vainly) trying to get the others to come to life. But I have another and more important quarrel about the sensational novel. There seems to be a very general idea that the romance of the tomahawk will be (or will run the risk of being) more immoral than the romance of the teapot. This I violently deny. And in this I have the support of practically all the old moral traditions of our civilization and of every civilization. High or low, good or bad, clever or stupid, a moral story almost always meant a murderous story. For the old Greeks a moral play was one full of madness and slaying. For the great mediaeval a moral play was one which exhibited the dancing of the devil and the open jaws of hell. For the great Protestant moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a moral story meant a story in which a parricide was struck by lightning or a boy was drowned for fishing on a Sunday. For the more rationalistic moralists of the eighteenth century, all agreed that shocking calamities could properly be indicated as the result of evil doing; that the more shocking those calamities were the more moral they were. It is only in our exhausted and agnostic age that the idea has been started that if one is moral one must not be melodramatic. Hence the novel of the tea table has passed the censor everywhere as a thing that cannot be really wrong because there are no murders in it. As a matter of fact I am prepared to wager that as much wickedness has been talked over a teapot as ever was talked over a witch’s cauldron.”

G.K. Chesterton “Novel-Reading” in T.P.’s Weekly 7/4/1911, reprinted in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024).