AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

Clapham patriot was ashamed of Clapham.
That Clapham journalist, who glowered at me, has been the problem of my
life. He has haunted me at every turn and corner like a shadow, as if he were a
blackmailer or a murderer. It was against him that I marshalled the silly
pantomime halberdiers of Notting Hill and all the rest. In other words,
everything I have thought and done grew originally out of that problem which
seemed to me a paradox. I shall have to refer to many problems in these pages,
if they are to be truthful pages; and to glance at solutions with some of which
the reader may agree, with some of which he may very violently disagree. But
I will ask him to remember throughout that this was the primary problem for
me, certainly in order of time and largely in order of logic. It was the problem
of how men could be made to realise the wonder and splendour of being alive,
in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and
which their imagination had left for dead. It is normal for a man to boast if he
can, or even when he can’t, that he is a citizen of no mean city. But these men
had really resigned themselves to being citizens of mean cities; and on every
side of us the mean cities stretched far away beyond the horizon; mean in
architecture, mean in costume, mean even in manners; but, what was the only
thing that really mattered, mean in the imaginative conception of their own
inhabitants. These mean cities were indeed supposed to be the component
parts of a very great city; but in the thoughts of most modern people, the great
city has become a journalistic generalisation, no longer imaginative and very
nearly imaginary. On the other hand, the modern mode of life, only professing
to be prosaic, pressed upon them day and night and was the real moulder of
their minds. This, I say by way of preliminary guide or direction, was what
originally led me into certain groups or movements and away from others.
What was called my medievalism was simply that I was very much
interested in the historic meaning of Clapham Common. What was called my
dislike of Imperialism was a dislike of making England an Empire, in the
sense of something more like Clapham Junction. For my own visionary
Clapham consisted of houses standing still; and not of trucks and trains rattling
by; and I did not want England to be a sort of cloakroom or clearing-house for
luggage labelled exports and imports. I wanted real English things that nobody
else could import and that we enjoyed too much to export. And this was
present even in the last and most disputed phase of change. I came to admit
that some sort of universality, another sort of universality, would be needed
before such places could really become shrines or sacred sites. In short, I
eventually concluded, rightly or wrongly, that Clapham could not now be
made mystical by the Clapham Sect. But I say it with the greatest respect for
that old group of philanthropists, who devoted themselves to the cause of the
remote negroes; the sect that did so much to liberate Africa; the Clapham Sect,
that did so little to liberate Clapham.