AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

the manner of the Know-Nothing movement in American politics. The
stranger, the mere intruder into the sacred village, would ask, “But what does
I.D.K. mean?”; and the initiate was expected to shrug his shoulders and say, “I
don’t know,” in an offhand manner; in the hope that it would not be realised
that, in a seeming refusal to reply, he had in fact replied. I know not whether
this motto was symbolic of the agnosticism of men like Hankin or the
mysticism of men like Yeats. But both points of view were, of course, present;
and I think they pretty well divided that intellectual world between them.
Certainly I always preferred the Celtic Twilight to the materialistic midnight. I
had more sympathy with the magician’s cloak that clothed the man who
believed in magic, or the dark elf-locks of the poet who had really something
to tell us about elves, than with the black clothes and blank shirt-front of the
sort of man who seemed to proclaim that the modern world, even when it is
festive, is only the more funereal. What I did not realise was that there was a
third angle, and a very acute angle, which was capable of piercing with the
sharpness, and some would say the narrowness of a sword.
The secretary of this debating-club always proved her efficiency by
entirely refusing to debate. She was one of a family of sisters, with one
brother, whom I had grown to know through the offices of Oldershaw; and
they had a cousin on the premises, who was engaged to a German professor
and permanently fascinated by the subject of German fairytales. She was
naturally attracted also to the Celtic fairytales that were loose in the
neighbourhood; and one day she came back glowing with the news that Willie
Yeats had cast her horoscope, or performed some such occult rite, and told her
that she was especially under the influence of the moon. I happened to
mention this to a sister of the secretary, who had only just returned to the
family circle, and she told me in the most normal and unpretentious tone that
she hated the moon.
I talked to the same lady several times afterwards; and found that this was
a perfectly honest statement of the fact. Her attitude on this and other things
might be called a prejudice; but it could not possibly be called a fad, still less
an affectation. She really had an obstinate objection to all those natural forces
that seemed to be sterile or aimless; she disliked loud winds that seemed to be
going nowhere; she did not care much for the sea, a spectacle of which I was
very fond; and by the same instinct she was up against the moon, which she
said looked like an imbecile. On the other hand, she had a sort of hungry
appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything
connected with production; about which she was quite practical. She practised
gardening; in that curious Cockney culture she would have been quite ready to
practise farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a
religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the
whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed