G K Chesterton

Twelve Types G K Chesterton

Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it reveals so much that is important andeven sacred about a man's life. The real objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it revealsabout a man the precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts and insists on exactlythose things in a man's life of which the man himself is wholly unconscious; his exact class insociety, the circumstances of his ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things whichdo not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They do not occur to a man's mind; itmay be said, with almost equal truth, that they do not occur in a man's life. A man no more thinksabout himself as the inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than he thinks abouthimself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man's name was, what his income was, whom hemarried, where he lived, these are not sanctities; they are irrelevancies.