repared and arouse the cry of paradox. But if we will not do
it we shall miss a great deal of truth.

Chesterton also saw many proverbs and old sayings as containing a
truth which the people who constantly repeated them had forgotten.
The world was asleep and must be awakened. The world had gone
placidly mad and must be violently restored to sanity. That the
methods he used annoyed some is undeniable, but he did force people
to think, even if they raged at him as the unaccustomed muscles came
into play.

"I believe," he said in a speech at this date, "in getting into
hot water. I think it keeps you clean." And he believed intensely
in keeping out of a narrow stream of merely literary life. To
those who exalted the poet above the journalist he gave this
answer:

The poet writing his name upon a score of little pages in the
silence of his study, may or may not have an intellectual right to
despise the journalist: but I greatly doubt whether he would not
morally be the better if he saw the great lights burning on through
darkness into dawn, and heard the roar of the printing wheels
weaving the destinies of another day. Here at least is a school of
labour and of some rough humility, the largest work ever published
anonymously since the great Christian cathedrals.*

[* "A Word for the Mere Journalist." _Darlington North Star:_
February 3, 1902.]

He plunged then into the life of Fleet Street and held it his
proudest boast to be a journalist. But he had his own way of being a
journalist:

On the whole, I think I owe my success (as the millionaires say) to
having listened respectfully and rather bashfully to the very best
advice, given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best
sort of success in journalism; and then going away and doing the
exact opposite. For what they all told me was that the secret of
success in journalism was to study the particular journal and write
what was suitable to it. And, partly by accident and ignorance and
partly through the real rabid certainties of youth, I cannot remember
that I ever wrote any article that was at all suitable to any
paper. . . . I wrote on a Nonconformist organ like the old _Daily
News_ and told them all about French cafes and Catholic cathedrals;
and they loved it, because they had never heard of them before. I
wrote on a robust Labour organ like the old _Clarion_ and defended
mediaeval the