'I have often had a fancy,' G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book Orthodoxy (1908), 'for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.' The man would arrive, 'armed to the teeth and talking by signs', and try to plant the British flag on the Brighton Pavilion. A little later Chesterton says: 'I am that man in a yacht. I discovered England.' He likes this trope and returns to it in detail in The Everlasting Man (1925), adding the variant story of the boy who couldn't recognise the exotic secret of his village until he got far enough away from it. 'That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today.' Home is not only where the heart is, it is our only chance of having a heart. Everything else is an abstraction.

LRB 9 April 2009 | PDF Download