The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton

There are some things of which the world does not like to be reminded, / for they are the dead loves of the world. One of these is that great / enthusiasm for the Arcadian life which, however much it may now lie open / to the sneers of realism, did, beyond all question, hold sway for an / enormous period of the world's history, from the times that we describe / as ancient down to times that may fairly be called recent. The / conception of the innocent and hilarious life of shepherds and / shepherdesses certainly covered and absorbed the time of Theocritus, of / Virgil, of Catullus, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Ariosto, of Shakespeare, / and of Pope. We are told that the gods of the heathen were stone and / brass, but stone and brass have never endured with the long endurance of / the China Shepherdess. The Catholic Church and the Ideal Shepherd are / indeed almost the only things that have bridged the abyss between the / ancient world and the modern. Yet, as we say, the world does not like / to be reminded of this boyish enthusiasm.

But imagination, the function of the historian, cannot let so great an / element alone. By the cheap revolutionary it is commonly supposed that / imagination is a merely rebellious thing, that it has its chief function / in devising new and fantastic republics. But imagination has its highest / use in a retrospective realization. The trumpet of imagination, like the / trumpet of the Resurrection, calls the dead out of their graves. / Imagination sees Delphi with the eyes of a Greek, Jerusalem with the / eyes of a Crusader, Paris with the eyes of a Jacobin, and Arcadia with / the eyes of a Euphuist. The prime function of imagination is to see our / whole orderly system of life as a pile of stratified revolutions. In / spite of all revolutionaries it must be said that the function of / imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make / settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make / facts wonders. To the imaginative the truisms are all paradoxes, since / they were paradoxes in the Stone Age; to them the ordinary copy-book / blazes with blasphemy.