Monday, December 08, 2008

When Chesterton and YouTube Agree

It's always interesting when several threads from completely different spools end up coming together.  I watched part of the 1938 version of Robin Hood tonight and found this post:

"...Wonder why Costner's robin wasnt [sic] more like Errol's, movie might have done better(like john unable to swim). I'll admit it was hard at first to swallow watching/reading a/b robin being defeated, but this movie showed it was his character."

Then I read some of Chesterton's book Heretics and came across this:

"When men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks and hard laws, when they knew what fighting really was, they had only two kinds of songs.  The first was a rejoicing that the weak had conquered the strong, the second a lamentation that the strong had, for once in a way, conquered the week.  For this defiance of the status quo, this constant effort to alter the existing balance, this premature challenge to the powerful, is the whole nature and inmost secret of the psychological adventure which is called man.  It is his strength to disdain strength.  The forlorn hope is not only a real hope, it is the only real hope of mankind.  In the coarsest ballads of the Greenwood men are admired most when they defy, not only the king, but what is more to the point, the hero.  The moment Robin Hood becomes a sort of Superman, that moment the chivalrous chronicler shows us Robin thrashed by a poor tinker whom he thought to thrust aside.  And the chivalrous chronicler makes Robin Hood receive the thrashing in a glow of admiration...
" (pp. 43-44).

Coincidence?  I think not.


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