There is on record the case of a man who, after some fourteen years of
robust health, spent a week in bed. His illness was apparently due to a
violent cold, but he confessed, on medical cross-examination, that the
real and underlying cause was the steady reading of Mr. Chesterton's
books for several days on end.
No one will accuse Mr. Chesterton of being an unhealthy writer. On the
contrary, he is among the most wholesome writers now alive. He is
irresistibly exhilarating, and he inspires his readers with a constant
inclination to rise up and shout. Perhaps his danger lies in that very
fact, and in the exhaustion of the nerves which such sustained
exhilaration is apt to produce. But besides this, he, like so many of
our contemporaries, has written such a bewildering quantity of
literature on such an amazing variety of subjects, that it is no wonder
if sometimes the reader follows panting, through the giddy mazes of the
dance. He is the sworn enemy of specialisation, as he explains in his
remarkable essay on "The Twelve Men." The subject of the essay is the
British jury, and its thesis is that when our civilisation "wants a
library to be catalogued, or a solar system discovered, or any trifle of
that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done
which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing
round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of
Christianity." For the judging of a criminal or the propagation of the
gospel, it is necessary to procure inexpert people--people who come to
their task with a virgin eye, and see not what the expert (who has lost
his freshness) sees, but the human facts of the case. So Mr. Chesterton
insists upon not being a specialist, takes the world for his parish, and
wanders over it at will.
This being so, it is obvious that he cannot possibly remember all that
he has said, and must necessarily abound in inconsistencies and even
contradictions. Yet that is by no means always unconscious, but is due
in many instances to the very complex quality and subtle habit of his
mind. Were he by any chance to read this statement he would deny it
fiercely, but we would repeat it with perfect calmness, knowing that he
would probably have denied any other statement we might have made upon
the subject. His subtlety is partly due to the extraordinary rapidity
with which his mind leaps from one subject to another, partly to the
fact that he is so full of ideas that many of his essays (like Mr.
Bernard Shaw's plays) find it next to impossible to get themselves
begun. He is so full of matter that he never seems to be able to say
what he wants to say, until he has said a dozen other things first.
The present lecture is mainly concerned with his central position, as
that is expounded in _Heretics_ and _Orthodoxy_. Our task is not to
criticise, nor even to any considerable extent to characterise his
views, but to state them as accurately as we can. It is a remarkable
phenomenon of our time that all our literary men are bent on giving us
such elaborate and solemnising confessions of their faith. It is an age
notorious for its aversion to dogma, and yet here we have Mr. Huxley,
Mr. Le Gallienne, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells (to mention only a few of many),
who in this creedless age proclaim in the market-place, each his own
private and brand-new creed.
Yet Mr. Chesterton has perhaps a special right to such a proclamation.
He believes in creeds vehemently. And, besides, the spiritual biography
of a man whose mental development has been so independent and so
interesting as his, must be well worth knowing. Amid the many weird
theologies of our time we have met with nothing so startling, so
arresting, and so suggestive since Mr. Mallock published his _New
Republic_ and his _Contemporary Superstitions_. There is something
common to the two points of view. To some, they come as emancipating and
most welcome reinforcements, relieving the beleaguered citadel of faith.
But others, who differ widely from them both, may yet find in them so
much to stimulate thought and to rehabilitate strongholds held
precariously, as to awaken both appreciation and gratitude.
Mr. Chesterton's political opinions do not concern us here. It is a
curious fact, of which innumerable illustrations may be found in past
and present writers, that political radicalism so often goes along with
conservative theology, and _vice versa_. Mr. Chesterton is no exception
to the rule. His orthodoxy in matters of faith we shall find to be
altogether above suspicion. His radicalism in politics is never long
silent. He openly proclaims himself at war with Carlyle's favourite
dogma, "The tools to him who can use them." "The worst form of slavery,"
he tells us, "is that which is called Cæsarism, or the choice of some
bold or brilliant man as despot because he is suitable. For that means
that men choose a representative, not because he represents them but
because he does not." And if it be answered that the worst form of
cruelty to a nation or to an individual is that abuse of the principle
of equality which is for ever putting incompetent people into false
positions, he has his reply ready: "The one specially and peculiarly
un-Christian idea is the idea of Carlyle--the idea that the man should
rule who feels that he can rule. Whatever else is Christian, this is
heathen."
But this, and much else of its kind, although he works it into his
general scheme of thinking, is not in any sense an essential part of
that scheme. Our subject is his place in the conflict between the
paganism and the idealism of the times, and it is a sufficiently large
one. But before we come to that, we must consider another matter, which
we shall find to be intimately connected with it.
That other matter is his habit of paradox, which is familiar to all his
readers. It is a habit of style, but before it became that it was
necessarily first a habit of mind, deeply ingrained. He disclaims it so
often that we cannot but feel that he protesteth too much. He
acknowledges it, and explains that "paradox simply means a certain
defiant joy which belongs to belief." Whether the explanation is or is
not perfectly intelligible, it must occur to every one that a writer who
finds it necessary to give so remarkable an explanation can hardly be
justified in his astonishment when people of merely average intelligence
confess themselves puzzled. His aversion to Walter Pater--almost the
only writer whom he appears consistently to treat with disrespect--is
largely due to Pater's laborious simplicity of style. But it was a
greater than either Walter Pater or Mr. Chesterton who first pointed out
that the language which appealed to the understanding of the common man
was also that which expressed the highest culture. Mr. Chesterton's
habit of paradox will always obscure his meanings for the common man. He
has a vast amount to tell him, but much of it he will never understand.
Paradox, when it has become a habit, is always dangerous. Introduced on
rare and fitting occasions, it may be powerful and even convincing, but
when it is repeated constantly and upon all sorts of subjects, we cannot
but dispute its right and question its validity. Its effect is not
conviction but vertigo. It is like trying to live in a house constructed
so as to be continually turning upside down. After a certain time,
during which terror and dizziness alternate, the most indulgent reader
is apt to turn round upon the builder of such a house with some
asperity. And, after all, the general judgment may be right and Mr.
Chesterton wrong.
Upon analysis, his paradox reveals as its chief and most essential
element a certain habit of mind which always tends to see and appreciate
the reverse of accepted opinions. So much is this the case that it is
possible in many instances to anticipate what he will say upon a
subject. It is on record that one reader, coming to his chapter on Omar
Khayyám, said to himself, "Now he will be saying that Omar is not drunk
enough"; and he went on to read, "It is not poetical drinking, which is
joyous and instinctive; it is rational drinking, which is as prosaic as
an investment, as unsavoury as a dose of camomile." Similarly we are
told that Browning is only felt to be obscure because he is too
pellucid. Such apparent contradictoriness is everywhere in his work, but
along with it goes a curious ingenuity and nimbleness of mind. He cannot
think about anything without remembering something else, apparently out
of all possible connection with it, and instantly discovering some
clever idea, the introduction of which will bring the two together.
Christianity "is not a mixture like russet or purple; it is rather like
a shot silk, for a shot silk is always at right angles, and is in the
pattern of the cross."
In all this there are certain familiar mechanisms which constitute
almost a routine of manipulation for the manufacture of paradoxes. One
such mechanical process is the play with the derivatives of words. Thus
he reminds us that the journalist is, in the literal and derivative
sense, a _journalist_, while the missionary is an eternalist. Similarly
"lunatic," "evolution," "progress," "reform," are etymologically
tortured into the utterance of the most forcible and surprising truths.
This curious word-play was a favourite method with Ruskin; and it has
the disadvantage in Mr. Chesterton which it had in the earlier critic.
It appears too clever to be really sound, although it must be confessed
that it frequently has the power of startling us into thoughts that are
valuable and suggestive.
Another equally simple process is that of simply reversing sentences and
ideas. "A good bush needs no wine." "Shakespeare (in a weak moment, I
think) said that all the world is a stage. But Shakespeare acted on the
much finer principle that a stage is all the world." Perhaps the most
brilliant example that could be quoted is the plea for the combination
of gentleness and ferocity in Christian character. When the lion lies
down with the lamb, it is constantly assumed that the lion becomes
lamblike. "But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of
the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion, instead of the
lion eating the lamb."
By this process it is possible to attain results which are
extraordinarily brilliant in themselves and fruitful in suggestion. It
is a process not difficult to learn, but the trouble is that you have to
live up to it afterwards, and defend many curious propositions which may
have been arrived at by its so simple means. Take, for instance, the
sentence about the stage being all the world. That is undeniably clever,
and it contains an idea. But it is a haphazard idea, arrived at by a
short-cut, and not by the high road of reasonable thinking. Sometimes a
truth may be reached by such a short-cut, but such paradoxes are
occasionally no better than chartered errors.
Yet even when they are that, it may be said in their favour that they
startle us into thought. And truly Mr. Chesterton is invaluable as a
quickener and stimulator of the minds of his readers. Moreover, by
adopting the method of paradox, he has undoubtedly done one remarkable
thing. He has proved what an astonishing number of paradoxical surprises
there actually are, lying hidden beneath the apparent commonplace of the
world. Every really clever paradox astonishes us not merely with the
sense of the cleverness of him who utters it, but with the sense of how
many strange coincidences exist around us, and how many sentences, when
turned outside in, will yield new and startling truths. However much we
may suspect that the performance we are watching is too clever to be
trustworthy, yet after all the world does appear to lend itself to such
treatment.
There is, for example, the paradox of the love of the world--"Somehow
one must love the world without being worldly." Again, "Courage is
almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking
the form of a readiness to die." The martyr differs from the suicide in
that he cherishes a disdain of death, while the motive of the suicide is
a disdain of life. Charity, too, is a paradox, for it means "one of two
things--pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people."
Similarly Christian humility has a background of unheard-of arrogance,
and Christian liberty is possible only to the most abject bondsmen in
the world.
This long consideration of Mr. Chesterton's use of paradox is more
relevant to our present subject than it may seem. For, curiously enough,
the habit of paradox has been his way of entrance into faith. At the age
of sixteen he was a complete agnostic, and it was the reading of Huxley
and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh which brought him back to orthodox
theology. For, as he read, he found that Christianity was attacked on
all sides, and for all manner of contradictory reasons; and this
discovery led him to the conviction that Christianity must be a very
extraordinary thing, abounding in paradox. But he had already discovered
the abundant element of paradox in life; and when he analysed the two
sets of paradoxes he found them to be precisely the same. So he became a
Christian.
It may seem a curious way to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who are
accustomed to regard the strait gate as of Gothic architecture may be
shocked to find a man professing to have entered through this
Alhambra-like portal. But it is a lesson we all have to learn sooner or
later, that there are at least eleven gates besides our own, and that
every man has to enter by that which he finds available. Paradox is the
only gate by which Mr. Chesterton could get into any place, and the
Kingdom of Heaven is no exception to the rule.
His account of this entrance is characteristic. It is given in the first
chapter of his _Orthodoxy_. There was an English yachtsman who set out
upon a voyage, miscalculated his course, and discovered what he thought
to be a new island in the South Seas. It transpired afterwards that he
had run up his flag on the pavilion of Brighton, and that he had
discovered England. That yachtsman is Mr. Chesterton himself. Sailing
the great sea of moral and spiritual speculation, he discovered a land
of facts and convictions to which his own experience had guided him. On
that strange land he ran up his flag, only to make the further and more
astonishing discovery that it was the Christian faith at which he had
arrived. Nietzsche had preached to him, as to Mr. Bernard Shaw, his
great precept, "Follow your own will." But when Mr. Chesterton obeyed he
arrived, not at Superman, but at the ordinary old-fashioned morality.
That, he found, is what we like best in our deepest hearts, and desire
most. So he too "discovered England."
He begins, like Margaret Fuller, with the fundamental principle of
accepting the universe. The thing we know best and most directly is
human nature in all its breadth. It is indeed the one thing immediately
known and knowable. Like R.L. Stevenson, he perceives how tragically and
comically astonishing a phenomenon is man. "What a monstrous spectre is
this man," says Stevenson, "the disease of the agglutinated dust,
lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding,
growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair
like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing
to set children screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier, known as his
fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes!" In like manner Mr.
Chesterton discovers man--that appalling mass of paradox and
contradiction--and it is the supreme discovery in any spiritual search.
Having discovered the fundamental fact of human nature, he at once gives
in his allegiance to it. "Our attitude towards life can be better
expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of
criticism and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not optimism,
it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world
is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is
miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the
turret, and the more miserable it is, the less we should leave it."
There is a splendid courage and heartiness in his complete acceptance of
life and the universe. In a time when clever people are so busy
criticising life that they are in danger of forgetting that they have to
live it, so busy selecting such parts of it as suit their taste that
they ignore the fact that the other parts are there, he ignores nothing
and wisely accepts instead of criticising. Mr. Bernard Shaw, as we have
seen, will consent to tolerate the universe _minus_ the three loyalties
to the family, the nation, and God. Mr. Chesterton has no respect
whatever for any such mutilated scheme of human life. His view of the
institution of the family is full of wholesome common sense. He
perceives the immense difficulties that beset all family life, and he
accepts them with immediate and unflinching loyalty, as essential parts
of our human task. His views on patriotism belong to the region of
politics and do not concern us here. In regard to religion, he finds the
modern school amalgamating everything in characterless masses of
generalities. They deny the reality of sin, and in matters of faith
generally they have put every question out of focus until the whole
picture is blurred and vague. He attacks this way of dealing with
religion in one of his most amusing essays, "The Orthodox Barber." The
barber has been sarcastic about the new shaving--presumably in reference
to M. Gillett's excellent invention. "'It seems you can shave yourself
with anything--with a stick or a stone or a pole or a poker' (here I
began for the first time to detect a sarcastic intonation) 'or a shovel
or a----' Here he hesitated for a word, and I, although I knew nothing
about the matter, helped him out with suggestions in the same rhetorical
vein. 'Or a button-hook,' I said, 'or a blunderbuss or a battering-ram
or a piston-rod----' He resumed, refreshed with this assistance, 'Or a
curtain-rod or a candlestick or a----' 'Cow-catcher,' I suggested
eagerly, and we continued in this ecstatic duet for some time. Then I
asked him what it was all about, and he told me. He explained the thing
eloquently and at length. 'The funny part of it is,' he said, 'that the
thing isn't new at all. It's been talked about ever since I was a boy,
and long before.'" Mr. Chesterton rejoins in a long and eloquent and
most amusing sermon, the following extracts from which are not without
far-reaching significance.
"'What you say reminds me in some dark and dreamy fashion of something
else. I recall it especially when you tell me, with such evident
experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is not really new. My
friend, the human race is always trying this dodge of making everything
entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off one thing it
shifts on to another.... It would be nice if we could be shaved without
troubling anybody. It would be nicer still if we could go unshaved
without annoying anybody--
"'But, O wise friend, chief Barber of the Strand,
Brother, nor you nor I have made the world.
Whoever made it, who is wiser, and we hope better than we, made it under
strange limitations, and with painful conditions of pleasure.... But
every now and then men jump up with the new something or other and say
that everything can be had without sacrifice, that bad is good if you
are only enlightened, and that there is no real difference between being
shaved and not being shaved. The difference, they say, is only a
difference of degree; everything is evolutionary and relative.
Shavedness is immanent in man.... I have been profoundly interested in
what you have told me about the New Shaving. Have you ever heard of a
thing called the New Theology?' He smiled and said that he had not."
In contrast with all this, it is Mr. Chesterton's conviction that the
facts must be unflinchingly and in their entirety accepted. With
characteristic courage he goes straight to the root of the matter and
begins with the fact of sin. "If it be true (as it certainly is) that a
man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious
philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the
existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union
between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to
think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat." It is as if
he said, Here you have direct and unmistakable experience. A man knows
his sin as he knows himself. He may explain it in either one way or
another way. He may interpret the universe accordingly in terms either
of heaven or of hell. But the one unreasonable and impossible thing to
do is to deny the experience itself.
It is thus that he treats the question of faith all along the line. If
you are going to be a Christian, or even fairly to judge Christianity,
you must accept the whole of Christ's teaching, with all its
contradictions, paradoxes, and the rest. Some men select his charity,
others his social teaching, others his moral relentlessness, and so on,
and reject all else. Each one of these aspects of the Christian faith is
doubtless very interesting, but none of them by itself is an adequate
representation of Christ. "They have torn the soul of Christ into silly
strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are equally puzzled by
His insane magnificence and His insane meekness. They have parted His
garments among them, and for His vesture they have cast lots; though the
coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout."
The characteristic word for Mr. Chesterton and his attitude to life is
_vitality_. He has been seeking for human nature, and he has found it at
last in Christian idealism. But having found it, he will allow no
compromise in its acceptance. It is life he wants, in such wholeness as
to embrace every element of human nature. And he finds that Christianity
has quickened and intensified life all along the line. It is the great
source of vitality, come that men might have life and that they might
have it more abundantly. He finds an essential joy and riot in creation,
a "tense and secret festivity." And Christianity corresponds to that
riot. "The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while
it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to
give room for good things to run wild." It has let loose the wandering,
masterless, dangerous virtues, and has insisted that not one or another
of them shall run wild, but all of them together. The ideal of wholeness
which Matthew Arnold so eloquently advocated, is not a dead mass of
theories, but a world of living things. Christ will put a check on none
of the really genuine elements in human nature. In Him there is no
compromise. His love and His wrath are both burning. All the separate
elements of human nature are in full flame, and it is the only ultimate
way of peace and safety. The various colours of life must not be mixed
but kept distinct. The red and white of passion and purity must not be
blended into the insipid pink of a compromising and consistent
respectability. They must be kept strong and separate, as in the blazing
Cross of St. George on its shield of white.
Chaucer's "Daisy" is one of the greatest conceptions in all poetry. It
has stood for centuries as the emblem of pure and priceless womanhood,
with its petals of snowy white and its heart of gold. Mr. Chesterton
once made a discovery that sent him wild with joy--
"Then waxed I like the wind because of this,
And ran like gospel and apocalypse
From door to door, with wild, anarchic lips,
Crying the very blasphemy of bliss."
The discovery was that "the Daisy has a ring of red." Purity is not the
enemy of passion; nor must passion and purity be so toned down and blent
with one another, as to give a neutral result. Both must remain, and
both in full brilliance, the virgin white and the passionate blood-red
ring.
In the present age of reason, the cry is all for tolerance, and for
redefinition which will remove sharp contrasts and prove that everything
means the same as everything else. In such an age a doctrine like this
seems to have a certain barbaric splendour about it, as of a crusader
risen from the dead. But Mr. Chesterton is not afraid of the
consequences of his opinions. If rationalism opposes his presentation of
Christianity, he will ride full tilt against reason. In recent years,
from the time of Newman until now, there has been a recurring habit of
discounting reason in favour of some other way of approach to truth and
life. Certainly Mr. Chesterton's attack on reason is as interesting as
any that have gone before it, and it is even more direct. Even on such a
question as the problem of poverty he frankly prefers imagination to
study. In art he demands instinctiveness, and has a profound suspicion
of anybody who is conscious of possessing the artistic temperament. As a
guide to truth he always would follow poetry in preference to logic. He
is never tired of attacking rationality, and for him anything which is
rationalised is destroyed in the process.
In one of his most provokingly unanswerable sallies, he insists that the
true home of reason is the madhouse. "The madman is not the man who has
lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except
his reason." When we say that a man is mad, we do not mean that he is
unable to conduct a logical argument. On the contrary, any one who knows
madmen knows that they are usually most acute and ingeniously consistent
in argument. They isolate some one fixed idea, and round that they build
up a world that is fiercely and tremendously complete. Every detail fits
in, and the world in which they live is not, as is commonly supposed, a
world of disconnected and fantastic imaginations, but one of iron-bound
and remorseless logic. No task is more humiliating, nor more likely to
shake one's sense of security in fundamental convictions, than that of
arguing out a thesis with a lunatic.
Further, beneath this rationality there is in the madman a profound
belief in himself. Most of us regard with respect those who trust their
own judgment more than we find ourselves able to trust ours. But not the
most confident of them all can equal the unswerving confidence of a
madman. Sane people never wholly believe in themselves. They are liable
to be influenced by the opinion of others, and are willing to yield to
the consensus of opinion of past or present thinkers. The lunatic cares
nothing for the views of others. He believes in himself against the
world, with a terrific grip of conviction and a faith that nothing can
shake.
Mr. Chesterton applies his attack upon rationality to many subjects,
with singular ingenuity. In the question of marriage and divorce, for
instance, the modern school which would break loose from the ancient
bonds can present their case with an apparently unassailable show of
rationality. But his reply to them and to all other rationalists is that
life is not rational and consistent but paradoxical and contradictory.
To make life rational you have to leave out so many elements as to make
it shrink from a big world to a little one, which may be complete, but
can never be much of a world. Its conception of God may be a complete
conception, but its God is not much of a God. But the world of human
nature is a vast world, and the God of Christianity is an Infinite God.
The huge mysteries of life and death, of love and sacrifice, of the wine
of Cana and the Cross of Calvary--these outwit all logic and pass all
understanding. So for sane men there comes in a higher authority. You
may call it common sense, or mysticism, or faith, as you please. It is
the extra element by virtue of which all sane thinking and all religious
life are rendered possible. It is the secret spring of vitality alike in
human nature and in Christian faith.
At this point it may be permissible to question Mr. Chesterton's use of
words in one important point. He appears to fall into the old error of
confounding reason with reasoning. Reason is one thing and argument
another. It may be impossible to express either human nature or
religious faith in a series of syllogistic arguments, and yet both may
be reasonable in a higher sense. Reason includes those extra elements to
which Mr. Chesterton trusts. It is the synthesis of our whole powers of
finding truth. Many things which cannot be proved by reasoning may yet
be given in reason--involved in any reasonable view of things as a
whole. Thus faith includes reason--it _is_ reason on a larger scale--and
it is the only reasonable course for a man to take in a world of
mysterious experience. If the matter were stated in that way, Mr.
Chesterton would probably assent to it. Put crudely, the fashion of
pitting faith against reason and discarding reason in favour of faith,
is simply sawing off the branch on which you are sitting. The result is
that you must fall to the ground at the feet of the sceptic, who asks,
"How can you believe that which you have confessed there is no reason to
believe?" We have abundant reason for our belief, and that reason
includes those higher intuitions, that practical common sense, and that
view of things as a whole, which the argument of the mere logician
necessarily ignores.
With this reservation,[6] Mr. Chesterton's position in regard to faith
is absolutely unassailable. He is the most vital of our modern
idealists, and his peculiar way of thinking himself into his idealism
has given to the term a richer and more spacious meaning, which combines
excellently the Greek and the Hebrew elements. His great ideal is that
of manhood. Be a man, he cries aloud, not an artist, not a reasoner, not
any other kind or detail of humanity, but be a man. But then that means,
Be a creature whose life swings far out beyond this world and its
affairs--swings dangerously between heaven and hell. Eternity is in the
heart of every man. The fashionable modern gospel of Pragmatism is
telling us to-day that we should not vex ourselves about the ultimate
truth of theories, but inquire only as to their value for life here and
now, and the practical needs which they serve. But the most practical of
all man's needs is his need of some contact with a higher world than
that of sense. "To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that
he is a man." In the scale of differences between important and
unimportant earthly things, it is the spiritual and not the material
that counts. "An ignorance of the other world is boasted by many men of
science; but in this matter their defect arises, not from ignorance of
the other world, but from ignorance of this world." "The moment any
matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever
spoilt for all purposes of science. It has become a thing incurably
mysterious and infinite; this mortal has put on immortality."
Here we begin to see the immense value of paradox in the matter of
faith. Mr. Chesterton is an optimist, not because he fits into this
world, but because he does not fit into it. Pagan optimism is content
with the world, and subsists entirely in virtue of its power to fit into
it and find it sufficient. This is that optimism of which Browning
speaks with scorn--
"Tame in earth's paddock as her prize,"
and which he repudiates in the famous lines,
"Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"
Mr. Chesterton insists that beyond the things which surround us here on
the earth there are other things which claim us from beyond. The higher
instincts which discover these are not tools to be used for making the
most of earthly treasures, but sacred relics to be guarded. He is an
idealist who has been out beyond the world. There he has found a whole
universe of mysterious but commanding facts, and has discovered that
these and these alone can satisfy human nature.
The question must, however, arise, as to the validity of those spiritual
claims. How can we be sure that the ideals which claim us from beyond
are realities, and not mere dream shapes? There is no answer but this,
that if we question the validity of our own convictions and the reality
of our most pressing needs, we have simply committed spiritual suicide,
and arrived prematurely at the end of all things. With the habit of
questioning ultimate convictions Mr. Chesterton has little patience.
Modesty, he tells us, has settled in the wrong place. We believe in
ourselves and we doubt the truth that is in us. But we ourselves, the
crude reality which we actually are, are altogether unreliable; while
the vision is always trustworthy. We are for ever changing the vision to
suit the world as we find it, whereas we ought to be changing the world
to bring it into conformity with the unchanging vision. The very essence
of orthodoxy is a profound and reverent conviction of ideals that cannot
be changed--ideals which were the first, and shall be the last.
If Mr. Chesterton often strains his readers' powers of attention by
rapid and surprising movements among very difficult themes, he certainly
has charming ways of relieving the strain. The favourite among all such
methods is his reversion to the subject of fairy tales. In "The Dragon's
Grandmother" he introduces us to the arch-sceptic who did not believe in
them--that fresh-coloured and short-sighted young man who had a curious
green tie and a very long neck. It happened that this young man had
called on him just when he had flung aside in disgust a heap of the
usual modern problem-novels, and fallen back with vehement contentment
on _Grimm's Fairy Tales_. "When he incidentally mentioned that he did
not believe in fairy tales, I broke out beyond control. 'Man,' I said,
'who are you that you should not believe in fairy tales? It is much
easier to believe in Blue Beard than to believe in you. A blue beard is
a misfortune; but there are green ties which are sins. It is far easier
to believe in a million fairy tales than to believe in one man who does
not like fairy tales. I would rather kiss Grimm instead of a Bible and
swear to all his stories as if they were thirty-nine articles than say
seriously and out of my heart that there can be such a man as you; that
you are not some temptation of the devil or some delusion from the
void.'" The reason for this unexpected outbreak is a very deep one.
"Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild
and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of
routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the
fairy tale is--what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The
problem of the modern novel is--what will a madman do with a dull world?
In the fairy tale the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In
the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers
from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos."
In other words, the ideals, the ultimate convictions, are the
trustworthy things; the actual experience of life is often matter not
for distrust only but for scorn and contempt. And this philosophy Mr.
Chesterton learned in the nursery, from that "solemn and star-appointed
priestess," his nurse. The fairy tale, and not the problem-novel, is the
true presentment of human nature and of life. For, in the first place it
preserves in man the faculty most essential to human nature--the faculty
of wonder, without which no man can live. To regain that faculty is to
be born again, out of a false world into a true. The constant repetition
of the laws of Nature blunts our spirits to the amazing character of
every detail which she reproduces. To catch again the wonder of common
things--
"the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower"
--is to pass from darkness into light, from falsehood to truth. "All the
towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately
upon one assumption: a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing
goes on repeating itself it is probably dead: a piece of clockwork." But
that is mere blindness to the mystery and surprise of everything that
goes to make up actual human experience. "The repetition in Nature
seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry
schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed
signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed
bent on being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a
thousand times."
That is one fact, which fairy tales emphasise--the constant demand for
wonder in the world, and the appropriateness and rightness of the
wondering attitude of mind, as man passes through his lifelong gallery
of celestial visions. The second fact is that all such vision is
conditional, and "hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things
conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling
things that are let loose depend upon one thing which is forbidden."
This is the very note of fairyland. "You may live in a palace of gold
and sapphire, _if_ you do not say the word 'cow'; or you may live
happily with the King's daughter, _if_ you do not show her an onion."
The conditions may seem arbitrary, but that is not the point. The point
is that there always _are_ conditions. The parallel with human life is
obvious. Many people in the modern world are eagerly bent on having the
reward without fulfilling the condition, but life is not made that way.
The whole problem of marriage is a case in point. Its conditions are
rigorous, and people on all sides are trying to relax them or to do away
with them. Similarly, all along the line, modern society is seeking to
live in a freedom which is in the nature of things incompatible with the
enjoyment or the prosperity of the human spirit. There is an _if_ in
everything. Life is like that, and we cannot alter it. Quarrel with the
seemingly arbitrary or unreasonable condition, and the whole fairy
palace vanishes. "Life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as
brittle as the window-pane."
From all this it is but a step to the consideration of dogma and the
orthodox Christian creed. Mr. Chesterton is at war to the knife with
vague modernism in all its forms. The eternal verities which produce
great convictions are incomparably the most important things for human
nature. No "inner light" will serve man's turn, but some outer light,
and that only and always. "Christianity came into the world, firstly in
order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards,
but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a
divine company and a divine captain." This again is human nature. No man
can live his life out fully without being mastered by convictions that
he cannot challenge, and for whose origin he is not responsible. The
most essentially human thing is the sense that these, the supreme
conditions of life, are not of man's own arranging, but have been and
are imposed upon him.
At almost every point this system may be disputed. Mr. Chesterton, who
never shrinks from pressing his theories to their utmost length, scoffs
at the modern habit of "saying that such-and-such a creed can be held in
one age, but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was
credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth.
You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on
Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a
view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not
suitable to half-past four." That is precisely what many of us do say.
Our powers of dogmatising vary to some extent with our moods, and to a
still greater extent with the reception of new light. There are many
days on which the dogmas of early morning are impossible and even absurd
when considered in the light of evening.
But it is not our task to criticise Mr. Chesterton's faith nor his way
of dealing with it. Were we to do so, most of us would probably strike a
balance. We would find many of his views and statements unconvincing;
and yet we would acknowledge that they had the power of forcing the mind
to see fresh truth upon which the will must act decisively. The main
point in his orthodoxy is unquestionably a most valuable contribution to
the general faith of his time and country. That point is the adventure
which he narrates under the similitude of the voyage that ended in the
discovery of England. He set out to find the empirical truth of human
nature and the meaning of human life, as these are to be explored in
experience. When he found them, it was infinitely surprising to him to
become aware that the system in which his faith had come at last to rest
was just Christianity--the only system which could offer any adequate
and indeed exact account of human nature. The articles of its creed he
recognised as the points of conviction which are absolutely necessary to
the understanding of human nature and to the living of human life.
Thus it comes to pass that in the midst of a time resounding with pagan
voices old and new, he stands for an unflinching idealism. It is the
mark of pagans that they are children of Nature, boasting that Nature is
their mother: they are solemnised by that still and unresponsive
maternity, or driven into rebellion by discovering that the so-called
mother is but a harsh stepmother after all. Mr. Chesterton loves Nature,
because Christianity has revealed to him that she is but his sister,
child of the same Father. "We can be proud of her beauty, since we have
the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire,
but not to imitate."
It follows that two worlds are his, as is the case with all true
idealists. The modern reversion to paganism is founded on the
fundamental error that Christianity is alien to Nature, setting up
against her freedom the repellent ideal of asceticism, and frowning upon
her beauty with the scowl of the harsh moralist. For Mr. Chesterton the
bleakness is all on the side of the pagans, and the beauty with the
idealists. They do not look askance at the green earth at all. They gaze
upon it with steady eyes, until they are actually looking through it,
and discovering the radiance of heaven there, and the sublime brightness
of the Eternal Life. The pagan virtues, such as justice and temperance,
are painfully reasonable and often sad. The Christian virtues are faith,
hope, and charity--each more unreasonable than the last, from the point
of view of mere mundane common sense; but they are gay as childhood, and
hold the secret of perennial youth and unfading beauty, in a world which
upon any other terms than these is hastening to decay.