I stood and spoke a blasphemy--
"Behold the summer leaves are green."
It was a defence of reality, crying for vengeance upon the realists. The
word realism had come to be the trade-mark of Zola and his followers,
especially of Mr. George Moore, who made a sacrifice of nine obvious,
clean and unsinkable aspects of life so as to concentrate upon the
submersible tenth. Chesterton came out with his defence of the common
man, of the streets
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God,
the grass, and all the little things of life, "things" in general, for
our subject, alone among modern poets, is not afraid to use the word. If
on one occasion he can merely
. . . feel vaguely thankful to the vast
Stupidity of things,
on another he will speak of
The whole divine democracy of things,
a line which is a challenge to the unbeliever, a statement of a
political creed which is the outgrowth of a religious faith.
The same year Chesterton formally stepped into the ranks of journalism
and joined the staff of The Daily News. He had scribbled poems since he
had been a boy at St. Paul's School. In the years following he had
watched other people working at the Slade, while he had gone on
scribbling. Then he had begun to do little odd jobs of art criticism
and reviewing for The Bookman and put in occasional appearances in the
statelier columns of The Speaker. Then came the Boer War, which made G.
K. Chesterton lose his temper but find his soul. In 1900 The Daily News
passed into new hands--the hands of G.K.C.'s friends. And until 1913,
when the causes he had come to uphold were just diametrically opposed to
the causes the victorious Liberal Party had adopted, every Saturday
morning's issue of that paper contained an article by him, while often
enough there appeared signed reviews and poems. The situation was absurd
enough. The Daily News was the organ of Nonconformists, and G.K.C.
preached orthodoxy to them. It advocated temperance, and G.K.C.
advocated beer. At first this was sufficiently amusing, and nobody
minded much. But before Chesterton severed his connection with the
paper, its readers had come to expect a weekly article that almost
invariably contained an attack upon one of their pet beliefs, and often
enough had to be corrected by a leader on the same page. But the
Chesterton of 1900 was a spokesman of the Liberalism of his day,
independent, not the intractable monster who scoffed, a few years later,
at all the parties in the State.
At this point one is reminded of Watts-Dunton's definition of the two
kinds of humour in The Renascence of Wonder: "While in the case of
relative humour that which amuses the humorist is the incongruity of
some departure from the laws of convention, in the case of absolute
humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the normal as fixed
by nature herself." We have our doubts as to the general application of
this definition: but it applies so well to Chesterton that it might
almost have come off his study walls. What made a series of more than
six hundred articles by him acceptable to The Daily News was just the
skilful handling of "the laws of convention," and "the normal as fixed
by nature herself." On the theory enunciated by Watts-Dunton, everything
except the perfect average is absolutely funny, and the perfect average,
of course, is generally an incommensurable quantity. Chesterton
carefully made it his business to present the eccentricity--I use the
word in its literal sense--of most things, and the humour followed in
accordance with the above definition. The method was simple. Chesterton
invented some grotesque situation, some hypothesis which was glaringly
absurd. He then placed it in an abrupt juxtaposition with the normal,
instead of working from the normal to the actual, in the usual manner.
Just as the reader was beginning to protest against the reversal of his
accustomed values, G.K.C. would strip the grotesque of a few
inessentials, and, lo! a parable. A few strokes of irony and wit, an
epigram or two infallibly placed where it would distract attention from
a weak point in the argument, and the thing was complete. By such means
Chesterton developed the use of a veritable Excalibur of controversy, a
tool of great might in political journalism. These methods, pursued a
few years longer, taught him a craftsmanship he could employ for purely
romantic ends. How he employed it, and the opinions which he sought to
uphold by its means will be the subjects of the following chapters.
Chesterton sallied forth like a Crusader against the political and
literary Turks who had unjustly come into possession of a part of the
heritage of a Christian people. We must not forget that the leading
characteristic of a Crusader is his power of invigorating, which he
applies impartially to virtues and to vices. There is a great difference
between a Crusader and a Christian, which is not commonly realized. The
latter attempts to show his love for his enemy by abolishing his
unchristianness, the former by abolishing him altogether. Although the
two methods are apt to give curiously similar results, the distinction
between a Crusader and a Christian is radical and will be considered in
greater detail in the course of this study. This study does not profess
to be biographical, and only the essential facts of Chesterton's life
need be given here. These are, that he was born in London in 1873, is
the son of a West London estate agent who is also an artist and a
children's poet in a small but charming way, is married and has
children. Perhaps it is more necessary to record the fact that he is
greatly read by the youth of his day, that he comes in for much amused
tolerance, that, generally speaking, he is not recognized as a great or
courageous thinker, even by those people who understand his views well
enough to dissent from them entirely, and that he is regarded less as a
stylist, than as the owner of a trick of style. These are the false
beliefs that I seek to combat. The last may be disposed of summarily.
When an author's style is completely sincere, and completely part of
him, it has this characteristic; it is almost impossible to imitate.
Nobody has ever successfully parodied Shakespeare, for example; there
are not even any good parodies of Mr. Shaw. And Chesterton remains
unparodied; even Mr. Max Beerbohm's effort in A Christmas Garland rings
false. His style is individual. He has not "played the sedulous ape."
But, on the other hand, it is not proposed to acquit Chesterton of all
the charges brought against him. The average human being is partly a
prig and partly a saint; and sometimes men are so glad to get rid of a
prig that they are ready to call him a saint--Simon Stylites, for
example. And it is not suggested that the author of the remark, "There
are only three things that women do not understand. They are Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity," is not a prig, for a demonstration that he is a
complete gentleman would obviously leave other matters of importance
inconveniently crowded out. We are confronted with a figure of some
significance in these times. He represents what has been called in other
spheres than his "the anti-intellectualist reaction." We must answer the
questions; to what extent does he represent mere unqualified reaction?
What are his qualifications as a craftsman? What, after all, has he
done?
And we begin with his romances.