THERE are innumerable books--or let us say twenty--on Mr. Bernard Shaw.
They deal with him as a sociologist, a dramatist, or what not, but never
as a humorist. There is a mass of books on Oscar Wilde, and they deal
with everything concerned with him, except his humour. The great
humorists--as such--go unsung to their graves. That is because there is
nothing so obvious as a joke, and nothing so difficult to explain. It
requires a psychologist, like William James, or a philosopher, like
Bergson, to explain what a joke is, and then most of us cannot
understand the explanation. A joke--especially another man's joke--is a
thing to be handled delicately and reverently, for once the bloom is
off, the joke mysteriously shrivels and vanishes. Translators are the
sworn enemies of jokes; the exigencies of their deplorable trade cause
them to maul the poor little things about while they are putting them
into new clothes, and the result is death, or at the least an appearance
of vacuous senescence. But jokes are only the crystallization of humour;
it exists also in less tangible forms, such as style and all that
collection of effects vaguely lumped together and called "atmosphere."
Chesterton's peculiar "atmosphere" rises like a sweet exhalation from
the very ink he sheds. And it is frankly indefinable, as all genuine
style is. The insincere stylists can be reduced to a formula, because
they work from a formula; Pater may be brought down to an arrangement of
adjectives and commas, Doctor Johnson to a succession of rhythms,
carefully pruned of excrescences, and so on, but the stylist who writes
as God made him defies such analysis. Meredith and Shaw and Chesterton
will remain mysteries even unto the latest research student of the
Universities of Jena and Chicago. Patient students (something of the
sort is already being done) will count up the number of nouns and verbs
and commas in _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ and will express the result
in such a form as this--[A]
_ _
/ / nouns cubed _________ sin A
Chesterton (G. K.) = | | ------ + / .2log bn - -----
_/_/ verbs squared \/ c e 47
But they will fail to touch the essential Chesterton, because one of
the beauties of this form of analysis is that when the formula has been
obtained, nobody is any the wiser as to the manner of its use. We know
that James Smith is composed of beef and beer and bread, because all
evidence goes to show that these are the only things he ever absorbs,
but nobody has ever suggested that a synthesis of foodstuffs will ever
give us James Smith.
Now the difficulty of dealing with the humour of Chesterton is that, in
doing so, one is compelled to handle it, to its detriment. If in the
chapter on his Romances any reader thought he detected the voice and the
style of Chesterton, he is grievously mistaken. He only saw the
scaffolding, which bears the same relation to the finished product as
the skeleton bears to the human body.
Consider these things:
If you throw one bomb you are only a murderer; but
if you keep on persistently throwing bombs, you
are in awful danger of at last becoming a prig.
If we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to
drift anywhere at any instant, the practical
result would be that no one would have the courage
to begin a conversation.
If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought
to be inscribed, "For the Fathers of Gentlemen
only." In two generations they can do the trick.
Now these propositions are not merely snippets from a system of
philosophy, presented after the manner of the admirers of Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche. These are quotations which display a quite exceptional
power of surprising people. The anticlimaxes of the first two passages,
the bold dip into the future at the expense of the past in the third are
more than instances of mere verbal felicity. They indicate a writer
capable of the humour which feeds upon daily life, and is therefore
thoroughly democratic and healthy. For there are two sorts of humour;
that which feeds upon its possessor, Oscar Wilde is the supreme example
of this type of humorist, and that which draws its inspiration from its
surroundings, of which the great exemplar is Dickens, and Chesterton is
his follower. The first exhausts itself sooner or later, because it
feeds on its own blood, the second is inexhaustible. This theory may be
opposed on the ground that humour is both internal and external in its
origin. The supporters of this claim are invited to take a holiday in
bed, or elsewhere away from the madding crowd, and then see how humorous
they can be.
Humour has an unfortunate tendency to stale. The joke of yesteryear
already shows frays upon its sleeves. The wit of the early volumes of
Punch is in the last stages of decrepitude. Watch an actor struggling to
conceal from his audience the fact that he is repeating one of
Shakespeare's puns. We tolerate the humour of Congreve, not because it
is thoroughly amusing, but because it has survived better than most.
Humorous verse stands a slightly better chance of evoking smiles in its
old age. There is always its unalterable verbal neatness; tradition,
too, lingers more lovingly around fair shapes, and a poem is a better
instance of form than a paragraph. Mankind may grow blase, if it will,
but as a poet of the comic, Chesterton will live long years. Take for
example that last and worst of his novels _The Flying Inn_. Into this he
has pitched with a fascinating recklessness a quantity of poems,
garnered from The New Witness and worthy of the immortality which is
granted the few really good comic poems. There is the poem of Noah, with
that stimulating line with which each stanza ends. The last one goes:
But Noah he sinned, and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod,
Till a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod,
And you can't get wine at a P.S.A., or Chapel, or Eisteddfod;
For the Curse of Water has come again because of the wrath of God.
And water is on the Bishop's board, and the Higher Thinker's shrine,
But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.
There is a lunatic song against grocers, who are accused of
nonconformity, and an equally lunatic song in several instalments on
being a vegetarian:
I am silent in the Club,
I am silent in the pub,
I am silent on a bally peak in Darien;
For I stuff away for life
Shoving peas in with a knife,
Because I am at heart a vegetarian.
There is a joyous thing about a millionaire who lived the simple life,
and a new version of "St. George for Merry England." Tea, cocoa, and
soda-water are the subjects of another poem. The verses about Roundabout
are very happy:
Some say that when Sir Lancelot
Went forth to find the Grail,
Grey Merlin wrinkled up the roads,
For hope that he should fail;
All roads led back to Lyonnesse
And Camelot in the Vale,
I cannot yield assent to this
Extravagant hypothesis,
The plain shrewd Briton will dismiss
Such rumours (_Daily Mail_).
But in the streets of Roundabout
Are no such factions found,
Or theories to expound about
Or roll upon the ground about,
In the happy town of Roundabout,
That makes the world go round.
And there are lots more like this.
Then there are the _Ballades Urbane_ which appeared in the early volumes
of The Eye-Witness. They have refrains with the true human note. Such as
"But will you lend me two-and-six?"
ENVOI
Prince, I will not be knighted! No!
Put up your sword and stow your tricks!
Offering the Garter is no go--
BUT WILL YOU LEND ME TWO-AND-SIX?
In prose Chesterton is seldom the mere jester; he will always have a
moral or two, at the very least, at his fingers' ends, or to be quite
exact, at the end of his article. He is never quite irresponsible. He
seldom laughs at a man who is not a reformer.
Or let us take another set of illustrations, this time in prose. (Once
more I protest that I shall not take the reader through all the works of
Chesterton.) I mean the articles "Our Note Book" which he contributed to
The Illustrated London News. They are of a familiar type; a series of
paragraphs on some topical subject, with little spaces between them in
order to encourage the weary reader. Chesterton wrote this class of
article supremely well. He would seize on something apparently trivial,
and exalt it into a symptom. When he had given the disease a name, he
went for the quack doctors who professed to remedy it. He goes to
Letchworth, in which abode of middle-class faddery he finds a teetotal
public-house, pretending to look like the real thing, and calling itself
"The Skittles Inn." He immediately raises the question, Can we
dissociate beer from skittles? Then he widens out his thesis.
Our life to-day is marked by perpetual attempts to
revive old-fashioned things while omitting the
human soul in them that made them more than
fashions.
And he concludes:
I welcome a return to the rudeness of old times;
when Luther attacked Henry VIII for being fat; and
when Milton and his Dutch opponent devoted pages
of their controversy to the discussion of which of
them was the uglier. . . . The new controversialists
. . . call a man a physical degenerate, instead of
calling him an ugly fellow. They say that red hair
is the mark of the Celtic stock, instead of
calling him "Carrots."
Of this class of fun Chesterton is an easy master. It makes him a
fearsome controversialist on the platform or in his favourite lists, the
columns of a newspaper. But he uses his strength a little tyrannously.
He is an adept at begging the question. The lost art called ignoratio
elenchi has been privately rediscovered by him, to the surprise of many
excellent and honest debaters, who have never succeeded in scoring the
most obvious points in the face of Chesterton's power of emitting a
string of epigrams and pretending it is a chain of argument. The case,
in whatever form it is put, is always fresh and vigorous. Another
epigrammatist, Oscar Wilde, in comparison with him may be said to have
used the midnight oil so liberally in the preparation of his witticisms,
that one might almost detect the fishy odour. But as with his prose so
with his verses; Chesterton's productions are so fresh that they seem to
spring from his vitality rather than his intellect. They are generally a
trifle ragged and unpolished as if, like all their author's productions,
they were strangers to revision. And vitality demands boisterous
movement, more even than coherence. Sometimes the boisterousness is
apparently unsupported by the sense of the words.
So you have gained the golden crowns and grasped the golden weather,
The kingdoms and the hemispheres that all men buy and sell,
But I will lash the leaping drum and swing the flaring feather,
For the light of seven heavens that are lost to me like hell.
Here the stanza actually goes with such a swing that the reader will in
all probability not notice that the lines have no particular meaning.
On the other hand, Chesterton's poetry has exuberant moments of sheer
delight. In one of his essays he is lamenting the songlessness of modern
life and suggests one or two chanties. Here they are:
Chorus of Bank Clerks:
Up, my lads, and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o'er.
Hear the Stars of Morning shouting: "Two and Two are Four."
Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the sophists roar,
Though we weep and pawn our watches, Two and Two are Four.
Chorus of Bank Clerks when there is a run on the bank:
There's a run upon the Bank--
Stand away!
For the Manager's a crank and the Secretary drank, and the Upper
Tooting Bank
Turns to bay!
Stand close: there is a run
On the Bank.
Of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing legend run, that she
fired with every gun
Ere she sank.
The Post Office Hymn would begin as follows:
O'er London our letters are shaken like snow,
Our wires o'er the world like the thunderbolts go.
The news that may marry a maiden in Sark,
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.
Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy):
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.
The joke becomes simply immense when we picture the actual singing of
the songs.
But that is not the only class of humour of which Chesterton is capable.
He can cut as well as hack. It is to be doubted whether any politician
was ever addressed in lines more sarcastic than those of _Antichrist_,
an ode to Mr. F. E. Smith. This gentleman, speaking on the Welsh
Disestablishment Bill, remarked that it "has shocked the conscience of
every Christian community in Europe." It begins:
Are they clinging to their crosses,
F. E. Smith.
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,
Are they, Smith?
Do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city?
Groaning "That's the Second Reading!"
Hissing "There is still Committee!"
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna's point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars?
Do they, Smith?
Then in Russia, among the peasants,
Where Establishment means nothing
And they never heard of Wales,
Do they read it all in Hansard
With a crib to read it with--
"Welsh Tithes: Dr. Clifford answered."
Really, Smith?
The final verse is:
It would greatly, I must own,
Soothe me, Smith,
If you left this theme alone,
Holy Smith!
For your legal cause or civil
You fight well and get your fee;
For your God or dream or devil
You will answer, not to me.
Talk about the pews and steeples
And the Cash that goes therewith!
But the souls of Christian peoples . . .
--Chuck it, Smith!
The wilting sarcasm of this poem is a feature which puts it with a few
others apart from the bulk of Chesterton's poems. Even as bellicosity
and orthodoxy are two of the brightest threads which run through the
whole texture of his work, so Poems of Pugnacity (as Ella Wheeler Wilcox
would say) and religious verses constitute the largest part of the
poetic works of G.K.C. His first book of verses--after _Greybeards at
Play_--_The Wild Knight_ contained a bloodthirsty poem about the Battle
of Gibeon, written with strict adhesion to the spirit of the Old
Testament. It might have been penned by a survivor, glutted with blood
and duly grateful to the God of his race for the solar and lunar
eccentricities which made possible the extermination of the five kings
of the Amorites. In 1911 came _The Ballad of the White Horse_, which is
all about Alfred, according to the popular traditions embodied in the
elementary history books, and, in particular, the Battle of Ethandune.
How Chesterton revels in that Homeric slaughter! The words blood and
bloody punctuate the largest poem of G.K.C. to the virtual obliteration
in our memory of the fine imagery, the occasional tendernesses, and the
blustering aggressiveness of some of the metaphors and similes. Not many
men would have the nerve, let alone the skill, to write:
And in the last eclipse the sea
Shall stand up like a tower,
Above all moons made dark and riven,
Hold up its foaming head in heaven,
And laugh, knowing its hour.
But, at the same time, this poem contains very touching and beautiful
lines. _The Ballad of the White Horse_ is an epic of the struggle
between Christian and Pagan. One of the essentials of an epic is that
its men should be decent men, if they cannot be heroes. The Iliad would
have been impossible if it had occurred to Homer to introduce the
Government contractors to the belligerent powers. All the point would
have gone out of Orlando Furioso if it had been the case that the
madness of Orlando was the delirium tremens of an habitual drunkard.
Chesterton recognizing this truth makes the pagans of the _White Horse_
behave like gentlemen. There is a beautiful little song put into the
mouth of one of them, which is in its way a perfect expression of the
inadequacy of false gods.
There is always a thing forgotten
When all the world goes well;
A thing forgotten, as long ago
When the gods forgot the mistletoe,
And soundless as an arrow of snow
The arrow of anguish fell.
The thing on the blind side of the heart,
On the wrong side of the door,
The green plant groweth, menacing
Almighty lovers in the spring;
There is always a forgotten thing,
And love is not secure.
The sorrow behind these lines is more moving, because more sincere,
than the lines of that over-quoted verse of Swinburne's:
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods there be--
That no life lives for ever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
This is insincere, because a pagan (as Swinburne was) could have
committed suicide had he really felt these things. Swinburne, like most
modern pagans, really hated priestcraft when he thought he was hating
God. Chesterton's note is truer. He knows that the pagan has all the
good things of life but one, and that only an exceptionally nice pagan
knows he lacks that much.
And so one might go on mining the _White Horse_, for it contains most
things, as a good epic should. Two short stanzas, however, should be
quoted, whatever else is omitted, for the sake of their essential
Christianity, their claim that a man may make a fool of himself for
Christ's sake, whatever the bishops have to say about it.
The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the Cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark.
The men of the East may search the scrolls
For sure fates and fame,
But the men that drink the blood of God
Go singing to their shame.
In his last volume of _Poems_ (1915) Chesterton presents us with a
varied collection of works, written at any time during the last twelve
or so years. The pugnacious element is present in _Lepanto_, through the
staccato syllables of which we hear drum-taps and men cheering. There is
a temptation to treat _Lepanto_, and indeed most of Chesterton's poems,
with special reference to their technique, but we must resist this
temptation, with tears if need be, and with prayer, for to give way to
it would be to commit a form of vivisection. G.K.C. is not a text,
praise be, and whether he lives or dies, long may he be spared the hands
of an editor or interpreter who is also an irrepressible authority on
anapaests and suchlike things. He is a poet, and a considerable poet,
not because of his strict attention to the rules of prosody, but because
he cannot help himself, and the rules in question are for the persons
who can, the poets by deliberate intention, the writers who polish
unceasingly. Chesterton has more impulse than finish, but he has natural
gifts of rhythm and the effective use of words which more or less
(according to the reader's taste) compensate for his refusal or his
incapacity to take pains.
Finally there are the religious poems. From these we can best judge the
reality of Chesterton's poetic impulse, for here, knowing that
affectation would be almost indecent, he has expressed what he had to
express with a care denied to most of his other works. In one of his
essays, G.K.C. exults in that matchless phrase of Vaughan, "high
humility." He has both adopted and adapted this quality, and the results
are wonderful. In _The Wise Men_ occurs this stanza:
The Child that was ere worlds begun
(. . . We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone . . .)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.
The superb antithesis leaves one struggling against that involuntary
little gasp which is a reader's first tribute to a fine thought. He
could be a great hymn writer, if he would. One of his poems, in fact,
has found its way into The English Hymnal, where it competes (if one may
use the word of a sacred song) with Recessional for the favour of
congregations. If we take a glance at a few of the finest hymns, we
shall find that they share certain obvious qualities: bold imagery, the
vocabulary of conflict, an attitude of humility that is very nearly also
one of great pride, and certain tricks of style. And when we look
through Chesterton's poems generally, we shall find that these are
exactly the qualities they possess.