G. K. CHESTERTON
Knight Errant of Orthodoxy
The central truth to be uttered about Mr. Chesterton is that
he is the greatest prophet of our generation. He is as great
as Tolstoy or Ibsen. It may seem rash to set him beside
these great prophets, but time will ratify my rashness. A
prophet is a man of genius with a spiritual message for his
age.
The spiritual message delivered by Mr. Chesterton is
mightier than any other sounding in our ears. He is a bigger
man than Maeterlinck or Bergson, though we know it not.
As a prophet he is larger in every way than Mr. Shaw or
Mr. Wells or Mr. Arnold Bennett, because he deals with the
soul, whereas they deal with the soul's environment. They
deal with man as a social animal. He deals with man as a
spiritual being.
Our failure to salute the prophet is complete, and it
is emphasized by our failure to perceive that he is the
authentic voice of that English soul which is now wrestling
with the Teutonic soul for the soul of the world. _He is the
soul of England_.--James Douglas in the _Observer_, 1916.
Can a journalist have a philosophy of life, and if so would it be
worth talking about? In answer to the first question I shall quote
Chesterton to the effect that everybody has a philosophy, even generals
and journalists. To prove the affirmative of the second I shall
present, as Exhibit B, the whole body of Chesterton's works. Perhaps
the most heretical passage of his book on "Heretics" was that which
begins:
But there are some people, nevertheless--and I am one of
them--who think that the most practical and important thing
about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that
for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know
his income, but still more important to know his philosophy.
We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it
is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more
important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the
question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects
matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects
them.
Like many other things in Chesterton's works this does not sound so
heretical now as when it was written, about the time when the weary old
world had finished Chapter XIX of the second volume of his history and
had turned over the page in hopes of finding something new and exciting
in Chapter XX--and found it. Chesterton's countrymen then were keeping
careful count of Germany's soldiers and ships, but they were
contentedly ignorant of German philosophy. But as soon as the war broke
out they began with feverish haste to translate and study Treitschke,
Nietzsche, Bernhardi, and any other books which might throw light upon
the German _Weltanschauung_, but which in the leisurely days of peace
they had no time to read.
It is convenient to compare Shaw and Chesterton because they are
antithetic in temperament and opinion and represent two opposite
currents of modern thought. Shaw stands for the earlier rationalistic,
socialistic revolt against the conventions of society. Chesterton
stands for the later conservative reaction to all this, for
ecclesiasticism, nationalism, and traditionalism. Shaw is a vegetarian
and teetotaler. Chesterton is quite the opposite; he champions the
public house as a good old English institution. Shaw is a suffragist;
Chesterton is dead set against anything of the kind. Shaw came from the
most pronounced Protestant stock, the Ulster kind, and, as we can see
from his introduction to "Androcles and the Lion", he has constructed
a sort of religion for himself, though he could hardly be accounted
orthodox. Chesterton is a Catholic, though of the Anglican rather than
the Roman variety, a champion of orthodoxy, and a defender of all
forms of ritualism and medievalism. Chesterton makes it his business to
find a logical basis for popular traditions, customs, and superstitions
which have always been regarded as purely irrational and arbitrary even
by those who liked them and defended them as poetic and conforming
to a deeper reality than that of reason. Shaw is always showing how
absurd and illogical are the soundest axioms and the most unquestioned
platitudes, whether of orthodox conservative or orthodox revolutionary
thought. Chesterton discovers new reasons in things; Shaw discovers new
unreasons in things.
Chesterton appears in the capacity of permanent minority leader. But
this is in respect to that really small minority of professional
writers, speakers, and agitators who set the fashions for the
Zeitgeist. Actually he has the backing of the great inarticulate
immobile mass of the people.
Chesterton has discovered how to be witty though orthodox. But his
orthodoxy is so extreme that it seems heterodoxy to most of us. Perhaps
that accounts for his success in making it sound paradoxical. As Wesley
determined that the devil had no right to all the pretty music, so
Chesterton determined that the iconoclasts should not monopolize
all the cleverness. His originality consists in his genius for turning
platitudes into epigrams. He can put the most unquestioned axiom in a
way to shock the world. If he is right in what he says in his books on
Watts that "there is only one thing that requires real courage to say
and that is a truism", Chesterton must be the bravest man alive. But
even he finds it necessary to promulgate his truisms in the disguise of
sensational novelties.
Chesterton's ideal is a complete democracy, not merely democracy in
politics but democracy in science, religion, literature, sport, and
art. If you say this is impracticable he doubtless would retort that it
was the essence of an ideal to be impracticable, otherwise it would be
confounded with dull reality. He always champions the opinion of the
many against that of the few, the laymen against the expert.
Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one
man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing
better. If scientific civilization goes on (which is most
improbable) only one man will laugh because he can laugh
better than the rest.--"Heretics."
It was absurd to say that Waterloo was won on Eton cricket
fields. But it might have fairly been said that Waterloo was
won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a very
clumsy cricket.
... It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done
badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it
is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very
well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics
are doing them and that the nation is merely looking
on.--"All Things Considered."
On this ground he hated Germany even before the war, as a nation ruled
by experts. He denounced its workingmen's insurance, its governmental
efficiency, its higher criticism, and the like. "I am all for German
fantasy, but I will resist German earnestness till I die. I am all for
Grimm's Fairy Tales; but if there is such a thing as Grimm's Law, I
would break it if I knew what it was."[1]
It is on the basis of democracy that he defends religion:
That Christianity is identical with democracy is the hardest
of gospels: there is nothing that so strikes men with fear
as that they are all sons of God.--"Twelve Types."
It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended
through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human
voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The
man who quotes some German historian against the tradition
of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing
to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one
expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite
easy to see why a legend is treated and ought to be treated
more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is
generally made by the majority of people in a village, who
are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in
the village who is mad.... If we attach great importance
to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when
dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should
disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable.
Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all
classes--our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead....
Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even
if he is our groom: tradition asks us not to neglect a good
man's opinion, even if he is our father.--"Orthodoxy."
I expect some time to find Chesterton defending the Trinity on the
ground that it is more democratic than Mohammedan monotheism, a sort of
commission government extended to the universe.
Chesterton has the true artist's love for the individual and the
concrete. He delights in clear outlines and bright colors. He thinks
in pictures. I have never seen any of his painting, but he must have
the color sense strongly developed. He will halt in a stern chase or in
the height of an argument to describe a sunset with the most chromatic
language at his command. He studied art at the Slade School in
London, and although he was soon switched off into journalism he still
reverts to the pencil on occasion. He has supplied the illustrations to
three of Belloc's books; "The Great Enquiry", "The Green Overcoat", and
"Emmanuel Burden."[2] The last, a satire on imperialistic financiering,
is one of the cleverest pieces of irony to be found in all literature,
but it raises the question of whether the ironical tone can be
sustained through a whole volume without a decline of interest. When
the question of illustration arose Chesterton sent out for a bundle
of wrapping paper, and in the course of one evening drew all of the
portraits in the book as well as a lot that were not used.
For the understanding of Chesterton's romances it is necessary to
remember that the more non-sensical they seem, the more sense they have
in them. This is because when he gets blinded by a big idea he sees
men as concepts walking. He is too much of a Platonist to be a good
novelist. He admires Dickens but never imitates him, for Chesterton's
stories are singularly devoid of individuals. All the little variations
and accidental peculiarities that make a type into a person in the
great novels of the world are lacking. In "The Ball and the Cross"
Mac Ian is simply the archetype of the Catholic Romanticist and
Turnbull of the Revolutionary Rationalist. Neither of them ever does
anything out of character, but then neither of them has any character
outside of the Idea that made them what they are. Each falls in love
with a girl of the opposite type, drawn to scale. This is carried
farther yet by the introduction of an incredibly consistent Tolstoyan
and a Nietzschean beside whom Nietzsche would seem all too human. Thus
the whole book is balanced and matched like old-fashioned wall paper or
an Italian garden.
Manalive comes closer to being real. He certainly is alive, but he is
not a man; he is an ideal, Chesterton's superman. "All habits are bad
habits" is the text of G. K. Chesterton's "Manalive", which proved
as delightful to his admirers and distasteful to his antipathists as
any of his former productions. In his essays Mr. Chesterton's method
is first to set down something that sounds like a wild absurdity and
then to argue the reader into the admission--cheerful or indignant,
according to his temperament--that it is a very sensible thing after
all. In his romances his method is essentially the same. Nobody could
act crazier than Mr. Innocent Smith in the first chapters of this
volume, but in the end he is proved, by a long legal process, to be
the only really sane man of the lot. He is accused of about as many
crimes as the hero of Jokai's tale, "The Death's Head", confessed
to, but he turns out to be quite as guiltless. Charges of murder,
burglary, bigamy, and kidnaping, amply certificated, slip off him
like water off a duck's back. Neither prison nor asylum can hold
Manalive. Smith's theory is that if you keep the commandments, you
may violate the conventions; which, being the reverse of the ordinary
rule of procedure, gets him into all sorts of misunderstandings. He
had evidently read Schopenhauer's theory that the only happiness
is the pursuit of happiness, and, what is more, he acts upon it by
letting go what he most delights in that he may recapture it. He goes
round the world in search of his own home, and his series of amorous
adventures are conducted in strict accord with monogamous morality.
By getting outside of himself he can gain the joy of coveting his own
possessions. The economic law of diminishing returns applies to all our
habitual pleasures, and to escape it we must be continually seeking new
investments.
So Manalive is distinguished from ordinary men in that he has legs
that he uses. He is not rooted. He breaks out and runs around and
discovers the most novel and wonderful things in the most commonplace
environment.
Mr. Chesterton is as fond of a chase as a fox hunter or a kinetoscope
man. We have it in "Manalive" as we have it in "The Man Who Was
Thursday" and "The Ball and the Cross." As usual he stops every little
while and paints a cloudscape to rest our eyes; and all along he
enlivens the way by epigrams and inverted proverbs. Here are a few:
When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but when they are
gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. We are never
free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot
exist until it is declared by authority.
For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all
men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate
species.
Though she never spoke she always looked as if she might
speak any minute. Perhaps this is the very definition of a
companion.
All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors
say is disproved. That's the only difference between science
and religion there's ever been or ever will be.
The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by
the simple process of being shallow and standing still.
With our weak spirits we should grow old in eternity, if
we were not kept young by death. Providence has to cut
immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and
butter into fingers.
The most fantastic and therefore characteristic of Chesterton's
romances is "The Man Who Was Thursday" which the French are able
more concisely to entitle _Nommé Jeudi_. The author calls it "A
Nightmare", and it is. The only books to compare with it are George
Macdonald's "Lilith", Strindberg's "Dream Plays", and Andreyev's
"Masked Ball"; but for wild imagining, grotesquerie, farcicality, and
swift transformations it cannot be matched. It is a detective story,
a motion-picture chase, and a system of theology, all in one. Like
all dreams, according to Freud, it is symbolic, but the symbolism
is not to be interpreted in the usual Freudian way, for Chesterton
is clean-minded. The clue to it is to be found in his earliest book
of essays, "The Defendant", when he argues for the moral value of
the detective story in the following fashion: "By dealing with the
unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to
remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war upon a chaotic
world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but
traitors within our gates."
The detective, he says, who stands alone and fearless amid
the knives and fists of a thieves' kitchen, is the original and
poetic figure, and the criminals surrounding him represent cosmic
conservatism. But in "The Man Who Was Thursday" each one of the
six detectives, separately commissioned by the mysterious head of
the secret police to enter the inner circle of seven anarchists,
believes himself to be fighting single-handed for law and order
against a criminal conspiracy to destroy civilization. The seven
pseudo-anarchists go through all sorts of perilous and absurd
adventures in the course of which they are metamorphosed successively
into the seven days of the week, the seven days of creation, the seven
orders of created things, and the seven angels of heaven. Finally
seated upon seven thrones, robed in state, blazoned--of course, since
it is Chesterton--with heraldic devices, they recognize one another
as friends and allies through all their strange strife. It reminds
one of Emerson's Brahma: "If the red slayer thinks he slays." But
Chesterton is too much of a Manichean to let it go at that. One of the
anarchists turns out to be genuine, the only real one in the world,
the irreconcilable rebel, the Eternal Anarchist, the spirit that
continually denies, the leader of His Majesty's Opposition. In some
ways Chesterton's conception of the devil reminds one of Andreyev's
"Anathema" or perhaps rather of the Satan whom Dostoievsky introduces
into his "Brothers Karamazarov." Chesterton's mind seems to have
a curious affinity to the Russian, though so far as I remember his
writings show no evidence of being influenced by Russian literature.
"The Man Who Was Thursday" affects readers variously. To some it seems
ridiculous; to others blasphemous. Julius West, usually sympathetic,
dismisses it in his biography of Chesterton as incomprehensible
and tiresome. Yet three people I know--a man, a woman, and a
child--consider it one of the most wonderful books in the world, and
know it almost by heart.
My own opinion is that it shows that Chesterton has not yet found the
true medium for the expression of his genius. Drawing and writing
are too slow and cold to give scope to his pictorial imagination. He
should, like D'Annunzio, take to the screen. "The Man Who Was Thursday"
would make a magnificent scenario as it stands, and Chesterton could
then add all of the things he thought of or saw while composing it but
could not put into words.
Blake, too, was a man who would have done wonders with the
cinematograph if it had only been invented sooner. Chesterton, in
his sketch of Blake, explains his difficulties of expression by word
and picture:
How shall we manage to state in an obvious and alphabetical
manner the ultimate query, the primordial pivot on which
the whole modern problem turns? It cannot be done in long
rationalistic words: they convey by their very sound the
suggestion of something subtle. One must try to think of
something in the way of a plain street metaphor or an
obvious analogy. For the thing is not too hard for human
speech: it is actually too obvious for human speech.
Chesterton's theory of the use of symbolism, even absurd symbolism, is
given in his "Defense of Nonsense".
Every great literature has always been
allegorical--allegorical of some view of the whole universe.
The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the
Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job
because all life is a riddle....
Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem)
are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that
to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as
impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.
Chesterton at the beginning of his career wrote "A Defense of Detective
Stories"[3] and he has since shown that he knows how to write them,
in the collections entitled "The Club of Queer Trades", "The
Innocence of Father Brown", and "The Wisdom of Father Brown." But
they are different from ordinary detective stories not merely because
a mild-mannered priest takes the place of Sherlock Holmes but more
because they frequently have nothing to do with crime and all parties
turn out, as in "Thursday", to have the best of intentions, whatever
their actions. Chesterton's method in these stories is much the
same as he employs in his essays; that is, he piles up paradoxical
impossibilities, and then by some simple expedient resolves them into
apparent reasonableness. The author's obvious enjoyment of his own
ingenuity adds to the reader's delight. It would be interesting to
know whether he has in mind the solution when he lays out the plot or
whether he is not playing a game with himself like jackstraws, pitting
his skill as a disentangler against a muddle of his own making.
As an artist Chesterton has always been attracted by the Orient, with
its mystical fanaticisms, its cruel colors, and its unfamiliar habits
of thought. But while Turkey is all very well at a distance, Turkey
in Europe is to him a distinct and horrible menace. In "The Flying
Inn" we have a story of Mohammedan influence not only in Europe but
in England itself. This novel is an allegory of the war between the
sacred symbol of the cross and the sacred symbol of the crescent, as
Chesterton has similarly related the struggle of the Ball and the Cross
in his book of that name.
The champions of the crescent are Misysra Ammon, the Prophet of the
Moon, and Lord Ivywood, an eccentric nobleman, a fanatic against
the liquor traffic as the embodiment of Christian custom as opposed
to Moslem. Misysra, who is as fertile with impossible theories as
with plausible arguments to support them, maintains that England is
Mohammedan at heart and proves it in a hundred ways from the contempt
with which the pig is popularly spoken of to the absence of any
"idolatrous" animal or vegetable forms in modern cubist painting. Lord
Ivywood's persecution of the inn-keepers sends one of them adrift
throughout the country carrying his inn-sign with him and accompanied
by Captain Dalroy, an athletic Irishman who champions the cause of the
cross.
So far we have a straight Chesterton novel, a symbolic theme variegated
by satires on modern life. But Chesterton really seems uncertain that
he aimed to write a prose novel at all, for the book is plentifully
interspersed with verses, serious, comic, ironical, militant, in
good meter and in bad, till the novel takes on the not unpleasant
appearance of a Chesterton anthology of songs.
Everybody who likes G. K. Chesterton has wished that he might be
induced to follow the example of Charles Dickens and write a Child's
History of England. When a literary man of wayward genius undertakes
to interpret and record the story of his country the result is almost
always worth while. We do not get the white sunlight of impartiality,
but we get a beautiful rainbow of prejudices, personal opinions,
and mystical insight. Chesterton has still to write us a complete
English history, but he has dealt faithfully with about a century
and a half of it in "The Crimes of England." It is due to him to
say that the unhistorical character of the work is caused rather by
partisan emphasis than by any inaccuracy of detail. Rarely if ever
has Chesterton written with such care for his facts, and, as for his
transcendental interpretation of them, he has as much warrant to
philosophize as Carlyle or Taine or any other literary historian.
But one does tend to get the impression from the book that only
Prussians had ever incurred the scriptural curse on him who removes his
neighbor's landmark.
For the "crimes of England" are really the crimes of Prussia, and
England's guilt is summed up in the phrase that English politics
has been devoted ever since the time of Frederick the Great to "the
belittlement of France and the gross exaggeration of Germany."
Chesterton denounces the part played by his country in the wars of
Frederick the Great, in the Napoleonic struggles, in the repression
of Ireland, in tolerating Bismarck's schemes of aggrandizement, only
to bring into darker relief the wickedness of the state which used
England throughout all these years as a catspaw. Yet the indictment
of England as Prussia's accomplice is delivered in very sharp terms;
so far as Chesterton shows bias it is pro-French or pro-Irish rather
than pro-British. He really believes that the war is an epic struggle
between the old soul of Christendom, most clearly incarnated in
the Catholic nations, and a blast of sinister materialism from the
wastes and forests of Brandenburg. In this belief he writes not only
seriously, but soberly, as befits the great hour, and concludes his
book with a vivid and moving description of the Battle of the Marne
which has in it a world of eloquence and no "cleverness" at all.
The large volume of "Criticisms and Appreciations of Dickens" is
composed of his prefaces to the separate books of Dickens. Although
not so important a piece of work as Chesterton's biography of Dickens,
they are well worth bringing together in this way, because they form
not only a brilliant piece of literary interpretation, but because
they show that it is possible to write prefaces to the classics which
will increase the desire to read the book instead of dampening one's
ardor at the start with a mass of dry and trivial details of the
author's life and environment. Chesterton has the first requisite
of a good introducer, an enthusiasm for his subject and a belief in
the importance of his message for the times in which we live. His
comparison of Dickens and Thackeray, if not quite fair, has at least
sufficient point to suggest thought.
Thackeray has become classical; but Dickens has done
more; he has remained modern. There was a painful moment
(somewhere about the eighties) when we watched anxiously
to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern world.
We have watched a little longer, and with great relief
we begin to realize that it is the modern world that is
fading. All that universe of ranks and respectabilities in
comparison with which Dickens was called a caricaturist,
all that Victorian universe in which he seemed vulgar--all
that is itself--breaking up like a cloud-land. And only the
caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone.
But whether his medium is fiction, criticism, or editorial, Chesterton
is always a moralist, differing, however, from most moralists in that
he is never prosy and never directs his preachments at obsolete evils
and deceased sinners.
Prose and poetry are such widely sundered fields that a reputation made
in one does not carry over into the other. When Scott dropped poetry to
take up novel writing he found it expedient to leave his name behind.
When Kipling passed in the reverse direction from prose to poetry he
had to cultivate a new _clientèle_. It is very amusing to hear two
lovers of Hardy or of Meredith sing peans of praise to their favorite
author in strophe and antistrophe until on descending from the general
to the particular they discover that one was extolling the poet and
the other the novelist and that each had never read, or but lightly
esteemed what the other most admired.
So while the essays and romances of Gilbert Keith Chesterton reach
thousands of readers week by week through the journals, and are bought
with avidity in volume form, his poems are but little known to readers
of his prose, although they have, I fancy, a circle of their own. Yet
no one can understand Chesterton fully who ignores his verse, for his
thought, expressed through this medium, is seen from another angle
and so gains solidity to the view.
Chesterton, like Tennyson, has taken one of England's legendary
heroes as the theme of an epic by which to express his philosophy of
life and his message to his age. The stories of Alfred he accepts as
uncritically and handles as freely as Tennyson did those of Arthur, but
the poems resultant show not merely the difference between the authors,
but also, in a way, the difference between the past century and the
present one, the contrast between a faintly hopeful agnosticism and a
robustious affirmation of faith.
In his "Alarms and Discursions" he has told us in prose of the
impressions made upon him by his visit to the Vale of the White Horse
and Ethandune. These he transmutes into poetry in "The Ballad of the
White Horse."[4] In the beautiful dedication to his wife he gives her
credit for having opened his eyes to the Christian significance of the
wars of Alfred against the Danes. Miss Frances Blogg, whom he married
in 1900, was described by one who knew her then as "a conservative
rebel against the conventions of the unconventional." We may assume
that it was largely through her influence that he was converted from
youthful atheism to extremest orthodoxy. I can quote only a few stanzas
from this dedication although such fragments are distressing to those
who know the whole and aggravating to those who do not.
Lady, by one light only
We look from Alfred's eyes,
We know he saw athwart the wreck
The sign that hangs about your neck,
Where One more than Melchizedek
Is dead and never dies.
Therefore I bring these rimes to you,
Who brought the cross to me,
Since on you flaming without flaw
I saw the sign that Guthrum saw
When he let break his ships of awe,
And laid peace upon the sea.
Do you remember when we went
Under a dragon moon,
And 'mid volcanic tints of night
Walked where they fought the unknown fight
And saw black trees on the battle-height,
Black thorn on Ethandune?
And I thought "I will go with you,
As man with God has gone,
And wander with a wandering star,
The wandering heart of things that are,
The fiery cross of love and war
That like your self goes on."
O go you onward, where you are
Shall honor and laughter be,
Past purpled forest and pearled foam,
God's winged pavilion free to roam,
Your face, that is a wandering home,
A flying home to me.
* * * * *
Up through an empty house of stars
Being what heart you are,
Up the inhuman steeps of space
As on a staircase go in grace,
Carrying the firelight on your face
Beyond the loneliest star.
It is hard to carry the ballad meter through a whole volume without
its growing monotonous. Chesterton's poetry, like his prose, should be
taken in small doses. "The Ballad of the White Horse" contains some
wearisome stretches, particularly in the most exciting parts, the
fights. When I want real zest in blood letting and the enjoyment of
hand to hand combat I should turn to Percy's Reliques, or to Homer.
My volume of the "Ballad" opens easiest, as it has opened oftenest,
at three passages. The first is that where King Alfred as a fugitive
in the forest is set to mind the cakes and gets to musing, not, as we
children used to be told, about how to beat the Danes, but, according
to the Chestertonian version, about the Christian view of the labor
question. As the old, bent woman leaves the hut Alfred wonders what
shall become of such as she.
And well may God with the serving-folk
Cast in His dreadful lot:
Is not He too a servant
And is not He forgot?
For was not God my gardener
And silent like a slave:
That opened oaks on the uplands
Or thicket in graveyard grave?
And was not God my armorer,
All patient and unpaid,
That sealed my skull as a helmet
And ribs for hauberk made?
* * * * *
For God is a great servant
And rose before the day,
From some primordial slumber torn;
But all things living later born
Sleep on, and rise after the morn,
And the Lord has gone away.
On things half sprung from sleeping,
All sleepy suns have shone;
They stretch stiff arms, the yawning trees,
The beasts blink upon hands and knees,
Man is awake and does and sees--
But Heaven has done and gone.
* * * * *
But some see God like Guthrum
Crowned, with a great beard curled,
But I see God like a good giant,
That, laboring, lifts the world.
Wherefore was God in Golgotha,
Slain as a serf is slain:
And hate He had of prince and peer,
And love He had and made good cheer
Of them that, like this woman here,
Go powerfully in pain.
But whether Alfred pondered problems of war or labor the cakes got
burnt just the same.
Next I turn to the page where men come to Alfred on the island of
Athelney and beg him to become the ruler of all England. This gives
Chesterton a chance to expound his anti-imperialism.
And Alfred in the orchard,
Among apples green and red,
With the little book in his bosom,
Looked at green leaves and said:
"When all philosophies shall fail,
This word alone shall fit;
That a sage feels too small for life,
And a fool too large for it.
"Asia and all imperial plains
Are all too little for a fool:
But for one man whose eyes can see,
The little island of Athelney
Is too large a land to rule.
* * * * *
"An island like a little book,
Full of a hundred tales,
Like the gilt page the good monks pen
That is all smaller than a wren,
Yet hath high towers, meteors and" men,
And suns and spouting whales.
"A land having a light in it,
In a river dark and fast,
An isle with utter, clearness lit,
Because a saint has stood in it,
Where flowers are flowers indeed and fit,
And trees are trees at last."
As his men clear the weeds from the White Horse that had ages before
been cut upon the chalk bluff, Alfred has a vision of the day when the
ancient symbol shall be again overgrown and forgotten and when a new
and less manly kind of heathen than the Danes shall overrun England:
I know that weeds shall grow in it
Faster than man can burn:
And though they scatter now and go,
In some far century, sad and slow,
I have a vision, and I know
The heathen shall return.
They shall not come with war-ships,
They shall not waste with brands,
But books be all their eating,
And ink be on their hands.
* * * * *
The dear sun dwarfed of dreadful suns,
Like fiercer flowers on stalk,
Earth lost and little like a pea,
In high heaven's towering forestry
--These be the small weeds ye shall see
Crawl, covering the chalk.
* * * * *
By terror and the cruel tales
Of curse in bone and kin,
By weird and weakness winning,
Accursed from the beginning,
By detail of the sinning,
And denial of the sin:
By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire,
By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
And the end of the world's desire:
By God and man dishonored,
By death and life made vain,
Know ye the old barbarian,
The barbarian come again.
When is great talk of trend and tide,
And wisdom and destiny,
Hail that undying heathen
That is sadder than the sea.
In this specification of "the marks of the Beast" we may recognize
Chesterton's antipathies; materialism, commercialism, Darwinism,
imperialism, cosmopolitanism, pacifism, and Socialism. He is haunted
by the same nightmare as Samuel Butler, that the day may come when
machines will master the world and men be merely their slaves. For
relief he looks to a revolution like the French Revolution, only
worse. Chesterton is like the Eton boys who, after a debate over woman
suffrage, passed a unanimous resolution disapproving of the aim of the
suffragettes but approving of their methods. The socialists say we
must have a revolution, peaceful if possible. Chesterton would say,
"we must have a revolution, bloody if possible." The guillotine, he
says somewhere, had many sins to answer for, but, at least, there was
nothing evolutionary about it. And he makes the English people say:
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose
the first.
Our wrath come after Russia's wrath and our wrath
be the worst.
Like Hilaire Belloc and other Neo-Catholics, he manages somehow to
combine an admiration for the French Revolution with a devotion to
Catholicism. They are ardent advocates of democracy notwithstanding the
very explicit condemnations of popular government by the Popes. They
are more inclined toward syndicalism than Socialism and place their
hopes in the peasant proprietorship instead of in the nationalized
trust. It is an interesting novelty in the labor problem, for it cuts
across the old classifications, and I hope it will have a chance to
develop into something concrete. The similar movement in France, the
_Sillon_ of Marc Sangnier, was crushed out by a papal encyclical
in 1912. Chesterton might be called an English Sillonist, and in a
literal sense if we recall his essay on The Furrows in "Alarms and
Discursions." Chesterton sometimes praises the achievements of modern
science and industry, but always as ingenious toys. He is convinced
that mankind in the mass will never take the city seriously.
When the rest of the world was looking for the advent of
cosmopolitanism and the reign of peace, the earth lapped in universal
law and all the local idiosyncrasies ironed out, wherein all obstacles
to freedom of movement had been crushed out and one could buy a
tourist ticket to Timbuktu with the same accommodation all along
the route, Chesterton set his bugle to his lips and blew a fanfare
of audacious challenge to the spirit of the times in the form of a
nonsensical romance, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill." In this he carries
particularism to an extreme, breaking up London again into warring
wards, each with its own banner and livery, its gilds and folk ways.
The book is inscribed, as we might expect, to his friend, Hilaire
Belloc, and I quote part of the dedication as it sums up the message of
the volume and is strangely prophetic:
For every tiny town or place
God made the stars especially:
Babies look up with owlish face
And see them tangled in a tree;
You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,
A Sussex moon, untraveled still.
I saw a moon that was the town's,
The largest lamp on Campden Hill.
Yes, Heaven is everywhere at home,
The big blue cap that always fits,
And so it is (be calm; they come
To goal at last, my wandering wits),
So it is with the heroic thing
This shall not end for the world's end,
And though the sullen engines swing,
Be you not much afraid, my friend.
This did not end by Nelson's urn
Where an immortal England sits--
Nor where your tall young men in turn
Drank death like wine at Austerlitz.
And when the pedants bade us mark
What cold mechanic happenings
Must come; our souls said in the dark,
"Belike; but there are likelier things."
Likelier across these flats afar,
These sulky levels smooth and free,
The drums shall crash a waltz of war
And Death shall dance with Liberty!
Likelier the barricades shall flare
Slaughter below and smoke above,
And death and hate and hell declare
That men have found a thing to love.[5]
Remember this was written in 1904, at a time when it was commonly
thought that the last of the wars had been fought and the nations
might disarm, for henceforth the Hague Court would hold sway; when
the socialists were becoming opportunists and the anarchists had laid
aside their bombs; when such scientists as Metchnikoff were saying that
self-sacrifice and heroism of the fighting sort were antiquated virtues
for which the peaceful and sanitary world of the future would have
little use. Chesterton was wrong about the nature of the catastrophe.
He was looking and, I fear, hoping for a social revolution, and that
has not yet come although it seems now less improbable than it did then.
But the Great War has given an irresistible impulse to the movement
toward particularism as against cosmopolitanism. Whether we like
it or not, we must admit that the tide has turned in the other
direction and that it will be many years, perhaps more than one
generation, before there will be the freedom of trade, intercourse, and
migration that prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Even England has abandoned free trade, and every country will hereafter
strive to secure economic independence by developing its own resources.
Even before the war there was a tendency toward the sort of local
differentiation of which Chesterton gave a fantastic forecast in "The
Napoleon of Notting Hill." This tendency manifested itself in a variety
of ways; in the cultivation of local industries, the revival of folk
dances and historic costumes, in pageantry and community celebrations,
in the interest in town history and in the struggle to reëstablish
disappearing languages, like Gaelic, Czech, and Ruthenian.
From Chesterton's latest book devoted to the crimes of Germany, and
characteristically entitled "The Crimes of England",[6] we can see
that it is the primitive little peasant kingdom of Montenegro that
he most admires and the machine-like efficiency of the German empire
that he most abhors. Montenegro, since he wrote this volume, has
been overwhelmed by the tide of war, but probably Chesterton has
faith to believe that it will reappear like Ararat when the waters
subside. This faith he expressed in the poem, "The March of the Black
Mountain", written during the Balkan war which Montenegro initiated by
a single-handed attack upon the Turk:
But men shall remember the Mountain,
Though it fall down like a tree,
They shall see the sign of the Mountain
Faith cast into the sea;
Though the crooked swords overcome it
And the Crooked Moon ride free,
When the Mountain comes to Mahomet
It has more life than he.
Chesterton has a better right to appear now as the champion of small
nationalities than some other English authors we could name, for he
first entered the lists of public life to break a lance in defense of
the Boers at a time when it was most unpopular if not dangerous to say
a word in their favor. He refers to these youthful days in his "Song of
Defeat", published some ten years afterward. I quote part of one stanza:
I dream of the days when work was scrappy,
And rare in our pockets the mark of the mint:
When we were angry and poor and happy,
And proud of seeing our names in print.
For so they conquered and-so we scattered,
When the Devil rode and his dogs smelt gold,
And the peace of a harmless folk was shattered,
When I was twenty and odd years old.
When mongrel men that the market classes,
Had slimy hands on England's rod
And sword in hand upon Afric's passes
Her last Republic cried to God![7]
One of his youthful dreams was to see a reunion of the United States
and England which he imagined would come about in some great foreign
war. But by 1905, when he included the poem on "The Anglo-Saxon
Alliance" in a volume,[8] he had lost faith in such ethnic generalities
as the Anglo-Saxon race, so he explains in his preface:
I have come to see that our hopes of brotherhood with
America are the same in kind as our hopes of brotherhood
with any other of the great independent nations of
Christendom. And a very small study of history was
sufficient to show me that the American nation, which-is a
hundred years old, is at least fifty years older than the
Anglo-Saxon race.
But the poem, both because he wrote it and because he repudiated it,
has an especial interest now when American sympathy with England is
stronger than ever before, the traditional hostility has been
largely swept away, and there is talk of joining England in this
bloodiest of all wars.
This is the weird of a world-old folk,
That not till the last link breaks
Not till the night is blackest,
The blood of Hengist wakes.
When the sun is black in heaven,
The moon as blood above,
And the earth is full of hatred,
This people tells its love.
In change, eclipse and peril,
Under the whole world's scorn,
By blood and death and darkness
The Saxon peace is sworn;
That all our fruit be gathered,
And all our race take hands,
And the sea be a Saxon river
That runs through Saxon lands.
* * * * *
Deep grows the hate of kindred.
Its roots take hold on hell;
No peace or praise can heal it,
But a stranger heals it well.
Seas shall be red as sunsets,
And kings' bones float as foam,
And heaven be dark with vultures,
The night our son comes home.
In some respects we should expect Chesterton to go better in verse than
in prose. He thinks in metaphors and pictures, vivid, fantastic,
and colorful. The peculiarities of his prose style that grate upon
the taste of some readers, such as the repetition of the same words,
the alliteration, the unqualified assertion of half truths, the queer
rhythms, the verbal tricks, and the superabundance of tropes, are by
tradition permissible in poetry and so arouse no resentment.
On the other hand, poetry is a painstaking art, and Chesterton does
not like to take pains. He is too indolent or too indifferent to hunt
for the best possible word or rime. Consequently we find in his verse
many a perfect line, rarely a perfect stanza, and never a perfect poem.
But scattered all through his verse, even in the most nonsensical, we
happen upon curious cadences that linger in the memory like the chant
of some strange ritual. His ballads abound in unconventional rhythms
that haunt one like those of Lanier's "Ballad of the Trees and the
Master."
Although Chesterton often seems to disregard the canons of
versification from carelessness or caprice, yet at other times he takes
delight in subjecting himself to the most rigid of models, as, for
instance, the old French _ballade_, which, he says, is "the easiest
because it is the most restricted." He shows us how he constructs
one in "The Ballade of a Strange Town."[9] The strange town into
which he was shunted by the accident of taking the wrong tramcar one
rainy day while "fooling about Flanders" was Lierre, an unknown and
uninteresting way station then, but now one of the famous places of
world history, for it stood for days the shock of the German attack on
Antwerp. While waiting for the next car to take him away Chesterton
scribbled on the back of an envelope with an aniline pencil a poem
which begins in nonsense but ends with as good an expression of his
creed as he has given anywhere:
Happy is he and more than wise
Who sees with wondering eyes and clean
This world through all the gray disguise
Of sleep and custom in between.
Yes: we may pass the heavenly screen,
But shall we know when we are there?
Who know not what these dead stones mean,
The lovely city of Lierre.
Chesterton is so fond of the _ballade_ that I must quote one specimen
complete.[10] For the benefit of those who have taken no interest in
versification I may call attention to the technical difficulties of
the form of the _ballade_ that he has chosen. It consists of three
octaves and a quatrain all ending in the same refrain and using only
two rimes. The first rime is used in the first and third lines of the
first quatrain and in the second and fourth of the second quatrain.
The second rime is used in the second and fourth lines of the first
quatrain and in the first and third of the second quatrain. The closing
quatrain or _l'envoi_ is in the _ballade_ addressed to a prince or
other royal personage. Since Chesterton hates princes his apostrophe to
the prince in this _ballade_ is not in the usual sycophantic style.
A BALLADE OF SUICIDE
The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbors--on the wall--
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me... After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
To-morrow is the time I get my pay--
My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall--
I see a little cloud all pink and grey--
Perhaps the rector's mother will _not_ call--
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way--
I never read the works of Juvenal--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
The world will have another washing day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H. G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;
Rationalists are growing rational--
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray,
So secret that the very sky seems small--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
L'ENVOI
Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
Those who assisted--with more or less enthusiasm--in the Shakespeare
Tercentenary celebration will appreciate Chesterton's verses about a
similar commemoration decreed by the calendar.
_THE SHAKESPEARE MEMORIAL_
/$
Lord Lilac thought it rather rotten
That Shakespeare should be quite forgotten,
And therefore got on a Committee
With several chaps out of the city,
And Shorter and Sir Herbert Tree,
Lord Rothschild and Lord Rosebery,
And F. C. G. and Comyns Carr,
Two dukes and a dramatic star,
Also a clergyman now dead;
And while the vain world careless sped
Unheeding the heroic name--
The souls most fed with Shakespeare's flame
Still sat unconquered in a ring,
Remembering him like anything.
Lord Lilac did not long remain,
Lord Lilac did not come again,
He softly lit a cigarette
And sought some other social set
Where, in some other knots or rings,
People were doing cultured things,
--Miss Zwilt's Humane Vivarium
--The little men who paint on gum
--The exquisite Gorilla Girl....
He sometimes in the giddy whirl
(Not being really bad at heart),
Remembered Shakespeare with a start--
But not with that grand constancy
Of Clement Shorter, Herbert Tree,
Lord Rosebery, and Comyns Carr
And all the other names there are;
Who stuck like limpets to the spot,
Lest they forgot, lest they forgot.
Lord Lilac was of slighter stuff;
Lord Lilac had had quite enough.[11]
Chesterton's poetic versatility range may be inferred from the
fact that he has written a drinking song that is used as a whisky
advertisement and a devotional song that has been incorporated into
the hymn book. The former may be found in "The Flying Inn", the latter
in the "English Hymnal", also in "Poems." The hymn is as follows,
omitting, as the preachers always say,[12] the third stanza. Sing it to
the tune of "Webb."
O God of earth and altar,
Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die.
The walls of gold entomb us,
The swords of scorn divide,
Take not thy thunder from us
But take away our pride.
From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honor and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation
Deliver us, good Lord!
But I know of some people--and more sensible people than you would
suppose--who say that they like "Quoodle" the best of Chesterton's
poetry. Since there is no accounting for taste and some of my readers
may have taste, I must also quote this:
SONG OF THE DOG NAMED QUOODLE
They haven't got no noses,
The fallen sons of Eve.
Even the smell of roses
Is not what they supposes,
But more than mind discloses,
And more than men believe.
They haven't got no noses,
They cannot even tell
When door and darkness closes
The park old Gluck encloses,
Where even the Law of Moses
Will let you steal a smell.
The brilliant smell of water,
The brave smell of a stone,
The smell of dew and thunder,
And old bones buried under
Are things in which they blunder
And err, if left alone.
The wind from winter forests,
The scent of scentless flowers,
The breath of bride's adorning
The smell of snare and warning,
The smell of Sunday morning,
God gave to us for ours.
* * * * *
And Quoodle here discloses
All things that Quoodle can;
They haven't got no noses,
They haven't got no noses,
And goodness only knowses
The Noselessness of Man.[13]
According to Mendelism new species are most apt to come from the
crossing of diverse forms. We should then naturally expect Chesterton's
verse to be original, since it is the result of a cross between Whitman
and Swinburne. At any rate these were the poets who most influenced
Chesterton when in his teens he began to write poetry. In philosophy
of life Whitman and Swinburne were not so far apart, since they were
both pagans and democrats, but in form they are antipodes. Whitman was
the father or the grandfather of the _vers-librists_. He cultivated
the unconventional and introduced the most unpoetic and uncouth words.
Swinburne, on the other hand, sought his themes in the classics and
sacrificed anything to the music of his lines.
The early poetry of Chesterton shows traces of both influences. One
very interesting instance of this is found in a poem that he wrote
at school, when he was about sixteen. It is an Ave Maria in the
Swinburnian meter. That is, he has borrowed the weapon of the atheist
and used it in defense of Catholicism--a trick that he has been
playing ever since. The poem begins:
Hail Mary! Thou blest among women; generations
shall rise up to greet,
After ages of wrangle and dogma, I come with a
prayer to thy feet.
Where Gabriel's red plumes are a wind in the lanes
of thy lilies at eve
We pray, who have done with the churches; we
worship, who may not believe.
From his twelfth to his seventeenth year he went to St. Paul's school,
where, as he says, "I did no work but wrote a lot of bad poetry which
fortunately perished with the almost equally bad exercises. I got a
prize for one of these poems--Golly, what a bad poem it was!"
The prize was known as the Milton Prize and the subject assigned to the
pupils competing for it was St. Francis Xavier. A soliloquy of Danton
on the scaffold, written at the age of sixteen, shows how early began
his fascination for the French Revolution. His fondness for discussion
was cultivated at the St. Paul's school in the Junior Debating Club, of
which he was chairman, and the monthly periodical of the society, _The
Debater_, contains many essays and poems signed "G. K. C." His first
contribution to the outside press was a Socialist poem appearing in
_The Clarion_, but a few years later he was busy trying to puncture the
balloon of Socialism with his sharp-pointed pen.
After leaving St. Paul's he studied art at the Slade School in London
and has illustrated half a dozen books with cartoons, for he draws
as readily as he writes. His first book was a volume of jingles and
sketches entitled "Gray-Beards at Play; Literature and Art for Old
Gentlemen."
His propensity for dropping into nonsense rhymes and sketches may be
ascribed to heredity, for his father, Edward Chesterton, though a
respectable real estate agent by profession, was responsible for a slim
volume of child verse and drawings, "The Wonderful Story of Dunder van
Haeden and His Seven Little Daughters."
[Illustration: G. K. Chesterton]
G. K. Chesterton was born in Kensington, London, May 29, 1874.
There is nothing in his heredity or early training to account for
his conservative and High Church tendencies, for his father was a
liberal in politics and religion and attended Bedford Chapel where
the Reverend Stopford Brooke was preaching what was then called "the
new theology." Although educated as an artist, G. K. Chesterton soon
passed from sketching through art criticism to journalism. He began by
writing pro-Boer articles for _The Speaker_, a Liberal weekly. The
originality of his thought and the vigor of his style attracted public
attention, and _The Daily News_ took him over to write a weekly article
in spite of the fact that he differed in opinion from the editors and
readers on certain points. As his anonymous biographer says:
"Thousands of peaceful semi-Tolstoyan non-conformists have for years
been compelled to listen every Saturday morning to a fiery apostle
preaching consistently the praise of three things which seem to them
most obviously the sign-manuals of Hell--War, Drink, and Catholicism."
But more recently his antagonism to "cocoa"--extended symbolically
to the politics as well as to the beverage of Cadbury--became so
great as to break this incongruous alliance and he has found in his
brother's weekly _The New Witness_ a more congenial although a smaller
audience. He has also contributed for many years a weekly page to _The
Illustrated London News_, which is under entirely different management
from _The Daily News_. Besides these and frequent contributions to
other periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, he manages to turn out
a volume or two of stories every year as well as poetry and criticism,
an amazing output considering that there is hardly a dull page in
it. To keep it up so long and steadily must be a strain upon one
of his easy-going temperament. Fleet Street men tell me that it is
hard to get his copy on time. As press day draws near runners are sent
around to his clubs and other London haunts to tell him that the editor
must have his article immediately. Once caught Chesterton surrenders
good-naturedly and taking any paper handy will dash off his essay,
carrying on a lively conversation at the same time.
Producing under such pressure or at least under the compulsion of
filling a certain number of columns every week with witty comment on
current events inevitably tends to careless writing. Chesterton's work
is all equally readable, but not all equally worth reading. He is an
inspired writer, but he goes on writing quite as brilliantly after
the inspiration has given out, just as a man writing in the dark goes
on after his fountain pen has run dry and is only making meaningless
scratches on the paper. His display of gems of thought is hardly to be
matched by any other show window, but there are so many paste diamonds
among them of equal brilliancy that the half of the world which does
not like Chesterton takes it for granted that they are all paste. They
may even quote Chesterton in support of their view for he says: "All
is gold that glitters for the glitter is the gold."
When ex-President Roosevelt, on his return from Africa, was given a
dinner by the journalists of London, he was asked by the committee on
arrangements whom he would like to have placed by his side to talk
with during the meal, and he promptly chose Chesterton. I was of much
the same mind when I went to England, but not being in a position to
summon him to my side I sought him out in his home, Overroads. This is
a little way out of London, near the town of Beaconsfield from which
Disraeli took his title,--uncomfortable quarters, I should say, for
Chesterton, considering his antipathy for Disraeli and his race.
Arriving at Beaconsfield by the tea-time train I walked up the hill to
where I saw a big man sitting on the little porch of a little house. He
impressed me as Sunday impressed Symes. I do not mean Billy Sunday, but
quite a different personage, the Sunday of "The Man Who Was Thursday."
Great men are apt to shrink when you get too close to them. Mr.
Chesterton did not. He was too big to fit his environment. The house
was what we should call a bungalow; I don't know what they call it in
England. It was on a little triangular lot set with trees half his
height and a rustic arbor patiently awaiting vines. Afterward I saw in
the paper that Mr. Chesterton broke a leg on that arbor. I suppose he
must have tripped over it like a croquet wicket.
Mr. Chesterton has a big head covered with curly locks, two of them
gray. He is gifted with a Taft-like smile, and talks in a deep-toned,
wheezy voice, punctuating his remarks with an engaging chuckle. It
is no trouble to interview him. I never met a man who talked more
easily or more interestingly. "There are no uninteresting subjects,"
he says, "there are only uninterested persons." Start any idea you
please as unexpectedly as a rabbit from its lair, and he will after
it in a second and follow all its turns and windings until he runs
it down. His mind is as agile as a movie actor. Epigrams, paradoxes,
puns, anecdotes, characterizations, metaphors, fell from his lips in
such profusion that I, who knew the market value of such verbal gems,
felt as nervous as a jeweler who sees a lady break her necklace. I
wanted him to stop while I got down on my knees and picked them up. But
he did not mind wasting clever things on me, for there were so many
more where those came from. Besides they were not so completely lost
as I feared. I recognized some of them a few weeks later in his
_causerie_ page of _The Illustrated London News_.
But when you visit Mr. Chesterton don't make the mistake that I did and
attempt to please him by telling him how much he reminds you of Doctor
Johnson. He admitted to me that he had "paged a bit" in that rôle, but
I judge from what he says in "The Mystery of a Pageant"[14] he does not
regard his selection for the part as altogether complimentary to his
personal appearance.
Perhaps he would not like it any better to be told that the resemblance
was more psychical than physical. Chesterton is doubtless the most
dogmatic man England has seen since Doctor Johnson died. He has equally
violent prejudices, and he expresses them with equal wit. Unfortunately
he has no Boswell. Chesterton has written a book about Shaw, but so far
Shaw has shown no disposition to return the compliment.
Shaw, in speaking of Coburn's portrait of Chesterton says: "He is
our Quinbus Flestrin, the young Man Mountain, a large abounding
gigantically cherubic person."
It is Shaw's theory that G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are not
two persons, but one mythological monster to be known as "The
Chesterbelloc."
Chesterton's ideals are large and generous and very solid: A divinely
ordered church, a really democratic state, and a life of that hopeful
and humble wonder that men call romance. But his usefulness as a
moral philosopher is impaired by the possession of a number of blind
spots or inveterate prejudices that prevent him from seeing clearly.
He is like the tenor who had aelurophobia and was upset whenever a
cat came into the room. So whenever one of these phobias comes into
his mind Chesterton loses his poise and sings false. Some of the
things for which he has a particular abhorrence are: cocoa, colonies,
divorce, equal suffrage, Esperanto, eugenics, large scale production,
latitudinarianism, Lloyd George, official sanitation, organized
charity, peace movement, pragmatism, prohibition, public schools,
simplified spelling, vaccination, vivisection, and workingmen's
insurance, all of which some of the rest of us look upon with favor.
His inability to see any good in these and a score of other modern
movements brings him into curious inconsistencies. For instance, he
is an enthusiast for universal manhood suffrage. But any mention of
woman suffrage is like waving a red coat before an Irish bull. His
statement that there are three things which women can never understand,
liberty, equality, and fraternity, is as brutal and untrue as anything
Nietzsche or Strindberg has said.
In his essay on William James he says "pragmatism is bosh", yet his
whole system of apologetics is based upon the pragmatic argument;
religion is true because it works. "If Christianity makes a man happy
while his legs are being eaten off by a lion, might it not make me
happy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down the
street?" In order to make due allowance for Chesterton's class and race
prejudices while reading his works, it is convenient to keep a list
like this as a bookmark:
TABLE OF CHESTERTON'S AFFECTIONS AND AVERSIONS
CLASSES
He likes most: 1. Children
2. Peasants
3. Domestic women
4. Artisans and laborers
5. Priests and soldiers
6. Poets and adventurers
7. Shopkeepers
(hereabouts is a great gulf fixed)
8. Business and professional men
9. Criminals (including politicians)
10. The conceited professional classes (the intellectuals)
11. Landlords
12. Millionaires
He dislikes most: 13. Multimillionaires
RACES
He likes most: 1. Irish
2. French
3. English
4. Russians
5. Turks
6. Jews
7. Germans
He dislikes most: 8. Cosmopolites
In his youth Chesterton wrote a poem in defense of Dreyfus, "To A
Certain Nation", but by the time he came to publish it in his first
volume, "The Wild Knight", he had so changed his opinion that he
makes a partial apology for it in the preface. Since then he has, in
connection with his brother Cecil and Mr. Belloc, introduced into
British journalism a foreign element from which it had formerly been
free, the political anti-Semitism which has been the cause of so much
disturbance in France, Russia, and Germany. Almost every number of
_The New Witness_, edited by Cecil Chesterton, contains sneers at
Jewish financiers and politicians, and in 1912 he went so far that
he was fined five hundred dollars and costs for defamatory libel of
Godfrey Isaacs, director of the Marconi Company. The prosecution
significantly was conducted by Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith.
It is greatly to be hoped that _The New Witness_ group may get rid of
their race prejudice and cut down on their muckraking, which, though
often necessary, is never nice, and bring forward the constructive part
of their program, for this is the time when there is a chance to do
something. For instance, the British Party system against which they so
long clamored without effect has now broken down under stress of the
war, but there is nothing in sight to take its place. G. K. Chesterton
was quite right when he said that "the party system of England is
an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing political
conflicts",[15] and that what party politics had done was to turn
Balfour from the analysis of the doubtful to the defense of the dubious
and Morley from writing on compromise to practicing it. And again, "I
think the cabinet minister should be taken a little less seriously
and the cabinet maker a little more."[16]
Chesterton protests against being regarded as a mere obstructionist and
reactionary in such language as the following:
I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary friends)
that we should abolish the public schools. I propose the
much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make
them public. I do not wish to make Parliament stop working,
but rather to make it work; not to shut up the churches, but
rather to open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or
destroy the hedge of property, but only to make some rude
effort to make universities fairly universal and property
decently proper.[17]
Man has always believed in a paradise, but he has never been certain
whether to look for it in the past or the future, or both. We have very
detailed descriptions of Atlantis, Valhalla, the Golden Age, Utopia,
and the like, but the tense of the verb is indeterminable. Chesterton
is equally uncertain as to whether to look forward or backward for his
ideal state. His "Christmas Song for Three Gilds" is headed "To be sung
a long time ago--or hence." He has not yet favored us with a blueprint
of his Utopia, so we are left to surmise what he likes from the
very plain indications he has given us of what he does not like.
Chesterton seems to obey a negative magnetism and orients himself by
his antipathies.
We may infer that his ideal would be a self-governing community of
equally well-to-do, leisurely, patriotic, domestic, religious, jolly,
beer-drinking, pork-eating, art-loving, freehold farmers and gild
craftsmen, clustered about the village inn and church. They would all
be of one race and creed, healthy without doctors, wealthy without
financiers, governed without politicians. He believes with Belloc
that the nearest historical approach to this ideal was Western Europe
about 1200-1500. He probably would agree with Doctor James J. Walsh
in calling the thirteenth "the greatest of all centuries." Among
contemporary communities I should say that the mujiks of the Russian
mir come the nearest to complying with his specifications, although
he has not, to my knowledge, shown any disposition to leave London
and take to the steppes in order to live the simple life in these
communities of pure democracy. But perhaps this is because women vote
in the mir. Of the made-to-order utopias I presume that of William
Morris's "News from Nowhere" would suit him better than the Socialists
for whom it was written.
To sum up Chesterton in a sentence, I must borrow the words of the
_Forum_ article of O. W. Firkins:
A man who preaches an impassioned and romantic Christianity,
and who adds to that the Jeffersonian doctrine of democracy,
the Wordsworthian and Tolstoyan doctrine of the majesty
of the untutored man, the Carlylean doctrine of wonder,
the Emersonian doctrine of the spirituality latent in all
objects, the Dickensian faith in the worth and wisdom of
the feeble-minded, the Browningesque standard of optimism,
affects us as a man with whom, whatever his vagaries and
harlequinries, it would be wholesome and inspiriting to live.
HOW TO READ CHESTERTON
Read whatever is handiest, for there is no order and sequence is not
important. Chesterton expresses much the same philosophy of life in
essays, stories, and poems and there has been little change in his
opinions or style in the sixteen years he has been writing.
Nowhere has he given a complete and orderly presentation of his views.
He is a born journalist and prefers to fire at a moving target. About
once a year he gathers up a sheaf of his contributions to the press and
puts them out under as general and indefinite a title as he can think
up, but he never can think up a title broad enough to cover the variety
of topics he treats. The heading to a chapter gives no clue to the
theme or its importance. One is apt to find his deepest philosophy
tucked away in some corner of a discourse on cheese or mumming or
penny dreadfuls. He is like a submarine; when he goes under you never
can tell where he will come out. Consequently, as I say, it does not
matter much which volume you pick up; they are equally brilliant and
inconsequential.
His views on religion and society are expounded most thoroughly in
"Orthodoxy" (1908), "Heretics" (1905) both published by John Lane
Company, and "What's Wrong With the World" (1910, published by Dodd,
Mead & Company). Somewhat briefer, more varied, and trivial in topic
are "All Things Considered" (1908, Lane), "Tremendous Trifles" (1909,
Dodd), "Alarms and Discursions" (1910, Dodd), "A Miscellany of Men"
(1912, Dodd).
Since the war began he has published "The Barbarism of Berlin" (1914),
"The Appetite of Tyranny" including "Letters to an Old Garibaldian"
(1915, Dodd), and "The Crimes of England" (1916, Lane). To this we
should add his first work, "The Defendant" (1901, Dodd). In _The New
Witness_ he has been running a weekly page under the head of "At the
Sign of the World's End", and when his brother, Cecil Chesterton,
enlisted as a private in October, 1916, he assumed the editorship of
that lively journal.
His youthful poetry is in "The Wild Knight and Other Poems" (1900,
Dutton). "The Ballad of the White Horse" (1911, Lane) contains his epic
of King Alfred, and "Poems" (1915, Lane) contains all the rest of his
poetry except what still remains buried in "the files." Of these I must
mention "The Wife of Flanders", which may be found in the _Literary
Digest, Current Opinion_, or _Living Age_ of 1914.
Chesterton has written one play, "Magic: A Fantastic Comedy" (1913,
Putnam), which was a success on the London and New York stage.
Of his allegorical fantasias I have discussed at some length "The Man
Who Was Thursday" (1908, Dodd). "The Ball and the Cross" (1910, Lane)
describes the conflict between a religious fanatic and an equally
intolerant atheist. "Manalive" (1912, Lane) deals with domesticity,
and "The Flying Inn" (1915, Lane) is a defense of the public house. In
"Napoleon of Notting Hill" (1908, Lane), his first romance, he preaches
parochialism.
His detective or rather mystery stories are: "The Club of Queer Trades"
(1905, Harper); "The Innocence of Father Brown" (1911, Lane); and "The
Wisdom of Father Brown" (1914, Lane).
His literary criticism, mostly written as prefaces to standard
reprints, makes delightful reading, although sometimes he uses his
author merely as a point of departure. Of Dickens he has written most
and best in the prefaces to Everyman's Library edition (collected in
"Appreciations and Criticism of Dickens", Dutton) and "Charles Dickens;
A Critical Study" (1906, Dodd). His "Victorian Age in Literature"
(1913, Home University Library, Holt) is not quite so interesting
because he does not have room to ramble. His "George Bernard Shaw"
(1910, Lane) is not much of a biography, but it is valuable as bringing
into close contrast these representatives of opposing points of view.
His "Robert Browning" forms an admirable volume of the English Men of
Letters series (1908, Macmillan). Besides these he has written many
biographical sketches and critiques, among which may be mentioned:
"Five Types" (1911, Holt); "Varied Types" (1902, Dodd); "G. F. Watts"
(1902, Dutton); "William Blake" (1910, Dutton); "Samuel Johnson" (1903,
and 1911); "Carlyle" (1902 and 1904) and "R. L. Stevenson" (Pott).
Chesterton is eminently quotable, and the pocket volume of "Wit and
Wisdom of Chesterton" (1911, Dodd) will afford plenty of food for
thought for any one.
There are two biographies of Chesterton. One published anonymously in
1908 gives the best account of his early life; the other by Julius West
(1916, Dodd) gives the most complete criticism of his work up to date,
with a bibliography.
His picturesque personality and peculiar views have supplied
innumerable journalists with material for articles. Specially
noteworthy for one reason or another are: the excellent piece of
criticism by O. W. Firkins in _The Forum_ (vol. 48,. p. 597). "The
Defender of the Discarded", The Forum (vol. 44, p. 707), is harsh
and unsympathetic. "Chesterton as an Artist" by Joseph B. Gilder
(_Bookman_, vol. 39, p. 468, see also vol. 34, p. 117), containing
his sketches, a sketch by Henry Murray, with sixteen portraits
from childhood up, in the London Bookman, May, 1910. Wells, in his
"Social Forces in England and America" (p. 205), discusses Chesterton
and Belloc. "A Visit to G. K. C." by B. Russell Herts in _The
Independent_, November 7, 1912, contains some of Chesterton's sketches;
reprinted with other interviews in Herts's "Depreciations" (1915,
Boni). Chesterton wrote on "Shall the United States Fight?" in _The
Independent_, January 12, 1916.
[1] "The Crimes of England", p. 98.
[2] For specimens of his sketches see "Chesterton as an Artist" by
Joseph B. Gilder in _The Bookman_.
[3] See also "The Divine Detective" in "A Miscellany of Men."
[4] Published, 1911, by John Lane Co., New York.
[5] Republished, 1913, in "Poems" (John Lane Co., New York).
[6] Published, 1916, by John Lane Co., New York.
[7] From "Poems" (John Lane).
[8] "The Wild Knight" (Dutton & Co., New York).
[9] "In Tremendous Trifles ", 1909 (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York).
[10] From "Poems" (John Lane).
[11] From "Poems" (John Lane).
[12] It has always been a puzzle to me why congregations have to be
warned against singing the third stanza of any hymn. I never could see
that it was any worse than the rest, but I assume the clergy know best
about it.
[13] I quote from _The New Witness_. The version in "The Flying Inn" is
a trifle different.
[14] "Tremendous Trifles", p. 317.
[15] In Chesterton's book on Shaw.
[16] "Miscellany of Men."
[17] "What's Wrong with the World."