Gilbert Keith Chesterton

[“Artists appear at rare intervals; but there is one simple test of practice of their arrival.   The moment they begin to handle their material, the world discovers what an extraordinary rich and plastic thing it is. It does not matter very much what subject they choose; it matters not at all how often that subject has been treated. The last Madonna may be as good as the first, and there is always a fleet of fighting Temerairis to be toed to their berth.” –The late H. W. Massingham.]

In my recent article on George Bernard Shaw in Triveni I happened to mention the august name of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. The motto of that article was from him, and I went on to suggest that he was the fittest antagonist of Shaw, a foeman worthy of his steel. They met on the battlefield “like two clouds over the Caspian.” It is but meet, therefore, that I should now attempt to write a matching article on Chesterton himself, one of my literary idols, and the first. He used to contribute a page-long literary causerie to the Illustrated London News, the glossiest of glossy magazines then existing.

When I read the first of those causeries I felt as stout Cortez felt when he saw the Pacific; it was a revelation to me. A new planet had swum into my ken. Thereafter I diligently perused as many of those causeries as I could lay hands on. It is my firm conviction that there never have been such scintillating expositions of views by anyone as his were. After his lamented demise his mantle fell on the eminent historian, Sir Arthur Bryant. But the glory had departed from that magazine: only “G. K. C.” could have succeeded “G. K. C.” “as Amurath to Amurath.”Since then I have been the most consistent votary in his shrine.

Constructive, not Destructive Criticism

No one, I venture to think, should write upon an author with whom he does not find himself in sympathy. No one, in fact, stands more in need of sympathy than Chesterton. Men have not been lacking to cry him down at the slightest opportunity. But I have my doubts whether even the most confirmed of his detractors has not enjoyed him thoroughly in private. There is an old saying that all claret would be port if it could. And I have my lively suspicion that, criticise him as they might, his enemies would, nevertheless, like to possess a fraction of his gifts if they could. I have remarked that even the most confirmed of his detractors must have enjoyed him thoroughly in private.

Indeed, there is no author whose manner of writing is more delightful, more entrancing. Chesterton on anything–evenon the Middle Ages, his most constant bugbear–is a veritable treat to the intellect. Sir John Squire once confessed that, reservation being made for the matter under discussion, he enjoyed reading Chesterton on any subject. It is, I feel, a necessary reservation. Even his most enthusiastic admirers cannot swallow him whole. He was a bold spirit and held strong views on several subjects. It would, therefore, be surprising if he found admirers by the hundred. Such a man must, perforce, plough a lonely furrow.

Chesterton’s Manner of Writing

I have stressed, in passing, the manner of Chesterton’s writing. It is unique: it is in a class by itself. To call it brilliant is but to state the bare truth. It is, on occasion, more than brilliant: it is inspired. Then there is no one to equal him: as Cowley said of Pindar, he forms a vast species alone.” The basis of his style is, of course, the short sentence: as, indeed, the basis of all good style is, and must be. But, upon that short sentence, he weaves patterns all his own. Phrases seem to drop from nowhere. Words take on unusual meanings.

No doubt, the meanings had been all there before. Only, we had never thought of them until he came along and showed them to us. In short, he is a magician with words: with his Prospero’s wand, as it were, he can summon them, out of the vasty deep. It has been said that poets are born, not made. We may, with equal truth, say that prose-writers, too, are born, not made.

Good prose can, of course, be cultivated: by taking thought, one can, in a manner of speaking, add many cubits to the stature of one’s writing. But, when all is said, the most laboriously cultivated prose can at once be distinguished from prose that is written as if by inspiration. There are writers that are “to the manner born”; Chesterton is foremost among them.

His Wit

Side by side with his style goes his wit. It is irresistible: and it is exhibited at the least expected places. Like the gentleman mentioned by Boswell who told Dr. Johnson: “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but I don’t know how cheerfulness was always breaking in”, Chesterton might say that he had tried, too, in his time, to be serious, but he didn’t know how, wit was always breaking in. There can be no doubt about the quality of his wit. It is genuine; it rings true.

Once in his element, he almost revels in it: and then every sentence of his is sparkling. Often his opinions are belittled because of their admixture with his wit. Wit, on the other hand, is not so common that it should be regarded with a kind of lofty disdain. Wisdom, I am convinced, is all the better for a wee bit of wit. Wit is justified of her children: it is next to wisdom. That is the trouble with Chesterton: his wisdom is often masked as wit. For many people it is lost in the wit. Speaking for myself, I prefer lively wisdom to that which is merely dismal. But Chesterton himself appears to be wholly innocent of when he is overdoing his wit. This is what H. W. Nevinson means when he writes of him:

“Indeed, that man of genius (“G. K. C.”) has often reminded me of a village pump which, on festal occasions may run wine and ordinarily runs first-rate water, but never knows when it is running wine of the best, or water of the best, or liquid mud, or nothing at all, but always wears the same alluring look of promise. “ (More Changes, More Chances.)

“Many Splendoured” Chesterton

Chesterton is many things: poet, essayist, critic, novelist, dramatist, controversialist, and a sort of sociological writer as well. But he is chiefly known as essayist and critic.

As story-teller, he has at least one creation to his credit: Father Brown. Father Brown is a detective. He cannot, indeed, be compared to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. But be is famous in his own quiet, unobtrusive way. His chief weapon is not cleverness or cunning as in the case with most detectives, real or fictional. His real weapon is simplicity.

In fact, this is Chesterton’s master motive in all his stories: it runs like a refrain through all of them. His hero is, inevitably a simpleton. Take his Napoleon of Notting Hill: take his Return of Don Quixote. Everywhere is the notion that your simpleton, by virtue of his simplicity, gets the better, in the long run, of the subtlest person that may be arraigned against him. It follows that his stories are written with a purpose: they “point a moral, and adorn a tale.” His religion, his love of the Middle Ages, his scorn of all that is connoted by the word, “modern” – all these are evident in the least little bit that he has ever written. His novels do not conform to any known convention. To him the story is not the main point. The main point is the lesson that can be deduced from it. In other words, it is a mere vehicle for his philosophy.

His Essays

Chesterton has written several books of essays. One of his earliest and, to my mind, the best – is The Defendant. Here, perhaps, more than elsewhere, he comes nearest to being a great essayist. But, in my opinion, the essay is not his characteristic medium of expression. Not that I do not admire his essays: far from it. All that I mean is that he does not seem to have taken them seriously. He has a true essayist’s vein. But, oftener than not, he becomes a controversialist, starts off all kinds of intellectual hares, and forgets the main function of the essayist. He is, for one thing, too intent on proving his case: and this vitiates one’s essay. A modicum of sincerity is demanded of the essayist: as, I hope, it is demanded of everyone. But Chesterton is all sincerity: he is too fiercely sincere to be a good essayist.

With him, as I have remarked, the essay tends tobecome controversial. I fancy Chesterton loves controversy for its own sake. And I suspect that he sometimes invents imaginary opponents to produce the correct atmosphere of division and of dissension. He has, in other words, as everyone has who pretends to some individuality and is not content merely to form a part of the universal flux of things, his parti pris; only, he has far, far too much of it. He is, however, an expert in controversy, and there are not many who can even approach him in this particular line. Like his predecessor, Dr. Johnson, if his pistol misses fire, he has no qualms in beating his opponent with the butt end of it. But all this is a far cry from the essay proper.

Feast of Paradox

Chesterton’s essays are regular feasts of paradox: he is never content “to burn a candle in the pale shrine of platitude.” Shaw and Chesterton are the greatest masters of paradox. Chesterton, however, does not like the word “paradox”. He says in his masterpiece, Orthodoxy;

“I know nothing as contemptible as a mere paradox, a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six hours. It is as easy as lying; because it islying. The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth. I find myself under the same intolerable bondage. I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vanity, and may have thought it funny because I had said it. It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist; it is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he did not. One searches for truth but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extra­ordinary truths.”

I do not gainsay all this. But it is nonetheless true that Chesterton is a writer of paradoxes. He may not himself be aware of it: like M. Jourdain, who talked prose all his life without knowing it, Chesterton may have, in his time, produced paradoxes unconsciously. But it is an undisputed fact that he has produced them. To be a writer of paradox, one must have a keen intelligence: and one must have that rare commodity–a capacity for original thinking. A paradox is not, as many suppose, merely an inverted platitude. If that were all, we could be masters of it. But, then, a paradox must convince–at least for the time being.

Without this power of convincing, it ceases to be a paradox. I hold also that paradox is often necessary for good writing; it is what gives “an edge” to it. But here, again, Chesterton overdoes it. He uses paradoxes as other men use platitudes. As C. Lewis Hind justly remarked:

“Somebody should always be standing by his side when he is writing essays, saying ‘Gilbert, be dull for a bit. Paradox should be a souffle, not a joint’.” (Authors and I.)

Scintillating

But, when Chesterton is in his stride, every sentence becomes scintillating: it is as if one has had an electric shock. One is not given time to think: one is carried along by the vehement breeze of the writer’s opinions and, for the moment, one finds oneself in agreement with them: because agreement is less taxing than disagreement. Chesterton, indeed, revels in paradoxes to such an extent that it is a positive relief to turn to the most worn-out platitudes–just for a refreshing contrast. After all, the virtue of paradox is that it is rare, while platitude is too, too common.

My whole point is that Chesterton is not typically a writer of essays. For this we have his own authority. On the occasion of the lamb-dinner (in commemoration of Charles Lamb’s Centenary) he delivered himself of the following statement:

“I write articles, and a profound schism divides those who write essays and those who write articles. The essayist inhabits eternity, but the writer of articles is very emphatically under the government of time.”

But there is one peculiarity. When he tries an essay proper he often fails. When he is writing something else, however, when, that is, he is on a different track altogether, he becomes, un­consciously, the writer of beautiful essays. Essays fall from his pen unawares: almost, to use the poet’s words, “in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.” For some of his best essays one must go, not to his avowed volumes of essays, but to his critical and other writings. There one will find the master-critic as well as the master-essayist.

His Criticism

Chesterton’s Charles Dickens and Robert Browning are un­rivalled in their own spheres. Browning is justly considered to be one of the most difficult of English poets, and many would-be readers are discouraged at the very commencement. For all such, Chesterton’s Robert Browning (“English Men of Letters,” Series) provides the finest introduction.

And thus I come to the critic Chesterton. He is one of the most discerning of literary critics, past or present. He goes to the heart of his subject; he seizes the vital point about an author or an epoch. This is because he has rare imagination. He can, so to speak, put himself in the place of his author. Criticism is an art like any other. It is not merely a sort of scientific analysis. At the present time even literature is tending to become rigidly scientific. But when what we get is all science and no literature, then, indeed, it is high time we drew the line. The evil of the so-called scientific criticism is that it is invariably dull.

Literary criticism, to be absorbing, must be artistic: as much so as the imaginative literature to which it happens to apply itself. A distinction is usually drawn between “creation” and “criticism.” If one is a poet, or a dramatist, or a novelist, one is credited with being a “creative artist.” If one has written merely essays or books on the particular poem, or drama, or novel, one is credited with being only a literary critic: as such he must occupy a secondary place. But I am of the opinion that a first-rate “critic” is not inferior to a first-rate “creative artist.” As Professor Oliver Elton says in connection with William Hazlitt:

“Taste is not merely a passive and receptive thing­–the feminine of genius – something which creative art simply impregnates. No, the critic reacts on the art he enjoys – reacts masculinely, ardently, even wilfully – if he is Hazlitt; and so produces – if he be Hazlitt – another book of art of which the book he reviews is the subject-matter. He is inspired by it as one poet is inspired by another. This distinguishes him from the mere scholar and expositor who does useful work of an inferior order; and it disposes of the old sneer against the sterility of critics.” (A Study of English Literature, Vol. II.)

Of course, first-rate critics are rare: rarer than first-rate creative artists. But that is no reason we should fail to re­cognise them when they present themselves before us. A critic of the calibre of Chesterton is a creative artist even in his criticism – nothing less: “He produces another book of art of which the book he reviews is the subject-matter.”

In order to understand this it is necessary only to read a volume of Chesterton’s criticism and a volume of the ordinary run of criticism. The latter are in relation to the former “as moon­light unto sunlight, or as water unto wine.” Chesterton uses, in Rossetti’s phrase, “as much fundamental brain-work” in his criticisms as any poet or novelist uses in his poems or novels.

His critical books are pieces of perfect art: his Victorian Age in English Literature, his Charles Dickens, his Robert Browning and his George Bernard Shaw. He has the root of the matter in him. Take his explanation of the alleged obscurity of Browning:

“There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary theory that Browning’s obscurity is a part of the intoxication of fame and intellectual condescension. He was not unintelligible because he was proud, but unin­telligible because he was humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious... A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the difference between his readers’ intelligence and his own that he talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid? But a young man of genius who has genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately explain his discoveries because he does  not think that they are discoveries He thinks that the whole street is humming with his ideas and that the postman and the tailor are poets like himself. Browning’s impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of this beautiful optimism. Sordellowas the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man.” (Robert Browning)

Or take this on Thackeray’s so-called cynicism:

“The occasions are indeed very numerous in which Thackeray finds this knack of half-suggestion very convenient. How delicately he suggests the peculiar character of Helen Pendennis, a saint without a sense of humour. With how quiet a shade, as of the coming on of twilight, does he convey the fact that Colonel Newcome’s character was, after all, slightly spoiled in prosperity; suggests it less by any change in the old man’s face with the grey moustaches than by a certain change in the faces of Clive or Laura or Ethel as they look at it. In this connection it is specifically unjust to call Thackeray a cynic. He falls away into philosophising not because his satire is merciless but because it is merciful; he wishes to soften the fall of his character with a sense and suggestion of the weakness of all flesh. He often employs an universal cynicism because it is kinder than a personal sarcasm. He says that all men are liars rather than say directly that Pendennis is lying. He says easily that all is vanity so as not to say that Ethel Newcome was vain.” (Thackeray: Masters ofLiterature Series.)

Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy”

I have not yet mentioned Chesterton’s masterpiece, Orthodoxy. Our author was a deeply religious man. In these days of irreligion he stands out as the champion of orthodoxy and religion. Near the end of his life he turned a Roman Catholic. I have purposely avoided any description of the book. If space permitted I could give here copious extracts from it, especially from its earlier half. Stevenson says somewhere of one of Hazlitt’s essays that it is so good that a tax should be levied on all those who have not read it. I should like to say the same thing about Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.

I have referred, in passing, to Chesterton’s love for the Middle Ages. In fact, he was infatuated with them as someone, it has been said, was infatuated with the word, “Mesopotamia.” As was only to be expected, he has come in for a great deal of harsh criticism. These times, it was obvious, did not suit him. They are far too “advanced.” He ought to have been born in his beloved Middle Ages: he was “misplaced in Illyria”, as Charles Lamb would have said.

Arnold Bennett has somewhere recorded his conviction that Chesterton’s could not have been a first-rate intelligence because his mind always harped to the Middle Ages. Now, I have a very high opinion of Arnold Bennett. But he was grievously wrong in his estimate of Chesterton. Chesterton, as it happened, had a first-rate intelligence. May I go further and say that he was that rare phenomenon, a genius. Arnold Bennett, for all his cleverness, was assuredly not a genius. His mind, such as it was, could not comprehend anything beyond “Grand Babylon Hotels” and “multi-million dollar yachts.” So much the worse for him.

Dr. Johnson to my rescue

I have remarked that Chesterton was a genius. One test of genius is that it can do with the utmost ease things in themselves the most difficult. Genius is not, as we have been repeatedly told, the capacity for taking infinite pains. I have nothing but admiration for those who have that capacity: the labourer is worthy of his hire. Anyone can take pains: the rarer thing is to achieve your results with the irreducible minimum of trouble. To do this is to be gifted with genius: and Chesterton eminently fills the bill.

He has not, in the production of his hooks, to undergo the preliminary pangs that are, alas, only too common with the rank and file of writers. He comes with a mind that is fully adequate to his subject. In a word, he is terribly at ease in Zion. And it is curious that successful as he is in the most arduous tasks, he often fails in the most trivial ones.

What Dr. Johnson said of Milton may, with equal truth, be said of Chesterton. Miss Hannah More, it is related, expressed a wonder that the poet who had written Paradise Lost should write such poor sonnets. Dr. Johnson replied:

“Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut, a Colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherrystones.”

In like manner, Chesterton can do the rare things better than the trivial ones. No wonder he is one of my favourites: and not all the King’s horses and not “all the King’s men” can make me revise my opinion of him. As Andrew Lang says:

“It cannot be helped. Each of us has his author who is a favourite, a friend, an idol, whose immaculate perfection he maintains against all comers. For example, things are urged against Scott: I receive them in the attitude of the deaf adder of St. Augustine who stopped one ear with his tail and pressed the other against the dust. The same with Moliere. M. Scherer utters complaints against Moliere! He would not convince me even if I was convinced.” (Essays in Little)