Chapter III: G. K. Chesterton (2)

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."

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."