G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study Part 1

G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study.

by Julius West.

I

INTRODUCTORY

THE habit, to which we are so much addicted, of writing books about other people who have written books, will probably be a source of intense discomfort to its pract.i.tioners in the twenty-first century.

Like the rest of their kind, they will pin their ambition to the possibility of indulging in epigram at the expense of their contemporaries. In order to lead up to the achievement of this desire they will have to work in the nineteenth century and the twentieth.

Between the two they will find an obstacle of some terror. The eighteen nineties will lie in their path, blocking the way like an unhealthy moat, which some myopes might almost mistake for an aquarium. All manner of queer fish may be discerned in these unclear waters.

To drop the metaphor, our historians will find themselves confronted by a startling change. The great Victorians write no longer, but are succeeded by eccentrics. There is Kipling, undoubtedly the most gifted of them all, but not everybody's darling for all that. There is that prolific trio of best-sellers, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Miss Marie Corelli, and Mr. Hall Caine. There is Oscar Wilde, who has a vast reputation on the Continent, but never succeeded in convincing the British that he was much more than a compromise between a joke and a smell. There is the whole Yellow Book team, who never succeeded in convincing anybody. The economic basis of authors.h.i.+p had been shaken by the abolition of the three-volume novel. The intellectual basis had been lulled to sleep by that hotchpotch of convention and largeness that we call the Victorian Era. Literature began to be an effort to express the inexpressible, resulting in outraged grammar and many dots. . . .

English literature at the end of the last century stood in sore need of some of the elementary virtues. If obviousness and simplicity are liable to be overdone, they are not so deadly in their after-effects as the bizarre and the extravagant. The literary movement of the eighteen nineties was like a strong stimulant given to a patient dying of old age. Its results were energetic, but the energy was convulsive. We should laugh if we saw a man apparently dancing in mid-air--until we noticed the rope about his neck. It is impossible to account for the success of the Yellow Book school and its congeners save on the a.s.sumption that the rope was, generally speaking, invisible.

In this Year of Grace, 1915, we are still too close to the eighteen nineties, still too liable to be influenced by their ways, to be able to speak for posterity and to p.r.o.nounce the final judgment upon those evil years. It is possible that the critics of the twenty-first century, as they turn over the musty pages of the Yellow Book, will e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e with feeling: "Good G.o.d, what a dull time these people must have had!" On the whole it is probable that this will be their verdict. They will detect the dullness behind the mechanical brilliancy of Oscar Wilde, and recognize the strange hues of the whole aesthetic Movement as the garments of men who could not, or would not see. There is really no rational alternative before our critics of the next century; if the men of the eighteen nineties, and the queer things they gave us, were not the products of an intense boredom, if, in strict point of fact, Wilde, Beardsley, Davidson, Hankin, Dowson, and Lionel Johnson were men who rollicked in the warm suns.h.i.+ne of the late Victorian period, then the suicide, drunkenness and vice with which they were afflicted is surely the strangest phenomenon in the history of human nature. To many people, those years actually were dull.

The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of afternoon in a rich house with large rooms; the hours before teatime. They believed in nothing except good manners; and the essence of good manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be defined as a silent yell.

So says Chesterton, yawning prodigiously.

One may even go farther, and declare that in those dark days a yawn was the true sign of intelligence. It is no mere coincidence that the two cleverest literary debutants of that last decade, Mr. Max Beerbohm and the subject of this essay, both stepped on the stage making a pretty exhibition of boredom. When the first of these published, in 1896, being then twenty-four years old, his Works of Max Beerbohm he murmured in the preface, "I shall write no more. Already I begin to feel myself a trifle outmoded. . . . Younger men, with months of activity before them . . .

have pressed forward. . . . _Cedo junioribus._"

So too, when Chesterton produced his first book, four years later, he called it _Greybeards at Play: Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen_, and the dedication contained this verse:

Now we are old and wise and grey, And shaky at the knees; Now is the true time to delight In picture books like these.

The joke would have been pointless in any other age. In 1900, directed against the c.r.a.pulous exoticism of contemporary literature, it was an antidote, childhood was being used as a medicine against an a.s.sumed attack of second childhood. The attack began with nonsense rhymes and pictures. It was a complete success from the very first. There is this important difference between the writer of nonsense verses and their ill.u.s.trator; the former must let himself go as much as he can, the latter must hold himself in. In _Greybeards at Play_, Chesterton took the bit between his teeth, and bolted faster than Edward Lear had ever done. The ant.i.theses of such verses as the following are irresistible:

For me, as Mr. Wordsworth says, The duties s.h.i.+ne like stars; I formed my uncle's character, Decreasing his cigars.

Or

The Shopmen, when their souls were still, Declined to open shops-- And cooks recorded frames of mind, In sad and subtle chops.

The drawings which accompanied these gems, it may be added, were such as the verses deserved. They exhibit a joyous inconsistency, the disproportion which is the essence of parody combined with the accuracy which is the _sine qua non_ of satire.

About a month after Chesterton had produced his statement of his extreme senility (the actual words of the affidavit are

I am, I think I have remarked, [he had not], Terrifically old.)

he published another little book, _The Wild Knight and Other Poems_, as evidence of his youth. For some years past he had occasionally written more or less topical verses which appeared in The Outlook and the defunct Speaker. _Greybeards at Play_ was, after all, merely an elaborate sneer at the boredom of a decade; the second book was a more definite attack upon some points of its creeds and an a.s.sertion of the principles which mattered most.

There is one sin: to call a green leaf grey, Whereat the sun in heaven shuddereth.

There is one blasphemy: for death to pray, For G.o.d alone knoweth the praise of death.

Or again (_The World's Lover_)

I stood and spoke a blasphemy-- "Behold the summer leaves are green."

It was a defence of reality, crying for vengeance upon the realists. The word realism had come to be the trade-mark of Zola and his followers, especially of Mr. George Moore, who made a sacrifice of nine obvious, clean and unsinkable aspects of life so as to concentrate upon the submersible tenth. Chesterton came out with his defence of the common man, of the streets

Where s.h.i.+ft in strange democracy The million masks of G.o.d,

the gra.s.s, and all the little things of life, "things" in general, for our subject, alone among modern poets, is not afraid to use the word. If on one occasion he can merely

. . . feel vaguely thankful to the vast Stupidity of things,

on another he will speak of

The whole divine democracy of things,

a line which is a challenge to the unbeliever, a statement of a political creed which is the outgrowth of a religious faith.

The same year Chesterton formally stepped into the ranks of journalism and joined the staff of The Daily News. He had scribbled poems since he had been a boy at St. Paul's School. In the years following he had watched other people working at the Slade, while he had gone on scribbling. Then he had begun to do little odd jobs of art criticism and reviewing for The Bookman and put in occasional appearances in the statelier columns of The Speaker. Then came the Boer War, which made G.

K. Chesterton lose his temper but find his soul. In 1900 The Daily News pa.s.sed into new hands--the hands of G.K.C.'s friends. And until 1913, when the causes he had come to uphold were just diametrically opposed to the causes the victorious Liberal Party had adopted, every Sat.u.r.day morning's issue of that paper contained an article by him, while often enough there appeared signed reviews and poems. The situation was absurd enough. The Daily News was the organ of Nonconformists, and G.K.C.

preached orthodoxy to them. It advocated temperance, and G.K.C.

advocated beer. At first this was sufficiently amusing, and n.o.body minded much. But before Chesterton severed his connection with the paper, its readers had come to expect a weekly article that almost invariably contained an attack upon one of their pet beliefs, and often enough had to be corrected by a leader on the same page. But the Chesterton of 1900 was a spokesman of the Liberalism of his day, independent, not the intractable monster who scoffed, a few years later, at all the parties in the State.

At this point one is reminded of Watts-Dunton's definition of the two kinds of humour in The Renascence of Wonder: "While in the case of relative humour that which amuses the humorist is the incongruity of some departure from the laws of convention, in the case of absolute humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the normal as fixed by nature herself." We have our doubts as to the general application of this definition: but it applies so well to Chesterton that it might almost have come off his study walls. What made a series of more than six hundred articles by him acceptable to The Daily News was just the skilful handling of "the laws of convention," and "the normal as fixed by nature herself." On the theory enunciated by Watts-Dunton, everything except the perfect average is absolutely funny, and the perfect average, of course, is generally an incommensurable quant.i.ty. Chesterton carefully made it his business to present the eccentricity--I use the word in its literal sense--of most things, and the humour followed in accordance with the above definition. The method was simple. Chesterton invented some grotesque situation, some hypothesis which was glaringly absurd. He then placed it in an abrupt juxtaposition with the normal, instead of working from the normal to the actual, in the usual manner.

Just as the reader was beginning to protest against the reversal of his accustomed values, G.K.C. would strip the grotesque of a few inessentials, and, lo! a parable. A few strokes of irony and wit, an epigram or two infallibly placed where it would distract attention from a weak point in the argument, and the thing was complete. By such means Chesterton developed the use of a veritable Excalibur of controversy, a tool of great might in political journalism. These methods, pursued a few years longer, taught him a craftsmans.h.i.+p he could employ for purely romantic ends. How he employed it, and the opinions which he sought to uphold by its means will be the subjects of the following chapters.

Chesterton sallied forth like a Crusader against the political and literary Turks who had unjustly come into possession of a part of the heritage of a Christian people. We must not forget that the leading characteristic of a Crusader is his power of invigorating, which he applies impartially to virtues and to vices. There is a great difference between a Crusader and a Christian, which is not commonly realized. The latter attempts to show his love for his enemy by abolis.h.i.+ng his unchristianness, the former by abolis.h.i.+ng him altogether. Although the two methods are apt to give curiously similar results, the distinction between a Crusader and a Christian is radical and will be considered in greater detail in the course of this study. This study does not profess to be biographical, and only the essential facts of Chesterton's life need be given here. These are, that he was born in London in 1873, is the son of a West London estate agent who is also an artist and a children's poet in a small but charming way, is married and has children. Perhaps it is more necessary to record the fact that he is greatly read by the youth of his day, that he comes in for much amused tolerance, that, generally speaking, he is not recognized as a great or courageous thinker, even by those people who understand his views well enough to dissent from them entirely, and that he is regarded less as a stylist, than as the owner of a trick of style. These are the false beliefs that I seek to combat. The last may be disposed of summarily.

When an author's style is completely sincere, and completely part of him, it has this characteristic; it is almost impossible to imitate.

n.o.body has ever successfully parodied Shakespeare, for example; there are not even any good parodies of Mr. Shaw. And Chesterton remains unparodied; even Mr. Max Beerbohm's effort in A Christmas Garland rings false. His style is individual. He has not "played the sedulous ape."

But, on the other hand, it is not proposed to acquit Chesterton of all the charges brought against him. The average human being is partly a prig and partly a saint; and sometimes men are so glad to get rid of a prig that they are ready to call him a saint--Simon Stylites, for example. And it is not suggested that the author of the remark, "There are only three things that women do not understand. They are Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," is not a prig, for a demonstration that he is a complete gentleman would obviously leave other matters of importance inconveniently crowded out. We are confronted with a figure of some significance in these times. He represents what has been called in other spheres than his "the anti-intellectualist reaction." We must answer the questions; to what extent does he represent mere unqualified reaction?

What are his qualifications as a craftsman? What, after all, has he done?

And we begin with his romances.

II

THE ROMANCER

In spite of Chesterton's liberal production of books, it is not altogether simple to cla.s.sify them into "periods," in the manner beloved of the critic, nor even to sort them out according to subjects. G.K.C.

can (and generally does) inscribe an Essay on the Nature of Religion into his novels, together with other confusing ingredients to such an extent that most readers would consider it pure pedantry on the part of anybody to insist that a Chestertonian romance need differ appreciably from a Chestertonian essay, poem, or criticism. That a book by G.K.C.

should describe itself as a novel means little more than that its original purchasing price was four s.h.i.+llings and sixpence. It might also contain pa.s.sages of love, hate, and other human emotions, but then again, it might not. But one thing it would contain, and that is war.

G.K.C. would be pugnacious, even when there was nothing to fight. His characters would wage their wars, even when the bone of contention mattered as little as the handle of an old toothbrush. That, we should say, is the first factor in the formula of the Chestertonian romance--and all the rest are the inventor's secret. Imprimis, a body of men and an idea, and the rest must follow, if only the idea be big enough for a man to fight about, or if need be, even to make himself ridiculous about.

In _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ we have this view of romance stated in a manner entirely typical of its author. King Auberon and the Provost of Notting Hill, Adam Wayne, are speaking. The latter says:

"I know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that only one or two may rightly use, and only seldom.