The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics)

by Leys, Simon

  None of the activities that really matter can be pursued in a merely professional capacity; for instance, the emergence of the professional politician marks the decline of democracy, since in a true democracy politics should be the privilege and duty of every citizen. When love becomes professional, it is prostitution. You need to provide evidence of professional training even to obtain the modest position of street-sweeper or dog-catcher, but no one questions your competence when you wish to become a husband or a wife, a father or a mother—and yet these are full-time occupations of supreme importance, which actually require talents bordering on genius.

  Besides his description of his father, Chesterton made many other statements in praise of the amateur. These are justly famous and some have virtually become proverbs. For instance, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Or again, “Just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.”

  He further developed the contrast between the amateur and the professional into a comparison between the universalist and the specialist, and he applied this particular insight to an issue that was always of great concern to him: the condition of women. Thus he made the point that the man must be, to a certain extent, a specialist—out of necessity, he finds himself confined in a narrow professional pursuit, since he must do one thing well enough to earn the daily bread—whereas the woman is the true universalist: she must do a hundred things for the safe-guarding and management of the home. The modern fad of denouncing the narrowness of domesticity provoked Chesterton’s anger: “When domesticity is called drudgery all the difficulty arises from a double meaning of the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge building the cathedral of Amiens, or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar.” And then Chesterton goes on to survey the range of tasks within the household that require in turn, or simultaneously, the talents and initiative of a statesman, a diplomat, an economist, an educationist, a philosopher, and he concludes:

  I can understand how all this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. A woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task, I will never pity her for its smallness.

  * * *

  A first paradox which Chesterton presents for us today is the fact that he is both widely popular and relatively neglected; on the contemporary intellectual and literary scene, he appears to be simultaneously present and absent.

  His presence is manifested in many ways. First, on a superficial level, just consider the number of his witticisms which have been completely absorbed into our daily speech as proverbial sayings—we find them constantly quoted in newspapers and magazines, we use them all the time; sometimes we are not even aware that they were originally coined by him.

  His striking images could, in turn, deflate fallacies or vividly bring home complex principles. His jokes were irrefutable; he could invent at lightning speed surprising short-cuts to reach the truth. Thus, for instance, to those who said, “My country, right or wrong,” he would reply, “My mother, drunk or sober.” Or again, on democracy: “Democracy is like blowing your nose: you may not do it well, but you ought to do it yourself.”

  On the difficult problem of original sin and man’s fall from innocence, one of his comments shed an unusual, yet illuminating light: “If you wanted to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky, you would slap him on the back and say, ‘Be a man.’ No one who wished to dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth explorer would slap him on the back and say, ‘Be a crocodile.’”

  The baroque eccentricity of such images led shallow critics to overlook the depth and seriousness of his thought, and he was constantly accused of being frivolous. But what is frivolity and what is seriousness? Chesterton explained:

  A man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels, or lambs with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous, for he is taking one mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. But a man who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious view of the universe. The more widely different the topics talked of, the more serious and universal must be the philosophy which talks of them. The mark of the light and thoughtless writer is the harmony of his subject matter. The mark of the thoughtful writer is his apparent diversity.

  Reading Chesterton today, one is constantly amazed by the uncanny accuracy of so many of his analyses, by the prophetic quality of so many of his warnings—some of which were issued as early as the beginning of the twentieth century. There is a timeliness, an immediacy, an urgency in his writing, which none of his famous contemporaries can match. (How much of the social commentary of Bernard Shaw or H.G. Wells still bears scrutiny today?)

  I would like to provide quickly a series of random samples, suggesting both the wide range of Chesterton’s observations and the sharp relevance which so many of these still present for us now.

  On politics (from a portrait he made of an important statesman of his time): “He had about the fundamentals of politics and ethics this curious quality of vagueness, which I have found so often in men holding high responsibilities. For public men all seem to become hazier as they mount higher . . . I think I could say with some truth that politicians have no politics.”

  The truth of this striking insight is confirmed to us every day. The other day I happened to be reading the newly published memoirs of J.-F. Revel, Le Voleur dans la maison vide. Revel, who held for a while the portfolio of cultural affairs in François Mitterrand’s shadow cabinet (when the latter was still leader of the Opposition in France), paints a portrait of this consummate political acrobat, which appears cruelly true and verifies in its paradoxical conclusion the accuracy of Chesterton’s observation.

  Revel wrote, “The trouble with Mitterrand was that he had no interest in politics”—Mitterrand was so totally absorbed, all the time, with cunning political manoeuvres and manipulations, he was possessed with such an obsessive passion for political means, that he could no longer care for political ends. His exclusive concern was how to obtain and how to retain political power—but he never reflected on the question: political power for what purpose? (Paul Hasluck’s The Chance of Politics is another recent book which offers further illustrations of this same phenomenon.)

  On the Church, in its relation to the world and its times: “The Church is the only thing that can save a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of one’s own time. We do not want a Church that will move with the world. We want a Church that will move the world.”

  This utterance reminds me of a remarkable dialogue between Louis Massignon and Pope Pius XII. Massignon was a great Orientalist scholar (specialising in the study of ancient Islamic mysticism) and he was also a personal friend of the Pope. When the first war between Israel and the Arabs broke out, he urged the Pope to issue a solemn statement to ensure the protection of the Holy Places in Jerusalem. The Pope was hesitant: neither the Jews nor the Arabs were likely to pay attention to his words, and he objected: “Who would listen?” To which Massignon made this superb reply: “You are the Pope: you do not write in order to be read—you write in order to state the truth.” (Massignon died in 1962; it is a pity he did not live to know the pontificate of John Paul II.)

  On society: “It has been left to the very latest modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility . . . the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming not from a few socialists . . . The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, much more in Manhattan.” (He was writing this in 1926.)

  And this—which is ominously apposite to our present situation (I do not believe for instance that it is a mere coincidence that we are witnessing simultaneously the development of a movement supporting euthanasia and the development of a movement in favour of homosexual marriage):

  There ar
e destructive forces in our society, that are nothing but destructive, since they are not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them, basing themselves on an inner anarchy that denies all the moral distinctions on which mere rebels base themselves. The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. The enemy arises not from among the people, but from the educated and well-off, those who unite intellectualism and ignorance, and who are helped on their way by a weak worship of force. More specifically it is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the family and the State.

  In the early 1930s, T.E. Lawrence wrote in a letter to a friend, “I have not met Chesterton, but Bernard Shaw always tells me that he is a man of colossal genius.” This small example, picked at random, is characteristic of the sort of prestige which Chesterton commanded amongst the most brilliant minds of his time.

  By contrast, it is puzzling to observe that today he has become virtually invisible on our intellectual horizon. Just go into any bookshop and look for his works: most of them are unavailable and have been out of print for many years already. And when a new anthology of his wisdom came out in England a couple of months ago, the few reviews that appeared in the press were typically patronising, treating Chesterton as a sort of colourful dinosaur—mildly amusing, and utterly irrelevant. The fact is, the fashionable intelligentsia of the English-speaking world now largely ignores him. (Note, however, that among the French and the Latins, the situation is quite different; the two subtlest literary minds of our time, Paulhan and Borges, literally worshipped him—but that is another story.)[1]

  It may be interesting to ponder for a moment the various reasons that have contributed to this odd neglect (which at times is even tinged with scorn and hostility). One factor may well be his Catholicism. In a way, Catholicism has done to Chesterton’s reputation what the British empire did to Kipling’s: in the eyes of a shallow and ignorant public, it became a liability—an occasion for both partisans and detractors to indulge in schematisations and distortions, a sectarian pretext for support or for rejection. In this reductionist perspective, Chesterton’s Catholicism eventually came to obscure his catholicity. I just mentioned a newly published anthology of his writing: the unfortunate title of this book, Prophet of Orthodoxy, precisely illustrates the sort of simplification into which his admirers seem sometimes to fall all too easily. To be turned into a prophet was precisely a fate of which Chesterton felt most wary. He himself identified it as a temptation that had to be resisted absolutely. He realised it was a status he could easily have achieved, had he agreed to pay the usual price—which is to isolate and emphasise only one side of the truth. This is always an easy recipe for achieving popularity and for gathering crowds of disciples; but to secure this sort of demagogic success one must mutilate a complex reality.

  A second factor that may explain the relative neglect which has befallen him was shrewdly identified by Evelyn Waugh in a rather ambivalent critical assessment:

  Chesterton was a lovable and much loved man, abounding in charity and humility. But humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice—all the odious qualities which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work, until he has made something that gratifies his pride, and envy and greed. And in doing so, he enriches the world more than the generous and the good, though he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of artistic achievement.

  Indeed, Chesterton never attached much importance to his own writing. In this respect, he was the exact opposite of a “man of letters”—and this is one of the most endearing and admirable aspects of his personality. Generally speaking, literary people are exceedingly self-centred and vain—on the whole they are not a very attractive breed—but Chesterton did not belong to that species. For all his formidable wit, he had no urge to shine; among brilliant conversationalists, he was the strange exception: a man who truly enjoyed listening to others. He could say truthfully, “I have never taken my books seriously; but I take my opinions quite seriously.” This is a very important distinction. His brother, who knew him intimately, grasped it well: “He is merely a man expressing his opinions because he enjoys expressing them. But he would express them as readily, and as well, to a man he met on a bus.”

  Unlike most literary men, he never endeavoured to husband carefully his ideas and intellectual resources, or to manage his career, or to plan his moves and design publishing strategies. He simply could not care less.

  He wrote with the reckless generosity of genius. Mozart, who enjoyed (or suffered from?) a similar facility and composed with the same effortless flow, once said, “I write music like a cow pisses.”

  Chesterton’s fecundity was prodigious. His secretary described how, on some occasions, he would produce two articles at the same time: he dictated one, while simultaneously writing another.

  Did he write too much? It would be imprudent to discard lightly the enormous bulk of his journalistic output, for the problem is that, again, with lavish carelessness, he scattered gems everywhere, and many of these are to be found among trifling and whimsical little essays.

  He had spent his secondary-school years mostly sleeping and dreaming—to the perplexity and despair of his teachers. He never entered any university; he merely attended an art school in desultory fashion. But he managed to accumulate an immense culture—literary, historical and philosophical—solely through his extensive reading. (Again, the approach of the amateur.)

  Once, a woman told him with naïve admiration that he seemed to know a great many things. He replied, “Madam, I know nothing: I am a journalist.”

  All his life, Chesterton claimed no other title for himself but that of journalist. He gloried in being a journalist, he relished the atmosphere and romance of Fleet Street. As a perceptive critic observed, “He was a journalist because he was a democrat. Newspapers were what the ordinary people (the man on the bus!) like to read. There could therefore be no higher privilege than to write for the newspapers—whatever he might think of their proprietors.”

  And he had all the qualities of a superb journalist: intelligence, clarity, liveliness, speed, brevity and wit. But these are the very qualities that always damn a writer in the eyes of pretentious critics and pompous mediocrities. To impress the fools, you must be obscure. (“What I understand at once never seems true to me,” confessed a female admirer to a modern French novelist). And for these people, it is inconceivable that anything expressed with imagination and humour could also have an earnest purpose. How could you possibly say something important if you are not self-important? Chesterton constantly battled against this prejudice. He explained:

  My critics think that I am not serious but only funny, because they think that “funny” is the opposite of “serious.” But “funny” is the opposite of “not funny” and of nothing else. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or in short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German. The two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other . . . If you say that two sheep added to two sheep make four sheep, your audience will accept it patiently—like sheep. But if you say it of two monkeys, or two kangaroos, or two sea-green griffins, people will refuse to believe that two and two make four. They seem to believe that you must have made up the arithmetic, just as you have made up the illustration of the arithmetic. They cannot believe that anything decorated with an incidental joke can be sensible. Perhaps it explains why so many successful men are so dull—or why so many dull men are successful.

  * * *

  I have talked for much too long already, and yet I have barely skimmed the surface of this huge topic. But I now realise that I could have given it another title: Chesterton: The Man Who Was In Love With Daylight. He said, “If there is one thing of which I have always been certain since my boyhood and grow more certain as I advance in age, it is that nothing is poetical,
if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us, if the normal man does not amaze.”

  Most people tend to think of Chesterton as a “Catholic writer,” but they do not seem to realise that his conversion occurred fairly late in life (in 1922—only fourteen years before his death; a number of his major works were written long before he actually joined the Church). But when he finally made the move, he said that he became a Catholic in order to get rid of his sins.

  But there was, I think, another motivation, equally powerful: gratitude. He once said that if he were to go to hell upon his death, he would still thank God for this life on earth. From the very beginning, the urge to thank his creator is what impelled him to write.

  In Chesterton’s experience, the mere fact of being is so miraculous in itself that no subsequent misfortune could ever exempt a man from feeling a sort of cosmic thankfulness. I wish to end here with a short prose poem which he jotted down in a notebook of his agnostic youth; it shows that this overwhelming sense of wonder and gratitude actually predated by many years his religious conversion:

  EVENING

  Here dies another day

  During which I have had eyes, ears, hands

  And the great world round me;

  And with tomorrow begins another.

  Why am I allowed two?

  * Lecture to the Chesterton Society of Western Australia, Perth, September 1997.

  PORTRAIT OF PROTEUS

  A Little ABC of André Gide

  To tell the truth, I don’t know what I think of him. He is never the same for long. He never gets engaged in anything, yet nothing is more engaging than his permanent evasions. You cannot judge him, for you haven’t known him long enough. His very self is in a constant process of undoing and remaking. You think you have pinned him down, but he is Proteus:* he adopts the shape of whatever he happens to love. And you cannot understand him unless you love him.