by Ian Ker
But, if the modern urban world denied the dignity of the poor, there was an important way in which it also degraded the upper classes. Since the nineteenth century, the aristocracy had destroyed entirely their one solitary utility. It is their business to be flaunting and arrogant; but they flaunt unobtrusively, and their attempts at arrogance are depressing.’ The aristocracy was meant to stand for the idea of variety, experiment, and colour’, whereas now one had to look to the lower classes for these things: ‘chiefly, for example, to omnibus conductors, with their rich and rococo mode of thought …’. Their slang was ‘poetic’, unlike ‘the heavy, formless, lifeless slang of the man-about-town’. A barrow-boy’s curse contained more ‘remote metaphors’ than any sonnet of Keats. The working class lived in ‘a war of words’: ‘Any cabman has to be ready with his tongue, as any gentleman of the last century had to be ready with his sword. It is unfortunate that the poetry which is developed by this process should be purely a grotesque poetry.’ But the truth is that’ all slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry’.21
How had it come about that the lower classes preserved what the upper classes had lost? Chesterton put the blame on the spread of democratic ideas in the nineteenth century. Whereas previously the masses were certainly ‘conceived as mean and commonplace, but only as comparatively mean and commonplace’, ‘with the Victorian era came a principle which conceived men not as comparatively, but as positively, mean and commonplace’. Instead of the democrats extending the pride and vivacity’, the ‘towering symbols and flamboyant colours’ of the aristocracy to everyone as they should have done, they decreased rather than increased ‘the human magnificence of the past’. The tobacconist, for instance, should have been given a ‘crest’ and ‘the cheesemonger a war-cry’. There follows a marvellous passage of indignant Chestertonian rhetoric as he deplores the failure of democracy to uphold the dignity of the poor by upholding human dignity in general:
It began to be thought that it was ridiculous for a man to wear beautiful garments, instead of it being—as, of course, it is—ridiculous to wear deliberately ugly ones. It was considered affected for a man to speak bold and heroic words, whereas, of course, it is emotional speech which is natural, and ordinary civil speech which is affected. The whole relations of beauty and ugliness, of dignity and ignominy were turned upside down…. Dignity became a form of foolery and shamelessness, as if the very essence of a fool were not a lack of dignity…. We are forbidden to say that tradesmen should have a poetry of their own, although there is nothing so poetical as trade. A grocer should have a coat-of-arms worthy of his strange merchandise gathered from distant and fantastic lands; a postman should have a coat-of-arms capable of expressing the strange honour and responsibility of the man who carries men’s souls in a bag; the chemist should have a coat-of-arms symbolising something of the mysteries of the house of healing, the cavern of a merciful witchcraft.
A true belief in real democracy would soon lead to a blossoming of ‘symbolic colours and shapes’. It was significant that Shakespeare’s plays, for example, would never be presented on the stage in contemporary dress, unlike in the past, because of a lack of a ‘conviction of the poetry of our own life and manners’.22 These deficiencies were to be supplied in Chesterton’s first published novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
These early journalistic essays introduce other ideas that recur in Chesterton’s works. The threat to the institution of marriage was in his view founded on a form of pessimism, pessimism about the self: this terror of one’s self, of the weakness and mutability of one’s self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind.’ ‘Free’ love, he argued, was a contradiction in terms: It is the nature of love to bind itself …’. The institution of marriage ‘merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word’. That is to say, it did not pessimistically assume the worst of man, but respected’ him to the extent of giving him ‘the liberty to sell his liberty’.23
The Middle Ages that Chesterton was constantly to compare favourably with the modern world are here contrasted with Greek civilization, which, with all its ‘splendid work’, has blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin against the variety of life’ through their ‘worship of one aesthetic type alone’ and their ‘terror … of size, vitality, variety, energy, ugliness’. But ‘Nature intended every human face, so long as it was forcible, individual, and expressive, to be regarded as distinct from all others’. The medieval world, however, broke away from the Greek standard of beauty, and lifted up in adoration to heaven great towers, which seemed alive with dancing apes and devils’. Chesterton now uses a term that was to loom large in his thought: This branch of art is commonly dismissed as the grotesque. We have never been able to understand why it should be humiliating to be laughable, since it is giving an elevated artistic pleasure to others.’ But he goes on to say that the word ‘grotesque’ ‘is a misleading description of ugliness in art’ insofar as it suggests something comical. Gothic gargoyles, for example, were not intended to be funny: ‘Their extravagance was not the extravagance of satire, but simply the extravagance of vitality; and here lies the whole key to the place of ugliness in aesthetics.’ The same was true of nature itself: ‘We like to see a crag jut out in shameless decision from the cliff, we like to see the red pines stand up hardily upon a high cliff’, because ‘they are expressive of the dramatic stillness of Nature, her bold experiments, her definite departures, her fearlessness and savage pride in her children’; but we ‘do not burst with amusement’ at the sight of them. As opposed to a Greek idea of conventional beauty’, the Middle Ages knew that there are a million beautiful faces waiting for us everywhere’. In one of the two best-known articles in the book, ‘A Defence of Skeletons’, Chesterton maintains that ‘man’s horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all’; but rather the fundamental matter which troubles him in the skeleton is the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is shamelessly grotesque’. And man is not tempted to laugh at the human skeleton, which is fantastic- or bizarre-looking but not comical. Again, in nature, her highest and most valuable quality … is not her beauty, but her generous and defiant ugliness’. The essay ends with the hardly amusing thought: ‘And, however much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull underneath it are laughing for ever.’24
We have already seen from his Autobiography how seriously Chesterton took childhood. He also made the subject of children a regular theme of his writings. What was special about children was they had that sense of wonder at existence that adults only too often lost. But that gravity of astonishment at the universe’ that ‘dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old’ was only ‘transcendent common sense’. And ‘their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism’. One should not conclude from this that Chesterton was generally in approval of the serious and solemn. On the contrary, children were the exception to the rule, because their seriousness and solemnity were the result of their wonder at the world. Elsewhere in the book Chesterton condemns the lack of belief in … hilarity which marks modern aesthetics’. Farce and pantomime, although ‘glorified’ by great writers like Aristophanes and Molière, were now despised, and yet they corresponded to human emotions that include more than ‘the painful side of life only’. Indeed, in Chesterton’s view, the ‘literature of joy is infinitely more difficult, more rare, and more triumphant than the black and white literature of pain’.25
The final chapter in the book was the article that had attracted the most attention, ‘A Defence of Patriotism’. Instead of ‘the ancient love of country’ the English were consumed with a ‘lust for territory’. The failure to question the morality of the Boer War was not patriotism. ‘“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”’ A ‘deaf and raucous Jingoism�
�� needed to be discarded in favour of ‘a renascence of the love of the native land’. To be proud of colonies was like ‘a man being only proud of his legs’, in other words, of his ‘extremities’. Chesterton had his own explanation for this ‘decay of patriotism’: the fact that ‘we are the only people in the world who are not taught in childhood our own literature and our own history’. This failure to teach English literature in English schools ‘is, when we come to think of it, an almost amazing phenomenon’. He demanded to know: ‘What have we done, and where have we wandered, we that have produced sages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who could walk with Dante, that we should talk as if we have never done anything more intelligent than found colonies and kick niggers?’26
Before we leave The Defendant, it is important to emphasize Chesterton’s defence of the common man, which so distinguishes him from most other contemporary writers.27 The growth of population in Europe in the nineteenth century aroused panic and loathing among intellectuals. Nietzsche wrote chillingly: ‘Many too many are born, and they hang on their branches much too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree!’ Nietzsche’s ideas were immensely popular among early twentieth-century writers: W. B. Yeats praised him as an antidote to ‘the spread of democratic vulgarity’ and George Bernard Shaw hailed Thus Spoke Zarathustra as ‘the first modern book that can be set above the Psalms of David’. The Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who influenced Thomas Mann and Andre Gide among others, looked forward to the advent of Hitler, of whom he was to write an admiring obituary: ‘I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, the master, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.’28
On top of population explosion came educational reforms in England in the last decades of the nineteenth century that led to universal elementary education and consequently mass literacy. This in turn produced the popular newspaper, beginning with the launch of the Daily Mail in 1896. The masses ‘vomit their bile, and call it a newspaper’, snarled Nietzsche. An interesting aspect of the intellectuals’ hatred for newspapers was their catering for women readers: Nietzsche, who thought women should be regarded only in an ‘oriental way’, notoriously advised, ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip.’ There were exceptions among writers. Arthur Conan Doyle’s cerebral detective Sherlock Holmes has no hesitation is using newspapers extensively in his detection work, and for him members of the ‘masses’ are not anonymous units but individuals in their own right to whom he pays no less attention and respect than to their social superiors. Indeed, most of the stories were first published in the Strand Magazine, which catered for middle- and lower-middle-class readers.29
Other writers, on the contrary, far from being interested in individual members of the masses, simply favoured the wholesale extermination of the masses. Nietzsche thought that ‘the great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men’. He looked forward to the breeding of a higher race and the consequent ‘annihilation of millions of failures’. The new science of eugenics offered the possibility of more selective elimination, and Yeats joined the Eugenics Education Society founded in 1907, which Shaw also supported. If there was no possibility of abolishing universal education—as Nietzsche favoured, again in contrast to Sherlock Holmes, who hailed the new elementary schools as ‘Lighthouses … Beacons of the future!’—then writers could write in such a way that at least their writings could not be understood by the masses. Thus arose the movement called Modernism. Prior to that, Thomas Hardy feared that, when the masses ‘are our masters’, ‘the utter ruin of art and literature’ could follow. The literalism of the masses, who, Shaw noted, preferred the adventure stories of Stevenson to ‘serious’ literature, was counteracted before Modernism by the Impressionists in art and the Symbolists in literature, who eschewed fact and realism.30 It was, Chesterton noted, ‘the first time, perhaps, in the whole history of the world in which things can be praised because they are unpopular’. Artists and writers in the past ‘did not declare themselves great artists because they were unsuccessful: that is the peculiarity of our own time, which has a positive bias against the populace’.31
Chesterton, on the other hand, deplored ‘the deep anti-popular bias of the modern intellectuals’. ‘The evil’, he protested, ‘of our attitude to the masses is simply that we do think of them as masses’. He knew ‘nothing so vulgar as that contempt for vulgarity which sneers at the clerks on a Bank Holiday or the Cockneys on Margate sands’.32 In The Defendant he wrote explicitly, as we have seen, in defence of the poor and uneducated, of popular literature, particularly the detective story, of marriage and children. He delighted in newspapers, defending the profession of a journalist as against that of a poet in an article in a northern provincial newspaper a year later in 1902:
The poet writing his name upon a score of little pages in the silence of his study, may or may not have an intellectual right to despise the journalist: but I greatly doubt whether he would not morally be the better if he saw the great lights burning on through darkness into dawn, and heard the roar of the printing wheels weaving the destinies of another day. Here at least is a school of labour and of some rough humility, the largest work ever published anonymously since the great Christian cathedrals.33
On the other hand, he disliked Impressionism and Modernism, hated the idea of a Superman and loathed eugenics. He was also a solitary defender—although a forerunner of later writers like John Betjeman and Stevie Smith—of the despised suburbs where the masses lived.
The suburban clerk, the typical product of the new Board Schools, included Shaw and H. G. Wells among his favourite writers. Nevertheless Shaw, who became a highly successful journalist writing for the very newspapers that he saw as ‘fearfully mischievous’, as a follower of Nietzsche denigrated ‘the promiscuously bred masses’, asserting that ‘the majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive’ and anticipating Hitler’s gas chambers: ‘Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly … If we desire a certain type of civilization and culture, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.’ Shaw believed in a ‘Life Force’ that was struggling to evolve the ‘Superman’, a struggle that required the practice of eugenics in order to ‘eliminate the Yahoo’. There was certainly no possibility of a ‘Superwoman’: in Nietzsche’s view women were not equal with men and should be treated as property, slaves, or domestics. One reason for belittling the suburbs was that they were associated with female trivialities. George Gissing, who was in fact ‘the earliest English writer to formulate the intellectuals’ case against mass culture’, used women characters to exemplify the worst examples of bogus culture in his novels. Moreover, an interest in children and parenthood was disdained as a suburban distraction from serious culture. The contrast between journalists and popular writers catering for the masses and serious writers provides the theme of Gissing’s best-known novel, New Grub Street (1891). The idea that popular writing might possess some literary value simply never occurred to Gissing. The penny weekly Tit-Bits, which began in 1882, is satirized there as Chit-Chat. And yet the paper, which had no pictures, published excerpts from selected major writers, as well as serializing Conan Doyle’s novels The Sign of the Four and A Study in Scarlet in 1893. But the fact that it had a mass readership was enough to condemn it. H. G. Wells’s birthplace, Bromley in Kent, was ‘spoiled’ by suburban development, and anger against suburbia as well as mass tourism, advertising, and popular newspapers permeates his fiction. Women he condemned not only for their fertility that was responsible for overpopulation but also for their sex appeal that forced men into marriage and consequently into the work of breadwinning that drew them from intellectual pursuits. Wells did not hesitate to adv
ocate sterilization and poisoning of the ‘vicious, helpless and pauper masses’; as for black, brown, and yellow people, genocide was the only solution.34
Against all this more or less evil nonsense, Chesterton was to battle almost alone in defence of the common man and against the intellectuals.35
3
Most of the articles that Chesterton wrote for the Speaker were book reviews, and it was on the strength of these reviews that he began reviewing for a much larger audience in the Daily News, the first review signed with his initials appearing on 21 March 1901, and the first signed with his full name on 7 June.36 After these first two signed pieces, Chesterton’s reviews appeared as lengthy articles and with his name at the top, unlike nearly all the reviews of the other book reviewers, which were unsigned and short. He thus become one of the three leading reviewers for the Daily News, only one of whom appeared more regularly, the famous literary critic Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose classic anthology the first Oxford Book of English Verse had appeared in 1900.37 In March 1902 a new editor, A. G. Gardiner, took over, Cadbury having become sole owner. The paper was in financial difficulties because of its anti-imperialist, pro-Boer stance. Gardiner therefore gave the paper a new format, new features, and an expanded literary section.38 In 1903 Chesterton was given a regular column every other Saturday on the leader page, which the following year became a weekly column.39 It was noticeable that in time the newspaper’s circulation doubled on a Saturday.40 It amused Chesterton that he was described, ‘in the phrase of the time, as having a Saturday pulpit, rather like a Sunday pulpit. Whatever were the merits of the sermons, it is probable that I had a larger congregation than I have ever had before or since.’41
Chesterton was becoming very well known not only as a journalist and writer but also as a personality. ‘He was a striking figure in those days, upright and with a gallant carriage. His magnificent head had a thick mane of wavy chestnut hair, inevitably rumpled. His hands were beautifully shaped, with long slender fingers, but in sudden, almost painful contradistinction, his feet were very small and podgy, and never seemed to afford a stable base.’42 He was conspicuous for three things: his dress including his sword-stick, his absent-mindedness, and his predilection for taking cabs, however unnecessarily and regardless of the cost. Abandoning the struggle to make him dress tidily, Frances replaced the usual frock-coat and top hat with a sombrero-style hat and a cloak. The hat successfully covered the uncombed thick wavy chestnut hair and was much less likely to fall off, while the cloak was especially useful as he began rapidly to put on weight. Once, when he did lose his hat (no doubt a pre-sombrero-style hat) in the street and started chasing it, a passer-by rescued it ‘to his own imminent peril’, only to be met with Chesterton’s ungrateful comment that his wife would be sorry to see it again as she had just bought him a new one. Asked why in that case he had run after it, Chesterton replied, ‘It’s an old friend. I am fond of it and I wanted to be with it at the end.’ He was a tall man, six foot two. As a boy he had been thin, but now he was rapidly gaining weight. ‘His mere bulk is impressive,’ wrote one observer, but his absent-mindedness was even more impressive.