by Ian Ker
Turning to the previous century, Chesterton calls Pope the supreme poet of paradox, since the ‘antitheses’ of his poetry are ‘fully in harmony with existence, which is itself a contradiction in terms’. The modern idea that ‘the very antithesis of the typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality’ ignores the fact that an ‘element of paradox runs through the whole of existence itself’. Physically, it was impossible to ‘imagine a space that is infinite’ but equally impossible to ‘imagine a space that is finite’. Or, again, all moral qualities demanded the possibility of their opposite—‘we cannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear’. As ‘the last great poet of civilisation’, Pope was ‘supreme’ in ‘the great and civilised art’ of satire. For he understood, unlike modern writers, the paradox that generosity is required for satire. An attack on somebody’s weaknesses is only convincing and effective when one also recognizes their strengths. Otherwise the portrait painted is unreal and lacks conviction.69
Chesterton was to write a book about Francis of Assisi many years later, but in the essay here the central paradox of Francis’s life, as Chesterton saw it, was that ‘all true joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism’. It was ‘the universe itself’ that made Francis’s followers ‘mad with joy’—‘the only thing really worthy of enjoyment.’ Francis himself was ‘the happiest of the sons of men’, and yet he ‘undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious necessities’. Ultimately, people in Chesterton’s view are either optimists or pessimists: either they see ‘life black against white’ or ‘white against black’. And the Franciscans embraced sacrifice because they saw life as ‘full of the blaze of an universal mercy’, whereas pessimists indulge themselves because they see only ‘a black curtain of incalculable night’. But Chesterton concludes: ‘The revellers are old, and the monks are young. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts of happiness, and we who are its misers.’70
When Chesterton said that Francis ‘expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears’,71 he was touching on an idea that was to be one of the major themes in his writings. He complained that there was ‘no tradition in English literature which would justify us in calling a comedy heroic’, the hero’s place being in tragedy according to the modern conception. But great comedy, like that of Shakespeare, ‘not only can be, but must be, taken seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter.’ The idea that comedy was artificial was due to ‘a profound pessimism’, in other words to the assumption that the world was no place for laughter.72 Humour, Chesterton was to declare, is ‘mystical; it is no more to be argued about than a religion’, between which and ‘real fun’ ‘there is an alliance’, religion being ‘much nearer to riotous happiness than it is to the detached and temperate types of happiness in which gentlemen and philosophers find their peace’.73
Chesterton’s book on Robert Louis Stevenson, published a quarter of a century later, is also prefigured in a book review reprinted here. He had been an effective antidote to Chesterton’s fin de siècle gloom because ‘he took pleasure in life, in every muscular and emphatic action of life, even if it were an action that took the life of another’. He is one of Chesterton’s heroes because he delights in existence itself. He had ‘a positive love for inanimate objects such as had not been known since St Francis called the sun brother and the well sister’. Stylistically, his writings, Chesterton notes, were distinguished by ‘a certain clean-cut angularity which make us remember that he was fond of cutting wood with an axe’—a point he would develop in the book.74
The essay on Stevenson introduces another Chestertonian idea—the importance of romance: ‘The conception which unites the whole varied work of Stevenson was that romance, or the vision of the possibilities of things, was far more important than mere occurrences: that one was the soul of our life, the other the body, and that the soul was the precious thing.’75 In the last essay of the book on Walter Scott, Chesterton returns to the theme. He insists again on the importance of romance as ‘a state of the soul’, as against ‘the idea that romance is in some way a plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the outside’. Far from romance being escapist or unreal, Chesterton insists that it ‘lies not upon the outside of life but absolutely in the centre of it’. For the ‘centre of every man’s existence is a dream’—‘a man’s vision of himself, as swaggering and sentimental as a penny novelette’, a ‘vanity which is the mother of all day-dreams and adventures …’. Scott’s ‘spiritual adventurousness’ sets him apart from Dumas, for Scott understands that romance paradoxically ‘does not consist by any means so much in experiencing adventures as in being ready for them’. Action in itself is not the stuff of romantic adventure: nothing is more typical of Scott’s heroes than ‘their disposition to linger over their meals’. Like Stevenson, Scott is seen to have a Chestertonian love of things for themselves: ‘he loved weapons’ not just for the sake of adventure, but
with a manual materialistic love, as one loves the softness of fur or the coolness of marble. One of the profound philosophical truths which are almost confined to infants is this love of things, not for their use or origin, but for their own inherent characteristics, the child’s love of the toughness of wood, the wetness of water, the magnificent soapiness of soap.
Chesterton even suggests that people were not the only ‘characters’ in his novels: ‘Like a true child, he almost ignored the distinction between the animate and inanimate.’ Similarly, Scott made no distinction between his characters in the sense that he endows them equally, whether heroes or villains, with eloquence. His ‘difficulty, or rather incapacity, for despising any of his characters’ means that ‘every man of Scott can speak like a king’. This Scottish inability to distinguish the common man from the king Chesterton was later to contrast favourably with the class-consciousness of the English Dickens. Nor did Scott despise bombast as being ‘merely superficial’. Again, Scott stood with the common man or the child against the sophisticated intellectual: ‘The superficial impression of the world is by far the deepest. What we really feel, naturally and casually, about the look of skies and trees and the face of friends, that and that alone will almost certainly remain our vital philosophy to our dying day.’76
Where Carlyle and Ruskin, on the other hand, failed as prophets was in failing to treat ‘the average man as their equal, of trusting to his reason and good feeling without fear and without condescension’. Nevertheless Carlyle did possess that indispensable Chestertonian attribute—humour about what he was most serious about: ‘A man must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity.’ Because he had a ‘sense of the sarcasm of eternity’ he could see that there was ‘something elemental and eternal in a joke’. In Chesterton’s view, Carlyle’s main achievement was to induce people ‘to study less the truth of their reasoning, and more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned’. Nothing was more common than to hear people arguing quite logically but ‘without troubling about the deep assumptions involved, having lost their sense, as it were, of the real colour and character’ of the relevant underlying assumptions. But it was only common sense that there are truths that ‘cannot be formally demonstrated or even formally named’ and ‘realities that we all know to be real, but which have no place in argument except as postulates’. However, Chesterton was clear about the ‘evil side’ of Carlyle’s ‘religion of hero worship’, which led him to defend slavery ‘from the passion for applying everywhere his paradoxical defence of aristocracy’. And he was clear too about his evil influence: ‘Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern times the supreme maniac of this moon-struck consistency’ of applying a ‘single ethical test to everything in heaven and earth’.77 This kind of simplification is again the object of attack in ‘Tolstoy and the Cult of Simplicity’. On the one hand, understandi
ng leads naturally to simplification: ‘The more consistently things are contemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore to simplify themselves. The simplification of anything is always sensational. Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things.’ On the other hand, a ‘self-conscious simplicity’ that consists in ‘warring on complexity’ is likely to lead to even more complexity. Instead of this ‘search after a false simplicity, the aim of being … more natural than it is natural to be’, it ‘would not only be more human, it would be more humble of us to be content to be complex’. Tolstoy well exemplifies for Chesterton how ‘an artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique—all the part of his work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his opinions’. Thus ‘the real moral of Tolstoy’ emerges in his fiction, a moral ‘of which he is probably unconscious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehemently disapprove’. This moral through great art is in contrast to ‘the trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy’, ‘the almost venomous reformer’. As for the Tolstoyan doctrine of loving humanity, ‘Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity: He loved men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity …’. But then Christ never ‘wrote a word, except with his finger in the sand’. His teaching was characterized by its spontaneity: ‘It was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for any elaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and idle words that the cross was set up on Calvary, and the earth gaped, and the sun was darkened at noonday.’78 Here Chesterton anticipates his ability in Orthodoxy to make us see familiar biblical texts with new eyes.
In his essay on Savonarola, Chesterton returns to his favourite theme of grateful wonder.
He was making war against no trivial sins, but against godless and thankless quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which all creation fell…. He was preaching that alertness, that clean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as to gain holiness, as indispensable in a lover as in a monk…. The fact is that this purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else.
This appreciation of life itself required ‘a discipline in pleasure, and an education in gratitude’. For it was the hardest of all tasks to make people ‘turn back and wonder at the simplicities they had learned to ignore’. Like Chesterton, Savonarola believed in democracy because he believed in that ‘most unpopular’ of doctrines ‘which declares the common life divine’. It was ‘the hardest of gospels’, since nothing so terrifies people as ‘the decree that they are all kings’. For Savonarola, Christianity was ‘identical with democracy’ and was ‘the hardest of gospels’, because nothing ‘so strikes men with fear as the saying that they are all the sons of God’. Chesterton thought his own time was like that of the Florence of Savonarola and the Medici, with its decadent fin de siècle aestheticism and the Carlylean ‘hunger for the strong man which is unknown among strong men’.79 The concept of the masses as sons of God who were kings in their own right could hardly have been further away from that of the typical intellectuals and writers of the day to whom the masses represented such a threat that autocratic rule was the only possible alternative to extermination.
5
This is a good point at which to consider how far Chesterton would have professed himself to be a Christian when he published Twelve Types. We have already seen how Frances’s practice of Anglo-Catholicism had intrigued him. And we know that he had become friends with the Revd Conrad Noel before his marriage in June 1901. Noel’s recollection was that he and his wife met Chesterton for the first time at a meeting of the Christo-Theosophic Society. This must have been after April 1900, when Chesterton’s first review appeared in the Speaker; as Noel says: ‘We had been much intrigued by the weekly contributions of an unknown writer to the Speaker … brilliant work, and my wife and I, independently, came to the conclusion when we heard this young man speak that it must be he. The style was unmistakable.’ Before Noel could write to congratulate him on his speech, he received a letter from Chesterton, ‘saying that he was coming to hear me … in a week or so; it was thus we first became acquainted, and the acquaintance ripened into a warm friendship with us both. He and his brother Cecil were in and out of our flat in Paddington Green, where I was assistant curate.’80 Unlike his brother, who professed not even to wish to believe, Chesterton ‘always retained a sort of lingering loyalty or vague sympathy with the traditions of the past; so that, even during the period when I practically believed in nothing, I believed in what some have called “the wish to believe”’.81
Chesterton himself could not remember exactly when he first met Noel, but thought it was
at some strange club where somebody was lecturing on Nietzsche; and where the debaters (by typical transition) passed from the gratifying thought that Nietzsche attacked Christianity to the natural inference that he was a True Christian. And I admired the common sense of a curate, with dark curly hair and a striking face, who got up and pointed out that Nietzsche would be even more opposed to True Christianity than to False Christianity, supposing there was any True Christianity to oppose.
The curate’s common sense contracted favourably with the absence of thought among the intelligentsia of that ‘very strange world’ of ‘artistic and vaguely anarchic clubs’, which ‘thought a great deal about thinking’ but ‘did not think’. Its ideas came ‘at second or third hand; from Nietzsche or Tolstoy or Ibsen or Shaw’.
Those who pontificated most pompously were often the most windy and hollow. I remember a man with a long beard and a deep booming voice who proclaimed at intervals, ‘What we need is Love,’ or, ‘All we require is Love,’ like the detonations of a heavy gun. I remember another radiant little man who spread out his fingers and said, ‘Heaven is here! It is now!’ which seemed a disturbing thought under the circumstances. There was an aged, aged man who seemed to live at one of these literary clubs; and who would hold up a large hand at intervals and preface some fairly ordinary observation by saying, ‘A Thought.’ … A sort of Theosophist said to me, ‘Good and evil, truth and falsehood, folly and wisdom are only aspects of the same upward movement of the universe.’ Even at that stage it occurred to me to ask, ‘Supposing there is no difference between good and bad, or between false and true, what is the difference between up and down?’
These intellectuals, of course, who admired Ibsen and Shaw, were naturally totally contemptuous of Victorian farces, in which the curate was a stock type. And Chesterton himself had been ‘quite ready to believe that a dying superstition was represented by such feeble persons’. But, in fact, in these debates what struck Chesterton was that as often as not ‘it was the feebleminded clergyman, who got up and applied to the wandering discussion at least some sort of test of some sort of truth’. ‘Dreadful seeds of doubt began to be sown in my mind…. It seemed to me that the despised curates were rather more intelligent than anybody else; that they, alone in that world of intellectualism, were trying to use their intellects.’82
Noel was an eccentric who later became famous for flying the red flag from his church in Thaxted, Essex. But in these early days he was known as a ‘Bohemian’ rather than ‘Bolshevist’ clergyman. He specialized in wearing a combination of clerical, artistic, and working-class clothes. Chesterton remembered walking from a meeting with Noel and Dr Percy Dearmer, ‘then chiefly famous as an authority on the history of ritual and of vestments’.
Dr Dearmer was in the habit of walking about in a cassock and biretta which he had carefully reconstructed as being of exactly the right pattern for an Anglican or Anglo-Catholic priest; and he was humorously grieved when its strictly traditional and national character was misunderstood by the little boys in the street. Somebody would call out, ‘No Popery,’ or ‘To hell with the Pope,’ or some other sentimen
t of larger and more liberal religion. And Percy Dearmer would sternly stop them and say, ‘Are you aware that this is the precise costume in which Latimer went to the stake?’83
Such Anglo-Catholic eccentricities were the means of drawing Bohemians like Chesterton (‘I had no religion except the very haziest religiosity’84) and his ‘frankly anti-religious’ brother ‘towards the serious consideration of the theory of a Church’. The ‘most fascinating and memorable’ member of the Anglo-Catholic clergy to whom Chesterton always felt ‘gratitude’ was Canon Henry Scott Holland, a close friend of Canon, later Bishop, Charles Gore, the founder of Pusey House in Oxford. Holland, with his ‘humorous frog’s face and great stature and voice of bull-like bellowing’, was the founder of the Christian Social Union which had chapters all over the country and which Chesterton was to join. Like Chesterton himself, he had a strong sense of humour that could prevent him too from being taken seriously. At a meeting in Nottingham he was urging the merits of positive rather than merely negative state intervention, when he could not repress the ‘natural surge of laughter within him’—