by Ian Ker
and he said, waving his hand to the rigid and respectable Nottingham audience, ‘Punishment is an exceptional instrument. After all, it is only occasionally that you and I feel that tap on the shoulder, and that gruff recommendation to “come along quietly.” It is not every day of our lives that we are put in the dock and sentenced to some term of imprisonment…. Why, I suppose that even in this room there are quite half a dozen people who have never been to jail at all.’ A ghastly stare was fixed on all the faces of the audience; and I have ever since seen it in my own dreams; for it has constituted a considerable part of my own problem.
On the same occasion Chesterton penned some comic verses on the reaction of one of these respectable Nottingham tradesmen to being told their ‘Christian duty towards the modern problem of industrial poverty’:
The Christian Social Union here
Was very much annoyed;
It seems there is some duty
Which we never should avoid,
And so they sang a lot of hymns
To help the Unemployed….
As he recalled ‘those old exhilarating days’, Chesterton, now a Roman Catholic, could not help wondering ‘whither’ ‘those old’ Anglo-Catholic Socialist friends, ‘from whom I have been sundered in thought but never in sympathy’, were ‘marching so gallantly that you could not find the natural way?’85
6
Chesterton’s review article on Stevenson, republished in Twelve Types, was especially important in establishing his reputation. On the strength of it, the leading literary critic, Sir Sidney Colvin, who had recently edited both the works and letters of Stevenson, wrote to him and subsequently invited him to his house, where Chesterton became a frequent visitor. They differed on every possible subject, apart from their mutual love of Stevenson. When Colvin became engaged in 1903 to the charming and talented Mrs Fanny Sitwell, with whom Colvin’s friend Stevenson had also been deeply in love, the widow of a clergyman from whom she had been separated, Chesterton wrote to congratulate Colvin: ‘I have as much right to look on your new arrangements with delight as a criminal has to admire a sunset.’ However, ‘congratulations upon these real things’ always seemed to him ‘to be quite unsuited to this nasty and elegant language in which we write letters. If we could write a page of very exquisite blank verse, it might be all right, or erect an altar and slaughter a thousand oxen.’ But as ‘a milder form of burnt-offering’, he could only think of sending him his recently published book on Browning.86 Even more importantly, Edmund Gosse, the author of Father and Son, and another lover of Stevenson, was taken by the article. Chesterton felt ‘far more at home’ with him, because ‘he despised all opinions and not merely my opinions’.
He had an extraordinary depth of geniality in his impartial cynicism. He had the art of snubbing without sneering. We always felt that he had not enjoyed snubbing but the snub itself, as a sort of art for art’s sake, a million miles from any personal malice. It was all the more artistic because of the courtly and silken manner that he commonly assumed. I was very fond of him …
Chesterton also at the same time ‘discovered the secret of amiability in another person with a rather misleading reputation for acidity’, the caricaturist Max Beerbohm, whose novel Zuleika Dobson would be published a few years later.87 Like Chesterton, his humour misled people, in his case into thinking that he suffered from egoism as though humour could not accompany humility, just as Chesterton’s humour persuaded people that he could not be serious. It was at any rate a humorous note that he sent to Chesterton inviting him to lunch in May 1902.
I am quite different from my writings (and so, I daresay, are you from yours)—so that we should not necessarily fail to hit it off.
I, in the flesh, am modest, full of commonsense, very genial, and rather dull.
What you are remains to be seen—or not to be seen—by me, according to your decision.88
George Bernard Shaw, too, was so impressed in the summer of 1901 by
a review of Scott’s Ivanhoe which [Chesterton] wrote for the Daily News …that I wrote to him asking who he was and where he came from, as he was evidently a new star in literature. He was either too shy or too lazy to answer. The next thing I remember is his lunching with us on quite intimate terms, accompanied by Belloc.89
According to Lucian Oldershaw, Chesterton did not meet Shaw till five years later while visiting Paris in April 1906 when they went to see Rodin making a bust of Shaw.90 It seems that quite an audience would gather every day to watch the great French sculptor modelling the famous English playwright, sitting ‘in mesmerised silence’ while Shaw ‘concentrated and collected himself and Rodin filled the place’ with violent movement and cries.91 Rodin’s secretary, who was then the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, told them that Shaw had been trying to explain at some length what the Salvation Army was, no doubt in connection with his play Major Barbara. When Shaw had completed his explanation, the secretary informed him that ‘The Master says you have not much French but you impose yourself’. Oldershaw thought he imposed himself too much—he ‘talked Gilbert down’. As a great talker himself, Chesterton was most unusual in also being very good at listening to other people, and listening because he genuinely wanted to hear them talk.92
More important, however, for his literary career than the society he was now moving in was an invitation from the publisher Macmillan to write a book on Browning for its ‘English Men of Letters’ series. Even the self-deprecating Chesterton admitted it was ‘a very flattering invitation’ and ‘a crown of what I can only call respectability’.93 This was a very distinguished series: other contributors included J. A. Froude, Trollope, and Henry James. It was also a very bold move on the publisher’s part, as Chesterton had not yet written a book, apart from his collections of verse and essays. The gamble more than paid off, as the resulting book was often to be reprinted and is the only volume in the series that is remembered and still read today. The invitation had just arrived when he had lunch with Beerbohm, who advised him ‘in a pensive way: “A man ought to write on Browning while he is young.”’ Chesterton did not understand this cryptic advice at the time, but claimed that he did when he wrote his Autobiography—but without explaining to his readers what it meant. In characteristic self-deprecation, Chesterton said that he did not claim to have written a book on Browning but to have written
a book on love, liberty, poetry, my own views on God and religion (highly undeveloped), and various theories of my own about optimism and pessimism and the hope of the world; a book in which the name of Browning was introduced from time to time, I might almost say with considerable art, or at any rate with some decent appearance of regularity. There were very few biographical facts in the book, and those were nearly all wrong. But there is something buried somewhere in the book; though I think it is rather my boyhood than Browning’s biography.94
In fact, Chesterton spent many long hours in the British Museum Reading Room reading up on his subject. And there is a story that once, finding himself with no money, he sketched the picture of a man shaking with hunger and wrote underneath it a request for the loan of a sixpence, which he placed in turn on the desks of anyone he knew in the Reading Room. He collected enough for a visit to the nearest pub.95 The editor who had suggested that Chesterton should be commissioned to write the volume on Browning for the prestigious series was sent for by the senior partner in Macmillans, who was in a ‘white fury’ at the sight of the corrected proofs—
or rather not corrected; there were still thirteen errors uncorrected on one page; mostly in quotations from Browning. A selection from a Scottish ballad had been quoted from memory and three of the four lines were wrong. I wrote to Chesterton saying that the firm thought the book was going to ‘disgrace’ them. His reply was like the trumpeting of a crushed elephant. But the book was a huge success.96
The book was published in May 1903 and was widely and on the whole enthusiastically reviewed, although not all the reviewers appreciated the factual inaccurac
ies; one reviewer angrily pointed out that one line allegedly of Browning’s poetry was not inaccurate but simply invented by Chesterton. The truth was that Chesterton simply quoted from his extraordinary but not infallible memory; years after leaving Fisher Unwin he could still remember all the plots and most of the characters of the ‘thousands’ of novels he had read for the publisher, according to Frances. He did not bother to verify his facts and thought it pedantic to worry about verbal inaccuracies. Much later, when Dorothy Collins became his secretary, he was not at all keen on her checking references.97 A few years after publishing his book on Browning, he wrote: ‘I quote from memory both by temper and on principle. That is what literature is for; it ought to be part of a man.’98 But, whatever its shortcomings in accuracy, the book firmly established his literary reputation, so much so that a year later he was even invited to apply for the chair of English literature at Birmingham University, even though he had no degree.99 It is arguable that his book is still the best criticism of Browning ever written.100 On 15 July 1903 Lady Anne Ritchie, the eldest daughter of Thackeray, wrote to Chesterton to say that she was ‘much interested’ by his book, ‘which recalls dear Mr Browning so vividly to me’, indeed ‘instantaneously more vividly than my remembrances of him’.101
Browning is known as a difficult and obscure poet. But Chesterton argues that he is not obscure because he was an intellectual like his admirers. On the contrary, and the book begins with this paradox, he is difficult because ‘he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man’. Had he been more self-conscious and subtle he would, Chesterton claims, have been ‘immeasurably easier to understand’ because he would have practised ‘the art of self-analysis’. As it was, ‘the mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of the conscious one … existed peculiarly in Browning’ precisely because he was so un-self-conscious. Again, it was not any intellectual elitism that made him ‘unintelligible’ but rather the opposite; nor was it because his thoughts were ‘vague, but because to him they were obvious’. Unlike Matthew Arnold, who was ‘an intellectual aristocrat’, Browning was ‘an intellectual democrat’. Unlike his followers, he was not an intellectual but simply a poet. And he ‘discovered the one thing that he could really do better than any one else, the dramatic lyric’. This form of verse was ‘absolutely original; he had discovered a new field of poetry’. What especially distinguished this new form of poetry was ‘the fearless and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime emotions’. This central paradox is at the heart of Chesterton’s understanding of Browning: that he was the greatest of love poets because he did ‘not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about window-panes and gloves and garden walls’. In short, his love poetry, far from dealing with ‘abstractions’, ‘is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not speak much about love’.102 The same could be said of Chesterton’s own love letters to Frances, at least the ones that survive, although not of his love poetry.
Chesterton’s fascination with the grotesque evokes his most original criticism of Browning. For what is so peculiar to Browning was ‘his sense of the symbolism of material trifles’, and it is ‘this spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among all other poets’. ‘Enormous problems, and yet more enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground.’ Far from being incompatible with the spontaneity and naturalness of Browning’s poetry, ‘the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of the grotesque in nature, means … energy, the energy which takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning’s verse, in so far as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural …’. And just ‘as these strange things meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts and strange images meant to him energies in the mental world’. As Chesterton had already argued in one of the articles collected in The Defendant, the grotesque conveys the idea of vitality. But the grotesque also has another effect that is much more significant for Chesterton: ‘To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself.’ So important is the grotesque for Chesterton that he can even speak of ‘the philosopher of the grotesque’, whose ‘supreme function’ is ‘to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it’. As a poet, Browning wants his readers to look at the world with new eyes because he himself is ‘passionately interested in and in love with existence’, even with ‘the poetry of mean landscapes’, the ‘scrubbiness’ of which is ‘as of a man unshaved’. But one cannot be in love with or lost in wonder at existence and the world without loving and wondering at the ‘small things’ of which they are made up. And this is what makes The Ring and the Book ‘the great epic of the nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormous importance of small things’. By this exaltation or ‘apotheosis of the insignificant’, The Ring and the Book ‘pays to existence the highest of all possible compliments … the compliment of selecting from it almost at random’. The poem also exemplifies another key Chestertonian idea—namely, that it is impossible to live without some kind of philosophy or point of view. And this is ‘the second great respect in which The Ring and the Book is the great epic of the age. It is the great epic of the age, because it is the expression of the belief … of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without possessing a point of view.’103
Ten years later in The Victorian Age of Literature Chesterton was to be more critical of Browning, but without repudiating the insights of the book that made his name.
4
Controversy
I
IN March 1903, two months before the publication of Robert Browning, Chesterton’s former hero Robert Blatchford, the author of Merrie England, the collection of Socialist articles first published in the Clarion, in the same paper challenged Christians to respond to his attack on Christianity in the course of an enthusiastic review of a reprint of an anti-Christian polemic by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, ‘who used the theory of evolution to justify racism, aggressive nationalism and social Darwinism and whose arguments were later used in Germany to justify National Socialism’.1 Chesterton took up the challenge in the Daily News, thus inaugurating a controversy between the two men that lasted through to the end of 1904 and was carried on not only in the Clarion and the Daily News but also in the Commonwealth, the organ of the Anglo-Catholic Christian Social Union, which was edited by Henry Scott Holland. Chesterton’s first article was called ‘The Return of the Angels’. He wrote with ‘one great hope, that of arousing controversy’. It was time to break ‘the silence’ about religion, as Blatchford had done. He based his own defence of religious belief on science itself. The greatest modern scientific discovery was ‘the method of the hypothesis’, ‘the mother of innumerable facts’, including that of evolution. Chesterton’s own method of apologetic could hardly have been cleverer, since if there was one dogma his contemporaries believed in it was evolution. And so he now uses the methodology of hypothesis to justify religious belief—that is, of the ‘method of the successful hypothesis, of the theory that justifies itself’, in this case the hypothesis that explains why ‘so large a number of the young in this generation have returned to a certain doctrine of the spiritual’. He does not call it Christianity but the doctrine that ‘the world, clearly examined, does point with an extreme suggestiveness, to the existence of a spiritual world’. He and others who had ‘returned to this belief’ had done so, ‘not because of this argument or that argument’, but because the theory, when it is adopted, works out everywhere’. Just like the hypothesis of evolution, it made sense of things.2
It was supremely ironic that not only had Blatchford’s attack appeared in the Clarion, where the original articles once so admired by Chesterton that comprised Merrie England had also a
ppeared, but it was in the same paper that Chesterton had published in 1895 a highly anti-clerical, not to say anti-Christian, poem called ‘Easter Sunday’ (which he had not included in The Wild Knight). Blachford briefly dismissed Chesterton’s reply. But four months later Chesterton returned to the attack in six articles in the Commonwealth, and then in articles and letters in the Daily News as well as the Clarion over the course of the next six months. In the first of these articles, which appeared in July, Chesterton is specific that he is defending Christianity rather than simply religious belief in general. He acknowledges the failures of Christianity but attributes them to human sinfulness—arguing that the same would apply to the Socialist state that Blatchford advocated. Chesterton then challenges Blatchford’s determinism, which was to be the main point of controversy between them.3 In his Autobiography he claims:
It was not that I began by believing in supernormal things. It was that the unbelievers began by disbelieving even in normal things. It was the secularists who drove me to theological ethics, by themselves destroying any sane or rational possibility of secular ethics. I might myself have been a secularist, so long as it meant that I could be merely responsible to secular society. It was the Determinist who told me, at the top of his voice, that I could not be responsible at all. And as I rather like being treated as a responsible being, and not as a lunatic let out for the day, I began to look around for some spiritual asylum that was not merely a lunatic asylum.