G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look upon the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.85

  The contemporary worship of progress is a particularly absurd heresy. How, asks Chesterton, can one talk about progress without ‘being doctrinal’ in the sense of having ‘a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals’? In the despised Middle Ages, people had an idea of the ‘direction’ in which they wanted to go, but the contemporary age that liked to talk so much about progress but that differed so much on which ‘direction’ to go ‘had less right to use the word “progress” ‘than any previous age. The cult of progress also contravened one of Chesterton’s most fundamental convictions, the necessity of limitation: for it was ‘always concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas’. Chesterton enjoys brandishing dogma in the face of a culture that prided itself on the absence of dogmas that allegedly constrict but that in fact paradoxically liberate the human mind:

  But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. … When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut.

  That sarcastic analogy is succeeded by a provocative celebration of dogma that concludes with even more devastating analogies to show that it is dogma that makes us human and lack of dogma sub-human:

  Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

  Intellectual progress therefore means ‘the construction of a definite philosophy of life’ that is ‘right’. Chesterton takes two examples of contemporary writers who at least have ‘a constructive and affirmative view’, even if it is not one he agrees with. Kipling the imperialist and Shaw the Socialist, who were both ‘moralists’, showed that ‘the fiercest dogmatists can make the best artists’, whereas the fin de siècle slogan was that ‘literature should be free from all causes and all ethical creeds’.86

  Chesterton makes it clear in Heretics that his own view of life is religious and the dogmas he believes in are those of Christianity. The wonder at the very fact of existence had led him first to believe that ‘where there is anything there is God’. But this ‘inchoate’ religion87 had developed into a definite Christianity when Chesterton looked at the nature as opposed to the fact of existence. And what struck him most forcibly was that the paradoxes of Christianity are true to life. Thus the Christian virtue of hope is ‘justified in life’ by the fact that the more hopeless a situation is the more hopeful one has to be. Or again, the virtue of humility is ‘justified in life’ by the fact that pride (‘which the Roman Catholic Church … has done her best work in singling out’) ‘dries up laughter… dries up wonder… dries up chivalry and energy’. Vanity, on the other hand, is ‘humorous, and can enjoy the joke even of itself; pride is dull, and cannot even smile’. Chesterton’s hero Stevenson ‘had found that the secret of life lies in laughter and humility’. The characteristic virtues of Christianity—which, again significantly, Chesterton notes, ‘the Church of Rome calls virtues of grace’—of, that is, faith, hope, and charity, are ‘the gay and exuberant virtues’ in contrast to the pagan virtues of, for example, justice and temperance, which are ‘the sad virtues’. Even more obviously, the pagan virtues are ‘reasonable’, whereas the Christian virtues are ‘in their essence as unreasonable as they can be’, or, in other words, are inherently paradoxical. But the pre-Christian pagan world only ‘discovered in its death-pang this lasting and valuable truth, a heritage for the ages, that reasonableness will not do’. This ‘naked innocence of the intellect’, claims Chesterton, cannot be recovered after Christianity. And here he adduces a startling example: ‘The greatest tribute to Christianity in the modern world is Tennyson’s “Ulysses”’. For the poet ‘reads into the story… the conception of an incurable desire to wander’. But ‘the real Ulysses does not desire to wander at all. He desires to get home.’ Why? Because there is ‘no love of adventure for its own sake; that is a Christian product. There is no love of Penelope for her own sake; that is a Christian product’. In this reasonable, sensible pagan world, there were good men and bad men, but there was no concept of charity, since ‘charity is a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the human soul’. Nor had they any ‘idea of romance; for romance consists in thinking great minds. And from the lack a thing more delightful because it is dangerous; it is a Christian idea’. The Christian virtues are paradoxes certainly, but ‘they are all three practical, and they are all three paradoxical because they are practical’. That is, they are true to life, which is inherently paradoxical: ‘It is the stress of ultimate need, and a terrible knowledge of things as they are, which led men to set up these riddles, and to die for them. 88

  But there is another Christian virtue, Chesterton argues, which illustrates even better ‘the connection between paradox and practical necessity’. The pagans had set out to enjoy themselves but in the end made ‘the great psychological discovery’ that ‘a man cannot enjoy himself and continue to enjoy anything else’, and that, ‘whereas it had been supposed that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by extending our ego to infinity, the truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by reducing our ego to zero’. This virtue of humility is for Chesterton what saves us from ‘a tendency to be weary of wonders’:

  To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea. When he looks at all the faces in the street, he does not only realize that men are alive, he realizes with a dramatic pleasure that they are not dead.89

  Chesterton once quoted to his friend Charles Masterman Kipling’s lines about the doomed crew of a disabled battleship: ‘it is not meet that English stock | Should bide … | The death they may not see,’ as they ‘watched the harassed crowds pouring through the passages of the Underground to the iron and symbolic Inner Circle’. He, Chesterton, had ‘always retained a dim sense of something sacred in English stock, or in human stock, which separated me from the mere pessimism of the period’.90

  A proud intellectual like Carlyle, with his philosophy of hero worship, rejected the truism that no man is a hero to his valet; whereas, in reality, the ‘ultimate psychological truth, the foundation of Christianity, is that no man is a hero to himself’. Carlyle thought most men were fools, but Christianity regarded all men as fools. This doctrine of original sin, the ‘permanent possibility of selfishness’ arising ‘from the mere fact of having a self—’almost the first thing to be believed in‘—could be called ‘the doctrine of the equalit
y of men’. The discovery that ‘pride does not lead to enjoyment’ was an important discovery in the history of the world. But another aspect of the foolish modern cult of progress was the idea that progress depended on ‘independent thinking’, when in reality, ‘under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes on, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past.’91 Chesterton might have added that a deference to tradition is itself a product of humility.

  Another ‘intellectual’ with a contempt, like Carlyle, for the common man was George Bernard Shaw. Chesterton teases this ‘heretic’ with two connected paradoxes. The ‘only defect’ in his ‘greatness’, ‘to his claim to be a great man’, is ‘that he is not easily pleased. He is an almost solitary exception to the general and essential maxim, that little things please great minds’. And from the lack of ‘that most uproarious of all things, humility, comes … the peculiar insistence on the Superman’. Both these paradoxes were, of course, particularly offensive to the intellectuals, for whom ‘little things’ were obviously what pleased little not great men, and for whom the Christian virtue of humility, far from being a glorious thing, was the Christian virtue which their prophet Nietzsche held in especial contempt. Having discovered that the masses were not ‘progressive’, instead of deciding ‘to abandon progress and remain with humanity’, Shaw, ‘not being easily pleased’, has opted ‘to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake’. Instead of looking for ‘a new kind of philosophy’, Shaw wants ‘a new kind of man’. What Chesterton finds ‘valuable and lovable’ in the common man, ‘the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man’, Shaw finds contemptible. Chesterton ends his dissection of Shaw with yet another paradox and yet another pointed reference to the Church of Rome, which of course Shaw also held in great contempt, but which for Chesterton was a glorious, or, to use his own word, ‘uproarious’, vindication of the common man.

  When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paulnor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward—in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.92

  What Chesterton calls ‘the practical success of Christendom’ is due to ‘this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready for an infinity of unmerited triumphs’. And one of its fruits is ‘Romance, a purely Christian product’, the idea that something is ‘more delightful because it is dangerous’. For the most ‘herculean efforts’ are made for the things of which people know they are ‘unworthy’. Nor can anyone ‘deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs’. It was Christian ‘mediaeval Europe which asserted humility that ‘gained Romance’. But the contemporary world refuses to believe in the romance of the urban street, from which it says it flees ‘because it is dull’, whereas in fact it flees ‘because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive’. And so the contemporary man ‘invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuctoo’. It is because the ‘street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering’ that he has ‘to soothe and quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles’. But actually ‘he would have a much more romantic … change if he jumped over the wall into his neighbour’s garden’. For our neighbour ‘comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain. He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts’. Now to shrink from ‘the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men’ is perfectly natural but it is not admirable or superior as Nietzsche, ‘who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious’, thinks.

  Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

  Aversion to the masses, Chesterton dares to suggest, is really aversion to their ‘energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise humanity for its weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.’93

  The same intellectuals also for the same reasons find the family an ‘uncongenial’ institution, whereas, like the suburban street, it is precisely its ‘divergencies and varieties’ that make it ‘a good institution’. It is ‘romantic because it is a toss-up’ involving the ‘element of adventure’. The ‘supreme adventure’ in life is not falling in love but being born: ‘There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap…. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is a bolt from the blue.’ The intellectuals see the family as a dreary restricting bourgeois institution. Chesterton, on the contrary, insists that the ‘colour as of a fantastic narrative ought to cling to the family and to our relations with it throughout life. Romance is the deepest thing in life; romance is deeper even than reality.’ Life itself is not only a romance but ‘is always a novel or ‘story’ because it involves the will as well as the intellect. And the same Christian civilization that ‘asserted free will in the thirteenth century, produced the thing called “fiction” in the eighteenth. When Thomas Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man, he created all the bad novels in the circulating libraries.’ Inevitably, for Chesterton romance and the novel involve the idea of limitation: ‘The thing which keeps life romantic… is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or expect’. To be born is to be ‘born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance’, since, ‘in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, any rate, should be settled for us without our permission’. Modern intellectuals ‘imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty’, seeking as they do ‘a world where there are no limitations—that is, a world where there are no outlines’. And of all the ‘great limitations and frameworks which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is the most definite and important’, which is why the intellectuals so hate it.94

  Intellectuals, on the other hand, who consider themselves superior to the ordinary man talk ‘very solemnly’ about art, whereas the truly great artists are ‘ordinary men’ who do not take themselves or their art too seriously but have a ‘god-like carelessness’—unlike one of Chesterton’s ‘heretics’ who receives the ultimate Chestertonian condemnation: ‘The truth is, I believe, that Whistler never laughed at all. There was no laughter in his nature; because there was no thoughtlessness and self-abandonment, no humility.’ The ‘extreme ordinariness’ of a great artist like Shakespeare, who could be so ‘keen… on business transactions in a little town in Warwickshire’, is incomprehensible to the ‘modern artistic temperament’. Far from being ‘superior to other men ‘, Shakespeare felt himself ‘equal with other men’. This, maintains Chesterton, is true also of all the really great teachers and leaders whose superiority to other men is shown in their belief in ‘the equality of man’. The ‘plainness’, the ‘almost prosaic camaraderie with which Jesus Christ ‘addressed any motley crowd that happened to stan
d about Him’, ‘is the note of all great minds’.95