by Ian Ker
The intellectual history of the Victorian age consisted for Chesterton of the ‘series of reactions against [this dominant rationalism], which came wave after wave’.
They have succeeded in shaking it, but not in dislodging it from the modern mind. The first of these was the Oxford Movement; a bow that broke when it had let loose the flashing arrow that was Newman. The second reaction was one man; without teachers or pupils—Dickens. The third reaction was a group that tried to create a sort of new romantic Protestantism, to pit against both Reason and Rome—Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice—perhaps Tennyson. Browning also was at once romantic and Puritan; but he belonged to no group, and worked against materialism in a manner entirely his own.21
The study of Victorian literature, then, for Chesterton meant the study of ‘the romance of these various attacks’ on the dominant rationalism of the period. Newman was the ‘one great literary’ figure of the Oxford Movement, which Chesterton thought ‘was not so much a taste for Catholic dogma, but simply a hunger for dogma. For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not mean the absence of thought,’ but the end of thought.’ The Movement, therefore, was ‘a revolt against the Victorian spirit in one particular aspect of it; which may roughly be called (in cosy and domestic Victorian metaphor) having your cake and eating it. It saw that the solid and serious Victorians were fundamentally frivolous—because they were fundamentally inconsistent.’ The struggle of the Tractarians was, of course, the struggle of Chesterton himself in his own time to insist on the necessity of the intellectual limitation that is dogma. To make a profession of creed is to gain something but also to give up something, and that means creating something because it involves ‘making an outline and a shape’. Muhammad could be said to have created ‘when he forbade wine but allowed five wives’; just as the French Revolution created ‘when it affirmed property and abolished peerages’. The Tractarians’ ‘sub-conscious thirst’ for ‘the exalted excitement of consistency’ was something they therefore shared with Muslims and Jacobins—but not with the members of their own Church. In this sense, the Oxford Movement was ‘a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement’. And in that it was very different from ‘the other reactions that shook the Utilitarian compromise; the blinding mysticism of Carlyle, the mere manly emotionalism of Dickens’. Against the ‘damaged Puritanism’ of the Victorian middle class, this idea of the consistency of dogma ‘narrowed into a sort of sharp spear, of which the spear-blade was Newman’. Chesterton had no doubt that Newman had a ‘complete right to be in any book on modern English literature’. Far from Newman going over to Rome in order to ‘find peace and an end of argument’, he actually then had ‘far more quarrels’. However, he also had ‘far fewer compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by compromise than by quarrel’. Long before anything practically had been written about Newman as a writer, Chesterton’s brief literary sketch is still as acute a piece of criticism as anything that has been written:
He was a man at once of abnormal energy and abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written the Apologia. If he sometimes seems to skin his enemies alive, it was because he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his accusers but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their mere cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it was the breath of life to Newman to confess them, now that he was done with them for ever.
And Newman receives the highest Chestertonian praise for his satirical masterpiece, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics, ‘practically’ delivered ‘against a raging mob’ protesting at the so-called papal aggression of the re-establishment of the English Catholic hierarchy: ‘there is something grander than humour, there is fun…’. But even these lectures are ‘the triumphs of a highly sensitive man: a man must feel insults before he can so insultingly and splendidly avenge them. He is a naked man who carries a naked sword.’ The argumentation of his great predecessor as a controversialist is defined with beautiful precision and succinctness: ‘The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap.’ And Chesterton concludes as he began: ‘But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise.’22
In a 1904 article in the Speaker, Chesterton had criticized the ‘one weakness of Newman’s temper and attitude as a whole’: his lack of ‘democratic warmth’, which had ‘nothing to do with his religion; for in Manning, who was a far more rigid and central Catholic than he, democracy roared like a bonfire. It had something to do with his character and something to do with his training.’ But, in complete contrast to this alleged lack of democratic feeling, Newman, Chesterton went on, more than anyone else possessed that ‘finest instinct of geniality’ that ‘is to speak of common things with some dignity and care’. Indeed, and no higher praise was possible from Chesterton, Newman had achieved ‘that awful and beautiful thing which is the dream of all democracy, the seeing of all things as wonderful, the thing for which Whitman strove and which he did not perfectly attain’. As a controversialist, Newman had the ‘knack’ of having ‘the air of not being in any way in a hurry’. And it was this ‘air of leisure and large-mindedness, this scrupulosity about exceptions, that gave to the final assertion its sudden fire’. Certainly, Newman ‘often seemed’, in his ‘mildness and restraint, a long time coming to the point, but the point was deadly sharp’. This was reflected in his style, particularly in one ‘rhetorical effect’ that he had ‘perfectly’: ‘the art of passing smoothly and yet suddenly from philosophical to popular language.’ It was this kind of ‘abrupt colloquialism’ that marked ‘the wonderful termination of the introduction to the Apologia. After describing with ‘careful and melancholy phrases… how delicate and painful a matter it must necessarily be to give an account to the world of all the secret transactions of the soul’, Newman exclaims: ‘But I do not like to be called a knave and liar to my face, and—’. Chesterton concluded that he thought that
it was very fortunate for Newman, considered merely as a temperament and a personality, that he was forced into the insatiably fighting thing, the Catholic Church, and that he was forced into it in a deeply Protestant country. His spirit might have been too much protected by the politeness of our English temper and our modern age, but it was flayed alive by the living spirit of ‘No Popery’. The frigid philosopher was called a liar and turned into a man.
Here one has to interject that Chesterton seems only to have known about the ‘many tears’ that he says Newman shed ‘in the sweet but too refined atmosphere of the Oxford High Churchmen’: ‘But, like all brave men when he first saw the face of battle, he began to laugh.’ This would certainly have greatly surprised the Anglican Newman’s Evangelical and liberal opponents, who had been the butt of so much marvellously sarcastic satire. But all that sarcasm does no doubt pale in the face of what Chesterton calls the ‘wild and exuberant satire’ of the first lecture of Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, in which Newman compares ‘the English view of the Catholic church to the probable Russian view of the British Constitution’: ‘It is one of the great pages of fierce English humour.’23
From Scotland, Chesterton continues in The Victorian Age in Literature, had come ‘so many of those harsh economists who made the first Radical philosophies of the Victorian Age’, but it was Scotland that was ‘to fling forth … almost… to spit forth … their fiercest and most extraordinary enemy’. Around Carlyle, as around Newman, gathered another group of ‘reactionaries or romantics’ hostile to the spirit of the age. Chesterton thought that Carlyle’s strength came mainly from his Scottish background and his weaknesses partly from the later German influences he came
under. He was a Scotsman in his classless ‘consideration of men as merely men’ and in his ‘power of seeing things suddenly… a grand power of guessing’. The influence of Goethe, on the other hand, was less positive, for Goethe lacked the key Chestertonian virtue of humour: ‘The one civilised element that the German classicists forgot to put into their beautiful balance was a sense of humour.’ Indeed, there was ‘something faintly fatuous’ about Goethe’s ‘half sceptical, half sentimental self-importance’. Carlyle, on the other hand, did have humour, not least in ‘his very style; but it never got into his philosophy’, which ‘largely remained a heavy Teutonic idealism, absurdly unaware of the complexity of things’. But behind ‘all this transcendental haze’, ‘there hovered… a certain presence of old northern paganism; he really had some sympathy with the vast vague gods of that moody but not unmanly Nature-worship which seems to have filled the darkness of the North before the coming of the Roman Eagle or the Christian Cross’. Apart from ‘certain sceptical omissions’, it seemed to Chesterton that Carlyle combined all this ‘with the grisly Old Testament God he had heard about in the black Sabbaths of his childhood; and so promulgated (against both Rationalists and Catholics) a sort of heathen Puritanism: Protestantism purged of its evidences of Christianity.’ The Carlyle, on the other hand, that Chesterton thoroughly approved of was the Carlyle who assailed Utilitarianism in Past and Present and in his essay on Chartism; this was his ‘great and real work’: ‘It is his real glory that he was the first to see clearly and say plainly the great truth of our time; that the wealth of the state is not the prosperity of the people.’ The truth was that ‘only some of the less pleasing people’ were getting richer. And what Carlyle saw he saw ‘with stronger… humour than he showed on any other question’, never rising ‘to more deadly irony than in such macabre descriptions as that of the poor woman proving her sisterhood with the rich by giving them all typhoid fever’. But where Carlyle’s influence was bad, Chesterton thought, was through his philosophy of history: ‘he seems to have held the theory that the good could not be definitely defeated in this world.’ This had the corollary that what happens in history ‘happens for a higher purpose’. But this was tantamount to saying that ‘God is on the side of the big battalions—or at least, of the victorious ones’. This ‘dangerously optimist’ view of history was ‘the first cry of Imperialism’.24
As Carlyle’s successor as the scourge of Utilitarianism, Ruskin did not, like his master, ‘set up the romance of the great Puritans as a rival to the romance of the Catholic Church’, but rather ‘he set up and worshipped all the arts and trophies of the Catholic Church as a rival to the Church itself’. The great paradox of Ruskin was that he wanted ‘to tear down the gargoyles of Amiens or the marbles of Venice, as things of which Europe is not worthy; and take them away with him to a really careful museum, situated dangerously near Clapham’. But this was a common paradox among the Victorians, who had ‘a sort of divided head; an ethical headache which was literally a “splitting headache”; for there was a schism in the sympathies’. When they ‘looked at some historic object, like the Catholic Church or the French revolution, they did not know whether they loved or hated it most’. Thus Ruskin had ‘a strong right hand that wrote of the great mediaeval minsters in tall harmonies and traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen away—and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners’. Ruskin had very ‘mediaeval tastes’ but a ‘very unmediaeval temper’: ‘he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral except the altar.’ This ‘dark and doubtful’ acceptance of ‘Catholic art but not Catholic ethics’ was to produce ‘flagrant fruit’ in Swinburne, who was to use ‘mediaeval imagery to blaspheme the mediaeval religion’. Chesterton pounces on another paradox in Ruskin: his style. On the one hand, a Ruskin sentence ‘branches into brackets and relative clauses as a straight strong tree branches into boughs and bifurcations’, reminding us that their author ‘wrote some of the best of these sentences in the attempt to show that he did understand the growth of trees, and that nobody else did—except Turner, of course’. On the other hand, ‘if a Ruskin sentence (occupying one or two pages of small print) does not remind us of the growth of a tree, the only other thing it does remind us of is the triumphant passage of a railway train’—a modern invention Ruskin attacked repeatedly.25
In Walter Pater, Ruskin’s successor as the great art critic, ‘we have Ruskin’, joked Chesterton, ‘without the prejudices, that is, without the funny parts’. For the ‘moral tone’ of Pater’s writings was far from being Puritan; not that it was Catholic either—it was ‘strictly and splendidly Pagan’. Ruskin, like Newman, could ‘let himself go’; but that was impossible for Pater, ‘for the excellent reason that he wants to stay: to stay at the point where all the keenest emotions meet’. However, there is an objection to being where all the keenest emotions meet’—namely, ‘that you feel none of them’. Like Swinburne, Pater ‘wanted to see Paganism through Christianity: because it involved the accidental amusement of seeing through Christianity itself’.26
Chesterton saw Matthew Arnold as being ‘even more concentrated’ on Carlyle’s and Ruskin’s ‘main task—the task of convicting liberal bourgeois England of priggishness and provinciality’. For Arnold, the answer was ‘culture’, the disinterested play of the mind through the sifting of the best books and authorities’. Chesterton wickedly suggests that ‘some may suspect that culture was a man, whose name was Matthew Arnold’. But nevertheless, just as Carlyle was a man who saw things’, so Arnold ‘was chiefly valuable as a man ‘who knew things’. ‘He simply happened to know certain things’ that Carlyle and others did not know, such as that ‘England was a part of Europe’, that England was then (as it is now) an oligarchical State, and that many great nations are not’. He also knew that ‘the Catholic Church had been in history “the Church of the multitude”: he knew it was not a sect. He knew that great landlords are no more a part of the economic law than nigger-drivers: he knew that small owners could and did prosper.’ He reminded the English that ‘Europe was a society while Ruskin was treating it as a picture gallery’. In conclusion:
His frontal attack on the vulgar and sullen optimism of Victorian utility may be summed up in the admirable sentence, in which he asked the English what was the use of a train taking them quickly from Islington to Camberwell, if it only took them ‘from a dismal and illiberal life in Islington to a dismal and illiberal life in Camberwell?’
Chesterton also brilliantly evokes Arnold’s method as a critic:
The most vital thing he invented was a new style: founded on the patient unravelling of the tangled Victorian ideas, as if they were matted hair under a comb. He did not mind how elaborately long he made a sentence, so long as he made it clear. He would constantly repeat whole phrases word for word in the same sentence, rather than risk ambiguity by abbreviation. His genius showed itself in turning this method of a laborious lucidity into a peculiarly exasperating form of satire and controversy. Newman’s strength was in a sort of stifled passion, a dangerous patience of logic… But Arnold kept a smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school, that was enormously insulting. One trick he often tried with success. If his opponent had said something foolish, like the destiny of England is in the great heart of England’, Arnold would repeat the phrase again and again until it looked more foolish than it really was.
On the other hand, the irony of Chesterton’s amused dissection of Arnold’s religious views is deadly.
He seems to have believed that a ‘Historic Church’, that is, some established organisation with ceremonies and sacred books, etc., could be perpetually preserved as a sort of vessel to contain the spiritual ideas of the age, whatever those ideas might happen to be. He clearly seems to have contemplated a melting away of the doctrines of the Church and even of the meaning of the words: but he thought a certain need in man would always be
best satisfied by public worship and especially by the great religious literatures of the past. He would embalm the body that it might often be revisited by the soul—or souls… But while Arnold would loosen the theological bonds of the Church, he would not loosen the official bonds of the State. You must not disestablish the Church: you must not even leave the Church: you must stop inside it and think what you choose. Enemies might say that he was simply trying to establish and endow Agnosticism. It is fairer and truer to say that unconsciously he was trying to restore Paganism: for this State Ritualism without theology, and without much belief, actually was the practice of the ancient world. Arnold may have thought that he was building an altar to the Unknown God; but he was really building it to Divus Caesar.27