G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  It is significant that by far the best part of The Victorian Age in Literature are these pages on the Victorian ‘sages’, Newman, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold. It is here that Chesterton is clearly himself most personally involved. And that is as it should be if Chesterton is their successor in the twentieth century. By contrast, the pages on the Victorian novelists and poets are much less interesting—with the exception, naturally, of the discussion of his beloved Dickens.

  While these Victorian ‘sages’ were protesting against ‘the cold commercial rationalism’ of early Victorian England ‘in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten heroism and desecrated religion’, ‘already the Utilitarian citadel had been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and unlettered man of genius’. For, Chesterton explains, the ‘rise of Dickens’ was like the rising of a vast mob’—and a mob in revolt; he fought by the light of nature; he had not a theory, but a thirst’. And his thirst was for ‘things as humble, as human, as laughable as that daily bread for which we cry to God. He had no particular plan of reform; or, when he had it, it was startlingly petty and parochial compared with the deep, confused clamour of comradeship and insurrection that fills all his narrative.’ He ‘attacked the cold Victorian compromise’, but he attacked it without knowing he was doing so. He hated the Little Bethel chapel without knowing anything of religious history: ‘Newman could have told him that it was hateful, because it had no root in religious history; it was not even a sapling sprung of the seed of some great human and heathen tree: it was a monstrous mushroom that grows in the moonshine and dies in the dawn.’ Dickens knew none of this: ‘he simply smelt fungus, and it stank.’ Again, Dickens travelled on the French railways ‘and noticed that this eccentric nation provided him with wine that he could drink and sandwiches he could eat, and manners he could tolerate’, while ‘remembering the ghastly sawdust-eating waiting-rooms of the North English railways’.

  Matthew Arnold could have told him that this was but a part of the general thinning down of European civilisation in these islands at the edge of it; that for two or three thousand years the Latin society has learnt how to drink wine, and how not to drink too much of it. Dickens did not in the least understand the Latin society: but he did understand the wine.

  For if Carlyle ‘saw’ and Arnold knew’, Dickens tasted’ and felt’. What makes Dickens’s attack on ‘the solid scientific school’ seem so ‘successful’ to Chesterton was because it was the protest of the common man: ‘because he did not attack from the standpoint of extraordinary faith, like Newman; or the standpoint ofextraordinary detachment or serenity, like Arnold; but from the standpoint of quite ordinary and quite hearty dislike.’ Dickens, then, ‘the great romanticist’, turns out to be ‘truly the great realist also. For he had no abstractions: he had nothing except realities out of which to make a romance.’ He was in effect Cobbett come back to life—‘in this vital sense; that he is proud of being the ordinary man’. It was the triumph of the common sense of the common man:

  That which had not been achieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the burning dreams of Carlyle, the white-hot proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly achieved by a crowd of impossible people. In the centre stood that citadel of atheist industrialism: and if indeed it has ever been taken, it was taken by the rush of that unreal army.28

  When Chesterton turns to the other Victorian novelists and to the poets he is never dull, but he never writes with such power as in this first chapter on the Victorian ‘compromise’, where Dickens finds himself unexpectedly classed with the great Victorian ‘sages’—except in the next chapter on the novelists, where Dickens again appears. Here, inevitably, Chesterton echoes his great book on Dickens as he evokes Dickens’s sheer enjoyment of his characters—‘he enjoyed everybody in his books’:

  His books are full of baffled villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the villains and the cowards are such delightful people that the reader always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and make a last remark; or that the bully will say one thing more, even from the bottom of the stairs.

  It is the same central point that Chesterton makes over and over again in Charles Dickens without ever boring the reader—any more than he thought Dickens’s caricatures (as opposed to his serious characters) ever could bore the reader: ‘He had the power of creating people, both possible and impossible, who were simply precious and priceless people…’. The only comic villain Chesterton could remember Dickens ever killing was Quilp—but then he was made deliberately ‘more villainous than comic’:

  There can be no serious fears for the life of Mr Wegg in the muckcart; though Mr Pecksniff fell to be a borrower of money, and Mr Mantalini to turning a mangle, the human race has the comfort of thinking they are still alive: and one might have the rapture of receiving a begging letter from Mr Pecksniff, or even of catching Mr Mantalini collecting the washing, if one always lurked about on Monday mornings. This sentiment (the true artist will be relieved to hear) is entirely unmoral. Mrs Wilfer deserved death much more than Mr Quilp, for she had succeeded in poisoning family life persistently, while he was (to say the least of it) intermittent in his domesticity. But who can honestly say he does not hope Mrs Wilfer is still talking like Mrs Wilfer…29

  The most famous or notorious sentence in The Victorian Age in Literature is Chesterton’s remark that ‘Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot’.30 In his Autobiography Chesterton was to speak very warmly of the pessimistic Hardy. He was, he tells us, the ‘first great Victorian’ he had ever met, ‘though only for a brief interview’. He was then ‘a quite obscure and shabby young writer awaiting an interview with a publisher’. But what struck Chesterton so forcibly was that Hardy behaved as though he were in the same situation himself, as though he were ‘even a new writer awaiting his first publisher’. In actual fact, he was already a famous writer who had already written his most famous novels. Although he had ‘already the wrinkle of worry on his elfish face that might have made a man look old… yet, in some strange way, he seemed to me very young’. He was even ready to defend his pessimism ‘somehow with the innocence of a boys’ debating-club’. And so the youthful Chesterton actually ‘argued with Thomas Hardy’ for ‘about five minutes, in a publisher’s office’ that the ‘nonexistence’ that Hardy professed to prefer to the pains and pleasures of life was ‘not an experience’ and that therefore it made no sense to express a preference or liking for it. Chesterton does not tell us what, if any, was Hardy’s response to his logic. But what he does tell us is that he had discovered ‘the rather tremendous truth about Hardy; that he had humility’. As for his observation about Hardy in The Victorian Age in Literature, far from intending to attack Hardy he was actually defending him: ‘The whole case for him is that he had the sincerity and simplicity of the village atheist; that is, that he valued atheism as a truth and not a triumph.’ For, while Hardy was ‘blasphemous… he was not proud; and it is pride that is a sin and not blasphemy’. Chesterton’s final judgement was this: ‘Hardy was a well, covered with the weeds of a stagnant period of scepticism… but with truth at the bottom of it; or anyhow with truthfulness at the bottom of it.’31

  In his Autobiography Chesterton was to contrast another pagan pessimist with Hardy, his old teacher at University College, A. E. Housman, by whom he had ‘always been more intellectually impressed’. It was not that he was ‘impressed by anybody with the intellectual claims of pessimism, which I always thought was piffle as well as poison’; but Housman seemed to him to possess a literary authority that Hardy did not have, ‘which is all the more classic because its English is such very plain English’. Certainly, Housman seemed to him ‘one of the one or two great classic poets of our time’, whereas he ‘could never quite digest Hardy as a poet’, much as he admired him as a novelist. And he warmed to ‘that high heathen genius’ in the unflinching pessimism of his wonderful lines, ‘The troubles o
f our proud and angry dust | Are from eternity and shall not fail,’ by contrast with that ‘official optimism’ of ‘the collectivist ticket-collector of the Fabian tram’, with his cry, ‘Next stop, Utopia’. He also cherished the story of Housman’s after-dinner speech at Trinity College, Cambridge, in which he was reputed to have pronounced: ‘This great College, of this ancient University, has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. And here am I, a better poet than Porson, and a better scholar than Wordsworth, betwixt and between.’ Whether the story was true or not, whoever was responsible for those words had ‘a superb sense of style’.32

  At the beginning of the chapter on the Victorian poets in The Victorian Age in Literature, Chesterton has some harsh words about ‘a certain odd provincialism’ that distinguished even the great Victorian writers from their continental counterparts. While they were giants, they were also dwarfs: ‘we do most frequently feel, with the Victorians, that the very vastness of the number of things they know illustrates the abrupt abyss of the things they do not know.’ And he does not exclude the great ‘sages’ from his strictures.

  There is a moment when Carlyle turns suddenly from a high creative mystic to a common Calvinist. There are moments when George Eliot turns from a prophetess into a governess.… We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like Ruskin when he says, with a solemn visage, that building in iron is ugly and unreal, but that the weightiest objection is that there is no mention of it in the Bible; we feel as if he had just said he could find no hair-brushes in Habakkuk. We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like Thackeray when he proposes that people should be forcibly prevented from being nuns, merely because he has no fixed intention of becoming a nun himself.… We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like Browning to make spluttering and spiteful puns about the names Newman, Wiseman, and Manning. We feel that it is a disgrace to a man like Newman when he confesses that for some time he felt as if he couldn’t come into the Catholic Church, because of that dreadful Mr Daniel O’Connor, who had the vulgarity to fight for his own country.… Even Matthew Arnold, though he saw this peril and prided himself on escaping it, did not altogether escape it. There must be (to use an Irishism) something shallow in the depths of any man who talks about the Zeitgeist as if it were a living thing.

  Chesterton thought that this kind of parochialism was the key to understanding what was wrong with the two great Victorian poets, Tennyson in particular but also Browning. As a disciple of Virgil, Tennyson also aimed at ‘the universal balance of all the ideas at which the great Roman had aimed; but he hadn’t got hold of all the ideas to balance’. He achieved rather not ‘a balance of truths’ but ‘a balance of whims; like the British Constitution’. He was in truth a ‘provincial’ or ‘suburban’ Virgil, a believer in ‘the Victorian compromise’ that was ‘as freakish and unphilosophic, as arbitrary and untranslatable, as a beggar’s patched coat or a child’s secret language’. Browning’s ‘eccentric style’, on the other hand, was ‘more suitable to the poetry of a nation of eccentrics; of people… removed far from the centre of intellectual interests’. His poetry was ‘deliberately grotesque’: ‘But there certainly was, over and above this grotesqueness, a perversity and irrationality about the man which led him to play the fool in the middle of his own poems; to leave off carving gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones.’ But at least Browning did not take himself too seriously like Tennyson: ‘Browning is the Englishman taking himself wilfully, following his nose like a bulldog, going by his own likes and dislikes. We cannot help feeling that Tennyson is the Englishman taking himself seriously—an awful sight.’33

  Chesterton does not say so in so many words, but we cannot also help feeling that he thought those great Victorians might have saved themselves, in spite of whatever limitations their insular ignorance imposed, from their lapses into narrow provincialism if they had not taken themselves quite so seriously, if they had exercised, or at least exercised more vigilantly, the Chestertonian virtue of humour—something rather different from Browning’s playing the fool—which includes above all the ability to laugh at oneself, without which self-criticism is of necessity constrained. As Chesterton says, speaking of the limitations of George Eliot’s novels, ‘there was something by instinct unsmiling’ about them, even though they were certainly not ‘without humour’.34 Chesterton underestimates her mature masterpieces, as he did the later novels of Dickens, but any reader of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda must regret that their author lacked enough humour, if nothing else, to see what ridiculous characters Will Ladislaw and Daniel Deronda are—characters that their creator took only too seriously but who spoil these two great novels, and especially of course the latter novel.

  4

  Shaw had not given up trying to persuade Chesterton to write for the stage. The previous year he had written to Frances to try and draw her into a plot against her husband. He, Shaw, was going to be in the neighbourhood with his wife and would like to call on the Chestertons provided they had ‘no visitors who couldn’t stand us’. He wanted to read a play (Androcles and the Lion) to Chesterton that would take an hour and a half (it was only a sketch).

  I want to insult and taunt and stimulate Gilbert with it. It is the sort of thing he could write and ought to write: a religious harlequinade. In fact, he could do it better if a sufficient number of pins were stuck into him. My proposal is that I read the play to him…and that you fall into transports of admiration of it; declare that you can never love a man who cannot write things like that; and definitely announce that if Gilbert has not finished a worthy successor to it before the end of the third week ensuing, you will go out like the lady in A Doll’s House, and live your own life—whatever that dark threat may mean.

  If you are at home, I count on your ready complicity; but the difficulty is that you may have visitors; and if they are pious Gilbert will be under a tacit obligation not to blaspheme, or let me blaspheme, while they are beneath his roof (my play is about the Christian Martyrs, and perfectly awful in parts); and if they are journalists, it will be necessary to administer an oath of secrecy. I dont [sic] object to the oath; and nothing would please Gilbert more than to make them drink blood from a skull: the difficulty is, they wouldnt [sic] keep it. In short, they must be the right sort of people, of whom the more the merrier.35

  On 7 November 1913 Shaw’s demand that Chesterton write a play was finally met with the production of Magic at the Little Theatre in London—although it was not the play that Shaw had sketched out for him. Magic is a dramatic and autobiographical defence of the supernatural. A conjuror, provoked by a sceptic who declares that all his tricks are explicable and that science will eventually be able to explain all so-called miracles, turns a lamp from red to blue and then back to red. Eventually, the conjuror reveals that, having once (like the playwright himself) dabbled in spiritualism in spite of the terrible headaches that followed the séances, he had come to believe in the existence of evil spirits, and these he had accordingly invoked to change the lamp’s colours. But having done the trick by magic, he discovers a natural way of doing it—but once he has given his audience the natural explanation, he knows that that is how afterwards they will say the trick was done. At the end of the first performance, Shaw cried out ‘bravo’ and ‘speech’. Chesterton came on to the stage, ‘and in a delightful little speech’, recalled one member of the audience,

  told us he did not believe in his powers as a writer. He did not believe he could write a good play, nor a good article, nor even a picture post card, perhaps the hardest task of all. But he did believe in his own opinions, and so sure was he that they were right that he wanted his audience to believe them too.

  Another spectator thought the ‘best part of the whole evening’ was ‘the spectacle of Chesterton roaring with huge delight’ at his jokes. The newspaper reviews were generally favourable next morning. George Moore, the Anglo-Irish novelist whom Chesterton had attacked in Heretics, praised it to the skies: ‘I followed the comedy of
Magic from the first line to the last with interest and appreciation, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I think of all modern plays I like it the best.’ He considered the play to be ‘practically perfect’ inasmuch as the plot and dialogue perfectly fitted the idea that lay behind the drama. In Germany, where the play was also produced, reviewers compared Chesterton to Shaw, some more favourably.36 Shaw thought the play was better than Chesterton’s novels: ‘the characters which seem so fantastic and even ragdolly… in his romances become credible and solid behind the footlights, just the opposite of what his critics expected.’37 But Chesterton’s own judgement was more to the point: ‘It is a bad play, because it was a good short story.’ And the kind of short story Chesterton had in mind was, predictably, the detective story, the genre in which he did excel.38 However, as Frances wrote to Father O’Connor, ‘Really “Magic” seems to have caught on, though it will only be played for a short time in London. Already two companies are getting ready to go on tour with it.’39

  Shaw, who had also tried unsuccessfully to persuade Conrad, Kipling, and Wells to write for the theatre, was so incensed by the contract Chesterton had signed that he wrote disgustedly to Frances:

  In Sweden, where the marriage laws are comparatively enlightened, I believe you could obtain a divorce on the ground that your husband threw away an important part of the provision for your old age for twenty pieces of silver.… In future, the moment he has finished a play and the question of disposing of it arises, lock him up and bring the agreement to me. Explanations would be thrown away on him.40