G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  In November Chesterton published a slim critical study of his youthful hero Stevenson, to whom he had already devoted a chapter in Twelve Types. Biographies of Savonarola and Napoleon that had been advertised as In Preparation’ in William Cobbett were again announced as forthcoming; they would never appear. Chesterton begins the book by laying down that the one really great and important work’ that Stevenson ‘did for the world was done quite unconsciously’. Chesterton did not mean ‘the thing which he preached’ so much as the thing which he taught’: ‘Or, to put it another way the thing which he could teach was not quite so large as the thing which we can learn.’ It would take time for Stevenson’s true ‘significance’ to be understood ‘in relation to larger problems’, which were beginning to be appreciated but of which people were ‘almost entirely unaware’ in his own time. Indeed, the truth to which he testified was ‘a truth he did not understand’.118

  As in the earlier essay in Twelve Types, Stevenson’s love of sharp edges, which he shared with Chesterton, is especially emphasized, and its relevance to the ‘truth he did not understand’: ‘The first fact about the imagery of Stevenson is that all his images stand out in very sharp outline; and are, as it were, all edges.’ It was noticeable that his Highland stories had ‘everything Scotch except Scotch mist’, for there was ‘no Celtic twilight about his Celts’. Stevenson’s love of sharp edges and cutting or piercing action’ came from exactly the same source as Chesterton’s: the toy theatre of his childhood. It was because Stevenson ‘loved to see … and to think’ in terms of the toy theatre’s ‘definite outlines’ that ‘all his instinctive images are clear and not cloudy; that he liked a gay patchwork of colour combined with zigzag energy of action, as quick as the crooked lightening. He loved things to stand out; we might say he loved them to stick out …’. Unfortunately, there was also a downside to this angularity—namely, that ‘he simplified so much that he lost some of the comfortable complexity of real life. He treated everything with an economy of detail and a suppression of irrelevance which had at last something about it stark and unnatural.’ Both the strength and weakness of this brevity could be best appreciated by comparing him with ‘the great Victorian novelists in whose vast shadow he grew up’. For, while it was true that their novels were full of ‘padding’, this did ‘in a curious fashion confirm the reality of the characters’ and ‘made the reader feel at home with the characters’. The ‘hospitality’ of the great Victorian novels certainly led to their being a little more formless than Stevenson’, but the latter’s ‘verbal economy’ made his characters ‘almost thin’, ‘flat figures’ who ‘could only be seen from one side’—like the puppets of the toy theatre.119

  But there was another important influence: the rejected Calvinism of his upbringing. The English had ‘generally’ adopted ‘a sentimental religiosity’ in place of a ‘dogmatic religion’; whereas in Presbyterian Scotland, where ‘the taste for theology remained’ even if ‘the religion was dead’, the opposite had happened. Now, theology was ‘at least a form of thought’ and it had survived Stevenson’s loss of belief. The Scotch atheists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were ‘unmistakeable children of the Kirk’, who might seem ‘absurdly detached and dehumanised’ but at least were not suffering from a lack of ‘dull lucidity’—of which the world was now in such need. For ‘by being theological they had at least learnt to be logical’. And it was ‘this sort of clarity’ that enabled Stevenson instinctively to ‘draw lines that were as hard and clear as those of a mathematical diagram’. That ‘certain almost arid decision in the strokes of Stevenson’s style’ Chesterton thought was ‘due in no small degree to that inheritance of definition, that goes with an inheritance of dogma’. As Stevenson himself had put it, he did not write ‘in sand with a salt-spoon’ but ‘in the tradition of scriptures cut with steel into stone’. The mark of his style was that he ‘used the word because it was the right word’: ‘He does pick the words that make that picture that he particularly wants to make. They do fix a particular thing, and not some general thing of the same sort …’. Such was his beautiful and piercing sense of the clarity of form’ that, even though ‘he may seem to describe his subject in detail, he describes it to be done with it; and he does not return to the subject’. Even the best novelists did not have Stevenson’s ‘particular knack of putting a whole human figure together with a few unforgettable words’. Because of the ‘sharpness’ of Stevenson’s ‘verbal gestures’ his descriptions of characters were seldom static but rather dynamic descriptions’. Indeed, there was nothing that he touched that ‘he did not animate’. And Chesterton alludes to another aspect of Stevenson’s importance and significance in this concluding passage of the chapter on his style.

  I find everywhere, even in his mere diction and syntax, that theme that is the whole philosophy of fairy-tales, of the old romances and even of the absurd libretto of the little theatre—the conception that man is born with hope and courage indeed, but born outside that which he was meant to attain; that there is a quest, a test, a trial by combat or pilgrimage of discovery; or, in other words, that whatever else man is he is not sufficient to himself … The very movement of the sentence is the movement of a man going somewhere and generally fighting something …120

  If Calvinistic Presbyterianism had one beneficial influence on Stevenson, it had another baleful influence. For there was a part of Stevenson’s mind that was positively unhealthy owing to ‘that ancient heathen fatalism, which in the seventeenth century had taken the hardly less heathen form of Calvinism’. And this took the particular form of believing that ‘what is victorious is always good’. Presbyterians spoke of ‘the Lord’ rather than ‘our Lord’, implying fear rather than affection and ‘the idea of glorifying God for His greatness rather than His goodness’. Like Muslims, Puritans cried, ‘God is great’, with the implication that greatness is God. Now this feeling was present in Stevenson, who grew too familiar in his later works with … [a] swaggering cult of fear’. Chesterton thought that this ‘secret idolatry’ was ‘the only lesion in Stevenson’s perfect sanity, the only running sore in the normal health of his soul’.121

  The problem that Stevenson faced in his youth was the

  sharp … contrast between the shelter and delicate fancies of his childhood and the sort of world which met him like the wind on the front doorstep. It was not merely the contrast between poetry and Puritanism; it was also the contrast between poetry and prose; and prose that was almost repulsively prosaic. He did not believe enough in Puritanism to cling to it; but he did believe very much in a potential poetry of life, and he was bewildered by its apparently impossible position in the world of real living.

  Even if he had believed in ‘his national religion’ as he did in his nation, he ‘would never have met that particular point at issue’. There was nothing in Presbyterianism that ‘could in any way carry on the childish enthusiasm for simple things’: there was ‘no cult of the Holy Child, no feast of the Holy Innocents, no tradition of the Little Brothers of St Francis …’ Puritanism had its virtues, but one it lacked: ‘purity’. It lacked ‘images of positive innocence’. And so, when Stevenson left home, ‘he shut the door on a house lined with fairy gold, but he came out on a frightful contrast’. Chesterton suspected that ‘it was originally out of this chasm of ugly division that there arose that two-headed monster, the mystery of Jekyll and Hyde’. The action of the story was seemingly in London, but it was all the time very unmistakably happening in Edinburgh’. ‘The peculiar tone’ of Dr Jekyll’s ‘respectability, and the horror of mixing his reputation with moral frailty’ was redolent of ‘the upper middle classes in solid Puritan communities’. But Puritanism was even more evident in Mr Hyde, in the ‘sense of the sudden stink of evil, the immediate invitation to step into stark filth, the abruptness of the alternative between that prim and proper pavement and that black and reeking gutter’. The story’s ‘atmosphere and setting’ were those of ‘some tale of stiff hypocrisy in a rig
id sect’ with ‘a system which saw no difference between the worst and the moderately bad’. Stevenson abandoned Calvinism and became ‘a highly honourable, responsible and chivalrous Pagan’. And although he ‘often used the old national creed as a subject’, he actually used it as ‘an object’ upon which he ‘worked … and not with it’, for he had ‘left behind him a dead religion’. Neither he nor ‘the inheritors of his admirable tradition, like Barrie and Buchan’ would have ‘treated that national secret genially and even tenderly’ had it not been that ‘their very tenderness was the first soft signal that the thing was dead’. For they would never have ‘so fondled the tiger-cat of Calvinism until, for them, its teeth were drawn’:

  Indeed this was the irony and the pathos of … Scottish Calvinism: to be rammed down people’s throats for three hundred years as an unanswerable argument and then to be inherited at the last as an almost indefensible affection; to be expounded to boys with a scowl and remembered by men with a smile … All that long agony of lucidity and masterful logic ended at last suddenly with a laugh; and the laugh was Robert Louis Stevenson.

  But, having been ‘emptied of all the ethics and metaphysics’ of Calvinism, Stevenson became exposed to ‘all the views and vices of a rationalistic civilisation’. As for ‘the deeper lessons of his early life’, they must have seemed to him to be dead within him; nor did he himself know what thing within him was yet alive’.122

  But what was so ‘individual and interesting’ about Stevenson’s reaction to his new surroundings was the way in which ‘he refused to run with the crowd or follow the fashion’ but instead rebelled into ‘respectability’, shaking himself ‘with a sort of impatient sanity; a shrug of scepticism about scepticism’. His ‘real distinction’ was that he had ‘the sense to see that there is nothing to be done with Nothing’. Instead, unlike other contemporary artists, he deserted ‘art for life’. In particular, he proposed the ‘disturbing paradox that we should learn morality from little boys’—the ‘remarkable outcome’ being Treasure Island. If human beings were merely ‘puppets of destiny’ and ‘as futile as puppets’, was there anything to stop them from being ‘as entertaining as Punch’? Such a reaction was not ‘superficial’ compared to so-called realism, which, ‘so long as it was materialistic … could not really be realistic’, but ‘more fundamental’, as it took into account the ‘psychological’ truth that ‘happiness is not a trifle and certainly cannot be a trick’. Against fin de siècle pessimism, Stevenson ‘appealed to his own childhood’: ‘Its pleasures had been as solid as the taste of sweets; and it was nonsense to say that there had been nothing in them worth living for. … Therefore he appealed across the void or valley of his somewhat sterile youth to that garden of childhood, which he had once known and which was his nearest notion of paradise,’ ‘that square of garden’ on which, amidst ‘all that waste of Scottish moorland, the sun still glowed’. What had ‘moved’ Wordsworth now ‘moved’ Stevenson: ‘the unanswerable fact of that first vividness in the vision of life’—even though it was ‘hardly the vision of meadow, grove and stream’, but rather the vision of coffin, gallows and gory sabre that were apparelled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream’. In Stevenson’s ‘growing sense of the need of some escape from the suffocating cynicisms of the mass of men and artists in his time’, he wanted ‘to go back to that nonsense; for it seemed, by comparison, quite sensible’. By ‘reviving the adventure story’, he was ‘escaping from an exceedingly unhealthy climate’. It represented a sort of dash for liberty; and especially a dash for happiness’, ‘the escape of a prisoner as he was led in chains from the prison of Puritanism to the prison of Pessimism’. Hardly had he emerged ‘from the shadow of Calvin’ when he ‘came into the shadow of Schopenhauer’. Determined to escape from both, he ‘took refuge in his old home’ and ‘barricaded himself in the nursery’. In Chesterton’s view, it was this ‘sharp return to simplicity, as the expression of the fiery thirst for happiness’ that gave Stevenson an important place in the history of literature.123

  Finally, as we would expect, Chesterton finds more than one paradox in Stevenson. First, while, unlike Wordsworth, Stevenson found ‘it difficult to get any intimations of immortality’ even ‘in the vivid pleasures of childhood’, he was in fact ‘continually bearing witness to the Fall’ by his ‘constant tribute … to the poetry of early childhood’, for this made no sense unless it is true that ‘the world of sin comes between us and something more beautiful or, as Wordsworth, says, that we came first from God who is our home’. Probably it was because Stevenson had been taught ‘the doctrine of depravity’ by the Calvinists rather than the true doctrine of the Fall’ that he did not realize how orthodox a Christian he was. Then, too, there was the paradox that, partly because of the influence of Scott, Stevenson was ‘intellectually on the side of the Whigs and morally on the side of the Jacobites’, which resulted in the ‘curious and sometimes inconsistent mingling of … grey Whiggery with … purple Jacobite romance’. Again, it was paradoxical that death was much closer to Stevenson than to the hated pessimists, ‘who cowered under the shadow of death’, as he knew only too well whenever he coughed and found blood on his handkerchief’: He was not pretending to defy it half so much as they were pretending to seek it. It is no very unreasonable claim for him that he made a better use of his bad health than Oscar Wilde made of his good health …’.124

  T. S. Eliot reviewed the book in The Nation and Athenaeum. He complained that he found Chesterton’s ‘style exasperating to the last point of endurance’ and that Chesterton had wasted ‘a good deal of time’ in a diffuse, dissipated, but not at all stupid book’ in ‘attacking misconceptions which we had not heard of and in which we are not interested’. Chesterton had assumed ‘a misunderstanding that we are not likely to labour under’ by protesting’ that Stevenson stood for ‘health and happiness’ as opposed to the decadence of the fin de siècle. He, Eliot, confessed to finding Chesterton’s ‘own cheerfulness … depressing’: ‘He appears less like a saint radiating spiritual vision than like a ‘busman slapping himself on a frosty day.’ Chesterton, he thought, had only ‘partially’ shown why Stevenson was a writer of permanent importance’, although he had written concisely and to the point in defence of Stevenson’s style. His ‘Roman Catholic point of view’ concerning Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was ‘extremely interesting’: ‘And how illuminating his observation that though this story is nominally set in London, it is really taking place in Edinburgh!’125

  In The Victorian Age in Literature Chesterton had already paid tribute to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as ‘a double triumph; it has the outside excitement that belongs to Conan Doyle with the inside excitement that belongs to Henry James’. But it was generally supposed that the story was about ‘two personalities’ who were ‘equal, neither caring for the other’ and that the moral was that ‘man can be cloven into two creatures, good and evil’. But the whole stab of the story’ was that ‘man can’t: because while evil does not care for good, good must care for evil. Or, in other words, man cannot escape from God, because good is the God in man; and insists on omniscience. This point which is good psychology and also good theology and also good art, has missed its main intention merely because it was also good story-telling.126

  8

  In the 24 February 1928 issue of G.K.’s Weekly, Chesterton was forced to make a financial appeal to readers. He feared that the paper might have to close, and, if it did, that would be ‘the beginning of the end … of independent journalism’, as ‘a millionaire monopoly of the press’ was looking more and more likely. All that Chesterton could promise was that the paper would not be ‘sold’, would not ‘pass … into a plutocratic combine’. Now that they were ‘near the end of [their] resources’, they had no alternative but to appeal to readers. Four days later he warned potential donors and subscribers that it looked ‘the beginning of … the end of independent journalism’ as the ‘movement towards a millionaire monopoly of the press’ now appeared
‘inevitable’. One of the ‘few exceptions’ to the general trend was G. K.’s Weekly, although ‘hampered from the first by lack of capital, and especially by the lack of steady support from any single capitalist’. But no single capitalist’, Chesterton promised, ‘will ever count us among his numerous possessions. This organ of opinion may be smashed, but it will not be sold; it may be annihilated, but it will not be amalgamated.’ In inviting supporters to buy shares in the paper, he could at least point to ‘certain definite signs of the general turning of the tide in favour of own protest’ against ‘modern monopoly’, against which, admittedly, there were ‘few signs of the general turning of the tide’. Although ‘prevented from making’ the paper ‘as good as it might be under more normal conditions’, they had nonetheless ‘succeeded already in changing the tone of all talk about property and freedom. Capitalists and Socialists, in the thick of their own recognised and public quarrel, are conscious of a third thing which they are forced either to allow for or to answer or to deride.’ He could offer ‘no certain profit’ to financial backers, ‘except that of playing a part in history’—whether it would be an ‘effective part’ rested with them. Otherwise history would ‘take that turn which we regard as the tragedy of civilisation; the restoration of order in its old and heathen form of slavery’. He would not now be ‘making such an appeal’ if he were ‘attempting to pretend’ that the paper was ‘in the ordinary sense profitable’: ‘We are near the end of our resources; and we do not promise that such resources as we may gain can do anything but sustain the effort for its own sake. But there is a reasonable and practical chance of doing more; and if we save ourselves we may even perhaps save our country.’127