by Ian Ker
2
On 31 October 1929 G.K.C. as M.C., a selection of the introductions that Chesterton had written for books published between 1903 and 1929, had been published in England. In the opening essay on Boswell Chesterton justified selections (not that he had himself edited this selection): the universe itself cannot be seen in its ‘unity’ but only ‘in selections’. If there was no justification for dipping into a book, then there was no ‘justification for dipping into existence’. Everyone is born in ‘the middle of something’. Ifall things ‘fragmentary’ are ‘useless’, then the whole of life is useless.13
But the chief interest of this essay is what Chesterton has to say about the art of biography. So-called realistic biography, which ‘exhibits the things of which a man is ashamed’, ‘does not give the true portrait of a man’ for ‘the very fact that he is ashamed of them shows that they are not typical of the man’. Boswell had not had to resort to ‘privacies’ in order successfully to give ‘a most intimate and powerful picture of a human being’. He had only described Johnson as he was ‘on the surface’, but he had read ‘that surface like a man of genius’: ‘He paints him in the street, but sees his soul walking there in the sunlight.’ Boswell’s success provided ‘an almost inexhaustible evidence of the falsehood of the realistic or keyhole method’. Unlike Carlyle, about whom we know ‘all the parlour and bedroom details’ and yet the man remained ‘a mystery’, Johnson had been ‘painted by a genius’ and there was ‘no more mystery about him’. Far from being ‘an unsavoury gossiper and detailer of private things’, Boswell had ‘achieved a greater triumph of psychological analysis without using one private fact or one indiscreet word’. This did not mean that Boswell had suppressed Johnson’s faults, for ‘he was the first who discovered that in biography the suppression of a man’s faults did not merely wreck truth, but wrecked his virtues’. He had discovered that it was not necessary to praise a man in order to admire him’. Nevertheless Boswell’s ‘victory’ was ‘proved by his defeat’: ‘so real’ had he made Johnson’s daily and conversational life’ that people had taken it too seriously, admiring Johnson’s conversation not simply ‘as conversation’ but as literature. This ‘over-solemn treatment’ ran the danger of losing ‘the humorous atmosphere’ of his circle, ‘the peculiar uproar and frivolity of the table at Johnson’s Club’. And, of course, for Chesterton there was no simple antithesis between seriousness and frivolity: Frivolity is, in a sense, far more sacred than seriousness.’ People were less disinclined to speak of a family tragedy’ than a family joke’. Chesterton thought that Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, ‘with their excellent thumb-nail sketches and rule-of-thumb criticisms’, came nearer than anything else he wrote to the almost rollicking sagacity of his conversation’. And yet the truth was that Johnson was more vivid to us’ in Boswell’s life than in any of the books he wrote. After all, in his books he was all alone, and Johnson had a great dislike of being all alone’. In his books we can ‘overhear Johnson in soliloquy’, but for the ‘comedy’ we have to go to Boswell’s descriptions of his clash with other characters’. The essential comedy’ of Johnson lay in an ‘unconscious and even agreeable’ contradiction in his character: ‘a strenuous and sincere belief in convention, combined with a huge natural inaptitude for observing it’. But Johnson was ‘immortal’ because of his ‘gigantic and detached good sense’—not least in seeing the ‘fallacy’ in the modern idea of ‘progress’—namely, that as human history really goes one had only to be old-fashioned long enough to be in the very newest fashion. … that by lagging behind the times one can generally get in front of them’. But the ultimate Chestertonian accolade is that ‘he touched nothing that he did not touch with a certain mighty strength of controlled laughter’, a laughter that was paradoxically ‘perhaps least present when he was deliberately and consciously at play’, there being a sort of humorous atmosphere round much of his work that was then counted most serious’, while ‘a more melancholy atmosphere clings to everything that could be counted more light’. However, Johnson did have one serious fault: the ‘absence of the pleasures of religion’, perhaps ‘the only gap in the mind of that great religious genius’; but it was a lack that characterized the eighteenth century, which lacked ‘colour’, seeing ‘everything in black and white’, with the result that its religion had not enough positive joy’. As for Boswell’s life, it was a great biography because it was a book in which the book vanishes and the man remains; ‘not the man who wrote the book but the man about whom it was written’.14 It was the same compliment that Chesterton had paid Wilfrid Ward’s life of Newman: in a good biography the biographer disappears so that the subject may appear.
The same was true, though to a lesser extent, of Forster’s Life of Dickens, where the biographer’s triumph was ‘to draw Dickens out’ just as it had been ‘the genius of Dickens to draw everybody out’. Yet this ‘drawing out’ was not of that triumphant and almost faultless kind which exists in the great model of biography’. For Forster had not been able to ‘draw Dickens out as Boswell could draw Johnson out’. Still, his ‘success was of the same essential sort; though he generally achieved it more by reporting correspondence than conversation’. Because the subject of his study was not only a ‘creator’ but a ‘character’, indeed ‘a Dickens character’, he must be encouraged to give himself away; as it is the essence of every Dickens character to give himself away’. And Forster had succeeded in creating a very vivid impression of a very vivacious person; we do feel that he is walking briskly about the street and not that he is lying in a coffin helpless under funeral orations; and that is victory in the arduous art of biography’.15
Turning to religion and politics, Chesterton thought that the right religion goes hand in hand with the right politics in the ‘close kinship between Christianity and the democratic sentiment’. On the other hand, he detected a ‘tendency of all fine naturalistic thought towards oligarchy’, whose thinkers are unable to ‘understand the divine vulgarity of the Christian religion’. In Protestant northern Europe the feast of Christmas had been ‘kept up … by a dull democratic tenacity’, even through the madness of Calvinism’. The real ‘hero’ of Christmas, of course, for Chesterton is Dickens, who ‘came just in time to save the embers of the Yule Log from being trampled out’: ‘Dickens struck in time, and saved a popular institution while it was still popular. A hundred aesthetes are always ready to revive it as soon as it has become unpopular.’ But it was precisely because he was a man of the people that he was able to perpetuate the popular hold upon one of the customs that had only begun to slip from the popular grasp’. In defending Christmas in The Christmas Carol, Dickens waged war on ‘an old miser named Scrooge’, just as he was to do battle with ‘a new miser named Gradgrind’ in Hard Times. Not only did the new miser have the ‘old avarice’ but the old miser had ‘the new arguments’, for Scrooge was a utilitarian and an individualist’, uttering all the sophistries’ by which ‘the age of machinery’ had tried to turn the virtue of charity into a vice’. But this was something of an understatement’, for Scrooge was ‘more modern than Gradgrind’, belonging not only to the hard times of the middle of the nineteenth century, but to the harder times of the beginning of the twentieth century; the yet harder times in which we live’: ‘Many amiable sociologists will say, as he said, Let them die and decrease the surplus population.” The improved proposal is that they should die before they are born.’ But even Scrooge did not seek to bully the despised masses like the intellectuals of Chesterton’s day. After all, he believed at least in the negative liberty of the Utilitarians’:
He partook of gruel while his nephew partook of punch; but it never occurred to him that he could forcibly forbid a grown man like his nephew to consume punch, or coerce him into consuming gruel. In that he was far behind the ferocity and tyranny of the social reformers of our own day. If he refused to subscribe to a scheme for giving people Christmas dinners, at least he did not subscribe (as the reformers do) to a scheme for t
aking away the Christmas dinners they have already got.
No, to do such things he would need to be the more enlightened employee of a more progressive age’: These antics were far beyond the activities of poor Scrooge, whose figure shines by comparison with something of humour and humanity.’16
Chesterton’s essay on Matthew Arnold is one of the two most interesting pieces in this collection. On the one hand, Chesterton has no time for Arnold’s lack of any ‘feeling of familiarity with the loves and hungers of the common man, which is the essence of the egalitarian sentiment’. His contempt for the masses disgusts Chesterton: ‘He contemptuously dismissed the wage-earning, beer-drinking, ordinary labourers of England as “merely populace”. They are not populace; they are merely mankind. If you do not like them you do not like mankind.’ Arnold may have been a republican, but he was not a democrat’. There was a certain pride’ that was ‘natural to him and prevented him … from having an adequate degree of popular sympathy’. On the other hand, he did have a cold humility’—as opposed to ‘that hot humility which is the fascination of saints and good men’—’which he had discovered to be a mere essential of the intelligence’: To see things clearly, he said, you must get yourself out of the way”.’ Windows, he understood, needed to be washed not painted if one was to see out of them, but he ‘found the window of the English soul opaque with its own purple’; ‘so gorgeously’ had ‘the Englishman… painted his own image’ on ‘it that it had no opening on the world without’:
The Englishman could not see (for instance) that the French revolution was a far-reaching, fundamental and most practical and successful change in the whole structure of Europe…. The Englishman could not see that the Catholic Church was (at the very least) an immense and enduring Latin civilization, linking us to the lost civilizations of the Mediterranean. He really thought it was a sort of sect.
Again, Chesterton thoroughly approves of one aspect of Arnold’s pride as opposed to his humility: ‘He prided himself not upon telling the truth but upon telling the unpopular half-truth.’ Thus he criticized contemporaries like Carlyle ‘not for telling falsehoods but simply for telling popular truths’. Far from being the ‘Jeremiah’ he ‘professed to be’, Carlyle was ‘really a demagogue, and, in one sense, even a flatterer’: ‘He told Englishmen that they were Teutons, that they were Vikings, that they were practical politicians—all the things they like to be told they are, all the things that they are not.’ Arnold, in contrast, reminded the English of the vital fact that we are Europeans’: ‘He had a consciousness of Europe much fuller and firmer than that of any of the great men of his great epoch.’ Arnold certainly wanted, ‘as every sane European wishes, that the nations that make up Europe should continue to be individual’—but at the same time ‘he did wish that the contributions should be contributions, parts, that is, of a common cause and unity, the cause and unity of European civilization’. However, because Arnold prided himself upon telling only ‘the half-truth that was neglected’, ‘he reached at times a fanaticism that was all the more extraordinary because it was a fanaticism of moderation, an intemperance of temperance’. Thus he understood and rightly pointed out ‘the fault of the Mid-Victorian English was that they did not have any sense of definite excellence’; but he failed to notice that his own ‘celebration of excellence when carried past a certain point might become a very considerable madness’, as mad as that ‘extreme … vulgar and indiscriminate acceptance’ that he condemned: ‘It is true that a man is in some danger of becoming a lunatic if he builds a stucco house and says it is as fine as the Parthenon. But surely a man is equally near to a lunatic if he refuses to live in any house except the Parthenon.’ Similarly, Arnold’s ‘definition of Culture which he thought so comprehensive, knowing the best that has been said and thought on this or that subject’, was ‘a good definition within the field of literature; but the field of culture is much wider than the field of literature’. For culture was ‘not only knowing the best that has been said’ but also knowing the best that has been done, and even doing our best to do it’. Arnold’s definition of culture was unashamedly elitist, but Chesterton’s definition is characteristically democratic and more comprehensive, including as it does the creative achievements of the despised masses: the agricultural labourer does make a hedge with a bill-hook as much as a sculptor makes a statue of Hercules with a chisel.’17
The ruling class of Chesterton’s day assumed that the masses made good colonists but that it was ‘no good’ to ask them to colonize’ their own country. According to their ‘creed’, ‘the common Englishman can get on anywhere’ but ‘the common Englishman cannot get on in England’. It was thought ‘amusing’ that the common Englishman might live in his own house as in his own hat’, that ‘a farm should belong to a farmer’, that ‘private property is proper to every private citizen’. Chesterton noticed how contemporary satirists made ‘fun of common life’ but lacked the early Victorians’ ‘firm, fresh, and unaffected conviction that the great ones of this earth are comic also’. On the other hand, Chesterton deplored in ‘the Victorians’ conception of success… a certain conception of the elect who were above temptation’. As for the Comtean religion of humanity, by contrast, ‘the paradox of taking an irreligious humanity as a religion’, which appealed to a Victorian like George Eliot, it seemed strange to Chesterton ‘to worship a humanity that is not worshipping’: So much of what is best in our race is bound up with its religious emotions and traditions, that to worship it without those intimations of the best would come very near to worshipping it at its worst…. A self-contained and self-centred humanity would chill us in the same way as a self-contained and self-centred human being. For the spiritual hungers of humanity are never merely hungers for humanity.’ The only way of loving all human beings was to look at them in a certain light’—‘and the most agnostic of us know that it is not exactly identical with the light of common day’.18
The other most interesting essay in the book is an introduction to The Book of Job, published significantly in 1907, the year before the publication of The Man who was Thursday. Chesterton prefaces the introduction by arguing that to attempt to understand the Old Testament one has to realize the essential fact that it has a quite perceptible unity’, its ‘main idea’ being the idea of all men being the instruments of a higher power’: ‘The central idea of the great part of the Old Testament may be called the loneliness of God. God is not only the chief character of the Old Testament; God is properly the only character in the Old Testament…. All the patriarchs and prophets are merely His tools or weapons … ‘. In the Book of Job God employs the logical weapon of the true mystic’, ‘a higher scepticism’ than the scepticism of the sceptics, when he deals with ‘the arrogant asserter of doubt’, not by telling him to stop doubting’ but by telling him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself’. God’s ‘refusal… to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.’ For Job is ‘comforted’ by ‘the enigmas of Jehovah’, although they seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job’: He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.’ One of ‘the splendid strokes’ of this ‘religious’ rather than philosophical’ work is that ‘God rebukes alike the man who accused, and the man who defended Him’, that He knocks down pessimists and optimists with the same hammer’: God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained.’ God is determined to make Job ‘see a startling universe if He can only do it by making Job see an idiotic universe. To startle man God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist.’ God’s description of creation ‘is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is a
stonished at the things He has Himself made.’ Far from proving to Job that ‘it is an explicable world’, God ‘insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was’. But God contrives ‘to let fall here and there in the metaphors, in the parenthetical imagery, sudden and splendid suggestions that the secret of God is a bright and not a sad one—semi-accidental suggestions, like light seen for an instant through the cracks of a closed door’. The ‘lesson’ of the Book of Job is that ‘man is most comforted by paradoxes’.19
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In 1930 Chesterton became the first president or ‘Ruler’ of the Detection Club, the brainwave of Anthony Berkeley Cox, the mystery writer, one of whose three pseudonyms was Anthony Berkeley, who had written to Chesterton in 1929 saying that the club he wished to found ‘would be quite incomplete without the creator of Father Brown’. Chesterton wrote an article in the May 1933 issue of the Strand Magazine about the Club that he called ‘a very small and quiet conspiracy, to which I am proud to belong’. Meetings took place in various restaurants, at which members discussed various plots and schemes of crimes’. In the article Chesterton divulged details of the initiation ceremony, which was held once a year for new members, who had to have written two mysteries and to have been sponsored by two members, ‘thereby setting a good example to the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, the Illuminati… and all the other secret societies which now conduct the greater part of public life, in the age of Publicity and Public Opinion’. As Chesterton