 Chapter 11, Part 2 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dick Bourgeois Doyle. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. By Maisie Ward. Chapter 11, Part 2. Married Life in London. One felt always, with both Francis and Gilbert, that this society life stayed on the surface. Amusing, distracting, sometimes welcome, sometimes boring, but never infringing the deeper reality of their relationships with old friends and with their own families, with each other. Francis wrote endless business and other letters for them both. In just a handful, mainly to Father O'Connor, does she show her deeper life of thought and feeling. Gilbert had little time now for writing anything but books and articles. Never a very good correspondent, he had become an exceedingly bad one. Annie Furman's engagement to Robert Kidd produced one of the few letters that exist. It is handwritten and undated. A restaurant somewhere. My dear Annie, I have thought of you, I am quite certain, more often than I have thought of any human being for a long time past. Except my wife, who recalls herself continually to me by virtues, splendors, agreeable memories, screams, pokers, brickbats, and other things. And yet, though whenever my mind was for an instant emptied of theology and journalism and patriotism and such rot, it has been immediately filled with you. I have never written you a line. I am not going to explain this, and for a good reason. It is a part of the mystery of the male, and you will soon, even if you do not already, get the hang of it by the society of an individual who, while being unmistakably a much better man than I am, is nevertheless male. I can only say that when men want a thing, they act quite differently to women. We put off everything we want to do in an ordinary way. If the archangel Michael wrote me a complimentary letter tomorrow, as perhaps he may, I should put it in my pocket saying, How admirable a reply shall I write to that in a week or a month or so. I put off writing to you because I wanted to write something that had in it all that you have been to me, to all of us, and now instead I am scrolling this nonsense in a tavern after lunch. My very dear old friend, I am of a sex that very seldom takes real trouble, that forgets the little necessities of time that is by nature lazy. I never wanted really, but one thing in my life, and that I got. Any person inspecting 60 over-strand mansions may see that somewhat excitable thing free of charge. In another person, whom with maddening jealousy I suspect of being some inches taller than I am, I believe I noticed the same tendency toward monomania. He also, being as I have so keenly pointed out male, he also, I think, has only wanted one thing seriously in his life. He also has got it. Another male weakness which I recognize with sympathy. All my reviewers call me frivolous. Do you think all this kind of thing frivolous? Damn it all, excuse me. What can one be but frivolous about serious things? Without frivolity, they are simply too tremendous. That you, who, with your hair down your back, played at bricks with me in a house of which I have no memory except you and the bricks, that you should be taken by someone of my miserable sex as you ought to be, what is one to say? I am not going to wish you happiness because I am quite placidly certain that your happiness is inevitable. But because my wife is happy with me and the wild, weird, extravagant, singular origin of this is a certain enduring fact in my psychology which you will find paralleled elsewhere. God bless you, my dear girl. Yours ever, Gilbert Chesterton. Married in 1903, Annie and her husband took another flat in over-strand mansions. Gilbert never cared what he wore, she writes. I remember one night when my husband and I were living in the same block of flats, he came in to ask me to go down and sit with Francis who wasn't very well while he went down to the house to dine with Hugh Law. Gilbert was very correctly dressed except for the fact that he had on one boot and one slipper. I pointed it out to him and he said, Do you think it matters? I told him I was sure Francis would not like him to go out like that. The only argument to affect him. When he was staying with me here in Vancouver, Dorothy Collins had to give him the once over before he went lecturing. They had left Francis in Palos Verdes as she wasn't very well. In 1904, we're published a monograph on Watts, the Napoleon of Notting Hill, and an important chapter in a composite book, England A Nation. The Watts is among the results of Gilbert's art studies. Its reviewers admired it somewhat in the degree of their admiration for the painter but for a young man at that date to have seen the principles of art he lays down meant rare vision. The portrait painter, he says, is trying to express the reality of the man himself but he is not above taking hints from the book of life with its quaint old woodcuts. GK makes us see all the painter could have thought or imagined and he sets us before Memon and Jonah and Hope and bids us read their legend and note the texture in the lines of the painting. His distinction between the Irish mysticism of Yates and the English mysticism of Watts is especially valuable and the book, perhaps even more than the Browning or the Dickens, manifests Gilbert's insight into the mind of the last generation. The depths and limitations of the Victorian outlook may be read in GF Watts. The story of the writing of the Napoleon was told to me in part by Francis while part appeared in an interview given by Gilbert in which he recalled it his first important book quoted in Chesterton by Cyril Clemens, pages 16 and 17. I was broke, only ten shillings in my pocket leaving my worried wife, I went down Fleet Street, got a shave and then ordered for myself at the Chester cheese, an enormous luncheon of my favorite dishes and a bottle of wine. It took my all, but I could then go to my publishers fortified. I told them I wanted to write a book and outline the story of Napoleon of Notting Hill but I must have twenty pounds I said before I begin. We will send it to you on Monday. If you want the book I replied, you will have to give it to me today as I am disappearing to write it. They gave it. Francis meanwhile sat at home thinking as she told me, hard thoughts of his disappearance with their only remaining coin. Then dramatically he appeared with twenty golden sovereigns and poured them into her lap. Referring to this incident later Gilbert said what a fool a man is when he comes to the last ditch not to spend the last farthing to satisfy the inner man before he goes out to fight a battle with his wits. But it was his way to let the money shortage become acute and then deal with it abruptly. Frank Swinerton relates that when as a small boy he was working for JM Dent Gilbert appeared after office hours with a Dickens preface but refused to leave it because Swinerton the only soul left in the place could not give him the agreed remuneration. The Napoleon is the story of a war between the London suburbs and grew largely from his meditations on the Boer War besides being the best of his fantastic stories it contains the most picturesque account of Jester Dent's social philosophy that he ever gave but it certainly puzzled some of the critics one American reviewer feels that he might have understood the book if he had an intimate knowledge of the history of the various boroughs of London and of their present day characteristics. Others treat the story as a mere joke and many feel that it is a bad descent after the Browning. Two infernally clever for anything says one. Oberon Quinn, King of England chosen by lot as are all kings and all other officials by the date of this story which is a romance of the future is one of the two heroes of this book he is simply a sense of humor incarnate his little elfish face and figure was recognized by old Pauline's as suggested by a form master of their youth but by the entire reviewing world as Max Beerbon by Graham Robertson were held to be unmistakably Max Francis notes in her diary a delightful dinner party at the Lanes the talk was mostly about Napoleon Max took me into dinner and was really nice he is a good fellow his costume was extraordinary why should an evening waistcoat have four large white pearl buttons and why should he look that peculiar shape he seems only pleased at the way he has been identified with King Oberon alright my dear chap he said to G who was trying to apologize Mr. Lane I settled it all at lunch I think he was a little put out at finding no red carpet put down for his royal feet and we had quite a discussion as to whether he ought to proceed me into the dining room Graham Robertson was on the left he was jolly too kept on producing wonderful rings and stones out of his pockets he said he wished he could go about covered in the pieces of a chandelier the other guests were Lady Seton Mrs. W. K. Clifford Mr. W. W. Howells and his daughter to burn Jonesy to be really attractive Mr. Taylor police magistrate and Mrs. Eichholz Mrs. Lane's mother who is more beautiful than anything except a wee baby in fact she looks exactly like one so dainty and small she can never at any time have been as pretty as she is now Gilbert and Max and I drove to his house Max's where he basely enticed us in he gave me fearful preserved fruits which ruined my dress but he made himself very entertaining home 130 caring for nothing in the world but a joke and a breeze that the dull and respectable London boroughs shall be given city guards and resplendent armor each borough to have its own coat of arms its city walls toxin and the like the idea is taken seriously by the second hero Adam Wayne of Notting Hill an enthusiast utterly lacking any sense of humor who goes to war with the other boroughs of London to protect a small street which they have designed to pull down the interests of commercial development Pimlico Kensington and the rest attack Notting Hill men bleed and die in the contest and by the magic of the sword the old ideas of local patriotism and beauty and civic life return to England the conventional politician Barker who begins the story in a frock coat and irreproachable silk hat ends it clad in purple and gold when it becomes imperial minded goes down to destruction in a sea of blood Oberon Quinn confesses to Wayne that this whole story so full of human tragedy and hopes and fears had been merely the outcome of a joke to him all life was a joke to Wayne an epic and this antagonism between the humorist and the fanatic has created the whole wild story I know of something that will alter that antagonism something that is outside us something that you and I have all our lives perhaps taken too little account of the equal and eternal human being will alter that antagonism for the human being sees no real antagonism between laughter and respect the human being the common man whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god when dark and dreary days come you and I are necessary the pure fanatic the pure satirist we have between us remedied a great wrong we have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which everyone who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace but in healthy people there is no war between us we are but the two loaves of the brain of a plowman laughter and love are everywhere the cathedrals built in the ages that loved god are full of blasphemous grotesques the mother laughs continually at the child the lover laughs continually at the lover the wife at the husband the friend at the friend Oberon Quinn we have been too long separated let us go out together you have a hall bird and I have a sword let us start our wanderings over the world we are its two essentials come it is already day in the blank white light Oberon hesitated a moment then he made the formal salute with his hall bird and they went away together into the unknown world this is very important to the understanding of Chesterton with him profound gravity and exuberant fooling were always intermingled and some of his deepest thoughts are conveyed by a pun he always wanted to be intensely serious while hating to be solemn and it was a mixture apt to be misunderstood if gravity and humor are the two loaves of the average man's brain the average man does not bring them into place simultaneously to anything like the extent that Chesterton did Oberon Quinn and Adam Wayne are the most living individuals in any of his novels just because they are the two loaves of his brain all his stories abound in adventure are admirable in their vivid descriptions of London or the countryside of France or England seen in fantastic visions they are living in the portrayal of ideas by the road of argument but the characters are chiefly energies through whose lips Gilbert argues with Gilbert until some conclusion shall be reached in 1905 came the club of queer trades least good of the Fantasia and even admirers have begun to wonder if too many fields are being tried in 1906 Dickens and heretics and remain a moot point whether the browning or the Dickens is Chesterton's best work of literary criticism the Dickens is the more popular largely because Dickens is the more popular author most Dickens idolaters read anything about their idol if only for the pleasure of the quotations and no Dickens idolater could fail to realize that here was one even more wrapped in worship than himself after the publication of Charles Dickens Chesterton undertook a series of prefaces to the novels and one of them he took the trouble to answer one only of the criticisms the book had produced the comment that he was reading into the work of Dickens was something that Dickens did not mean criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they knew themselves exist to say the things about them which they did not know themselves if a critic says that the Iliad has a pagan rather than a Christian piety or that it is full of pictures made by one epithet of course he does not mean that Homer could have said that Dick would leave Homer to say it the function of criticism if it has a legitimate function at all can only be one function that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author's mind which only the critic can express and not with the conscious part of the author's mind which the author himself can express either criticism is no good at all a very defensible position or else criticism means saying about the author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots introduction to old curiosity shop reprinted in criticisms and appreciations of the works of Charles Dickens 1933 edition pages 51 to 52 he attended not all to the crop of comments on his inaccuracies one reviewer pointed out that Chesterton had said that every postcard Dickens wrote was a work of art but Dickens died on June 9th 1870 and the first British postcard was issued October 1st 1870 a wonderful instance of Dickens never varying propensity to keep ahead of his age after all what did such things matter Bernard Shaw however felt that they did he wrote a letter from which I think Gilbert got an important hint utilized later in his introduction to David Copperfield 6th of September 1906 Dear GKC as I am a super saturated Dickensite I pounced on your book and read it as Wade Red Gibbon and other authors right slapped through in view of a second edition let me hastily note for you one or two matters firstly and chiefly a fantastic and colossal howler in the best manner of Mrs. Nickelby and Flora Finching there is an association in your mind well founded between the quarrel over Dickens's determination to explain his matrimonial difficulty to the public and the firm of Bradbury and Evans there is also an association equally well founded between B and E and Punch they were the publishers of Punch but to gravely tell the 20th century that Dickens wanted to publish his explanation in Punch is Gas and Gators carried to an incredible pitch of absurdity the facts are B and E were the publishers of Household Words they objected to Dickens explaining an HW he insisted they said that in that case they must take HW out of his hands Dickens like a lion threatened with ostracism by a louse in his tail published his explanation which stands to this day and informed his readers that they were to ask in future not for Household Words but for all the year round Household Words left Dickens less gassed for a few weeks and died all the year round in exactly the same format flourished and entered largely into the diet of my youth there is a curious contrast between Dickens's sentimental indiscretions concerning his marriage and his sorrows and his quarrels and his impenetrable reserve about himself as displayed in his published correspondence he writes to his family about waiters he tells about screeching tumblers of hot brandy and water and about the seasick man in the next birth but never one really intimate word never a real confession of his soul David Copperfield is a failure as an autobiography because when he comes to deal with a grown up David you find that he has not the slightest intention of telling you the truth or indeed anything about himself even the child David is more responsible for the reserves than for the revelations he falls back on fiction at every turn Clinton and Pip are the real autobiographies I find that Dickens is at his greatest after the social awakening which produced hard times Little Dorot is an enormous work the change is partly the disillusion produced by the unveiling of capitalist civilization but partly also Dickens' discovery of the gulf between himself and the public that he did not realize this early is shown by the fact that he found out his wife before he married her as much too small for the job and yet plumbed the difference so inadequately that he married her thinking he could go through with it when the situation became intolerable he must have faced the fact that there was something more than incompatibilities between him and the average man and woman Little Dorot is written somewhat sadly in them Dickens recognizes that quite every day men are as grotesque as Bunsby Sparkler, one of the most extravagance of all of his gargoyles is an untouched photograph almost Weig and Ryderhood are sinister and terrifying because they are simply real which Squeers and Sykes are not and please remark that while Squeers and Sykes have their speeches written with anxious verisimilitude comparatively Weig says man shrouds and grapples Mr. Venus or she dies and Ryderhood describes Lightwood's sherry when retracting his confession as I will not say a huckest wine bought a wine as far from healthy for the mind Dickens doesn't care what he makes Weig and Ryderhood or Sparkler Mrs. F's aunt say because he knows them and he has got them and knows what matters doesn't. Fledgby, Lammel Jerry Cruncher, Trabzboy Wapsle, etc. etc. are human beings as seen by a master Swiveller and Mantellini are human beings as seen by Trabzboy sometimes Trabzboy has the happier touch. What I'm told young John Shivery whose epitaphs you ignore whilst quoting Mrs. Sapsys would have gone barefoot through the prison against rules from little Dorot had been paved with red hot flower shares. I'm not so affected by his chivalry as by Swiveller's exclamation when he gets the legacy. For she, the Marquioness, shall walk in silt attire and silver eye to spare Evan Druid is no good in spite of the stone throwing boy, buzzard and honey thunder. Dickens was a dead man before he began it. Collins corrupted him with plots I know the Philistinism the utter detachment from the great human heritage of art and philosophy why not a sermon on that? GBS. Note in the introduction to David Copperfield what GK says as to the break between the two halves of the book he calls an instance of weariness in Dickens a solitary instance is not Shaw's explanation at once fascinating and probable Kate Perugini the daughter of Dickens wrote two letters of immense enthusiasm about the book saying it was the best thing written about her father since Forster's biography but she shatters the theory put forth by Chesterton and Dickens thrown into intimacy with a large family of girls fell in love with them all and happened, unluckily, to marry the wrong sister. At the time of the marriage her mother, the eldest of the sisters, was only 18 married between 14 and 15 very young and childish in appearance Georgina 8 and Helen 3 nothing could better illustrate the clash between enthusiasm and despair that fills a Chestertonian while reading any of his literary biographies where so much is built on this theory which the slightest investigation would have shown to be baseless Heretics aroused animosity in many minds dealing with Browning and Dickens a man may encounter literary prejudices or enthusiasm but there is not the intensity of feeling that he finds when he gets into the field with his own contemporaries reviewers who had been extending a friendly welcome to a beginner found that beginner attacking landmarks in the world of letters venturing to detest Ibsen and to ask William Archer whether he hung up his stocking on Ibsen's birthday accusing Kipling of lack of patriotism it is said one angrily unbecoming to spend most of his time criticizing his contemporaries his sense of mental perspective is an extremely deficient one the manufacturer of paradoxes is really one of the simplest processes conceivable Mr. Chesterton's sententious wisdom in fact it was like the scene in the Napoleon of Notting Hill when most people present were purple with anger but an intellectual few were purple with laughter and even now most of the reviewers seem not to understand where GK stood or what was his philosophy Bernard Shaw says one as a disciple he naturally exalts this after a series of books in which GK had exposed with perfect lucidity and a wealth of examples a view of life differing from Shaw's in almost every particular one reviewer clearly discerned the influence of Shaw in the Napoleon of Notting Hill but without a trace of Shaw's wonderful humor and perspicacity Bellick's approval was hearty he wrote I am delighted with what I have read in the daily mail hit them again hurt them continue to binge and accept my blessing give them hell it is the only book of yours I have read right through which shows that I don't read anything which is true enough this letter is written in the style of Herbert Paul continue to bang them about you did wrong not to come to the south coast Margate is a fraud but looks like C in front of it is really a bank with hardly any water over it I stuck on it once in the year 1904 so I know all about it moreover the harbor at Margate is not a real harbor Ramsgate round the corner has a real harbor on the true sea in both towns are citizens not averse to bribes do not fail to go out in a boat on the last of the ebb as far as the long nose there you will see the astonishing phenomenon of the tide racing down the north fourland three hours before it has turned in the estuary of the Thames which you at Margate foolishly believed to be the sea item no one in Margate can cook Gilbert was not really concerned in this book to bang his contemporaries about so much as to study their mistakes and so discover what was wrong with modern thought Shaw George Moore Ibsen Wells the mildness of the yellow press Omar and the sacred vine Rudyard Kipling smart novelists and the smart set Joseph McCabe and a divine frivolity the collection was a heterogeneous one and in the introduction the author tells us he is not concerned with any of these men as a brilliant artist or a vivid personality but as a heretic that is to say a man whose view of things has the hearty hood to differ from mine is a man whose philosophy is quite solid quite coherent quite wrong I revert to the doctrinal methods of the 13th century inspired by the general hope of getting something done in England a nation and even more in the study of Kipling in this book there is one touch of inconsistency which we shall meet again in his later work he hated imperialism yet he glorified Napoleon himself ardently patriotic he accused Kipling of lack of patriotism on the ground that he again could not at once love England and love the empire for there was a curious note in the anti imperialism of the Chester Bellock that has not always been recognized the ordinary anti imperialist holds that England has no right to govern an empire and that her leadership is bad for the other dominions but the Chester Bellock view was that the dominions were inferior and unworthy of a European England the phrase typical the Kipling was thrilled by those suburbs and Chesterton who had as a boy admired Kipling attacks him in heretics for lack of patriotism Puck of Pooks Hill was not yet written but like Kipling's poem on Sussex it expressed a patriotism much akin to Gilbert's own remember the man who returned from the South African belt to be the squires gardener me that have done what I've done me that have seen what I've seen that man with eyes open to a sense of his own tragedy was speaking for Chesterton's people of England who have not spoken yet yes they have spoken through the mouth of English genius as Langlans Piers Plowman as Dickens Sam Weller but not least as Kipling's Tommy Aitkins it was a pity Chesterton was deaf to this last voice with a better understanding of Kipling he might in turn have made Kipling understand what was needed to make England marry England once again have given him the philosophy that should make his genius fruitful for the huge distinction between Chesterton and most of his contemporaries lean not in the wish to get something done but in the conviction that the right philosophy alone could produce fruitful action a parable in the introduction shows the point at which his thinking had arrived suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something let us say a lamp post which many influential persons desire to pull down a great clad monk who is the spirit of the middle ages is approached upon the matter and begins to say in the arid manner of the schoolman let us first of all consider my brethren the value of light if light be in itself good at this point he is somewhat exclusively knocked down all the people make a rush for the lamp post the lamp post is down in 10 minutes and they go about congratulating each other on their un medieval practicality but as things go on they do not work out so easily some people have pulled the lamp post down because they wanted the electric light some because they wanted old iron some because they wanted darkness because their deeds were evil some thought is not enough for a lamp post some too much some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery some because they wanted to smash something and there is a war in the night no man knowing whom he strikes so gradually and inevitably today tomorrow or the next day that comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all that all depends on what is the philosophy of light only what we might have discussed under the gas lamp we now must discuss in the dark heretics pages 22 to 23 every year during this time at Battersea the press books reveal an increasing flood of engagements Gilbert lectures for the new reform club on political watchwords for the Midland Institute on Modern Journalism for the men's meeting of the south London central mission on brass bands and for the London Association of Correctors of the Press at the Trocadero for the CSU at Church Kirk Accrington and at the men's service at the Colchester moot hall he debates at the St. King's Literary Society meaning that the most justifiable wars are the religious wars opens the anti-puritan league at the Shaftesbury club speaks for the Richmond and Kew branch of the PNEU on the romantic element in morality for the ickly PSA on Christianity and materialism and so on without end all these are on a few pages of his father's collection interspersed with clippings recording articles and reviews innumerable introductions to books, interviews and controversies there was almost no element of choice in these engagements, GK was intensely good nature and hated saying no he was the lion of the moment and they all wanted him to roar for them in spite of the large heading lest we forget that met his eye daily in the drawing room he did forget a great deal in fact friends say he forgot any engagement made when Francis was not present to write it down directly it was made she had to do memory in all the practical side of life for him there might have been one slight chance of making Gilbert responsible in these matters that chance was given to his parents and by them thrown away how far it is even possible to groom and train a genius is doubtful anyhow no attempt was made waited on hand and foot by his mother never made to wash or brush himself as a child personally conducted to the tailor as he grew older given by his parents no money for which to feel responsible not made to keep ours how could Francis take a man of 27 and make him over again but there is of course the most genuine difficulty in all this which Gilbert once touched on when he denied the accusation of absence of mind it was he claimed presence of mind on his thoughts that made him unaware of much else and indeed no man can be using his mind furiously in every direction at once anyone who has done even a little creative work anyone even who has lived with people who do creative work knows the sense of bewilderment with which the mind comes out of the world of remotor but greater reality and tries to adjust with the daily world in which meals are to be ordered letters answered in engagements kept what must this pain of adjustment not have been to a mind almost continuously creative where I have never known anyone work such long hours with a mind at such tension as Gilbert's there was no particular reason why he should have written his article for the daily news as the reporter writes his at top speed at a late hour but he usually did the writing of it was left till the last minute and if at home he would need Francis to get it off for him before the deadline was reached but he often wrote by preference in Fleet Street Cheshire cheese or some little pub where journalists gathered and then he would hire a cab to take the article 100 yards or so to the daily news office the cab in those days was the handsome with its two huge wheels over which one perilously ascended while the driver sat above only to be communicated with by opening a sort of trap door in the roof Gilbert once said that the imaginative Englishman in Paris would spend his days in a cafe the imaginative Frenchman in London would spend his driving in a handsome in Napoleon the thought of the cab moves him to right poet whose cunning carved this amorous cell where Twain may dwell Evie Lucas his daughter tells us used to say that if one were invited to drive with Gilbert in a handsome cab it would have to be two caps but this is not strictly true for in those days I drove with Gilbert and Francis to in a handsome he and I side by side she on his knee we must have given to the populace the impression he says any handsome would give on first view to an ancient Roman or a simple barbarian that the driver riding on high and flourishing his whip was a conqueror carrying off his helpless victims like the buffers at the veneering election he spent much of his time taking cabs and getting a boat and not even getting about in them but leaving them standing at the door for hours on end calling a one publisher he placed in his hands a letter that gave excellent reasons why he could not keep the engagement the memory so admirable in literary quotations was not merely unreliable for engagements but even for such matters as street numbers and addresses Edward McDonald who worked with him later on GK's weekly relates how some months after the paper had changed his address he failed one day to turn up at a board meeting finally appeared with an explanation I'm calling a taxi at Marlborn he realized that he could not give the address so he told the driver to take him to fleet street there as his memory still refused to help he stopped the taxi outside a tea shop left it there while he was inside and ordering a cup of tea began to turn out all his pockets in the hope of finding a letter or proof bearing the address then as no clue could be found he told the driver to take him to a bookstore that stocked the paper at first and the second he drew blanks but at the third bought a copy of his own paper and thus discovered the address I'm not sure at what date he began to hate writing anything by hand my mother treasured two handwritten letters I have none after a friendship of close on 30 years but I remember on his first visit to France home in Surrey is calling Francis that he might dictate an article to her his writing was pictorial and rather elaborate he drew his signature rather than writing says Edward McDonald who remembers him saying as he signed a check with many a curve my banks I fret I wonder if Tennyson fretted his at one of our earliest meetings I asked him to write in my autograph book it was at least five years before the ballot of white horse appeared but the lines may be found almost unchanged in the ballot verses made up in the dream which you won't believe people if you have any prayers say prayers for me and bury me underneath the stone in the stones of Battersea bury me underneath the stone with the sword that was my own to wait till the holy horn is blown and all poor men are free the dream went on he said and I think Francis was anxious for the mind must find rest and sleep the little flat at Battersea was a vortex of requests and engagements broken promises and promises fulfilled authors ink and printers ink speeches and prospect and speeches in memory meetings and social occasions a sincere admirer wrote during this period of his fears of too great a strain on his hero and from 1904 to 1908 the only change was an increase of pressure I see that Chesterton has just issued a volume on the art of G.F. Watts his novel was published yesterday soon his monograph on Kingsley should be ready I believe he has a book on some modern aspects of religious belief in the press he is part editor of the illustrated booklets on great authors issued by the bookman he is contributing prefaces and introductions to odd volumes in several series of reprints he is a constant contributor to the daily news and the speaker he is conducting a public controversy with Latchford of the Clarion on atheism and free thinking he is constantly lecturing and debating and dining out it is almost impossible to open a paper that does not contain either an article or review or a poem or drawing of his and his name is better known now to compositors than Bernard Shaw now both physically and mentally Chesterton is a Hercules from what I hear of his methods of work he is capable of a great output without much physical strain nevertheless it is clear I think to anyone that at his present rate of production he must either wear or tear no man born can keep so many irons in the fire and not himself come between the hammer and the anvil it is a pitiful thing to have a good man spend himself so recklessly and I repeat once more that if he and his friends have not the will or power to restrain him there could be a conspiracy of editors and publishers in his favor not often is a man like Chesterton born he should have his full chance and that can only come by study and meditation and by slow study accumulation of knowledge and wisdom Shanif Bullock in the Chicago Evening Post 9th of April 1906 in a volume made up of introductions written at this time to individual novels of Dickens we find a passage that might well be Gilbert's summary of his own life calls upon him at this time were insistent and overwhelming this necessarily happens at a certain stage of a successful writer's career he was just successful enough to invite others and not successful enough to reject them there was almost too much work for his imagination and yet not quite enough work for his housekeeping and it is a quite curious tribute to the quite curious greatness of Dickens that in this period of youthful strain we do not feel the strain but feel only the youth his own amazing wish to write equaled or outstripped even his readers amazing wish to read working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once but he wanted to write twenty novels at once thus too with Gilbert the first eight years of his married life saw in swift succession the publication of ten books comprising literary and art criticism and biography poetry fiction or rather fantasy late essays and religious philosophy all these were so full at once of the profound seriousness of youth and of the bubbling wine of its high spirits as to recall another thing Gilbert said that Dickens was accused of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there is foam upon deep seas that was a matter and dispute about himself and very furiously disputed it was during these years was G.K. Sirius or merely posing was he a great man or a mount bank was he clear or obscure was he a genius or a charlatan audacious reconciliation he pleaded or rather asserted for his tone could seldom be called a plea it is a mark not of frivolity but of extreme seriousness a man who deals in harmonies who only matches stars with angels or lambs with spring flowers he indeed may be frivolous for he is taking one mood at a time and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes but a man who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious view of the universe the man who should write a dialogue between two early Christians might be a mere writer of dialogues but a man who should write a dialogue between an early Christian and the missing link would have to be a philosopher more widely different the types talked of, the more serious and universal must be the philosophy which talks of them the mark of the light and thoughtless writer is the harmony of his subject matter the mark of the thoughtful writer is its apparent diversity the most flippant lyric poet might write a pretty poem about lambs but it requires something bolder engraver than a poet a static prophet to talk about the line lying down with the lamp G.K. Chesterton criticisms and appreciations of the world of Charles Dickens, 1933 pp. 68-69 a man starting to write a thesis on Chesterton's sociology once complained bitterly that almost none of his books were indexed so he had to submit to the disgusting necessity of reading them all through for some striking view on sociology might well be embedded in a volume of art criticism or be in the very center of a fantastic romance Chesterton's was a philosophy universal and unified and it was at this time growing fast and finding exceedingly varied techniques of expression, but the whole of it was in a sense in each of them, in each book almost in each poem as he himself says of the universe of Charles Dickens there is something in it there is in all great creative writers, like the account and genesis of the light being created before the sun, moon and stars, the idea before the machinery that made it manifest Pickwick is in Dickens career the mere mass of light before the creation of sun or moon it is the splendid shapeless substance of which all his stars are ultimately made and again he said what he had to say and yet not all he had to say wild pictures, possible stories tantalizing and attractive trains of thought, perspectives of adventure crowded so continually upon his mind that at the end there was a vast mass of them left over ideas that he literally had not the opportunity to develop tales that he literally had not the time to tell End of Chapter 11 Chapter 12 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Candice Tuttle Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Macy Ward Chapter 12 Clearing the Ground for Orthodoxy G.K. Chesterton A Criticism Published anonymously in 1908 was a challenge thrown to the world of letters, for it demanded the recognition of Chesterton as a force to be reckoned with in the modern world. As its title implied the book was by no means a tribute of sheer admiration and agreement. Gilbert was rebuked for that love of a pun or an effective phrase that sometimes led him into indefensible positions. It was hotly asked of him that he should abandon his unjust attitude toward Ibsen. He was accused of calling himself a liberal and being in fact a Tory. But even in differing from him the book showed him as of real importance not least in the sketch given of his life and of the influences that had contributed to the formation of his mind. It did too another thing. It clarified his philosophical position for the world at large for some time now many had been demanding such a clarification. When G.K. attacked the utopia of Wells and of Shaw both Wells and Shaw had been urgent in their demands that he should play fair by setting forth his own utopia. When he attacked the fundamental philosophy of G.S. Street, Mr. Street retorted that it would be time for him to worry about his philosophy when G.K.'s had been unfolded. G.K.'s retort to this was orthodoxy. G.K. Chesterton, a criticism far the best book that has ever been written about Chesterton showed at last a mind that had really grasped his philosophy and could even have outlined his utopia. Perhaps this was the less surprising as it ultimately turned out to have been written by his brother Cecil. I do not know at what stage Cecil revealed his authorship but I remember that at first Francis told me only that they suspected Cecil because it was from the angle of his opinions that the book criticized many of Gilbert's. However I was at that date only in acquaintance and the truth may still have been a family secret. At any rate Cecil it was small wonder if after all those years of arguing he understood something of the man with whom he had been measuring forces. But he did better than that for he explained him to others without ever having to resort to these arguments which after all were more or less private property. He explained G.K.'s general philosophy from the Napoleon, his ideas of cosmic good from the wild night and the man who was Thursday which had just been published that same year, 1908. In this fantastic story the group of anarchists distinguished by being called after the days of the week turn out through a series of incredible adventures to be all save one detectives in disguise. The gigantic figure of Sunday before whom they all tremble turns from the chief of the anarchists to the chief of the destructive forces into what? The subtitle A Nightmare is needed for Sunday would seem to be some wild vision seen in dreams not merely of forces of good, of sanity, of creation but even of God himself. When almost twenty years later the man who was Thursday was adapted for the stage Chesterton said in an interview In an ordinary detective tale the investigator discovers that some amiable looking fellow who subscribes to all the charities and his fond of animals has murdered his grandmother or is a trigamist. I thought it would be fun to make the tearing away of menacing masks reveal benevolence. Associated with that merely fantastic notion was the one that there is actually good to be discovered in unlikely places that we who are fighting each other may be all fighting on the right side. I think it is quite true that it is just as well we do not while the fight is on know all about each other. The soul must be solitary or there would be no place for courage. A rather amusing thing was said by Father Knox on this point. He said that he should have regarded an entirely pantheist and as preaching that there was good in everything if it had not been for the introduction of the one real anarchist and pessimist. But he was prepared to wager that if the book survives for a hundred years which it won't they will say that the real anarchist was put in afterwards by the priests. But though I was more foggy about ethical and theological matters than I am now, I was quite clear on that issue that there was a final adversary and that you might find a man resolutely turned away from goodness. People have asked me whom I mean by Sunday. Well, I think on the whole and allowing for the fact that he is a person in a tale I think you can take him to stand for nature as distinguished from God huge, boisterous, full of vitality dancing with a hundred legs bright with the glare of the sun and at first sight somewhat regardless of us and our desires. There is a phrase used at the end spoken by Sunday can ye drink from the cup that I drink of which seems to mean that Sunday is God. That is the only serious note in the book. The face of Sunday changes the mask of nature and you find God. Monsignor Knox has called the man who was Thursday an extraordinary book written as if the publisher had commissioned him to write something rather like the pilgrims' progress in the style of the Pickwick papers which explains perhaps why some reviewers call it irreverent. The very wildness of it conveys a sense of thoughts seething and straining to express the inexpressible. Later, in his more definitely philosophical books G. K. could say calmly much that he or he splashes on a ten-legged canvas with brushes of Comet's hair with all the violent directness of a vision. Of that vision his brother began the interpretation in his challenging book. Reactions were interesting for even those who wanted most ardently to say that Cecil's book should not have been written found that it was necessary to say it loudly and to say it at great length. Their very violence showed their sense of Chesterton as apparel even when they abused anyone who felt him to be important. It was not the kind of contempt that is really bestowed on the contemptible. The Academy expended more than two columns saying we propose to deal with the quack and leave his sycophants and licks spittles to themselves. One skips him in numerous corners of third and fourth rate journals, e.g. the Illustrated London News, the Bookman, Daily News, and one avoids his books because they are always and inevitably a bore. Ancelot Bathurst had also dared to write of G. K. his daily life as a journalist, so the article goes on. Let us kneel with the honourable Lancelot at his greasy burgundy-stained shrine, what time the jingling handsome waits us with its rolling occupant, and his sword-stick, and his revolver, and his pocket stacked with penny-dreadfuls. The fact is, we have in Mr. Chesterton the true product of the debauched Haypenny Press. If the Haypenny Press ceased to notice him forthwith it seems to us more than probable that he would cease at once to be of the highest importance in literary circles, and the bishops and members of Parliament who have honoured him with their kind notice would be compelled to drop him. Most of the reviews were very different from this one, which is certainly great fun, although some few other reviewers suggested that Gilbert himself quote the criticism. I have wondered whether the Academy notices of his own books all much like this were written by a personal enemy or merely by one of the jolly people as he often called them who were maddened by his views. For some years now Gilbert had been gathering in his mind the material for orthodoxy. Some of the ideas we have seen faintly traced in the notebook and the coloured lands but they all grew to maturity in the atmosphere of constant controversy. In a controversy with the reverend RJ Campbell we see for instance his convictions about the reality of sin shaping under our eyes. Discussing modernism in the nation he analyses the differences between the true development of an idea and the mere changing from one idea to another. Modernism claiming to be a development was actually an abandonment of the Christian idea. For the Catholic this is among the most interesting of his controversies. In the course of it he refers to the earlier works of Newman and the literature of the Oxford movement to support his view of the Anglican position. I have already said that Chesterton read far more than was usually supposed to be read so quickly and with so little parade of learning and it has been too lightly assumed that the statement in Orthodoxy that he avoided works of Christian apologetic meant that he had not read any of the great Christian writers of the past. True he was not then or at any time reading books of apologetic. He must however have been reading something more life-giving as we learn from a single hint. When asked to draw up a scheme of reading for 1908 in G.K.'s weekly he suggests Butler's analogy Coleridge's confessions of an inquiring spirit Newman's apologia St. Augustine's confessions and the summa of St. Thomas Aquinas. It was absurd he said in this article to suppose that the ancients the truth was that the great ancients not only saw them but saw through them. Butler had sketched the real line along which Christianity must ultimately be defended. These great writers all remained modern while the new theology takes one back to the time of Crinolins. I almost expect to see Mr. R. J. Campbell in peg-top trousers with very long side whiskers. In this controversy although not yet a Catholic he showed the gulf between the modernist theory of development and the Newman doctrine with a clarity greater than any Catholic writer of the time. A man who is always going back and picking to pieces his own first principles may be having an amusing time but he is not developing as Newman understood development. Newman meant that if you wanted a tree to grow you must plant it finally in some definite spot. It may be I do not know and I do not care that Catholic Christianity is just now passing through one of its numberless periods of undue repression and silence but I do know this that when the great powers break forth again the new epics and the new arts they will break out in the ancient and living tree. They cannot break out upon the little shrubs that you are always pulling up by the roots to see if they are growing. Against R. J. Campbell he showed in a lecture on Christianity and social reform how belief in sin as well as in goodness was more favorable to social reform than was the rather woolly optimism that refused to recognize evil. The nigger driver will be delighted to hear that God is imminent in him the sweater that he has not in any way become divided from the supreme perfection of the universe. If the new theology would not lead to social reform the social utopia to which the philosophy of Wells and of Shaw was pointing seemed to Chesterton not a heaven on earth to be desired but a kind of final hell since it banished all freedom and human responsibility. Arguing with them was again highly fruitful and two subjects he chose for speeches are suggestive the terror of tendencies and shall we abolish the inevitable. In the new age Shaw wrote about Bellock and Chesterton and so did Wells while Chesterton wrote about Wells and Shaw till the Philistines grew angry called itself advertisement and log rolling and urged that a bill for the abolition of Shaw and Chesterton should be introduced into Parliament but G.K. had no need for advertisement of himself or his ideas just then he had a platform he had an eager audience every week he wrote in the illustrated London news beginning in 1905 to do our notebook until his death in 1936 he was still writing every Saturday in the daily news publishers were disputing for each of his books yet he rushed into every religious controversy that was going on because thereby he could clarify and develop his ideas the most important of all these was the controversy with Blatchford editor of the Clarion who had written a rationalist credo entitled God and My Neighbor in 1903-04 he had the generosity and the wisdom to throw open the Clarion to the freest possible discussion of his views the Christian attack was made by a group of which Chesterton was the outstanding figure and was afterwards gathered into a paper volume called The Doubts of Democracy one essay in this volume written in 1903 is of primary importance in any study of the sources of orthodoxy for it gives a brilliant outline of one of the main contentions of the book and shows even better than orthodoxy itself but he meant by saying that he had first learnt Christianity from its opponents it is clear that by now he believed in the divinity of Christ the pamphlet itself has fallen into oblivion the Christian share of it was only three short essays I think it well to quote a good deal from the first of these because in it he has put in concentrated form and with different illustrations what he developed five years later there is nothing more packed with thought in the whole of his writings than these essays the first of all the difficulties that I have in controverting Mr. Blatchford would be this that I shall be very largely going over his own ground my favourite textbook of theology is God in my neighbour but I cannot repeat it in detail if I give each of my reasons for being a Christian a vast number of them would be Mr. Blatchford's reasons for not being one for instance Mr. Blatchford and his school point out that there are many myths and stories that there were pagan Christs and red Indian incarnations and Patagonian crucifixions for all I know or care but does not Mr. Blatchford see the other side of the fact if the Christian God really made the human race would not the human race tend to rumours and perversions of the Christian God if the centre of our life is a certain fact that far from the centre have a muddled version of that fact if we were so made that a son of God must deliver us is it odd that Patagonians should dream of a son of God the Blatchfordian position really amounts to this that because a certain thing has impressed millions of different people as likely or necessary therefore it cannot be true and then this bashful being veiling his own talents convicts the wretched GKC of paradox the story of a Christ is very common in legend and literature so is the story of two lovers parted by fate so is the story of two friends killing each other for a woman but will it seriously be maintained that because these two stories are common as legends therefore no two friends were ever separated by love or no two lovers by circumstances it is tolerably plain surely that these two stories are common because the situation is an intensely probable and human one because our nature is so built as to make them almost inevitable thus in this first instance when learned skeptics come to me and say are you aware that the kafirs have a sort of incarnation I should reply speaking as an unlearned person I don't know but speaking as a Christian I should be very much astonished if they hadn't take a second instance the secularist says that Christianity has been a gloomy and ascetic thing and points to the procession of austere or ferocious saints who have given up home and happiness and macerated health and sex but it never seems to occur to him that the very oddity and completeness of these men's surrender make it look very much as if there were really something actual and solid in the thing for which they sold themselves they gave up all pleasures for one pleasure of spiritual ecstasy they may have been mad but it looks as if there really were such a pleasure they gave up all human experiences for the sake of one superhuman experience they may have been wicked but it looks as if there were such an experience it is perfectly tenable that this experience is as dangerous and selfish a thing as drink a man who goes ragged and homeless in order to see visions may be as repellent and immoral as a man who goes ragged in order to drink brandy that is a quite reasonable position but what is manifestly not a reasonable position what would be in fact not far from being an insane position would be to say that the raggedness of the man and the stupefied degradation of the man proved that there was no such thing as brandy that is precisely what the secularist tries to say he tries to prove that there is no such thing as supernatural experience by pointing at the people who have given up everything for it he tries to prove that there is no such thing by proving that there are people who live on nothing else again I may submissively ask whose is the paradox take a third instance the secularist says that christianity produced tumult and cruelty he seems to suppose that this proves it to be bad but it might prove it to be very good for men commit crimes not only for bad things far more often for good things for no bad things can be desired quite so passionately and persistently as good things can be desired and only very exceptional men desire very bad and unnatural things most crime is committed because owing to some peculiar complication very beautiful or necessary things are in some danger and when something is set before mankind that is not only enormously valuable but also quite new the sudden vision the chance of winning it the chance of losing it it has the same effect in the moral world that the finding of gold has in the economic world it upsets values and creates a kind of cruel rush we need not go far for instances quite apart from the instances of religion when the modern doctrines of brotherhood and liberality were preached in France in the 18th century the time was ripe for them and the educated classes everywhere had been growing towards them the world, to a very considerable extent, welcomed them and yet all that preparation and openness were unable to prevent the burst of anger and agony which greets anything good and if the slow and polite preaching of rational fraternity in a rational age ended in the massacres of September when Ah Fortiori is here what would be likely to be the effect of the sudden dropping into a dreadfully evil century of a dreadfully perfect truth what would happen if a world baser than the world of Seid were confronted with a gospel purer than the gospel of Rousseau the mere flinging of the polished pebble of republican idealism into the artificial lake of century Europe produced a splash that seemed to splash the heavens and a storm that drowned ten thousand men what would happen if a star from heaven really fell into the slimy and bloody pool of a hopeless and decaying humanity men swept a city with the guillotine a continent with a sabre because liberty and fraternity were too precious to be lost how if Christianity was yet more maddening because it was yet more precious but why should we labor the point when one who knew human nature as it can really be learnt from fishermen and women and natural people saw from his quiet village the track of this truth across history and in saying that he came bearing not peace but a sword set up eternally his colossal realism against the eternal sentimentality of the secularist thus then in the third instance when the learned skeptic says Christianity produced wars and persecutions we shall reply naturally and lastly let me explain an example that leads me on directly to the general matter I wish to discuss for the remaining space of the articles at my command the secularist constantly points out that the Hebrew and Christian religions began as local things that their God was a tribal God that they gave him material form and attached him to particular places this is an excellent example of one of the things that if I were acting a detailed campaign I should use as an argument for the validity of biblical experience for if there really are some other and higher beings than ourselves and if they in some strange way at some emotional crisis really revealed themselves to rude poets or dreamers in very simple times that these rude people should regard the revelation as local with the particular hill or river where it happened seems to me exactly what any reasonable human being would expect it has a far more credible look than if they had talked cosmic philosophy from the beginning if they had I should have suspected priestcraft and forgeries and third century nosticism if there be such a being as God and he can speak to a child and if God spoke to a child in the garden the child would of course say that God lived in the garden I should not think it any less likely to be true for that if the child said God is everywhere an impalpable essence pervading and supporting all constituents of the cosmos alike if I say the infant addressed me in the above terms I should think he was much more likely to have been with the governess than with God so if Moses had said God was an infinite energy I should be certain he had seen nothing extraordinary as he said he was a burning bush I think it very likely that he did see something extraordinary for whatever be the divine secret and whether or know it has as people have believed sometimes broken bounds and surged into our world at least it lies on the side furthest away from pedants and their definitions and nearest to the silver souls of quiet people to the beauty of bushes and the love of one's native place thus then in our last instance out of hundreds that might be taken we conclude in the same way when the learned skeptics say the visions of the Old Testament were local and rustic and grotesque we shall answer of course they were genuine thus as I said at the beginning I find myself to start with face to face with the difficulty that to mention the reasons that I have for believing in Christianity is in very many cases simply to repeat those arguments which Mr. Blatchford in some strange way seems to regard as arguments against it his book is really rich and powerful he has undoubtedly set up these four great guns of which I have spoken I have nothing to say against the size and ammunition of the guns I only say that by some strange accident of arrangement he has set up those four pieces of artillery pointing at himself if I were not so humane I should say gentlemen of the secularist guard fire first he goes on in the next essay to talk of the positive arguments for Christianity of this religious philosophy which was and will be again the study of the highest intellects and the foundation of the strongest nations but which our little civilization has for a while forgotten very briefly he then deals with determinism and free will the need for the supernatural and the question of the fall dealing with the fall he uses one of his most brilliant illustrations we speak he says of a manly man but not of a waily wail if you want to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whiskey you would slap him on the back and say be a man no one who wished to dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth explorer would slap it on the back and say be a crocodile for we have no notion of a perfect crocodile no allegory of a wail expelled from his waily Eden continuing the swift sketch of some elements of Christian theology Chesterton next deals with miracles while the development in orthodoxy makes this section look very slight there are passages that make one realize the mental wealth of a man who could afford to leave them behind and rush on Blatchford had said that no English judge would accept the evidence for the resurrection and G.K. answers that possibly Christians have not all got such an extravagant reverence for English judges as is felt by Mr. Blatchford himself the experiences of the founder of Christianity have perhaps left us in a vague doubt of the infallibility of courts of law in reference to the many rationalists whose refusal to accept any miracle is based on the fact that experiences against it he says there was a great Irish rationalist of this school who when he was told that a witness to him commit a murder said that he could bring a hundred witnesses who had not seen him commit it the final essay on the eternal heroism of the slums has two main points it begins with an acknowledgement of the crimes of Christians only pointing out that while Mr. Blatchford outlaws the church for this reason he is prepared to invoke the state whose crimes are far worse but the most vigorous part of the essay is a furious attack on determinism Blatchford apparently held that bad surroundings inevitably produce bad men Chesterton had seen the heroism of the poor in the most evil surroundings and was furious that this association of vice with poverty the vilest and the oldest and the dirtiest of all the stories the insolence has ever flung against the poor men can and do lead heroic lives in the worst of circumstances because there is in humanity a power of responsibility there is free will Blatchford in the name of humanity is attacking the greatest of human attributes more numerous than can be counted in all the wars and persecutions of the world men have looked out of their little graded windows and said at least my thoughts are free no no says the face of Mr. Blatchford suddenly appearing at the window your thoughts are the inevitable result of heredity and environment your thoughts are as material as your dungeons your thoughts are as mechanical as the guillotine so pants this strange comforter from cell to cell I suppose Mr. Blatchford would say that in his utopia nobody would be in prison what do I care whether I am in prison or no if I have to drag chains everywhere a man in his utopia may have for all I know free food, free meadows his own estate his own palace what does it matter he may not have his own soul an architect once discourse to me on the need of humility in face of the material the stone and marble of his building thus Chesterton was humble before the reality he was seeking to interpret pride he wants to find as the falsification of fact by the introduction of self to learn a man must subtract himself from the study of any solid and objective thing this humility he had in a high degree and also that rarer humility which saw his friends and opponents alike as intellectual equals almost anybody Monsignor Knox once said was an ordinary person compared with him but this was an idea that certainly never occurred to him the philosophy shaping into orthodoxy was stimulated by newspaper controversy and also by the talk in which Gilbert always delighted as I have noted he loved to listen and he was a little slow in getting off the mark with his own contribution many years later an American interviewer described him when he did get going as answering questions in brief essays Frank Swinerton has admirably described the manner of speech so well remembered by his friends his speech is prefaced and accompanied by a curious sort of humming such as one may hear when glee singers give each other the note before starting to sing he pronounces the word I without egotism as if it were I and draws not in the highly gentlemanly manner which Americans believe to be the English accent and which many English call the Oxford accent but in a manner peculiar to himself either attractive or the reverse according to one's taste to me attractive even more attractive to most of us was his fashion of making us feel that we had contributed something very worthwhile he would take something one had said and develop it till it shone and glowed not from its own worth but from what he had made of it almost anything could thus become a starting point for a train of his best thought and the style disliked by some in his writings was so completely the man himself that it was the same in conversation as in his books he would approach a topic from every side throwing light on those contradictory elements that made a paradox he himself had what he attributes to Saint Thomas that instantaneous presence of mind alone really deserves the name of wit asked once the traditional question what single book he would choose if cast on a desert island he replied Thomas's guide to practical shipbuilding in talk as in his books GK loved to play upon words and sometimes of course this was merely a matter of words and the puns were bad ones once for instance after translating the French phrase for playing truant as he goes to the bushy school or the school among the bushes he adds not lightly to be confounded with the art school at bushy this is indefensible but rare Christopher Morley has noted how his play upon words often led to a genuine play upon thoughts one of Chesterton's best pleasantries was his remark on the so called emancipation of women 20 million young women rose to their feet with the cry we will not be dictated to and proceeded to become stenographers he complained in a review of a novel every modern man is an atlas carrying the world and we are introduced to a new cosmos with every new character each man has to be introduced accompanied by his cosmos like a jealous wife or on the principle of love me, love my dogma each of Chesterton's readers can think of a hundred instances of this inspired fooling many have been given in this book and many will yet be given but the thing went far deeper than fooling it has been compared by Mr. Bellick to the gospel parables as a method of teaching he made men see what they had not seen before he made them know he was an architect of certitude whenever he practiced the art in which he excelled Bellick's analysis of this special element of Chesterton's style alike written and spoken is of first rate importance to an understanding of the man whose mind at this date was still rapidly developing while his method of expression had become what it remained to the end of his life his unique his capital genius for illustration by parallel by example is his peculiar mark the word peculiar is here the operative word no one whatsoever that I can recall in the whole course of English letters had his amazing I would almost say superhuman capacity for parallelism now parallelism is a gift or method of vast effect in the conveyance of truth parallelism consists in the illustration of some unperceived truth by its exact consonance with the reflection of a truth already known and perceived whenever Chesterton begins a sentence with it is as though having a false bit of reasoning you may expect a stroke of parallelism as vivid as a lightning flash always in whatever manner he launched the parallelism he produced the shock of illumination he taught parallelism was so native to his mind it was so naturally a fruit of his mental character that he had difficulty in understanding why others did not use it in his own way in his own way I was always astonished at an ability in illustration which I not only have never seen but cannot remember to have seen attempted he never sought such things they poured out from him as easily as though they were not the hard forged products of intense vision but spawned a new new form of intense vision but spontaneous remarks to return to the Blatford controversy a final point of interest is a psychological one G.K. admits his difficulty in using in his arguments the reverent solemnity of the agnostic he realizes that he is thought flippant because he is amusing on a subject where he is more certain than of the existence of the moon he is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessor of it with a certain silly exuberance which sad and high-minded rationalists might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery but if this is his own psychology he faces too the special difficulty of theirs the main and towering barrier that he wished but hardly hoped to surmount he was the first person I think to see that free thought was no longer a young movement but old and even fossilized it had formed minds which were now too set to be altered it had its own dogmas and its own most rigid orthodoxy you are armed to the teeth he told the readers of the Clarion and buttoned up to the chin with the great agnostic orthodoxy perhaps the most placid and perfect of all the orthodoxies of men I approach you with the reverence and the courage due to a bench of bishops the Clarion controversy was as we have seen in 1903 and 1904 when Chesterton was approaching 30 others of those I have mentioned come later but I don't think any of them fully explain the depth and riches of orthodoxy End of Chapter 12 Recording by Candice Tuttle Chapter 13 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Larry Wilson Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward Orthodoxy Philosophy is either eternal or it is not philosophy A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man A cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon Introduction to the Book of Job Because orthodoxy is supremely Chesterton's own history of his mind more must be said of it than of his other published works For this book is the life of a man and a man is his mind The notebook shows him thinking and feeling in his youth exactly on the lines that he recalls but they were only lines in fact an outline The richness of life was needed the richness of thought to turn the outline into the masterpiece No man not even Chesterton could have written orthodoxy at the age of twenty It was sufficiently remarkable that he should have written it at thirty-five but only a man who had been thinking along those lines at twenty and much earlier could have written it at all For the book is, as he says a sort of slovenly autobiography It is not so much an argument for orthodoxy as the story of how one man discovered orthodoxy as the only answer to the riddle of the universe In an interview given shortly after its publication Gilbert told of a temptation that had once been his in which he had overcome almost before he realized he had been tempted The temptation was to become a prophet like all the men in heretics by emphasizing one aspect of truth and ignoring the others Through this wood he knew bring him a great crowd of disciples He had a vision which constantly grew wider and deeper of the many-sided unity of truth, but he saw that all the prophets of the age from Walth Whitman and Schopenhauer to Wells and Shaw had become so by taking one side of the truth and making it all of the truth It is so much easier to see and magnify a part than laboriously to strive to embrace a soul a sage feels too small for life and a fool too large for it Not that he condemned as fools the able men of his generation for Wells he had a great esteem for Shaw a greater Whitman he had in his youth almost idolized but increasingly he recognized even Whitman as representing an idea that was too narrow because it was only an aspect There was not room in Whitman's for some of the facts he had already discovered and he felt he had not yet completed his journey He must not for the sake of being a prophet and having a following sacrifice I will not say a truth already found but a truth that might still be lurking somewhere He could not be the architect of his own intellectual universe any more than he had been the creator of sun, moon and earth God and humanity made it out of the philosophy he discovered and it made me He had begun a boyhood as we have seen by realizing that the world as depicted in fairy tales was saner and more sensible than the world as seen by the intellectuals of his own day These men had lost the sense of life's value They spoke of the world as a vast place governed by iron laws of necessity Chesterton felt in it the presence of will While the mere thought of vastness was to him about as cheerful a conception as that of a jail that should with its cold empty passages cover half the county These expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more than the infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that was divine Quote These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing but they were not fond of the universe but I was frightfully fond of the universe and I wanted to address it by diminutive I often did so and it never seemed to mind actually and in truth I did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it large For about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt between the pricelessness and the peril of life They showed only a dreary waste but I felt a sort of sacred thrift for economy is far more romantic than extravagance To them stars are an unending income of halfpence but I felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the color and tone that entails. Thus I have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege I may express this other feeling of cosmic coziness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood Robinson Crusoe which I read about this time and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits and imprudence Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea The best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck The greatest of poems is an inventory I really felt the fancy may seem foolish as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship that there are two sexes in one sun was like the fact that there are two guns and one axe it was poignantly urgent that none should be lost but somehow it was rather fun that none could be added the trees in the planet seemed like things saved from the wreck and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires they are called so in Milton's Eden I hoarded the hills for the universe is a single jewel and while it is natural can't to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless of this jewel it is literally true this cosmos is indeed without peer and without price for there cannot be another one unquote orthodoxy chapter 4 pages 112 to 15 a fragment of an essay on Hans Anderson that cannot be later than the age of 17 shows Gilbert trying to shape part of what he calls here the ethics of Elfland but a large part was as he says subconscious in this chapter he sums up the results of musings about the universe begun so long ago small wonder that he had seemed to sleep over his lessons while he was seeing these visions and dreaming these dreams which after every effort to tell them he still knows remains half untold quote the attempt to utter the unutterable things these are my ultimate attitudes towards life the soils for the seeds of doctrine these in some dark way I thought before I could write and felt before I could think and we may proceed more easily afterwards I will roughly recapitulate them now I felt in my bones first that this world does not explain itself it may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation it may be a conjuring trick a natural explanation but the explanation of the conjuring trick if it is to satisfy me will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard the thing is magic true or false second I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning and meaning must have someone to mean it there was something personal in the world as in a work of art whatever it meant it meant violently but I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design in spite of its defects such as dragons fourth that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint we should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them we owed also an obedience to whatever made us and last and strangest there had come into my mind good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods he had saved them from a wreck all this I felt in the age gave me no encouragement to feel it and all the time I had not even thought of Christian theology unquote orthodoxy chapter 4 pages 155 to 6 this theology came with the answers to all the tremendous questions asked by life here the convert has one great advantage over the Catholic brought up in the faith most of us hear the answers before we have asked the questions hence intellectually we lack what G.K. calls the soils for the seeds of doctrine it is nearly impossible to understand an answer to a question you have not formulated not the sense of urgency that an insistent question brings many people do not even try all the years of his boyhood and early manhood Chesterton was facing the fundamental questions and hammering out his answers at first he had no thought of Christianity as even a possible answer growing up in a world called Christian he fancied it a philosophy that had been tried and found wanting it was only as he realized that the answers he was finding for himself always fitted into were always confirmed by the Christian view of things that he began to turn towards it he sees a good deal of humor in the ways he strained his voice in a painfully juvenile attempt to utter his new truths only to find that they were not his and were not new but were part of an eternal philosophy in the chapter called The Big of the World he tells of the moment when he discovered the confirmation and reinforcing of his own speculations by the Christian theology the point at which this came concerned his feelings about the men of his youth who labeled themselves optimist and pessimist both he felt were wrong it must be possible at once to love and to hate the world to love it more than enough to get on with it and the church solved this difficulty by her doctrine of creation and of original sin quote God had written not so much a poem but rather a play a play he had planned as perfect but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage managers who had since made a great mess of it as to that mess the Christian could be as pessimist as he liked as to the original design he must be optimist for it was his work to restore it St. George could still fight the dragon if he were as big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world quote and then followed an experience impossible to describe it was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines of different shapes and without apparent connection the world and the Christian tradition I had found this hole in the world the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it somehow one must love the world without being worldly I found this projecting feature of Christian theology like a sort of hard spike the dogmatic insistence that God was personal and had made a world separate from himself the spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world it had evidently been meant to go there and then the strange thing began to happen when once these two parts of the two machines had come together one after another all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief having got one part right all the other parts were repeating that rectitude as clock after clock strikes noon instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine or to vary the metaphor I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress and when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me the whole land was lit up as it were back to the first fields of my childhood all those blind fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I had tried in vain to trace on the darkness became suddenly transparent and sane I was right when I felt that I would almost rather say that grass was the wrong color than say that it must by necessity have been that color it might verily have been any other my sense that happiness hung in the crazy thread of a condition did not mean something when all was said it meant the whole doctrine of the fall even those dim and shapeless monsters of notions which I have not been able to describe much less to fend step quietly into their places like colossal cariadides of the creed the fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void but small and cozy had a fulfilled significance now for anything that is a work of art must be small in sight of the artist to God the stars might be only small and dear like diamonds and my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used but a relic to be guarded like the goods from Crusoe's ship even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise for according to Christianity we were indeed the survivors of a wreck the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world orthodoxy chapter 5 pages 142 to 44 in the chapter called the paradoxes of Christianity the richness of his mind is most manifest and in that chapter can best be seen what Mr. Bella commenced when he told me Chesterton's style reminded him of St. Augustine's talking over with an old school fellow of his list of books he had as we have seen drawn up for T.P.'s weekly I discovered deep doubt as to whether Gilbert would really have read these books as most of us understand reading combined with a conviction that he would have got out of them at a glance more than most of us by prolonged study I have certainly never known anyone his equal at what the school boy called de-gutting a book he did not seem to study an author yet he certainly knew him but it remained that his own mind reflecting and experiencing made of his own life his greatest storehouse so that in all this book there was as my father handed out in the Dublin review at the time an intensely original new light cast on the eternal philosophy about what so much had already been written the discovery specially needed perhaps for his own age was that Christianity represented a new balance that constituted a liberation the ancient Greek or Roman had aimed at equilibrium by enforcing moderation and getting rid of extremes Christianity made moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions it got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both and keeping them both furious quote the more I consider Christianity the more I felt that while it had established a rule and order the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild unquote thus inside Christianity the pacifist could become a monk and the warrior a crusader Saint Francis could praise good more loudly than Walt Whitman and Saint Jerome denounced evil more darkly than Schopenhauer but both the motions must be kept in their place I remember how George Wyndham laughed as he recited to us the paragraph where this idea reached its climax quote and sometimes this pure gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled and in the soul of St. Louis the lion laid down with the lamb but remember that this text is too lightly interpreted it is constantly assumed especially by our Tolstoy tendencies that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb like but that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb that is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb the real problem is can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain its royal ferocity that is the problem the church attempted that is the miracle she achieved unquote orthodoxy chapter 6 pages 178 to 79 all this applied not only to the release of the emotions and development of all the elements that go to make up humanity but even more to the truths of revelation a heresy always means lopping off a part of the truth and therefore ultimately a loss of liberty orthodoxy and keeping the whole truth safeguarded freedom and prevented any one of the great and devouring ideas she was teaching from swallowing any other truth this was the justification of councils of definitions even of persecutions and wars of religion that they had stood for the defensive reason as well as a faith they had stood to prevent the suicide of thought which must result if the exciting but difficult balance were lost that had replaced the classical moderation quote the church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of irregular equilibrium that one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful it was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading but a herd of bulls and tigers of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste to the world remember that the church went in specifically for dangerous ideas she was a lion tamer the idea of birth through a holy spirit of the death of a divine being of the forgiveness of sins or the fulfillment of prophecies or ideas which anyone can see need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious a sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe a slip in the definitions might stop all the dances might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs doctrines had to be defined within strict limits even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties the church had to be careful if only that the world might be careless this is the thrilling romance of orthodoxy people have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum and safe there never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy it was sanity and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad it was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses seeming to stoop this way and to sway that yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic the church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea like a vulgar fanaticism she swirred to the left and right so as exactly to avoid enormous obstacles she left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly the next instance she was swerving to avoid an Orientalism which would have made it too unworldly the orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions the orthodox church was never respectable it would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians it would have been easy for the modernistic 17th century to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination it is easy to be a madman it is easy to be a heretic it is always easy to let the age have its head the difficult thing is to keep one's own it is always easy to be a modernist as it is easy to be a snob to have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion set along the historic path of Christendom that would indeed have been simple it is always simple to fall there are an infinity of angles at which one falls only one at which one stands to have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame but to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure and in my vision the heavenly cherry flies thundering through the ages the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate the wild truth reeling but erect orthodoxy chapter 6 pages 182 to 85 no quotation can adequately convey the wealth of thought in the book yet amazingly the times reviewer rebuked GK for substituting emotion for intellect partly on strength of a sentence in the chapter called the maniac quote the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason unquote the reviews when one reads them as a whole exactly confirm what Wilford Ward said in the Dublin review that whereas he had regarded orthodoxy as a triumphant vindication of his own view that GK was a really profound thinker he found to his amazement that those who had thought him superficial held it as proof of theirs obviously with a man so much concerned with ultimates the place accorded to him in letters will depend upon whether one agrees or disagrees with his conclusions in a country that is not Catholic this consideration must affect the standing of any Catholic thinker thus Newman was considered by Carlisle to have the brain of a moderate sized rabbit yet by others his is counted the greatest mind of the century similarly Arnold Bennett could credit Chesterton only a second-class intellectual apparatus because he was a dogmatist to this Chesterton replied in fancies versus facts quote and truth there are only two kinds of people those who accept dogmas and know it and those who accept dogmas and don't know it my only advantage over the gifted novelist lies in my belonging to the former class unquote if one grasps the Catholic view of dogma is satisfying if not the objecter is left with his original objection as against Chesterton as against Newman and Chesterton had the extra disadvantage of being a journalist famous for his jokes now moving in Newman's unquestioned field of philosophy and theology it was in part the difficulty of convincing a man against his will these critics as Wilford Ward pointed out read superficially and looked only at the fooling fantastic puns and comparisons ignoring the underlying deep seriousness and lines of thought that made him as it then seemed boldly ranked Chesterton with such writers as Butler, Coleridge and Newman taking as his text the same truth can understand error but error cannot understand truth Wilford Ward called his article Mr. Chesterton among the prophets he showed especially the curious confusion made in such comments as the one I have quoted from the Times and made clear what Chesterton was really saying by a comparison with the ill-ative sense of Cardinal Newman it is the usual difficulty of trying to express a partly new idea Newman had coined an expression but it did not express all he meant still less all that Chesterton meant yet it was difficult to use the word reason in this particular discussion without giving to it two different meanings for in two chapters the maniac and the suicide of thought Chesterton was concerned to show that authority was needed for the defense of reason in a larger sense against its own power of self-destruction yet the maniac commits the suicide by excessive use of reason in the narrow sense quote he is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity or by the dumb certainties of experience he is the more logical for using certain sane affections he is the clean and well-lit prison of one idea he is sharpened to one painful point unquote to Chesterton it seemed that most of the modern religions and philosophies were like the argument by which a madman suffering from persecution mania proves that he is in a world of enemies it is complete it is unanswerable yet it is false the madman's mind quote the narrow circle the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one only it is not so large there is such a thing as a narrow universality there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity you may see it in many modern religions unquote philosophies such as materialism idealism monism all have in their explanations of the universe this quality of the madman's argument of covering everything out the materialist like the madman is unquote unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth he is not thinking of the real things of the earth of fighting peoples or proud mothers or first love or fear upon the sea the earth is so very large and the cosmos is so very small unquote people sometimes say life is larger than logic when they want to dismiss logic but that was not chesterton's way he wanted logic he needed logic as part of the abundance of the mind's life as part of a much larger whole what was the word we are looking for it still for a use of the mind that included all these things logic and imagination mysticism and ecstasy and poetry and joy a use of the mind that could embrace the universe and reach upwards to god without losing its balance work and time yet it can reach out into eternity it is conditioned by space and can glimpse infinity the modern world has imprisoned the mind far more than the body it needed great open spaces and chesterton breaking violently out of prison looked around and saw how the church had given health to the mind by giving it space to move in and great ideas to move among chesterton the poet saw too that man is a poet and must therefore get his head into heaven he needs mysticism and among her great ideas the church gives him mysteries End of Chapter 13