It is hard to carry the ballad meter through a whole volume without its growing monotonous. Chesterton's poetry, like his prose, should be taken in small doses. "The Ballad of the White Horse" contains some wearisome stretches, particularly in the most exciting parts, the fights. When I want real zest in blood letting and the enjoyment of hand to hand combat I should turn to Percy's Reliques, or to Homer. My volume of the "Ballad" opens easiest, as it has opened oftenest, at three passages. The first is that where King Alfred as a fugitive in the forest is set to mind the cakes and gets to musing, not, as we children used to be told, about how to beat the Danes, but, according to the Chestertonian version, about the Christian view of the labor question. As the old, bent woman leaves the hut Alfred wonders what shall become of such as she.
And well may God with the serving-folkCast in His dreadful lot:Is not He too a servantAnd is not He forgot?For was not God my gardenerAnd silent like a slave:That opened oaks on the uplandsOr thicket in graveyard grave?And was not God my armorer,All patient and unpaid,That sealed my skull as a helmetAnd ribs for hauberk made?* * * * * * *For God is a great servantAnd rose before the day,From some primordial slumber torn;But all things living later bornSleep on, and rise after the morn,And the Lord has gone away.On things half sprung from sleeping,All sleepy suns have shone;They stretch stiff arms, the yawning trees,The beasts blink upon hands and knees,Man is awake and does and sees—But Heaven has done and gone.* * * * * * *But some see God like GuthrumCrowned, with a great beard curled,But I see God like a good giant,That, laboring, lifts the world.Wherefore was God in Golgotha,Slain as a serf is slain:And hate He had of prince and peer,And love He had and made good cheerOf them that, like this woman here,Go powerfully in pain.
But whether Alfred pondered problems of war or labor the cakes got burnt just the same.
Next I turn to the page where men come to Alfred on the island of Athelney and beg him to become the ruler of all England. This gives Chesterton a chance to expound his anti-imperialism.
And Alfred in the orchard,Among apples green and red,With the little book in his bosom,Looked at green leaves and said:"When all philosophies shall fail,This word alone shall fit;That a sage feels too small for life,And a fool too large for it."Asia and all imperial plainsAre all too little for a fool:But for one man whose eyes can see,The little island of AthelneyIs too large a land to rule.* * * * * * *"An island like a little book,Full of a hundred tales,Like the gilt page the good monks penThat is all smaller than a wren,Yet hath high towers, meteors and" men,And suns and spouting whales."A land having a light in it,In a river dark and fast,An isle with utter, clearness lit,Because a saint has stood in it,Where flowers are flowers indeed and fit,And trees are trees at last."
As his men clear the weeds from the White Horse that had ages before been cut upon the chalk bluff, Alfred has a vision of the day when the ancient symbol shall be again overgrown and forgotten and when a new and less manly kind of heathen than the Danes shall overrun England:
I know that weeds shall grow in itFaster than man can burn:And though they scatter now and go,In some far century, sad and slow,I have a vision, and I knowThe heathen shall return.They shall not come with war-ships,They shall not waste with brands,But books be all their eating,And ink be on their hands.* * * * * * *The dear sun dwarfed of dreadful suns,Like fiercer flowers on stalk,Earth lost and little like a pea,In high heaven's towering forestry—These be the small weeds ye shall seeCrawl, covering the chalk.* * * * * * *By terror and the cruel talesOf curse in bone and kin,By weird and weakness winning,Accursed from the beginning,By detail of the sinning,And denial of the sin:By thought a crawling ruin,By life a leaping mire,By a broken heart in the breast of the world,And the end of the world's desire:By God and man dishonored,By death and life made vain,Know ye the old barbarian,The barbarian come again.When is great talk of trend and tide,And wisdom and destiny,Hail that undying heathenThat is sadder than the sea.
In this specification of "the marks of the Beast" we may recognize Chesterton's antipathies; materialism, commercialism, Darwinism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, pacifism, and Socialism. He is haunted by the same nightmare as Samuel Butler, that the day may come when machines will master the world and men be merely their slaves. For relief he looks to a revolution like the French Revolution, only worse. Chesterton is like the Eton boys who, after a debate over woman suffrage, passed a unanimous resolution disapproving of the aim of the suffragettes but approving of their methods. The socialists say we must have a revolution, peaceful if possible. Chesterton would say, "we must have a revolution, bloody if possible." The guillotine, he says somewhere, had many sins to answer for, but, at least, there was nothing evolutionary about it. And he makes the English people say:
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first.Our wrath come after Russia's wrath and our wrath be the worst.
Like Hilaire Belloc and other Neo-Catholics, he manages somehow to combine an admiration for the French Revolution with a devotion to Catholicism. They are ardent advocates of democracy notwithstanding the very explicit condemnations of popular government by the Popes. They are more inclined toward syndicalism than Socialism and place their hopes in the peasant proprietorship instead of in the nationalized trust. It is an interesting novelty in the labor problem, for it cuts across the old classifications, and I hope it will have a chance to develop into something concrete. The similar movement in France, theSillonof Marc Sangnier, was crushed out by a papal encyclical in 1912. Chesterton might be called an English Sillonist, and in a literal sense if we recall his essay on The Furrows in "Alarms and Discursions." Chesterton sometimes praises the achievements of modern science and industry, but always as ingenious toys. He is convinced that mankind in the mass will never take the city seriously.
When the rest of the world was looking for the advent of cosmopolitanism and the reign of peace, the earth lapped in universal law and all the local idiosyncrasies ironed out, wherein all obstacles to freedom of movement had been crushed out and one could buy a tourist ticket to Timbuktu with the same accommodation all along the route, Chesterton set his bugle to his lips and blew a fanfare of audacious challenge to the spirit of the times in the form of a nonsensical romance, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill." In this he carries particularism to an extreme, breaking up London again into warring wards, each with its own banner and livery, its gilds and folk ways. The book is inscribed, as we might expect, to his friend, Hilaire Belloc, and I quote part of the dedication as it sums up the message of the volume and is strangely prophetic:
For every tiny town or placeGod made the stars especially:Babies look up with owlish faceAnd see them tangled in a tree;You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,A Sussex moon, untraveled still.I saw a moon that was the town's,The largest lamp on Campden Hill.Yes, Heaven is everywhere at home,The big blue cap that always fits,And so it is (be calm; they comeTo goal at last, my wandering wits),So it is with the heroic thingThis shall not end for the world's end,And though the sullen engines swing,Be you not much afraid, my friend.This did not end by Nelson's urnWhere an immortal England sits—Nor where your tall young men in turnDrank death like wine at Austerlitz.And when the pedants bade us markWhat cold mechanic happeningsMust come; our souls said in the dark,"Belike; but there are likelier things."Likelier across these flats afar,These sulky levels smooth and free,The drums shall crash a waltz of warAnd Death shall dance with Liberty!Likelier the barricades shall flareSlaughter below and smoke above,And death and hate and hell declareThat men have found a thing to love.[5]
Remember this was written in 1904, at a time when it was commonly thought that the last of the wars had been fought and the nations might disarm, for henceforth the Hague Court would hold sway; when the socialists were becoming opportunists and the anarchists had laid aside their bombs; when such scientists as Metchnikoff were saying that self-sacrifice and heroism of the fighting sort were antiquated virtues for which the peaceful and sanitary world of the future would have little use. Chesterton was wrong about the nature of the catastrophe. He was looking and, I fear, hoping for a social revolution, and that has not yet come although it seems now less improbable than it did then.
But the Great War has given an irresistible impulse to the movement toward particularism as against cosmopolitanism. Whether we like it or not, we must admit that the tide has turned in the other direction and that it will be many years, perhaps more than one generation, before there will be the freedom of trade, intercourse, and migration that prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even England has abandoned free trade, and every country will hereafter strive to secure economic independence by developing its own resources. Even before the war there was a tendency toward the sort of local differentiation of which Chesterton gave a fantastic forecast in "The Napoleon of Notting Hill." This tendency manifested itself in a variety of ways; in the cultivation of local industries, the revival of folk dances and historic costumes, in pageantry and community celebrations, in the interest in town history and in the struggle to reëstablish disappearing languages, like Gaelic, Czech, and Ruthenian.
From Chesterton's latest book devoted to the crimes of Germany, and characteristically entitled "The Crimes of England",[6]we can see that it is the primitive little peasant kingdom of Montenegro that he most admires and the machine-like efficiency of the German empire that he most abhors. Montenegro, since he wrote this volume, has been overwhelmed by the tide of war, but probably Chesterton has faith to believe that it will reappear like Ararat when the waters subside. This faith he expressed in the poem, "The March of the Black Mountain", written during the Balkan war which Montenegro initiated by a single-handed attack upon the Turk:
But men shall remember the Mountain,Though it fall down like a tree,They shall see the sign of the MountainFaith cast into the sea;Though the crooked swords overcome itAnd the Crooked Moon ride free,When the Mountain comes to MahometIt has more life than he.
Chesterton has a better right to appear now as the champion of small nationalities than some other English authors we could name, for he first entered the lists of public life to break a lance in defense of the Boers at a time when it was most unpopular if not dangerous to say a word in their favor. He refers to these youthful days in his "Song of Defeat", published some ten years afterward. I quote part of one stanza:
I dream of the days when work was scrappy,And rare in our pockets the mark of the mint:When we were angry and poor and happy,And proud of seeing our names in print.For so they conquered and-so we scattered,When the Devil rode and his dogs smelt gold,And the peace of a harmless folk was shattered,When I was twenty and odd years old.When mongrel men that the market classes,Had slimy hands on England's rodAnd sword in hand upon Afric's passesHer last Republic cried to God![7]
One of his youthful dreams was to see a reunion of the United States and England which he imagined would come about in some great foreign war. But by 1905, when he included the poem on "The Anglo-Saxon Alliance" in a volume,[8]he had lost faith in such ethnic generalities as the Anglo-Saxon race, so he explains in his preface:
I have come to see that our hopes of brotherhood with America are the same in kind as our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent nations of Christendom. And a very small study of history was sufficient to show me that the American nation, which-is a hundred years old, is at least fifty years older than the Anglo-Saxon race.
I have come to see that our hopes of brotherhood with America are the same in kind as our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent nations of Christendom. And a very small study of history was sufficient to show me that the American nation, which-is a hundred years old, is at least fifty years older than the Anglo-Saxon race.
But the poem, both because he wrote it and because he repudiated it, has an especial interest now when American sympathy with England is stronger than ever before, the traditional hostility has been largely swept away, and there is talk of joining England in this bloodiest of all wars.
This is the weird of a world-old folk,That not till the last link breaksNot till the night is blackest,The blood of Hengist wakes.When the sun is black in heaven,The moon as blood above,And the earth is full of hatred,This people tells its love.In change, eclipse and peril,Under the whole world's scorn,By blood and death and darknessThe Saxon peace is sworn;That all our fruit be gathered,And all our race take hands,And the sea be a Saxon riverThat runs through Saxon lands.* * * * * * *Deep grows the hate of kindred.Its roots take hold on hell;No peace or praise can heal it,But a stranger heals it well.Seas shall be red as sunsets,And kings' bones float as foam,And heaven be dark with vultures,The night our son comes home.
In some respects we should expect Chesterton to go better in verse than in prose. He thinks in metaphors and pictures, vivid, fantastic, and colorful. The peculiarities of his prose style that grate upon the taste of some readers, such as the repetition of the same words, the alliteration, the unqualified assertion of half truths, the queer rhythms, the verbal tricks, and the superabundance of tropes, are by tradition permissible in poetry and so arouse no resentment.
On the other hand, poetry is a painstaking art, and Chesterton does not like to take pains. He is too indolent or too indifferent to hunt for the best possible word or rime. Consequently we find in his verse many a perfect line, rarely a perfect stanza, and never a perfect poem. But scattered all through his verse, even in the most nonsensical, we happen upon curious cadences that linger in the memory like the chant of some strange ritual. His ballads abound in unconventional rhythms that haunt one like those of Lanier's "Ballad of the Trees and the Master."
Although Chesterton often seems to disregard the canons of versification from carelessness or caprice, yet at other times he takes delight in subjecting himself to the most rigid of models, as, for instance, the old Frenchballade, which, he says, is "the easiest because it is the most restricted." He shows us how he constructs one in "The Ballade of a Strange Town."[9]The strange town into which he was shunted by the accident of taking the wrong tramcar one rainy day while "fooling about Flanders" was Lierre, an unknown and uninteresting way station then, but now one of the famous places of world history, for it stood for days the shock of the German attack on Antwerp. While waiting for the next car to take him away Chesterton scribbled on the back of an envelope with an aniline pencil a poem which begins in nonsense but ends with as good an expression of his creed as he has given anywhere:
Happy is he and more than wiseWho sees with wondering eyes and cleanThis world through all the gray disguiseOf sleep and custom in between.Yes: we may pass the heavenly screen,But shall we know when we are there?Who know not what these dead stones mean,The lovely city of Lierre.
Chesterton is so fond of theballadethat I must quote one specimen complete.[10]For the benefit of those who have taken no interest in versification I may call attention to the technical difficulties of the form of theballadethat he has chosen. It consists of three octaves and a quatrain all ending in the same refrain and using only two rimes. The first rime is used in the first and third lines of the first quatrain and in the second and fourth of the second quatrain. The second rime is used in the second and fourth lines of the first quatrain and in the first and third of the second quatrain. The closing quatrain orl'envoiis in theballadeaddressed to a prince or other royal personage. Since Chesterton hates princes his apostrophe to the prince in thisballadeis not in the usual sycophantic style.
A BALLADE OF SUICIDEThe gallows in my garden, people say,Is new and neat and adequately tall.I tie the noose on in a knowing wayAs one that knots his necktie for a ball;But just as all the neighbors—on the wall—Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"The strangest whim has seized me... After allI think I will not hang myself to-day.To-morrow is the time I get my pay—My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall—I see a little cloud all pink and grey—Perhaps the rector's mother willnotcall—I fancy that I heard from Mr. GallThat mushrooms could be cooked another way—I never read the works of Juvenal—I think I will not hang myself to-day.The world will have another washing day;The decadents decay; the pedants pall;And H. G. Wells has found that children play,And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;Rationalists are growing rational—And through thick woods one finds a stream astray,So secret that the very sky seems small—I think I will not hang myself to-day.L'ENVOIPrince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;Even to-day your royal head may fall—I think I will not hang myself to-day.
Those who assisted—with more or less enthusiasm—in the Shakespeare Tercentenary celebration will appreciate Chesterton's verses about a similar commemoration decreed by the calendar.
THE SHAKESPEARE MEMORIALLord Lilac thought it rather rottenThat Shakespeare should be quite forgotten,And therefore got on a CommitteeWith several chaps out of the city,And Shorter and Sir Herbert Tree,Lord Rothschild and Lord Rosebery,And F. C. G. and Comyns Carr,Two dukes and a dramatic star,Also a clergyman now dead;And while the vain world careless spedUnheeding the heroic name—The souls most fed with Shakespeare's flameStill sat unconquered in a ring,Remembering him like anything.Lord Lilac did not long remain,Lord Lilac did not come again,He softly lit a cigaretteAnd sought some other social setWhere, in some other knots or rings,People were doing cultured things,—Miss Zwilt's Humane Vivarium—The little men who paint on gum—The exquisite Gorilla Girl....He sometimes in the giddy whirl(Not being really bad at heart),Remembered Shakespeare with a start—But not with that grand constancyOf Clement Shorter, Herbert Tree,Lord Rosebery, and Comyns CarrAnd all the other names there are;Who stuck like limpets to the spot,Lest they forgot, lest they forgot.Lord Lilac was of slighter stuff;Lord Lilac had had quite enough.[11]
Chesterton's poetic versatility range may be inferred from the fact that he has written a drinking song that is used as a whisky advertisement and a devotional song that has been incorporated into the hymn book. The former may be found in "The Flying Inn", the latter in the "English Hymnal", also in "Poems." The hymn is as follows, omitting, as the preachers always say,[12]the third stanza. Sing it to the tune of "Webb."
O God of earth and altar,Bow down and hear our cry,Our earthly rulers falter,Our people drift and die.The walls of gold entomb us,The swords of scorn divide,Take not thy thunder from usBut take away our pride.From all that terror teaches,From lies of tongue and pen,From all the easy speechesThat comfort cruel men,From sale and profanationOf honor and the sword,From sleep and from damnationDeliver us, good Lord!
But I know of some people—and more sensible people than you would suppose—who say that they like "Quoodle" the best of Chesterton's poetry. Since there is no accounting for taste and some of my readers may have taste, I must also quote this:
SONG OF THE DOG NAMED QUOODLEThey haven't got no noses,The fallen sons of Eve.Even the smell of rosesIs not what they supposes,But more than mind discloses,And more than men believe.They haven't got no noses,They cannot even tellWhen door and darkness closesThe park old Gluck encloses,Where even the Law of MosesWill let you steal a smell.The brilliant smell of water,The brave smell of a stone,The smell of dew and thunder,And old bones buried underAre things in which they blunderAnd err, if left alone.The wind from winter forests,The scent of scentless flowers,The breath of bride's adorningThe smell of snare and warning,The smell of Sunday morning,God gave to us for ours.* * * * * * *And Quoodle here disclosesAll things that Quoodle can;They haven't got no noses,They haven't got no noses,And goodness only knowsesThe Noselessness of Man.[13]
According to Mendelism new species are most apt to come from the crossing of diverse forms. We should then naturally expect Chesterton's verse to be original, since it is the result of a cross between Whitman and Swinburne. At any rate these were the poets who most influenced Chesterton when in his teens he began to write poetry. In philosophy of life Whitman and Swinburne were not so far apart, since they were both pagans and democrats, but in form they are antipodes. Whitman was the father or the grandfather of thevers-librists. He cultivated the unconventional and introduced the most unpoetic and uncouth words. Swinburne, on the other hand, sought his themes in the classics and sacrificed anything to the music of his lines.
The early poetry of Chesterton shows traces of both influences. One very interesting instance of this is found in a poem that he wrote at school, when he was about sixteen. It is an Ave Maria in the Swinburnian meter. That is, he has borrowed the weapon of the atheist and used it in defense of Catholicism—a trick that he has been playing ever since. The poem begins:
Hail Mary! Thou blest among women; generationsshall rise up to greet,After ages of wrangle and dogma, I come with aprayer to thy feet.Where Gabriel's red plumes are a wind in the lanesof thy lilies at eveWe pray, who have done with the churches; weworship, who may not believe.
From his twelfth to his seventeenth year he went to St. Paul's school, where, as he says, "I did no work but wrote a lot of bad poetry which fortunately perished with the almost equally bad exercises. I got a prize for one of these poems—Golly, what a bad poem it was!"
The prize was known as the Milton Prize and the subject assigned to the pupils competing for it was St. Francis Xavier. A soliloquy of Danton on the scaffold, written at the age of sixteen, shows how early began his fascination for the French Revolution. His fondness for discussion was cultivated at the St. Paul's school in the Junior Debating Club, of which he was chairman, and the monthly periodical of the society,The Debater, contains many essays and poems signed "G. K. C." His first contribution to the outside press was a Socialist poem appearing inThe Clarion, but a few years later he was busy trying to puncture the balloon of Socialism with his sharp-pointed pen.
After leaving St. Paul's he studied art at the Slade School in London and has illustrated half a dozen books with cartoons, for he draws as readily as he writes. His first book was a volume of jingles and sketches entitled "Gray-Beards at Play; Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen."
His propensity for dropping into nonsense rhymes and sketches may be ascribed to heredity, for his father, Edward Chesterton, though a respectable real estate agent by profession, was responsible for a slim volume of child verse and drawings, "The Wonderful Story of Dunder van Haeden and His Seven Little Daughters."
G. K. Chesterton was born in Kensington, London, May 29, 1874. There is nothing in his heredity or early training to account for his conservative and High Church tendencies, for his father was a liberal in politics and religion and attended Bedford Chapel where the Reverend Stopford Brooke was preaching what was then called "the new theology." Although educated as an artist, G. K. Chesterton soon passed from sketching through art criticism to journalism. He began by writing pro-Boer articles forThe Speaker, a Liberal weekly. The originality of his thought and the vigor of his style attracted public attention, andThe Daily Newstook him over to write a weekly article in spite of the fact that he differed in opinion from the editors and readers on certain points. As his anonymous biographer says:
"Thousands of peaceful semi-Tolstoyan non-conformists have for years been compelled to listen every Saturday morning to a fiery apostle preaching consistently the praise of three things which seem to them most obviously the sign-manuals of Hell—War, Drink, and Catholicism."
But more recently his antagonism to "cocoa"—extended symbolically to the politics as well as to the beverage of Cadbury—became so great as to break this incongruous alliance and he has found in his brother's weeklyThe New Witnessa more congenial although a smaller audience. He has also contributed for many years a weekly page toThe Illustrated London News, which is under entirely different management fromThe Daily News. Besides these and frequent contributions to other periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, he manages to turn out a volume or two of stories every year as well as poetry and criticism, an amazing output considering that there is hardly a dull page in it. To keep it up so long and steadily must be a strain upon one of his easy-going temperament. Fleet Street men tell me that it is hard to get his copy on time. As press day draws near runners are sent around to his clubs and other London haunts to tell him that the editor must have his article immediately. Once caught Chesterton surrenders good-naturedly and taking any paper handy will dash off his essay, carrying on a lively conversation at the same time.
Producing under such pressure or at least under the compulsion of filling a certain number of columns every week with witty comment on current events inevitably tends to careless writing. Chesterton's work is all equally readable, but not all equally worth reading. He is an inspired writer, but he goes on writing quite as brilliantly after the inspiration has given out, just as a man writing in the dark goes on after his fountain pen has run dry and is only making meaningless scratches on the paper. His display of gems of thought is hardly to be matched by any other show window, but there are so many paste diamonds among them of equal brilliancy that the half of the world which does not like Chesterton takes it for granted that they are all paste. They may even quote Chesterton in support of their view for he says: "All is gold that glitters for the glitter is the gold."
When ex-President Roosevelt, on his return from Africa, was given a dinner by the journalists of London, he was asked by the committee on arrangements whom he would like to have placed by his side to talk with during the meal, and he promptly chose Chesterton. I was of much the same mind when I went to England, but not being in a position to summon him to my side I sought him out in his home, Overroads. This is a little way out of London, near the town of Beaconsfield from which Disraeli took his title,—uncomfortable quarters, I should say, for Chesterton, considering his antipathy for Disraeli and his race.
Arriving at Beaconsfield by the tea-time train I walked up the hill to where I saw a big man sitting on the little porch of a little house. He impressed me as Sunday impressed Symes. I do not mean Billy Sunday, but quite a different personage, the Sunday of "The Man Who Was Thursday." Great men are apt to shrink when you get too close to them. Mr. Chesterton did not. He was too big to fit his environment. The house was what we should call a bungalow; I don't know what they call it in England. It was on a little triangular lot set with trees half his height and a rustic arbor patiently awaiting vines. Afterward I saw in the paper that Mr. Chesterton broke a leg on that arbor. I suppose he must have tripped over it like a croquet wicket.
Mr. Chesterton has a big head covered with curly locks, two of them gray. He is gifted with a Taft-like smile, and talks in a deep-toned, wheezy voice, punctuating his remarks with an engaging chuckle. It is no trouble to interview him. I never met a man who talked more easily or more interestingly. "There are no uninteresting subjects," he says, "there are only uninterested persons." Start any idea you please as unexpectedly as a rabbit from its lair, and he will after it in a second and follow all its turns and windings until he runs it down. His mind is as agile as a movie actor. Epigrams, paradoxes, puns, anecdotes, characterizations, metaphors, fell from his lips in such profusion that I, who knew the market value of such verbal gems, felt as nervous as a jeweler who sees a lady break her necklace. I wanted him to stop while I got down on my knees and picked them up. But he did not mind wasting clever things on me, for there were so many more where those came from. Besides they were not so completely lost as I feared. I recognized some of them a few weeks later in hiscauseriepage ofThe Illustrated London News.
But when you visit Mr. Chesterton don't make the mistake that I did and attempt to please him by telling him how much he reminds you of Doctor Johnson. He admitted to me that he had "paged a bit" in that rôle, but I judge from what he says in "The Mystery of a Pageant"[14]he does not regard his selection for the part as altogether complimentary to his personal appearance.
Perhaps he would not like it any better to be told that the resemblance was more psychical than physical. Chesterton is doubtless the most dogmatic man England has seen since Doctor Johnson died. He has equally violent prejudices, and he expresses them with equal wit. Unfortunately he has no Boswell. Chesterton has written a book about Shaw, but so far Shaw has shown no disposition to return the compliment.
Shaw, in speaking of Coburn's portrait of Chesterton says: "He is our Quinbus Flestrin, the young Man Mountain, a large abounding gigantically cherubic person."
It is Shaw's theory that G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are not two persons, but one mythological monster to be known as "The Chesterbelloc."
Chesterton's ideals are large and generous and very solid: A divinely ordered church, a really democratic state, and a life of that hopeful and humble wonder that men call romance. But his usefulness as a moral philosopher is impaired by the possession of a number of blind spots or inveterate prejudices that prevent him from seeing clearly. He is like the tenor who had aelurophobia and was upset whenever a cat came into the room. So whenever one of these phobias comes into his mind Chesterton loses his poise and sings false. Some of the things for which he has a particular abhorrence are: cocoa, colonies, divorce, equal suffrage, Esperanto, eugenics, large scale production, latitudinarianism, Lloyd George, official sanitation, organized charity, peace movement, pragmatism, prohibition, public schools, simplified spelling, vaccination, vivisection, and workingmen's insurance, all of which some of the rest of us look upon with favor. His inability to see any good in these and a score of other modern movements brings him into curious inconsistencies. For instance, he is an enthusiast for universal manhood suffrage. But any mention of woman suffrage is like waving a red coat before an Irish bull. His statement that there are three things which women can never understand, liberty, equality, and fraternity, is as brutal and untrue as anything Nietzsche or Strindberg has said.
In his essay on William James he says "pragmatism is bosh", yet his whole system of apologetics is based upon the pragmatic argument; religion is true because it works. "If Christianity makes a man happy while his legs are being eaten off by a lion, might it not make me happy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down the street?" In order to make due allowance for Chesterton's class and race prejudices while reading his works, it is convenient to keep a list like this as a bookmark:
TABLE OF CHESTERTON'S AFFECTIONS AND AVERSIONSCLASSESHe likes most: 1. Children2. Peasants3. Domestic women4. Artisans and laborers5. Priests and soldiers6. Poets and adventurers7. Shopkeepers(hereabouts is a great gulf fixed)8. Business and professional men9. Criminals (including politicians)10. The conceited professional classes (the intellectuals)11. Landlords12. MillionairesHe dislikes most: 13. MultimillionairesRACESHe likes most: 1. Irish2. French3. English4. Russians5. Turks6. Jews7. GermansHe dislikes most: 8. Cosmopolites
In his youth Chesterton wrote a poem in defense of Dreyfus, "To A Certain Nation", but by the time he came to publish it in his first volume, "The Wild Knight", he had so changed his opinion that he makes a partial apology for it in the preface. Since then he has, in connection with his brother Cecil and Mr. Belloc, introduced into British journalism a foreign element from which it had formerly been free, the political anti-Semitism which has been the cause of so much disturbance in France, Russia, and Germany. Almost every number ofThe New Witness, edited by Cecil Chesterton, contains sneers at Jewish financiers and politicians, and in 1912 he went so far that he was fined five hundred dollars and costs for defamatory libel of Godfrey Isaacs, director of the Marconi Company. The prosecution significantly was conducted by Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith.
It is greatly to be hoped thatThe New Witnessgroup may get rid of their race prejudice and cut down on their muckraking, which, though often necessary, is never nice, and bring forward the constructive part of their program, for this is the time when there is a chance to do something. For instance, the British Party system against which they so long clamored without effect has now broken down under stress of the war, but there is nothing in sight to take its place. G. K. Chesterton was quite right when he said that "the party system of England is an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing political conflicts",[15]and that what party politics had done was to turn Balfour from the analysis of the doubtful to the defense of the dubious and Morley from writing on compromise to practicing it. And again, "I think the cabinet minister should be taken a little less seriously and the cabinet maker a little more."[16]
Chesterton protests against being regarded as a mere obstructionist and reactionary in such language as the following:
I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public schools. I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make them public. I do not wish to make Parliament stop working, but rather to make it work; not to shut up the churches, but rather to open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of property, but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly universal and property decently proper.[17]
I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public schools. I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make them public. I do not wish to make Parliament stop working, but rather to make it work; not to shut up the churches, but rather to open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of property, but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly universal and property decently proper.[17]
Man has always believed in a paradise, but he has never been certain whether to look for it in the past or the future, or both. We have very detailed descriptions of Atlantis, Valhalla, the Golden Age, Utopia, and the like, but the tense of the verb is indeterminable. Chesterton is equally uncertain as to whether to look forward or backward for his ideal state. His "Christmas Song for Three Gilds" is headed "To be sung a long time ago—or hence." He has not yet favored us with a blueprint of his Utopia, so we are left to surmise what he likes from the very plain indications he has given us of what he does not like. Chesterton seems to obey a negative magnetism and orients himself by his antipathies.
We may infer that his ideal would be a self-governing community of equally well-to-do, leisurely, patriotic, domestic, religious, jolly, beer-drinking, pork-eating, art-loving, freehold farmers and gild craftsmen, clustered about the village inn and church. They would all be of one race and creed, healthy without doctors, wealthy without financiers, governed without politicians. He believes with Belloc that the nearest historical approach to this ideal was Western Europe about 1200-1500. He probably would agree with Doctor James J. Walsh in calling the thirteenth "the greatest of all centuries." Among contemporary communities I should say that the mujiks of the Russian mir come the nearest to complying with his specifications, although he has not, to my knowledge, shown any disposition to leave London and take to the steppes in order to live the simple life in these communities of pure democracy. But perhaps this is because women vote in the mir. Of the made-to-order utopias I presume that of William Morris's "News from Nowhere" would suit him better than the Socialists for whom it was written.
To sum up Chesterton in a sentence, I must borrow the words of theForumarticle of O. W. Firkins:
A man who preaches an impassioned and romantic Christianity, and who adds to that the Jeffersonian doctrine of democracy, the Wordsworthian and Tolstoyan doctrine of the majesty of the untutored man, the Carlylean doctrine of wonder, the Emersonian doctrine of the spirituality latent in all objects, the Dickensian faith in the worth and wisdom of the feeble-minded, the Browningesque standard of optimism, affects us as a man with whom, whatever his vagaries and harlequinries, it would be wholesome and inspiriting to live.
A man who preaches an impassioned and romantic Christianity, and who adds to that the Jeffersonian doctrine of democracy, the Wordsworthian and Tolstoyan doctrine of the majesty of the untutored man, the Carlylean doctrine of wonder, the Emersonian doctrine of the spirituality latent in all objects, the Dickensian faith in the worth and wisdom of the feeble-minded, the Browningesque standard of optimism, affects us as a man with whom, whatever his vagaries and harlequinries, it would be wholesome and inspiriting to live.
Read whatever is handiest, for there is no order and sequence is not important. Chesterton expresses much the same philosophy of life in essays, stories, and poems and there has been little change in his opinions or style in the sixteen years he has been writing.
Nowhere has he given a complete and orderly presentation of his views. He is a born journalist and prefers to fire at a moving target. About once a year he gathers up a sheaf of his contributions to the press and puts them out under as general and indefinite a title as he can think up, but he never can think up a title broad enough to cover the variety of topics he treats. The heading to a chapter gives no clue to the theme or its importance. One is apt to find his deepest philosophy tucked away in some corner of a discourse on cheese or mumming or penny dreadfuls. He is like a submarine; when he goes under you never can tell where he will come out. Consequently, as I say, it does not matter much which volume you pick up; they are equally brilliant and inconsequential.
His views on religion and society are expounded most thoroughly in "Orthodoxy" (1908), "Heretics" (1905) both published by John Lane Company, and "What's Wrong With the World" (1910, published by Dodd, Mead & Company). Somewhat briefer, more varied, and trivial in topic are "All Things Considered" (1908, Lane), "Tremendous Trifles" (1909, Dodd), "Alarms and Discursions" (1910, Dodd), "A Miscellany of Men" (1912, Dodd).
Since the war began he has published "The Barbarism of Berlin" (1914), "The Appetite of Tyranny" including "Letters to an Old Garibaldian" (1915, Dodd), and "The Crimes of England" (1916, Lane). To this we should add his first work, "The Defendant" (1901, Dodd). InThe New Witnesshe has been running a weekly page under the head of "At the Sign of the World's End", and when his brother, Cecil Chesterton, enlisted as a private in October, 1916, he assumed the editorship of that lively journal.
His youthful poetry is in "The Wild Knight and Other Poems" (1900, Dutton). "The Ballad of the White Horse" (1911, Lane) contains his epic of King Alfred, and "Poems" (1915, Lane) contains all the rest of his poetry except what still remains buried in "the files." Of these I must mention "The Wife of Flanders", which may be found in theLiterary Digest, Current Opinion, orLiving Ageof 1914.
Chesterton has written one play, "Magic: A Fantastic Comedy" (1913, Putnam), which was a success on the London and New York stage.
Of his allegorical fantasias I have discussed at some length "The Man Who Was Thursday" (1908, Dodd). "The Ball and the Cross" (1910, Lane) describes the conflict between a religious fanatic and an equally intolerant atheist. "Manalive" (1912, Lane) deals with domesticity, and "The Flying Inn" (1915, Lane) is a defense of the public house. In "Napoleon of Notting Hill" (1908, Lane), his first romance, he preaches parochialism.
His detective or rather mystery stories are: "The Club of Queer Trades" (1905, Harper); "The Innocence of Father Brown" (1911, Lane); and "The Wisdom of Father Brown" (1914, Lane).
His literary criticism, mostly written as prefaces to standard reprints, makes delightful reading, although sometimes he uses his author merely as a point of departure. Of Dickens he has written most and best in the prefaces to Everyman's Library edition (collected in "Appreciations and Criticism of Dickens", Dutton) and "Charles Dickens; A Critical Study" (1906, Dodd). His "Victorian Age in Literature" (1913, Home University Library, Holt) is not quite so interesting because he does not have room to ramble. His "George Bernard Shaw" (1910, Lane) is not much of a biography, but it is valuable as bringing into close contrast these representatives of opposing points of view. His "Robert Browning" forms an admirable volume of the English Men of Letters series (1908, Macmillan). Besides these he has written many biographical sketches and critiques, among which may be mentioned: "Five Types" (1911, Holt); "Varied Types" (1902, Dodd); "G. F. Watts" (1902, Dutton); "William Blake" (1910, Dutton); "Samuel Johnson" (1903, and 1911); "Carlyle" (1902 and 1904) and "R. L. Stevenson" (Pott).
Chesterton is eminently quotable, and the pocket volume of "Wit and Wisdom of Chesterton" (1911, Dodd) will afford plenty of food for thought for any one.
There are two biographies of Chesterton. One published anonymously in 1908 gives the best account of his early life; the other by Julius West (1916, Dodd) gives the most complete criticism of his work up to date, with a bibliography.
His picturesque personality and peculiar views have supplied innumerable journalists with material for articles. Specially noteworthy for one reason or another are: the excellent piece of criticism by O. W. Firkins inThe Forum(vol. 48,. p. 597). "The Defender of the Discarded", The Forum (vol. 44, p. 707), is harsh and unsympathetic. "Chesterton as an Artist" by Joseph B. Gilder (Bookman, vol. 39, p. 468, see also vol. 34, p. 117), containing his sketches, a sketch by Henry Murray, with sixteen portraits from childhood up, in the London Bookman, May, 1910. Wells, in his "Social Forces in England and America" (p. 205), discusses Chesterton and Belloc. "A Visit to G. K. C." by B. Russell Herts inThe Independent, November 7, 1912, contains some of Chesterton's sketches; reprinted with other interviews in Herts's "Depreciations" (1915, Boni). Chesterton wrote on "Shall the United States Fight?" inThe Independent, January 12, 1916.