G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study Part 4

He was no mean critic, whatever the tricks he played, who could pen these judgments:

The dominant pa.s.sion of the artistic Celt, such as Mr. W. B. Yeats or Sir Edward Burne-Jones, lies in the word "escape"; escape into a land where oranges grow on plum trees and men can sow what they like and reap what they enjoy. (_G. F.

Watts._)

The supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions arise from a condition of mind. (_Robert Browning._)

This essential comedy of Johnson's character is one which has never, oddly enough, been put upon the stage. There was in his nature one of the unconscious and even agreeable contradictions loved by the true comedian. . . . I mean a strenuous and sincere belief in convention, combined with a huge natural inapt.i.tude for observing it. (_Samuel Johnson_.)

Rossetti could, for once in a way, write poetry about a real woman and call her "Jenny." One has a disturbed suspicion that Morris would have called her "Jehanne." (_The Victorian Age in Literature_.)

These are a few samples collected at random, but they alone are almost sufficient to enthrone Chesterton among the critics. He has a wonderful intuitive gift of feeling for the right metaphor, for the material object that best symbolizes an impression. But one thing he lacks. Put him among authors whose view of the universe is opposed to his own, and Chesterton instantly adopts an insecticide att.i.tude. The wit of Wilde moves him not, but his morals stir him profoundly; Mr. Thomas Hardy is "a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot." Only occasionally has he a good word to say for the technique of an author whose views he dislikes. His critical work very largely consists of an attempt to describe his subjects' views of the universe, and bring them into relation with his own. His two books on Charles d.i.c.kens are little more than such an attempt. When, a few years ago, Mr.

Edwin Pugh, who had also been studying the "aspects" of d.i.c.kens, came to the conclusion that the novelist was a Socialist, Chesterton waxed exceeding wrath and gave the offending book a severe wigging in The Daily News.

He loves a good fighter, however, and to such he is always just. There are few philosophies so radically opposed to the whole spirit of Chesterton's beliefs as that of John Stuart Mill. On religion, economic doctrine, and woman suffrage, Mill held views that are offensive to G.K.C. But Mill is nevertheless invariably treated by him with a respect which approximates to reverence. The princ.i.p.al case in point, however, is Mr. Bernard Shaw, who holds all Mill's beliefs, and waves them about even more defiantly. G.K.C.'s admiration in this case led him to write a whole book about G.B.S. in addition to innumerable articles and references. The book has the following characteristic introduction:

Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do not agree with him.

Chesterton, of course, could not possibly agree with such an avowed and utter Puritan as Mr. Shaw. The Puritan has to be a revolutionary, which means a man who pushes forward the hand of the clock. Chesterton, as near as may be, is a Catholic Tory, who is a man who pushes back the hand of the clock. Superficially, the two make the clock show the same hour, but actually, one puts it on to a.m., the other back to p.m.

Between the two is all the difference that is between darkness and day.

Chesterton's point of view is distinctly like Samuel Johnson's in more respects than one. Both critics made great play with dogmatic a.s.sertions based on the literature that was before their time, at the expense of the literature that was to come after. In the book on Shaw, Chesterton strikes a blow at all innovators, although he aims only at the obvious failures.

The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freely with my favourite colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we and of things done which we cannot do. I know I cannot write a poem as good as _Lycidas_.

But it is always easy to say that the particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the future.

Sentiments such as these have made many young experimentalists feel that Chesterton is a traitor to his youth and generation. n.o.body will ever have the detachment necessary to appreciate "futurist" poetry until it is very much a thing of the past, because the near past is so much with us, and it is part of us, which the future is not. But fidelity to the good things of the past does not exonerate us from the task of looking for the germs of the good things of the future. The young poet of to-day sits at the feet of Sir Henry Newbolt, whose critical appreciation is undaunted by mere dread of new things, while to the same youth and to his friends it has simply never occurred, often enough, to think of Chesterton as a critic. It cannot be too strongly urged that an undue admiration of the distant past has sat like an incubus upon the chest of European literature, and Shakespeare's greatness is not in spite of his "small Latin and less Greek," which probably contributed to it indirectly. Had Shakespeare been a cla.s.sical scholar, he would almost certainly have modelled his plays on Seneca or Aeschylus, and the results would have been devastating. Addison's Cato, Johnson's Irene, and the dramas of Racine and Corneille are among the abysmal dullnesses mankind owes to its excessive estimation of the past. Men have always been too ready to forget that we inherit our ancestors' bad points as well as their good ones. Ancestor-worship has deprived the Chinese of the capacity to create, it has seriously affected Chesterton's power to criticize. Chesterton's own generation has seen both the victory and the downfall of form in the novels of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. H. G. Wells. It has witnessed fascinating experiments in stagecraft, some of which have a.s.suredly succeeded. It has listened to new poets and wandered in enchanted worlds where no Victorians trod. A critic in sympathy with these efforts at reform would have written the last-quoted pa.s.sage something like this:

"The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the past, because it has no boundaries; it is a soft job; you can find in it what you like. The past ages are rank, and I can daub myself freely with whatever colours I extract. It requires no courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which neutralize one another; of men certainly no wiser than we, and of things done which we could not want to do. I know I cannot write a poem as good as Lycidas. But I also know that Milton could not write a poem as good as The Hound of Heaven or M'Andrew's Hymn. And it is always easy to say that the particular kind of poetry I can write has been the poetry of some period of the past."

But Chesterton didn't; quite the reverse.

So that one comes to the sorrowful conclusion that Chesterton is at his best, as a critic, when he is writing introductions, because then he has to leave the past alone. When he is writing an introduction to one of the works of a great Victorian (d.i.c.kens always excepted) he makes his subject stand out like a solitary giant, not necessarily because he is one, but on account of the largeness of the contours, the rough shaping, and the deliberate contrasts. He has written prefaces without number, and the British Museum has not a complete set of the books introduced by him. The Fables of aesop, the Book of Job, Matthew Arnold's Critical Essays, a book of children's poems by Margaret Arndt, Boswell's Johnson, a novel by Gorky, selections from Thackeray, a life of Mr. Will Crooks, and an anthology by young poets are but a few of the books he has explained.

The last thing to be said on Chesterton as a critic is by way of ill.u.s.tration. For a series of books on artists, he wrote two, on William Blake and G. F. Watts. The first is all about mysticism, and so is the second. They are for the layman, not for the artist. They could be read with interest and joy by the colourblind. And, incidentally, they are extremely good criticism. Therein is the triumph of Chesterton. Give him a subject which he can relate with his own view of the universe, and s.p.a.ce wherein to accomplish this feat, and he will succeed in presenting his readers with a vividly outlined portrait, tinted, of course, with his own personality, but indisputably true to life, and ornamented with fascinating little gargoyles. But put him among the bourgeoisie of literature and he will sulk like an angry child.

V

THE HUMORIST AND THE POET

THERE are innumerable books--or let us say twenty--on Mr. Bernard Shaw.

They deal with him as a sociologist, a dramatist, or what not, but never as a humorist. There is a ma.s.s of books on Oscar Wilde, and they deal with everything concerned with him, except his humour. The great humorists--as such--go unsung to their graves. That is because there is nothing so obvious as a joke, and nothing so difficult to explain. It requires a psychologist, like William James, or a philosopher, like Bergson, to explain what a joke is, and then most of us cannot understand the explanation. A joke--especially another man's joke--is a thing to be handled delicately and reverently, for once the bloom is off, the joke mysteriously shrivels and vanishes. Translators are the sworn enemies of jokes; the exigencies of their deplorable trade cause them to maul the poor little things about while they are putting them into new clothes, and the result is death, or at the least an appearance of vacuous senescence. But jokes are only the crystallization of humour; it exists also in less tangible forms, such as style and all that collection of effects vaguely lumped together and called "atmosphere."

Chesterton's peculiar "atmosphere" rises like a sweet exhalation from the very ink he sheds. And it is frankly indefinable, as all genuine style is. The insincere stylists can be reduced to a formula, because they work from a formula; Pater may be brought down to an arrangement of adjectives and commas, Doctor Johnson to a succession of rhythms, carefully pruned of excrescences, and so on, but the stylist who writes as G.o.d made him defies such a.n.a.lysis. Meredith and Shaw and Chesterton will remain mysteries even unto the latest research student of the Universities of Jena and Chicago. Patient students (something of the sort is already being done) will count up the number of nouns and verbs and commas in _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ and will express the result in such a form as this--[A]

_ _ / / nouns _________ sin A Chesterton (G. K.) = ------ + / 2log bn - ----- _/_/ verbs / c e 47

But they will fail to touch the essential Chesterton, because one of the beauties of this form of a.n.a.lysis is that when the formula has been obtained, n.o.body is any the wiser as to the manner of its use. We know that James Smith is composed of beef and beer and bread, because all evidence goes to show that these are the only things he ever absorbs, but n.o.body has ever suggested that a synthesis of foodstuffs will ever give us James Smith.

Now the difficulty of dealing with the humour of Chesterton is that, in doing so, one is compelled to handle it, to its detriment. If in the chapter on his Romances any reader thought he detected the voice and the style of Chesterton, he is grievously mistaken. He only saw the scaffolding, which bears the same relation to the finished product as the skeleton bears to the human body.

Consider these things:

If you throw one bomb you are only a murderer; but if you keep on persistently throwing bombs, you are in awful danger of at last becoming a prig.

If we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation.

If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to be inscribed, "For the Fathers of Gentlemen only." In two generations they can do the trick.

Now these propositions are not merely snippets from a system of philosophy, presented after the manner of the admirers of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. These are quotations which display a quite exceptional power of surprising people. The anticlimaxes of the first two pa.s.sages, the bold dip into the future at the expense of the past in the third are more than instances of mere verbal felicity. They indicate a writer capable of the humour which feeds upon daily life, and is therefore thoroughly democratic and healthy. For there are two sorts of humour; that which feeds upon its possessor, Oscar Wilde is the supreme example of this type of humorist, and that which draws its inspiration from its surroundings, of which the great exemplar is d.i.c.kens, and Chesterton is his follower. The first exhausts itself sooner or later, because it feeds on its own blood, the second is inexhaustible. This theory may be opposed on the ground that humour is both internal and external in its origin. The supporters of this claim are invited to take a holiday in bed, or elsewhere away from the madding crowd, and then see how humorous they can be.

Humour has an unfortunate tendency to stale. The joke of yesteryear already shows frays upon its sleeves. The wit of the early volumes of Punch is in the last stages of decrepitude. Watch an actor struggling to conceal from his audience the fact that he is repeating one of Shakespeare's puns. We tolerate the humour of Congreve, not because it is thoroughly amusing, but because it has survived better than most.

Humorous verse stands a slightly better chance of evoking smiles in its old age. There is always its unalterable verbal neatness; tradition, too, lingers more lovingly around fair shapes, and a poem is a better instance of form than a paragraph. Mankind may grow blase, if it will, but as a poet of the comic, Chesterton will live long years. Take for example that last and worst of his novels _The Flying Inn_. Into this he has pitched with a fascinating recklessness a quant.i.ty of poems, garnered from The New Witness and worthy of the immortality which is granted the few really good comic poems. There is the poem of Noah, with that stimulating line with which each stanza ends. The last one goes:

But Noah he sinned, and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod, Till a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod, And you can't get wine at a P.S.A., or Chapel, or Eisteddfod; For the Curse of Water has come again because of the wrath of G.o.d.

And water is on the Bishop's board, and the Higher Thinker's shrine, But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.

There is a lunatic song against grocers, who are accused of nonconformity, and an equally lunatic song in several instalments on being a vegetarian:

I am silent in the Club, I am silent in the pub, I am silent on a bally peak in Darien; For I stuff away for life Shoving peas in with a knife, Because I am at heart a vegetarian.

There is a joyous thing about a millionaire who lived the simple life, and a new version of "St. George for Merry England." Tea, cocoa, and soda-water are the subjects of another poem. The verses about Roundabout are very happy:

Some say that when Sir Lancelot Went forth to find the Grail, Grey Merlin wrinkled up the roads, For hope that he should fail; All roads led back to Lyonnesse And Camelot in the Vale, I cannot yield a.s.sent to this Extravagant hypothesis, The plain shrewd Briton will dismiss Such rumours (_Daily Mail_).

But in the streets of Roundabout Are no such factions found, Or theories to expound about Or roll upon the ground about, In the happy town of Roundabout, That makes the world go round.

And there are lots more like this.

Then there are the _Ballades Urbane_ which appeared in the early volumes of The Eye-Witness. They have refrains with the true human note. Such as "But will you lend me two-and-six?"

ENVOI Prince, I will not be knighted! No!

Put up your sword and stow your tricks!

Offering the Garter is no go-- BUT WILL YOU LEND ME TWO-AND-SIX?

In prose Chesterton is seldom the mere jester; he will always have a moral or two, at the very least, at his fingers' ends, or to be quite exact, at the end of his article. He is never quite irresponsible. He seldom laughs at a man who is not a reformer.

Or let us take another set of ill.u.s.trations, this time in prose. (Once more I protest that I shall not take the reader through all the works of Chesterton.) I mean the articles "Our Note Book" which he contributed to The Ill.u.s.trated London News. They are of a familiar type; a series of paragraphs on some topical subject, with little s.p.a.ces between them in order to encourage the weary reader. Chesterton wrote this cla.s.s of article supremely well. He would seize on something apparently trivial, and exalt it into a symptom. When he had given the disease a name, he went for the quack doctors who professed to remedy it. He goes to Letchworth, in which abode of middle-cla.s.s faddery he finds a teetotal public-house, pretending to look like the real thing, and calling itself "The Skittles Inn." He immediately raises the question, Can we dissociate beer from skittles? Then he widens out his thesis.

Our life to-day is marked by perpetual attempts to revive old-fashioned things while omitting the human soul in them that made them more than fashions.

And he concludes: