MOULDERS OF PUBLIC OPINION : MR. G. K. CHESTERTON

New Zealand Tablet, 5 June 1919, Page 17

MOULDERS OF PUBLIC OPINION : MR. G. K. CHESTERTON

(Hy E. T. llaymond, in E very man.)

Mr. Chesterton, as a jesting philosopher, suffers one considerable disadvantage. Serious people tend to like his jokes and distrust his philosophy. Flippant people are willing to respect his philosophy at a distance, but refuse to be amused by his pleasantries. There is a highly intellectual set of men— their view is expressed by Mr. A. G. Gardiner —who will not have Mr. Chesterton as a thinker, but roar their sides out when he says “Pass the mustard.” They insist on treating him simply as an embodied, even over-em-bodied, jest, as “your only jig-maker,” a “Thousand Best Things,” bound, like the books of Meudon, in human skin. On the other hand, the professional merrymakers find little amusement in Mr. Chesterton. Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Cadbury parted. Mr. Chesterton and Sir Owen Seaman have apparently never met. The greatest joke of the age is never seen in Punch.

It is, I suppose, Mr. Chesterton’s own fault that he is so generally conceived as a chuckle, et pro-terra jHirvum. He has made himself, or allowed himself to become, too much of a character. There was a time when he sat on a high-legged stool, in a city office, doing something with invoices. It is true he did not stay there long, but his mere presence for the fraction of a day would seem proof that at. one time he was thought commercially possible, capable of being made some sort of a clerk. That is to say, he must have presented

some outward resemblance to other youths ; from Aidgate Pump to St. Paul’s Churchyard no firm exists wide-minded enough to admit a recruit with the? vast sombrero, the Samsonian locks, and the Bolivar-poncho cloak which at a later period were the honest pride of Fleet Street, still revelling, though grown prim itself, in the reputation of Bohemianism. Whether Mr. Chesterton, of fixed purpose, adopted the dress and mannerisms of his earlier period, or whether it was ? all more or less an accident, only Mr. Chesterton may say. But in permitting himself to become a character he threw away much of his birthright as an influence..... The fault is, of course, the time’s as well as Mr. Chesterton’s. Socrates was joked at as much as Mr. Chesterton, but Socrates was no joke. Many a'- saint must have raised a coarse laugh by his appearance, but no saint was ever a laughing matter. Yet we moderns, with our mania for specialism, will hardly allow Jack Point to have a soul to save or a tooth to ache. If accepted as an authentic funny man, he must be funny for ever. The mere fact about Mr. Chesterton is that he is a big man, who dresses as he likes, and, being inactive and fond of his comfort, used to take many cabs when cabs could be taken. lie also drank a certain moderate quantity of beer when it was, at .least, an intelligible proceeding to drink beer. Further, ho preferred an excellent meal in a tavern, with good company, to decorous malnutrition at. two shillings a mouthful. - It was inevitable that a legend should grow round such a man ; unfortunately the legend, for most people, has strangled the man, as ivy does a tree. I have before me what purports to be a critical study of Mr. Chesterton. If I knew nothing else of the subject I should picture a person physically and mentally inert, conceited, rather puerile, and given to paltry verbal smartness —a Cockney Tony Lumpkin who, like Olivia Primrose, had “read a great deal of controversy.’’ It may be Mr. Chesterton’s fault that he is so represented. It is certainly society’s misfortune that it has no clearer estimate of one of the most powerful personalities of the time. • "?> Clearly the only way to arrive at the truth is to put in as evidence Mr. Chesterton’s own books. Swinburne has protested against the theory that an unlettered Shakespere wrote “Hamlet” without effort; in odd times—“as a bird might moult a feather or a fool might break a jest’’ ; he knew that such things were not made so. And the works of Gilbert Keith Chesterton contain ample testimony on which to found an impeachment of a quite novel kind. He stands hereby indicted for that he has labored well and faithfully, first to see the truth and then to tell it; for that: he, being a great, rhetorician, seldom uses rhetoric to obscure or to deceive ; and, being a great wit, employs wit only to season wisdom and make it memorable.

How say you, Gilbert Keith Chesterton—are you guilty or not guilty ? , i > • Of *course, Mr. Chesterton talks nonsense sometimes, and often he is right rather by a divine luck than by conscious effort. Of much of his work he can say, like Petruchio, "It is extempore" from my motherwit.” His insight, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say his power of guessing, almost approaches a sixth /sense. His dexterity in using words is like that of a gifted stock-rider in using whips; he seems almost to misuse them in the sense of forcing them to do more than their proper work. It seems as unnatural to smash a rationalist with a pun as to flick a fly off a lady’s back with 7 a 30ft. lash. Of Mr. Chesterton’s wit there can be no question ; it is stressed most by those least inclined to take him seriously. But the praise is nearly always wrongly given. The popular idea of him is of a man perpetually standing on his head, and shouting joyously how funny things look from that standpoint; whereas the whole point of his best jokes is that he is astonished to be flat on his feet, while other men (quite gravely and naturally) are careering about upside-down. ‘ But wit,, readiness, and even genius, fail to account for all the rare merit there is in much of Mr. Chesterton’s'work. This undisciplined jester, this wayward Bohemian, has done some remarkable things. For example, there is his Victorian Age in Literal It is a trifle, of course, but such a trifle ! An essay is often condensed in a phrase, such as that which describes Macaulay’s prose as "at its best like steel and at its worst like tin,’’ or Tennyson’s work as that of "a provincial and sometimes a suburban Virgil,” "not a balance of truths, like the universe, but a balance of whims, like the British constitution.” Again, it is no light business to set about telling the history of England in 240 pages. Mr. Chesterton does not tell it : no god or mortal could. But, with much fancy, perhaps some fantasy, and a wealth of incidental wisdom, he gives more essential truth than has ever been packed in such a space by any English historical writer. There is, of course, another and weaker side to Mr. Chesterton. His proper business is to give us great truths if possible, and, failing that, what the schoolboy would call “whopping” great lies, lies so vast and provocative as to make the defence of truth a necessity. We want to know from him the rough and thorny path to one considerable place, and the broad road to another resort, even more fashionable and populous. But we do not look to him for a directory of Houndsditch or a plan of the underground places of Westminster. He is just as likely to be wrong in very small things as he is to be right in very large things. Not that the - small things are unimportant, but they are work for lesser men. By all means let Mr. Chesterton thunder at Parliamentary corruption and Parliamentary futility in general ; but the special case of the . notorious ,Mr. Snide, M.P., is better left to another. may .be. for the public good as well as for the comfort of Mr. Chesterton’s own soul that be should rail at Israel, or, as he would himself put it, rescue the Jew from, the unfair, position he occupies in the modern State. But Mr. Chesterton is too big a man to spit tlpoii 3 single Jewish gaberdine. It may be possible to respect and even sympathise with Torqticuiada. But nobody would like to think of him as taking a turn at the rack with his own hand. It is this local lack of balance, much more than fear.of the omnipresent and omnipotent Israelite, that prevents timid souls from adopting Mr. Chesterton as a leader. They are afraid that, if there happens to be no crusade, they will be invited to share in a pogrom. Yet he docs, in a roundabout way, influence many who in turn have an effect on public opinion. These men quote his jests to point morals they have furtively borrowed from him. If you are fairly familiar with Mr. Chesterton’s, thought you will recognise it as easily in the leading columns as in the “Pithy Paragraphs” or “Wisdom of the Week.” Of course, as in most cases of theft, the thief mars what he steals. But the merchandise - does reach ; some sort <•-of- - market ■ that way. . One catches thought, like - disease,, without knowing

whence, and Mr. Chesterton, if he takes notice at all, must sometimes smile at finding in the primmest quarters a faint echo of his most revolutionary slogans. For Mr. Chesterton, though and perhaps because he is an optimist, is a decided revolutionary. It must bo added a generous one, for his compelling motive is a noble and comprehensive sympathy with the captive and the oppressed. He sees in modern civilisation a Bastille in which there are very’vile dungeons, moderately comfortable cells, and pleasant quarters for the governor and his staff, but in which all, governor and staff included, are true prisoners. It is dull work for Baisemaux, the gaoler, as well as for the young prince, the unlucky pamphleteer, and the nameless wretches below the moat ; and Mr. Chesterton would set them all free.

It is the tyranny of civilisation itself, the bondage of things rather than the incidental cruelties of men themselves bound (though in chains of gold and swathes of precious paper) that he is out to fight. He sympathises with a strike as a strike, without regard to the ostensible merits of the dispute. It is an attempt of the victim bound to the tyrannous wheel of routine to throw it momentarily out of gear if ho cannot subdue it to his own rational wants. Such an attempt, if it asserts only for a moment the sovereignty of man. over things, is worth the while.