Chesterton is perhaps perceived as a greater Catholic apologist than Belloc, largely due to the enormous influence that his two important works, Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, exerted on several generations of converts to the Faith. Without wishing to understate the importance of either of these works, or indeed other works of apologetics by Chesterton, it is necessary to raise a small plaintive voice in praise of Belloc’s seminal work, Survivals and New Arrivals. This sadly neglected work needs to be rediscovered. In essence it sets out the intellectual history of the past two thousand years, delineating the areas of heresy and illustrating the perennial truth and wisdom of the Church. Its style is more cumbersome and perhaps less exhilarating than Chesterton’s Orthodoxy or The Everlasting Man. Chesterton takes our breath away with his vision of the Church as a heavenly chariot. Belloc, in Survivals and New Arrivals, makes us gasp in amazement as we perceive the Church as an unstoppable tank trundling over the horizon onto the landscape of history, relentlessly overpowering the impotent defense of her enemies. Whether one prefers the pyrotechnic prose of Chesterton, where the dazzling words serve as swords to cut down the enemy—wordplay as swashbuckling swordplay, wordsmanship as swordsmanship—or whether one prefers Belloc’s battering rams and heavy artillery, the defense of the Faith is as successful in both cases.
Having spread the Chesterbelloc on the operating table, we feel that we have failed to dissect the beast as we had hoped. On the contrary, we feel that, far from making incisive inroads into the anatomy of the beast, we have barely scratched its surface. A whole book would be needed to study the nature of the Chesterbelloc with anything like the meticulousness that the subject requires. Perhaps the book will one day be written. In the meantime, this short exploratory operation has at least enabled us to see that both halves of the Chesterbelloc are indispensable. Chesterton’s childlike and whimsical genius is enhanced by the balance of Belloc’s gravitas; Belloc’s bellicosity and bombast is softened by the counterpoise of Chesterton’s charity. Perhaps we have at least discovered enough to confirm that the Chesterbelloc, as a mystical and mythological beast, is greater than its component parts. Perhaps we can truly infer that, as far as this particular beast is concerned, two is indeed a friendship but one’s an army.
Since our end is our beginning, as Mary Stuart proclaimed and as T. S. Eliot never ceased to remind us, we shall end as we began. We commenced with a playfully plaintive comment by one of the Chesterbelloc’s most illustrious enemies; we shall end in the same fashion. We began with Shaw; we shall end with Wells.
Wells complained that “Chesterton and Belloc have surrounded Catholicism with a kind of boozy halo.” Wells, as usual, was wrong. As amusingly attractive as is the image he successfully presents, he fails to convey the magnitude of the truth he fails to perceive. The Church is not in need of a halo, boozy or otherwise. As the Mystical Body of Christ, she has her halo enshrined within her very being. The Chesterbelloc’s value to the Church, and consequently its value to the world, is as a sometimes boozy defender of that halo. All sons and daughters of Christendom should, in the name of the halo of holiness, raise their glasses to the Chesterbelloc. May we always rejoice in the “boozy” beauty of the beast,
And thank the Lord
For the temporal sword,
And howling heretics too;
And whatever good things
Our Christendom brings,
But especially barley brew!
4
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CHESTERTON AND SAINT FRANCIS
CHESTERTON ENJOYED a lifelong friendship with Saint Francis of Assisi. As a small boy, long before he had an inkling of the nature of Catholicism, Chesterton was read a story by his parents about a man who gave up all his possessions, even the clothes he was wearing on his back, to follow Christ in holy poverty. From the moment the wide-eyed Gilbert first heard the story of Saint Francis, he knew he had found a friend. As such, long before he had submitted to the reason of Rome, Chesterton had succumbed to the romance of Assisi.
Perhaps inevitably, childlike wonder was followed by adolescent doubt. As Chesterton groped toward manhood during the early 1890s, he succumbed temporarily to the beguiling power of the Decadents. Under the charismatic and iconoclastic seduction of Oscar Wilde, the world of Chesterton’s youth seemed under the mad and maddening influence of those who preferred the shadows of sin and cynicism to the light of virtue and verity. Romance itself had donned the mask of darkness. It was in this gloom-laden atmosphere that the young Chesterton wrote a poem on Saint Francis of Assisi, published in November 1892. The questions it asks were a quest for answers in a world of doubt.
Is there not a question rises from his word of “brother, sister”,
Cometh from that lonely dreamer that today we shrink to find?
Shall the lives that moved our brethren leave us at the gates of darkness,
What were heaven if ought we cherished shall be wholly left behind?
Is it God’s bright house we dwell in, or a vault of dark confusion. . .?
This poem, dedicated to the “lonely dreamer” of Assisi, illuminates the darkness of Chesterton’s adolescence. The young poet, seeking to make sense of the conflicting visions of reality vying for his allegiance, was beginning to perceive that the Decadents had cast out Brother Sun so that they could worship Sister Moon. Within three years of the publication of this poem, Wildean Decadence had decayed in the squalor of the police courts. Wilde himself would repent and would be received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. In his conversion, he was merely following many of the other Decadents, both in England and France, who, having dipped their toes in the antechambers of hell, had decided, prudently, that it wasn’t somewhere they wished to spend eternity. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Huysmans, Beardsley, Johnson and Dowson had all followed the “Decadent path to Christ”, repenting of their sin and embracing the loving forgiveness to be found in Mother Church. Paradoxically, the path to Christ was always to be found in the implicit Christian morality of much of the art of the Decadents, particularly, and most memorably, in Wilde’s masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Chesterton’s own response, and riposte, to the Decadence of the 1890s can be found in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday. Whereas the Decadents—taking their own perverse inspiration from the dark romanticism of Byron, Shelley and Keats—had stripped the masks off “reality” and discovered darkness, Chesterton stripped the masks off “reality” (from the “anarchists” in his novel) and discovered light. By the dawn of the new century, Chesterton had emerged from the subreal dream of Decadence into the real awakening of a Christian perception of the cosmos. In this journey from darkness to light, he had as his constant ally and companion the “lonely dreamer” of Assisi. On 1 December 1900, the day after Wilde had died a Catholic in Paris, Chesterton, not yet a Catholic, was singing the praises of Saint Francis in an article published in The Speaker.
To most people . . . there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of Saint Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk and not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked; we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also.
These words, which could have served as the introduction to Chesterton’s biography of Saint Francis published twenty-three years later, indicated that the saint had served as an antidote to the poison of the previous decade.
In 1902, in Twelve Types, Chesterton again lauded Saint Francis with the lucidity and faith that had been almost wholly absent in the questioning ambivalence of his poem of ten years earlier.
In July 1922 Chesterton was finally received into the Catholic Church. Eight weeks later he received the sacrament of confirmation, choosing Francis as his confirmation name. It would, perhaps, be easy to suggest that the obvious motive for the choice was a desire to show love and respect for Frances, his wife. It was, however, hardly surprising that he should have chosen the saint who had been the friend of his childhood, the ally in his confused adolescence and the companion in his approach to the Faith. In any case, the two motives are not mutually exclusive. In pleasing his wife, he was also pleasing himself.
At the time of his reception into the Church, Chesterton was already planning a full-length biography of Saint Francis that would be published in the following year. Confirming the saint’s importance, he wrote that the figure of Saint Francis “stands on a sort of bridge connecting my boyhood with my conversion to many other things”. With these words in mind, it is not difficult to imagine that Chesterton took on the writing of Saint Francis of Assisi so soon after his conversion as an act of thanksgiving to the saint who, above all others, had accompanied him on his journey to the Faith.
The admiration that Chesterton felt toward Saint Francis was inextricably bound up with his belief in the superiority of childlike innocence over all forms of cynicism. Saint Francis and his followers were called the Jongleurs de Dieu because of the innocence of their jollity and the jollity of their innocence. “The jongleur was properly a joculator or jester; sometimes he was what we should call a juggler.” It was this mystical synthesis of laughter and humility, a belief that playing and praying go hand in hand, which was the secret of the saint’s success. Ultimately, however, the laughter and the humility were rooted in gratitude because, as Chesterton discerned with characteristic and Franciscan sagacity, “there is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset”.
Chesterton’s life of Saint Francis was destined to be one of the most commercially and critically successful of all his books. Typical of the enthusiastic response of the critics was that of Patrick Braybrooke, who described the book as “astoundingly brilliant”: “The Catholic Church has found in Mr. Chesterton the greatest interpreter of her greatest saint.” Ultimately, however, the book’s brilliance shone from the blurring of the distinction between the Chestertonian and the Franciscan. It is, at times, difficult to distinguish between Chesterton’s exposition of the Franciscan spirit and his elucidation of Chestertonian philosophy. Throughout the pages of the book, Chesterton chases the saint, complaining that all explanations of the saint’s enigmatic character were “too slight for satisfaction”. The book unravels like a heaven-sent game of hide-and-seek, similar to the plot of The Man Who Was Thursday, with the Man who was Francis remaining as difficult to pin down as the Man who was Sunday. Yet, as with the plot to the novel, there is something thrilling in the chase.
Whatever the book’s shortcomings as an entirely satisfying explanation of the saint, it remains an emphatically successful romp and romance in the true Franciscan and Chestertonian spirit. From start to finish, Chesterton plays cat and mouse with the Jongleur de Dieu. And, in keeping with the poetry of the saint, it doesn’t really matter that sister cat fails to catch brother mouse. The charm is in the chase. For those reading Chesterton’s Saint Francis of Assisi for the first time, you are in for a rare treat. Prepare to be charmed. Enjoy the chase!
5
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SHADES OF GRAY IN THE SHADOW OF WILDE
THE DISCOVERY OF a “new” novel by G. K. Chesterton, sixty-five years after his death, has sent ripples of excitement through the literary world. It is, of course, not a new novel in the literal sense of the word but, as the cover of this attractively produced volume proclaims, “a first novel, previously unpublished”. It was also, prior to publication, a first novel, previously untitled—a fact that its discoverer, Denis J. Conlon, has rectified. Basil Howe: A Story of Young Love is, however, far more exciting as a detective story than as a love story, and far more alluring as a barely concealed portrait of the young Chesterton than as an inadequately revealed portrait of “Basil Howe”. It is the character of the author, not the character in the novel, who emerges from its fascinating pages.
Like all good detective stories, Basil Howe seduces the reader with tantalizing clues. Conlon, as both a dedicated Chestertonian and as a diligent academic, has uncovered many of these clues in the course of his work in preparing the manuscript for publication. We learn how the manuscript was discovered among Chesterton’s notebooks “which had long lain forgotten under articles of clothing in an old box trunk”; we discover how the notebooks themselves had been saved from the municipal tip (or garbage can, for our American readers) by Dorothy Collins, Chesterton’s secretary; we are taken through the painstaking process by which Professor Conlon assembled separated sections of the manuscript so that the novel could begin to emerge from the fragments. This, in itself, is an intriguing yarn—and we are still only on the first pages of Professor Conlon’s introduction, long before we get to the novel itself.
Most importantly, Professor Conlon is convinced, and is pretty convincing in his conviction, that the novel was probably written in late 1893 or early 1894, when Chesterton was only nineteen years old. If this is so, the plot really thickens.
On 6 October 1893 Chesterton began his studies at University College in London and the Slade School of Art. It was at Slade, by his own admission, that he had temporarily fallen under the spell of the Decadents “and their perpetual hints of the luxurious horrors of paganism”. Chesterton’s “decadence” was short-lived, but if his own account is to be believed, it was very real while it lasted. “I deal here”, he wrote in his autobiography, “with the darkest and most difficult part of my task; the period of youth which is full of doubts and morbidities and temptations; and which, though in my case mainly subjective, has left in my mind for ever a certitude upon the objective solidity of sin.” In Orthodoxy, a book he wrote in 1908, he confessed that “I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen”. In 1893, at the age of nineteen and at the time he was apparently writing his first novel, he had regressed further:
I am not proud of believing in the Devil. To put it more correctly, I am not proud of knowing the Devil. I made his acquaintance by my own fault; and followed it up along lines which, had they been followed further, might have led to devil-worship or the devil knows what.
In truth, Chesterton did not “know” the Devil at the age of nineteen any more than he was a pagan at twelve or an agnostic at sixteen. He had not formulated a final view in any of these areas at any of these ages. He was still searching, groping, exploring. He was asking the questions but, as yet, had not received the answers. Catholicism, Protestantism, paganism, agnosticism, socialism and spiritualism were all influences to varying degrees at varying times. During these formative years he caught these influences for short periods much as a man catches influenza. Each was a passing fancy, a temporary aberration battling for supremacy. None was accepted as definitive fact; all were fed on as fads that faded away, one by one, until the truth emerged from the remnants.
Nonetheless, Chesterton did have, so it seems or so he claimed, a decadent or devilish phase in his intellectual and emotional development, and this novel was written at the very height, or depth, of its influence upon him. It is this aspect of Basil Howe that is most intriguing and most fascinating.
The circles in which Chesterton moved at the Slade School of Art were very much under the spell of the Decadents and, in particular, under the beguiling influence of Oscar Wilde, wh
ose novel The Picture of Dorian Gray had been published three years earlier. It is inconceivable that Chesterton had not read Wilde’s controversial book, and there is evidence, albeit subliminal, in the pages of Basil Howe that he had done so. The fact that Chesterton named his heroine, the object of Basil Howe’s affections, Gertrude Grey, is no doubt entirely coincidental, but there is more than a hint in Chesterton’s characterization of Howe to suggest the powerful, if invisible, presence of Dorian Gray.
The effects of Wilde’s worldly influence on the otherworldly Chesterton are laughably absurd, and it is hardly surprising that Chesterton’s naïve teenage efforts to make his hero sophisticated in the Wildean sense are never convincing. He is convivial even when he is trying to be maudlin; chivalrous when he claims to be a charlatan; a gentleman when he protests that he is a cad. Basil Howe wears the masks of Wildean sophistication about as convincingly, as comfortably and as comically as a six-year-old child might wear her mother’s makeup and shoes.
Chesterton is more convincing when his characters cease to imitate the Wildean with any sort of reverential deference and are allowed to mimic it mockingly instead. Most memorable in this respect is the discourse by the character Valentine Amiens on the legacy of classical Greece. “The Athenians . . . selected as wives decent and hardworking women and called them by one name which I forget. They then locked them in a kind of everlasting kitchen and told them to do the housekeeping. Then they had another set of women, about whom the less said the better, and called them another name I forget. These women were very clever and amusing and said all sorts of funny things. They also dressed well, I believe. So you see the enlightened Athenians went to the bad women when they wanted wit, and went to the good ones when they wanted dinner.
Literary Giants Literary Catholics Page 8
