Books: Orthodoxologist

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON—Maisie Ward—Sheed & Ward ($4.50).

“People,” said the late, large Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “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 is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.”

How Chesterton chose to keep his own head is the theme of Maisie Ward’s intimate biography. Biographer Ward (wife and business partner of Publisher Francis J. Sheed) is, like Chesterton, a Roman Catholic, and writes as one. Her book is fat with Chestertonian facts. It is also intelligent, somewhat adulatory, exhaustive (668 pages).

Unorthodox Orthodoxy. No man was more unorthodox than Chesterton—in his appearance and view of orthodoxy. Author of some 100 novels, stories, plays, volumes of poems, biographies (studies of William Cobbett, Charles Dickens, Chaucer), he was one of modern Britain’s keenest literary minds and a master of paradox. A passionate journalist (for 40 years Chesterton wrote for a dozen papers), he was the creator of one of literature’s famed sleuths (Father Brown) and the most prominent Roman Catholic convert of his day. A devotee of beer and wine, he weighed between 300 and 400 Ib. Once, when he politely heaved himself up in a crowded bus, three women took the proffered seat. A lover and highly successful practitioner of romantic balladry, Chesterton carried a sword cane and a 14-in. clasp knife under his flowing cape. Assailants might have found him hard to locate, for he often could not locate himself: his absentmindedness was prodigious. He was sometimes obliged to buy a copy of his own weekly (G.K.’s) to find the address of his office. “Am in Market Harborough,” he once wired his wife. “Where ought I to be?” Frequently he wore two ties at once.

His style was equally unorthodox. Like his friendly enemy in a lifelong battle of wits, Bernard Shaw, Chesterton delighted in weaving his strictures against the unorthodox in a web of paradoxical wit. To freethinkers he said: “You are armed to the teeth 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.”

Massive Disdain. His own orthodoxy he revealed in an equal disdain for 20th-century socialism and 20th-century imperialism. In a world of massive empires and massive trusts, Chesterton wanted a revival of opportunity for the small shopkeeper and farmer. He called Britain’s colonies deplorable, distracting “suburbs.” One of his objections to the Boer War was Britain’s destruction of a small nation of small farmers. Where Shaw wanted state socialism (which Chesterton and his friends denounced as “the Servile State”*), Chesterton wanted Distributism (the division of land into small holdings, and of chain stores into thousands of small shops). He hoped for a “League of Little People.” He shuddered at talk of an expanding universe—”more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that was divine.” To him the beauty of the cosmos lay in its “poetry of limits.”

Chesterton’s resistance to the common confusion of greatness with bigness and worldly importance was shared by his brilliant older friend, Historian Hilaire Belloc. Bernard Shaw transformed the two men into a single mythical creature called “The Chesterbelloc”—intellectual Siamese twins who waged furious war against those who preferred a recklessly expanding future to a return to a smaller, intenser way of life. The Chesterbelloc opposed votes for women. “Twenty million young women,” wrote Chesterton. “rose to their feet with the cry We will not be dictated to: and proceeded to become stenographers.”

Democracy and Dogma. In Christian theology Chesterton found “the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy,” and the dogmatic justification of many of his social and political views. In the medieval church he saw the protector of the small landowner and the life of individual intensity. “There is no basis for democracy,” he concluded, “except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.” Chesterton’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922 (his priest, Father O’Connor, was the model for Detective Father Brown) was a sensation in England.

Bernard Shaw wrote to Chesterton: “Faith is a curious thing. . . . You will have to go to Confession next Easter; and I find the spectacle—the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil inside wishing you had become a Fire-worshipper instead of coming there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and yours—all incredible, monstrous, comic.”

Normal Happiness. Few devout men managed to combine orthodoxy with gusto so successfully as Chesterton. When T. S. Eliot wrote: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper,” Chesterton burst out: “I’m damned if I ever felt like that.” He resented the suggestion that modern life had been made as dull as ditchwater: “And, by the way, is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.” But to apostles of progress he remarked: “We sometimes tend to overlook the quiet and even bashful presence of the machine gun.”

Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out. “It is constantly assumed,” he wrote, “especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamblike. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. . . . The real problem is—Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved.” In the same manner he explained the profound significance of the story of Fall of Man: “If you wanted to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky, 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 whale expelled from his Whaley Eden.”

In 1928 in G. K.’s Weekly, Chesterton summed up his view of modern man: “There is a sense in which men may be made normally happy; but there is another sense in which we may truly say, without undue paradox, that what they want is to get back to their normal unhappiness. At present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. They have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to contend with; time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection and dissatisfaction with themselves. But they have not got the elements of consolation and encouragement that ought normally to renew their hopes or restore their self-respect. They have not got vision or conviction, or the mastery of their work, or the loyalty of their household, or any form of human dignity. Even the latest Utopians, the last lingering representatives of that fated and unfortunate race, do not really promise the modern man that he shall do anything, or own anything, or in any effectual fashion be anything. They only promise that, if he keeps his eyes open, he will see something; he will see the Universal Trust or the World State or Lord Melchett coming in the clouds in glory. But the modern man cannot even keep his eyes open. He is too weary with toil and a long succession of unsuccessful Utopias. He has fallen asleep.”

A little tired himself with the exultant paradoxes of logic and the exuberant paradoxes of life, Chesterton fell asleep once & for all in 1936. He was 62. Said his friendly enemy, Bernard Shaw: “A man of colossal genius.”

* “Servile State!” roared Bernard Shaw. “I’ll servile him!” “Shaw,” quipped Chesterton, “dislikes murder, not so much because it wastes the life of the corpse as because it wastes the time of the murderer.”