CHAPTER III

G. K. CHESTERTON

Knight Errant of Orthodoxy

The central truth to be uttered about Mr. Chesterton is that he is the greatest prophet of our generation. He is as great as Tolstoy or Ibsen. It may seem rash to set him beside these great prophets, but time will ratify my rashness. A prophet is a man of genius with a spiritual message for his age.

The spiritual message delivered by Mr. Chesterton is mightier than any other sounding in our ears. He is a bigger man than Maeterlinck or Bergson, though we know it not. As a prophet he is larger in every way than Mr. Shaw or Mr. Wells or Mr. Arnold Bennett, because he deals with the soul, whereas they deal with the soul's environment. They deal with man as a social animal. He deals with man as a spiritual being.

Our failure to salute the prophet is complete, and it is emphasized by our failure to perceive that he is the authentic voice of that English soul which is now wrestling with the Teutonic soul for the soul of the world. _He is the soul of England_.--James Douglas in the _Observer_, 1916.

Can a journalist have a philosophy of life, and if so would it be worth talking about? In answer to the first question I shall quote Chesterton to the effect that everybody has a philosophy, even generals and journalists. To prove the affirmative of the second I shall present, as Exhibit B, the whole body of Chesterton's works. Perhaps the most heretical passage of his book on "Heretics" was that which begins:

But there are some people, nevertheless--and I am one of them--who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them.

Like many other things in Chesterton's works this does not sound so heretical now as when it was written, about the time when the weary old world had finished Chapter XIX of the second volume of his history and had turned over the page in hopes of finding something new and exciting in Chapter XX--and found it. Chesterton's countrymen then were keeping careful count of Germany's soldiers and ships, but they were contentedly ignorant of German philosophy. But as soon as the war broke out they began with feverish haste to translate and study Treitschke, Nietzsche, Bernhardi, and any other books which might throw light upon the German _Weltanschauung_, but which in the leisurely days of peace they had no time to read.

It is convenient to compare Shaw and Chesterton because they are antithetic in temperament and opinion and represent two opposite currents of modern thought. Shaw stands for the earlier rationalistic, socialistic revolt against the conventions of society. Chesterton stands for the later conservative reaction to all this, for ecclesiasticism, nationalism, and traditionalism. Shaw is a vegetarian and teetotaler. Chesterton is quite the opposite; he champions the public house as a good old English institution. Shaw is a suffragist; Chesterton is dead set against anything of the kind. Shaw came from the most pronounced Protestant stock, the Ulster kind, and, as we can see from his introduction to "Androcles and the Lion", he has constructed a sort of religion for himself, though he could hardly be accounted orthodox. Chesterton is a Catholic, though of the Anglican rather than the Roman variety, a champion of orthodoxy, and a defender of all forms of ritualism and medievalism. Chesterton makes it his business to find a logical basis for popular traditions, customs, and superstitions which have always been regarded as purely irrational and arbitrary even by those who liked them and defended them as poetic and conforming to a deeper reality than that of reason. Shaw is always showing how absurd and illogical are the soundest axioms and the most unquestioned platitudes, whether of orthodox conservative or orthodox revolutionary thought. Chesterton discovers new reasons in things; Shaw discovers new unreasons in things.

Chesterton appears in the capacity of permanent minority leader. But this is in respect to that really small minority of professional writers, speakers, and agitators who set the fashions for the Zeitgeist. Actually he has the backing of the great inarticulate immobile mass of the people.

Chesterton has discovered how to be witty though orthodox. But his orthodoxy is so extreme that it seems heterodoxy to most of us. Perhaps that accounts for his success in making it sound paradoxical. As Wesley determined that the devil had no right to all the pretty music, so Chesterton determined that the iconoclasts should not monopolize all the cleverness. His originality consists in his genius for turning platitudes into epigrams. He can put the most unquestioned axiom in a way to shock the world. If he is right in what he says in his books on Watts that "there is only one thing that requires real courage to say and that is a truism", Chesterton must be the bravest man alive. But even he finds it necessary to promulgate his truisms in the disguise of sensational novelties.

Chesterton's ideal is a complete democracy, not merely democracy in politics but democracy in science, religion, literature, sport, and art. If you say this is impracticable he doubtless would retort that it was the essence of an ideal to be impracticable, otherwise it would be confounded with dull reality. He always champions the opinion of the many against that of the few, the laymen against the expert.

Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If scientific civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will laugh because he can laugh better than the rest.--"Heretics."

It was absurd to say that Waterloo was won on Eton cricket fields. But it might have fairly been said that Waterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket.

... It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them and that the nation is merely looking on.--"All Things Considered."

On this ground he hated Germany even before the war, as a nation ruled by experts. He denounced its workingmen's insurance, its governmental efficiency, its higher criticism, and the like. "I am all for German fantasy, but I will resist German earnestness till I die. I am all for Grimm's Fairy Tales; but if there is such a thing as Grimm's Law, I would break it if I knew what it was."[1]

It is on the basis of democracy that he defends religion:

That Christianity is identical with democracy is the hardest of gospels: there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as that they are all sons of God.--"Twelve Types."

It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated and ought to be treated more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in a village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.... If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes--our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.... Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom: tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.--"Orthodoxy."

I expect some time to find Chesterton defending the Trinity on the ground that it is more democratic than Mohammedan monotheism, a sort of commission government extended to the universe.

Chesterton has the true artist's love for the individual and the concrete. He delights in clear outlines and bright colors. He thinks in pictures. I have never seen any of his painting, but he must have the color sense strongly developed. He will halt in a stern chase or in the height of an argument to describe a sunset with the most chromatic language at his command. He studied art at the Slade School in London, and although he was soon switched off into journalism he still reverts to the pencil on occasion. He has supplied the illustrations to three of Belloc's books; "The Great Enquiry", "The Green Overcoat", and "Emmanuel Burden."[2] The last, a satire on imperialistic financiering, is one of the cleverest pieces of irony to be found in all literature, but it raises the question of whether the ironical tone can be sustained through a whole volume without a decline of interest. When the question of illustration arose Chesterton sent out for a bundle of wrapping paper, and in the course of one evening drew all of the portraits in the book as well as a lot that were not used.

For the understanding of Chesterton's romances it is necessary to remember that the more non-sensical they seem, the more sense they have in them. This is because when he gets blinded by a big idea he sees men as concepts walking. He is too much of a Platonist to be a good novelist. He admires Dickens but never imitates him, for Chesterton's stories are singularly devoid of individuals. All the little variations and accidental peculiarities that make a type into a person in the great novels of the world are lacking. In "The Ball and the Cross" Mac Ian is simply the archetype of the Catholic Romanticist and Turnbull of the Revolutionary Rationalist. Neither of them ever does anything out of character, but then neither of them has any character outside of the Idea that made them what they are. Each falls in love with a girl of the opposite type, drawn to scale. This is carried farther yet by the introduction of an incredibly consistent Tolstoyan and a Nietzschean beside whom Nietzsche would seem all too human. Thus the whole book is balanced and matched like old-fashioned wall paper or an Italian garden.

Manalive comes closer to being real. He certainly is alive, but he is not a man; he is an ideal, Chesterton's superman. "All habits are bad habits" is the text of G. K. Chesterton's "Manalive", which proved as delightful to his admirers and distasteful to his antipathists as any of his former productions. In his essays Mr. Chesterton's method is first to set down something that sounds like a wild absurdity and then to argue the reader into the admission--cheerful or indignant, according to his temperament--that it is a very sensible thing after all. In his romances his method is essentially the same. Nobody could act crazier than Mr. Innocent Smith in the first chapters of this volume, but in the end he is proved, by a long legal process, to be the only really sane man of the lot. He is accused of about as many crimes as the hero of Jokai's tale, "The Death's Head", confessed to, but he turns out to be quite as guiltless. Charges of murder, burglary, bigamy, and kidnaping, amply certificated, slip off him like water off a duck's back. Neither prison nor asylum can hold Manalive. Smith's theory is that if you keep the commandments, you may violate the conventions; which, being the reverse of the ordinary rule of procedure, gets him into all sorts of misunderstandings. He had evidently read Schopenhauer's theory that the only happiness is the pursuit of happiness, and, what is more, he acts upon it by letting go what he most delights in that he may recapture it. He goes round the world in search of his own home, and his series of amorous adventures are conducted in strict accord with monogamous morality. By getting outside of himself he can gain the joy of coveting his own possessions. The economic law of diminishing returns applies to all our habitual pleasures, and to escape it we must be continually seeking new investments.

So Manalive is distinguished from ordinary men in that he has legs that he uses. He is not rooted. He breaks out and runs around and discovers the most novel and wonderful things in the most commonplace environment.

Mr. Chesterton is as fond of a chase as a fox hunter or a kinetoscope man. We have it in "Manalive" as we have it in "The Man Who Was Thursday" and "The Ball and the Cross." As usual he stops every little while and paints a cloudscape to rest our eyes; and all along he enlivens the way by epigrams and inverted proverbs. Here are a few:

When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but when they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist until it is declared by authority.

For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.

Though she never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any minute. Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion.

All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been or ever will be.

The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.

With our weak spirits we should grow old in eternity, if we were not kept young by death. Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers.

The most fantastic and therefore characteristic of Chesterton's romances is "The Man Who Was Thursday" which the French are able more concisely to entitle _Nommé Jeudi_. The author calls it "A Nightmare", and it is. The only books to compare with it are George Macdonald's "Lilith", Strindberg's "Dream Plays", and Andreyev's "Masked Ball"; but for wild imagining, grotesquerie, farcicality, and swift transformations it cannot be matched. It is a detective story, a motion-picture chase, and a system of theology, all in one. Like all dreams, according to Freud, it is symbolic, but the symbolism is not to be interpreted in the usual Freudian way, for Chesterton is clean-minded. The clue to it is to be found in his earliest book of essays, "The Defendant", when he argues for the moral value of the detective story in the following fashion: "By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war upon a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but traitors within our gates."

The detective, he says, who stands alone and fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves' kitchen, is the original and poetic figure, and the criminals surrounding him represent cosmic conservatism. But in "The Man Who Was Thursday" each one of the six detectives, separately commissioned by the mysterious head of the secret police to enter the inner circle of seven anarchists, believes himself to be fighting single-handed for law and order against a criminal conspiracy to destroy civilization. The seven pseudo-anarchists go through all sorts of perilous and absurd adventures in the course of which they are metamorphosed successively into the seven days of the week, the seven days of creation, the seven orders of created things, and the seven angels of heaven. Finally seated upon seven thrones, robed in state, blazoned--of course, since it is Chesterton--with heraldic devices, they recognize one another as friends and allies through all their strange strife. It reminds one of Emerson's Brahma: "If the red slayer thinks he slays." But Chesterton is too much of a Manichean to let it go at that. One of the anarchists turns out to be genuine, the only real one in the world, the irreconcilable rebel, the Eternal Anarchist, the spirit that continually denies, the leader of His Majesty's Opposition. In some ways Chesterton's conception of the devil reminds one of Andreyev's "Anathema" or perhaps rather of the Satan whom Dostoievsky introduces into his "Brothers Karamazarov." Chesterton's mind seems to have a curious affinity to the Russian, though so far as I remember his writings show no evidence of being influenced by Russian literature.

"The Man Who Was Thursday" affects readers variously. To some it seems ridiculous; to others blasphemous. Julius West, usually sympathetic, dismisses it in his biography of Chesterton as incomprehensible and tiresome. Yet three people I know--a man, a woman, and a child--consider it one of the most wonderful books in the world, and know it almost by heart.

My own opinion is that it shows that Chesterton has not yet found the true medium for the expression of his genius. Drawing and writing are too slow and cold to give scope to his pictorial imagination. He should, like D'Annunzio, take to the screen. "The Man Who Was Thursday" would make a magnificent scenario as it stands, and Chesterton could then add all of the things he thought of or saw while composing it but could not put into words.

Blake, too, was a man who would have done wonders with the cinematograph if it had only been invented sooner. Chesterton, in his sketch of Blake, explains his difficulties of expression by word and picture:

How shall we manage to state in an obvious and alphabetical manner the ultimate query, the primordial pivot on which the whole modern problem turns? It cannot be done in long rationalistic words: they convey by their very sound the suggestion of something subtle. One must try to think of something in the way of a plain street metaphor or an obvious analogy. For the thing is not too hard for human speech: it is actually too obvious for human speech.

Chesterton's theory of the use of symbolism, even absurd symbolism, is given in his "Defense of Nonsense".

Every great literature has always been allegorical--allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle....

Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.

Chesterton at the beginning of his career wrote "A Defense of Detective Stories"[3] and he has since shown that he knows how to write them, in the collections entitled "The Club of Queer Trades", "The Innocence of Father Brown", and "The Wisdom of Father Brown." But they are different from ordinary detective stories not merely because a mild-mannered priest takes the place of Sherlock Holmes but more because they frequently have nothing to do with crime and all parties turn out, as in "Thursday", to have the best of intentions, whatever their actions. Chesterton's method in these stories is much the same as he employs in his essays; that is, he piles up paradoxical impossibilities, and then by some simple expedient resolves them into apparent reasonableness. The author's obvious enjoyment of his own ingenuity adds to the reader's delight. It would be interesting to know whether he has in mind the solution when he lays out the plot or whether he is not playing a game with himself like jackstraws, pitting his skill as a disentangler against a muddle of his own making.

As an artist Chesterton has always been attracted by the Orient, with its mystical fanaticisms, its cruel colors, and its unfamiliar habits of thought. But while Turkey is all very well at a distance, Turkey in Europe is to him a distinct and horrible menace. In "The Flying Inn" we have a story of Mohammedan influence not only in Europe but in England itself. This novel is an allegory of the war between the sacred symbol of the cross and the sacred symbol of the crescent, as Chesterton has similarly related the struggle of the Ball and the Cross in his book of that name.

The champions of the crescent are Misysra Ammon, the Prophet of the Moon, and Lord Ivywood, an eccentric nobleman, a fanatic against the liquor traffic as the embodiment of Christian custom as opposed to Moslem. Misysra, who is as fertile with impossible theories as with plausible arguments to support them, maintains that England is Mohammedan at heart and proves it in a hundred ways from the contempt with which the pig is popularly spoken of to the absence of any "idolatrous" animal or vegetable forms in modern cubist painting. Lord Ivywood's persecution of the inn-keepers sends one of them adrift throughout the country carrying his inn-sign with him and accompanied by Captain Dalroy, an athletic Irishman who champions the cause of the cross.

So far we have a straight Chesterton novel, a symbolic theme variegated by satires on modern life. But Chesterton really seems uncertain that he aimed to write a prose novel at all, for the book is plentifully interspersed with verses, serious, comic, ironical, militant, in good meter and in bad, till the novel takes on the not unpleasant appearance of a Chesterton anthology of songs.

Everybody who likes G. K. Chesterton has wished that he might be induced to follow the example of Charles Dickens and write a Child's History of England. When a literary man of wayward genius undertakes to interpret and record the story of his country the result is almost always worth while. We do not get the white sunlight of impartiality, but we get a beautiful rainbow of prejudices, personal opinions, and mystical insight. Chesterton has still to write us a complete English history, but he has dealt faithfully with about a century and a half of it in "The Crimes of England." It is due to him to say that the unhistorical character of the work is caused rather by partisan emphasis than by any inaccuracy of detail. Rarely if ever has Chesterton written with such care for his facts, and, as for his transcendental interpretation of them, he has as much warrant to philosophize as Carlyle or Taine or any other literary historian. But one does tend to get the impression from the book that only Prussians had ever incurred the scriptural curse on him who removes his neighbor's landmark.

For the "crimes of England" are really the crimes of Prussia, and England's guilt is summed up in the phrase that English politics has been devoted ever since the time of Frederick the Great to "the belittlement of France and the gross exaggeration of Germany." Chesterton denounces the part played by his country in the wars of Frederick the Great, in the Napoleonic struggles, in the repression of Ireland, in tolerating Bismarck's schemes of aggrandizement, only to bring into darker relief the wickedness of the state which used England throughout all these years as a catspaw. Yet the indictment of England as Prussia's accomplice is delivered in very sharp terms; so far as Chesterton shows bias it is pro-French or pro-Irish rather than pro-British. He really believes that the war is an epic struggle between the old soul of Christendom, most clearly incarnated in the Catholic nations, and a blast of sinister materialism from the wastes and forests of Brandenburg. In this belief he writes not only seriously, but soberly, as befits the great hour, and concludes his book with a vivid and moving description of the Battle of the Marne which has in it a world of eloquence and no "cleverness" at all.

The large volume of "Criticisms and Appreciations of Dickens" is composed of his prefaces to the separate books of Dickens. Although not so important a piece of work as Chesterton's biography of Dickens, they are well worth bringing together in this way, because they form not only a brilliant piece of literary interpretation, but because they show that it is possible to write prefaces to the classics which will increase the desire to read the book instead of dampening one's ardor at the start with a mass of dry and trivial details of the author's life and environment. Chesterton has the first requisite of a good introducer, an enthusiasm for his subject and a belief in the importance of his message for the times in which we live. His comparison of Dickens and Thackeray, if not quite fair, has at least sufficient point to suggest thought.

Thackeray has become classical; but Dickens has done more; he has remained modern. There was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin to realize that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed vulgar--all that is itself--breaking up like a cloud-land. And only the caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone.

But whether his medium is fiction, criticism, or editorial, Chesterton is always a moralist, differing, however, from most moralists in that he is never prosy and never directs his preachments at obsolete evils and deceased sinners.

Prose and poetry are such widely sundered fields that a reputation made in one does not carry over into the other. When Scott dropped poetry to take up novel writing he found it expedient to leave his name behind. When Kipling passed in the reverse direction from prose to poetry he had to cultivate a new _clientèle_. It is very amusing to hear two lovers of Hardy or of Meredith sing peans of praise to their favorite author in strophe and antistrophe until on descending from the general to the particular they discover that one was extolling the poet and the other the novelist and that each had never read, or but lightly esteemed what the other most admired.

So while the essays and romances of Gilbert Keith Chesterton reach thousands of readers week by week through the journals, and are bought with avidity in volume form, his poems are but little known to readers of his prose, although they have, I fancy, a circle of their own. Yet no one can understand Chesterton fully who ignores his verse, for his thought, expressed through this medium, is seen from another angle and so gains solidity to the view.

Chesterton, like Tennyson, has taken one of England's legendary heroes as the theme of an epic by which to express his philosophy of life and his message to his age. The stories of Alfred he accepts as uncritically and handles as freely as Tennyson did those of Arthur, but the poems resultant show not merely the difference between the authors, but also, in a way, the difference between the past century and the present one, the contrast between a faintly hopeful agnosticism and a robustious affirmation of faith.

In his "Alarms and Discursions" he has told us in prose of the impressions made upon him by his visit to the Vale of the White Horse and Ethandune. These he transmutes into poetry in "The Ballad of the White Horse."[4] In the beautiful dedication to his wife he gives her credit for having opened his eyes to the Christian significance of the wars of Alfred against the Danes. Miss Frances Blogg, whom he married in 1900, was described by one who knew her then as "a conservative rebel against the conventions of the unconventional." We may assume that it was largely through her influence that he was converted from youthful atheism to extremest orthodoxy. I can quote only a few stanzas from this dedication although such fragments are distressing to those who know the whole and aggravating to those who do not.

Lady, by one light only We look from Alfred's eyes, We know he saw athwart the wreck The sign that hangs about your neck, Where One more than Melchizedek Is dead and never dies.

Therefore I bring these rimes to you, Who brought the cross to me, Since on you flaming without flaw I saw the sign that Guthrum saw When he let break his ships of awe, And laid peace upon the sea.

Do you remember when we went Under a dragon moon, And 'mid volcanic tints of night Walked where they fought the unknown fight And saw black trees on the battle-height, Black thorn on Ethandune?

And I thought "I will go with you, As man with God has gone, And wander with a wandering star, The wandering heart of things that are, The fiery cross of love and war That like your self goes on."

O go you onward, where you are Shall honor and laughter be, Past purpled forest and pearled foam, God's winged pavilion free to roam, Your face, that is a wandering home, A flying home to me.

* * * * * Up through an empty house of stars Being what heart you are, Up the inhuman steeps of space As on a staircase go in grace, Carrying the firelight on your face Beyond the loneliest star.

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-folk Cast in His dreadful lot: Is not He too a servant And is not He forgot?

For was not God my gardener And silent like a slave: That opened oaks on the uplands Or thicket in graveyard grave?

And was not God my armorer, All patient and unpaid, That sealed my skull as a helmet And ribs for hauberk made?

* * * * *

For God is a great servant And rose before the day, From some primordial slumber torn; But all things living later born Sleep 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 Guthrum Crowned, 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 cheer Of 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 plains Are all too little for a fool: But for one man whose eyes can see, The little island of Athelney Is too large a land to rule.

* * * * *

"An island like a little book, Full of a hundred tales, Like the gilt page the good monks pen That 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 it Faster than man can burn: And though they scatter now and go, In some far century, sad and slow, I have a vision, and I know The 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 see Crawl, covering the chalk.

* * * * *

By terror and the cruel tales Of 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 heathen That 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, the _Sillon_ of 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 place God made the stars especially: Babies look up with owlish face And 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 come To goal at last, my wandering wits), So it is with the heroic thing This 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 urn Where an immortal England sits-- Nor where your tall young men in turn Drank death like wine at Austerlitz. And when the pedants bade us mark What cold mechanic happenings Must 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 war And Death shall dance with Liberty! Likelier the barricades shall flare Slaughter below and smoke above, And death and hate and hell declare That 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 Mountain Faith cast into the sea; Though the crooked swords overcome it And the Crooked Moon ride free, When the Mountain comes to Mahomet It 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 rod And sword in hand upon Afric's passes Her 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.

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 breaks Not 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 darkness The Saxon peace is sworn; That all our fruit be gathered, And all our race take hands, And the sea be a Saxon river That 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 French _ballade_, 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 wise Who sees with wondering eyes and clean This world through all the gray disguise Of 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 the _ballade_ that 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 the _ballade_ that 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 or _l'envoi_ is in the _ballade_ addressed to a prince or other royal personage. Since Chesterton hates princes his apostrophe to the prince in this _ballade_ is not in the usual sycophantic style.

A BALLADE OF SUICIDE

The gallows in my garden, people say, Is new and neat and adequately tall. I tie the noose on in a knowing way As 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 all I 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 will _not_ call-- I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall That 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'ENVOI

Prince, 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 MEMORIAL_

/$ Lord Lilac thought it rather rotten That Shakespeare should be quite forgotten, And therefore got on a Committee With 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 sped Unheeding the heroic name-- The souls most fed with Shakespeare's flame Still 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 cigarette And sought some other social set Where, 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 constancy Of Clement Shorter, Herbert Tree, Lord Rosebery, and Comyns Carr And 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 us But take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches, From lies of tongue and pen, From all the easy speeches That comfort cruel men,

From sale and profanation Of honor and the sword, From sleep and from damnation Deliver 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 QUOODLE

They haven't got no noses, The fallen sons of Eve. Even the smell of roses Is not what they supposes, But more than mind discloses, And more than men believe.

They haven't got no noses, They cannot even tell When door and darkness closes The park old Gluck encloses, Where even the Law of Moses Will 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 under Are things in which they blunder And err, if left alone.

The wind from winter forests, The scent of scentless flowers, The breath of bride's adorning The smell of snare and warning, The smell of Sunday morning, God gave to us for ours.

* * * * *

And Quoodle here discloses All things that Quoodle can; They haven't got no noses, They haven't got no noses, And goodness only knowses The 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 the _vers-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; generations shall rise up to greet, After ages of wrangle and dogma, I come with a prayer to thy feet. Where Gabriel's red plumes are a wind in the lanes of thy lilies at eve We pray, who have done with the churches; we worship, 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 in _The 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 for _The Speaker_, a Liberal weekly. The originality of his thought and the vigor of his style attracted public attention, and _The Daily News_ took 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 weekly _The New Witness_ a more congenial although a smaller audience. He has also contributed for many years a weekly page to _The Illustrated London News_, which is under entirely different management from _The 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 his _causerie_ page of _The 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 AVERSIONS

CLASSES

He likes most: 1. Children 2. Peasants 3. Domestic women 4. Artisans and laborers 5. Priests and soldiers 6. Poets and adventurers 7. Shopkeepers (hereabouts is a great gulf fixed) 8. Business and professional men 9. Criminals (including politicians) 10. The conceited professional classes (the intellectuals) 11. Landlords 12. Millionaires

He dislikes most: 13. Multimillionaires

RACES

He likes most: 1. Irish 2. French 3. English 4. Russians 5. Turks 6. Jews 7. Germans He 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 of _The 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 that _The New Witness_ group 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]

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 the _Forum_ article 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.

HOW TO READ CHESTERTON

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). In _The New Witness_ he 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 the _Literary Digest, Current Opinion_, or _Living Age_ of 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 in _The 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 in _The 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?" in _The Independent_, January 12, 1916.

[1] "The Crimes of England", p. 98.

[2] For specimens of his sketches see "Chesterton as an Artist" by Joseph B. Gilder in _The Bookman_.

[3] See also "The Divine Detective" in "A Miscellany of Men."

[4] Published, 1911, by John Lane Co., New York.

[5] Republished, 1913, in "Poems" (John Lane Co., New York).

[6] Published, 1916, by John Lane Co., New York.

[7] From "Poems" (John Lane).

[8] "The Wild Knight" (Dutton & Co., New York).

[9] "In Tremendous Trifles ", 1909 (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York).

[10] From "Poems" (John Lane).

[11] From "Poems" (John Lane).

[12] It has always been a puzzle to me why congregations have to be warned against singing the third stanza of any hymn. I never could see that it was any worse than the rest, but I assume the clergy know best about it.

[13] I quote from _The New Witness_. The version in "The Flying Inn" is a trifle different.

[14] "Tremendous Trifles", p. 317.

[15] In Chesterton's book on Shaw.

[16] "Miscellany of Men."

[17] "What's Wrong with the World."