[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.