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.