G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study

by Julius West

The wilting sarcasm of this poem is a feature which puts it with a few others apart from the bulk of Chesterton's poems. Even as bellicosity and orthodoxy are two of the brightest threads which run through the whole texture of his work, so Poems of Pugnacity (as Ella Wheeler Wilcox would say) and religious verses constitute the largest part of the poetic works of G.K.C. His first book of verses—after Greybeards at Play—The Wild Knight contained a bloodthirsty poem about the Battle of Gibeon, written with strict adhesion to the spirit of the Old Testament. It might have been penned by a survivor, glutted with blood and duly grateful to the God of his race for the solar and lunar eccentricities which made possible the extermination of the five kings of the Amorites. In 1911 came The Ballad of the White Horse, which is all about Alfred, according to the popular traditions embodied in the elementary history books, and, in particular, the Battle of Ethandune. How Chesterton revels in that Homeric slaughter! The words blood and bloody punctuate the largest poem of G.K.C. to the virtual obliteration in our memory of the fine imagery, the occasional tendernesses, and the blustering aggressiveness of some of the metaphors and similes. Not many men would have the nerve, let alone the skill, to write:

And in the last eclipse the sea
Shall stand up like a tower,
Above all moons made dark and riven,
Hold up its foaming head in heaven,
And laugh, knowing its hour.

But, at the same time, this poem contains very touching and beautiful lines. The Ballad of the White Horse is an epic of the struggle between Christian and Pagan. One of the essentials of an epic is that its men should be decent men, if they cannot be heroes. The Iliad would have been impossible if it had occurred to Homer to introduce the Government contractors to the belligerent powers. All the point would have gone out of Orlando Furioso if it had been the case that the madness of Orlando was the delirium tremens of an habitual drunkard. Chesterton recognizing this truth makes the pagans of the White Horse behave like gentlemen. There is a beautiful little song put into the mouth of one of them, which is in its way a perfect expression of the inadequacy of false gods.

There is always a thing forgotten
When all the world goes well;
A thing forgotten, as long ago
When the gods forgot the mistletoe,
And soundless as an arrow of snow
The arrow of anguish fell.
The thing on the blind side of the heart,
On the wrong side of the door,
The green plant groweth, menacing
Almighty lovers in the spring;
There is always a forgotten thing,
And love is not secure.

The sorrow behind these lines is more moving, because more sincere, than the lines of that over-quoted verse of Swinburne's:

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods there be—
That no life lives for ever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

This is insincere, because a pagan (as Swinburne was) could have committed suicide had he really felt these things. Swinburne, like most modern pagans, really hated priestcraft when he thought he was hating God. Chesterton's note is truer. He knows that the pagan has all the good things of life but one, and that only an exceptionally nice pagan knows he lacks that much.

And so one might go on mining the White Horse, for it contains most things, as a good epic should. Two short stanzas, however, should be quoted, whatever else is omitted, for the sake of their essential Christianity, their claim that a man may make a fool of himself for Christ's sake, whatever the bishops have to say about it.

The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the Cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark.
The men of the East may search the scrolls
For sure fates and fame,
But the men that drink the blood of God
Go singing to their shame.

In his last volume of Poems (1915) Chesterton presents us with a varied collection of works, written at any time during the last twelve or so years. The pugnacious element is present in Lepanto, through the staccato syllables of which we hear drum-taps and men cheering. There is a temptation to treat Lepanto, and indeed most of Chesterton's poems, with special reference to their technique, but we must resist this temptation, with tears if need be, and with prayer, for to give way to it would be to commit a form of vivisection. G.K.C. is not a text, praise be, and whether he lives or dies, long may he be spared the hands of an editor or interpreter who is also an irrepressible authority on anapaests and suchlike things. He is a poet, and a considerable poet, not because of his strict attention to the rules of prosody, but because he cannot help himself, and the rules in question are for the persons who can, the poets by deliberate intention, the writers who polish unceasingly. Chesterton has more impulse than finish, but he has natural gifts of rhythm and the effective use of words which more or less (according to the reader's taste) compensate for his refusal or his incapacity to take pains.