Gilbert Keith Chesterton

by Patrick Braybrooke

There are a number of quite well meaning people who will say, without much thought, that Chesterton is a great man, and if you ask them why, they will answer, 'He is a great writer, he is a great lecturer, he must be great; look at the times he appears in the Press, look at the wealth of caricature that is displayed on him.' No doubt these are good reasons in their way, but they rather indicate that Chesterton is well known in a popular sense; they are not a true indication that he is great. The public of to-day is inclined to measure greatness by the number of times a person appears in the newspapers, it seldom realizes that greatness is, above all, a moral quality, not a quantity; the fact that a person is in front of the public eye (very often a blind eye) is no indication of true greatness. If it was, then of necessity every Prime Minister would be a great man, every revue actress would be a great woman, every ordinary person would be small.

It is one of the most difficult things possible to determine what is the place a writer takes in literature. It does not make the task easier when the writer is not only alive but is still a comparatively young man in the height of his powers. A pure and simple biography cannot always determine with any satisfaction its subject's literary standing. Critical studies of classic authors do not usually give any preciseness about the exact niche the subject fills.

Literature is one of the most elastic qualities of the day, of human activity; it cannot be bound by rules, yet has a more or less artificial standard, which is, perhaps, an imaginary line which has style on the one side and lack of style on the other. Yet there is a further difficulty: it is in no way fair to award an author his place in literature entirely by his style, nor is it fair to literature to disregard it.

I have anticipated in earlier chapters some of what must be said in this, but it is not, I think, out of place to attempt to write of the literary qualities of Chesterton and of his place in contemporary literature. With regard to his position in respect of former writers I must say something, but it would not be wise to give any comment of what may be the permanent place of Chesterton in the world of books. He has, I hope, many years of literary output in front of him. It cannot be ignored that his reception into the Roman Catholic Church may greatly influence his future writings; it is too soon to make any effort to predict whether his writings will stand the test of time, whether he will be popular in a hundred years or whether he will have the neglect that has attended some of the greatest of authors.

There is a question that must be faced. Has Chesterton a place in literature at all, if, as is the usual thing, we have to compare him with contemporary writers, or is it that he has such a unique place that it is impossible to compare him to any living writer? Probably, although it is not necessary, it is best to compare Chesterton with some of the greatest writers of the day, and see why it is that he is worthy of a place in the foremost rank. There are, at the present day, a great number of writers who would appear worthy of a foremost place in literature. Those I have chosen have been selected because, in a sort of vague way, people couple them with the name of Chesterton. They are, I think, H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Hilaire Belloc.

I do think that all these writers have a unique place in contemporary literature. Perhaps, of the three, Wells is the greatest, because there is possibly no greater thing than a scientific prophet who is also a brilliant novelist. If Belloc and Shaw are smaller men it is because they deal with smaller matters.

At the present day Chesterton does occupy in contemporary literature a place that no one else does. He is, in a sense, a Dickens of the twentieth century; he is something more, he may even be a prophet. Of course Chesterton has not the enormous following that Dickens had at the height of his powers, but he has that kind of monumental feeling in the twentieth century that belonged to Dickens in the nineteenth: he is typical of this century, being an optimist when ordinary men are pessimistic. As in the nineteenth century Dickens made common men realise their greatness when they themselves felt immeasurably small, so Chesterton makes great men feel small when they are really so.

But in another sense he cannot really be compared to Dickens. Dickens undoubtedly was a delineator of supreme characters. I do not think it can be said that any of the characters of Chesterton would ever be known with the knowledge with which Mr. Pickwick is known. Dickens was not in any sense an essayist; Chesterton is one in every sense. Dickens was a man who really cared very much that all kinds of oppression should be put down; Chesterton, no doubt, cares also, but he rather imagines that things ordinary people quite rightly call welfare work are but forms of slavery. If Dickens hated factories it was because he had hateful experience of them; if Chesterton hates factories it is because he thinks they destroy family life and the home. I have attempted to suggest that Dickens and Chesterton are alike as regards their being monuments of their respective centuries. I have also suggested that they are extremely unlike. Yet I can think of no writer of the nineteenth century who, in ideal, is so near to Chesterton as Dickens; but that at the same time they are also so far apart is but another indication that to place Chesterton in regard to the past is almost impossible.

One thing that Chesterton is not, is an Eclectic; if he is an original thinker, it is because he can see that though black is not really white there is no particular reason why it should not be grey; if Notting Hill can boast of forty fried fish shops he does not see any reason why it could fail to produce a Napoleon. If a party of Dons are sitting round a table discussing how desirable is the elimination of life, he sees that it is a perfectly good ethic for one of the undergraduates to test the theory by brandishing a loaded pistol at the warden's head. If, as a novelist, he is different to all his contemporaries, it is because he has discovered that the word novel sometimes means something new, sometimes something original, very often something extremely old.

Yet another difficulty for finding an exact niche for Chesterton lies in the fact that he is a bit of everything, and, what is more, these bits are very big and make a large kaleidoscope. He is a theological professor who is so entirely sensible that the public hardly discovers the fact; he does not wear a cap and gown, and quote quite easily from all the Fathers of the ancient Church. He does not apologize for Christianity by reading Christian books. Rather to learn the Christian standpoint he discovers the tenets of Rationalism; he writes a theological philosophy that might be a discussion between Satan and Christ and puts it into a novel; he writes a dissertation on Transubstantiation and puts it into a tale of anarchy that is so untheological that it mentions Leicester Square and lobster mayonnaise; he is a historian who not only writes history but understands it; he does not consider that William conquered England, but that England conquered William; he says the best way to read history is to read it backwards; he is a historian who does not consider the most important facts are the dates of kings who lived and died.