CHESTERTON.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 151, 27 June 1936, Page 1 (Supplement)

CHESTERTON.

A GREAT ENGLISHMAN. ARTIST AND CRUSADER.

(By CYRANO.)

Writing about Gilbert Keith Chesterton is rathpr like writing about the universe. Not that he was a universal genius, but that there was universality in his outlook. Though there were things he did not understand—such as the British Empire, perhaps —and he often wrote carelessly, there was something big and embracing about his work.

To begin with, his range was impressive. Kipling was a storyteller and a poet. Chesterton was a storyteller, a poet, an historian, an essayist, a philosopher and a critic. He was English in his dislike of specialisation. He tried to take the world for his province, and he succeeded in being intensely interesting —and often very impressive—on a very large number of subjects. He could write well about herrings and authors, donkeys and pictures, grocers' shops and crusades. There was a man and a boy in his work —a man who, like Francis Thompson, saw cclestial visions in the Strand, and a big jolly schoolboy who enjoyed a lark. Like Dr. Johnson he was an "original," a great public character; indeed in English history there has perhaps been 110 one who reminds one so much of Dr. Johnson. But we must picture him as a rollicking Dr. Johnson, father of humour as well as wit, and at the same time a Christian mystic. There was something ponderous about Dr. Johnson. There was nothing ponderous about "G.K.C.," except his physical size, and that was exaggerated. He overflowed with high spirits, and even when he. was indignant he wrote in a dancing measure. He wrote foolish things, but never a dull one. Humour and Beauty. "Art for Art's sake" was no creed of Chesterton's. He wrote for fun; he wrote for causes; sometimes he wrote, as all geniuses do, because he had to. But he wrote abundantly and with enormous zest. Not for him the painful polishing of a paragraph through an afternoon. For him the world was crammed with good and evil, and day by day the good h,ad to be pradsed and the evils scourged. He would write a parody of a great poet, a piece of social or political satire, an essay on a saint, a book of criticism* or a lyric of pure beauty. "Chuck it. Smith!" is the ending of his rebuke in verse to "F.E.," afterwards Lord Birkenhead, a rebuke that for moral indignation expressed in pungent wit is as devastating as anything in the language. A book of verses underneath the bougli, Provided that the verses do not scan, A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and Thou, Short-haired, all angles, looking like a man. This was his "New Omar." But the man who wrote these things also wrote the splendid rhetoric of "Lepanto," and described the secret of the donkey— "there was'a shout about my ears, and palms before my feet," and gave us this: Fearfully plain the flowers grew,

Like a child's hook to read, Or like a friewrs face seen in a glass

He looked: and there Our Lady was, She stood and stroked the tall live grass As a man strokes his steed.

Her face was like an open word When brave men speak and choose, The very colours of her coat Were better than good news. These last four lines were his favourite passage from what is probably his greatest poem, "The Ballad of the White Horse." There are four main considerations to bear in mind about Chesterton: he was a poet, ho was a devout and joyous Christian, he believed passionately that the world was full of glory and wonder, and he found happiness in simple things. He simply could not keep poetry out of his work. He thought habitually as a poet and wrote a poet's prose. The Father Brown detective stories—which had their origin in a remark made by two young men that the Catholic priesthood hadn't much knowledge of the world —are coloured through and through with the imaginings of a poet. It is their poetry as well as their spirituality that makes them unique. Chesterton looked on the world with the eyes of a child, and "the very colours of her coat were better than pood news." That is what a child would feel and might say. He could give facile optimism short shrift, but when W. B. Yeats counselled us to come away with the fairies, "for the world is more full of weeping than you can understand," he replied as a mortal that though the world was hot and cruel it was "more full of glory than you can understand." Never Bored. In one of the breeziest of his poems — and he was a great comic poet —he says that, bored by intellectual conversation in his club, he rose and asked would someone lead him to a pub, but he really wasn't bored. Chesterton was never bored. "Cockney artists profess," he said, "to find the bourgeoisie dull, as if artists had any business to find anything dull." What he said of Moliere's "M. Jourdain"—"He has the freshness to enjoy a fresh fact; the freshness to enjoy even an old one," is applicable to himself. His tremendous zest for life, his interest in everything, and his sanative sense of values, are the best possible antidote to the poison of overcivilisation, the narrow preoccupations of cliques and coteries, the weariness of disillusionment, and the stagnant air of forced cynicism. Chesterton's robust, humorous humanity, so vital and understanding, has been one of the most salutary forces of his age. It i? so much warmer, so much more sympathetic, so much more liberal than Shaw's, but Shaw, as Chesterton once said, ceased to believe in Santa Claus at a discreditably early age. Chesterton loved England and her common people. If his plans for her regeneration were unpractical, the strength and wit and courage with which he fought for his ideals in religion and life rallied and led on the forces opposed to materialism. Critic and Philosopher. Chesterton was a great critic. His "Browning" and his "Dickens" are books to live with, to read over and over again. He knew so well what so many clever men have not learned, that the first duty of a critic is to praise, not to find fault. And prejudiced though he was in many directions he could praise generously and with fne understanding men with whose opinions he violently disagreed} the atheistical

Swinburne, for example. As a critic Chesterton combined extraordinary understanding with a style that for wit and point and the element of surprise has never been surpassed. I have read tlie "Dickens" over and over again, and if any of my readers pay me the compliment of remembering what I have written they may have noted that I have quoted from this book perhaps more than anj' other. I have looked into it again for the purpose of this article and the old delight has returned. Was there ever, before or since, one asks, 5o much general as well as particular wisdom in a book of criticism ? It is as readable as a romance. These books contain philosophy of life as we'll as, studies of great writers. The "Dickens" in particular has that quality of universality I have referred, to. I can quote only one passage; it refers to the American part of "Martin Cliuzzlewit."

The great democrat lias got hold of one of the dangers of democracy. The great' optimist confronts a horrible nightmare of optimism. Above all, the genuine Englishman attacks a sin that is not merely American, but English also. The eternal complacent Iteration of patriotic halftruths, the perpetual buttering of one's self all over with the same stale butter ; above all, the big defiances of small enemies or the very urgent challenges to very distant enemies; the cowardice so habitual and unconscious that it wears the plumes _of courage—all this is an English temptation as well as an American one. 'Martin Cliuzzlewit' may be a caricature of America. America may be a caricature of England. But in the gravest college, in the quietest country house in England, there is the .seed of the same essential madness that tills Dickens' book, like an asylum, with brawling Chollops and raving .Jefferson Bricks. That essential madness is the idea that the good patriot is the man who feels at ease about his country, A Loved Crusader. Chesterton worked in high good humour, and his work had a quality that won him the admiration and affection of men and women who differed from him profoundly Even when he fatigues you with his paradoxes, or sets you thinking that he idealises the Middle Ages and is unfair to the modern world, including industrialism, politicians and Jews, you cannot help liking and loving the man. You may believe in divorce reform and yet smile at But Higgins is a Heathen, And to lecture ro-oms is forced, "Where his aunts who are not married Demand to be divorced. j And a teetotaller can see the fun of The righteous minds of innkeepers Induce tbem now and then To crack a bottle with a friend Or treat unmoiieyed men, But who hath seen the grocer Treat housemaids to his teas Or crack a bottle of fish-sauce Or stand a man a cheese? My own meeting with him in London gave me a better understanding of the hold he had on the public. He was so courteous and deferential; I might have been the celebrity and he the obscure visitor from the other side of the world. He was a Bayard of letters and controversy —without fear and without reproach. We love him for his gusto, his wit and humour, his fantasy of imagination, but most for his warm fireside humanity, his gay and chivalrous courage, his belief in goodness, and his insistent call to us to revise values. The simplicities he proclaimed, and among them colour aid laughter were children of God.