Knight errant
Simon Raven
G. K. Chesterton A Centenary Appraisal Edited by John Sullivan (Elek £5.00)
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
Many would say, I suppose, that in this couplet of Chesterton we have the whole of the man and his message: a cheerful and Christian aceptance of terrestrial mortality, gratitude for the pleasures to be had by the W, ay, and optimism about the ultimate destination. An encouraging, amiable and rather naive message, simple yet witty in its language, generous in tone, ample in expression, SO clear and commonplace — and so unfashionable — that clever men tend to take it as read, shrug their shoulders, and remark that that, for what it is worth, is all there ever Was to G. K. Chesterton. As we shall see, however, there is much more to be said than that, both for good and ill. The writers whose essays John Sullivan has collected in G. K. Chesterton A Centenary APpraisal, begin, most of them, by promising caution: this book, we are told, is a critical and personal assessment, not an anthology of Pieties. But before very long the assessment becomes euphoric, not to say flighty. So far from merely purveying the small beer of journalistic platitude, Dudley Barker tells us, Chesterton had much of the melancholy insight of Gissing and (adds P. N. Furbank) the Paradoxical humours of Wilde. He wished, says Mr Furbank, to "redeem the suburban," to endow bourgeois life and attitudes with dignity and even with glory. As a writer of fiction, says Kingsley Amis, he was not only an abundant entertainer but many other things beside: a powerful moralist, a brilliant verbal painter both of urban scenes and of landscape, a magical evoker of mood. In the rather Brown stories, opines W. W. Robson, he uses the detective genre as an "illumination of the universal potentiality of guilt and sin." W. H. Auden credits him with at least one poem "which any poet would be proud to have written" and with "triumphant success" as a maker of comic verses. And so on. Nothing, to be sure, which is quite impossibly lavish, but a good deal which is somewhat less than sober.
Which leads us on to another and more serious charge. It seems to me that the contributors to this book have been at pains, not only to elaborate the good news about Chesterton, but also to obscure, or at least to disguise, the bad, which is, quite simply, that as Chesterton grew older he became credulous to the point of crankiness. It is significant that all his best work, as Dudley Barker admits, was done before 1914 — before, that is, he was converted to the Roman Catholic faith and (far worse) took up with the cause of 'Dis tributism.' Now, Distributism is a social theory which advocates the division of the populace into small and decentralised com
munities,. these to be dependent on crafts, agriculture and gnomic wisdom, and to flourish in a world which will have utterly eschewed bureaucratic and industrial processes, along with all but the simplest mechanical aids. A beguiling vision, most certainly; the only trouble is that the thing just is not on. The whole idea is a denial of the realities and necessities of the world as it exists now and had already existed for a clear century before Chesterton was born.
It is this element of velleity, not to say straight silliness, which has always tended to put people off Chesterton. Since it cannot be altogether concealed or ignored, Mr Sullivan has found contributors to condone or even to endorse it. Distributism, for example, played so large a part in Chesterton's affairs that it has to be dealt with at some length; and Mr Sullivan has therefore found two sympathetic writers, in Patrick Cahill and Brocard Sewell, to present Chesterton's support of Distributism as a mildly and consciously eccentric hobby (and therefore as something venial if not admirable) rather than as the sheer deluded cretinism which in fact was.
And of course one sees why Mr Sullivan and his contributors have tried to mislead us in this and similar matters. They do not wish us to discount Chesterton at his best as a result of being reminded of Chesterton at his disastrous worst. For here we have the pity of it all. Chesterton at his best was a man who fought and wrote against stupidity, corruption and cruelty, whatever their political complexion and whenCeSover they had their origins. With style, clarity, rhythm and immaculate common sense, he demolished pretension, exposed tyranny and entered irresistible pleas for every rational pleasure and rightful freedom. To anyone who has read and admired Chesterton in this vein, it must come as a disagreeable, an intolerable shock, to find that this same lucid and logical champion of sanity espoused and vigorously upheld, later in his life and career, religious and political causes of Medieval futility and revolting sentimentality. Mr Sullivan has tried to spare us this shock. He should know better.
Simon Raven's novel Bring Forth The Body, the ninth volume in his series Arms For Oblivion, will be published later this year by Blond and Briggs.
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