Joker with a sense of evil
Allan Massie
G. K. CHESTERTON by Michael Ffinch
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, f16
AUTOBIOGRAPHY by G. K. Chesterton
Hamish Hamilton, £5.95
It is the English practice to license jesters: 'there is no slander in an allowed fool though he do nothing but rail.' This is very prudent; he can be enjoyed and disregarded. Unfortunately, Michael Ffinch goes wrong on the first page of his biography of Chesterton, because he con- fuses enjoyment with influence: 'unlike the great prophets of old, most of whom were utterly rejected and brutally done to death, Chesterton was avidly listened to and, it appears, was one of the few men who never made an enemy.' Up to a point, Lord Copper. One might fairly ask of a prophet how many he converted; where is the Distributist League now? Well, Richard Ingrams in his introduction to the very welcome new edition of Chesterton's Autobiography 'finds an echo in our mod- ern concern with self-sufficiency and Dr Schumacher's creed of "Small is beauti- ful" ', but it's hardly an echo that disturbs the City of London.
Mr Ffinch admires and likes Chesterton, and that is good, but admiration and liking do not by themselves guarantee a good biography, and he gives us further reason to question his judgment on this same page: 'Chesterton, who in the opinion of the poet, Alfred Noyes, had one of the most original minds in Europe. . .' So he had, but are we more likely to be con- vinced by learning that this was the view of Alfred Noyes? You might as well say: 'Henry James, who in the opinion of Hugh Walpole. . . ' but I needn't go on.
There are difficulties in writing a biogra- phy of Chesterton, and the most obvious one is that he didn't have a dramatic life. Very little happened to him: he grew up, married (and it is possible to speculate about that), wrote articles and books, gave lectures and died. The true history of Chesterton is the history of his mind, and the best way to discover that is to read Chesterton. A good deal of this biography in fact reads like a re-working of the Autobiography, which is better written and more interesting. It might be possible to do better if the biographer got really close to his subject, but despite Mr Ffinch's liking for Chesterton, and his assertion that `writing the life of someone is in many ways like being washed up on a desert island with them', he never does this. We do not for instance learn much in detail about Chesterton's finances, and his daily life is too vaguely treated.
Even the history of his mind is less than expected. Though Chesterton travelled from the Unitarianism and conventional Liberalism in which he was brought up to Roman Catholicism and a sort of Tory Radicalism that was all his own (and Belloc's), the journey was briefer than might be. thought. He found his manner and his meaning quite early. True, he delayed his formal reception into the Roman Catholic Church till 1922 when he felt his wife Frances was ready to accom- pany him, but he had long before con- cluded that Belloc was right in calling the Catholic Church 'the natural home of the human spirit'; his mind was fully formed when he wrote his Orthodoxy in 1908. Thereafter he repeatedly elaborated the position he had then reached.
Chesterton was that rarity, a pure intel- lectual who revered common sense and common experience. His genius rested in his ability to see the reality of things. Considering the difference between St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, he pointed out that Aquinas 'belonged to an age of intellectual unconsciousness, to an age of intellectual innocence, which was very intellectual' whereas Luther 'did be- gin the modern mood of depending on things not merely intellectual. . . He des- troyed Reason and substituted Sugges- tion.' Now Chesterton saw that an intellec- tual argument is better conducted on intel- lectual terms, and tried so to conduct it; but he was a modern man despite himself and the charm of his personality always comes through. This was one reason why he was misinterpreted and had less influ- ence than he deserved. People saw that he played with ideas and welcomed him as a joker; they didn't realise that he played with ideas because both play and ideas were serious matters to him. Yet he told them so time and again.
There was something in Chesterton which remained innocent and childlike: his excesses were a child's; he always required to be mothered; but he retained also a child's lack of resentment, a child's sense of wonder and a child's penetration. This continuing ability to see things fresh helped to make him a great writer; it makes him a confoundedly difficult subject for biography.
Chesterton and Belloc are still linked together, but they were very different, and comparison of this biography with A.N. Wilson's of Belloc makes that difference plain. There was a desperate doggedness about Belloc; in comparison Chesterton seems weightless. All Belloc's best writing is rooted in a sense of place and history: Chesterton's for all his local patriotism is pure spirit and reason. In his Autobiogra- phy he observes that Belloc's poem 'The Rebel' :was the only revolutionary poem I ever read that suggested that there was any plan for making any attack'; 'Lepanto' on the other hand is all idea and colour. Then Belloc was a countryman and historian, Chesterton a suburbanite with the lack of attachment to anything other than personal experience which is characteristic of the suburbs.
Yet Chesterton had a sense of evil that Belloc lacked. Mr Ffrench makes much of Chesterton's awareness of evil, which is best displayed in the Father Brown stories though he disparages these. However, since he relies mostly on what Chesterton revealed of this in his Autobiography, there is something vague and unspecific about his treatment of this important mat- ter. This need not be so. Chesterton's awareness of evil surely came from his capacity for introspective imagination. Father Brown imagined the state of mind in which a man might commit a particular murder, and he was able to do so because he looked first into his own heart and found evil there. Like Dr Johnson, with whom he has often been compared and whom he liked to impersonate, Chester- ton's sanity, which was conspicuous, rested on an understanding, and healthy abhorr- ence, of his own insanity. He was a good man because he knew the temptations of evil and resisted them.
Even now Chesterton can still surprise. He is a writer to whom one often returns because one always finds more there at a new reading. Of how many can one say that? The Autobiography is a tired book, the prose suffering from an excess of the lecturer's self-deprecatory tricks; these are irritating; but it is not a stale book, because it time and again encourages one to look at life in a new light. He retained to the end his ability to question received opinion in the name of claigity and sense. He was capable of holding opposed ideas steady in his mind, and making a just appreciation of both. He had, like Johnson again, the antithetical quality of mind.
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