Horror prone
Martin SEYMOUR-SMITH
The Mind of Chesterton Christopher Hollis (Hollis'and Carter 42s) Chesterton could never be uninteresting, either as man or writer. Indeed, when you encounter him, it has been said, you are cer- tain that you have discovered a master; but 'he is a master who left no masterpiece'. That seems fair—until one wonders about Father Brown. Does not some masterpiece-like quality inform—some individual stories? the whole conception? the character of Father Brown? ...
Anyway, it is undoubtedly right that his creator is now being rediscovered and re- examined. There is no doubt that his best novels and stories have stood up remark- ably well. The values underlying the five Father Brown volumes may be Christian, even specifically Roman Catholic; but the stories themselves do not depend upon those values—only, perhaps, upon their author's having held them. The vitality of Chester- ton's best writing is not a consequence of his Christianity, the intellectual content of which may now be seen, from the point of view of literature, as an accidental. There is something in Chesterton's work that goes beyond the meagre and not interesting con- tents of the thoughts he thought he thought.
Mr Christopher Hollis's The Mind of Chesterton is a pleasant, informative and readable book, in which a modern progres- sive Catholic discusses a paradoxical one. Its particular virtue is that it leaves the reader to make up his own mind: while it pursues its own line, of Roman Catholic interest, it gives all the clues for a critical interpretation that eliminates the question of the truth or otherwise of Chesterton's beliefs.
Thus, Mr Hollis rightly puts much em- phasis upon Chesterton's early, self-styled• 'sceptical', 'pessimistic' period, discerning that in this lies the key to his later achieve- ment. The details were deliberately kept vague by Chesterton himself, and there is necessarily little other information. As a young student at the Slade School of Art, Chesterton, in his own words, 'reached that condition of moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of Wilde, that "Atys with the blood-stained knife were better than the thing I am" . . . I could at this time imagine the worst and wildest dis- tortions of more normal passion; . . . the whole mood was . . . oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination . . . I had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images . . . I was one of the very few people in that world of diabol- ism [i.e. the mid-'nineties] who believed in devils'. Later in life, when asked the reason for his change to Catholicism, he used to answer: `To be absolved of my sin'.
What was the nature of this 'sin'? Chester- ton's own disclaimer-1 have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the particular
madness of Wilde'—may initially arouse our suspicions, but in the absence of any other
internal or external evidence it must be taken
as meaning what it says; besides, Chesterton was as honest as it is possible to be. Per- haps a short reminiscence printed in Tremen-
dous Trifles; to which Mr Hollis draws our attention, may offer a clue as to the precise nature of Chesterton's 'sin'. One day at the Slade he had a conversation with a professed 'diabolist' (as he might have called him) at the top of a flight of steps; the man boasted of his contempt for respectability, and argued that the object of life was to collect as many experiences as possible. Chesterton said that he believed in good and evil, and as his acquaintance departed he told Chester- ton: 'What you call evil I call good'. A few minutes later Chesterton came across the man talking with some companions, and heard him saying, 'If I do that, I shan't know the difference between right and wrong'. Then follows the authentic Chester- tonian frisson, the question: At what evil did even the evil man shudder?
This is instructive. The obvious point of the story is that the man was given to a familiar enough form of foolish showing. off. But Chesterton was so obsessed by the idea of the nature of evil that he put an en- tirely different interpretation on his exper- ience. His 'sin' almost certainly consisted in no more than indulging himself in sadistic or masochistic sexual fantasies, which he illustrated. Such experiences horrified him; but regarded intellectually and in the absence of a God they appeared unexcep- tionable . . . . So that his deep-seated nihil- ism, his fascination with the absurd notion of a godless creation, early became charged with what we might now describe as 'Freud- ian' guilt. Hence he came to regard it as something unspeakable, horribly evil. His dabbling in spiritualism and his interest in impressionism, of the same period, became associated with this notion of evil.
Thus, with his horrified and repressed vision of the gratuitousness of existence, Chesterton stood upon the verge of mod- ernism—which, of course, he abhorred. In his first long poem, The Wild Knight (1900), he invented Lord Orm, the first of a series of evil characters who are manipulated to possess a final grace—in this instance an ultimate vulnerability to opinion. He spent his creative life indulging his nihilism, but rendering it powerless with brilliant final twists. Terror is the father of his ingenuity. His ostensible message—bluff, matter-of- fact, 'jolly', beery, genial—is 'Everything's all right really: see how harmless I render these fascinating horrors'. But a little exam- ination reveals a profound unease: a spirit wrestling with the notion of absurdity as far as it dared without madness.
The wonderfully ingenious The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), the best of his novels, reveals all evil as non-existent: six of the anarchists are really detectives, and the seventh is God. But the figure of Sunday (God behind the mask of -Nature) is ambig- uous and ill-defined: 'a clear confession of faith', as Mr Hollis correctly says, but an unsatisfactory ending in imaginative terms. For Chesterton was too honest to define a God in whom his imagination did not be- lieve; just as he was too afraid—and there- fore not a 'great' writer—to try to define the state of mind he apprehended as evil. But he deserves honour for his honesty, his humour, and his half-conscious awareness of the real problem of faith.
Mr flollis deals sensibly with Chesterton's politics and his regrettable anti-semitism, as well as with the doctrinal nature of his re- ligion. He will not agree with my assessment or with the reasons for it; but I am, as other readers will be, grateful to him for his many insights and for his scrupulosity in handling the facts. This will be an essential book for students of Chesterton.
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