The Chester-Belloc's better half

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

The publication of a new edition of Chester- ton's Autobiography is beginning to produce a reassessment of his place in English literature. Of course, immediately after his death his repu- tation began to slump. This book was first pub- lished in 1936, the year he died. I remember seeing him a year or two before, coming out of Westminster Cathedral and looking like a parody of the figure I had been familiar with since I was about ten. Chesterton was not merely a fat man, he was a very big man, and by this time he had lost most of his fat and looked as if his clothes and his skin hung loosely over the framework of his bones. When one contrasted him with his dwarfish brother Cecil, it was easy to assert that the material for the Chesterton brothers hacLbeen divided in the proportion of one and a half to Gilbert and half to Cecil. No brothers could have looked less alike, except in certain details of their features.

GKC'S reputation as a writer suffered not merely from the normal deflation that follows the death of a celebrated author (which is now affecting, for example, the reputation of T. S. Eliot). It suffered from the nearly total irrele- vance of a great deal of the writing of the Chcster-Belloc to Hitler's world. So many things had gone wrong with their picture of the world; so many more things were to go wrong, like the Spanish Civil. War; and so many things were to go monstrously wrong, like the Final Solution applied by Hitler to the 'Jewish problem,' that there was indifference or hostility to a great deal of what Chesterton and, still more, of what Belloc had written.

But some of Chesterton deserves to live and will, I think, live, although what is his continu- ous best seller, the Father Brown Stories, for all their great merits, are not what I think he would most have liked to be remembered by. But there is not only the famous story of the invisible man (who was the postman), but there is the extremely interesting story of the philo- sopher, Boulnois, who infuriated the great landed magnate on whose estate he had a cot- tage. by refusing to be jealous about the wicked baronet's ostentatious attentions to the philo- sopher's wife. There is a great deal of very acute psychology buried in this, and in some of the other stories. The literalness of the Scottish mind is brought out beautifully in the story of the servant who cut out all the gold from the missals because he had been left all the gold in the house and collecting gold was one of the hobbies of the great family he served. After all, they were commemorated in two lines from a mythical ballad:

As green sap tae the simmer trees Is red gold tae the Ogilvies.

Another book that survives, and I think will continue to survive, is his Short History of England. The Times Literary Supplement re- cently reprinted the original review of it by A. F. Pollard. Pollard was a great if limited scholar, but he completely missed the point of the book, written by one who was not a scholar at all but had talents very different from and very superior to Pollard's. A Short History of England is not only full of brilliant phrases like • the famous account of the death of Nelson ('he died with his stars on his breast and his heart on his sleeve'), but there is a great deal of shrewd

comment on aspects of English history which the official English tradition did not emphasise. There are many worse ways of introducing in- telligent boys and girls to English history.

What has badly affected GKC'S reputation was his excessive use of sometimes not very in- genious paradox. Some of his jokes in this genre were no better than Philip Guedalla's Oxford Union jokes. Some were as good as Ronald Knox's much superior Oxford Union jokes. But at times they were better than any- thing that either Guedalla or Knox could pos- sibly have produced.

It is possible that GKC will be largely remem- bered for his often admirable verses. I say 'verses' deliberately, not poems. I think it could be reasonably said of Belloc that he was a genuine minor poet, and we should remember that Augustine Birrell said when one described a man as a minor poet, the word to emphasise was 'poet.' Belloc was sometimes a poet; I don't think GKC ever was. But is there a better satiric poem in the English language than his attack on F. E. Smith with its famous refrain, 'Chuck it, Smith!' (I am told that the second Earl of Birkenhead-does not refer to this poem in his life of his father.) It is far more effective and basically far more savage than Belloc's cele- brated anti-semitic poem about the Rand gold lords. And there is 'Lepanto.' This is very much over-written in places, but it is full of admirable verses to chant aloud.

I never took much interest in 'The Ballad of the White Horse,' but some of the shorter poems are excellent as rhetorical statements of a posi- tion, and possibly 'The Donkey' is more than that. But Chesterton was a polemical writer with something serious to say. In his Autobiography, which shows so many signs of the falling off of his physical and literary powers, he is still very well worth reading for its capture of the atmo- sphere of the very prosperous Liberal middle class in the London of his youth. I think Ches-

G. K. Chesterton

tenon is wrong in writing off Hardy's poetry, but his account of Hardy is curiously moving,

and he denied the hostile implications of his

verdict on Hardy in The Victorian Age in Literature. This book was written hastily for

the Home University Library, but it is a very good book still, not only highly readable but with the great additional merit of being written by a man with his own independent tastes, a man of great intelligence and a man who had something more to say about literature than mere points of style or formal organisation. There are other books still worth re-reading.

But unfortunately Chesterton fell more and more under the influence of Belloc, and I think that influence was almost totally bad. For one thing. Chesterton took Belloc's claims to scholarship far too seriously. GKC did recognise that there was something special about the knowledge of his great friend and my old teacher, John Swinnerton Phillimore; but he had no real idea of how remote from Philli- more's subtle academic mind were Belloc's hasty dashes across history, literary criticism, religion and the like. GKC, however, makes a good point when he tells us that although his family were the agents or, we should say in Scotland, the factors for the Phillimore estate, he had never met the son of Admiral Philli- more until he met him through Belloc. The upper middle class to which Chesterton be- longed did not expect to meet socially, apart from professionally, families like the Philli- mores, and GKC, who knew that the most im- portant thing about the Duke of Argyll was that he was McCallum More, would no more have thought of speaking to the Duke or being • introduced to him than he would have thought of being introduced to Queen Victoria. (Later on, he once met George V of whom he gives a very lively, amusing and convincing account.) The damage done by Belloc was not merely the damage done by inserting a great deal of historical nonsense into Chesterton's head. It involved him in the great Marconi controversy, to his loss in many ways. Maisie Ward has told us how shocked she was when she discovered how irresponsible Belloc and Cecil Chesterton were in the Marconi affair. Yet though they were not irresponsible in their attack on Lloyd George, they were very irresponsible in attack- ing other people : for example, the future Lord Samuel. One of the largest bricks I have ever dropped (and I drop a great many) was at a great official party in the Guildhall where I saw Lord Samuel who by this time was Visitor of Balliol. I knew—and know—his son Godfrey extremely well, and I went up to Lord Samuel and said I had been discussing with his son Belloc's ambition to be made an honorary Fel- low of Balliol. I had quite forgotten what very good reasons Samuel had for disliking Belloc. can remember the cool severity with which he said, 'As long as I am Visitor, Belloc will not be an honorary Fellow of Balliol,' an answer which, overheard by Norman Robertson, then Canadian High Commissioner in London, sent him off into roars of laughter.

The New Witness not only drew money from Chesterton, it drew energy. Most of the writers were rather incompetent parodies of GKC at best. As in Mr Buckley's National Review in America today, there was only one writer in the New Witness always worth reading, and that was GKC himself. It was like him to undertake this 'chore' if only as a memorial to his dead brother Cecil. But nearly all the best of mcc was written before 1914, and some of it still seems to me very good indeed.