BOOKS OF THE DAY
G. K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton. By Maisie Ward. (Sliced and Ward. 255.) IT is possible to argue that the best biographies have been the result of a conflict and not of a surrender. One pictures the bio- grapher, however cheerfully he may have undertaken his task, glowering with sullen determination and resentment at the huge mass of intractable material any life must represent. A man lives for seventy years: to make sense of this is a worse labour than reducing to order the record of a mere four-years' war. To simplify is essential: so we see Boswell brushing aside in a few pages more than half his subject's lifetime, or Lytton Strachey choosing one characteristic sentence and holding it like a thread of cotton through the maze.
Mrs. Ward, however, is too fond of her subject and too close to it to reduce her material into a portrait for strangers. Her bio- graphy is often of great interest : it is a useful and sometimes explicit corrective to Mrs. Cecil Chesterton's vulgar and inaccurate study of the Chesterton family ; but it is too long for its material, too cumbered with affectionate trivialities. When we love we hoard a scrap of dialogue, a picture postcard, a foreign coin but " these foolish things " must be excluded from a biography which is written for strangers. Mrs. Ward has amiably supposed her readers to be all friends of her subject: her book would have been better if she had realised—as Stevenson's biographers also failed to realise—that in the case of a great writer the years inevitably produce enemies. One wishes, too, that she had remembered more frequently her non- Catholic audience. Remarks such as "the `holier bread' came perhaps to his (Chesterton's) mind from the fact that the average of Daily Communion is unusually high at Notre Dame " display the embarrassing parochialism that haunts so much Catholic writing in England.
Chesterton's bibliography consists of one hundred volumes, the " quiet resolute practice of the liberty of a free mind," as Mrs. Ward admirably expresses it. Out of this enormous output time will choose. Time often chooses oddly, or so it seems to us, though it is more reasonable to suppose that it is we ourselves who are erratic in our judgements. We are already proving our eccentricity in the case of Chesterton: a generation that appreciates Joyce finds fOr some reason Chesterton's equally fanatical play on words ex- hausting. Perhaps it is that he is still suspected of levity, and the generation now reaching middle-age has been a pecUliarly serious one. Mrs. Ward should at least alter that opinion: she dwells at great length on Chesterton's political opinions. He cared passionately for individual liberty and for local patriotism, but the party which he largely inspired has an art-and-crafty air about it today. He was too good a man for politics: he never, one feels, penetrated far enough into the murky intricacies of political thought. To be a politician a man needs to be a psychologist, and Chesterton was no psychologist, as his novels prove. He saw things in absolute terms of good and evil, and his immense charity prevented him admitting the amount of ordinary shabby deception in human life. At their worst our politicians were fallen angels.
For the same reason that he failed as a political writer he suc- ceeded as a religious one, for religion is simple, dogma is simple Much of the difficulty of theology arises from the efforts of mitt who are not primarily writers to distinguish a quite simple idea with the utmost accuracy. He re-stated the original thought with the freshness, simplicity and excitement of discovery. In fact, it was discovery : he unearthed the defined from beneath the defini- tions, and the reader wondered why the definitions had ever been thought necessary. Orthodoxy, The Thing and The Evelasting Man are among the great books of the age. Much else, of course, will be disappointing if time does not preserve out of that weight of work : The Ballad of the White Horse, the satirical poems, such prose fantasies as The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill, the early critical books on Browning and Dickens; but in these three religious books, inspired by a cosmic optimism, the passionately held belief that " it is good to be here," he con- tributed what another great religious writer closely akin to him in political ideas, and even in style, saw was most lacking in our age. Peguy put these lines on man into the mouth of his Creator:
" On peut, lui demander beaucoup de cceur, beaucoup de charite, beaucoup de sacrifice.
Il a beaucoup de foi et beaucoup de charite.
Mais ce qu'on ne peut pas lui demander, sacredie, c'est un pep d'esperance."
GRAHAM GREENE.
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