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A first paradox which Chesterton presents for us today is the fact that he is both widely popular and relatively neglected; on the contemporary intellectual and literary scene, he appears to be simultaneously present and absent.
His presence is manifested in many ways. First, on a superficial level, just consider the number of his witticisms which have been completely absorbed into our daily speech as proverbial sayings — we find them constantly quoted in newspapers and magazines, we use them all the time; sometimes we are not even aware that they were originally coined by him.
His striking images could, in turn, deflate fallacies or vividly bring home complex principles. His jokes were irrefutable; he could invent at lightning speed surprising short-cuts to reach the truth. Thus, for instance, to those who said, “My country, right or wrong,” he would reply, “My mother, drunk or sober.” Or again, on democracy: “Democracy is like blowing your nose: you may not do it well, but you ought to do it yourself.”
On the difficult problem of original sin and man’s fall from innocence, one of his comments shed an unusual, yet illuminating light: “If you wanted to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky, you would slap him on the back and say, ‘Be a man.’ No one who wished to dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth explorer would slap him on the back and say, ‘Be a crocodile.’”
The baroque eccentricity of such images led shallow critics to overlook the depth and seriousness of his thought, and he was constantly accused of being frivolous. But what is frivolity and what is seriousness? Chesterton explained:
A man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels, or lambs with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous, for he is taking one mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. But a man who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious view of the universe. The more widely different the topics talked of, the more serious and universal must be the philosophy which talks of them. The mark of the light and thoughtless writer is the harmony of his subject matter. The mark of the thoughtful writer is his apparent diversity.
Reading Chesterton today, one is constantly amazed by the uncanny accuracy of so many of his analyses, by the prophetic quality of so many of his warnings — some of which were issued as early as the beginning of the twentieth century. There is a timeliness, an immediacy, an urgency in his writing, which none of his famous contemporaries can match. (How much of the social commentary of Bernard Shaw or H.G. Wells still bears scrutiny today?)
I would like to provide quickly a series of random samples, suggesting both the wide range of Chesterton’s observations and the sharp relevance which so many of these still present for us now.
On politics (from a portrait he made of an important statesman of his time): “He had about the fundamentals of politics and ethics this curious quality of vagueness, which I have found so often in men holding high responsibilities. For public men all seem to become hazier as they mount higher… I think I could say with some truth that politicians have no politics.”
The truth of this striking insight is confirmed to us every day. The other day I happened to be reading the newly published memoirs of J.-F. Revel, Le Voleur dans la maison vide. Revel, who held for a while the portfolio of cultural affairs in François Mitterrand’s shadow cabinet (when the latter was still leader of the Opposition in France), paints a portrait of this consummate political acrobat, which appears cruelly true and verifies in its paradoxical conclusion the accuracy of Chesterton’s observation.
Revel wrote, “The trouble with Mitterrand was that he had no interest in politics”—Mitterrand was so totally absorbed, all the time, with cunning political manoeuvres and manipulations, he was possessed with such an obsessive passion for political means, that he could no longer care for political ends. His exclusive concern was how to obtain and how to retain political power — but he never reflected on the question: political power for what purpose? (Paul Hasluck’s The Chance of Politics is another recent book which offers further illustrations of this same phenomenon.)
On the Church, in its relation to the world and its times: “The Church is the only thing that can save a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of one’s own time. We do not want a Church that will move with the world. We want a Church that will move the world.”
This utterance reminds me of a remarkable dialogue between Louis Massignon and Pope Pius XII. Massignon was a great Orientalist scholar (specialising in the study of ancient Islamic mysticism) and he was also a personal friend of the Pope. When the first war between Israel and the Arabs broke out, he urged the Pope to issue a solemn statement to ensure the protection of the Holy Places in Jerusalem. The Pope was hesitant: neither the Jews nor the Arabs were likely to pay attention to his words, and he objected: “Who would listen?” To which Massignon made this superb reply: “You are the Pope: you do not write in order to be read — you write in order to state the truth.” (Massignon died in 1962; it is a pity he did not live to know the pontificate of John Paul II.)
On society: “It has been left to the very latest modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility… the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming not from a few socialists… The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, much more in Manhattan.” (He was writing this in 1926.)
And this — which is ominously apposite to our present situation (I do not believe for instance that it is a mere coincidence that we are witnessing simultaneously the development of a movement supporting euthanasia and the development of a movement in favour of homosexual marriage):
There are destructive forces in our society, that are nothing but destructive, since they are not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them, basing themselves on an inner anarchy that denies all the moral distinctions on which mere rebels base themselves. The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. The enemy arises not from among the people, but from the educated and well-off, those who unite intellectualism and ignorance, and who are helped on their way by a weak worship of force. More specifically it is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the family and the State.
In the early 1930s, T.E. Lawrence wrote in a letter to a friend, “I have not met Chesterton, but Bernard Shaw always tells me that he is a man of colossal genius.” This small example, picked at random, is characteristic of the sort of prestige which Chesterton commanded amongst the most brilliant minds of his time.
By contrast, it is puzzling to observe that today he has become virtually invisible on our intellectual horizon. Just go into any bookshop and look for his works: most of them are unavailable and have been out of print for many years already. And when a new anthology of his wisdom came out in England a couple of months ago, the few reviews that appeared in the press were typically patronising, treating Chesterton as a sort of colourful dinosaur — mildly amusing, and utterly irrelevant. The fact is, the fashionable intelligentsia of the English-speaking world now largely ignores him. (Note, however, that among the French and the Latins, the situation is quite different; the two subtlest literary minds of our time, Paulhan and Borges, literally worshipped him — but that is another story.)[1]
It may be interesting to ponder for a moment the various reasons that have contributed to this odd neglect (which at times is even tinged with scorn and hostility). One factor may well be his Catholicism. In a way, Catholicism has done to Chesterton’s reputation what the British empire did to Kipling’s: in the eyes of a shallow and ignorant public, it became a liability — an occasion for both partisans and detractors to indulge in schematisations and distortions, a sectarian pretext for support or for rejection. In this reductionist perspective, Chesterton’s Catholicism eventually came to obscure his catholicity. I just mentioned a newly published anthology of his writing: the unfortunate title of this book, Prophet of Orthodoxy, precisely illustrates the sort of simplification into which his admirers seem sometimes to fall all too easily. To be turned into a prophet was precisely a fate of which Chesterton felt most wary. He himself identified it as a temptation that had to be resisted absolutely. He realised it was a status he could easily have achieved, had he agreed to pay the usual price — which is to isolate and emphasise only one side of the truth. This is always an easy recipe for achieving popularity and for gathering crowds of disciples; but to secure this sort of demagogic success one must mutilate a complex reality.