Search

Current issue

Previous issues

Archive

Further Reading

Liturgical Calendar

The Tablet Radio Show

Manage your Subscription

Newsletter

Book Review

Life as triumph over pessimism

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy

William Oddie's full 400-page study of the development of Chesterton's life and thought up to the publication of Orthodoxy in 1908, when he was 34, confirms the true importance of these two elements.

Chesterton remembered his childhood not as a world of cloudy fancy but with the clarity of "a sort of white light on everything, cutting things out very clearly and rather emphasising their solidity. The point is that the white light had a sort of wonder in it."

This was the counterpart to the pessimism that overwhelmed him at the age of 19 or 20. In the abyss into which he sank, "I dug quite deep enough to discover the devil." This episode has reductively been explained by some biographers as depression or a temptation to homosexual practices (despite Chesterton's declaration that he had never been drawn to the latter). Dr Oddie makes clear that the experience was more far-reaching. Chesterton later wrote that Christ in Gethsemane passed through this "human horror of pessimism".

So if Chesterton at this period denounced Impressionism, it was not because he did not like the appearance of Impressionist paintings. It was because the next step after seeing a cow as "a white line and a purple shadow" was not to believe in cows - a triumph of scepticism attained via subjectivism. If Chesterton wrote strongly against decadence, it was not because he disliked the jokes of The Importance of Being Earnest, but because "the decay of society was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms".

Chesterton's reaction to the Slade slough of despond was to embrace a kind of methodic optimism. He rejoiced in mere existence. "I went far into the abyss," he wrote to his friend E.C. Bentley. "I saw lots that made me certain it is all right. The vision is fading into common day now, and I am glad. It is embarrassing talking to God face to face."

Up to that period he had hardly mentioned God in any confident way. In his first published poems, as in his schooldays, he was anticlerical. He was already a socialist, under the influence of the journalist and apostle of socialism with a cultural face, Robert Blatchford. It is important to remember that Chesterton came to Christianity from the Left, not from the conservative stance of a Newman. He never lost his preference for the poor. He fell out with Blatchford not over politics so much as over God. In reacting to Blatchford's lengthy mass-circulation atheist arguments, Chesterton argued himself into a position, that, with the help of Christian socialist clergy such as Henry Scott Holland and Conrad Noel, brought him to Catholicism (by which he at first meant Anglo-Catholicism).

In a way, his discovery in the first decade of the twentieth century of the dogmatic truth of Catholicism gave ripe expression to his childhood vision, confirmed by his Slade conversion (as it might be called) to the realisation of existence as overpoweringly good.

It is striking that Chesterton, like C.S. Lewis, found that a book by George MacDonald "made a difference to my whole existence". As a teenager, Lewis (himself deeply influenced by Chesterton, discernibly by The Man Who Was Thursday) had his imagination "baptised" by MacDonald's novel Phantastes; as a boy, Chesterton found in The Princess and the Goblin "a vision of things which even so real a revolution as a change in religious allegiance has substantially only crowned and confirmed". MacDonald's book was not so much an allegory as a myth in which belief in a fairy great-grandmother saves the princess whose house (Chesterton's house, everyone's house) was being tunnelled into by wicked goblins.

Oddie elucidates Chesterton's journey from a comfortably bohemian childhood in liberal Kensington ("Oh, Edward, don't!" exclaimed his mother when his father was asked to be churchwarden. "You will be so respectable! We never have been respectable yet; don't let's begin now") without relying on previous biographies, apart from Chesterton's Autobiography and Maisie Ward's biography of 1944, which made use of information no longer to be had. Instead he has burrowed among the Chesterton papers in the British Library. He judiciously considers previous datings and judgements and puts down the

errors of those who have written about Chesterton in the past few decades. Perhaps his biographical demeanour sometimes seems a little proud, but Oddie is right to be proud. This is the most convincing account of the development of Chesterton's mind yet published.

Apart from his labours among Chesterton's published and unpublished works, Oddie comes to his task with the advantage of writing as a former Anglican clergyman and a Catholic journalist with a very full knowledge of the historical setting of Chesterton's life. His own judgements (very seldom speculations) are soundly based. I'm only hesitant about a couple of pages on the connection between immanentism and Modernism.

Although Chesterton commands admiration from a far wider readership than convinced Catholics, he has in the past suffered from some of his admirers. There is little in this book of an ultramontane or Bellocian flavour. Indeed, Hilaire Belloc doesn't get much of a look-in, partly because he and Chesterton were not linked in the public mind by 1908. Indeed, when Bernard Shaw invented the fabulous beast, the "Chesterbelloc" (in the month that Orthodoxy was published), his joke was that "Chesterton and Belloc are so unlike that they get frightfully into one another's way". Certainly Belloc had played no notable part in the development of Chesterton's ideas and beliefs.

Chesterton did not invent a new ideology, but he understood the truth and beauty of a very old body of belief. He has often been likened to Dr Johnson (not least for a practical triumph over pessimism), but Johnson lacked an ability to tell a story with mythopoeic resonance. Chesterton, like Johnson, could tell a moral fable, but in The Man Who was Thursday, Chesterton produced a "Nightmare" (where a catastrophe is turned upside down with the triumph of good) that has succeeded in making a permanent mark on the minds of many readers. They are left like the hero of the book, Gabriel Syme, who "felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality". This vision is not complete in this life. "We see everything from behind and it looks brutal. That is not a tree but the back of a tree," says Syme. "If only we could get round in front."

Back to homepage