The Troubling Genius Of G.K.Chesterton

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A Critic at Large JULY 7, 2008 ISSUE

The Back of the World

The troubling genius of G. K. Chesterton.

BY ADAM GOPNIK

This year is the hundredth anniversary of G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday,” and it has come out in at least two new editions on the occasion. “The Man Who Was Thursday” is one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges. It is also, along with Chesterton’s “The Napoleon of Notting Hill,” the nearest thing that this masterly writer wrote to a masterpiece.

Chesterton is an easy writer to love—a brilliant sentence-maker, a humorist, a journalist of endless appetite and invention. His aphorisms alone are worth the price of admission, better than any but Wilde’s. Even his standard-issue zingers are first-class—“Americans are the people who describe their use of alcohol and tobacco as vices”; “There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle”; “ ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no true patriot would think of saying. . . . It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober’ ”—while the deeper ones are genuine Catholic koans, pregnant and profound: “Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.” Or: “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” Or: “A key has no logic to its shape. Its logic is: it turns the lock.”

But he is a difficult writer to defend. Those of us who are used to pressing his writing on friends have the hard job of protecting him from his detractors, who think he was a nasty anti-Semite and medievalizing reactionary, and the still harder one of protecting him from his admirers, who pretend that he was not. His Catholic devotees are legion and fanatic—the small Ignatius Press has taken on the heroic job of publishing everything he wrote in a uniform edition, and is already up to the thirty-fifth volume—but not always helpful to his non-cult reputation, especially when they insist on treating his gassy Church apologetics as though they were as interesting as his funny and suggestively mystical Christian allegories. He has a loving following among liberal Catholics, like Garry Wills and Wilfrid Sheed, and even nonbelievers, like Martin Gardner. But his most strenuous advocates are mainly conservative preVatican II types who are indignant about his neglect without stopping to reflect how much their own uncritical enthusiasm may have contributed to it.

Chesterton is one of that company of writers whom we call Edwardian (though they stretch back to the last years of Victoria), a golden generation that emerged in the eighteen-nineties with personas seeming as fully formed as the silent comedians of the Mack Sennett studio, complete with style, costume, and gesture. Writing in London at a time when hundreds of morning newspapers and as many magazines competed for copy, and where mass literacy had created a mass audience without yet entirely removing respect for intellect, they made themselves as much as they made their sentences. We see them as we read them: Shaw all crinkled, beaming rationality, Kipling beetle-browed, bespectacled imperial intensity. Chesterton embodied the hearty side of mysticism, cape thrown across his shoulders, broad-brimmed hat on his head and sword-stick at his side, a hungry Catholic Pantagruel in London. (The last generation of writers who had anything like the same signature presence were the Americans who first encountered television, in the fifties—Mailer and Capote and Vidal—and for the same reason: they lent prestige to a new mass medium that hadn’t yet learned how easily it could get along without them.)

Chesterton’s autobiography, begun in the late twenties and published just after his death, in 1936, tells his early story more or less accurately. Born into a conventional and unreligious family in suburban London in 1874, he had an extraordinary sensitivity to the secret life of things. In a chapter titled “The Man with the Golden Key,” perfect in its delicate unwinding of the tension between truth and play in a child’s life, he explains that the transforming event of his early life was watching puppet shows in a toy theatre that his father had made for him. (The man with the golden key was a prince whose purpose he can no longer recall in a play whose plot he can no longer remember; but the purposefulness and romance of the figure stay with him.) Chesterton’s point is that childhood is not a time of illusion but a time when illusion and fact exist (as they should) at the same level of consciousness, when the story and the world are equally numinous:

If this were a ruthless realistic modern story, I should of course give a most heart-rending account of how my spirit was broken with disappointment, on discovering that the prince was only a painted figure. But this is not a ruthless realistic modern story. On the contrary, it is a true story. And the truth is that I do not remember that I was in any way deceived or in any way undeceived. The whole point is that I did like the toy theatre even when I knew it was a toy theatre. I did like the cardboard figures, even when I found they were of cardboard. The white light of wonder that shone on the whole business was not any sort of trick. . . . It seems to me that when I came out of the house and stood on the hill of houses, where the roads sank steeply towards Holland Park, and terraces of new red houses could look out across a vast hollow and see far away the sparkle of the Crystal Palace (and seeing it was juvenile sport in those parts), I was subconsciously certain then, as I am consciously certain now, that there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of the life of man; and that it is man who afterwards darkens it with dreams or goes astray from it in self-deception. It is only the grown man who lives a life of makebelieve and pretending; and it is he who has his head in a cloud.

The other epiphany concerned limits, localism. “All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary line that brings one thing sharply against another,” he writes. “All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window. To the grief of all grave dramatic critics, I will still assert that the perfect drama must strive to rise to the higher ecstasy of the peepshow.” The two central insights of his work are here. First, the quarrel between storytelling, fiction, and reality is misdrawn as a series of illusions that we outgrow, or myths that we deny, when it is a sequence of stories that we inhabit. The second is not that small is beautiful but that the beautiful is always small, that we cannot have a clear picture in white light of abstractions, but only of a row of houses at a certain time of day, and that we go wrong when we extend our loyalties to things much larger than a puppet theatre. (And this, in turn, is fine, because the puppet theatre contains the world.)

This vision, not yet specifically religious, though determinedly antimaterialist, helped launch Chesterton into the world that he went out to conquer. After a failed attempt at art school and a flirtation with politics, he began, at the turn of the century, writing pop journalism. He was an immediate hit. (He wrote a regular column for the Illustrated London News for more than a quarter century.) He was a big man: six feet four, and constantly expanding outward, from too much food and ale. Bernard Shaw liked to refer to Chesterton and his close friend the Catholic poet and philosopher Hilaire Belloc as if they were a single right-wing Carrollian monster, the Chesterbelloc. (Appearance is the great sorter-out of literary fame; it is hard to become an iconic writer without first looking like an icon.)

A certain kind of fatuous materialist progressivism was ascendant—the progressivism of Shaw and Wells and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, which envisaged a future of unending technological advance. The illusions of faith would be dispelled in an empire of slow-chewed spinach, rational spelling, and workers’ reading circles. Against this, the young Chesterton’s themes, the superiority of the local and the primacy of the imaginary, were irresistible. As he recognized, the papers wanted what they always want: the passionate assertion of the opposing point, the unexpected view in clown makeup, the contrarian as comedian. And that he gave, understanding perfectly the role he was to play. He could appeal to heaven, but he never put on airs. Discussing the “mystery” of his Fleet Street success, he wrote, “I have a notion that the real advice I could give to a young journalist, now that I am myself an old journalist, is simply this: to write an article for the Sporting Times and another for the Church Times, and put them into the wrong envelopes.”

What he had to say came pouring out in essays, poems, and books. (His first book, called “Robert Browning,” had, as he knew, things to say about almost every subject under the sun save the poet. A later book on Dickens, though a little less absent-minded, is really about “The Pickwick Papers” and bits of “Martin Chuzzlewit” and “Nicholas Nickleby.”) He wrote an essay nearly every week, perhaps the best and most characteristic of them, “On Running After One’s Hat,” making the case for the romance of everyday existence:

Most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences—things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys’ habit in this matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen.

Chesterton’s mysticism always resolves in the close at hand: in a signal light at Paddington station, not in a sunrise over a beach in Tahiti. With a comic touch, he goes on to make a serious point, elevating stories over situations:

A friend of mine was particularly afflicted in this way. Every day his drawer was jammed, and every day in consequence it was something else that rhymes to it. But I pointed out to him that this sense of wrong was really subjective and relative; it rested entirely upon the assumption that the drawer could, should, and would come out easily. “But if,” I said, “you picture to yourself that you are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, the struggle will become merely exciting and not exasperating. Imagine that you are tugging up a lifeboat out of the sea. Imagine that you are roping up a fellow-creature out of an Alpine crevass. Imagine even that you are a boy again and engaged in a tug-of-war between French and English.”. . . I have no doubt that every day of his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a flushed face and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts to himself, and seeming to hear all round him the roar of an applauding ring. . . . An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Chesterton liked to pair himself, congenially, with Shaw, as his opposite, and he was right to do so, for they were the two most perceptive critics of capitalism in their decade. The chief bourgeois vices are hypocrisy and homogenization. Mercantile capitalist societies profess values that their own appetites destroy; calls for public morality come from the same people who use prostitutes. Meanwhile, the workings of capital turn the local artisan into a maker of mass-produced objects and every high street into an identical strip mall. Shaw is the great critic of the hypocrisy of bourgeois society—its inconsistencies and absurdities, the way it robs the poor and then demands that they be “deserving.” Chesterton is the great critic of its homogenization, the levelling of difference in the pursuit of cash. He is the grandfather of Slow Food, of local eating, of real ale, the first strong mind that saw something evil in the levelling of little pleasures.

The idea for Chesterton’s first novel, “The Napoleon of Notting Hill,” published in 1904, is an illustration of the principle: Chesterton imagines a future London where medieval clan identity has reasserted itself, so that Notting Hill proudly distinguishes itself from Kensington, and the good yeomen of Chelsea guard their traditions against the interlopers from Battersea. The joy of the book lies in the marriage of Chesterton’s love of feudal romance with his love of the density and mystery of the modern city. And London does bring out his strongest and most eloquent emotions: “A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post card.” Chesterton’s preference for the small state made him a vehement and, for the time, courageous anti-imperialist. His was one of the leading voices against the Boer War. “The two great movements during my youth and early manhood were Imperialism and Socialism,” he recalled. “Both believed in unification and centralization on a large scale. Neither could have seen any meaning in my own fancy for having things on a smaller and smaller scale.”

“The Napoleon of Notting Hill,” after establishing its beautiful conceit, fritters away some of its energy in frantic plot-turning. Four years later, in “The Man Who Was Thursday,” his other principle, the necessity of the imagination, got fully dramatized. The novel tells the story, in a mood deliberately feverish and overlit—snowstorms over St. Paul’s and prismatic sunsets in the suburbs—of a young poet, Syme, who becomes a policeman in order to pursue an international circle of anarchists who have embarked on a nihilistic war against civilization. The anarchists’ leaders, following Poe’s principle of the purloined letter—that no one notices the obvious—meet openly on a balcony overlooking Leicester Square. Each has taken as a code name a day of the week. Syme, after infiltrating the group, becomes Thursday; its chief is the dreadful Sunday. Syme discovers that the group is plotting a bombing in Paris, and sets off to stop it. As he races through England and across the Channel, he discovers that the entire circle of anarchists is really made up of undercover policemen, including the sinister-seraphic Sunday, who is, somewhat mystically, both the ultimate anarchist and the leading cop—the two faces of the deity, as Chesterton seems to have imagined him then.

At times wonderfully funny, at times frightening, the book is filled with what we would now call existential panic, rendered not in an intuitive, dreamlike way, as in Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” or “The Hunting of the Snark,” but made to disturb through the invocation of a world almost but not quite like our own. It is a Surrealist atmosphere, in the sense that the awful and the extraordinary don’t intrude on the normal but rise from the normal—are the normal in another dimension. (Here Kafka and Borges are implicit; Chesterton must have influenced both.) In “The Man Who Was Thursday,” he recaptures a childhood sense of what it feels like to be frightened by a nothing that is still a something, and by the sense that ordinary things hold intimations of another world, that the crack in the teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead so easily that the dead are already in the living room, pouring out of the broken porcelain. The book is also stippled with small epigrammatic moments, as when Syme comes upon an anarchist poet, Gregory, standing by a street lamp (“whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the fence behind him”) on a silent, starlit street:

“I was waiting for you,” said Gregory. “Might I have a moment’s conversation?”

“Certainly. About what?” asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.

Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree.

“About this and this,” he cried; “about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself—there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold.”

“All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.”

The really startling thing in the book is Chesterton’s imagining of the anarchists as philosopher-demons. It’s easy to forget just how scary anarchists could seem at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the previous quarter century, they had killed a French President, an American President, and the Russian Tsar, and had bombed the Royal Greenwich Observatory, near London. (The same score now—Sarkozy, Bush, Putin, and the London Eye—and we’d all be under martial law.) “Anarchism,” for Chesterton, has the same resonance that “terrorism” has for English writers like Amis and Hitchens exactly a century later: it represents a kind of vengeful, all-devouring nihilism that is assumed to be pervasive and—this is the crucial thing—profoundly seductive, sweeping through whole classes, of intellectuals, or immigrants, or, especially, immigrant intellectuals. Chesterton’s portrait of Syme could be a portrait of the “awakened” post-9/11 liberal: “He did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion. He poured perpetually into newspapers and their wastepaper baskets a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this deluge of barbaric denial. . . . There was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage and solitary as he.”

Chesterton thinks the anarchist’s hatred of bourgeois materialism is so obviously attractive, comes so near to the divine, that it is the truest evil. Only an act of strong will can resist it. Where the ordinary liberal scoffs at the idea that apocalyptic terror represents a real threat to his society, the awakened humanist, like Syme the poet-policeman or Chesterton himself, believes that everyone else has missed the reality, by refusing to accept how plausible and alluring the argument for destruction is. To anyone “awakened” in this way, people who hold the alternative normal view—that there is nothing much to be frightened of—are literally insane. They cannot see what is in front of their noses even as it blows up their cities. The nightmarish intensity of “The Man Who Was Thursday” derives from this conviction. Only cops and criminals are really alive.

Yet Chesterton still had his wits about him, and recognizes, at the end of his book, that the demon-terrorists are largely a projection of the policeman’s mind. Or is it, perhaps, that the anarchists, who are really policemen, secretly wish to be anarchists? This double vision, where the appetite for romantic violence is imagined as the flip side of the desire for absolute order, gives the book its permanence. It ends with a powerful and strange image of reality itself as two-sided:

“Listen to me,” cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis. “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stopping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”

Given that longing, it was as obvious that Chesterton was headed to Rome as it was that Wilde was headed to Reading jail. If you want a solution, at once authoritarian and poetic, to the threat of moral anarchism, then Catholicism, which built Chartres and inspired Dante, looks a lot better than Scotland Yard. If you want stability allied to imagination, Catholicism has everything else beat. Although Chesterton did not officially convert until 1922, well after the war, his drift toward what he called “Orthodoxy” was apparent in the years just after the publication of “The Man Who Was Thursday.”

And right around here is where the Jew-hating comes in. A reader with a casual interest in Chesterton’s life may have a reassuring sense, from his fans and friendly biographers, that his antiSemitism really isn’t all that bad: that there’s not much of it; that a lot of it came from loyalty to his younger brother Cecil, a polemical journalist in the pre-war years, and to his anti-Dreyfusard friend Belloc; that he had flushed it out of his system by the mid-twenties; and, anyway, that it was part of the time he lived in, a time when pretty much everyone, from Kipling to T. S. Eliot, mistrusted Jews—when even the philo-Semites (give them a home!) were really anti-Semites (get them out of here!).

Unfortunately, a little reading shows that there’s a lot of it, that it comes all the time, and that the more Chesterton tries to justify it the worse it gets. The ugliness really began in 1912, when he joined his brother in a crusade against the corruption of the Liberal Government, using a scandal that involved Rufus Isaacs, a Cabinet minister, and his brother Godfrey, a businessman. The affair, then called the Marconi Scandal (it had to do with what would now be called insider trading in a wireless-telegraph company), implicated non-Jews, too—David Lloyd George, for one—but the nasty heart of the accusations was directed by the Chestertons against the Isaacs brothers, who were not only corrupt but alien. Eventually, Godfrey Isaacs sued Cecil Chesterton, successfully, for libel.

This campaign—and, perhaps, the courtroom loss as well—set off something horrible in the older brother, and, after Cecil died, in 1918, in the war, Chesterton’s hatreds became ugly and obsessive. There had been mild Jew-bashing in his work before, based on the ethnic generalities that everyone engaged in—the Jews are all alike in his stories, but then the French and the Italians are all alike, too. From then on, however, Chesterton hammers relentlessly at the idea that there is “a Jewish problem,” the problem being that Jews are foreigners, innately alien to the nations into which they’ve insinuated themselves. Writing in 1920, he tells us that Jews are regarded, by the Arabs in Palestine, as “parasites that feed on a community by a thousand methods of financial intrigue and economic exploitation.” Chesterton then adds that this charge may not be entirely true but needs to be addressed by the Jews—as though they were compelled to consider themselves permanently on trial by their persecutors. Later in the decade, writing about a journey to America, he says, in defense of Henry Ford, “No extravagance of hatred merely following onexperience of Jews can properly be called a prejudice. . . . These people of the plains have found the Jewish problem exactly as they might have struck oil; because it is there, and not even because they were looking for it.”

It’s a deeply racial, not merely religious, bigotry; it’s not the Jews’ cupidity or their class role—it’s them. In his autobiography, Chesterton tries to defend himself by explaining what it is that makes people naturally mistrust Jews. All schoolboys recognized Jews as Jews, he says, and when they did so “what they saw was not Semites or Schismatics or capitalists or revolutionists, but foreigners, only foreigners that were not called foreigners.” Even a seemingly assimilated Jew, in Chesterton’s world, remains a foreigner. No one born a Jew can become a good Englishman: if England had sunk into the Atlantic, he says, Disraeli would have run off to America. The more he tries to excuse himself, the worse it gets. In his autobiography, he writes of how he appreciates that “one of the great Jewish virtues is gratitude,” and explains that he knows this because as a kid at school “I was criticized in early days for quixotry and priggishness in protecting Jews; and I remember once extricating a strange swarthy little creature with a hooked nose from being bullied, or rather being teased.”

The insistence that Chesterton’s anti-Semitism needs to be understood “in the context of his time” defines the problem, because his time—from the end of the Great War to the mid-thirties—was the time that led to the extermination of the European Jews. In that context, his jocose stuff is even more sinister than his serious stuff. He claims that he can tolerate Jews in England, but only if they are compelled to wear “Arab” clothing, to show that they are an alien nation. Hitler made a simpler demand for Jewish dress, but the idea was the same. Of course, there were, tragically and ironically, points of contact between Chesterton and Zionism. He went to Jerusalem in 1920 and reported back on what he found among the nascent Zionists, whom he liked: he wanted them out of Europe and so did they; he wanted Jews to be turned from rootless cosmopolitans into rooted yeomen, and so did they.

Chesterton wasn’t a fascist, and he certainly wasn’t in favor of genocide, but that is about the best that can be said for him—and is surely less of a moral accomplishment than his admirers would like. He did speak out, toward the end of his life, against the persecution in Nazi Germany, writing that he was “appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities,” that “they have absolutely no reason or logic behind them,” that “I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and I will die defending the last Jew in Europe.” Yet he insisted, “I still think there is a Jewish problem,” and he denounced Hitler in the context of a wacky argument that Nazism is really a form of “Prussianism,” which is really a form of Judaism; that is, a belief in a chosen, specially exalted people. (For what it’s worth, although he mistrusts Judaism, he detests Islam; Judaism is merely pre-Christian but Islam is a kind of parody Christianity. All the favorite historical arguments for Jesus—that he had to be either crazy or right, and he doesn’t seem crazy; that he changed the world with a suddenness not plausible in an ordinary human; that the scale of the edifice he inspired is proof of divine inspiration—apply just as well to Muhammad, and they can’t both be the guy.)

The trouble for those of us who love Chesterton’s writing is that the anti-Semitism is not incidental: it rises from the logic of his poetic position. The anti-Semitism is easy to excise from his arguments when it’s explicit. It’s harder to excise the spirit that leads to it—the suspicion of the alien, the extreme localism, the favoring of national instinct over rational argument, the distaste for “parasitic” middlemen, and the preference for the simple organ-grinding music of the folk.

His defenders insist that, whatever harm he did to himself and his reputation by his prejudices, the often long, always didactic, and specifically Catholic books to which he devoted himself after his conversion more than make up for it, since they are both profound and genuinely universal, insisting on a pan-national commonality in the true faith. I have had these books—“The Everlasting Man,” a study of Jesus and Christianity; his life of St. Francis; his defense of Thomas Aquinas—pressed on me by Catholic friends with something like the same enthusiasm with which I have proselytized for the pre-Catholic Chesterton. It is hard for a nonbeliever to evaluate this kind of writing, which, despite its evangelical exhortations, is really written to comfort and encourage the already convinced. We choose a religion, when we do, not for the tenets of a creed but for the totality of a circumstance, for a tone and a practice and an encompassing condition: “It feels like home” (or “like my father’s puppet theatre”) is about the truest thing that the convert can say about his new faith. As Chesterton would have been the first to admit, nobody has to argue so strenuously for what he actually believes. Nobody gets up on a soapbox and shouts about the comfort of his sofa and chairs. He just invites other people to sit in them.

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis’s intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas’s pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts to Catholicism are relieved not to have to defend Henry VIII’s divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts timeservers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you’re new to mail.

The books became narrower as they got bigger. The problem of how you reconcile a love of the particular with a set of universal values seemed easy; the Catholic Church was large enough to provide a universal code and ritual for life with plenty of room for variation among lives within it. The trouble is that Catholic universalism is not so convincing to those whose idea of local variation involves a variation on the Catholic ritual, or wanting some other ritual, or wanting no ritual at all. Chesterton’s vision has no room in it for tolerance, except as a likable personal whim or an idiosyncratic national trait. (That he was personally tolerant, on this basis, no one can doubt.) The history of persecution, of Albigensians and Inquisitions, is constantly defended in the inevitable “though it can only be regretted/still it must always be remembered” manner.

The wonderful spirit of early Chesterton—who is equally religious but not so neatly dogmatic—got channelled into the Father Brown detective stories, which he wrote for money and from increasingly flagging inspiration, and into the torrent of weekly journalism, which he kept up right until his death. The later essays are often as brilliant as those of the early nineteen-hundreds. Chesterton on the virtues of the newly invented cartoon, on the absurdities of Prohibition in America, on social manners within New York skyscrapers is still wonderful. (Musing on how an American always takes off his hat in an elevator, he writes that the very word “elevator” “expresses a great deal of his vague but idealistic religion,” and he goes on, “Perhaps a brief religious service will be held in the elevator as it ascends; in a few well-chosen words touching the Utmost for the Highest. . . . The tall building is itself artistically akin to the tall story. The very word skyscraper is an admirable example of an American lie.”) But often one has the sense of a man chained to a paradox assembly line in a prose factory. Too much journalism does drain a writer; turns his tics into tocks, dully marking the time until the next check.

And then he seemed very dated very soon. There are two great tectonic shifts in English writing. One occurs in the early eighteenth century, when Addison and Steele begin The Spectator and the stop-and-start Elizabethan-Stuart prose becomes the smooth, Latinate, elegantly wrought ironic style that dominated English writing for two centuries. Gibbon made it sly and ornate; Johnson gave it sinew and muscle; Dickens mocked it at elaborate comic length. But the style—formal address, long windups, balance sought for and achieved—was still a sort of default, the voice in which leader pages more or less wrote themselves.

The second big shift occurred just after the First World War, when, under American and Irish pressure, and thanks to the French (Flaubert doing his work through early Joyce and Hemingway), a new form of aerodynamic prose came into being. The new style could be as limpid as Waugh or as blunt as Orwell or as funny as White and Benchley, but it dethroned the old orotundity as surely as Addison had killed off the old asymmetry. Chestertonian mannerisms—beginning sentences with “I wish to conclude” or “I should say, therefore” or “Moreover,” using the first person plural un-self-consciously (“What we have to ask ourselves . . .”), making sure that every sentence was crafted like a sword and loaded like a cannon—appeared to have come from some other universe. Writers like Shaw and Chesterton depended on a kind of comic and complicit hyperbole: every statement is an overstatement, and understood as such by readers. The new style prized understatement, to be filled in by the reader. What had seemed charming and obviously theatrical twenty years before now could sound like puff and noise. Human nature didn’t change in 1910, but English writing did. (For Virginia Woolf, they were the same thing.) The few writers of the nineties who were still writing a couple of decades later were as dazed as the last dinosaurs, post-comet. They didn’t know what had hit them, and went on roaring anyway.

In the late twenties, many people lost their bearings, and Chesterton began to drift farther right than he had before. Though he never fully embraced Mussolini, he was in spirit as good a Falangist as you could find: he dreamed of an anti-capitalist agricultural state overseen by the Catholic Church and governed by a military for whom medieval ideas of honor still resonated, a place where Jews would not be persecuted or killed, certainly, but hived off and always marked as foreigners. All anti-utopians cherish a secret utopia, an Eden of their own, and his, ironically, was achieved: his ideal order was ascendant over the whole Iberian Peninsula for half a century. And a bleak place it was, too, with a fearful ruling class running a frightened population in an atmosphere of poverty-stricken uniformity and terrified stasis—a lot more like the actual medieval condition than like the Victorian fantasy. (Just as William Morris’s or Ruskin’s medieval guilds were the leisure activities of a Victorian moneyed and altruistic class projected backward in time, Chesterton’s medieval London was really a nostalgic vision of late-Victorian London suburbs, small craftsmen gathered around the village green.)

He died, at the age of sixty-two, in his beloved country town of Beaconsfield (Disraeli had previously been its most illustrious resident), worse for wear after decades of non-stop writing, editing, and lecture-touring. His coffin was too big to be carried down the stairs, and had to be taken through a window. But even in his final years the sinuosity of his mind and the beauty of his line remained strong. (Besides, if obviously great writers were allowed onto the reading list only when they conform to the current consensus of liberal good will—voices of tolerance and liberal democracy—we would probably be down to George Eliot.)

Chesterton’s conundrums of imagination and fact retain their grip on us, because they remind us that we know two things. We know that we have our experience of a limited world, Surbiton or Notting Hill or Telegraph Hill. We also know that this experience doesn’t feel limited, that it includes far more—all of myth and religion and meaning, as the children’s puppet theatre does. The desire for mystery and romance can’t be argued out of importance, but it can’t be willed into existence, either. It is a mistake to believe that the man with the golden key is “only” a puppet when he acts out a story that alters the inside of your head; it is also a mistake to cover your eyes and wish away the strings.

We can take the belief in that puppet to be a delusion, as the rationalists did. Or we can take it to be an intimation, as Chesterton did, of the existence of another world, in which the things that we sense as shadows will become real, and we will see ourselves as puppets that have come alive in the hand of God. Or we can believe that the credit we give the puppet show is the credit it deserves, that the wonder of it cannot be explained, up or down, but only experienced; that the side we see is the side there is to look at, and that the white radiance of wonder shines from inside, which is where the light is. ♦