Literary Giants Literary Catholics (10 page)

If we call it “pastiche”, we realize at once that we have employed too light and artificial a word. Artificial in a sense it is, and no one could describe it as heavy; but deep feeling underlies the artifice and the humour has the weight of Belloc’s own
gravitas
. The book grinds no axe and proves no point. It is a gratuitous, disinterested and quite impersonal essay in romantic irony. Small in scale and purposely conventional in subject, it still leaves an impression of grandeur; fine, not finicky; hard as a diamond and delicate as wrought iron.

If, as Speaight maintains,
Belinda
can be called an essay in romantic irony, there is an amusing irony in the fact that it appears to contradict what Belloc had written in his essay “On Irony” almost twenty years earlier. “Irony is a sword, and must be used as a sword”, he had written. In
Belinda
irony is not wielded as a weapon, but flourished like a feather. It is not used to bludgeon its victim senseless but to tickle him with an affectionate sensibility. It is not an irony that is iron-shod and hardened by its own heartlessness, but one that is fleet of foot and on a flight of fancy.

Belinda
is for Belloc what
The Man Who Was Thursday
is for Chesterton; it is the one literary achievement in fiction that ensures him a place among the great novelists of his day. Perhaps, however, one should not leave a discussion of Belloc’s purely literary merit in prose without alluding to those two wonderful books,
The Path to Rome
and
The Four Men
. Neither book can be categorized as fiction, though the latter presents an assemblage of imaginary characters worthy of any novel; nor can either book be dismissed as a mere work of nonfiction, in the arid sense in which the word is usually taken.
The Path to Rome
and
The Four Men
are, first and foremost, great works of literature meriting their place in the literary canon of the twentieth century. If Belloc had not written a single word of fiction, these two works would have ensured him a place among the literary giants of his day.

We have lingered on the purely literary status of the Chesterbelloc, principally because it is through its artistic achievement that the beauty of the beast is most clearly evident. Nonetheless, no examination of the beast would be complete without a discussion of its position as a powerful commentator on socioeconomic and political issues, nor would any examination be considered adequate without due attention being given to its role as a fearless defender of the Faith. A full examination is not possible within the parameters of a solitary essay of this length, so we shall have to content ourselves with a short summary of the Chesterbelloc’s importance in these areas.

As socioeconomic and political commentators, Chesterton and Belloc have bequeathed to posterity an invaluable iteration of the social teaching of the Church. The sociopolitical creed dubbed “distributism” by the Chesterbelloc is merely the social doctrine known as “subsidiarity” in the
Catechism of the Catholic Church
. Chesterton bowed to Belloc’s preeminence as a disseminator of the ideas of distributism, declaring Belloc the master in relation to whom he was merely a disciple. “You were the founder and father of this mission”, Chesterton wrote. “We were the converts but you were the missionary. . . . You first revealed the truth both to its greater and its lesser servants. . . Great will be your glory if England breathes again.” In fact, of course, Belloc was merely the propagator and the popularizer of the Church’s social doctrine as expounded by Pope Leo XIII in
Rerum novarum
, a doctrine that would be restated, reconfirmed and reinforced by Pope Pius XI in
Quadragesimo anno
and by Pope John Paul II in
Centesimus annus
. Belloc’s key works in this area were
The Servile State
and
An Essay on the Restoration of Property
, whereas Chesterton’s
The Outline of Sanity
and his late essay “Reflections on a Rotten Apple”, published in
The Well and the Shallows
, represent the most salient and sapient contribution of the other half of the Chesterbelloc to the cause of subsidiarity. It should also be noted that Chesterton’s novel
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
is essentially a distributist parable.

Chesterton is perhaps perceived as a greater Catholic apologist than Belloc, largely due to the enormous influence that his two important works,
Orthodoxy
and
The Everlasting Man
, exerted on several generations of converts to the Faith. Without wishing to understate the importance of either of these works, or indeed other works of apologetics by Chesterton, it is necessary to raise a small plaintive voice in praise of Belloc’s seminal work,
Survivals and New Arrivals
. This sadly neglected work needs to be rediscovered. In essence it sets out the intellectual history of the past two thousand years, delineating the areas of heresy and illustrating the perennial truth and wisdom of the Church. Its style is more cumbersome and perhaps less exhilarating than Chesterton’s
Orthodoxy
or
The Everlasting Man
. Chesterton takes our breath away with his vision of the Church as a heavenly chariot. Belloc, in
Survivals and New Arrivals
, makes us gasp in amazement as we perceive the Church as an unstoppable tank trundling over the horizon onto the landscape of history, relentlessly overpowering the impotent defense of her enemies. Whether one prefers the pyrotechnic prose of Chesterton, where the dazzling words serve as swords to cut down the enemy—wordplay as swashbuckling swordplay, wordsmanship as swordsmanship—or whether one prefers Belloc’s battering rams and heavy artillery, the defense of the Faith is as successful in both cases.

Having spread the Chesterbelloc on the operating table, we feel that we have failed to dissect the beast as we had hoped. On the contrary, we feel that, far from making incisive inroads into the anatomy of the beast, we have barely scratched its surface. A whole book would be needed to study the nature of the Chesterbelloc with anything like the meticulousness that the subject requires. Perhaps the book will one day be written. In the meantime, this short exploratory operation has at least enabled us to see that both halves of the Chesterbelloc are indispensable. Chesterton’s childlike and whimsical genius is enhanced by the balance of Belloc’s
gravitas
; Belloc’s bellicosity and bombast is softened by the counterpoise of Chesterton’s charity. Perhaps we have at least discovered enough to confirm that the Chesterbelloc, as a mystical and mythological beast, is greater than its component parts. Perhaps we can truly infer that, as far as this particular beast is concerned, two is indeed a friendship but one’s an army.

Since our end is our beginning, as Mary Stuart proclaimed and as T. S. Eliot never ceased to remind us, we shall end as we began. We commenced with a playfully plaintive comment by one of the Chesterbelloc’s most illustrious enemies; we shall end in the same fashion. We began with Shaw; we shall end with Wells.

Wells complained that “Chesterton and Belloc have surrounded Catholicism with a kind of boozy halo.” Wells, as usual, was wrong. As amusingly attractive as is the image he successfully presents, he fails to convey the magnitude of the truth he fails to perceive. The Church is not in need of a halo, boozy or otherwise. As the Mystical Body of Christ, she has her halo enshrined within her very being. The Chesterbelloc’s value to the Church, and consequently its value to the world, is as a sometimes boozy defender of that halo. All sons and daughters of Christendom should, in the name of the halo of holiness, raise their glasses to the Chesterbelloc. May we always rejoice in the “boozy” beauty of the beast,

     And thank the Lord

     For the temporal sword,

          And howling heretics too;

     And whatever good things

     Our Christendom brings,

          But especially barley brew!

4

_____

C
HESTERTON ENJOYED
a lifelong friendship with Saint Francis of Assisi. As a small boy, long before he had an inkling of the nature of Catholicism, Chesterton was read a story by his parents about a man who gave up all his possessions, even the clothes he was wearing on his back, to follow Christ in holy poverty. From the moment the wide-eyed Gilbert first heard the story of Saint Francis, he knew he had found a friend. As such, long before he had submitted to the reason of Rome, Chesterton had succumbed to the romance of Assisi.

Perhaps inevitably, childlike wonder was followed by adolescent doubt. As Chesterton groped toward manhood during the early 1890s, he succumbed temporarily to the beguiling power of the Decadents. Under the charismatic and iconoclastic seduction of Oscar Wilde, the world of Chesterton’s youth seemed under the mad and maddening influence of those who preferred the shadows of sin and cynicism to the light of virtue and verity. Romance itself had donned the mask of darkness. It was in this gloom-laden atmosphere that the young Chesterton wrote a poem on Saint Francis of Assisi, published in November 1892. The questions it asks were a quest for answers in a world of doubt.

     Is there not a question rises from his word of “brother, sister”,

          Cometh from that lonely dreamer that today we shrink to find?

     Shall the lives that moved our brethren leave us at the gates of darkness,

          What were heaven if ought we cherished shall be wholly left behind?

     Is it God’s bright house we dwell in, or a vault of dark confusion. . .?

This poem, dedicated to the “lonely dreamer” of Assisi, illuminates the darkness of Chesterton’s adolescence. The young poet, seeking to make sense of the conflicting visions of reality vying for his allegiance, was beginning to perceive that the Decadents had cast out Brother Sun so that they could worship Sister Moon. Within three years of the publication of this poem, Wildean Decadence had decayed in the squalor of the police courts. Wilde himself would repent and would be received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. In his conversion, he was merely following many of the other Decadents, both in England and France, who, having dipped their toes in the antechambers of hell, had decided, prudently, that it wasn’t somewhere they wished to spend eternity. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Huysmans, Beardsley, Johnson and Dowson had all followed the “Decadent path to Christ”, repenting of their sin and embracing the loving forgiveness to be found in Mother Church. Paradoxically, the path to Christ was always to be found in the implicit Christian morality of much of the art of the Decadents, particularly, and most memorably, in Wilde’s masterpiece,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
.

Chesterton’s own response, and riposte, to the Decadence of the 1890s can be found in his novel
The Man Who Was Thursday
. Whereas the Decadents—taking their own perverse inspiration from the dark romanticism of Byron, Shelley and Keats—had stripped the masks off “reality” and discovered darkness, Chesterton stripped the masks off “reality” (from the “anarchists” in his novel) and discovered light. By the dawn of the new century, Chesterton had emerged from the subreal dream of Decadence into the real awakening of a Christian perception of the cosmos. In this journey from darkness to light, he had as his constant ally and companion the “lonely dreamer” of Assisi. On 1 December 1900, the day after Wilde had died a Catholic in Paris, Chesterton, not yet a Catholic, was singing the praises of Saint Francis in an article published in
The Speaker
.

To most people . . . there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of Saint Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk and not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked; we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also.

These words, which could have served as the introduction to Chesterton’s biography of Saint Francis published twenty-three years later, indicated that the saint had served as an antidote to the poison of the previous decade.

In 1902, in
Twelve Types
, Chesterton again lauded Saint Francis with the lucidity and faith that had been almost wholly absent in the questioning ambivalence of his poem of ten years earlier.

In July 1922 Chesterton was finally received into the Catholic Church. Eight weeks later he received the sacrament of confirmation, choosing Francis as his confirmation name. It would, perhaps, be easy to suggest that the obvious motive for the choice was a desire to show love and respect for Frances, his wife. It was, however, hardly surprising that he should have chosen the saint who had been the friend of his childhood, the ally in his confused adolescence and the companion in his approach to the Faith. In any case, the two motives are not mutually exclusive. In pleasing his wife, he was also pleasing himself.

At the time of his reception into the Church, Chesterton was already planning a full-length biography of Saint Francis that would be published in the following year. Confirming the saint’s importance, he wrote that the figure of Saint Francis “stands on a sort of bridge connecting my boyhood with my conversion to many other things”. With these words in mind, it is not difficult to imagine that Chesterton took on the writing of
Saint Francis of Assisi
so soon after his conversion as an act of thanksgiving to the saint who, above all others, had accompanied him on his journey to the Faith.