Literary Giants Literary Catholics (11 page)

The admiration that Chesterton felt toward Saint Francis was inextricably bound up with his belief in the superiority of childlike innocence over all forms of cynicism. Saint Francis and his followers were called the Jongleurs de Dieu because of the innocence of their jollity and the jollity of their innocence. “The jongleur was properly a joculator or jester; sometimes he was what we should call a juggler.” It was this mystical synthesis of laughter and humility, a belief that playing and praying go hand in hand, which was the secret of the saint’s success. Ultimately, however, the laughter and the humility were rooted in gratitude because, as Chesterton discerned with characteristic and Franciscan sagacity, “there is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset”.

Chesterton’s life of Saint Francis was destined to be one of the most commercially and critically successful of all his books. Typical of the enthusiastic response of the critics was that of Patrick Braybrooke, who described the book as “astoundingly brilliant”: “The Catholic Church has found in Mr. Chesterton the greatest interpreter of her greatest saint.” Ultimately, however, the book’s brilliance shone from the blurring of the distinction between the Chestertonian and the Franciscan. It is, at times, difficult to distinguish between Chesterton’s exposition of the Franciscan spirit and his elucidation of Chestertonian philosophy. Throughout the pages of the book, Chesterton chases the saint, complaining that all explanations of the saint’s enigmatic character were “too slight for satisfaction”. The book unravels like a heaven-sent game of hide-and-seek, similar to the plot of
The Man Who Was Thursday
, with the Man who was Francis remaining as difficult to pin down as the Man who was Sunday. Yet, as with the plot to the novel, there is something thrilling in the chase.

Whatever the book’s shortcomings as an entirely satisfying explanation of the saint, it remains an emphatically successful romp and romance in the true Franciscan and Chestertonian spirit. From start to finish, Chesterton plays cat and mouse with the Jongleur de Dieu. And, in keeping with the poetry of the saint, it doesn’t really matter that sister cat fails to catch brother mouse. The charm is in the chase. For those reading Chesterton’s
Saint Francis of Assisi
for the first time, you are in for a rare treat. Prepare to be charmed. Enjoy the chase!

5

_____

T
HE DISCOVERY OF
a “new” novel by G. K. Chesterton, sixty-five years after his death, has sent ripples of excitement through the literary world. It is, of course, not a new novel in the literal sense of the word but, as the cover of this attractively produced volume proclaims, “a first novel, previously unpublished”. It was also, prior to publication, a first novel, previously untitled—a fact that its discoverer, Denis J. Conlon, has rectified.
Basil Howe: A Story of Young Love
is, however, far more exciting as a detective story than as a love story, and far more alluring as a barely concealed portrait of the young Chesterton than as an inadequately revealed portrait of “Basil Howe”. It is the character of the author, not the character in the novel, who emerges from its fascinating pages.

Like all good detective stories,
Basil Howe
seduces the reader with tantalizing clues. Conlon, as both a dedicated Chestertonian and as a diligent academic, has uncovered many of these clues in the course of his work in preparing the manuscript for publication. We learn how the manuscript was discovered among Chesterton’s notebooks “which had long lain forgotten under articles of clothing in an old box trunk”; we discover how the notebooks themselves had been saved from the municipal tip (or garbage can, for our American readers) by Dorothy Collins, Chesterton’s secretary; we are taken through the painstaking process by which Professor Conlon assembled separated sections of the manuscript so that the novel could begin to emerge from the fragments. This, in itself, is an intriguing yarn—and we are still only on the first pages of Professor Conlon’s introduction, long before we get to the novel itself.

Most importantly, Professor Conlon is convinced, and is pretty convincing in his conviction, that the novel was probably written in late 1893 or early 1894, when Chesterton was only nineteen years old. If this is so, the plot really thickens.

On 6 October 1893 Chesterton began his studies at University College in London and the Slade School of Art. It was at Slade, by his own admission, that he had temporarily fallen under the spell of the Decadents “and their perpetual hints of the luxurious horrors of paganism”. Chesterton’s “decadence” was short-lived, but if his own account is to be believed, it was very real while it lasted. “I deal here”, he wrote in his autobiography, “with the darkest and most difficult part of my task; the period of youth which is full of doubts and morbidities and temptations; and which, though in my case mainly subjective, has left in my mind for ever a certitude upon the objective solidity of sin.” In
Orthodoxy
, a book he wrote in 1908, he confessed that “I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen”. In 1893, at the age of nineteen and at the time he was apparently writing his first novel, he had regressed further:

I am not proud of believing in the Devil. To put it more correctly, I am not proud of knowing the Devil. I made his acquaintance by my own fault; and followed it up along lines which, had they been followed further, might have led to devil-worship or the devil knows what.

In truth, Chesterton did not “know” the Devil at the age of nineteen any more than he was a pagan at twelve or an agnostic at sixteen. He had not formulated a final view in any of these areas at any of these ages. He was still searching, groping, exploring. He was asking the questions but, as yet, had not received the answers. Catholicism, Protestantism, paganism, agnosticism, socialism and spiritualism were all influences to varying degrees at varying times. During these formative years he caught these influences for short periods much as a man catches influenza. Each was a passing fancy, a temporary aberration battling for supremacy. None was accepted as definitive fact; all were fed on as fads that faded away, one by one, until the truth emerged from the remnants.

Nonetheless, Chesterton
did
have, so it seems or so he claimed, a decadent or devilish phase in his intellectual and emotional development, and this novel was written at the very height, or depth, of its influence upon him. It is this aspect of
Basil Howe
that is most intriguing and most fascinating.

The circles in which Chesterton moved at the Slade School of Art were very much under the spell of the Decadents and, in particular, under the beguiling influence of Oscar Wilde, whose novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray
had been published three years earlier. It is inconceivable that Chesterton had not read Wilde’s controversial book, and there is evidence, albeit subliminal, in the pages of
Basil Howe
that he had done so. The fact that Chesterton named his heroine, the object of Basil Howe’s affections, Gertrude Grey, is no doubt entirely coincidental, but there is more than a hint in Chesterton’s characterization of Howe to suggest the powerful, if invisible, presence of Dorian Gray.

The effects of Wilde’s worldly influence on the otherworldly Chesterton are laughably absurd, and it is hardly surprising that Chesterton’s naïve teenage efforts to make his hero sophisticated in the Wildean sense are never convincing. He is convivial even when he is trying to be maudlin; chivalrous when he claims to be a charlatan; a gentleman when he protests that he is a cad. Basil Howe wears the masks of Wildean sophistication about as convincingly, as comfortably and as comically as a six-year-old child might wear her mother’s makeup and shoes.

Chesterton is more convincing when his characters cease to imitate the Wildean with any sort of reverential deference and are allowed to mimic it mockingly instead. Most memorable in this respect is the discourse by the character Valentine Amiens on the legacy of classical Greece. “The Athenians . . . selected as wives decent and hardworking women and called them by one name which I forget. They then locked them in a kind of everlasting kitchen and told them to do the housekeeping. Then they had another set of women, about whom the less said the better, and called them another name I forget. These women were very clever and amusing and said all sorts of funny things. They also dressed well, I believe. So you see the enlightened Athenians went to the bad women when they wanted wit, and went to the good ones when they wanted dinner.

“But Athens”, Valentine concluded, with a conundrum that is paradoxical in the Wildean and not the Chestertonian sense, “was the mother of civilization. We owe a great deal to Athens.”

Evidently bemused by this line of reasoning, Valentine’s friend, Lucien, “beginning to think that genius was to madness near allied”, asked his friend to explain himself. What follows, in Valentine’s reply, is an early flourishing of the true Chestertonian wit that would delight readers a decade later and a clear indication that the nineteen-year-old Chesterton had already seen through the transparent spirit of the Decadents.

We are a good deal too Athenian in our method with women. The
Alruna wives
of our teutonic ancestors and the mothers in Israel of Semitic moralism were alike in this that they were great through goodness: and the combination of the two produced the Queen of Love and Beauty of mediaeval chivalry. But the curse of our modern man of the worldism is that we court the women we disapprove and despise the women we respect: we talk of a good woman lightly, like an old household chattel, and forget that her price is above rubies. We are not lowest on our knees before the pure and tender woman, but before two eyes and half a dozen diamonds. I am sick of all this
fin de siècle
sniggering over wit and culture and the rest of it. Did wit bring us into the world? Did culture bear pain that we might live? Did they love us in our silly fractious childhood and have no thought on earth but us? Can they comfort us, or kindle or sustain?. . . No, indeed: beauty is deceitful, and favour is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord she shall be praised: give her the portion that is due to her, and let her works praise her in the gates!

Later, a stimulating dialogue between Valentine Amiens and Basil Howe serves as a wonderfully penetrating insight into the conflicting philosophies battling for supremacy in the young Chesterton. The idealized medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, championed by Valentine, is countered by Howe’s championing of Chaucer as being representative of medieval realism. More perplexingly intriguing, in the light of Chesterton’s later traditionalist stance, is the way in which Valentine’s antimodern reaction is met with Howe’s faith in “progress”.

We see in the characters of Valentine Amiens and Basil Howe the heart and the head of the postadolescent Chesterton; we see, in fact, a heart and a head that were hardly in harmony but that were nonetheless in creative conflict, colliding with the clash of symbols. With youthful precocity, Chesterton was struggling to give his head its head, though his heart was never fully in it. Over the following decade the Basil-Howeism would emerge in Chesterton’s political radicalism and in his brief flirtation with Christian socialism; the spirit of Valentine Amiens would gestate more slowly but would bear fruit more fulsomely in the birth of Chesterton’s Christian spirituality and its fulfillment in his later conversion to Catholicism. Eventually, of course, the two apparent antitheses would unite in the powerful synthesis of dynamic orthodoxy, the indissoluble marriage of the head and the heart, of Rome and romance, with which Chesterton would do battle with the enemies of faith and reason.

Basil Howe
is not a great—or even a good—work of literature. How could it be? Its author was only a teenager. As such, those hoping to be carried away by Basil Howe’s “story of young love” will be disappointed. The novel does, however, offer a priceless insight into a great mind. First and foremost it is a portrait of the author as a young man—and, more specifically, a portrait of a young man trying to make up his own mind. Those who wish to discover more about the mind of Chesterton will be enthralled.

6

_____

The Ghost of Chesterton Haunts Lord Howe

C
HESTERTON
, the “jolly journalist” who became one of the finest prose stylists of the twentieth century, is suddenly, it seems, very much
en vogue
. A century after his paradoxes and his good-natured wit first delighted the reading public, he is once more being praised and lauded by the great and the good. Among the literati, those best-selling fantasists J. K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett have both paid homage to the man who blazed his own fantastic trail across Edwardian and Georgian England with novels such as
The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday
and
The Ball and the Cross
.

It is, however, among politicians that Chesterton is now considered to be particularly chic. Ken Clark is known to be an aficionado, as is Lord David Alton. William Hague, meanwhile, came out as a closet Chestertonian by declaring during his heady days as Leader of the Opposition that Chesterton was one of the most underrated writers and thinkers of the previous century.

The latest politician to nail his colors to the Chestertonian mast is Lord Howe, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and present-day champion of European federalism. As the subject of Radio Four’s broadcast of “Great Inspirations”, Lord Howe nominated Chesterton’s
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
as the book that had most inspired his early life.

I was asked to participate in the program, presumably due to my authorship of a recent biography of Chesterton, and thus it was that I sat in the BBC’s Westminster studio, both agape and aghast, as Lord Howe made out a bizarrely incredible case for Chesterton’s posthumous membership of the “Britain in Europe” campaign. Seldom have I witnessed such a brazen display of Orwellian “double-think” or “newspeak”, even from the mouth of a politician, and I recalled with grim irony that Chesterton’s futuristic fantasy had been set, like Orwell’s darker fantasy, in nineteen eighty-four.