Gilbert Keith Chesterton
When G.K.Chesterton died in 1936 at the age of 62, he was at the height of his fame and influence. ' The very sound of his name', as the historian Sir Arthur Bryant put it at the time, 'is like a trumpet call.… If any literary name of our age becomes a legend, it will be his…. He was the kind of man of whom Bunyan was thinking when he drew the picture of Mr. Greatheart.'
His premature death was seen as the stilling of a prophetic voice at a time when it was desperately needed: T.S.Eliot wrote of his sense of loss at Chesterton's 'disappearance from a world such as that we live in.' In Bryant's words, 'To him, the world was a strenuous field in which one went about doing battle with evil in order that good might endure'. It was a world in which 'doing battle with evil' was soon, in the war against Nazi Germany, to be a terrifying reality, in which the appalling possibility of defeat was by no means unthinkable. After Britain's disastrous military collapse in Crete, it seemed natural that The Times newspaper, in a now legendary leading article, should call on Chesterton's voice to articulate the national response of grim determination. It was the shortest first leader in the paper's history. Under the heading 'Sursum Corda' ('lift up your hearts') was a brief statement of the disaster, followed by the words of the Blessed Virgin Mary to King Alfred in The Ballad of the White Horse:
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?
Months later, after the victory of El Alamein, when Winston Churchill spoke of "the end of the beginning," it was fitting that The Times should return to The Ballad of the White Horse to quote King Alfred's words at the battle of Ethandune (when the West Saxons under his leadership inflicted a crushing defeat on the Danes under Guthrum):
"The high tide!" King Alfred cried.
"The high tide and the turn!"
There is today a growing understanding that Chesterton's indomitable voice speaks to our own confused and often despairing age with undimmed relevance. Above all, he believed in the wonder of human life, in the profound joy which for him was at the heart of all human existence. 'Man is more himself', he insisted in Orthodoxy (1908) 'man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.' His hostility towards what he called 'the Pessimists' defined his literary identity; it was at the heart of a complex of ideas that make Chesterton as much a landmark for the culture of the twentieth century as Carlyle and Ruskin had been for the nineteenth, each of them epitomising their own age by prophetically denouncing many of its most characteristic beliefs.
Chesterton's denunciations, for the most part, were gentle, even affectionate. His treatment of Schopenhauer, the prophet of pessimism as a philosophy of life (the title of his most famous essay was 'The Misery of Life') was an exception. In 1901, he wrote that 'of all men whose souls have influenced the world, Schopenhauer seems to me the most contemptible'. 'He did not realise', wrote Chesterton, 'that the question of whether life contains a preponderance of joy or sorrow is entirely secondary to the fact that life is an experience of a unique and miraculous character, the idea of missing which would be intolerable if it were for one moment conceivable.'
Chesterton's attitude to Schopenhauer was a touchstone for his profound and instinctive opposition to what was to become, ever more powerfully, the mainstream of twentieth-century culture; it is also a touchstone for his prophetic relevance to that culture and to that of the new millennium. By the end of the century, Schopenhauer's impact on twentieth century thought grew to be even greater than Chesterton foresaw. Schopenhauer was a major influence over philosophy and over psychology (both Freud and Jung); and his influence over creative writers was greater than that of any other philosopher, including Marx. The common theme was a profound disenchantment with human nature and with the human situation itself. With hindsight, we can see Chesterton's passionate gratitude for creation and his unconditional love of humanity as indicating from the beginning of his career that his place in twentieth century culture was inevitably to be one of unremitting insurgency against a civilisation in which, more and more, the human race was to be perceived as inhabiting the heart of darkness.
His writings were extraordinary for their variety and their sheer volume. He wrote over 80 books. His journalistic output was staggering—in the number of words written, perhaps even more voluminous than his books. He wrote novels, poetry, literary criticism, art criticism, biography, short stories (most famously those about his priest-detective Father Brown) and classic works in which he expounded his religious beliefs, works of enormous influence, both when they were written and on later generations too. His influence was both on ordinary readers and also on some of the most impressive minds of the century. Dorothy L. Sayers returned to Christian belief after reading Orthodoxy; C.S.Lewis credited The Everlasting Man with “baptising” his intellect, and included it in a list of the 10 books that had most powerfully shaped his philosophy of life. He was one of the great literary critics of the century; he wrote with insight and vast learning (he read widely, and forgot nothing) on men of genius as utterly different as Charles Dickens (on whom his is still widely considered the best critical work) and St Thomas Aquinas (Etienne Gilson, one of the twentieth century's most influential Thomist scholars remarked that he had 'been studying St. Thomas all [his] life' and that he 'could never have written such a book'.