By JOHN YOUNG
In his autobiography, G.K Chesterton remarks that some people in writing of their life curse everything and everyone for making them what they are. He adds that he is not too sure what he is, but he is pretty sure that it is mainly his own fault.
This is an indication of his character. The same attitude of humility is indicated in an early letter. It is an imaginary dialogue between a cosmos and a pessimist, with the cosmos representing God.
The pessimist is reasonably satisfied with the world, but complains that there should be a tree halfway up a hillside. The cosmos replies: “First permit me to reduce you to nothing, and then we will discuss the matter.”
He was not embarrassed by his size, but made a joke of it. When traveling by car in Europe, with his secretary Dorothy Collins driving, he joked that she ascended the Alps like Hannibal, with an elephant in the car.
But he could become irritated when hustled, as on an occasion when he was to chair a meeting of women belonging to a religious group. Finally they got him settled in his chair and the meeting proceeded, with Chesterton drawing pictures on his pad. A member of the group asked for advice: She believed that her maid went to a pub on her days off. There were murmurs of sympathetic concern from the other women.
Chesterton looked up from his drawing and said: “Best place she could go!”
He greatly admired St Thomas Aquinas; both had minds that penetrated into the depths of reality, although each expressed that reality differently. Aquinas expressed eternal truths metaphysically, Chesterton expressed them journalistically.
He brought out the truth through paradoxes, which sometimes led to misunderstandings, although it should not have. In his book Orthodoxy, speaking of a person with a one-track mind, and who uses his reason to distort reality, making it fit his narrow outlook, Chesterton states that the madman is a man who has lost everything except his reason.
Amazingly, one critic managed to completely misunderstand this and accused him of being anti-intellectual!
A valid criticism is that he could have been briefer in many places. And he acknowledges the reason for this on one occasion: He didn’t have time to be brief. I think many writers find it takes time to write briefly.
He was an expert debater, showing what he himself somewhere describes as “an instantaneous presence of mind” — he was referring, if I remember rightly, to St. Thomas Aquinas. And his humor found scope in debates, as when he was heckled with the question, “What do you do when you find you’ve made a mistake?” He replied, “On such occasions I invariably commit suicide.”
He speaks of the intense sense of reality of the young child. A child of seven, he says, is thrilled if you tell him that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. A child of three is thrilled if you tell him that Tommy opened a door. Already by seven, he thought, that sense of reality in the presence of reality is beginning to fade.
In an early piece he writes of a boy who was so aware of the reality of the things around him that people thought he lacked a sense of reality; for them reality was confined to the superficial. Chesterton never lost his sense of wonder at the ordinary things.
He was at his best when speaking spontaneously. When using notes he sometimes had them on pieces of paper which he shuffled about, and if using a microphone he tended to hold the note between his mouth and the microphone.
He read and wrote and debated so much that it is not surprising that he should sometimes make mistakes about matters of fact, as when he criticized a correspondent who (in a letter to the editor, I think) stated that he (the correspondent) was a solipsist and wondered why there were not more followers of this philosophy. Solipsism is the doctrine that I am the only person and the only thing in existence, or if there is anything else I can’t know this.
The correspondent clearly intended his comment as a joke and as a refutation of solipsism. Chesterton evidently read it too hurriedly or his memory was at fault.
Similarly, evidently quoting from memory, he misunderstood a passage in the Sherlock Holmes story A Scandal in Bohemia, and says that had Holmes been less exclusively intellectual he would not have assumed Godfrey Norton to be Irene Adler’s solicitor: He would have seen that they were in love. In fact Holmes did not make that mistake, but kept an open mind.
As a young man Chesterton went through a dark period intellectually and emotionally where his state of mind was reflected in grotesque drawings and friends worried that he might be going insane. He was not really moving away from reality; he was finding reality so real as to be almost overwhelming.
His wife Frances, a High Church Anglican, had a profound influence on the development of his religious beliefs. He dedicates his great poem The Ballad of the White Horse to her, and the dedication includes the words, “You who brought the Faith to me.”
Because he had the mind of a metaphysician and the style of a journalist he can be understood and appreciated by both the philosopher and the person with no academic background. This helps explain his universal appeal.
The eminent Thomistic philosopher Etienne Gilson praised him highly. “Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable” (quoted by Maisie Ward: Gilbert Keith Chesterton, p. 382).
His holiness and his intense awareness of the deepest realities are shown in his awe in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament and his emotion on receiving Holy Communion.
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